This was a fun talk to put together. Thank you to Wharton for the chance to speak and great engagement from the audience!

Cory Ondrejka Wharton UIConf Keynote

For some reason, there have been some questions about what I’m up to these days. Since leaving EMI, I’ve been plugging back into technology and tech companies I thought were interesting and that I could help. Time for an update on them:

Instinctiv

Instinctiv is a multiplatform music player that uses some very clever machine learning to let you discover the music you already own. The OS X player is released, mobile and Windows are close. If you spend a lot of time listening to music off of your Mac, grab Instinctiv! You can also sign up on the site to be part of the private beta on your mobile phone.

Togetherville

Togetherville is an online community for kids and their grownups. Togetherville entered public beta in May and has had some great coverage. The team have done an amazing job and if you have kids, you should check it out!

Profounder

Profounder is bringing crowdfunding to business. They’ve just started their alpha entrepreneur program which you can learn more about.

Celmatix

Celmatix is a New York-based biotechnology and personalized medicine startup, focused on creating a non-invasive diagnostic for assessing oocyte quality and female fertility. Amazing mix of scientific research and computational challenges, but very early stage. Stay tuned.

In addition, without going into details, I can say David, James, and Ethan at Bessemer are great to work with.

Plus, coding everyday is a blast. So having fun and keeping plenty busy.

I’ve posted a few times about ebooks, but I’ve been reading a lot more about ebooks recently. Recently Wired discussed the desire to have a universal ebook format and the PBS Newshour hosted a discussion with best-selling author Scott Turow, president of the Authors Guild, Jonathan Galassi, president of the publishing house Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, and Cathy Langer, lead buyer for Tattered Cover Book Stores.

Apparently nobody in the book business is aware of what happened to the music business over the last decade and they are determined to make all the same mistakes.

Mistake #1: Piracy is the enemy

Tim O’Reilly wrote about this years ago. There is no compelling evidence that the impact of piracy on media is nearly as negative as the double whammies of technological change and institutional incompetence.

Mistake #2: People will always want hardcover books

True, but true in the same sense that people — and by people, I mean “hardcore fans” — will always want vinyl. Despite vinyl records being crushed by CDs, vinyl has made a bit of a comeback of late. Collectors and audiophiles have created a thriving niche market.

But it’s still niche. In the case of vinyl, about 1% of overall music sales.

Mistake #3: People will always need bookstores

Three words: Independent. Record. Stores.

We all miss the personalized recommendation of the small record store employee, but apparently the market did not. At FooCamp this weekend, Sara Winge had a great comment that capture the problem of the market not sufficiently rewarding the curator:

So, the curactor needs to work at a gas station?

It’s very different if the curation you love can also pay your bills.

So, how to avoid following the music path?

Focus on Discovery

Friends share, borrow, and recommend books. Currently, publishers are generally being stupid about this. There are two paths to reduced stupid.

The first is publishers who understand how technology is changing reading habits and take advantage of it. Baen and O’Reilly are leading this charge by avoiding DRM and giving away books, though neither is really focused on helping me lend and share books.

The second is for Amazon or Apple — the only two ebook retailers with the scale to really push publishers — to optimize their reading software to enable sharing, loaning and discovery. The software work to do this would be trivial — the hard part is getting the licenses correct. However, with both Amazon and Apple already enabling books to be simultaneously read on multiple devices, it would appear they have made some progress on the legal side.

Make eBooks as Valuable as Books

Speaking of legal and usefulness, eBooks with DRM suck. You can’t lend them, you may have to repurchase them, and you can’t use them the way you want. If publishers want to be able to sell eBooks at closer to hardcover price points, they can’t break the book with DRM. This is so obvious — and amply demonstrated by Apple and Amazon’s experiences with music DRM — it is astounding to see book publishers not get it.

Stop Leaving Money on the Table

Ask anyone with an e-reader and they will tell you that they want to subscribe to authors and series. Please, take my money and let me automate these purchases! There is no downside to this.

If you want to make even more, do what Baen does and let me buy copies early. Baen lets us off easy, actually charging less than hardcover for their ARCs.

Create Markets for Curators

Amazon already does this a bit with Amazon Associates, but it doesn’t really work for a physical curator.

I regularly make Kindle purchases while in bookstores. I’ll see something on the shelf, decide that I want it and immediately have it on my iPhone and iPad. That doesn’t help the bookstore. Barnes and Noble decided to address this with the Nook, which I doubt will help given the development and marketing costs involved.

Worse, it really doesn’t help the small bookstore.

What would help is if Amazon or Apple made their apps location aware and created a revenue sharing program for small bookstores. Increased ebook awareness in exchange for rewarding the curators. This would work even better if more ebook readers offered subscription and recurring revenue purchase options, so the local book store could sell higher value packages than a single book, making more significant rev shares possible.

Play to the 1% Fans

Just like vinyl is making a comeback, it is certain that fans of certain authors will want special editions. This doesn’t just mean a normal hardcover. Take a lesson from Josh Freese. Don’t just publish a hardcover, give me a goldleaf, dragon leather wrapped tome!

Of course, this isn’t easy either. If each special edition costs you a million dollars to create, book publishers are still hosed. The challenge is to make it easy for a particular publisher and author to choose the right options for them. J.K. Rowling probably doesn’t want to have dinner with a fan, but should definitely offer super-premium editions of Harry Potter.

As Charlie Stross points out — just like making music — there are a host of costs in the lifecycle of a creating a book. Unlike music or newspapers, book publishing has not gone through a recent period of internal misalignment — with music, institutions optimized for physical distribution during vinyl replacement, while newspapers built staked the business on classified ads. As a result, ebooks aren’t likely to be as immediately destructive.

However not “immediately destructive” doesn’t mean “be dumb.” Losing local bookstores will badly damage discovery. Reduced price points for eBooks can hurt margins. Making smart decisions about book publishing has the chance to make books more useful than every before. Unlike the music industry in 2002, book publishers should be focusing on their customers and how to make books better now.

Just finished delivering this. Great, engaged audience despite being early in the morning, tons of good questions afterwards, too.

Cory Ondrejka OGI Keynote

Earlier this week, a friend hit me with a request for an Unvarnished Review on Facebook. Normally, I respond to nothing on Facebook — the Werewolf bites were fun while they lasted — but since I trust Hunter I thought “what the hell?” and clicked through. It’s an interesting concept — get anonymous feedback from people you (in theory) trust and an area Hunter just posted about — so I gave a few reviews. Was going to leave it there but instead decided to do an experiment.

I was curious how inoculated Facebook users were to spammy-looking invites. Facebook has made a host of changes to their home pages and alerting rules, plus the various social games dominate whatever attention space is left. My hypothesis: even with a careful selection of likely responders, very few would respond.

I sent out 35 Unvarnished invites to likely responders. The results?

• 12 (35%) people emailed to ask variants of “was your account hacked?”, “are you advising this company?”, “was this an experiment?” (Answers: No, No, Yes. I have no connection with Unvarnished and have since removed the app from my Facebook account.)

• 6 (17%) people left reviews

A bit higher than I expected, but the law of small numbers applies. Thus endeth the experiment. Apologies for the spam added to your Facebook wall, but thanks for the tidbit of data.