After 15 years working in Book Publishing and 6 years at HarperCollins I can now announce that I will be leaving the industry to work for NDM (News Digital Media) as a Technology Manager. My time in publishing has been a great one especially through the significant changes in distribution, information management and now digital supply chains. I will finish with HarperCollins on June 16 and will commence with News Digital Media on June 17. If you need to get in contact with me please contact me at spiros@kotsialos.com

The challenge of marketing direct to the consumer is a conversation that often comes up a lot in media, especially in book publishing. The reality is that although it gets a lot of voice there are very few examples of it actually happening.

I have just finished reading a short book from Larry Dignan the editor in chief at ZDNet and thought the following extract was a very interesting insight.

“Direct Marketing isn’t glamorous. Chasing leads is difficult. And you need reach and a lot of information systems – that can talk to each other – to make it work. Direct marketing is really on big math question. Let’s face it: Media people suck at math. Direct marketing is also a big information technology problem. Guess what? Media people generally stink at technology too.” The Business of Media

I think that this is becoming more and more obvious with the need for people to be effective in marketing to have comprehensive understanding of SEO, SGO and CRM (search engine optimisation, Social Graph Optimisation, Customer relationship Management)

Founders at Work is a collection of interviews with founders of some of the largest and most interesting technology companies including Steve Wozniak from Apple, Max Levchin from PayPal, Mitch Kapor from Lotus and Caterina Fake from Flickr.

It is absolutely fascinating to see how some of the most famous tech businesses got started and the combination of luck, flexibility, determination and individual brilliance that led to their success.

It is an inspiration of sorts that if you bring the right mixture of things together, the path to extreme success can be so quick. The book reinforces that in order to succeed you need to be flexible and as long as you stay focused to listening directly to the customer and reacting to them you will succeed.

In contrast it is so disappointing to reflect after reading this book that when many of the businesses mentioned became subsidiaries of large corporations that their momentum and entrepreneurial spirit were lost.

I thoroughly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the way new highly successful businesses are formed and are interested in the people who form them.

I spoke at the Adobe Digital Publishing Forum recently

“The output process has changed. It is not just the printer, we have to take into account how and where people want to read, whether it is an eBook, an application, website or syndicated partner. For all these we face the challenge of outputting to multiple complex formats, and being confident of rights throughout the workflow,” Kotsialos said.

Read full article

So the Apple iPad has been released!

What I like from what I see so far!

The price:- for a bit of good looking equipment with the  features it contains I think the entry price is good.  Although  an additional 48 gigs of storage $330 seems a bit steep.

iBooks: It is fantastic that Apple are going with ePub as its format and the application looks like it’s really making an effort to improve the book browsing performance

iPhone application compatibility: By making it so all iPhone applications can run on the iPad gives the opportunity for further innovations from the likes of Stanza, Kobo, Kindle and Fictionwise.  With all these great readers and the new iBooks application eBooks are just going to get better and better.

The touch screen keyboard: Lots of people don’t seem to understand this.  Typing on a tablet till now has been crap, the reason for this was the inability to multi-touch,  i.e. you couldn’t hold the shift key and a letter down at the same time.  This screen will be fine for the touch-typing and the Apple correction software will ensure it.

What could be better?

The OS:- the iPad desperately needs an improvement to include multi-tasking and java compatibility so I can truly browse the web and use this as a home device.

The Screen: oLed is needed to make the screen readable for long times, the compromise is pretty good through and I think will be fantastic for non-fiction books.

Storage: a few movies, few songs, few books and then you will run out of storage.  The storage needs to be expanded or at the very least the ability to add memory cards

ITunes: I don’t want to have to sync this with my computer constantly and I want to be able to travel without the constant need to sync.

Camera: video conferencing please?

CEO Michael Moynahan says, “As we pursue growth in an ever-changing market, it is essential we are creative and fast moving.  To that end we have decided to establish an exciting new area within the company charged with finding ambitious innovative solutions.”

I’m delighted to announce that Spiros Kotsialos will take on responsibility for coordinating and working with the business as Head of Innovation.  He will retain his current reporting lines for IS and will also be supported by a Digital Innovation Manager (to be appointed).   Clearly, many of the initiatives that will emerge in this area will come from the digital sphere and be supported by IS, which is why these areas form a natural alliance.

All quality eReaders of today use eInk technology as it is the only screen surface that gives you a non backlight, high resolution and long battery life experience.  This is required in order to give an acceptable e-reading experience.    I love this technology but am coming to the realisation that there are other screen technologies that could not only do the same thing but do it so much better.

OLED is one of those technologies and I don’t think it will be too long before we start to see these as the new trend in eBooks,  most probably being released through mobile devices.  It deals with the prerequisites of reading on electronic devices and starts to provide a few more, here is why;

• No backlight – OLED does not need a backlight to function, this means that there is not a light competing with the sun etc… with OLED the ability to read in all the same environments as a traditional book becomes possible.
• High resolution – OLED resolution matches and could exceed that of eInk
• Battery Life – because there is no need for a backlight the battery life is greatly extended as it only needs to power the pixels being used.  In the case of eBooks the amount of pixels that need to be active is much lower than other applications such as video.
• Portable – the screen is as thin as .3 millimeter.

There are also some added advantages

• It is full color and capable of showing video
• It can bend, making it possible to make things fold out.  This gives the potential for incorporating into mobile devices that can fold out to give a bigger reading experience as required
• The production process could be cheaper than LCD screens

Read more on LED with these links

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oled

http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/oled1.htm

Telco’s have recently started to offer business consolidated wireless plans where they can purchase for instance 40 gigabytes a month and have as many simm card’s as they want attached to it.

Today individuals are still locked into one device, one simm plans. Telco’s seems to be ever dominated by the device, probably because of the ever increasing turnover of new products encouraging people to sign up to new plans. However forming a dependence on device manufactures in a world where the consensus for the future is wireless connectivity and content must be fraught with problems.

Telco’s need to concentrate on their core business and start to provide and promote quality bandwidth and then allow users to associate as many Simms as they want to one plan. For those that see themselves as more than just a simple carrier then differentiate yourself by giving people access to quality cheap services. i.e. your data plan lets you get the wall street journal and 50 TV channels for free.

I think that the eBook business really emphasizes why this is so important. If you look at the market today the Amazon Kindle is the only device where you can purchase books in a seamless easy-to-use way. The key reason this can be achieved is by providing a wirelessly connected device. For this market to open up all eBook devices need to be connected seamlessly and retailers then compete for their customers by the experience they can offer rather than the deal they can struck with a network provider. This will ultimately result in cheaper devices

And for the device manufacturers AT&T has proven that a great device can be limited by the network that it operates on and that even the best network has limits in its coverage and strength. For a manufacturer providing your product through one carrier must be limiting your market.

It’s vital for the advancement of technology that people work in their primary market and work to improve it. Manufacturers concentrate on devices, telco’s concentrate on connections and retailers concentrate on the buying experience.

Your thoughts?