Announcing my new Kindle book "The Future of Content"

Today is a very big day for me. My new Kindle book "The Future of Content" just went online at Amazon, and is already gaining a lot of traction. You can view a very short video greeting about the book on my GerdTube channel (Youtube:) 

Of course I would be very happy if you would consider buying the book for yourself (only $3.90, Kindle-only) but beyond that it would be really great if you could help me spread the word via rating and / or 'liking' the book on the Amazon.com page, tweeting about it or just forwarding this mail to some friends that may be interested.

As you probably know, I have published my last 3 books as free pdfs (which are quite popular) but really wanted to try something new with this book; after all reading on the Kindle is a much better experience than reading a PDF, and thus is, to quote Kevin Kelly, one of those "New Generatives" :)

"The future of content" will also be available in dead-tree-versions aka print, via my Lulu store, soon - please stay tuned.    Happy reading!

Gerd Leonhard
(Media Futurist and CEO of The Futures Agency),
Basel /  Switzerland
http://twitter.com/#!/gleonhard
My public Amazon / Kindle profile
(sharing all my book highlights there)

 

Update October 25 2011: this nice review may be helpful:

Increases brain power for content creators, October 25, 2011

By 

Suzanna Stinnett

This review is from: The Future of Content (Kindle Edition)

"I challenge you to expand your brain and read this book. What Gerd Leonhard is always doing is informing the global brain (or the collective brain) in ways that help us all get where we're trying to go. He builds the buildings in front of us.

This collection points toward several compelling answers for content creators. As a writer who is already swimming in the changing currents of "content," I found it intensely informative.  Leonhard shores up my courage to continue embracing a digital world without DRM, and ebook prices "for the masses." He makes the all-important concept of curation crystal clear. If you are providing any kind of content in print or on the web, it's relevant. If you want to stay on the front edge of content creation and publishing, it's basic. I'm making this book mandatory reading for my epublishing circles"

Amazon Kindle German Store
Amazon Kindle French Store
Amazon Kindle UK Store

ABOUT "THE FUTURE OF CONTENT"
Futurist Gerd Leonhard has been writing about the future of content i.e. music, film, TV, books, newspapers, games etc, since 1998. He has published 4 books on this topic, 2 of them on music (The Future of Music, with David Kusek, and Music 2.0). For the past 10 years Leonhard has been deeply involved with many clients in various sectors of the content industry, in something like 17 countries, and it’s been a great experience, he says. “I have learned a lot, I have listened a lot, I have talked even more (most likely:) and I think I have grown to really understand the issues that face the content industries - and the creators, themselves - in the switch from physical to digital media.”

This Kindle book is a highly curated collection of the most important essays and blog posts Leonhard has written on this topic, and even though some of it was written as far back as 2007 - “I believe it still holds water years later. I have tried to only include the pieces that have real teeth. Please note that the original date of each piece is shown here in order to allow for contextual orientation.” Leonhard’s intent to publish this via the amazing Amazon Kindle platform, exclusively, and at a very low price, is to make these ideas and concepts as widely available as possible while still trying to be an example of what digital, paperless distribution can look like, going forward.

Related articles

• "A free Kindle could be just the beginning of an explosion of book-like content from Amazon and..." (futureof.biz)
• The Future of Digital - Eco NOT Ego (futureof.biz)
• The End of Control & The Future of Content: Gerd Leonhard Authors@Google (gerdleonhard.typepad.com)
• Mobile advertising must be content-based (review of my talk at MMA Forum in Sao Paulo (mediafuturist.com)
• Future of Connected Television Gerd Leonhard @ MIPCOM Digital Minds 2011 (slideshare.net)
• Meet me in Geneva on October 26th: Visions of a Networked Future at ITU Telecom World (mediafuturist.com)
• Gerd Leonhard: New video: "Friction is Fiction" explained (mediafuturist.com)

MUST WATCH: PressPausePlay Movie, related 9-minute excerpt of interview with me (future of music ++)!

I am delighted to be involved with PressPausePlay, a movie about digital creativity, funded and promoted by Ericsson, featuring people such as Hank Shocklee, Seth Godin, ZeFrank, Sean Parker, Larry Lessig and Mike Mesnick. And it's finally out and available! Here is what it's all about:

 "The digital revolution of the last decade has unleashed creativity and talent in an unprecedented way, with unlimited opportunities. But does democratized culture mean better art or is true talent instead drowned out? This is the question addressed by PressPausePlay, a documentary film containing interviews with some of the world's most influential creators of the digital era"

You can download it via bit-torrent (free but painful) or iTunes US (paid but much swifter:)

From the blog:  "we have had so many people ask "Where can we see your film?" and this week we are very happy to say our digital distribution has begun! PressPausePlay is now available online in many countries around the world, with more coming soon. You can now find PressPausePlay on iTunes US, iTunes Canada and iTunes UK. You can also purchase PressPausePlay on Amazon.com, Walmart.com, Vudu.com, CinemaNow.com, Xbox, and Playstation. Or put us on your Netflix cue where we will be coming soon..."

Please RT and spread the word!!

Related articles

• Good read: Rolling Stone Australia: albums - the next generation (quotes Gerd) (mediafuturist.com)
• Gerd Leonhard: New video: "Friction is Fiction" explained (mediafuturist.com)
• The Future of the Music Business: video update by Futurist and Speaker Gerd Leonhard (gerdleonhard.typepad.com)

Is traditional content licensing fit for the digital age?

It seems like every single day I read about how Internet and mobile companies are struggling to obtain the rights for what they want to do, whether it's about music, videos, TV shows, films, articles, text and images.

Here are some quick examples:

• GoogleTV just can't seem to get the TV studios seriously interested in allowing them to even search their online offerings, while...
• Netflix seems to have been more successful at tackling this wicked problem of content licensing, at least  to some degree, by - as cnet aptly puts it  - 'building relationships in traditional means' (I guess this means playing nice with Hollywood? Read the article - those are good, old-fashioned golf-club paradigms I'd say)
• Spotify is a fantastic music service, no doubt; very much along the lines of what Dave Kusek and me envisioned as 'music like water' in our 2005 book 'The Future of Music', and subsequently expanded on in my follow -up book, Music 2.0 (free PDF here). Spotify is not officially available in Switzerland but I have been successfully using it via a UK paypal account (after trying simfy.de and not getting anywhere with their really awkward and crash-prone iPhone app). Unfortunately, Spotify just can't seem to get the music labels and national rights organizations to bless their launch in many other territories, including the U.S. (read this Slashgear piece for more details ). All of this - you guessed it - because the record companies and the music publishers have not agreed on the licensing and deal terms for those countries, yet, and despite the fact that Spotify is already spending most of its VC money on paying for the music licenses. The fact is that there are no compulsory licenses available for on-demand streaming and flat-rate access services so unless these deals are negotiated nobody can touch it. Read about it here, or here (my Spotify-related blog posts), or via my July 2009 blog post on specifically why I think Spotify is unlikely to survive, or peruse the Zemanta-enabled links below for more enlightenment by some smart people

 So here is the point I am trying to make: I don't think a purely free-market-driven and  unregulated approach will work, in the future. Many large, incumbent media companies, publishers, record labels and other traditional intermediaries (i.e. the 'industry' as opposed to the actual creators) have every reason NOT to be flexible or even slightly forthcoming with their licensing terms and thereby support the deployment of new cloud-based, access-on-demand and flat-rated services. This is simply because their very existence may quickly and  irreversibly change the entire playing-field, and may make it very hard for the incumbent rights-conglomerates to continue to effectively control distribution (and by extension, advertising prices) in the same way as before. These changes aren't for the better when you currently run the entire show, so why should you agree?

This is why Warner Music Group's Edgar Bronfman has said many times that he will not license any unlimited streaming-on-demand service, why Netflix - despite of (or because?) its vast growth - has been back and forth with the Hollywood studios on getting more content deals done, and why Hulu is losing steam because of the studios' concerns over future cable-TV  revenue streams. Clearly, this is all about controlling and milking the market (i.e. the 'people formerly known as consumers') as long as possible. Yes, sure, just like the big telcos used to do before they had to let competition in. This is not about 'getting the artists / creators paid' or about fighting digital piracy - it's about maintaining a comfortable and lucrative monopoly position for the longest possible time. Which is OK, too - if it wasn't for the criminalizing effect it has on every single Internet user.

Most large, international media companies (disclosure: many of which are or have been my clients in some way or the other) and almost all major TV, film and music rightsholders are used to absolute control over the distribution of the works (and artists / producers) that they own or represent, and this simple fact used to result in getting much higher license fees - the other party had no choice but to take it or leave it; no license simply meant no (legal) business. This may sound somewhat reasonable in a mostly offline world (i.e. until  just recently, when the mobile Internet started to take of), but on the Net, in a truly networked society, this kind of thinking plays out quite differently: refusal to license at a price that is affordable (and / or financially viable for a  new, potentially huge but legally unprecedented player) simply encourages and produces piracy, because the desired content will become available anyway, legal or not, one way or the other.  The reality is that there is no real control of distribution of digital content, any longer, and all models based on re-achieving that control will fail miserably. Witness the 100s of illegal movie sites that now stream pretty much any movie on-demand, or the many new IP-cloaking and re-routing services (commonly used to access locally restricted content services) that are currently flooding the market. Not licensing content  to new players on actually survivable terms simply lets other, parasitic entities prosper by offering it without permission. Everyone loses.

My thesis is that - just like telecom deregulation - we urgently need new, open and public mechanisms that first significantly encourage and then possibly even enforce the licensing of copyrighted works for new services that require a new and more experimental approach, and that may end up serving the consumers much better than the traditional services. A 'use it or lose it' rule may be useful to that end; and as far as music is concerned I have been proposing a new, public digital music license for a long time.

In any case, I think that a system that continues to be based on deriving future benefits ONLY for the largest and most powerful rightsholders (again, by that I do not mean the actual creators, but the industries that represent them) is, in my view, simply unsustainable  and socially indefensible in this  dawning broadband-culture and in a connected, networked and interdependent society. We need better and more transparent EcoSystems and less EgoSystems; less empires and more Open Networks.

Let me have your feedback please! 

Note: if there is some kind of problem with my comment box on this blog, please use Facebook or Twitter for comments, for now, or email me and I will post them.

 

Related articles

• Gerd Leonhard: Music for the masses (telecoms.com)
• WMG Renews Spotify For Europe, Still Talking In U.S. (paidcontent.org)
• Spotify won't be coming to the States this year (geek.com)
• Spotify Bleeding From Licensing Costs (businessinsider.com)
• TECHCRUNCH: How Spotify Almost Sold To Google For $1 Billion, Plus New Apple Rumors (blogrunner.com)
• Spotify's Daniel Ek Explains Why the Music Business Needs Him, and You Do, Too (Video) [MediaMemo] (mediamemo.allthingsd.com)
• The Future of Media: video of my talk at ICTQatar (mediafuturist.com)
• My guest post on the DDB blog: The Future of Marketing & Media - Data Is the New Oil (mediafuturist.com)

The Future of Intellectual Property & Copyright (presentation at TedXNewStreet, London)

It was a great pleasure to speak at TedX New Street in London yesterday (tweet flow is here, btw) I was allotted the usual 18 Ted-minutes to speak about the future of intellectual property and copyright - a piece of cake!  Here is my presentation, below - let me know how you like it. Hopefully we will have a video on Ted.com pretty soon, as well. If you want a quicky download (rather than the high-res slideshare version, below), you can try this low-res PDF: Future of IP and Copyright Gerd Leonhard Tedx London LOW RES

 

The Future of IPR and Copyright (presentation at TedX NewStreet London)

View more presentations from Gerd Leonhard.

Related articles

• Gerd Leonhard: [The Music Industry Report] Future of Music 2010: Copyright czar outlines file-sharing agenda at odds with how many Americans consume music (musicindustryreport.org)
• Gerd Leonhard: Preservation v. Protection (artsjournal.com)
• New video: 5 customer engagement trends by Gerd Leonhard (future of marketing) (mediafuturist.com)
• Egosystems become Ecosystems: the future of media, marketing and business (my presentation at DoLectures 2010) (mediafuturist.com)
• The Future of Advertising: Interaction before Transaction (AdTech London) (mediafuturist.com)