Where will bookstores be five years from now?
Upton Sinclair famously said that “it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
I keep putting facts about publishing’s commercial realities that I think most of the smart people running things accept together with forecasts for the future that I think most of the smart people running things accept and coming up with a view of where we’ll be sometime pretty soon that I find very few people will accept.
We have definitely passed what Michael Cader has dubbed “peak bookstores” in the US. Shelf space for books is probably dropping faster than the number of stores as book retailers look for other items to keep their customers more satisfied and give those items space previously devoted to books. And shelf space available for publishers who don’t own bookstores is dropping faster than that because Barnes & Noble, the leading provider of bookshelf display space, is aggressively sourcing their own product both to improve their margins and to develop proprietary product not available to their competitors.
Search engines learn how to watch and listen to video
07 July 2010 by Gareth Morgan
MISSED the winning goal in that crucial football match at the 2010 FIFA World Cup? Just get on the net and you'll find hours of user-generated video content of every moment in every match.
But with 650,000 - and counting - World Cup 2010 videos uploaded to YouTube alone, finding the right replay is a challenge. Existing video search tools struggle to deal with such a volume of content, but the search giants are on the case. Microsoft is sharpening the ability of its search engine, Bing, to find video content. Google, meanwhile, is set to launch an internet TV service later this year, using its video search technology to deliver the right footage.
The core strength of these engines has been in text search, but video search seems likely to move away from this approach. That's because sorting video content using metadata - the keyword tags manually attached to videos - is like searching via an interpreter. Tags encapsulate one person's judgement of a video's content, and a tag-only search system will produce a lot of irrelevant results, says Suranga Chandratillake, chief executive of online video and audio search engine Blinkx. "For video search to be really effective, you need better ways to understand what is going on in the actual footage."
As well as metadata, Blinkx uses speech recognition algorithms to interrogate a video directly. The transcripts it generates provide more data for the firm's text-based search engine. Blinkx's algorithms attempt to parse a chunk of speech into phonemes - the small sound segments that make up individual words. The speech recognition tools then attempt to reconstruct a sentence out of the phonemes. It is by no means a foolproof approach, however. "Two distinct sentences may contain indistinguishable phonemes," Chandratillake says. "So 'recognise speech' could be transcribed as 'wreck a nice beach'.
Google Plans Music Service Tied to Search Engine
Google Inc. is preparing to roll out a music download service tied to its search engine later this year, followed by an online subscription service in 2011, according to people familiar with the Internet giant's discussions with the music industry.
Google's proposals are still vague, say these people, and it's unclear whether it has struck any deals with record labels so far. But Google has been stepping up conversations about offering new music services tied to phones running its Android operating system along with the broader Web, said people who have been briefed on the talks. The launch of Google's download music store is still months away, these people said.
The discussions come as Google has been pushing deeper into music. Last year, as a first step, the company began linking to partner websites like iLike and Pandora through its search engine, allowing people to stream songs with one click from its search page. Now, the company is looking to tie its own service to its search engine, too.
E-Books Rewrite Bookselling
NEW YORK—In the massive new Barnes & Noble superstore on Manhattan's Upper East Side, generous display space is devoted to baby blankets, Art Deco flight clocks, stationery and adult games like Risk and Stratego.
The eclectic merchandise, which has nothing to do with books, may be a glimpse into the future of Barnes & Noble Inc., the nation's largest book chain.
For 40 years, Barnes & Noble has dominated bookstore retailing. In the 1970s it revolutionized publishing by championing discount hardcover best sellers. In the 1990s, it helped pioneer book superstores with selections so vast that they put many independent bookstores out of business.
Today it boasts 1,362 stores, including 719 superstores with 18.8 million square feet of retail space—the equivalent of 13 Yankee Stadiums.