I am thrilled about the direction we’re going at Logos, and to see so many publishers getting ready to make the changes necessary to succeed on digital platforms.

It was all exciting the first time, too, in the late 1990’s. I enjoyed talking this week with fellow attendees of the ACM Conference on Digital Libraries ‘98 and the early NIST e-Book conferences. E-books: an overnight success decades in the making! And it’s funny how many of the products in the exhibit area look exactly like ones we saw back then; only this time the prototypes are shipping. Now it all feels “real.”

The slides for my session Network Effects Support Premium Pricing are online at the session page. (These slides have the outline I spoke from. I didn’t show it during the session because I hate reading bullet points off slides, and didn’t have the time to do all the art.)

It looks like the Ignite presentation (20 slides that auto-advance every 15 seconds – stressful!) isn’t online yet, but you can read about how Sean Boisen stumbled upon it on his blog.

But now I’m hearing from upset customers every day. And I don’t blame them: wait times to talk to customer service or technical support can be over half-an-hour. (It hurts me to type that!)

We released Logos 4 on November 2nd. Knowing that upgrades always create extra customer service, we planned appropriately. We scheduled overtime, extended our hours, opened on Saturday, and even catered lunch for the team the first few days.

It’s not been enough. Within a couple weeks our reps were burning out, and we had to cut back the extended hours. We started hiring, but too slowly. We kept thinking “the rush is almost over.” But it’s still not; Logos 4 upgrade sales were more than double my expectations, and in the first eight weeks of our release we had as many users move to our new platform as move to our platform in an entire “normal” year.

And now we’re facing limits we didn’t even consider. We need to recruit, interview and train more service agents. We need to shuffle departments to make more space for desks and chairs. We’re out of phone lines; we’ve hit capacity on our telephone trunk line. (The one I thought would last us forever!) And our six-year-old phone system that was supposed to grow with us? It was discontinued the year after we bought it, and we’re having problems expanding it to support a second receptionist.

Our goal for customer service is every email answered in 24 business hours, every phone call answered -- by a person – in a few rings, and no more than two minutes, if any, on hold.

These are ambitious goals, and we’re not meeting them today. I’m sorry. But we’re working hard to get back there as fast as possible.

Today he posted about how there’s now not one other person at Tatango who was there at the start.

It’s true, the people who are a perfect fit for a startup or small business often don’t fit when the business grows. People and businesses change. Employees who like or thrive in the chaos of a startup don’t always like the structure and organization of a profitable business. And the people who work well in a stable, profitable business often don’t have the attitude (or the courage!) to work on a shaky startup.

I joke that Logos in the early days was staffed by pirates. We were a motley crew of ignorant youth, corporate refugees, failed entrepreneurs, dropouts, disc jockeys, roofing salesmen… a lot of people you wouldn’t have hired, myself included.

Today people apply to work at Logos because they’ve heard we’re a strong company with good pay and benefits that treats people well. (It’s true! And we’re hiring!) And we hire people with relevant education, experience, and a track record.

It works well for everybody. And there’s less yelling in the office.

But some of those pirates were amazing people. Some could do tech support, write code, and fix the company van, all in one day. One built a loft for developers to sleep in, up under the eaves, and baked a blackberry pie from berries picked behind the office.

And most importantly, they weren’t afraid to speak the truth.

18 years later, we’ve managed to hold onto a few of the pirates. 2 of 3 founding partners are still here, along with some family members, employee #1, and a few from the second year.

And I love these people. (Most days.) Because they will do whatever needs to be done. Because they do remember that time when… Because they never call me ‘sir’. And because they will fearlessly speak the truth when others keep their mouths shut.

Derek, it’s going to get even more lonely. As you move from success to success, which I am sure you will, you’ll find more and more people who tell you what you want to hear. People will join you because you’re a meal-ticket. They’ll work for you because they want a stable, safe job. And that’s great.

But keep an eye out for those few crazy pirates who can grow with you. People you can count on today, and tomorrow, and who will be there to give it to you straight when no one else will. Even when you don’t want to hear it.

If you’re developing a tech product, though, I think it’s a better plan to address tomorrow’s needs than today’s. Because by the time you develop and market your product, today will be history, and gone with it may be the problem you were trying to solve.

Remember the dedicated e-mail devices that were sold in office supply stores? A small screen, keyboard, and phone-line connection so that you could get on e-mail for a couple hundred bucks instead of buying a more expensive general-purpose computer.

Not a big hit, because the price of the computer was falling every day.

The family radios? (Higher-powered, more phone-like walkie-talkies.) Released just a few years before everyone and their dog got a much more useful cell phone.

Of course you can be too early. E-books are hot now, but none of the pioneers of the late 1990’s are with us today.

There is money to be made solving today’s problem, and if you’re able to move quickly and exploit a window in time, good for you. But if you’re making a large investment, it’s worth looking down the road.

Don't do it!

It takes time to integrate a new employee, and for the employee to learn the corporate culture, procedures, and why we always take a little extra time with this one particular customer. It takes you time to learn if they are diligent, punctual, trustworthy, and a regular source of insight.

There will come a day when you need to fill a position with more responsibility. And it's great to have someone who knows your organization ready and is chomping-at-the-bit to step up to that important job.

Every job in your organization is a trainee position. You're already investing in teaching employees the one thing you can't hire outside: your people, products, procedures and culture. Why not leverage that investment for the future?

There is a downside: you may hire someone with an eye to the future and lose them to another opportunity before you can use all their growing talents. But graduating some great people from your organization is a small price to pay for having a deep bench when you need it.

Are you a star player? Are you looking for a growing company where you'll have lots of opportunities? We're hiring.

Is anyone reading the 937th review of that movie? Nope. But the 938th guy just wants to rant or rave.

It’s the detailed, thoughtful post you want to write but someone-already-did-three-months-ago that’s frustrating. And once I find it, I lose enthusiasm for writing my own take.

I need to have more original thoughts. Or resign myself to twittering links.

Today I searched for the answer to a question. The top hit was a useful article written by a subject-matter expert. (Good job, Google.) Many of the following hits were a simplistic rewrite of that article that had been search engine optimized, and were hosted on massive “content” sites cluttered with ads.

You can always tell a Search Engine Optimized page. A Search Engine Optimized page reads like it was written by a six year old. People who write a Search Engine Optimized page are sure to include keyword phrases many times so that search engines can optimize the way they find the Search Engine Optimized page.

I’m not saying anything new. I’ve just reached my personal “I want to scream” point.

I’ll give them some credit; Google has gotten better. Now when I search for “hilton fresno” I’m very likely to see Hilton’s official site ahead of the nine-million “I loaded the yellow pages into a web site” sites.

But it’s still out of control. You can’t trust search anymore. It’s why people are turning to social media for links and visiting trusted blogs and content providers.

(It’s good for my business, too: people buy Bible software because they want a dedicated tool and a curated library. There’s lots of free Bible content online, but our users don’t have time to separate the wheat from chaff.)

Google, Bing, and especially Wolfram Alpha are trying to offer more “answers,” rather than just links. But most of my searching is for another site, not just an answer. I want to be sent to somebody’s page – just a real page, not an ad-farm.

There’s an opportunity here to create a web search engine that punishes results littered with ads. Google can’t do it – they live off those ads. A site that took ads but didn’t have an incentive to send you to other sites full of them could offer a superior experience.

And there’s an opportunity for publishers, too, to take their quality brands and build content sites that take over some of what you’d use the search engine for.

A quarter-cup of Worcestershire sauce.

Why is Caesar salad dressing so good?

Parmesan cheese, Worcestershire sauce, and (I hope!) anchovies.

I spent years loving umami-rich foods without understanding why. It’s a natural flavor common in many foods and cuisines, but if you don’t know it’s there, it’s hard to incorporate in your own cooking.

The WSJ has an excellent overview, and you’ll find more information and recipes at the Umami Information Center. My rule of thumb? There aren’t many dishes you won’t improve with either parmesan cheese or Worcestershire sauce.

It’s very cool, and looks like the obvious next step in publishing: the freshness of a web page, the editorial attention of a magazine, and the depth of a book, in the form factor of a Kindle.

It even looks comfortable and familiar to me... I feel like I’ve seen it before...

Separated at birth?

We’ve been building the future for a few years, and we’re shipping it now. (Minus the dedicated device with touch screen; but put Logos 4 on a tablet PC and you’re just about there.)

So here’s my experience-based take on Hyatt’s six conclusions about the future of book publishing:

1. The line between newspapers, magazines, and books is about to become blurred.

Boy, howdy. We contracted with professional news artists from major newspapers to build a whole new set of infographics, like Solomon’s Temple shown above. We consulted The Society for News Design’s annual awards book for Home Page layout ideas. The page incorporates hand-chosen excerpts from books and will integrate with Bible Study Magazine in the future.

And let me add databases to the blurry mix. A single table or piece of data in isolation won’t satisfy users of an interactive tool. SI will need to have their stats linked into massive back-end databases, just like a Bible map now needs to be backed up with all kinds of metadata.

2. Publishers will need to envision multimedia content from the beginning.

And in many cases this means starting over. We have dozens of books with graphic representations of Solomon’s Temple, but we had to start over to ensure we’d have not only a great image, but the high-resolution vector art and 3D model. (Look for that same temple model to be animated and explorable in the future.)

Publishers also need to secure the rights to re-mix and re-use data. You don’t want a timeline graphic, you want a database of events you can repurpose many ways.

3. Consumer expectations are going to skyrocket.

Paper is the true what-you-see-is-what-you-get medium. Our expectations for what we can do with it don’t go beyond scissors and tape. In the digital world, consumers expect the production values of a major motion picture with the data crunching of a spreadsheet and the flexibility of a scrapbook.

There are many issues for publishers to worry about here:

• Production Quality – There will need to be a bigger investment in art and design. And, in interactive media, a significant investment in the design of the user interface. Design will need to anticipate usage scenarios, too. The picture bleeds off the page for artistic effect? Great – but can I copy it uncropped to put into my report?
• Flexibility – We already had high-production-value multimedia content. The 1990’s saw a plethora of multimedia products; Microsoft’s Multimedia Beethoven: The Ninth Symphony was an excellent example of using every media type to produce something that wasn’t a book, a magazine, or a movie. But production of each product was insanely expensive, and each product was a closed box, tied tightly to a technological moment in time. These products are unusable today. Future-proof publishing needs to have flexibility designed-in.
• Rights – The entire publishing industry is built on a rights-model designed for physical distribution. Any significant property (books with text, multiple contributors, and licensed images, or video with music, images, and other content) is tied down like Gulliver was by the Lilliputians. We are creating new media and new content not only to use it flexibly, but to be able to grant consumers the right to use it in the ways they’re demanding.

4. The cost of producing digital books will get more expensive.

In addition to audio, video, and design costs, publishers will need to invest more in markup and tagging. It’s not enough to cite an article in a footnote, it needs to be linked to the source. Are cross references links? Are people disambiguated? Are places tagged with latitude and longitude? Are events tagged for timelines? Are images annotated so that you can search for a picture as easily as for a word?

Indexing and abstracting will become much more important. Stand-alone back-of-the-book indexes will need to be replaced with rich tagging that works across multiple properties.

5. Digital content creation and distribution will become our primary focus.

We’re still distributing on DVD-ROM’s, to my amazement. (Broadband Internet just isn’t everywhere yet.) But a few months ago we shut down the last of our physical distribution network. The good news is, we didn’t own a warehouse, and serving that distribution network was just a small part of our business, and never our focus.

Physical products will remain an important part of the traditional publisher’s business, but they’ll need to decide if their focus will remain on physical-goods logistics or move to digital competencies. This is different than the move to sell off printing-presses a decade ago. It is more than asking “Do we outsource the warehouse?” It’s asking “Who are we?”

6. People will be reading more than ever.

The good news! We see this all the time. Freedom from the bonds of paper weight means we can give the user a great deal on more content than their shelves could hold. An easy interface and automated research tools help engage users with their content. Each innovation – especially our move to a newspaper-style Home Page – helps users get more out of their digital library. And when they get more value from it, they purchase more content.

Publishers, are you ready?

Take this simple quiz:

• [ ] Graphic design is a core competency in-house, not an outsourced project.
• [ ] I have unrestricted global rights to the content I publish.
• [ ] I employ an Information Architect.
• [ ] My content is always designed for use in multiple media or formats.
• [ ] Everything we own or license is thoroughly indexed and stored in a database.
• [ ] I employ an Interaction Designer.
• [ ] Software development is a core competency in-house.
• [ ] I have an experienced digital publishing partner, not a project-based contractor.

Do you need a perfect score? Nope. (I don’t have one either.) But these are things to think about as we prepare for the new normal in publishing.

I got a thank you letter from the university, which didn’t surprise me. What did surprise me was that it included an all-campus parking pass.

This pass has little cash value. It’s not transferrable, and not good for events. I’m on campus just a few times a year (an advisory board, visiting a class, etc.) and there is always a free day-permit reserved for me at the visitor’s center. I don’t need this pass.

But I love it. Parking is always a mess at universities, and I’ve got a golden ticket. I can drive from my office right to the building I’m visiting.

This pass costs the university nothing. But it’s the free prize inside. And I’m embarrassed by what a difference it makes in my attitude towards visiting and contributing to the school.

I don't know, but I'm going along, at least in regards to salt. Murray River Pink Salt Flakes are a difference you can taste at the table. (It's too expensive at the gourmet stores; split a 2 lb. bag from SaltWorks with a friend. Or keep it all; you'll use it.)

And then I discovered Fennel & Salt. Twice the insane price of Murray River by the jar. But sprinkle it on some sauteed vegetables...or right into your mouth...it's like fairy dust from Italy. I don't regret it one bit.

So I won't be spending the month of April toasting 50 years of the overopinionated and underinformed little book... English syntax is a deep and interesting subject. It is much too important to be reduced to a bunch of trivial don't-do-this prescriptions by a pair of idiosyncratic bumblers who can't even tell when they've broken their own misbegotten rules.

Alas, The Elements march on unmolested. A testimony to the convenience of their form, the boldness of the assertions, and the continued strength of the brand.

In that spirit:

1. Throw away your Elements.
2. Purchase On Writing Well, by William Zinsser.

Alas, I never got to try F-8, V-8’s fruity friend, and one of the projects my grandfather worked on. “This deliciously distinctive fruit drink is a blend of: water, sugar, naranjilla and cocona juices, concentrates of pineapple, apricot, apple, lemon and lime, banana puree, citric acid, guar gum and ascorbic acid (Vitamin C).”

I don’t know if F-8 even made it to shelves, or how long it lived; I do know the concept lives on in V8 Splash and V8 V-Fusion.

An F-8 label was tacked to the boathouse ceiling at my grandparents’ summer home, and I always wanted one. My mother has the last one we could find, and I scanned it in so I could share it with other family members. And you.

From William S. Walsh’s fascinating time killer, Handy Book of Literary Curiosities, 1906, kept dangerously in reach of my chair.

What can you do with pen, scuffle, men, ruffle?

“One would suppose a silly pen
A shabby weapon in a scuffle;
But yet the pen of critic men
A very hero’s soul would ruffle.”

“I grant that some by tongue or pen
Are daily, hourly, in a scuffle;
But then we philosophic men
Have placid tempers naught can ruffle.”

“Last night I left my desk and pen,
For in the street I heard a scuffle,
And there, torn off by drunken men,
I left my coat-tails and shirt-ruffle.”

But the best is a “rhyming end unto itself,” if you will:

“Boy,
Gun;
Joy,
Fun.

Gun
Bust,
Boy
Dust.”

This fantastic article by Matthew B. Crawford makes the case eloquently:

“A gifted young person who chooses to become a mechanic rather than to accumulate academic credentials is viewed as eccentric, if not self-destructive. There is a pervasive anxiety among parents that there is only one track to success for their children. It runs through a series of gates controlled by prestigious institutions. Further, there is wide use of drugs to medicate boys, especially, against their natural tendency toward action, the better to ‘keep things on track.’”

At least when I wrote code I felt like I had done “real work” that day. Now that I spend my days thinking, talking, and processing email, I feel like something is missing. I think that’s why I’ve been doing so much cooking: we knowledge workers need to make something once in a while.

“The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because philosophy is an exalted activity, will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.” – John William Gardner