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Introducing TED Books

Brilliant way to monetize, and effective way to introduce the new Kindle Singles.

Today, we’re thrilled to announce the launch of TED Books, an imprint of short nonfiction works designed for digital distribution. Shorter than traditional books, TED Books run less than 20,000 words each — long enough to explain a powerful idea, but short enough to be read in a single sitting. Books are available on the Kindle and Kindle Reader apps, and cost $2.99 each.

Nic Marks: The Happiness Manifesto: How Nations and People Can Nurture Well-Being
Juan Enriquez and Steve Gullans: Homo Evolutis: Please Meet the Next Human Species
Gever Tulley: Beware Dangerism! Why We Worry About the Wrong Things, and What It’s Doing to Our Kids

TED Books are launching as part of Amazon’s brand-new Kindle Singles imprint. (Read their press release.) As Amazon told us: “Our goal with Singles is to allow compelling ideas to be expressed at their natural length. TEDBooks fit nicely within that mission,” said Russ Grandinetti, vice president of Kindle Content. “TED has a great history of bringing important ideas to a wider audience, and we expect TEDB ooks will add to that legacy.”

Read more at blog.ted.com

See this Amp at http://bit.ly/gLM6QF

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Davos: Too little content

Here’s a thought: should we consider writing and reading as a frozen accident? Something than we can un-learn in the near future, to liberate our built-in oral and storytelling capacities?

Amplify’d from www.buzzmachine.com

The one interesting thing I’ve heard so far at Davos this year is that the world doesn’t have too much content. It has too little. So says Philip Parker of INSAED, who is doing fascinating work with automatic creation of content. He’s not doing it for evil purposes: content farms and spam. He is doing it to fill in knowledge that is missing in the world, especially in smaller cultures and languages.

Parker’s system has written tens of thousands of books and is even creating fully automated radio shows in many languages, some of which have never been used for weather reports (they don’t have words for “degree” or “celsius”). He used his software to create a directory of tropical plants that didn’t exist. And he has radio beaming out to farmers in poor third-world nations.

I’m fascinated by what Parker’s project says about our attitudes toward content: that we in the West think there’s too much of it (we’re overloaded); that content is that which content creators create; that content has to be owned; that it has to be inefficient and expensive to be good and useful.

Parker looks for content that is formulaic. That’s what his technology can replace. He studied TV news and found that 70% of its content is formulaic. No surprise. Most of it could be replaced with a machine.

That’s not just my joke and insult. The more efficient we make the creation of content, the less we will waste on repetitive tasks with commodified results, and the more we can concentrate our valuable and scarce resources on necessity and quality. Certain people will likely screech that such thinking and technology further deprofessionalizes the alleged art of creating content. So be it.

Read more at www.buzzmachine.com

See this Amp at http://bit.ly/g3NxhZ

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What about the ‘protected’ format of Pecha Kucha Nights?

Pecha Kucha Nights Groningen #15 Sociale Innovatie

Mark Hoekstra (of Geektechnique fame), introduced Pecha Kucha Nights in Groningen (and The Netherlands) a long time ago. Since his unexpected and tragic death, I am proud to be part of a small crew that continues to organise Pecha Kucha Nights in Groningen, partly in his honour.
Last Monday, the fifteenth edition of a Groningen Pecha Kucha Night took place, in Leeuwarden. I was allowed a few words to kick off the event and share the idea and specifics of Pecha Kucha with the audience. Obviously, I mentioned the 20 slides, 20 seconds criteria, and I also referred to the fact that a license is part of the world of Pecha Kucha Nights.

“If it requires a license, it is not an open format!”

I was amazed by the response I received on that particular bit of information. Since the theme of this particular edition was “Social Innovation” (Dutch link), I anticipated enthusiastic comments regarding the fast pace and the easy way that Pecha Kucha allows a series of people to quickly present their projects and then interact directly in the breaks and afterwards.

Instead, a few people came up to me and said that they objected to the fact that a license is required to put on a Pecha Kucha Nights. They claimed that that was old-fashioned, and couter to the open atmosphere and attitude that Pecha Kucha Nights promoted.

I think they were projecting their own (old-fashioned) rules and expectations on a new way of sharing successful ideas. They associated ‘license’ with restriction, not ‘setting the stage for successful growth’.

It requires a license, because you have to commit to a shared vision

As anyone can read, Pecha Kucha Nights is very open about what it is that they want to see happen, but this is the most important to me:

City organizers are really seen as stewards of the PechaKucha spirit, not owners!

So the license acts as a token of your commitment and promise to do it ‘the Pecha Kucha’-way. It is called a ‘handshake’ for that reason.

What do you think?

Do you think this is the best way to go about creating a uniform, globally recognizable event? Does utilizing a license appear counterintuitive in this day and age of open sharing.What are your pro’s and con’s? Let me know in the comments!

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