Amazon's Hit Man

Physical book sales have been flat for a decade and are starting to get eclipsed by e-books. According to a recent report by the Association of American Publishers, sales of adult paperbacks and hardcovers fell 18 percent between 2010 and 2011. Amazon could be an unstoppable competitor to big publishing houses. If history is any guide, Bezos, who declined to comment for this story, doesn’t care whether he loses money on books for the larger cause of stocking the Kindle with exclusive content unavailable in Barnes & Noble’s Nook or Apple’s iBookstores. He’s also got almost infinitely deep pockets for spending on advances to top authors. Even more awkwardly for publishers, Amazon is their largest retailer, so they are now in the position of having to compete against an important business partner. Bezos and his minions will, characteristically, gauge the success of their new publishing effort over the long term. They are likely positioning Amazon Publishing for a world that is still a few years away, in which a majority of books are distributed electronically. In that world there could be even fewer traditional bookstores than there are now, and Amazon may look a whole lot more appealing to prominent authors. Read more here

Who does Google think you are?

A Google tool that's been available since 2009 but which few people know about lets users see what the search giant has inferred about them based on the websites they visit. Try searching "ad preferences manager." It should be the first link. The results can be spot on -- or wildly off the mark. They're based on a "cookie," a file placed by Google (and many other companies) on each computer browser to track how its users surf the Web. Google actually knows far more than browsing histories, though. It knows what people write in Gmail messages, what YouTube videos they prefer and where they go with an Android phone. Historically, Google's privacy policies forced it to cordon off some of its most important data sources from each other, so the profile of a given YouTube user was totally separate from her Gmail profile. It was a schizophrenic view of the world. Starting in March, Google will be able to pull together everything it knows from its disparate products. Read more here

study finds newspapers most trusted news source

Craigslist founder Craig Newmark commissioned a survey of Americans’ trust of news sources. Among the findings: Newspapers are the most trusted source of news for most respondents, but that’s not exactly something to crow about: Only 22 percent overall called newspapers “very credible” for reporting on politics and elections. Cable and networks news are a close second with 21% saying they are very credible. (A Gallup poll last fall found 55% of Americans distrust the media generally.) Read more here

'The Daily' 100,000 Subs - Ceiling Or Just A Start?

News Corp. unveiled The Daily with much fanfare a year ago, with Rupert Murdoch himself on hand at the New York launch event for the ambitious iPad-only newspaper. The News Corp. chairman set the bar high from the start, saying The Daily would have to pull in 500,000 paying subscribers to be viable, given its weekly operating costs of $500,000. On its one-year anniversary earlier this month, the company announced the publication had amassed 100,000 paid subscribers to date, making it the third top-grossing iPad app in the iTunes Store last year. It’s now the top-grossing app. Still, the paid subscribers level to date is well below the half-million goal set by Murdoch last year. Read more here

Gannett Plans Paywalls For Community Papers

The country’s largest newspaper publisher plans to create online paywalls for scores of local community newspapers nationwide, according to Gannett Co. community publishing president Bob Dickey. As with other newspapers' online paywalls, Dickey said that visitors to Gannett’s 82 community newspaper Web sites will be able to see a certain amount of content for free -- probably in the range of five to 15 articles. After that, they will be asked to buy a monthly or yearly subscription for the digital product. Earlier this month, it offered early retirement to 665 community publishing employees, in what could be the largest reduction in the company’s workforce in several years. Gannett Co.’s total revenues have declined from $8.03 billion in 2006 to $5.24 billion in 2011 -- a 35% loss in five years. Read more here

How Storify And Pinterest Are Cultivating The Wild Web, And Why Social Media Will Civilize The Internet

Pinterest gives people the ability to curate photos on various online pinboards easily and quickly, and to follow pinboards curated by others. Instead of asking users to set up their own account from scratch, Pinterest users can login with their Facebook or Twitter accounts. Integration, rather than direct competition, with the giants of social media appears to be the strategy, and it seems to be working. Storify does something similar. Not only does the “social story-telling” site allow users to login in via Facebook or Twitter, it allows them to curate stories or events on the web using Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and various other social media and news sites. Rather than seeing the internet devolve into the lowest common denominator, we’re seeing the rise of social-cultivation online. Read more at Forbes

Why Twitter Ties Resemble Airline Hub Maps

NPR talks about new research showing our Twitter ties are different than most of us imaginehere.

Is Twitter a Publisher?

Is Twitter a publisher and distributor of information like a newspaper, or is it just a dumb pipe like a telephone network? Lawyers in Australia seem to believe that a case could be made that Twitter is a publisher, like a newspaper, and therefore it can be sued for defamation as a result of a single tweet. That may be a stretch — especially in the United States, which has legislation that protects online commentary from such lawsuits — but it highlights the difficulties that Twitter could have as it tries to expand around the globe and into different legal environments.

 But the real-time information network is unlike the phone system in many other ways, some of which could be very relevant to such a case. For example, the phone company doesn’t normally listen to conversations and delete or block the ones that it doesn’t like — but Twitter has explained that it routinely blocks users and also deletes tweets for all sorts of reasons, including illegal behavior of various kinds. Doing this, some lawyers argue, makes the company a lot more like a newspaper publisher than a phone network or dumb pipe.

In countries like Australia and Canada, meanwhile, there is very little U.S.-style protection for any website or service that hosts defamatory content, which leaves Twitter open to actions like the one that was recently filed in Sydney. 

Read more here

Radio Ads Are Coming Back, and the Presidential Run Will Help

According to a report released Friday by the Radio Advertising Bureau, revenue from radio advertising last year was $17.4 billion, up 1 percent from the year before. Automotive companies, the largest category of sponsors, made up 26 percent of spending. It was the second year of growth for the industry, after three down years. Spending in 2010 was $17.3 billion, up 6 percent from the year before. But the market is still down 18 percent from 2007, when ad revenue was $21.3 billion, according to the advertising bureau, whose data is collected by the accounting firm Miller, Kaplan, Arase & Company. Read more at the New York Times