Get the free PDF of my Music 2.0 book - just pay with a tweet or Facebook post!

Attention is the new currency is one of my favorite memes. So: simply tweet about my 2009 book Music 2.0 (even if you already have it, in print or as PDF) and receive the link to the free download. Use this link to PAY WITH A TWEET and spread the word.  If you really must get a dead-tree edition, the print version can be ordered via my bookstore at Lulu.com

About Music 2.0 (from the free mobile site): "This book was self-published in 2009 and is an edited collection of my best essays on the future of the music industry, and continues the work I presented in my first book, The Future of Music, co-written with Dave Kusek. It further describes what I think the next generation of music companies will actually look like – hence the term Music 2.0, a description derived from the now increasingly popular “Web 2.0.” I have been writing and blogging about digital music and the next generation of the music industry for almost four years now – in airplanes, taxis, trains, busses, hotel lobbies, conference halls, and at home. In Internet time (and it certainly feels that way to me), this is almost forever! In many ways my message and my opinions may have evolved a bit but the bottom lines and visions have not changed a whole lot.

Looking back at some 1,000 blog posts and over 20 essays it is evident that by far the most often covered subject is indeed what I (and many other people – I make no claim to having invented this moniker!) have come to call Music 2.0, the new principles that define the next iteration of the music business. All of this is also closely connected with a few other terms that I have co-coined and have come to be associated with: Music Like Water (MLW), the Flat Rate for Music, Feels Like Free (FLF), the Usator, Friction is Fiction, and the People Formerly Known As Consumers. In this book, I aim to just fine-tune the best of my writings from the past four years, while not altering the content too much, in order to preserve the timeliness and context of when it was actually written..."

You can also read the book on pretty much any mobile device just by going to MusicFutures.com.

Also, be sure to follow my music-business specific tweets via @music2dot0. To see all my blog posts on the Music 2.0 book (and the topics covered in the book) please go here. For the music-business specific videos, visit my Youtube channel. Slideshows are here.

 

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Mission 2012: Green Futures. Plus, my first public talk on Green Business: EcoSummit Berlin March 22nd

This year I am embarking on a new, additional mission. You may have already noticed in my Twitter feed and via my Facebook updates that I am expanding my work into various 'green' topics such as sustainability (in particular what has been termed 'sustainable capitalism), climate change and global warming, and renewable energy. While investigating these new topics I am also hard at work on my new book "From Ego to Eco" which will cover some of these issues (in addition to media, culture, politics and what I call 'the networked society) as well.

My new site / blog at GreenFuturist.com was launched a few months ago and is shaping up pretty well, already; I am using it primarily to share updates and interesting snippets culled from my research and 100s of RSS feeds that I scan for the latest developments. Please take a look, read the announcement (also below), comment, follow me on Tumblr, or subscribe to the GreenFuturist RSS feed. You may also want to visit (and like?) my new Facebook 'Green Futurist' page, or check out my new @AGreenFuturist Twitter channel.

I also recommend you follow my new public Kindle notes on Amazon - this is starting to be a good resource and I am sharing notes on 30+ books there.

My work in media, content, communications and the Future of Business will continue, of course; both with my esteemed colleagues at The Futures Agency as well as by myself. Stay tuned via TFA's Facebook page.

I have just confirmed my first public appearance as 'Green Futurist' at the EcoSummit 2012 in Berlin, on March 22nd (first thing in the morning), and look forward to maybe seeing you there (on-location or virtually) if at all possible.

See you soon!  Gerd Leonhard

PS: be sure to follow and use this new Twitter hashtags #greenfutures and #mission12

Here is the official announcement of my new Mission 2012.

 ANNOUNCING GREEN FUTURIST

I have worked in digital music, media and in the Internet business since 1995. Since 2001 I have worked as an independent Futurist with a focus on media, content, entertainment and publishing, technology, telecom as well as in marketing, branding and communications.

In 2012, I will expand my activities into a new direction which I like to call ”Green Futures”, encompassing issues such as sustainability, climate changeand carbon reduction, alternative and renewable energies, the future of transportation, a new type of capitalism that is not (just) based on profit and growth (as I call it, shifting from EGO to ECO), environmental action, eco-tourism and the future of the tourism, the ‘greening’ of business; and in general, the radical changes that a post-growth society will certainly demand of us, very soon.

Venture capitalist John Doerr said in his seminal and deeply moving 2007 Ted talk on green technologies, quoting KPCP Founder Eugene Kleiner:  “there are times when the appropriate response is panic”. Without wanting to push the panic button even more frequently, or harder, than other futurists before me, I must admit that I also feel that we urgently must consider sweeping changes in how we live, work and do business.

I therefore want to use my somewhat tried-and-tested speaking and presentation skills to address perhaps the most important issue there is: how we can we change the way we live, how we operate our businesses, define our policies and direct our governments; and how we will use and replenish our planet’s resources, going forward.

I believe that if we don’t stop borrowi ng from our own future, and if we don’t start paying the real price for what our ever-increasing consumption actually costs (or maybe even curtail our consumption??), we have a very good chance at losing everything we value, today, in the next 20-50 years. We may lose our oceans, our forests, our glaciers, our rivers, our wildlife, our breathable air and our clean water - and this is not a world that I want my children, or grand-children, to live in.

Maybe we can no longer be content with ‘tinkering around the edges’, making only minor dents into this rapidly widening path to destruction. Maybe we need large, sweeping actions that will require significant sacrifices from us.  It is these conversations and actions I want to further with my work as Green Futurist.

Gerd Leonhard, January 2012

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A gift for you: free PDFs of my last 3 books: Music 2.0, The End of Control, Friction is Fiction

Update: my new book "The Future of Content" was just released on the Kindle

I want to start 2011 in a renewed spirit of generosity and sharing, so here are the complete PDFs of my last 3 books, for free; provided under a Creative Commons,non-commercial, share-alike, attribution license (see below). If you still want to buy the dead-tree versions of these books (or donate something for the free PDFs - yes, that's an option, too;), you can visit my Lulu Store, or go to Amazon.com, or check out my 'Paying for Gerd' page. You can also return the favor by blogging or tweeting of Facebook-liking my stuff.  Thanks, and enjoy, and have a great 2011.  Update: my free videos (50+ keynotes and presentations) are here, the iTunes podcast feed is here (just subscribe to download all videos to your iPod / iPad / iPhone, or computers), and my free slideshows (90+) are here, on Slideshare :)

 

  Download 7MB Music20book pdf

 

 

 

 

Download Friction is Fiction 6.8MB PDF

 

 

 

 

 

 

Download The End of Control Gerd 8MB PDF

 

 

 

And be sure to check out my free iPhone and Android apps

   These free books by Gerd Leonhard are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Based on various works offered by Gerd Leonhard

 

 

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Presentation, audio and video from the Books 2.0 event in London: the Future of Books & Publishing

Updated: this post now includes Dominic Pride's presentation, embedded below. I also just added the audio version of my presentation (sorry for the rather poor quality), as well as the front-row-shoot with a video of my presentation, below; please note that this is the 'unofficial version', quickly recorded with my Kodak Zi8 - better quality video to follow soon. Clive Rich's presentation is embedded below.

Gerd Leonhard at Future of Books event London March 19

Below is the link to the PDF with my edited presentation from today's Books 2.0 event at Olswang in London. I will add the slideshare embed code and file download options later, today (very slow connection here at the Hilton;), and we will have Clive's and Dominic's slides available as well; videos should follow within a few days, too. This was a really inspiring event, a great and very clued-in audience, beautiful location (Olswang London), and a perfect combination of different view-points by the 3 of us. More comments are available via the Twitter stream and via #books20 hashtag.

Some of the topics I covered included: the toxic assumptions of the music industry and what book publishers could learn from them, the reality of upside-down consumers (digital access first), the ecology of selling access vs selling copies, the Napster-Moment in eBooks - and what to do about (or rather, with) it, the characteristics of 'Reading 2.0', the new definition of books, media as a service and the potentials of 'content in the cloud', the future role of publishers... and much more.  32MB PDF:  files.me.com/gleonhard/824xup  (Creative Commons non-commercial, attribution licensed, as always)

Books 2.0: The Future of Books and Publishing

View more presentations from Gerd Leonhard.

Update: Here is Dominic Pride's great presentation from the same event

The Future of Books - Creating New Value from Reading

View more presentations from The Sound Horizon.

L1031 ppt books 2 -_future_of_publishing_seminar_presentation_-_2_a

View more presentations from RichFutures.

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Some previews of my Books 2.0 presentation this coming Friday (March 19, London)

Here are 4 'scenes' from my upcoming presentation at the Books 2.0 event in London, March 19. I still have a few seats reserved for my tweeps and blog-readers - ping me if you are interested (yes, it's still a free event;). I will publish my slides on this blog, via Slideshare, and via Twitter, sometime in the afternoon of that day. Stay tuned. The Twitter Hashtag is #books20 and the Twitter-Stream is here.

From Hardbacks to Hot Bytes: the Future of Books & Publishing (March 19 event in London)

Today, I am delighted to announce a very special event on "The Future of Books & Publishing in a connected World", on March 19th, in London. I have teamed up with Clive Rich (Rich Futures / Olswang) and Dominic Pride (the SoundHorizon) to jointly present a powerful, conclusive and inspiring program (8.30 am to 12 noon), geared towards Senior Executives, strategists and decision makers from all sectors of the book publishing industry, including the creatives, i.e. the authors / writers and their agents and representatives.

The Future of Books will present C-Level publishing executives with the real (and so far unspoken) learnings  from the music industry, a business which has been in transition since the days of Napster 1.0 and the first MP3 players. The speakers will present their views on what book publishers need to understand, believe and do, to take advantage of this dramatic shift from selling copies of printed books to selling access to a digital book (or both). Clive, Dominic and me will be making one presentation each, centering around several key questions: 1) what can and should really be learned from the music industry as far as adopting web-native business models is concerned? What really happened during the last decade in digital music, and why, and how could book publishers avoid a very similar situation? Is protection in technology or is it in the business model? 2) What are those 'immediate-future' business models for what we like to call Books 2.0, what exactly are the most likely new revenue streams and how can those real "New Generatives" be nurtured? 3) What needs to change so that a win-win-win future for publishers, authors and consumers can be constructed and realized?

In addition, we will try and address questions such as:

• How can publishers respond to these rapidly emerging scenarios? Will books become "free" and ubiquitous on all digital networks? If customers continue to pay, will authors and their publishers get digital pennies instead of pounds?
• As reading becomes another part of new retail environments and other services, how will it be taken to market? And what are the additional services and usages which will form part of the new value proposition, and ultimately new revenue streams?
• Publishers need to act now to ensure that they continue to play a valuable role in fostering talent, nurturing careers and in providing great content to readers

About the Speakers (apart from myself):

Dominic Pride: Founder and Principal Consultant, The Sound Horizon. Dominic founded The Sound Horizon in 2009 to serve the growing number of companies wishing to create and maintain digital strategies, successfully manage innovation and create new service concepts. Key clients for The Sound Horizon include Nokia Media & Games and City Showcase. Prior to The Sound Horizon, Dominic was Product Marketing Director for Shazam, where he spearheaded the company’s expansion into branded, application-based services on iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Windows and Nokia platforms, and helped to position the company as one of the planet’s prime music discovery brands. At Orange / France Telecom Group, he drove the international market development of mobile and convergent music services and played a key role in DRM-free music.
» www.thesoundhorizon.com
» www.twitter.com/thesoundhorizon

Clive Rich: Principal, Rich Futures and Consultant to Olswang. At Olswang, Clive works closely with the Firm's music and new media practices. Clive has a 25 year history of excellence in the Music business as a lawyer, Board Director and Strategic Director. At Sony BMG Music UK Clive created and ran the “Futures Division”, responsible for all Sony BMG’s new and developing business - including its digital music business, TV programming and brand partnerships. This included developing the business interests of Syco, SonyBMG's TV joint venture with Simon Cowell. Prior to that he held senior business affairs positions with BMG, and chaired PPL and the BPI Rights Committee. Through Rich Futures he has since provided business affairs services to, among others, the Royal Opera House, MySpace, SanDisk and the UK Government’s Technology Strategy Board. He also assists in the business development of a number of emerging digital media companies in which he is a shareholder.
» www.richfutures.co.uk

Olswang London is generously hosting this event; registration is free-of-charge but invitation-only, and limited to senior execs from the book publishing business. If you are interested in participating please contact me directly (and soon - space is limited). 

Prior to the event, check out the Books2.0 Twitterfall, and peruse the related #books20 hashtag tweets. Download the event flyer.

When: Friday 19 March 8.30am - 12.00pm

Where: Olswang LLP, 90 High Holborn, London, WC1V 6XX (click here for a map)

Below is our 'official' video trailer for this event, with all 3 speakers commenting on what we will talk about. A conversation with Dominic Pride and myself can be viewed below, as well. More videos are available on our Youtube channel.

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Tim O'Reilly on Safari Books Online: a Cloud Library as an alternate model for ebooks (and other key learnings for online content)

Image via Wikipedia

Back in October 09, Tim O'Reilly ( someone that I really admire for his cutting-edge and very wise thinking on the future of content and technology) published a very important piece on ebook publishing, on the occasion of the Safari eBook portal relaunch.

I think that most of us working in the content industries can learn a lot from this post, no matter if it's about books, magazines, news, music, film or software. I will therefore summarize his most important bottom lines, below, and provide some comments and context where needed.

• "Recent releases of O'Reilly ebooks as iPhone applications have even outsold the same books in print" Comment: in my view, this trend will happen with most business books, and text books, in the next 2-3 years (beyond the iPhone, of course, i.e. for all kinds of mobile devices)
• "Most people thinking about ebooks are focused on creating an electronic recreation of print books, complete with downloadable files and devices that look and feel like books. This is a bit like pointing a camera at a stage play and concluding that was the essence of filmmaking" Comment: this is a crucial point - publishers and distributors urgently need to let go of the idea of merely recreating offline sales models online.
• "Everything is always in sync because your library is in the cloud; an ebook cloud works the same way the web itself works. It provides ubiquitous access and shared experience" Comment: amen. indeed.
• "One of our mottos at O’Reilly is to "create more value than you capture."

And from Tim's 1995 (!) piece Publishing Models for Internet Commerce, here are some more morsels:

"Some of the characteristics of the print publishing market:

• Barriers to entry are low. Especially with the advent of desktop publishing, almost anyone can produce a book, a magazine, a newsletter.

• Niches abound. Over 50,000 books are published each year in the U.S. alone. A major bookselling chain such as Borders keeps literally hundreds of thousands of unique titles in inventory. And despite major industry consolidation,and focus on a small number of bestsellers, there are still thousands of publishers, ranging in size from those who publish only a single book to those who publish thousands. What's more, there are about 3500 general circulation magazines and tens of thousands of newsletters and other limited circulation publications.

• So do business models. Books are sold "by the piece." They are also available for free in the library, though in limited circulation. Magazines and newspapers may be had for free (perhaps subsidized by advertising or membership), for a single-copy newsstand price, or for a recurring subscription fee. Prices range from a few dollars to hundreds or even thousands of dollars for specialized newsletters.

• No one "owns" the market, or needs to. A bestselling book might sell a million copies or so. The largest circulation magazine in the country, the AARP's membership magazine, has a circulation of about 7 million, Reader's Digest about 5 million. No one else comes close. It's possible to have a successful book selling only a few thousand copies, a newsletter a few hundred, and a four color magazine a few tens of thousands.

• The same technology is available to everyone...

• There is a rich ecology of mutually successful players. Authors sell to publishers. Publishers screen material, edit and produce it to add value, develop a marketing campaign, and build a network of distribution relationships to get the book to the ultimate consumer. Publishers may sell books directly to the consumer, through major retailers, and through wholesalers to smaller retailers whom they don't serve directly....

• Access is universal and non-exclusive..."

via radar.oreilly.com

If you are in the content business, be sure to read his entire post, and watch his 2009 Web2.0 video, here. There sure is a ton of stuff to chew on. Enjoy.

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I love widgets - here is a really cool 'favorite books' widget from Amazon

I just ordered the new 'International' Kindle eReader: the reading revolution has started!

Amazon rocks, once again. Jeff Bezos made a deal with AT&T for 3G roaming so now I can get my books pretty much anywhere in the world, anytime; and without worrying about my iPhone's battery;). The new 'Kindle wireless reading device' looks set to deliver what I have wanted for five years: access to a large library of books, wirelessly, and (hopefully) at a much lower price, at my fingertips. Plus newspapers, blogs, Wikipedia... I shall report when I have tested it, but in the meantime, below is a quick summary where I see things going in terms of the business model and pricing, for eBooks (and yes, there will be a blog post on this topic very soon).

Update: just added this quick slideshow... enjoy

And here is a video from Amazon which pretty much says it all:

Discover Simple, Private Sharing at Drop.io

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What would Google do? A must read / watch for pretty much anyone (Jeff Jarvis)

 

Jeff Jarvis rocks - no doubt about it. I have been reading his new book "What would Google do" and in my view it's at least as important as Wikinomics or the LongTail. Check out Jeff's slideshow and video below (yes, you can fast-forward thru the first 8 mins of German intro;) - no matter what business you are in, this will give you some serious food for thought; if you're in the content business - well... watch it 5 times!
Some of his key points:

• The link changes everything    
• Do what you do best and link to the rest
• Join a network / Be a platform
• Think distributed
• If you’re not searchable, you won’t be found
• Everybody needs a little SEO
• Life is public, so is business
• Your customers are your ad agency
• Small is the new big
• Manage abundance (not scarcity)
• Join the open-source, gift economy
• The mass market is dead—long live the mass of niches
• Google commodifies everything
• Welcome to the Google economy

WWGD? - The PowerPoint

View more OpenOffice presentations from jeffjarvis.

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Imagine an iPhone Netbook 2x the size - adios Kindle and Sony Reader. Publishers: get ready!

Thinking about the current Netbook craze I have a strong hunch that Apple may well jump in and roll out a new iPhone-inspired Netbook - let's call it the Apple iNet - that could be roughly 2-2.5 as large as an iPhone. A TOUCH-SCREEN device like this could easily become a major challenge to digital reading devices such as the Kindle (which I can't try here in Europe) and the Sony Reader (which I have but don't like a lot). I have found myself wanting an iPhone / iPod like device like this 100s of times already, especially while traveling.

If Apple does this - and I would certainly like that , let's just imagine:

• We could finally, really read offline web-pages, PDFs, slideshows, white-papers, non-fiction books etc on a nice, full-color touch screen, using next-gen versions of existing apps such as Instapaper ****, Soonr, Stanza, Bookshelf, EReader (in fact, this may be why the new Kindle app for the iPhone is crucial for Amazon!)
• We could review our RSS feeds much easier, including images and videos, using apps like Byline (my favorite) and Newsstand, or the Google Reader offline app (once they offer it)
• We could cache i.e. record video and audio streams and play them on our 'Apple iNet' device - and actually have a really nice viewing experience
• We could use the iNet device to do some simple image and video editing - but most likely this would be done 'in the cloud' not using local software

  Image via Wikipedia

A smart, Apple-style device like this (which may have similar elements to OLPC's XO2 but would not compete in the low price markets, naturally) would give a huge boost to the mobile content ecosystem - and it would also usher in an era of rampant and wide-spread electronic book sharing that would make music file sharing look like child's play.

Publishers: you may want to get ready for this sometime soon. My 2 cents: radically lower the prices for ebooks, start looking at bundles, subscriptions and flat rates, figure out how to monetize sharing with new advertising-supported models, gear up to provide added values all the time (value is around the content!!), start planning for those New Generatives - you've got another 12 months if you're lucky. Go!!

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Just discovered: powerful free book 'MetheMedia - Rise of the Conversation Society' - a must read.

Sander Duivestein, senior analyst at Sogeti's VINT, and one of the co-writers of this powerful ebook that provides a huge amount of both information and inspiration for anyone pondering the Future of Media, just send me the link to where his great book can be downloaded as a free PDF. Go get it before they run out of server juice;)

The full title is: Me the Media: Rise of the Conversation Society - Past, Present and Future of the Third Media Revolution

The authors are Jaap Bloem, Menno van Doorn, Sander Duivestein. There are some pretty cool illustrations in the book as well (see below).

I will be chewing my way through this during the next few weeks - hey, I may even take advantage of this opportunity and start using my new Sony Reader, i.e. without printing all 292 pages.

The main topic of the book (as far as I have read it, at the time of this blog post) is how drastically things have changed because WE 'the people formerly known as consumers' are becoming more empowered by the minute, i.e. it's increasingly more about MEMedia than about THEIRMedia; about conversation and engagement not (you guessed it) about Control. The video below provides a nice intro as well, more vids are here.  This is a must-read, imho! Be sure to pass on the news of the release.

Incidentally, I have found a few slideshows on Slideshare that are also a very good fit with this book, including this one (not mine:), and, naturally quite a few of these PDFs might also make a good fit (yes, they're mine;).  Enjoy. Don't print.

 

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The Media Futurist Lulu Experiment: new book & pdf with 'Best of 2008' essays and blog posts available now

Lulu rocks! I just created a 92 pages 6"x9" b/w book that comprises my best blog posts and essays from 2008, along with various illustrations. I thought that a very-low-price, on-demand book likes this makes perfect sense for everyone that does not have the time to keep up with my daily writings on this blog or otherwise - and a lot of people told me that they would like to read my stuff in a different way than via RSS or PDFs.

So now, courtesy of the ingenious folks at Lulu, you can order a nicely printed 'real' book for a very low price ($9.95 USD) and read it using the good old 'dead tree' interface. A PDF is also available, for 1/4 of the price of the book ($2.50 USD) Please note that I will keep revising this book (Lulu makes that very easy), i.e. I will of course add my best posts from Nov & Dec 2008, as well.

If you like this idea, please spread the word!

Book review: The Nature of Marketing, by Chuck Brymer (DDB): Marketing to the swarm and the herd

I get a lot of books in the mail, via my clients or (mostly) via networks on LinkedIn, Facebook, Friendfeed etc. Very few of them make it into my dead-tree-interfaced reading list (yes, it maybe that part of my problem is the 800+ RSS feeds I try to look at when I have a minute). But when the DDB people in NY send me their CEO Chuck Brymer's new book "The Nature of Marketing" I was quickly drawn into actually reading it all the way through (in pretty much one go, no less... perfect for that ZRG - SNG longhaul I went on a few weeks ago;), which by itself is a rare occasion.

I reckon that a lot of people at DDB have contributed to this book but mostly it is Chuck's enthusiasm for reinventing advertising that makes this book an inspiring read. Chuck, and DDB, is of course known for the Swarm Marketing concept (get the white paper here) which keeps popping up in this book, as well, but more importantly I really like all the various examples such as the Philips 'Simple Switch' campaign that are being presented throughout the book. Great food for thinking laterally!

I will be chewing on some of the ideas in this book for some time to come, but in the neantime here are 2 things I agree on, very much, and therefore want to share with you:

• The future will require connected agencies that are evolving from merely orchestrating campaigns to actually facilitating conversations
• Technology is now merely a commodity, and this is a social / cultural revolution, not a technological one

Making a long story short - this is a good read.

Related: my slideshow on the Future of Social Media, here

Disclosure: I have held various speeches and keynotes for DDB and TribalDDB in the past.

"A Shared Culture": nice new video explaining the Creative Commons concepts

Found this today

Context: my own video on Sharing 2.0