Books, Technology

Why do we pay VAT on eBooks but not on print books?

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There’s no VAT charged on books – it’s one of a number of exempt products and services that the HMRC sets to be zero rated (For the full list – click here).

…but there is on eBooks. I’ve been searching for an answer as to why (and indeed, why print books are zero rated). I can only assume that – as books broadly speaking ‘better’ or are needed for civilized society, a view was taken that they should be zero rated and that’s been maintained over the years.

As to why eBooks aren’t zero rated? The suggestions I’ve read online indicate that legislators haven’t quite caught up with the concept. Would they be taxing a digital download/service, or a ‘book’ in the traditional sense? In the case of Kindle, you aren’t buying the book but the right to access it from Amazon – so how is that classified by the bean counters?

Irrespective of the logistics of it and whether they should be zero rated or not, this is why the pricing on eBooks is so broken. It is almost inevitably cheaper for me to buy a hardback on Amazon than the Kindle equivalent (given Amazon’s extensive discounting of new mass-market hardback novels). Frustrating, but I’m still paying the digital tax – the convenience of e-reading – not to mention the enormous amounts of shelf space it’ll save me in the long run – is immense.

Technology

The future of human/machine interaction

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I’ve been thinking about this one for a while as well. We all know the scene from minority report…

This has been held up as the way in which people will interact with machines, and – indeed – some people have been working to make it a reality.

But is this the way that people will interact with technology in the future? A big part of me thinks no – too much work! Sci-fi tells lots of different stories, and one of the main things people imagine is voice control.

My own feeling falls down a few different paths. I should flag that my agency has clients involved in a few of these fields – Logitech on the more traditional machine interaction side and Nuance on the voice recognition side – but these views are my own and uninformed by discussions with those guys.

1. Traditional man/machine interaction isn’t going away for a while. Mice and keyboards are very effective at getting through many of the tasks we’ve made for ourselves and are very well entrenched.

2. Voice is going to continue to develop. Whilst voice control has always had its fans and its critics, there will be two key things that both limit it and send it on its way. The limitation – is accuracy. In the near to mid term it’s unlikely to reach the 90+% accuracy levels you get when typing. The driving force – is the need for hands free. There are always going to be contexts in which hands-free control over a machine will be important, more so as mobile computing entrenches itself in modern society. So whether its in an industrial context, in a car or on a mobile device there are platforms on which voice would be an optimum control mechanism.

3. Touch. The ‘hot’ interface right now. As someone who owns and uses and iPad and and iPhone I can tell you that I am a convert; initial mediocre experiences on tediously inadequate Windows Mobile devices, unresponsive and stylus-driven, made me very sceptical indeed but the potential of this for innovative and interesting interaction with different applications is tremendous. But I can’t help but feel that the limitation here is the screen…

Which leads me to…

4. AR interaction. I have no idea how far this will go – at the moment augmented reality provides wonderful toys for marketers to play with and the potential for some retail novelty. But if you’ve read Charlie Stross‘ Halting State (as you know I have), you’ll have read of a world in which everyone wears AR enabled glasses, and can overlay ‘layers’ of Internet reality on the real world. So – an overlay of Google Maps on your current view of the street, complete with turn by turn navigation. An overlay of SquareMeal’s restaurant reviews. An overview of World of Warcraft’s avatars, if you are so inclined. An overlay of the police criminal database, giving you information on individuals, crime scenes, etc. Whilst that’s a fun extrapolation, I think there’s scope for more everyday applications, and – as ever – I have no doubt that marketers will be amongst the first to pick them up. Imagine an AR iPhone app, for example, that allowed you to view special offers on a poster, and interact with them to choose the one you wanted to download (app would recognise a QR code, or some such, download the relevant reality overlay from the Internet alongside an interaction protocol, and let you play!). Or imagine a gaming context – in which you could run around, laserquest style, interacting with phantoms like the one in the Lynx ad.

AR is exciting for much the same reason that the Wii was exciting – it involves every day people in an interactive experience – in the real world. There may be screens or bits of tech to support the interaction but over time they will fade into routine mundanity (is that a word? computer says no). Although I do think that perhaps Gmail’s new features might be taking the concept a bit further than it should go.

5. Direct neural interface. Still far away? I’ve not read anything in the mainstream media about this one. A lot of sci-fi features subvocalisation to intelligent digital agents (Peter F Hamilton (link) calls them ‘u-shadows’). I’ve never been sure what subvocalisation is (oh, that’s interesting, wonder what Nuance is doing there…), and over the years of meeting people, the workings of whose minds completely evades me, I’m cynical about the capacity of a machine to interpret the synaptic instructions of a broad subset of humanity. Not without the Cylons taking over, anyway.

One thing’s for sure – there’s a lot going on in this space and it’s massively exciting. Have I missed any particularly interesting ones? Always interested to read.

PR, Work

The European Digital Journalism Survey 2011

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Updated: to include my boss’ take on the survey and its findings, via Vimeo embed, below.

The EDJS 2011 – “Clicks, Communities and Conversations” – was launched today by my agency, Brands2Life, in coordination with the Oriella PR Network – our partner network of independent agencies around the world.  It examines the views of 478 journalists polled over the last few months.

Fronted by my esteemed colleague and Head of International @mistergrainger and our co-founder, @gilesfraser, we were joined by a panel made up of @kieranalger, @tphallett and @reutermarkjones to comment on the key findings of the study.

The headline trends:

The slump in advertising revenues is slowing. This year, barely 20 percent of the journalists surveyed expected their publications to see a fall in revenue. In 2010, however, 62 percent said this was the case, and in 2009 the figure was 66 per cent.

Those polled say that the popularity of online media is gradually eclipsing that of ‘offline’ publications. This year, the proportion of respondents who agreed their offline print or broadcast outlet had the biggest audience fell to 50 percent for the first time.

Social media are permeating the newsroom. Increasingly journalists are using digital channels such as blogs and Twitter to source and verify story leads.

You can read the study in full here and read SamKano’s take on the findings over on the Oriella blog, but I took a few notes and thought I’d share perspectives here too.

One of the things I found most interesting about the presentation and discussion was a conversation about the value of social media to newsrooms.

Reuters’ Mark Jones said: “I don’t think any serious professional journalist could do their job any more, without being on Twitter.” Talking about the Osama story (which Chris played his part in), Mark said: “One of the things that came out of this was that expert views came into the conversation very quickly. You didn’t have to wait for the TV broadcast or full form stories to get the analyst view. You could see the story being formed in front of your eyes on Twitter. That’s where news is going – and it has profound implications for what journalists and communicators do.”

By the same token, disintermediation in social media is an important development for journalists in sourcing expert views and validating stories.  Mark continued: “When people are looking for comments from experts or company representatives, time is of the essence. Twitter supercharges this. In a straw poll of my colleagues – [the delays are] their number one complaint. The answer is in the media.” The challenge to PR execs is to do what’s necessary to research and be hyperconnected with their media contacts.

The flip side to that question came up in discussion – does disintermediation threaten media, as it allows consumers direct access to news from the people making it, at the scene, et al? The panel didn’t come to a conclusion – though I have my views here – in that the role of the media needs to shift – less churnalism and more investigative reporting, less simple narrative and more dynamic storytelling, less straight reportage and more insightful analysis. Some of this relates to the Public Business agenda, in my view: ‘The People’ need to demand this sort of journalism, and allow publishers to fund it.

T3’s Kieran Alger made some interesting comments building on this – as a publication – T3 is working with brands on reciprocal promotion: “Today we have 20,000 followers on Twitter and 17,000 on Facebook. On any day they’ll deliver about 10,000 unique users or 20% of our overall traffic. We increasingly look to people running brands, Twitter feeds and so on to help out with that – asking PRs to help promote our stories to their followers. Big brands like Samsung, for example, have massive numbers of fans.”

Talking about the plethora of social media venues and communities that media outlets run – and the fact that survey showed a reduction in the number of reporters whose media outlets run their own communities – there was an interesting discussion as to what the different public social media outlets do for media publications. Talking about the rise of Facebook, CBS Interactive’s Tony Hallett said: “It’s horses for courses – some forms of content work on different platforms. Facebook works well for a particular type of very loyal users. Traffic that media gets from social outlets is still small compared to Google, for example, but you do get a certain type of super-user – people that interact with you in a big way. [These users] make for a very fun environment.”

Tony had given us another example of a passionate audience earlier in the discussion (making an entirely separate point): “On ZDNet, we have a subset of users that go crazy for photos of data centres – data centre porn… These are extremely secure, secretive environments, so we will take photography and video supplied to us – and are transparent about sourced material.” Which, whilst it makes the serious point that publishers are keen for more interactive comment, is amusing for the fact that it underlines the adage – that it takes all kinds.

For me, the overall takeaway is that the platforms and mechanics for engaging with media continue to shift, and professional communicators need to evolve their comms infrastructure – from the content they create to the way we pitch the media – to suit.

Also, spend more time on Twitter.

I’ll add my thanks to those of my colleagues for the fantastic discussion and encourage you to head over to the Oriella blog to join the digital debate.

 

Oriella Digital Journalism Study 2011 from Brands2Life on Vimeo.

Media & Marketing, PR, Work

Six skills today’s PR professional needs to have

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One in a sporadic series of work-related posts. I’ve been thinking about some of these for a while, and a couple of them in particular sparked the idea for a post. What do you think? These are in no particular order…

1. Polymath tendencies. I think a good consultant is able to shift with the winds, being as interested in mechanical engineering one day as social anthropology or fiscal policy the next. Being able to understand the drivers behind major political, social, economic and technological trend is a key skill in helping clients meet the media agenda and too many people come into careers without even the curiosity to help them evolve to a state of general interestedness in the world. If you can step into the shoes of a psychologist, information architect, one of your client’s customers – whatever it may be – it will provide an additional lens through which you can see campaign ideas, and provide another basis of insight on which you can build your ideas.

2. Hyperconnectivity. By this I mean that you are able to connect yourself into different information and social streams with deft facility – coping with dialogues on multiple channels, and absorbing information at a quick pace. It’ll help you cope with the burgeoning requirement of enterprise to keep tabs and engage with social media conversation, it’ll support your ability to engage with hyperconnected media contacts, it’ll let you be on the edge of what’s happening.

3. Numeracy (and visual thinking). I’ve talked about data before, and the ridiculous accessibility of it – more than most people can understand or make use of. A PR’s job, in its simplest sense, is in crafting and communicating stories for and with its clients. Telling these stories increasingly requires a ludicrous amount of context and capturing this context in visual representations is a vital part of contemporary journalism and blogging. Everyone loves a good infographic – can you tell a story in pictures as readily as you can in words? Note that I don’t mean that you need to be a statistician, or a designer – just equipped enough to do some basic number crunching so that you can build the story – and think visually enough to brief a graphic designer to create what you want.

4. Literacy. I’ve met in equal number over the years – of PRs who treat the English language like an bat, crushing messages into as short a space as possible – and those that throw flowery turns of phrase into every other sentence. Good PR writing is jargon free, to the point, well-referenced, in context and over all else – concise.

5. Confidence. Whilst it may be possible to be a mild-mannered Clark Kent in the world of media (and I’m doubtful about that), PR calls for a strong temperament – you have to be able to consult (either into the business or to clients) which by definition may require taking a contrary view, you have to be able to deal with investigative journalists, you’ll probably have to deal with a crisis or two – all of this requires a steady hand and an occasionally loud voice. Not to mention confidence goes hand-in-hand with having no fear of the phone.

6. Ethics. It may be out of fashion for some, but at our agency – and in my own moral framework – it’s important to maintain certain boundaries. I’m not going to mention the obvious example here – if you’re in the industry you’ll know the current showcase example of dubious professional practice.

Have I missed any? Tell me in the comments.

Miscellany, Observational

Commercialism-as-a-Service

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I’m – believe it or not – beginning to get bored of the endless shuffle of stuff. The computer’s died, get a new one, the new iPhone weighs 15g less, get a new one, etc. It’s astonishing that some industries – I’m looking at you, Gillette – actually deliberately engineer products to fail sooner than the materials would require just to turn a dime. Depressing, really.

My pipe dream? Commercialism-as-a-Service. It’s a bit like the Abel & Cole veg box but for, y’know, everything else. I will voluntarily give information about my needs and shopping requirements to whoever wants it (Google? Facebook? Duke it out amongst yourselves), and you can just sort it all out for me, preferably on some kind of sensible lease/upgrade cycle. Cash for CaaS. Good for the environment, good for me. We can have some kind of sensible iterative process to refine what you give me and we’ll negotiate a sensible rate for outgoings.

Where do I sign?

Technology

Helpful Mac gestures and shortcuts for Windows users

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I’m still getting used to the MacBook, so discovering things daily. The below are my current most helpful shortcuts and gestures. What do you use? Tell me, Macfans!

Option instead of alt, COMMAND instead of CTRL. COMMAND-OPTION-ARROW (or COMMAND-OPTION-SHIFT-ARROW). Keep messing that one up.

Command tab – switch apps, etc. Command generally replaces CTRL. Command-` will switch between tabs in an application.

Enter to rename files (F2 in Windows)

FN-DELETE – forward delete (delete key in Windows)

COMMAND-SPACEBAR – Spotlight search (keep thinking it should be left-swish – probably will be in Lion)

Loads of cool stuff with Expose, the applicaton switching, erm, application – COMMAND-F3 shows desktop, for example, Expose shows all open windows wby pressing F3 (same as three finger gesture)

Cool touchpad stuff:

Two finger touch gesture – scrolling.

Four fingers swoosh down gesture – view all open apps (or swoosh up to show desktop)

Three fingers sideways swoosh – back/forward

Pinch to zoom

Rotate to… rotate

Internet, Miscellany, Observational

Digital ancient

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I had an email from Yahoo! the other day thanking me for being a user for the last 12 years.

I mostly use it as a spam-catch these days but find it astonishing that I signed up for it that long ago. In times before that – I had a Hotmail account (which I still use for IM) – that’ll be going back 17 years.

Holy heck, I seem to be old. Does this mean I’m no longer a Digital Native? Or that there’s some kind of ghastly Digital Native 2.0 out there?

As edgy and down with the kids as I try to be perhaps I should accept the crushing inevitability of it all, get a pipe and smoking jacket and start being irate at young people these days…

Technology

International broadbandness

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Because I’m curious about these things, I tend to make a cursory study of broadband connectivity wherever I travel (after all, in my professional life, I helped promote a global Broadband Quality Study three times…). All speed ratings are as determined by the Speedtest.net app on my iPhone.

– In the UK, we get an average of 3 mbp/s down and 0.8 mbp/s up. Mediocre, but serviceable. I’m considering BT Infinity when my contract is up in September – anyone have any insight into whether that might be a terrible idea? This is a suburban reading.

– In Malaysia, which for years has had a fairly consistently terrible broadband service, my parents have recently acquired a fibre optic cable service – resulting in synchronous 10mbp/s internet access for them. It’s amazing, although not massively cheap – at over 40 quid a month, in local currency. This is also a suburban reading.

– In Denmark, the speed as tested was more like 2 mbp/s down and 1 mbp/s up. Which is low, until you consider that somehow they manage to stream HD IPTV over the same line, at the same time, with nary a glitch or artefact. They have some clever traffic management stuff going on to make that happen, although aspects of the connection confounded sense: the router periodically stopped routing to random websites (including Google.com) and the original router supplied didn’t have wifi or switch features, so was tediously difficult to share. Thank goodness for the wifi upgrade Onkel and Moster got! This is a remote rural reading.

I didn’t check Finland – but that was a suburban reading which has been the cause for a little complaint.

No grand conclusions to draw from this except to point out that the fibre experience was almost magical next to the increasing creakiness of DSL broadband, which gets proportionately worse the further you are from a city. My hesitation around BT Infinity stems as much from concerns about how effectively the copper and in-house wiring will carry an increased broadband quality, how crappy the BT provided VDSL modem/router is likely to be… as well as the cost, which is double what I’m currently paying with O2.

I’ll continue to fight a broadband crusade – we need Next Generation Access in the UK sooner rather than later – and look forward to seeing what the likes of BT and Virgin Media do about it. I can’t believe that the Malaysians have managed to provide such a good quality of service, but it’s early days for the product there so imagine TMNet will soon eat its own tail in contention ratios.

Any other International broadband experiences to share?

Dadblogging, Internet

Curious Emily

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In a strange sort of way, I’m looking forward to Emily getting to the "But why, Daddy…" phase of child development.

30 years ago, when I was growing up, my parents invested heavily in encyclopaedia. How else to satisfy the curiosity of three precocious children? Other than providing the best answers possible to the extensive and occasionally tedious litany of questions about the world.

Tony Buzan, when we met him a few months back, made a big thing about the intellectual capacity of children being disproportionately greater  – before traditional education systems (and probably tired parents) drill it out of them. I don’t want that for Emily if we can manage it – I’d love for her to continue to be curious about the world for as long as possible.

Which is reason #3984 that I’m grateful for the Internet. It’s amazing and probably taken for granted that we now have persistent access to the world’s knowledge. All you need is an understanding of how to search and how and when to trust information (not trivial in itself), and virtually any (likely) question can be answered. Unless she proves to be a philosopher or particle physicist, in which case she’ll find more questions…

I just need to be careful that I don’t shortcut my answers too much… "Because, the Internet," might turn her into a Daily Mail reader*….

 

* If this doesn’t make sense now, keep hitting refresh on Chris’ Daily Mail headline generator until it tells you the Internet causes cancer, or some other ill. I think that headline actually happened earlier this year. Mental.

Travel

To the management at Southwest Trains

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Dear management team at SWT,

Thank you. For the privilege of furnishing me with a ticket to travel on one of your luxuriant trains. For the economies made when I purchased, at a cost of over 3000 pounds, an annual travel card. The ‘gold card’ privileges, I’m sure will furnish me with lavish and extreme comforts at some indeterminate, difficult-to-conceive time in the future.

Thank you for your convenient and spacious parking facilities. It is helpfully located, just far enough away from the station to result in a complete drenching in the event of one of England’s frequent and persistent bouts of precipitation. I find it remarkable value at over 7 pounds a day. Simply remarkable.

Thank you for the morning rush. There’s nothing like the swarm of tired, grumpy people first thing in the morning to kick start your day. It provides the perfect dose of adrenaline to get the blood boiling ahead of a day in the office. Thank you also for refusing to add additional capacity to the line – where would we be without natural selection? And after all, sitting is bad.

Speaking of which, thank you for providing such inadequate seating. It hones my hunter/gatherer skills as I cram my way past elderly ladies in search of a perch. It has made me more appreciative of what I have; I am piteously grateful when I can find a broken fold-down seat next to one of your curiously fragrant toilets.

Thank you for your cracked cooperation with the other rail operators. It is a rousing challenge when, every month when my railcard fails to be read by a barrier gate and I seek a replacement, I have to go to a SWT office and can’t be helped by your partners elsewhere in the British rail network.Truly, Nationalisation is a terrible evil.

Of late, I’ve noticed that you seem to have employed psychic train drivers… they are inevitably and persistently late when I am anxious to get home and invariably punctual when I’m running more than 15 seconds late for a train. I can only assume you have some ingenious mechanism by which the punctuality of a train is in some way powered by the collective unhappiness of the people ahead of or behind it. In this respect, you have adapted the powers of the slime from Ghostbusters 2 as a power supply and should be applauded for it.

Thank you for the disruptive modernisation works you are soon to be carrying out at Basingstoke station. Whilst I don’t immediately see the logic in modernising the perfectly functional ticket hall, in which no regular commuters spend any great period of time, I’m sure there’s a sound strategy behind it and its not at all an enormous, bloated waste of time and money.

Ah, train travel. One of the most idyllic ways to travel, and a remarkable innovation. Every time I stand perched for an hour between a drunk banker and an aromatic systems architect, I marvel at the elegy that is Britain’s rail system. I look forward to the hot, sweaty summer days ahead; to desensitising myself to empathy and building my lower back strength as I stand for the two hours a day I travel with you.

Thank you.

Armand David's personal weblog: dadhood, technology, running, media, food, stuff and nonsense.