Horace Dediu made some calculations and plotted all of the data on a chart over at his Asymco blog:

Source: Asymco

Based on these latest numbers, Dediu calculated how much iTunes users spend per year on different types of media. He says it’s “about $9/yr on Software, $2/yr on books, $16/yr on apps $12/yr on music and $4/yr on video.”

On one hand, this chart backs up something we already know: that iOS apps — via a growing number of iPhone and iPad users — has been driving those iTunes account signups. As new subscribers arrive, the category of spending seeing the most growth is apps, at $16 per user, per year. In 2008, when the App Store opened, users were only spending about $4 per year apiece on apps; that number has quadrupled in almost six years.

But what’s interesting is that even though Apple says there have been 1 billion TV episodes downloaded and 380 million movies, that number spent per user is still relatively small, hovering around $4 per user, per year. (That’s about the price of one movie download on iTunes, btw.) And that’s even with the advent and growth of the Apple TV.

Ebooks are still the smallest category, and also Apple’s newest. However, the fact that so little — just $2 per user, per year — is spent on them in iTunes makes Apple’s recent claim that it has 20 percent of the ebook market seem a bit questionable.

“Recovering the Classics“ launched Tuesday and invites readers to design a jacket for one of 50 classic public domain works (Middlemarch, Jane Eyre, A Tale of Two Cities and so on). The books are then sold, with their custom covers, through the Recovering the Classics website. Ebooks are $2.99 and are sold using Ganxy’s technology; they’ll eventually also be sold on Kindle. Print-on-demand paperback editions, which can be ordered online, are available from the Harvard Book Store through its Espresso Book Machine. (Jeffrey Mayersohn, the owner of the Harvard Book Store, is an investor in Plympton/DailyLit.)

Each time a book with a custom jacket is sold, the artist makes money: 40 percent of a book’s revenue after the retailer — digital or print — deducts its costs. DailyLit and the Creative Action Network split the remaining 60 percent.

Recovering the Classics eventually plans to sell the covers as posters, and also hopes to bundle an ebook with each print book sold. It also plans to work with other bookstores that have the Espresso Book Machine.

I got a demo of Bookish at the company’s trendy, book-filled offices in Manhattan’s Flatiron District last week, and had a chance to use the site further on Monday when it was prematurely available online for several hours as it was being tested. Overall, I think the long-delayed Bookish is off to a promising start.

Bookish has the opportunity to shape book discovery and offers publishers a chance to directly engage with readers. It also allows them to tiptoe into direct sales. I’m less intrigued by the original editorial content: I’m not sure it differentiates itself enough from other book-related content on the web to draw users to the site for the first time. Once those users make their way to the site, though, they’ll find a clean, easy-to-use design, and an algorithm that may well find them their next book — even though it’s limited to less than a quarter of the books on the site for now. Here’s my overview of the site.

 The basics: Books and authors

While only three of the big-six publishers are financially backing the site, the other three — Random House, HarperCollins and Macmillan — are making their books available through it, along with 10 other publishers including Scholastic and Houghton Mifflin. In total, that’s 1.2 million unique titles spanning 18 genres (fiction and literature, children’s, cookbooks, and so on), and 400,000 authors have profile pages. The book pages include basic information, a preview of the first chapter, related news and videos, and a roundup of any “must-read” lists that the book has appeared on (for more on those lists, see below). Each book page also includes purchase links (more on that below, too).

Algorithm-generated book recommendations

Online book discovery is a huge problem for publishers, and Bookish tackles it with a recommendation algorithm that lets users input up to four titles to find what to read next. “We’re very much a technology company,” Karen Sun, an MIT grad (and book blogger) who is heading the company’s recommendation engine, told me. “This is probably the largest venture in the book space, in terms of data.” Sun explained that while Amazon and Goodreads primarily deliver book recommendations based on “collaborative filtering” — namely, a user’s purchasing or rating and reviewing history as well as those of other users — Bookish doesn’t have that user or purchase data yet. Instead, it relies on “deep, introspective” data: “Recommendations are based on the books and understanding of the books.” The recommendation looks at features like the authors, editors and illustrators who contributed to a book, the awards a book has won, and genre and publication date, then layers on a machine-learning component that parses user and professional reviews to try to distill themes, concepts and sentiments. Insights from the editorial team are included, too.

A user who liked The Help, for instance, receives recommendations for Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford — another women’s fiction title that features race relations — and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, a book that, like The Help, includes an aspiring female author. Type in Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point and the engine pulled up four similar “big ideas” books, but also two Spanish-language titles that were out of place even if the subject matter was similar (and you’ll see a Spanish-language edition of The Room in the recommendations for The Help above).

For now, Bookish’s recommendation engine works with only about 250,000 of the 1.2 million books on the site. Sun says the engine will improve over time, and will eventually integrate reader reviews and user actions — other books users have looked at and rated on the site.

E-commerce: Essential, but…

Each book on the site can be purchased in print or digital formats directly through Bookish or from another retailer — there are affiliate links to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, IndieBound, Apple and Kobo.

Distributor Baker & Taylor is handling all of Bookish’s direct sales. For now, ebooks purchased through Bookish are only available in EPUB and PDF formats, for reading on iPad, Android, Nook and desktop — no Kindle.

Bookish seems to want to stress that it’s not cutting into other retailers’ sales, even though a serious direct-sales outlet is something that book publishers desperately need.

“We want to be able to say you can buy [a book] here and it’s reasonably priced. We’re not trying to steal sales away from other places,” CEO Khazaei told me. Publishers probably don’t care about taking sales from Amazon, but they may not want to sour relationships with retailers like Barnes & Noble and the independent bookstores represented by IndieBound.

Bookish’s print and ebook prices appeared to match those offered by Amazon, though I wasn’t able to test many titles. Khazaei told me that “I don’t know how the pricing decisions are made, really,” Khazaei said. “I assume [Baker & Taylor] is tracking [prices on other sites] but we just leave it in their hands.” While the site seems like an obvious place for publishers to run special sales on both print and digital books, that doesn’t seem to be a priority for now. Update: Khazaei stressed to me that his lack of involvement with pricing is required by the Department of Justice in order to be compliant with antitrust regulations. (The DOJ sued Hachette, Penguin and Simon & Schuster, along with Macmillan and HarperCollins, last year for allegedly colluding to set ebook prices; Hachette, Penguin and S&S all settled.)

Original editorial content along with the algorithm

Bookish has seven full-time editors who each manage different genres and update those sections daily with original book coverage. The site is also soliciting pieces from well-known authors and other public figures. In one ongoing feature, for instance, editors from The Onion review books. Other editorial features at launch include a column by Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert and an interview between bestselling thriller authors Michael Connelly and Michael Kortya. In addition to that content, the site’s editors are curating columns and lists of books like “The Biggest BFF Breakups in YA Books” and “Big Ideas.”

Advertising, revenue and partnerships

Bookish is collaborating with USA Today’s books website. Its original editorial content will be syndicated on USA Today’s website, and the technology that Bookish uses to let readers view the first chapter of a book and to offer book recommendations will also be included on USA Today’s site. In exchange, Bookish will feature USA Today’s book bestseller lists on bookish.com.

In addition to book sales, Bookish will get revenue from advertising. For now the site’s ad slots are taken up with books from the three launch partners, but eventually the company will expand advertising to other publishers and to companies from outside the book business. Prior to its launch two years ago, Bookish had announced an advertising and content syndication deal with AOL Huffington Post, but that’s off the drawing board for now. A company spokeswoman told me Bookish is “in discussions about continuing to work with AOL in the future.”

Not a focus: Social, self-publishing

Other publishers can sign an agreement with Bookish to add their titles to the site. (Khazaei told me Bookish doesn’t charge publishers anything to join, but they presumably have to fulfill a number of requirements to be included.) However, self-published authors can’t add their books. “The focus right now is on traditionally published titles,” Khazaei said.

Also at launch, the social features that are a key part of Goodreads’ mission are absent from Bookish. Users can’t friend or follow each other — the focus is on a reader’s individual interests. I found that refreshing: Just because you’re Facebook friends with someone doesn’t mean that he or she shares your book preferences, and I prefer the algorithm-driven approach.

Internet curmudgeon Nick Carr attacked this particular question in a recent post on his blog, and got into an interesting debate with digital-media theorist Clay Shirky via the comments. Ironically, while Shirky is often criticized as a purveyor of wishful thinking about media, it is Carr who argues there is something ineffable and mysterious about the format we know as the book, while Shirky’s argument seems more based in reality

(Note: we are going to be discussing the future of the book and potential business models for book-related content at our paidContent media conference in New York on April 18, with a panel discussion featuring Atavist founder Evan Ratliff and Dominique Raccah of Sourcebooks).

In his original essay — entitled “Will Gutenberg laugh last?” — Carr notes that research shows e-book reading is still on the rise, but also shows that print reading continues to command a large share of the market, and that printed book sales are “holding up relatively well.” Some publishers and distributors have even noticed a slowdown in e-book sales, says Carr, who then goes on to propose some reasons why that might be the case, including:

“We may be discovering that e-books are well suited to some types of books (like genre fiction) but not well suited to other types (like nonfiction and literary fiction)… the e-book may turn out to be more a complement to the printed book, as audiobooks have long been.”

Shirky says even e-books themselves are transitional

Among those who showed up to comment on Carr’s piece was Shirky, who argues that it is more likely the book format itself is simply going to die out as a result of the web and other developments — and not just the printed book, but the whole concept of a book, which he describes as nothing more than a “production unit” for content, like the album was for music.

As Shirky puts it:

“Maybe books won’t survive the transition to digital devices, any more than scrolls survived the transition to movable type… what the internet portends is not the end of the paper container of the book, but rather the way paper organized our assumptions about writing altogether.”

In a comment of his own, Carr responds that whatever might happen to reference works like encyclopedias or phone books — which he agrees would make more sense in digital form — books that consist of an “extended narrative, either fictional or factual and almost always shaped by a single authorial consciousness and expressed in a single authorial voice” would always remain, even if it is in digital form, because there is more to it than just being a convenient container for content.

“Your desire to see cultural artifacts as mere technological artifacts, as “production units,” leads you to jump to the conclusion that because the narrative art of the book is resistant to digital re-formation, the narrative art is doomed to obsolescence.”

In a follow-up comment, Shirky maintains that the novel — fictional or not — is a content model that is “pretty decisively wrapped up in the affordances and limitations of print,” from their length to the idea that all of the content has to be delivered at the same time and for a single price. He argues that given the “native grain of the internet,” those features would not be transferrable to an online environment in the long term. In other words, e-books themselves might be just an interim step towards something else.

“If I’m right about this, the fate of the printed book will have less to do with competition from ebooks (at least in their ‘digital copy of print’ versions) than from competition with Longreads and New Inquiry for the time and attention of the reader of extended narratives.”

Will books follow the epic poem into oblivion?

This doesn’t sit well with Carr, however, who responds with a comment that (among other things) accuses Shirky of having an almost nihilistic approach to cultural artefacts like books, and of failing to see that in some cases having a new product or platform replace an old one might be a loss for humanity rather than a gain:

“I’m certainly not suggesting that uniquely valuable forms of media, or the modes of thinking or expression that they promote, are immune to destruction or alteration by historical forces, particularly ones driven by utilitarian concerns. But if such a medium is lost or diminished by technological or economic change, we shouldn’t simply say ‘who cares; other shit will come along.’”

In a response to an email from Wired magazine founder and author Kevin Kelly on the subject, Carr gives some examples of valuable forms of media that he believes have been lost or diminished: namely, “the oral epic poem, the symphony, the silent film with live musician accompaniment, the dramatic play, the short-form cartoon, the map [and] the LP.” And he argues that the book, the movie and the video game could also fall into this category.

In the end, Carr’s argument comes down to a belief that old forms of expression like the traditional book are better than anything that might have come along to displace them from their position of dominance in our culture — and his belief forms part of the argument in his book The Shallows, which argues that digital media is actually changing the way we think, and in general making us more stupid (a view I have argued against).

Are we seeing the rise of new artistic forms that will be as beneficial to humanity as the epic poem was, or the symphony, or the silent film? I think we are, and Clay Shirky seems to as well, but Carr clearly disagrees. Who is right won’t be known for some time, if ever.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Marcus Hansson, retro writer and Frederic della Faile

There are elements of the Hathi Trust decision that make it different from the issues raised by the Google case, since it involves universities rather than a corporate entity, but the bottom line is that a federal court has decided scanning of books for search purposes is not an infringement of copyright — or rather that this activity is covered under the principle of “fair use,” and therefore should be allowed to continue. And in my opinion (and that of many others) the court was right to do so.

Some authors and publishers clearly don’t like the concept of fair use as it applies to books, because they believe it infringes on their rights as creators and owners of intellectual property — that is, the right to control whatever happens to their work, in any context. But the court reiterated that fair use exists for a crucial reason: namely, to allow others to transform and re-use parts of copyrighted works for artistic or other socially-beneficial purposes. And whether the Guild likes it or not, scanning books so that they can be indexed and searched clearly falls within that description.

The court accepted the fair-use case without a trial

One sign of how clearly the court believes this is that Judge Harold Baer’s decision was a summary judgement, meaning he didn’t think there was any point in even going to trial to argue the details of the case. As a post at the Copyright Librarian points out, “winning on summary judgment means the court agrees your arguments are a slam-dunk.” In his decision (which is embedded in full below), the judge says:

“Although I recognize that the facts here may on some levels be without precedent, I am convinced that they fall safely within the protection of fair use… I cannot imagine a definition of fair use that would not encompass the transformative uses made by Defendants’ MDP and would require that I terminate this invaluable contribution to the progress of science and cultivation of the arts.”

The parts of the Hathi Trust case that make it distinct from Google’s battle with the Authors Guild have to do with the purposes for which the books were being scanned. For example, Judge Baer found that protecting old works from physical deterioration by scanning them was a “transformative use” (one of the four factors the courts take into account when deciding whether something should qualify as fair use), and that making digital books available for the use of visually impaired and other handicapped users was also an important element of the program.

Those kinds of arguments likely wouldn’t hold as much weight for Google itself, except as they apply to scholarly works that are provided to universities and projects like the Hathi Trust. A big part of the Authors Guild case rests on the fact that Google is a corporation with a profit motive, and therefore shouldn’t be allowed to scan copyrighted books without permission, even if its index makes them easier for buyers to find and purchase (Google also shows excerpts or “snippets” for all of the books that it scans, while the Hathi library only shows excerpts for public-domain books).

Indexing books for search is clearly fair use

But even here, the Hathi Trust case provides a substantial amount of ammunition for Google’s defence, because Judge Baer ruled that scanning books for the purpose of indexing them and making them searchable was an important transformative use — something that has also been found in other similar copyright-infringement cases against Google (such as the Perfect 10 lawsuit involving the use of thumbnail images). And that transformative use, he suggested, outweighs other factors such as the potential impact on the commercial market for the works in question.

Quoting from a previous court decision, Judge Baer said: “A copyright holder cannot pre-empt a transformative market.” And he dismissed the Authors Guild argument that scanning and indexing a book doesn’t qualify as a transformative use because it copies the entire book exactly, rather than making use of a part or adding something to the original work:

“The use to which the works in the HDL are put is transformative because the copies serve an entirely different purpose than the original works: the purpose is superior search capabilities rather than actual access to copyrighted material… Plaintiffs’ argument that the use is not transformative merely because defendants have not added anything ‘new’ misses the point.”

In the end, Judge Baer said that his decision was determined by the original goal of copyright law, which is to promote research and knowledge. As he put it: “The ultimate focus is the goal of copyright itself [and] whether ‘promoting the Progress of Science and useful Arts would be better served by allowing the use than by preventing it.’” His ruling makes it clear that the Hathi Trust project met that test, and based on his arguments there is every reason to believe that Google could win its case on similar grounds — and that would be in everyone’s best interests, as much as the Authors Guild would like to believe otherwise.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Marcus Hansson and Marya

Although the Guild says that it is still steadfastly opposed to a deal, the agreement with the AAP means that Google might finally be able to start moving forward with its plan, which stands to make book searching and buying a lot easier — something that would theoretically benefit just about everyone, with the possible exception of Amazon.

There is much that is still unknown about the latest agreement: Neither side is saying much about the details, including whether Google will be able to scan books without having a prior deal in place with the owner of the rights, and what will happen with respect to the contentious topic of “orphan works,” or books whose publisher and/or author cannot be found. Both of these aspects — among others — were what helped to torpedo an earlier settlement agreement Google had made with the publishers’ organization and the Guild, which was eventually struck down last year. That deal also involved the payment of $125 million by the search company, but the latest arrangement has no financial terms associated with it, or at least not any that have been made public.

From world-changing dream to never-ending lawsuit

It’s hard to remember now, but when Google first announced in 2004 that it planned to scan and digitize the world’s books (a project that used to be known as Google Books, before the search giant started actually selling books, and then became known as Google Print and finally the Google Library Project) it sounded like another one of the company’s awe-inspiring and somewhat futuristic attempts to create a better world — along the lines of robot cars and Google Street View. Google even had partnerships with some of the world’s most famous universities, including Harvard, which provided access to their massive archives of historical texts and journals (although Harvard has since shelved its partnership and put its efforts into the Digital Public Library of America project instead).

It didn’t take long for reality to set in, however: within a year, the publishers group and Authors Guild had sued the company, arguing that scanning their books without permission amounted to copyright infringement — even though Google only showed users a small excerpt or “snippet” of the book when they searched for it, and also linked prominently to sites where someone could buy a copy. To the Guild and the AAP (although not to some of their members, who supported the project) scanning amounted to illegal copying, and they launched an all-out legal attack on the search company. Google offered a settlement in 2008, which wound up in court until it was rejected last year.

One of the things we don’t know is why the publishers decided to accept an agreement with Google now, especially one that sounds very similar — at least on the surface — to the one that the company has been offering in various forms for almost four years now. Did Google cave in on the “orphan works” clause that the court said gave the company too much power over these books once they were scanned? Or did the publishers’ group simply come to the conclusion that this was a war that would never end, and possibly one that should never have begun?

“The publicly described terms sound indistinguishable from the terms Google has offered to its print partners for years. If that’s all, it’s hard to understand why this deal took so long.” — New York Law School professor James Grimmelmann

Publishers and readers both benefit, and so do authors

As more than one legal scholar has pointed out (not to mention Google itself), there is a case to be made that scanning of books — with or without prior approval from the rights-holder — fails under the “fair use” principle in copyright law, which allows for others to make use of copyrighted material under certain circumstances. There’s no question that Google’s scanning would likely qualify as a “transformative use,” which is one of the four factors the courts look at when it comes to determining such cases.

And not only does Google’s plan not impair the rights-holder’s ability to market their books (another of the four factors for fair use), it arguably improves it substantially by making them easier to find and buy, something publishers could clearly benefit from.

Did the publishers come to see that they had more to gain from a Google deal than they had to lose? Their position in the industry has certainly changed dramatically in the past seven years — at one time, they were the dominant players in the book business, but the rise of Amazon and the Kindle platform has destabilized things to the point where publishers are now struggling to remain competitive, especially as the focus increasingly turns to mobile and digital books. And the Google arrangement could help them to some extent, since the search giant has said that part of the deal is providing publishers with a digital copy of any books they agree to have scanned.

In fact, the Google deal appears to benefit just about everyone (even authors, although the Guild doesn’t want to admit it). Readers get to search for and buy books more easily, and Google gets to get more content that could bring in users and keep them searching, which pays the bills. The only one who probably doesn’t benefit is Amazon — since it increases the supply of digital copies that Amazon doesn’t control or get a share of the revenue from. And it may help publishers become better at selling their own digital content, instead of relying on the digital-book giant to do so.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Eric Mueller and Stefan

Announcements of retailers carrying electronics gadgets are nothing new. The salient points are…

• This isn’t an exclusive for Nook – John Lewis will go on selling other e-readers.
• And it isn’t an exclusive for John Lewis – it sounds like Nook will be sold elsewhere, too.
• There is no mention of the store selling Nook Tablet or Nook Color, just its Simple Touch e-ink readers with and without GlowLight.

After all, which brand like B&N would want to commit to a solitary retail channel if it could help it?

John Lewis has 37 well-regarded department stores, and an increasingly high-trafficked e-commerce website. The store has become a respected home electronics brand.

This is a good deal for Nook’s first foray outside the States. But many will watch for the arrival of its complete product line-up later.

Leading UK book retailer Waterstones is selling Amazon’s Kindle. WH Smith is amongst those selling Kobo.

Much of the negative response to LendInk came about because of a series of misunderstandings about how the service worked, and also a lack of knowledge about how Amazon handles lending for Kindle books. But the incident also says a lot about how authors view lending of e-books to begin with — many seem to see every book loaned as a potential sale that has been lost, just as the music industry used to look down on file-sharing of music as theft. But they are just as wrong.

Fear of piracy mixed with misunderstanding

It’s not clear how or why LendInk first attracted the recent fuss, since the service — which has been run by a single individual, founder owner Dale Porter — has been around for close to two years. At some point, an author noticed that their book was listed as being available for lending on the site, and sounded the alarm on Twitter, as well as discussion forums devoted to Kindle-published authors, saying the site was pirating their content. This eventually turned into a hue and cry by dozens of authors, all of whom called on their colleagues to send LendInk copyright-takedown notices under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

Those notices ultimately had the desired effect, and the company’s website was taken offline by its web-hosting provider. The situation was complicated by the fact that the service had more or less been running on auto-pilot for about 18 months because Porter — a disabled army veteran — had been dealing with health issues. As a result, copyright notices and angry emails from authors didn’t get an immediate reply, and that likely caused the anger to escalate.

In most cases, the authors who got the most upset about LendInk completely misunderstood the purpose of the website. To them, it looked as though the service was hosting copies of their books and allowing anyone to borrow them, something that would clearly be a breach of their rights as copyright holders — like an e-book version of MegaUpload.

Some authors are against sharing on principle

In fact, however, all LendInk did was allow readers who already owned e-books to connect with other readers who wanted to borrow them. As Porter explained in a statement posted to a reader forum, only books that had already been approved for lending by Amazon could be shared through the service, in the same way they can with services such as Lendle (whose CEO has posted a response to the LendInk incident).

Some authors didn’t even seem to be aware that their books could be loaned under the terms of their agreement with Amazon to publish on the Kindle, and a few later apologized for their attacks on LendInk — but others seemed unrepentant about their criticism, and argued that built-in approval for lending of e-books between complete strangers was somehow wrong. At least one author argued that sharing of books was fine between two friends, but not between two people who had been connected by a website or service like LendInk.

Aside from the misunderstandings about the service, the dissatisfaction felt by some authors about the whole idea of e-book lending seems to be driven by the same impulse that keeps publishers from making sharing easier: namely, the idea that every book that gets shared is a book that isn’t bought, despite the fact that plenty of evidence shows that sharing — and even outright piracy — in many cases helps increase the demand for content. As musician Neil Young put it recently: “Piracy is the new radio — it’s how music gets around.”

The sooner authors and publishers get used to that idea, the better off they will be. And taking down an innocent web service, whose only purpose was to try and increase the potential market for their books, is just an attempt to postpone the inevitable.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Jeremy Mates and Mike Licht

Comedian Louis CK raised some eyebrows earlier this year when he sold downloads of a live show through his website and pulled in more than $1 million in about a week, despite the fact that fans could easily download the content for free. Now, he has done it again: instead of a traditional tour, he decided to sell tickets through his website, and sold $4.5-million worth in under 48 hours. Content creators of all kinds — authors, musicians and others — would do well to learn from his example, and that of others like Amanda Palmer, who recently financed a new album and tour through Kickstarter. The main lesson? Building a community is more important than ever.

Louis CK (whose real name is Louis Szekely) was far from being an unknown when he launched his download experiment in December: he had a show on Comedy Central the FX network that was fairly successful, and had appeared on late-night talk shows — but he was far from being a top-tier name. But one thing CK did have was a community of fans, and he tapped into that when he offered a self-financed show to them as both a live-stream and a download. And he deliberately didn’t encrypt the show with digital-rights management locks or barriers, because he said he wanted to make it as frictionless as possible for fans.

As I pointed out at the time, media companies of all kinds could learn a lot from that approach — including the lack of DRM controls and the power of the community that CK was able to draw on. Tens of thousands of fans paid $5 for that show even though they could have easily downloaded it for nothing. His latest move, in which he offered single-price tickets for a 39-city tour through his website, built on that community and created a sold-out $4.5-million tour in less than 48 hours. That’s an incredibly powerful example of going direct to your fans.

Can giving content away result in more money?

This kind of model isn’t necessarily restricted to individuals either, as Union Square Ventures partner Andrew Weissman points out in a blog post about the TED conference entitled “What If We Give It Away.” As he notes, the conference has spent the past couple of years giving its content away for nothing — via videos on its website and elsewhere, and also through the branding of free TED spinoffs called TEDx conferences in cities around the world. As Weissman notes:

[B]y giving away what one would generally think of as a company’s (a media entity) greatest assets – its content, brand and business processes – the business has grown enormously in just a few short years.

On the individual front, musician Amanda Palmer is another great example of this approach: she quit her record label in 2010 and decided recently to fund a new album and tour directly by allowing her fans to donate through Kickstarter. Her original goal was $100,000 — but she blew through that figure in a matter of hours after the launch, and by the end of the campaign had raised ten times that amount or almost $1.2 million. In return for the funds, fans get a variety of rewards, including a signed art book, an invitation to special dinners and parties for fans in a number of cities, and so on.

One thing that’s important to note about both of these examples is that CK and Palmer didn’t just pull in a huge amount of money and walk off to do whatever they wanted with it: both of them have spent a lot of time detailing what exactly will happen to the funds, with Palmer in particular posting an itemized breakdown of her expenses for the album and the tour so that her fan community realizes what is involved. Louis CK, meanwhile, gave a substantial portion of the money he made from his downloadable show to charity, and wrote about that.

Building on those “1,000 true fans”

Authors can also benefit from this kind of community, and there are any number of examples: self-published young-adult fiction writer Amanda Hocking made more than $2 million without an agent or a traditional publisher by distributing her e-books through Amazon’s Kindle platform, and author John Green managed to get his new e-book to the number one spot on the best-seller list before the book was even completed — because his community of fans was already connected to him on multiple levels, including Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

This kind of community engagement has always been important: the band The Grateful Dead was legendary for allowing fans to tape its live shows and share that content, and other artists such as Jonathan Coulton have also made a living while still giving away much of their content for free (Coulton is also a thoughtful commenter on the issues around copyright infringement). Radiohead and Girl Talk have both used the “pay what you want” model for album downloads, which show — just as Louis CK has — that fans will pay even when they can get the content for nothing.

What has happened is that the web and social media — along with crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo — have added more horsepower to the concept that Wired magazine founding editor Kevin Kelly described as “1,000 True Fans.” In that model, trying to become the next global superstar through traditional media is replaced by connecting with a loyal fan base and then engaging with them, whether it’s to fund a tour or an album or a book (marketer and author Seth Godin is funding his new book through Kickstarter).

Can anyone make use of this new model? Obviously it helps to have already established a brand, as Louis CK and Amanda Palmer have (or Seth Godin and TED). And there may be no easy parallel to the concert tour when it comes to some kinds of content — but the power of connecting directly to your fans, however small that group might be, can’t be underestimated. And whether its record labels or publishing houses or media companies, former intermediaries and gatekeepers of all kinds are going to have to try a lot harder to prove that they are adding some value to that process in order to survive.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Christian Scholz and Giuseppe Bognanni

There’s been a lot written about the domain-name “land grab” that ICANN — the agency in charge of the internet’s central address system — unleashed recently, by offering companies the chance to register thousands of new top-level domains that could be used alongside the usual selection like .com and .org. While some of the suggestions are amusing, others are more troubling: Google, for example, wants the exclusive right to reserve domains such as .search and .blog for its own use, and Amazon wants to do the same with .music and .cloud. Some critics, including open-web advocate and blogging pioneer Dave Winer, think this is wrong and shouldn’t be allowed. Are they right?

Just to recap, ICANN — otherwise known as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which used to be a U.S. government-funded agency but is now a non-profit managed by a variety of industry stakeholders — decided last year that it was going to add hundreds or even thousands of new “top level” domains to the system. The agency says that this is driven by a desire to open up competition in the domain-registry business, but others argue that it is a revenue grab by ICANN and others (since registrants had to pay $185,000 to file each claim and will pay monthly fees as well) and will make the internet even more complicated.

Google wants .blog and Amazon wants .book

A couple of weeks ago, ICANN released the names of the companies and individuals who had applied to register new domains — a massive laundry list that includes everything from .beer and .lol to .gay and .asian. As my colleague Jeff Roberts described at the time, two of the biggest registrants were Google and Amazon: the former applied for more than 100 domains through a subsidiary called Charleston Road Registry, and Amazon applied for more than 75. Google’s applications range from .lol and .fun to .search and .map, while Amazon has applied for .music, .book and .like, among others.

The part of these applications that raised warning flags for Winer and others was what the companies said they planned to do with them. In Google’s case, the web giant said that some of the domains — such as .lol and .fun – would be open to the public to register addresses on, but others would be closed and for use by Google properties only, including .search and blog. The .blog domain would only be for users of Google’s Blogger software, the application said:

Google will manage a process whereby users will be able to make use of unique vanity names in the gTLD; such second-level domains will only point to the Google offering.

Amazon, meanwhile, has said that all of the 76 domains it has filed an application for will be its sole property and will be used for its own purposes — in other words, not available to the general public — and that includes .cloud and .music and .book, and even .news. Although the success of the applications by Google and Amazon is not guaranteed, the terms of the ICANN auction make it sound as though no reasonable offer will be refused, in the interests of enhancing competition. But does giving Google .blog solely for its own internal use serve that purpose?

Winer and other critics of the move, including Irish blogger and domain registrar Michele Neylon, say they have no argument with either Google or Amazon — or any other company, for that matter — controlling their own domains, such as .google or .amazon or even .gmail or .kindle, since those relate to trademarks that they have as a corporation. But why should Google be allowed to single-handedly use .blog, asks Winer — who helped pioneer the medium through his Userland software:

[W]hat if the name was created by an open source community, without the financial resources to mount a challenge? I have some standing there, because I played a role in establishing blogs. How does Google get the right to capture all the goodwill generated in the word blog?

Should Google control .cloud, or Amazon .news?

Even something as seemingly innocuous as .cloud could become contentious, especially since both Google and Amazon are vying for exclusive control of the domain — and Google is expected to announce at its upcoming I/O conference that it is launching an Amazon-style cloud service, which it will presumably want to distinguish from that of its competitor. Should ICANN be giving one company or the other the exclusive right to offer companies a .cloud address? And what about .news? Controlling that could theoretically allow Amazon to convey benefits on news entities that play by its rules.

One counter-argument that some commenters have made on the discussion at Hacker News around Winer’s blog post is that domain names are becoming increasingly irrelevant, since many web users simply type a bunch of keywords into their search box or address bar (which in Google’s Chrome browser are the same thing) and then expect the search engine to figure out where they want to go. By that logic, having a .blog or .book or even .news domain isn’t really going to cause much trouble, since one domain isn’t likely to be preferred over another.

But is that really the case? Prominent Google critic Scott Cleland has argued that the web giant could easily give preferential treatment to its own .blog or .search properties over those on other domains when it comes to search, just as it gives a higher profile to its own Google+ social results as part of the somewhat contentious “Search Plus Your World” feature. Cleland goes so far as to argue that Google’s control of such domains would give anti-trust regulators even more ammunition for their ongoing investigation of the company.

Whether ICANN accepts any of the applications from Google and Amazon remains to be seen — but if it does, there will be an even bigger spotlight on what those companies plan to do with them, and whether that is in the interests of the web as a whole.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Fabio Venni and Wesley Fryer