Crowd Accelerated Innovation and eBooks

This month’s Wired features an article by Chris Anderson of TED (not to be confused with editor-in-chief Chris Anderson) on what he calls Crowd Accelerated Innovation. It follows Clay Shirky’s thesis that the massive increase in online access for communities of variant sizes brings changes in kind, not just degree. Anderson uses dance as an example, pointing to rapid advancement of style and new moves once online video became ubiquitous (in the first world, but still): thanks to YouTube, six year olds can memorize moves by bleeding-edge choreographers.

Here’s his own TED talk about it:

Now, he stresses the importance of online video to this development. He saw TED talks get better as speakers reviewed past highlights and worked to advance the format.

While this is all well and good, and overlaps plenty with Steven Johnson’s recent work, I’d like to investigate how Crowd Accelerated Innovation informs the ebook sector of trade publishing.

Ye Olde Magazine Website

With the relaunch of Vogue.com, I thought it would be worth discussing a few magazine’s websites. After all, they must convert web traffic into subscriptions (or ad impressions), a tricky balance between print and digital familiar to those of us in the trade industry. At an admittedly smaller scale, of course.

Vogue.com is the highest profile relaunch this year, and it looks like they’re emphasizing photos and video above all else. The top carousel would be more compelling if it didn’t read “Advertisement” on the arrow-tabs. Intentional? Or bad metadata? Thanks either way for telling me not to click through.

I jumped right to the Culture section, and was happy to see their Books coverage topping Film and Music. How often does that happen? Most magazine and culture aggregators prioritize books slightly above AM radio.

The name of the game is certainly email subscriptions. One must register to use their “lightbox” feature, which isn’t enough of a value add for me, but could be for others.

Which brings us to GQ.com, another feather in Condé’s cap. My friends know I’ve been a GQ reader since, well, birth. Blame Dad.

I was a fan of their site’s previous iteration as Men.Style.com, which shared content with Details. This meant more content, but weaker branding. Guess which one won out in the relaunch? Now most of the print magazine’s articles are repeated as blog posts, which means you turn off your core audience while weakening your subscription argument to the fence-sitters. On top of this, there seem to be no benefits to giving your email address, other than redundant advertiser surveys.

Like everything else, they need to play to the strengths of the medium: Their periodic “30 Days of Style” package is smartly produced, with an ingenious mix of editorial, video, and community engagement. It can’t be done in print and I bet it drives site registration through the roof. They also do a good job with the random guest-blog by a comedian.

Others? I find Wired is too vertically-oriented, attempting to over-categorize their blogs and sections. The New Yorker site and blogs are content-rich and well-organized, setting the standard for everyone else.

What do you think? Are there others that succeed or fail?

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On Chris Anderson’s “Free”

I plan on reading Wired editor Chris Anderson’s book Free: The Future of a Radical Price. I greatly admire the man’s magazine, and I’ve heard from enough reviews that the book, taken with a grain of salt, contains some noteworthy ideas. As Galleycat has noted, his free-for-a-month version on Scribd has been viewed 17K times so far, though you have to read the text on your computer monitor: no pdf or epub download for your preferred reading device. Also, the reader is flash-based, so you can’t read it on your iPhone’s browser either. It’s like a library that gives away books for free, only you can’t take them out of the building!

Anderson notes in the comments (if that is him) that the audiobook version is free, without restriction, in perpetuity, and that ebook reader versions are coming soon. So… why couldn’t Hyperion roll out all versions simultaneously? I really hope there’s a justification for the staggered releases beyond organizational incompetence.

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