Sometimes, I choose the ebook over print for other reasons. Let’s take Debt: The First 5.000 Years, the unlikely pageturner by anthropologist/anarchist David Graeber. As Amazon Germany told me, I would have to wait for 4-6 weeks until it was ready to ship. The ebook was an easy choice. Zap – instant gratification.

But I still might get myself the print edition.
Why would I do that: duplicating content, if content is really king and all that matters?

The easy answer goes like this: I grew up with printed books. Case closed. True, socialization makes a difference. But having been math-socialized with a LED pocket calculator by Texas Instrumentsdidn’t prevent me from preferring Excel or nowadays Google spreadsheets for my calculations. I’m not a pure-bred Luddite. My music is not on vinyl or MCs, I treat CDs as a MP3 backup.

Book wannabe.

So what’s the thing with books and reading? As we haven’t reached the age of fully billable telepathy yet, any aspiring author will have to write down his thoughts and constructs. That’s a good start. But to reach any readers, he now has to replicate his opus magnum. A cloisterful of monks can accomplish this job quite nicely, a printing press will speed up the whole thing, and the Interwebs brought me Graeber’s Debt in light speed.

But in any case: to replicate, we need a carrier medium. And not all media are created equal. Production cost, durability, and usability may vary. Many 5.000 year old Sumerian clay tablets are still around and even pretty readable (if you happen to be fluent in cuneiform). They should get an A+ for durability. Maybe a  bit later, the neighboring Egyptians switched to papyrus as their medium of choice. Most likely not because they ran out of clay, but because of the superior usability if you want to write down more than some bookkeeping notes or an ancient tweet. As the Egyptians held on to their papyrus monopoly, the others were drawn to the parchment. Which, as it turned out, was not as lightweight and snazzy, but way more durable. Then the Chinese invented paper, Gutenberg the movable types, and so on and so on.

It took a while. But the modern printed book is a rather fascinating device. A dedicated handheld reader with a high resolution display, offering random access to its content. It’s easy to grab and hold. It’s rather sturdy (please do not drop your Kindle from a four storied building). It’s nice to look at and comes in manifold distinctive packagings, from cheap and colorful throwaway to leather-encased monolith.

Easily customizable spatial access to content.

Compared to this, the ebook is rather bland. Of course you can judge a printed book by its cover. Just compare this to that. Even a book spine says a lot. Pile up some books on your nightstand, and you have instant  access to your chosen bedtime stories. Pile them on your work desk, and chances are high, that you’re after business, not leisure. We’re talking spatially customizable 1click access to your readings.

Think about it: ebook usability really sucks. I’m not talking about the reading experience, which is constantly getting better and better (notable exception: iBooks with it’s kitschy when-I-grow-up-I-want-to-become-a-real-book page design). The real un-fun part is the time before you start with chapter one. Turn on, search, see results with tiny images and standardized typeface. And, come on, who in real life is so anal to sort his printed library by title, author AND/OR category?

List this: compulsive sorting disorder.

But it’s getting weirder. You have to know where you bought the book, or at least the file format. Buy some music, and any mp3-player will do the job. Buy Neal Stephenson’s highly recommendable Reamde on Amazon, and it will live in your Kindle or Kindle app and only there, not to forget. Buy Graeber’s Debt at the publisher’s store, and it will sit either in your iBooks or Stanza app or both or anywhere else, depending on which app you synced it in, but definitely not in the Kindle or the Kindle app.

Can we, at least. please get this sorted out?

This machine ♥ CDs.

So let’s flash back to those prehistoric times. For about two decades, the music industry had made a killing by distributing billions and billions of digital masters. The CD, as conceived in the 1980, wrapped up the vinyl album into a shiny digital disc and propelled sales figure to an entirely new level.

But now, at the turn of the millennium, the CD monoculture found itself under attack. The PC (formerly known as a strange device for decidedly uncool nerds) and the Internet (formerly known as a service for decidedly strange scientists) had tainted the love affair of the industry with all things shiny and digital.

And a monoculture it was. Let’s have a look at the US-sales figures in 2001. The CD delivered roughly 94% of all revenues. As we know from the world of agriculture, monocultures have their advantages. You can waltz with hugely oversized machines through fields the size of the Central Park profiting from economies of scale. The drawbacks are equally known. “Monocultures can lead to the quicker spread of diseases”, as Wikipedia drily states.

The music industry fought the digital pest of copying their freely distributed masters like any Idaho potato megafarmer would do. After ignoring the first signs of disease, they started crop dusting. As with any pesticide, spreading DRM and later on even (involuntary) infecting PCs with root kits had some serious side effects. Their legal crop dusting may have killed Napster. But in 2001, after several years of digital infights, legally buying and downloading music was still virtually impossible. (Look at the charts, based upon RIAA revenue figures: downloads will not even appear before 2004.)

The CD monoculture: making a bundle with bundles.

But back to 2001. “iPod’s built-in FireWire® port lets you download an entire CD into iPod in under 10 seconds and 1,000 songs in less than 10 minutes,” boasted Apple in their press release. Yup. Basically, the iPod was CD player on steroids – sans discs and drive. You filled it by ripping your CDs on a Mac (no Windows yet). Strike your CDs. Any CD was fine. (Or you gathered some music files by strolling through the darknets of the times. But that’s a different story)

Now, let’s have a look at the CD. The recorded music industry, as any media industry, extracts value out of content by selling it via a medium. It’s a productification process, but it does no stop there.

Traditionally, the music industry bundled their content either into a single (buy one medium, get two pieces of content) or an album or compilation (buy one slightly more expensive medium, get at least eight pieces of content). Broken down, an album equals to a price incentive of something like buying 10 for the price of six.

From the business perspective, getting consumers to buy such a bundle makes perfect sense. Especially, if you are in an increasing returns business like software or media: the production of the content is a one time expenditure. Duplication and distribution add only marginal costs. Hence, the more you sell, the higher the returns.

Music in 2010: downloads = mostly unbundled content.

The value proposition seemed to have worked pretty well. Can you spot the CD-Single, containing mostly four titles? In 2001 it’s this tiny little orangeish sliver down there on the right, with a share 0.6% of all sales. Good for the industry. Because the cost of producing and distributing the single equals pretty much the cost of the whole album – which generates much more revenue.

As we saw, the original iPod was still somewhat of positioned as a CD aggregating device, somewhat legally filled by buying CDs and putting your music onto your device. Yes, overall sales were declining. But the industry was still selling bundled content to the consumer.

On April 28, 2003 this was going to change. Opening as the iTunes Music Store Apple, albums were still available. And still, the price for the bundle was lower than buying just a single piece of content. But how did the consumer react?

Killing the CD.

Have a look at the sales figures of 2010. The CD is shrinking fast, downloads are gaining just fine. But look at the product shares: 20% Download Singles vs 12.1% Download Albums. Essentially, more than two thirds of the formerly sold content bundles are replaced by single downloads.

The iPod device family of 2011.

Coming back to the iPod. The device family still holds a market share of way over 75%. As pure software, it lives happily in every iPhone. The interface still honors the good old times of the album and the compilation. But buying music has massively changed. Be it the iTunes store, Amazon’s mp3 downloads, or any other digital music warehouse: single downloads rule.

Next time: what is really going on there? Is this sustainable? And can or should there be anything done?

Facebook's Timeline: diving deeply into your private data parts.

But the really big step happens in the background. The ubiquitous Like-button introduced an explicit way to write some information into Facebook’s Open Graph. You like a piece of content – press this button. That’s one way to fill your Timeline, and a fairly cumbersome one.

The new social apps expand this collection of user specific data. Instead of having to press a button, the social apps rely on implicit submissions. Last.fm pioneered this approach with their audioscrobbler technology. As soon as you started listening to music, last.fm collected all relevant meta data, building up a data warehouse which could deliver recommendations based upon real usage. A powerful tool.

Facebook puts this sniffing technology onto a new level. Instead of filling a single container (dubbed: music), Facebook collects data from all over the place. Listening to music on Spotify or Mixcloud adds data as well as watching a movie via Netflix or reading some news on the Guardian app.

This massive data hoarding is combined with the most powerful recommendation mechanism in the world: endorsements by people you know. As Spotify’s Daniel Ek points out: this is like Napster. Not the still existing empty brand name of today, but the original  p2p powerhouse started by Sean Parker, and who had played an important role in the early days of Facebook as well.

The old Napster opened up the hard disks of fellow music fans, who happened to share a digital copy of a song you were looking for on their PCs. The real fun started by browsing what else was in the directory. Was it just a fluke, that this guy shared Miles Davis “Kind of Blue”? Or, maybe, some other strange music I never heard of might be something I like to hear download as well. Which was of course completely, utterly illegal, and the music industry preferred to commit collective suicide instead of working with this altered reality.

Facebook’s open graph enabled (music) partners are of course going the legal way (that’s why you won’t get Spotify or Netflix or … in this or that region or country). But, compared to the old Napster, they can combine the power of content neighborhoods with real life relationships. What happens with a social app looks more or less like this:

• A friend listens to some music.
• The apps share the titles automatically, and write it into the listeners open graph. That’s the “scrobbling”-part
• But now, the app posts this information immediately into the Facebook tickers of the listeners Facebook friends.
• If you happen to like (or maybe, you like him or trust his tastes), you just click, and you can listen as well.
• Or have a look what else this person likes to hear … or read … or watch … or where they run … or what they cook … or …

But be careful: as long as you app is Facebook-enabled (be it on the web, your iPhone, an Android handset, a smart TV …), everything can will be shared. So you better keep Facebook’s privacy settings manual at hand.

Compare the smart phone with the smart tv. The first makes your typical phone tasks a bit easier, simply by adding a smooth user interface. It puts some networking and computing power in your pocket, adds some extras like GPS, and offers even financial incentives for developers to do some great, new things. Thank you, smart phone.

How about the smart tv? The main task of the tv set is being a window to another world, constructed by mostly really large corporations. The last three inventions making your viewing task a bit easier were the remote control (you don’t have to stand up for your right to choose), the VCR/DVD (buy or rent whatever you want) and the PVR (you don’t have to be on time to meet you favourite tv star).

Compared to those three game changers, the smart tv is still a rather weak contender. Yes, they’re selling well. Because it’s hard to find a tv set with a decent screen and no built in internet access. But people aren’t really using the “smart” part. So why would that be?

Let’s have a look at the idea of the app. Most of the apps on my iphone are just easing up things I could do as well on a browser. But hey, the phone’s processor is rather slow and its screen a midget. Apps make life easier for me, because they shrinkwrap a task so I can hold it in the palm of my hand. Even more important: Where or when do I use it? Only, if there’s no larger networked screen with sizable processing power around. (The ipad app use case fits just in between. You’ve got the extra space to handle the slightly larger screen. But you’re not schlepping around a powerful laptop.)

Now, let’s compare those use cases to the current promise of the smart tv. Assume, you’re just two people watching CSI. Wouldn’t it be kind of rude to overlay parts of the screen with your personal Twitter stream? The tv app does not add anything to tv’s core use case: watching tv. It’s either watching tv or app watching. Even more important: you bear with the tiny screen of the smart phone, because you’re on the road. Sitting on your couch, you surrounded by a wifi cloud and you have the choice between laptop, ipad, smart phone – and the tv remote. For all task and things not connected to watching tv, the smart tv loses (no privacy, meager screen resolution, cumbersome data entry …). And smart manufacturers now even get rid of the dumb remote, and stuff it as an app in your phone or tablet.

One of the rare tasks where a smart tv makes sense is finding stuff to watch. But even here, we should look more into well constructed back end systems, than watching out for appy eye candy. To be sure, displaying static information on a tv set is quite a challenge. But the real value does not come out of a grid display of tv shows currently on. The value is in the meta data, the ability to get any video content you want (hello, generation YouTube), starting from a single point of entry. Which could be an app on your tv screen, your tablet, a web browser, whatever.

See, from it’s heritage, the tv is a window to an outside world. Or, technically speaking, a rather dumb displaying device. Will stupid evolve into something like a fully capable large screen ipad on the wall – or more likely resemble the screen attached to a desktop PC?
I guess the interesting part starts in the grey area in between: how much smart will do good?

Upcoming: there’s a rotten app in my smart fridge and where’s the app store in my Smart (as in car)?

What’s the big deal? Sir Howard Stringer smoothely presented the vision of the wholly integrated media and entertainment empire. Hardware, content, and distribution, all under one roof. Now, what’s missing here? Right: Software. Entertainment hardware is almost a commodity. The differentiator is software and the User Interface. Why? Look at your smartphone, your tablet, your smart tv: big shiny screens, with slightly different form factors.

The new Sony tablet has a nice new form factor. But turn it on, and it’s an Android device. The new smart TVs look definitely nice. Turn it on, and it’s an Android device. Boot a Sony PC: hello Microsoft Windows. Start the Playstation: it’s a Sony.

Sure, you still could find a way to combine all those different worlds. Integrating all battling units into one large consumer unit sounds like a smart and ambitous move.
But the press conference mostly proved, that running a vertically and horizontally and however else integrated empire is not a silver bullet. One hour with three talking heads, from smoothely presented CEO vision to well rehearsed droning on features of products with gripping names like XYZ-123 is definitely nothing I would expect from a media empire with a gazillion tv, movie, and music superstars in their employ. Text to speech in front of a smurfish-blue background does not substitute for an entertaining event. And I won’t start to compare this hour with the product presentations of a certain Man in Black.

Facebookistan has the 3rd largest population on the globe, just behind China and India. Google+, the new kid on the block, already surpassed Switzerland (big deal), Senegal, and even Australia. Which puts its current rank somewhere between Canada (population of 34.5 million, rank 35) and China (Republic of Taiwan that is, 23.2 millions, rank 50).

Mark Zuckerberg in the 17th century.

Now, those numbers do not make Facebook into a sovereign state, at least not in the traditional sense. Sovereign states are defined by territory. But the Googleplex is not like the Vatican a sovereign enclave in a larger territory. It’s still just a piece of real estate located in the US. And “Business is War” doesn’t mean Google war droids attacking the design soldiers of Jobs.

No land, no armies. The differences between Facebook (more than 10 times the population) and France (real nukes, real food) or Google (credit rating of AA+, just like the US) and Greece (CC, just like me) are obvious.

But so are the similarities. Sovereign nations are defined by their people, otherwise the Antarctica would be a superpower. And it’s we, the digital people, forming those digital Leviathans of the 21st century, which provide us with our digital IDs and currencies. They handle our communications, they might even tax us or control, what’s to be published or not (on their our Kindles and iPads).

350 years ago, Thomas Hobbes’ concluded, that an absolute monarchy be the best way to govern any sovereign. This would be a fringe opinion nowadays, at least in the western part of the real world. Our ancestors fought pretty hard to get us, where we are now: nobody should stay above the law, censorship is bad, sovereignty belongs to the people.

But a look at the digital domain might make Hobbes a happy man. The digital sovereign is not the people, but a corporation.

• Post your artwork on Facebook, which might offense some bible belters? You’ll get evicted (as it happened to my friend Thomas). Eventually you might be allowed to return (as it happened to my friend Thomas). But no legal recourse here. It’s a little bit like GDR light.
• Use a pseudonym on Google+? Say good-bye to your Google account.
• …

In a heavily distributed digital universe, this wouldn’t be a big deal at all. Don’t like this bar? There are plenty next door. But Facebook isn’t your neighborhood Hooters, and Larry Page definitely not the soup nazi. There are not even a handful of Digital Sovereigns aspiring to become the operating systems of our digital lives.

The preamble to the United States Constitution starts like this: “We the People of the United States, … secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.“

Our digital selves do not enjoy a constitution or according rights. We the users, have to accept some Terms of Service. And as most of you never really read what you OKed with a single mouse click, we hand now over to Richard Dreyfuss declaiming some parts of the Apple iTunes EULA.

A more hands-on approach comes from Sanjay Jha, CEO of Motorola Mobility. After hinting that Motorola could use its bazillion mobile patents to tax some of its Android competitors, Google defended its Android franchise by buying
the whole of Motorola Mobility.

• Free is powerful, and
• any digital commodity will sooner or later end up there.

So one question can be: where and for whom could we prevent commoditization? A core feature of a digital file is infinite, lossless copies. So we’re talking not just commodity, but commodity with an endless supply. For a while, copy restrictions for digital files seemed to some parties a doable, systemic approach to kill this killer feature. Sure. Unfortunately, this was a bit like trying to protect the water business by demanding that all water has to be kept in its solid form. Yes, ice is great. But you have to deep freeze the world, otherwise your business is going to melt.

But, does everything digital necessarily become a commodity? I guess that’s where we started to disagree. Disclaimer: some people will know, that I’m working on a platform which bets on the value of a digital creation – emphasizing the creation, and not the digital part.

As we have no proof or traction or even a counter-example yet, I’m always glad to hear of people thinking into comparable directions. A couple of months ago, Robert Douglass, Open Source developer of Drupal-Core fame, proposed his idea of a Drupal App Store to the Drupal community. Which led to some rather heated exchanges. Now can listen to his reasonings in this podcast by Lullabot Consultants.

While Twitter was struggling with its success, throwing all resources after keeping the service up and running, a plentitude of developers started to create a multitude of clients. This was great. A/B-testing a user experience is helpful. But Twitter managed something like an A/n-testing: With A being Twitter’s own dusty old web interface, and n all those other ways to work and interact with the platform.

But now, after 5 years of growth (and countless A/n-tests), the corporate part of Twitter had to step on the brakes. The artful balance of internal and external developments had to be shaken up. Buy why kill a very successful continuous development process, which externalized most of the cost and risk? After raking in funds like Scrooge McDuck into his money bin, Twitter finally needs a business model, which delivers the Dollar per user Twitter-co-founder Biz Stone promoted once.

In the meantime, the original post declaring war on the mainstream interface developers has disappeared (and resurrected). But I don’t think the core problem can be solved that easily. The high wire act of being Mozilla and Microsoft at the same time is becoming tricky. Or, to twist the old adage on cake ownership and nutrition: You cannot be the cake and eat it, too

• cotton
• jeans
• digital media

Right. Jeans is the wrong one. Because cotton and digital media are commodities, but the jeans a value added product.

Exhibit 1

As Joe Weisenthal insightful question in Business Insider: Guess What Surging Cotton Prices Do To The Cost Of Blue Jeans. In the last year, cotton prices almost doubled. As jeans are (or: should be) mostly cotton, what would be the effect on the retail prices of let’s say a Levi’s Ex-Girlfriend Jean (no kiddin’).

The effect is actually: zilch.
Levi’s bill of material rose from $1.41 to $2.53 – the final product cost $65.

Exhibit 2

Remember this infographic?

It tell’s you one thing: musician’s are cultural cotton pickers. Under current conditions, the (monetary) value is created elsewhere. And there’s not even a commodity bubble for music in sight.