Captain Cook in Google Earth: Point Danger to Bustard Bay
Today, I added a leg of Cook’s exploration of the Australian coast to my Google Earth tour which presents his first voyage round the world. The screenshot above shows Endeavour anchored in Bustard Bay on 23May1770 after travelling north from Point Danger.
If you use Google Earth I can strongly recommend version 6.2 which, to my mind, has dramatically improved imagery.
Copyright © Colin Hazlehurst, 2012
If you would like to follow Cook’s voyage, you will need to install the latest version of Google Earth on your computer; then go to the Captain Cook blog and click on the links on the right-hand side of the page, under the ‘Google Earth’ heading. After the animation is loaded in Google Earth, you need to expand an entry in the Table of Contents. You will see a ‘Play’ icon which you double-click to start the animation. Don’t forget to enable your speakers to hear the spoken journal.
Captain Cook in Google Earth: Botany Bay to Point Danger
Between May 6th and May16th, 1770, Endeavour sailed between Botany Bay and Point Danger passing Port Jackson, Broken Bay, Port Stephens, Cape Hawke, and arriving at Point Danger. This last is the point on the coast where New South Wales and Queensland meet.
I have now completed this leg of Cook’s exploration of the Australian coast in my Google Earth tour which presents his first voyage round the world. The screenshot above shows Endeavour off Point Danger, viewed from Mount Warning.
Copyright © Colin Hazlehurst, 2012
If you would like to follow Cook’s voyage, you will need to install the latest version of Google Earth on your computer; then go to the Captain Cook blog and click on the links on the right-hand side of the page, under the ‘Google Earth’ heading. After the animation is loaded in Google Earth, you need to expand an entry in the Table of Contents. You will see a ‘Play’ icon which you double-click to start the animation. Don’t forget to enable your speakers to hear the spoken journal.
Captain Cook in Google Earth: Botany Bay
This post reports the completion of my endeavours to present, in a Google Earth tour, Lieutenant James Cook’s exploration and description of Botany Bay. The screenshot above shows Endeavour anchored in the bay close to the place where Cook first set foot on Australian soil.
It takes just under 24 minutes to read aloud Cook’s account of the bay, its hydrography, its wildlife, and its inhabitants. He sounded the bay and determined where there were deeper channels and areas of shoal water. He described the trees, the soil, the shellfish, and other marine life, including leather jackets and the stingrays after which the bay was given its first name. He also gave as good an account as he could of the people he met, though at no point was there an exchange of views, other than the throwing of spears and the firing of muskets.
Seaman Forby Sutherland died here and was buried near the watering place close to the southern promontory at the entrance to Botany Bay, which Cook then named Point Sutherland.
Copyright © Colin Hazlehurst, 2012
If you would like to follow Cook’s voyage, you will need to install the latest version of Google Earth on your computer; then go to the Captain Cook blog and click on the links on the right-hand side of the page, under the ‘Google Earth’ heading. After the animation is loaded in Google Earth, you need to expand an entry in the Table of Contents. You will see a ‘Play’ icon which you double-click to start the animation. Don’t forget to enable your speakers to hear the spoken journal.
Captain Cook in Google Earth: exploring Botany Bay
April 29th, 1770; Lieutenant James Cook brought Endeavour to anchor in 5 fathoms 2 miles within the entrance to Botany Bay. Already they have seen people on the north and south points of the bay and Cook was keen to make contact with them. From his journal:
Saw, as we came in, on both points of the bay, several of the Natives and a few hutts; Men, Women, and Children on the South Shore abreast of the Ship, to which place I went in the Boats in hopes of speaking with them, accompanied by Mr. Banks, Dr. Solander, and Tupia. As we approached the Shore they all made off, except 2 Men, who seem’d resolved to oppose our landing. As soon as I saw this I order’d the boats to lay upon their Oars, in order to speak to them; but this was to little purpose, for neither us nor Tupia could understand one word they said. We then threw them some nails, beads, etc., ashore, which they took up, and seem’d not ill pleased with, in so much that I thought that they beckon’d to us to come ashore; but in this we were mistaken, for as soon as we put the boat in they again came to oppose us, upon which I fir’d a musquet between the 2, which had no other effect than to make them retire back, where bundles of their darts lay, and one of them took up a stone and threw at us, which caused my firing a second musquet, load with small shott; and altho’ some of the shott struck the man, yet it had no other effect than making him lay hold on a target. Immediately after this we landed, which we had no sooner done than they throw’d 2 darts at us; this obliged me to fire a third shott, soon after which they both made off, but not in such haste but what we might have taken one; but Mr. Banks being of opinion that the darts were poisoned, made me cautious how I advanced into the woods.
I have started to add the exploration of Botany Bay to my latest Google Earth tour. The screenshot above shows Endeavour anchored in Botany Bay close to the place where Cook first set foot on Australia.
Copyright © Colin Hazlehurst, 2012
If you would like to follow Cook’s voyage, you will need to install the latest version of Google Earth on your computer; then go to the Captain Cook blog and click on the links on the right-hand side of the page, under the ‘Google Earth’ heading. After the animation is loaded in Google Earth, you need to expand an entry in the Table of Contents. You will see a ‘Play’ icon which you double-click to start the animation. Don’t forget to enable your speakers to hear the spoken journal.
Captain Cook in Google Earth: Point Hicks to Botany Bay
It was April 28th, 1770. Lieutenant James Cook had just attempted to land on Australian soil and meet some of its inhabitants. This was about about 9 miles to the north of Red Point. They were prevented from getting ashore by the great surf breaking on the beach. After this he wrote in his journal:
At this time, it fell calm and we were not above a mile and a half from the shore, in 11 fathoms, and within some breakers that lay to the southward of us; but luckily, a light breeze came off from the land, which carried us out of danger, and with which we stood to the northward.
During the night they sailed Endeavour northwards and:
At daylight, in the morning, we discovered a bay, which appeared to be tolerably well sheltered from all winds, into which I resolved to go with the ship.
This inlet was first given the name Stingray Bay but was soon renamed Botany Bay on account of “the great quantity of plants Mr. Banks and Dr. Solander found in this place.”
This post reports the completion of the first leg of a Google Earth tour showing Cook’s exploration of the east coast of Australia. It spans 11 days from 18Apr1770 to 28Apr1770 inclusive and shows the approach of Endeavour to Australia and the first sighting of land by Lieutenant Hicks. It animates a 3D model of a ship to follow Endeavour’s track as Lieutenant Cook surveyed the coast in a northerly direction. The places he named on this coast include:
- Point Hicks
- Ramhead Point
- Cape Howe
- Cape Dromedary
- Mount Dromedary
- Pigeon House Mountain
- Cape St. George
- Long Nose
- Red Point
- Botany Bay
Copyright © Colin Hazlehurst, 2012
If you would like to follow Cook’s voyage, you will need to install the latest version of Google Earth on your computer; then go to the Captain Cook blog and click on the links on the right-hand side of the page, under the ‘Google Earth’ heading. After the animation is loaded in Google Earth, you need to expand an entry in the Table of Contents. You will see a ‘Play’ icon which you double-click to start the animation. Don’t forget to enable your speakers to hear the spoken journal.
Endeavour abreast Pigeon House Mountain, 22Apr1770
On 22Apr1770, H.M. Bark Endeavour sailed from Bateman Bay to just south of Jervis Bay. While the ship was hove-to overnight, the southerly current carried her 10 miles back over ground they had already covered. Working close in alongshore to the north north-east, they saw several people on the beach. Pigeon House Mountain was a remarkable hill inland that Cook used for triangulating the ship’s position.
Today, I added 22Apr1770 to the Google Earth tour showing Cook’s exploration of the east coast of Australia.
Copyright © Colin Hazlehurst, 2012
If you would like to follow Cook’s voyage, you will need to install the latest version of Google Earth on your computer; then go to the Captain Cook blog and click on the links on the right-hand side of the page, under the ‘Google Earth’ heading. After the animation is loaded in Google Earth, you need to expand an entry in the Table of Contents. You will see a ‘Play’ icon which you double-click to start the animation. Don’t forget to enable your speakers to hear the spoken journal.
Endeavour off Bateman Bay, 21Apr1770
Endeavour off Bateman Bay, 21Apr1770
Today, I added 21Apr1770 to the Google Earth tour showing Cook’s exploration of the east coast of Australia.
Endeavour sailed northwards from Cape Howe past Cape Dromedary, with Mount Dromedary behind, and on as far as Bateman Bay.
If you would like to follow Cook’s voyage, you will need to install the latest version of Google Earth on your computer; then go to the Captain Cook blog and click on the links on the right-hand side of the page, under the ‘Google Earth’ heading. After the animation is loaded in Google Earth, you need to expand an entry in the Table of Contents. You will see a ‘Play’ icon which you double-click to start the animation. Don’t forget to enable your speakers to hear the spoken journal.
Copyright © Colin Hazlehurst, 2012
(Screenshot courtesy of Google)
Captain Cook explores Australia in Google Earth
- Endeavour hove to off Cape Howe (20Apr1770)
Last year I started a Google Earth project to present Lieutenant James Cook’s account of his first voyage round the world. At the same time, I launched a WordPress blog to deliver the daily entries of his journal on the corresponding day of the year (the calendar for 2011 followed that for 1768, the year H.M. Bark Endeavour set off from Plymouth).
The technique in Google Earth is to animate a model so that it follows the track of Cook’s ship. The animation is accompanied by an audio rendition of Cook’s journal. So far I have ‘sailed’ Endeavour from Plymouth to Tahiti, via Madeira, Rio de Janeiro, and Tierra del Fuego; then I modelled the circumnavigation of the North and South Islands of New Zealand.
The latest phase of the project is to present Cook’s exploration of the east coast of Australia. The difference this time is that I intend to release the presentation at more frequent intervals, rather than waiting until I have modelled the entire leg of the journey.
If you would like to follow Cook’s voyage, you will need to install the latest version of Google Earth on your computer; then go to the blog I mentioned before and click on the links on the right-hand side of the page, under the ‘Google Earth’ heading. After the animation is loaded in Google Earth, you need to expand an entry in the Table of Contents. You will see a ‘Play’ icon which you double-click to start the animation. Don’t forget to enable your speakers to hear the spoken journal.
As a sampler, here’s the arrival of Endeavour off the coast of Australia.
Copyright © Colin Hazlehurst, 2012
(Screenshot courtesy of Google)
Using Google SketchUp for garden design
I blogged a while back about SketchUp and how useful it is to visualise the designs of DIY projects and to estimate quantities even before the circular saw comes out of its box. Here’s another example which shows the SketchUp design for a deck and its final construction.
I built this deck over a flagged patio using 4.8 metre lengths of 144mm reversible, treated, grooved boards attached to a frame of 100mm X 47mm (used to be called 2 by 4) construction timber. I placed weed control mat under everything and used 2 tons of greenslate chippings to cover the ground.
…and even before the computer was switched on and SketchUp loaded, the design started life as a notebook sketch which was refined over a number of days.
Quantum Physics: A Beginner’s Guide
I should have seen the risks when I bought a copy of Alastair I.M. Rae’s book Quantum Physics. The cover says that the book belongs to a series called Beginners Guides. That missing apostrophe says it all though, admittedly, it could have been annihilated in a collision with an anti-apostrophe.
I am only up to page 36 and I have to stop to write this. I didn’t realise I was buying a proof copy of the book. It’s been reprinted every year for the last five years and I’ve found two mistakes, one of them serious. You can’t hide behind the fact that beginners don’t understand what you’re trying to say. I’m not criticising the author – well I am because some of the sentences try to say too much – rather I’m saying the publisher should have done a better job.
Example 1.
On page 20 you will find the following sentence:
Up and down quarks carry positive charges of value -2/3 and -1/3 respectively of the total charge on a proton, which contains two up quarks and one down quark.
What? Positive charges of minus two thirds and minus one third? This is awkward and wrong. How about:
The up quark carries a charge of +2/3 and the down quark carries a charge of -1/3. The proton comprises two up quarks and one down quark giving the observed total charge of +1.
Isn’t that better? I’m not a physicist – that’s why I’m reading the book – but to me the second version makes sense. The mental arithmetic is within everyone’s grasp: 4/3 minus 1/3 equals 1.
Example 2.
On page 36, in a presentation of Young’s classic interference experiment, we are told:
It follows from the discussion in the previous paragraph that at some points on S the weaves will reinforce each other, while at others they will cancel;
This simply isn’t good enough. Are we to believe in the wave-weave-particle triple nature of light? I have a central retinal vein occlusion in one eye and I was able to see these errors. Come on OneWorld Publications of Oxford, put down that Proof Reading for Dummies and get it fixed.
Copyright © Colin Hazlehurst, 2010
So I says to Fay I says
On Thursday, 07Oct2010, I attended a prize-giving lunch in Kensington in the company of the three judges: Fay Weldon, James Buchan, and Deborah Moggach. My entry to the Mail on Sunday novel competition had come third. This earned me £200 in book tokens or £1.37 for each of the 146 words I submitted. Also present were the other five winners and a handful of literary agents and commissioning editors.
Talk about dance of the the trolls in the hall of the mountain king. In this literary landscape we winners were the foothills sitting between mighty peaks of writing achievement – small fish in a big pond. The lunch was excellent, as was the generosity of the judges all of whom gave their advice and encouragement freely. All my illusions about my ability to write were reinforced.
Since hearing of this success in August, I’ve stretched those 146 words to 79,000 which is only 1000 short of the minimal entry length for submission to the Terry Pratchett Prize. The writing was described by the judges as: ‘a quite grand idea, an alternative universe, done most elegantly’. Here it is:
The Gates-Guggenheim Museum on the Upper East Side of New Manhattan, Antarctica was a faithful copy of the building that had once stood at the southern end of Museum Mile in New York City. Frank Lloyd Wright would have appreciated its unexpected harmony with the new setting. It was a small step from his Prairie Style to this building which stood in the bleak landscape like a great slab of ice at the nose of a glacier, seemingly about to topple into the sea. Its pale, outward sloping exterior, emitting a bluish pearlescent light, evoked memories of building-sized floes breaking away from the ice-shelf that many New Manhattanites had seen and feared towards the end of their difficult journey south. In the imaginations of some, the curved lines brought to mind a trapped cruise ship with decks tilted, crushed and creaking in the grip of the freezing winter.
Frog blog
Picture it: Taormina, Sicily, July 1923. David Herbert Lawrence writes the following words in response to a chance encounter with one of the ‘Lords of life’:
A snake came to my water-trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,
To drink there.
In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob-tree
I came down the steps with my pitcher
And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough before
me.
In a strange parallel, I walked down the garden today carrying a full watering can into the shade of a hawthorn tree. My plan was to water the courgettes but there, sitting on the grow bag, was a young Common Frog.
Rana temporaria Copyright © C.Hazlehurst, 2010
Lawrence continues:
But must I confess how I liked him,
How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my water-trough
And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,
Into the burning bowels of this earth?
I was equally delighted to have this amphibious visitor. We built a pond last year and I was hoping that it would be more than a bird-bath for the blackbirds and a breeding ground for mosquitoes.
Lawrence’s encounter ended with him throwing a clumsy log and the snake ‘convulsed in undignified haste’. I dashed for my camera and reported the good news to the family. We are now treading very carefully in that corner of the garden.
Copyright © Colin Hazlehurst, 2010
Lemon and courgette soup
Lemon and Courgette Soup
Here’s a recipe to help cope with a super-abundance of courgettes. There are only a few ingredients, so preparation is quick. Even so, the flavour produced is light and fresh and this soup is delicious hot or cold.
| Ingredients | Method |
| 2 tablespoons olive oil |
|
| 25g butter | |
| 2 cloves of garlic, peeled and chopped | |
| 1 onion, chopped | |
| 900g courgettes, chopped | |
| 800ml vegetable stock | |
| Salt and ground black pepper | |
| Zest and juice of 1 lemon |
recumbent blackberry quantum zinc karma
A few days ago I walked to the shops to buy a bag of lemons; that’s what you need to make lemon and courgette soup and then 2 kg of bramble jelly. On the way there I stopped to pick some blackberries which weighed in at just over a kilogram. This is not the best photograph ever taken of blackberries, but they are the blackberries I picked.
On the way home, I called in at the estate agent to pick up details of a 1-bedroom apartment in a Grade 2 Listed building which is shortly coming on to the market. It’s set in 8 acres of grounds and will have a security gate controlling access. This is the estate agent’s photograph and I hope the fact that I’m giving them free publicity – click on the photo for more details – will ease my way in the copyright infringement suit.
I chatted for a while with the agent, then left and walked towards home. The road goes downhill and there’s a steep bank down to the right of the path which has a crash barrier at the top. Half way down this slope a car approached. When it was nearly up to me, the object shown below detached itself and carved a silhouetted parabola towards me. It flew past, dangerously close, and clattered into the barrier.
You may recognise this as a type of weight used for wheel balancing. I recognised it as a very lucky escape. If I had collected one fewer blackberry or exchanged one fewer pleasantry with the estate agent I would certainly have lost my balance as this thing struck me at x miles per hour.
That set me thinking in a number of directions. First, could I have made it in a freak show (those who know me would say ‘easily’) – roll up, roll up; see the man with the wheel balancing weight embedded in his skull.
Next, what was the value of x? In other words, how fast was the weight travelling towards me? I love this kind of problem. The diameter of the wheel was about 2 feet, so the circumference would be 2π or 6.28 feet. The wheel would make 5260/2π or about 837 revolutions per mile. At 30 miles per hour that’s (837*30)/3600 revolutions per second…then it occurred to me (duh!) – if the car was travelling at 30mph then the outer edge of the wheel must also be travelling at 30mph. The rim of the wheel had a diameter of about 20 inches, so the speed of the weight as it left the wheel was about (20/24)*30 or about 25mph. Which just goes to show there are better ways of killing a pig than choking it on π (blackberry or otherwise).
How many of you budding Sherlocks out there have already identified the projectile from its distinguishing features? The markings on the weight are:
40 Zn 326 X
The 40 is its weight. I know that because I weighed it and it weighs 40grams. Zn means it’s made of zinc. 326, I think, identifies a style of wheel. X is an unknown to me. What is clear is that this particular weight didn’t have my name on it.
So, a lump of zinc went hurtling by my head with a momentum of 0.445kg-m/s. Was it luck or fate that I wasn’t a few more feet along the road? Was it randomness, or some kind of quantum zinc effect where all of the atoms in the weight experienced the probability that they would head off at a tangent to the wheel?
If I were a Buddhist I might think it was karma. After all I did blog a while back about returning my car to the finance company and taking to my recumbent tricycle (Nil by ear). Was karma saving me with early payback in this lifetime for a virtuous act or was it a shot across the bows warning me what was to come?
What worried me more than anything, though, was that the driver of the car might not notice his loss until he reached a critical speed on the motorway when the vibrations would set in and maybe a considerably greater mass of metal would leave the road. It’s being so cheerful that keeps me going.
Copyright © Colin Hazlehurst 2010 (pace primelocation.com)
Thanks to Frances Hazlehurst for copy editing.
Inside Epub presents: opubWriter, an online wysiwyg epub editor
If you’ve been following my Inside Epub blog, you’ll know that I’m developing an online, wysiwyg epub editor. This project is now at a point where I’m only slightly embarrassed to release it. I suppose it should be called a beta release, version 0.001, on account of the number of features it still needs.
However, it’s available for you to look at here: opubWriter.
I don’t especially like the name opubWriter. It does emphasise the fact that it outputs Open Publications in epub format. The names I might have preferred – epubWriter, epubAuthor, epubCreator – all these domains have already been taken along with many more beginning with ‘epub’ – so opubWriter.com it is.
If you’re someone who heeds the advice: ‘never use software before release 3′, then it may not be for you, but if you’re happy to try out something different, please give it a go. There’s a contact form on the site, so I hope you will report to me any problems you have and any suggestions for enhancement.
Publishing Value Influence Model
Cometh the hour, cometh the model…
I wrote some time ago about the Value Influence Model (How’s your strategy? Does your business have VIM?) and the powerful synoptic view of a business that it can provide. Essentially, the outputs of a range of strategic analyses – STEP, SWOT, 5 forces, Boston Matrix etc., are drawn on the Value Chain as either positive or negative influences. Its power lies in the ability to visualise which parts of the business are affected by which influences.
Pradip Kumar (Head- Media & Information Services BPO at Tata Consultancy Services) posted the question recently in LinkedIn’s Tools of Change for Publishing group – Can you draw up a value chain for the publishing industry?
It’s not actually that difficult to do and one example of a value chain was soon identified. For me, that model is static, predictable, and tells you nothing about what to do in rapidly changing business environments. By maintaining a Value Influence Model you can easily add, remove, and weight influences. The model can guide your thinking about how to change your organisation to adapt to the changing business climate.
Figure 1. shows a bare bones Publishing Value Influence Model. You can see a fuller example in the earlier blog. The model shows a value chain and a number of lines emanating above and below each activity. This is where the influences are added – above the line for positive influences, below for negative.
Figure 1. Publishing Value Influence Model
My problem is that I’m not an industry insider; I don’t work for a publishing business, so I don’t have the insights of a publishing strategist – including the ability to put numbers against topics - that’s what’s needed to get the best out of the model. However, I offer below an outsider’s ‘armchair strategic analysis’ of the publishing industry.
Where might we go from there? I’m happy to make this a collaborative exercise in which, together, we identify and gauge the strength of strategic influences, and then plot them on the VIM – or you can take the ideas away and develop them yourselves.
STEP analysis
Recall that the STEP analysis looks at social, technological, economic, and political trends that are impacting, or are soon expected to impact, the business environment. Some analysts extend this to STEEPV to include environmental and ‘value’ trends, the latter relating to corporate responsibility rather than financial value.
Social Trends
- Are people reading less? Steve Jobs thinks so. Or are they reading more – just not books? Newsprint is dwindling; online reading is growing.
- Printed matter is in stiff competition against other uses for the eye and brain – TV, cinema, computer games, web browsing, mobile technology, social networking.
- More people than ever are writing rather than reading; they write blogs, and they write and self-publish novels.
- The digital natives of Web 3.0 expect everything for free (well, their parents have all the money so it’s to be expected). Jeff Jarvis has described the emergence of ‘free as a business model’ in his book What Would Google Do?
- any more…?
Technological Trends
- Machinery, and an online business model with global scope, have enabled the creation of sites like Lulu which offer writers the tools to self-publish and market their creations. To some extent this takes talent away from traditional publishing, but it also provides employment opportunities for freelance editors and illustrators.
- The increasing range and availability of reading systems – combinations of hardware and software – which allow content to be viewed on screens ranging in size from the smallest smartphone to the largest computer monitor - Kindle, Sony Reader, iPhone, iPad, and a multitude of others. Potentially, these are bad news for printed books but, maybe, good news for publishing overall.
- Print On Demand offers the potential to save costs on logistics – delivery, collection, and pulping.
- More?
Economic trends (UK)
- RECESSION is the big influence at the moment. We may be on the way out but there is fear of a double-dip.
- Unemployment is rising.
- Disposable income is falling.
- Inflation is rising.
- Anything positive?
Political trends (UK)
- Government action to cut the budget deficit may involve higher taxation, further reducing disposable income.
- The long history of high levies on fuel, combined with environmental policies, may increase the cost of logistics. On the other hand, concern for the environment may, finally, encourage a culture of reading electronic books rather than printed ones.
- The legal position of the Google book project, with respect to the intellectual property of authors and publishers, is ongoing.
- etc?
SWOT Analysis
The SWOT analysis looks at the strengths and weaknesses of an organisation, the opportunities available to it, and the threats which it faces. The analysis is internal and external – strengths and weaknesses are internal to an organisation – opportunities and threats are external. The results of a SWOT analysis are particular to a business. Features like corporate culture and the efficiency of support systems and working processes are unique to each business and must be determined by introspection. Opportunities and threats are more general, tending to affect all businesses equally, but not necessarily. For instance a large, rigid organisation may not have the agility to take advantage of a technological opportunity, but they may be able to resist a threat more easily than a small, cash poor organisation.
The following SWOT factors may apply to a business, but only internal strategic analysis will reveal the truth.
Strengths
- Large businesses have economies of scale – their unit cost of production is lower.
- Large businesses have the ability to take larger (financial) risks than smaller businesses. So far, publishing has been all about taking the risk that the returns from producing and marketing printed content will exceed the costs. The cost structure of publishing is changing with the growth of digital workflows and electronic delivery. The rewards are also changing, negatively.
- Smaller businesses can more easily take advantage of technological trends.
- Smaller organisations can also much more easily reorganise, reshape, and resize to match the demands of their niche markets.
Weaknesses
- One man’s weakness is another man’s strength, so it’s possible to reverse the strengths of large businesses and call them the weaknesses of small organisations – and vice versa.
- What are the weaknesses of your organisation? Work ethic, motivation, ‘hygiene factors’ – you know your business better than I.
…etc.
Porter’s 5 forces model
Are they really still teaching this stuff to MBA students? My MBA study with the Open Business School was about 20 years ago (I didn’t complete the course) and Michael Porter was very big at the time. Let’s see what it shows.
Power of suppliers
The poor old content providers – writers and their intermediaries – mostly have very little power in the traditional publishing industry. There is an abundance of talent and a superfluity of hopefuls (including me). The supply of content is almost limitless. The balance is changing, with the ability to self-publish and self-market using the internet, but effectively a lot of the slush – raw, unedited content – is out there on Smashwords and Lulu.
Power of consumers
Traditionally, the power that consumers have is through their ability to dictate what gets published. If people don’t want to read it, it doesn’t make it to print. They have some influence over price – if they won’t pay it, it won’t sell. However, whereas the marketing department of the publisher understands the reader, the sales department sees Waterstones, ASDA, and Tesco. These businesses, which are giants in their field, do have the power to command discounts, and sometimes very large ones.
Ease of entry
On the web, it is now very easy and quite cheap to set up a storefront. You can become a publisher in a few days if you want to. You don’t need a large organisation because you can buy services as you need them – copy editors, illustrators, design and print services. You won’t be a threat to Penguin or Harper Collins, but they started somewhere.
Threat of substitute products
If you think you’re in the printing-on-paper industry and will stick to it come what may, you probably have a vinyl record collection and you buy 35mm film for your camera. With the exceptions of pop-up books and the glossier photographic productions, I can think of no content that cannot be delivered electronically. Digital photography and the music download must surely tell the publisher of books that change is on the way. Ebooks are the future.
However, it’s not all doom and gloom. The dross available free on the web makes it clear that the key activities in the publishing value chain are those which ensure the quality of the end-product, however it’s delivered – editing, design, proof-reading, backed by marketing to understand consumer desires. In my opinion there is no substitute for the quality control that the publisher provides.
Jockeying for position
This feature of the competitive environment is about market share, market power, and survival. In publishing, as in many other industries, size matters. Consolidation, mergers and acquisitions, these are the means by which big publishers get bigger. Smaller names disappear, and start-ups are created by those who are discarded.
Conclusions
So far this post has proposed the creation of a Value Influence Model for the publishing industry. A number of (dubious) observations have been made about publishing which industry insiders are well placed to correct. Each business really needs to personalise the model to describe its own situation. Each identified influence needs to be categorised as positive or negative, and the part of the value chain which is affected should be identified. Only then can the Value Influence Model be completed and its usefulness begins.
As suggested earlier, if you want to submit comments about the model or about specific influences or to make corrections to my analysis, please do so.
Copyright © Colin Hazlehurst, 2010
Inside Epub Project Review – feedback welcome
The project to develop an online wysiwyg epub editor has reached a critical point. It’s time to make the application multi-user and no longer rely on the type of hard-coding that’s common in prototypes.
This article from Inside Epub: Online wysiwyg epub editor project review looks at what’s been achieved to date and what remains to be done.
If you have any comments, observations, or suggestions or if you think this project should take a direction that’s different from the one I’m proposing, I’d be happy to hear from you.
Manifest and spine management in C#
Inside Epub has published an article presenting designs for C# classes to handle the manifest and spine elements of an epub’s package document.
These are mainly concerned with the manipulation of XML elements. Ebook readers only need to read and parse the manifest and the spine. However, an epub editor needs the ability to get and set element attributes as well as add, remove, and rearrange content documents.
XML Islands in epub publications
The Open Publication Structure’s Preferrred Vocabulary is a subset of XHTML 1.1 modules. This identifes the groups of tags - <div>, <table>, <p> etc. that all reading systems must be able to render.
A very high proportion of existing printed matter, including its illustrations, could be converted to epub format using this vocabulary - with formatting and layout support from CSS.
However, XML is a widely used technology and there is a rapidly growing amount of XML content that ebook authors and publishers are sure to want to include. Using open standards means not restricting content to proprietary reading systems, so the problem becomes how to make that content available to all.
The latest Inside Epub article explains how using XML Islands in epub publications extends the power and flexibility of the epub format by specifying how a non-preferred XML vocabulary can be incorporated.
Creative avoidance – with yeast
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I’m experiencing a bout of creative avoidance – finding useful and easily justifiable tasks to do in order to avoid tackling a bigger, more important activity. At Christmas, our daughter Frances made a delicious batch of bread following a no-knead recipe which originated in the Sullivan Street bakery in New York, courtesy of the New York Times. Her results were inspirational. I’ve dabbled with yeast for many years with varying degress of success – basic loaves, bloomers, plaits, bagels, croissants, muffins – I’ve tried them all and with a wide range of flours. What made me try again was a combination of Fran’s superb bread and the availability of fresh yeast at a nearby supermarket.First, I repeated the no-knead recipe and followed this with a bloomer and two coburgs. The results with the fresh yeast, I found, were much better than with the dried yeast I’ve used before.
So, what else could I make in order not to do that other job? First it was baps (see first photo). That went well – nice and soft – thanks to a heavy dusting of flour and covering them with a tea-towel as they cooled. The drawback was the 40g of lard that get rubbed into the flour at the start of the recipe – that’s more fat than I would like in my diet. What else? We recently bought a Czech cooker. This is a low energy cooker that can be used instead of an oven. The difference in power is considerable – a typical oven might consume 3 kilowatts while the Czech cooker at full power consumes 450 watts. I made the casserole, shown left, in 2 hours with the power set to 1, which I think equates to a 100 watt light bulb. My problem with the yeast was that it was sold as four 1oz packets and had an imminent ‘use by’ date. I realised that, to get the best out it, I needed to get kneading. I like making bagels; they have extra ingredients compared with plainer bread, like whisked egg white and melted butter. There’s also a poaching interlude when you get to toss the rings of dough into simmering water for 30 seconds. Glaze with the egg yolk and bake for 20-25 minutes and you get the bagels shown here. I suppose I should get on with that job that’s looming. I know, I’ll just blog about creative avoidance first. |
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