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The entire world found out earlier this week that US special forces killed one of the most wanted men in the world. It was everywhere. Information is still sketchy and there are thousands of web-sites feeding information to the general population.

The book industry has also responded with announcing a few “instant books.” These are titles that are put together in a few weeks and rushed into stores. In the past, the physical book was a means of telling how the story unfolded. It was more than a magazine piece although done by a journalist. Today, I am not sure of the value of these “instant books.”  At least not on the physcial side. By the time these books hits stores, it will be 2-3 weeks old. New information will have appeared and it will not be in the books.

Hell, the morning newspaper is out of date by the afternoon. News travels instant on-line. Books are out-of-date before they hit the stores.

eBooks definitely are much better than paperbacks in this case. But even those can be out of date quickly.

The world has changed. The instant book -so much an opportunity for publishers in the past – is now that important at all.

Adapt or die.

Everyone says that ‘you must go on-line and develop a social network.’ So people do so and create a Twitter following, a Facebook page, start blogging and join LinkedIn. But then what happens? You get a few followers on Twitter, your friends multiply on Facebook. People you forgot in high school are now contacting you to be connected.  You spend a lot of time crafting your words and send them into cyberspace.

Hopefully someone reads something.

“If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, did it make a sound?”

“If you tweet and no one reads it, did you really tweet at all?”

There are some analytics to gauge your web-site especially Google. But how do you gauge your Twitter influence. Ok, the sheer number of followers is the easiest and most direct. But how much spam is included. Does anyone retweet you? Does anyone reply? Is it better to have 10 retweets than to have an additional 100 followers? How many lists are you on? The questions go on and on.

I stumbled across one of the solutions. KLOUT.

KLOUT assigns an influence number from 1-100 to each Twitter account. The higher, the more influential. I am at 50. I know I am not that influential on-line — not yet. I was 44 a few weeks ago. I found that many individuals are higher than corporate accounts. This makes sense to me given people generally seem to have more to say than many publishers. It is fun, it is something that I feel everyone should check out.

KLOUT also breaks your score out to ‘True Reach’, ‘Network’ and ‘Amplification.’

Check it out. There must be ways to analyze all the data to figure out what truly is going on… online.

I stumbled across ZITE about a month ago. It is now the first place I look for news that interests me. ZITE is a Canadian start-up that went live about the same time as the iPad2.  It is a company to watch.

ZITE is a personalized iPad magazine. You go through various categories and click on the subjects that interest you. Although there are many categories to choose from, I do wish they would start doing ‘micro-subjects.’ Possibly this will come soon in Zite 2.0.

ZITE also works like PANDORA in that you can give each article a thumbs up or down.  ZITE will use your preferences to choose stories and articles to pump into your magazine. I have not used it enough to see how effective this is, but look forward to figuring this out.

ZITE has a very easy interface and looks similar to FLIPBOARD. But I prefer it because of the multitudes of categories and the crafting of my reading personality. I read that some publications like the WSJ and NYT are upset that their articles were linked to and asked that the be taken down. That is a shame. But I still feel ZITE will continue to deliver news in a way that is time-saving and customized to me.

The era a micro-customization is upon us.

Enjoy!

Publisher’s Weekly (PW) recently announced the best selling books of 2010. One of the list is a combination of eBooks and hardcover sales. This generally contains the biggest and highest profile titles of the year.

In the top 10, the following non-fiction; George Bush; Keith Richards; SHIT MY DAD SAYS and Bill O’Reilly’s crazy rants. A very bizarre group of titles.  The eBook conversion rate compared to physical was 10.4%; 4.1%; 24.1% and 3.8%. SHIT had a high rate. Given the book was hatched from a Twitter account, it does make sense. Bush at 10.4% is in line with this type of big non-fiction seller. The other two had unbelievably poor conversion ratios.  My feeling is people wanted to own Richards plus it may have grabbed a higher cut of the casual reader who probably doesn’t own a Kindle.  Bill O? I think it’s his Right-Wing Wal-Mart shopping fans also are not early movers to digital.

The Fiction list has 6 titles.  The authors are Steig Larssen; John Grisham; Nicholas Sparks; James Patterson; Jonathan Franzen; and Stephen King.  Larsson and Grisham both has over 29% eBook ratio! Franzen had 23%. So these author’s reflect the ‘accepted knowledge’ that 30% of best-selling fiction is digital. But it drops off considerably after these three, with Evans at 10.5%; Patterson at 6.2% (he had 5 of the top 30 combined); and most surprising of all Stephen King at 5.9%. I have always thought King’s audience would go for eBooks? Could it be the publisher’s play on digital that kept his eBook sales so low?

All titles in the combined top 10 were from the “Corporate 6.”

Looking to the eBook only list… there are 30 titles on it., 17 sold over 100,000 units. 26 of the top 30 are Fiction.

ALL 30 TITLES ARE FROM THE “BIG 6.”

So as much as people want to predict the demise of the big dinosaur, corporate publishers, they are still roaring.