“Freedom of the press is guaranteed
only to those who own one.”

—A.J. Liebling (MagCloud)

A Press for Democracy

So you want to be a print publisher. Luckily, you’re living at the right time in history. Freedom of expression has never been more celebrated and available. From personal broadcasts of text, voice and video messages to social networks, blogs, micro-blogs and podcasts, media options and outlets abound.

A Democratic Appeal

Although digital media is easily distributed, it’s imprisoned by electronic devices and an endless sea of competition for readership. And, often it’s merely scanned, not truly read.

By contrast, published works derive value from their singular appeals: a tactile form, a willing and welcomed commitment of one’s time, a personal gift.

Until now, print-publishing was expensive, with customized items made affordable only via mass production and distribution methods.

Democratic Demand

Traditional publishing and digital print technologies have now merged, offering a vast array of online, on-demand, turnkey publishing and distribution platforms like these, ready to meet your needs:

Lightning Source
Lightning Source, a sister company to U.S. book wholesaler Ingram Book Group, is an online print-on-demand (POD) service provider to publishers. They offer online publishing, production and distribution solutions that can reduce on-hand inventories and warehousing costs by satisfying niche book demands and calls for backlist and out-of-print books.

CreateSpace and BookSurge
Amazon’s answer to on-demand publishing brings their third party connections and distribution acumen to help you develop and distribute manuscripts and other types of media.

Blurb
Affiliated with Flickr’s popular photography management and sharing site, Blurb offers prepackaged, user-friendly templates for a more consumer-oriented solution to book publishing.

Shutterfly
Shutterfly enters the on-demand book and publishing market from its core focus, online photo sharing and management. The seamless port of existing albums into books, calendars and other product templates positions Shutterfly as a solid consumer choice.

BookPrep
HP brings its leadership in on-demand printing to BookPrep. BookPrep allows you to digitize any existing book into a virtual asset that can be ported via the web and printed on-demand as-is, or customized by the consumer.

MagCloud
For those wanting to produce the next New Yorker, Fast Company or Sports Illustrated, MagCloud offers an affordable solution for would-be magazine publishers. MagCloud not only handles printing, but mailing and subscription management as well.

Lulu.com
Lulu provides a matrix of vertically and horizontally marketed offerings, from consumer-oriented photo calendars to hardbound business books and digital media. In an obvious response to Amazon, it also offers the means to buy and sell works.

A Freeing Democracy

Whether you want to target a single customer with an extended one-to one message or hope to take your ideas to market in multiples, on-demand printing solutions offer both prototype and production solutions in a single model.

From individuals to tier one corporations, online on-demand publishing provides another instrument to add to your integrated brand marketing mix, and a chance at real freedom of the press.

[image: tonystl]

Our latest top 20 list of inane musings from the Brainstorm office white board: Top 20 New Wireless Projects

(at right)

$1000. Write away.

Need some cash—right away? In celebration of The Marketing Technology Blog hitting the triple quadruple (1,000 posts, over 1,000 unique visitors daily, and over 1,000 feed subscribers) Doug Karr, FormSpring, and eight other sponsors are ponying up a cool $1,000 to the best blog post featuring a sentence or two about each of the contest sponsors.

Check out the rules for yourself and write on.

Campy but Good

Google announced the launch of OpenSocial—their set of standardized application programming interfaces (APIs)—at “Campfire One” last Thursday.

Thrilled Social Network developers attending the event laud the benefits in the highlight video above (4:15). See the full event here (57:23).

S’More of a Good Thing

And why not be happy? Those developers are now aligned with Google and Google’s next big thing, and they also join a growing list of prominent OpenSocial online networks and supporters with whom to collaborate, including:

Engage.com, Flixster, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, iLike, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING.

Their combined reach equates to over 200 million subscribers.

Roasting Distribution

Most importantly, OpenSocial promises developers a way to optimize development costs through the creation of a common platform available (thus far) only to OpenSocial affiliates.

A single source development platform means more rapid distribution and greater reach since developers can now build one app for multiple social networks, eliminating the need to create multiple network-specific applications.

Passing on the Hot Dogs

Conspicuously missing from the list of Google OpenSocial faithful was social media darling, Facebook. Facebook passed up a $1 billion offer from Yahoo last year, then a week ago sold a 1.6% stake to Microsoft for $240 million, inflating Facebook’s value to an estimated $15 billion.

Google’s OpenSocial countermeasure is expected to significantly reduce that estimate.

If OpenSocial delivers as promised and becomes the global de facto standard for social network development, Facebook may one day need to face compliance just to remain relative and viable. Probably not what Microsoft or Facebook had in mind when they inked the deal late last month.

Branded Just Right

All of which bodes well for for brand marketers, advertisers, developers and users. OpenSocial’s standards and conventions should drive streamlined creation, processing, access and distribution of messaging, bringing deeper reach and measurably greater returns for marketers.

Of course, sometimes standardization translates to stifling and stale—we’ll see. But the commercial benefits of ubiquitous and proprietary standardization are hard to deny.

Just ask Microsoft.

Update. From Techcrunch: Facebook may already be talking to Google.

Our copy of Web Analytics: An Hour a Day, already on its way to a good dog-earing.

Serious about marketing your brand online? This book will teach you what you need to know about web analytics.

Published by Wiley’s Sybex brand, Web Analytics: An Hour a Day, by Avinash Kaushik, the Analytics Evangelist for Google, and author of the widely-read Occam’s Razor blog, is a must-have resource for online marketers.

About the Book

The book went beyond what we were expecting, i.e., how to better read analytics dashboards. What we found was a sophisticated and marketing-oriented book that teaches how to use the available data to create a clear picture of return on investment in the online world. This is more than your typical programming book, this is a marketing book.

Kaushik does a great job with the format. As with any subject you’re committed to knowing, reading the information and applying it in small pieces is the best way to learn. Most of the content is arranged by subject and is segmented into daily readings, allowing you to focus and build upon the knowledge one piece at a time.

A Worthwhile Library Addition

The book is easy to read, full of practical application, and one that will be tattered, bookmarked, and referenced often here at Brainstorm.

Best of all, Kaushik has committed every dollar earned from the book to charitable causes.

Order a copy on Amazon now.