“I Own a Google Phone”: A True Story

By Ariel Aberg-Riger

I love Google. Like, a lot. I use Google Reader. And Gmail. And Google Docs. And Google Calendar. And Google Analytics. I happily let Google see everything I do. I eagerly await the day Google search can be fused to my brain.

So, when I first heard the rumors about Google’s mobile operating system Android last year, I got excited. And when I heard that they were partnering with T-Mobile, the service provider to whom I owe years of indentured servitude, I got really excited. I imagined what a great workhorse it would be. Not as sexy as the iPhone, but solid. Functional. Ugly hot. OPEN SOURCE.

Last month, I followed the live blog of the press conference and immediately spent the rest of the afternoon refreshing the G1 Web site until I could pre-order.

Last week, it came.

I wish I could say the phone was perfect, but the reviews have been fairly spot on: it’s not quite there yet. Google integration for their most popular services is seamless. My Gmail and GCal are gorgeous, Google Reader is amazing, and the Google search is just as fast and precise as on my laptop. Google maps are the biggest disappointment, since my phone can never figure out precisely where I am (350 feet may not mean much elsewhere, but a block off in New York is crucial). The keypad is great (even if the little banana ending gets in the way), and the phone quality is fabulous (even though my battery runs out in a hot millisecond). Also, the phone isn’t nearly as ugly as I expected it to be (although it’s obviously not as beautiful as the iPhone).

The most exciting part is what happens next. The app offering is still paltry at this point, but growing. For now, one of my favorite party trick apps is the barcode scanner. Hold the phone over a barcode and in a few seconds you get a picture of the product, user reviews, best online prices with links to buy, and local stores with directions on how to get there. It works less well with random items (it told me my US Weekly was a pair of Ralph Lauren boxer shorts, and that my Aquafina was Fuse water), but with books it’s a thing of beauty.

Which made me wonder why Google didn’t bother optimizing Google Books for Android. On the phone, you just float around the page as you would online, only tinier. I’ve never actually been a big fan of Google Books (I’ve always found it much easier to search Amazon), but in envisioning future iterations of the phone, I imagine there will be more seamless integration between the mobile platform and GBooks as both continue to improve. And now that Google is allowed to host far greater portions of books online with a higher revenue share (some 63% for copyright holders) after it ponied up $125 million in its settlement with publishers, what’s to stop them from becoming an “iTunes for Books,” as one recent headline proclaimed?

I will never, ever buy a dedicated e-reader (a tirade for a different day), but I could imagine myself downloading books straight to my phone. And therein lies the future.

Survey Results: The Last Non-Work-Related Book You Read

What are publishing people reading outside of work?* A sampling:

LITERARY-LEANING BESTSELLERS


AWFUL BESTSELLERS


? BESTSELLERS


POLITICAL FOODY BOOKS

*”All books are work related.”–Editor at a large house

Our New E-Reader Survey

Do you work at a publishing house that supplies e-readers to some or all of its employees? We’d love it if you’d take our new survey, here:

Publishing Trends E-Reader Survey

Thanks!

Survey Results: Non-Work-Related Reading


As we noted in our original article, a lot of publishing people don’t have as much time as they’d like to read for fun because they’re too busy reading for work. “The work day never ends–‘so much to read’ is a blessing and a curse,” wrote one agent, while an editor described her heavy reading load as “too much of a good thing.”

Still, 34.3% of respondents find the time to read one or two non-work-related books a month. Here’s the rest of the breakdown:
0-1 non-work-related books: 17.4%
2-3: 22.4%
3-4: 13.1%
4-5: 3.2%
5+: 9.6%

Who are these champs who read at least 4 non-work-related books a month? Perhaps not surprisingly, 34.1% are agents and 25% are editors. They’d surely win a library summer-reading contest, if there were such a thing for adults.

Survey Results: When Is Happy Hour?

It’s Friday, and it’s been a hard week. If you’re going to happy hour with a publishing crowd after work today, expect lots of people to order red wine–the drink of choice for 35.8% of respondents. 16.7% prefer white. One respondent just loves “good delicious wine.” 5.3% go for vodka tonics, and 3.5% like Bud Light.

But many more do NOT like Bud Light. We’re sorry we didn’t give beer lovers more choices, and they called us out on it:

  • “Beer that isn’t Bud Light. Yeesh.”
  • “Any beer but Bud Light”
  • “Come on folks, a publishing survey without craft beers? We’re not all girls.”

Sorry. We’ll add microbrews to the list next year.

For now, what’s your favorite happy hour spot? Let us know in the comments.

Survey Results: Salary

How much money do you make? It’s a personal question, but we asked it, and most respondents answered. Here’s the salary breakdown:

  • 3.2% of respondents make less than $30,000.
  • 24.8% make $30,000-$50,000.
  • 13.9% make $50,000-$60,000.
  • 7.7% make $60,000-$70,000.
  • 8.3% make $70,000-$80,000.
  • 11.8% make $80,000-$100,000.
  • 14.7% make $100,000-$150,000.
  • 8.3% make $150,000-$200,000.
  • 7.4% make more than $250,000.

Publishers Weekly conducts its own salary survey every year; here are their 2008 results. hey found that the average man working in publishing made $103,822 in 2007, while the average woman made $64,742. PW notes that the highest jobs are in management, where more men work.

However, in our survey, 35.9% of the people making over $100,000 a year work in editorial.

When we asked the over $100,000 group what they should be making, 25% thought that their salary was about right. “Money is always tight, but my compensation seems fair,” wrote one respondent who makes $150,000-$200,000. “It’s a loaded question, but I’m well compensated by publishing standards,” wrote another respondent. And an editor making between $150,000 and $200,000 thought an “aggravation bonus” was in order.

At sites like Glassdoor.com, employees can anonymously report their salaries, as well as review their companies. Here are the results for Random House, McGraw-Hill, Scholastic, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Rodale, HarperCollins, and Wiley. The site is free, but to see the reviews or numbers, you have to (anonymously) post.

Give Me More

I’ve posted an expanded version of Rich Kelley’s article from the October issue, “Battling the Online Tyranny of ‘More,'” on our Web site. Check it out here:
http://pubtrends.wpenginepowered.com/copy/08/0810/0810tyranny.html

Survey Results: How Did You Get Your Job?

Want to get into publishing? A lot of people say it’s all about who you know–and the results of our survey support that belief. 35.5% of respondents heard about their current job via word of mouth. 9.6% found their position on the job board of a Web site like Publishers Marketplace, and 6% were recruited.

How did respondents hear about their first publishing job? Again, the main way is word of mouth, for 33.4%. But 18.1% of respondents got their first job through a newspaper listing. (When was the last time you saw a publishing job listed in the New York Times?)

“I sent out many letters, and a few publishers responded,” an editor at a large house told us. “This was 30+ years ago!”

Several respondents also told us that they got their first publishing positions through employment agencies, like the Lynne Palmer Agency and “Career Blazers Agency.” We know that the Lynne Palmer Agency still exists and are curious about whether it still works with those seeking entry-level jobs. Publishing newbies out there, did you consider a career agency when you were looking for your job And publishing vets, do you work with any career agencies or have you ever used one? Let us know in the comments.

Publishing Trends Announces Results of Second Annual Industry Survey

Wondering how much your publishing coworkers make, or how they take their coffee? We got tons of interesting answers in our second annual publishing industry survey, and couldn’t fit them all into our feature article in the October issue of Publishing Trends. So we’ll be posting additional results throughout this month. Stay tuned!

Battling the Online Tyranny of “More” at MIXX 2008

PT thanks New York–based marketing consultant Rich Kelley for his reporting.

“What we have today is the tyranny of more,” warned Mike Linton, CMO of eBay. “More choices, more technology, more competition, more alliances, more complexity, more risk.” “The Internet is run on love,” mused Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. “The motivation is social, not economic.” Marketers and Internet pundits exchanged insights on how people behave online—and how marketers are responding—at MIXX 2008, the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s annual two-day celebration of interactive marketing excellence.

“Don’t confuse an explosion of usage with an explosion of revenue,” Linton cautioned. “Rely on proven tools—the traditional ‘Ready, Aim, Fire’ methodology—to deliver dependable ROI…But sometimes you just have to go for it.” At that point “Ready, Fire, Aim” may be what’s called for. “Experience can sometimes be better than planning,” Linton advised, provided you can remain objective, “kill your own mistakes” and follow “the 70% rule—test if it’s within 70% of where it should be.”

Global Moms

What are moms doing on the Internet? OMD, Platform A, and Ipsos collaborated on a quantitative survey of some 2,300 mothers in 13 countries. One of their findings won’t surprise anyone: the average mom lives in “double-time,” accomplishing 27 hours of work in 16 waking hours—but she does spend 2.6 hours on the Internet every day. 70% of mothers in the U.S. are on the Internet (compared with only 9% in India)—and worldwide, 60% of mothers consider the Internet their “lifeline to the outside world” (this gets as high as 80% in Mexico, and as low as 24% in France). Most intriguing, 62% of moms worldwide co-use the Internet with their children at least once a week.

Is Search Overvalued?

Do you use search now for what you used to bookmark?  If so, you’re part of a trend. Young-Bean Song of Microsoft’s Atlas Institute shared results of a July 2008 study that found that 71% of search clicks are navigational—repeat visitors using search to find their way back to a site. Only 29% of search clickers were first-time visitors. Should search get all the credit for a sale just because it’s the last click? Would you attribute all the sales of Corona in a bar to the neon sign outside? If not, then why, asked Song, do we attribute sales online to the last link clicked? Atlas Institute has developed methodology they call “engagement mapping” that scores the other elements that are usually undercounted in generating a sale: recency and frequency of views of related display ads, ad sizes, ad formats, time of day viewed. He cited an ALLTEL case study in which 60% of revenue attributed to search was reassigned to display after an engagement mapping analysis. In a separate study, Atlas found that sponsored search clickers were 22% more likely to convert if they were also exposed to display ads from the same advertiser.

As if in response, Oliver Deighton, a Google rep, explained how advertisers deploying Google content campaigns in AdWords could now opt for a “Virtual CPA” model rather than the traditional CPM or CPC. You still pay on a CPC basis, but the cost of the campaign is organized around how many conversions occur at the targeted CPA.

Getting Engaged

Examples of engagement tools abounded at the conference. Adgregate showed an e-commerce widget that enables a visitor to complete a purchase transaction without ever leaving the page. Innovid showcased a clickable 3-D virtual item you can place inside a video. The virtual object is mapped to its surroundings so that when the camera angle changes so does the object—yet it can interact if clicked.

Ever wanted to be an M&M? Andrew Robertson, chairman and CEO of BBDO Worldwide, offered a sampling of BBDO’s award-winning M&M campaign: “Become an M&M.” Visitors to www.mms.com/us/becomeanmm/ can personalize and even animate their own M&M in a SimCity-like environment.

Keen to create your own superhero? Kaltura showed a video tool that enables fans to create their own Heroes character—one of many technologies that enabled Tim Kringe, the creator/executive producer of the TV hit Heroes, to realize his vision of “transmedia.” From the start, Kringe conceived of Heroes as a cross-platform universe with intersecting storylines. Characters can originate in a graphic novel or online and then appear in the TV series. A fan must become immersed in multiple media in order to follow the complete storyline—and fans are encouraged to create and submit their own characters, some of whom have been adopted.

Looking for the ultimate online photobook? Andrew Blau, SVP and GM of Time Inc. Interactive, announced the relaunch of Life Magazine in an online collaboration with Getty Images. Starting in February 2009, visitors will be able to browse through some 6 million photos online—and the total is slated to rise to 15 million images from the Life archives, and only 3% of them ever appeared in print. Photobook makers will be able to create a life timeline that juxtaposes images from Life alongside their own photos.

Sharing photos represents what Shirky calls the first rung on the ladder of social activates made easier by today’s social tools. In “Inventing: The Spontaneous Organization,” one of the conference’s best-attended sessions, Shirky was grilled by Charlie Rose for 40 minutes. The ladder’s next rungs, collaboration (think Wikipedia) and collective action, require increasing levels of time and commitment but have already begun to reshape society in dramatic ways. “Wikipedia is not a product,” Shirky noted. “It’s a process. If people stopped tending to it, it would cease to exist within a week.” As an example of collective action, Shirky cited the walkout of 40,000 students in Los Angeles in 2006 to protest the school system’s anti-immigration policy—the entire protest had been “organized” in less than 48 hours through Facebook and SMS messages.

To market in this space marketers must understand that the social fabric is already there—people already have a way of doing things. Marketers need to listen. The number of peer to peer conversations is increasing but it has its downside. One popular teen forum had to be shut down because, in the words of one anonymous spokesperson, “we couldn’t get the anorexics to shut up.”  And no marketer wants to be viewed as sponsoring an unhealthy lifestyle.