Many newspapers and other traditional media entities still think of themselves as delivering their content in a specific package, although most are trying hard to build an online readership as well, or experiment with iPad and Facebook apps (not to mention paywalls). But few are thinking about their businesses in radically different ways — as content-generating engines with multiple delivery methods, or as platforms for data, around which other things can be built. USA Today  appears to be moving in this direction, by opening up its data for others to use and even commercialize, following in the footsteps of The Guardian and its ground-breaking “open platform.”

USA Today has had an API (an “application programming interface,” which allows outside developers and services to access its content) for some time now, as many other newspapers such as the New York Times  do. But like most of those other media outlets, the terms of the USA Today content API said it could only be used for personal or non-commercial uses, which meant the range of applications that could make use of the paper’s content was extremely limited. Now, the Nieman Journalism Lab notes that the newspaper has changed the terms of its API, and will allow commercial licensing of its data, with no rate limits or data caps for these “premium” licenses.

Opening up a relationship with outside developers
The paper’s APIs include one for all of its news articles, one for reviews of books, movies and other entertainment, and one for its census data — which is made up of public data, but has been collected by USA Today and made available in a more usable format than the original government version (although most of its APIs require non-commercial use, the New York Times allows commercial use of its government-info API, which is also made up of public data). Stephen Kurtz, VP of digital development at USA Today, told the Nieman Lab that most of the developers interested in using the paper’s APIs for commercial use are “mom-and-pop” shops, or a couple of guys in a garage, mashing up the content they get with other sources — such as combining USA Today movie reviews with data from Netflix. Said Kurtz:

We encourage that, and they give us good feedback of what they’d like to see and how they would like the API to grow. So for us, it’s very symbiotic.

This is a smart way to think of what an open API accomplishes. It’s not so much that it’s going to generate huge sums of money for a newspaper that offers it, but it allows for experimentation outside the traditional confines of the publication itself — and that can generate valuable ideas and feedback. For The Guardian, which launched its “open platform” approach last year, the opening up of its API was very much an extension of editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger’s belief in what he calls a “mutualized newspaper,” one in which readers and those outside the publication help on both the journalistic side and the development side.

Those outside the paper have good ideas too

As Chris Thorpe, then the Guardian‘s developer advocate, described in an interview with me last year when the open platform launched, the paper’s API allows for access on several levels. One is the original free level, which allows anyone to use the data for personal or non-commercial purposes; the second is a commercial license, which allows developers to make use of the API provided they agree to accept advertising within the content; and the third is a “bespoke” arrangement, in which developers can request specific data and work with the paper to build a service or app — and then share in the revenue generated from it.

The British paper has been inviting outside developers to make use of its APIs through a series of “hack days,” and they have come up with some interesting ideas. For example, Thorpe has a prototype of a site he calls the “Later Today” Guardian: the site takes the newslists that the newspaper recently made public, which detail which stories it is working on for a particular day, and then maps them against the stories that the paper actually produces. Not only that, but it also notes which ones are in the process of being updated, so readers with useful information can contact the author via Twitter or email.

It’s great that newspapers like the New York Times have “labs” like Beta620, where their staff can experiment with different formats and services based around their content. But one of the driving forces behind the Guardian open platform was the idea that the paper itself couldn’t possibly think of or develop every interesting or worthwhile project involving its content — so why not “crowdsource” that effort via the API? That’s a worthwhile attitude that more traditional media outlets could benefit from. Embedded below is the video interview I did with Thorpe when the open platform launched.



Watch this video for free on GigaOM



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Amazon started out as a book retailer, a company that was arguably a friend to book publishers, since it expanded the market for many of their books. But increasingly, the web giant is becoming a competitor to those traditional publishers, as the New York Times details in a recent article and as we have noted a number of times. Just as it did with book retailing, Amazon has its sights set on lowering the barriers between authors and readers, both via the Kindle and through its own publishing deals — and in many cases, the biggest barrier between authors and readers is a traditional publisher. Until that changes, Amazon will continue to win.

Although some are just beginning to see the company as a publishing competitor, Amazon has been marshalling its forces for some time now. As GigaOM Pro analyst Mike Wolf has described in a number of posts, the company has been putting together the pieces of a “book industry in a box” for the better part of a year — launching new imprints of its own for various different genres, including one devoted to popular thrillers. Then in May, it hired publishing-industry veteran Larry Kirshbaum, former CEO of the Time Warner Book Group, and opened a New York office.

In the months since then, Amazon has signed deals with a number of prominent authors, including one with popular writer Tim Ferriss, whose books — such as The 4-Hour Workweek and The 4-Hour Body — have sold millions of copies. The terms of the deal with Ferriss weren’t released, but the author said “The opportunity to partner with a technology company that is embracing publishing is very different than partnering with a publisher embracing technology.” Amazon also signed thriller writer Barry Eisler, who gained attention earlier this year when he turned down a $500,000 two-book deal with a traditional publishing house and said he planned to self-publish instead.

It’s not just about the money
Why are authors signing these kinds of deals? In some cases it could be about the money (a deal with former TV star Penny Marshall was reportedly for $800,000 according to the New York Times), but in many cases it seems to be mostly about getting past some of the legacy processes that are typical with traditional publishers, and expanding the potential market for a book. The core of the problem confronting the industry is summed up in a comment by Amazon executive Russell Grandinetii in the NYT piece, in which he says:

The only really necessary people in the publishing process now are the writer and reader. Everyone who stands between those two has both risk and opportunity.

If you look at the comments made by Barry Eisler about why he decided to take a deal with Amazon instead of self-publishing, he says virtually nothing about the money, or about other factors that traditional publishers are used to focusing on. It’s the other terms of the deal that he was swayed by: for example, the fact that Amazon was going to come out with an e-book version within a matter of days after the book was finished, and then follow that quickly with a paperback — and that both were going to be sold at a cheaper price, instead of the traditional industry’s approach of trying to charge print prices for electronic books.

What I care about is readers, because without readers I can’t make a living [and] I want people to read a lot. To that end, if I can find a way to get readers books that cost less and are delivered better and faster, I want that.

Just part of a wave of disruption
And as we’ve described before, Amazon signing deals to publish authors is just part of the bigger wave of disruption that is sweeping through the industry: self-publishing via the Kindle is becoming a larger and larger phenomenon, thanks in part to advocates such as JA Konrath and the kind of success that writers like Amanda Hocking have had by publishing their own books. Authors such as John Locke have shown that selling a million copies of a self-published book is not only possible but entirely feasible — and the fact that he and other writers who do so get to keep 70 percent of the proceeds is yet another wakeup call for the traditional industry.

And what kind of response have mainstream publishers had to all of this? Most have just continued to offer the old deals they are used to — deals that serve the publisher’s needs, but not necessarily those of the author. And in some cases, they have tried to punish authors who try to meet those needs themselves: the NYT piece describes how Hawaiian writer Kiana Davenport, who signed a book deal with Penguin last year, was threatened by the publisher after she packaged some of her short stories into a Kindle e-book. Penguin wanted all copies of the book removed from the internet; when the author refused, the publisher cancelled the deal and is now suing her for breach of contract.

Here’s a hint for book publishers: take a lesson from the music industry, and don’t spend all your time suing people for misusing what you believe is your content — think instead about why they are doing this, and what it says about how your business is changing, and then try to adapt to that. Amazon is giving authors what they want, and as long as it continues to do so, you will be at a disadvantage. Wake up and smell the disruption.

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Amazon said on Wednesday that it will roll out a Kindle Lending Library later this year, which will allow users of the popular e-reader to borrow books from more than 11,000 libraries throughout the United States. While there are some interesting features included in this program — such as the ability to keep the notes you make while reading a borrowed e-book, and transfer them if you buy a copy — the offering also raises questions about who ultimately controls the content in those books, and what happens if Amazon or its publishing partners change their minds about the terms of the arrangement.

The news release from Amazon doesn’t say anything about the details of the program — for instance, whether there is a limit on how long the books can be borrowed for, and if so what it is (maybe libraries get to set the terms?). And it also doesn’t say whether Amazon or the publishers involved will have limits on how many times a library can lend a book.

That’s an important point, because some publishers have already begun to place arbitrary limits on the books they allow libraries to lend. HarperCollins, for example, recently capped its lending program at 26 loans, a limit many libraries and librarians were incensed about. HarperCollins argued that lending books more often than that would hurt its sales and damage the “e-book ecosystem,” saying in a statement:

We have serious concerns that our previous e-book policy, selling e-books to libraries in perpetuity, if left unchanged, would undermine the emerging e-book eco-system, hurt the growing e-book channel, place additional pressure on physical bookstores, and in the end lead to a decrease in book sales and royalties paid to authors.

in the wake of HarperCollins’ move, some libraries said they would no longer buy books from the publisher for their systems. “The library model has always been you purchase and own it for perpetuity, and I don’t think the format should matter as long as rights are being protected,” Joan Kuklinski of the Central/Western Massachusetts Automated Resource Sharing consortium told Library Journal. “No one tells a library they have to pull their books off the shelf after a certain number of circulations so why should this be different?” An excellent question.

Because e-books are digital rather than physical objects, publishers and distributors like Amazon have far more control over them than they used to, and in some cases, they’ve exerted that power in disturbing ways. In one infamous incident in 2009, Amazon actually yanked e-books from users’ devices electronically after the publisher changed its mind about offering a digital version — and to make the issues raised by the incident even more stark, the books it removed were George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm, both of which are about the capricious actions of totalitarian states.

More recently, Amazon used its control over its lending API — which third parties use to integrate their services with its offerings — to shut down a book-lending service called Lendle, which is designed to allow users to share books among themselves, something Amazon says it’s in favor of (within certain well-defined limits, of course). The company reinstated Lendle’s access after Lendle changed the terms of its service, but this kind of thing reinforces how much control Amazon has over the contents of the books users believe they have bought and paid for.

As more and more content has moved from the physical to the digital realm, book publishers (and music labels, and newspapers, etc.) have tried to perpetuate the control they used to have over the physical artifact, and in many cases have actually tried to create new forms of control they never had in the physical world. Whether — and how — Amazon and its partners choose to exert this over libraries and book-lending remains to be seen.

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