Posts tagged: nicholas carr

Will Improving The Book Make It Frictionless — And Dumb?

October 1, 2011, by No comments yet

With the book apparently teetering on the brink of a new “frictionless” digital existence, Nicholas Carr plumbs some of the less-enchanting side effects:

When Amazon delivers a copy of The Remains of the Day to your Kindle, Bezos goes on to explain, the company “has pre-calculated all of the interesting phrases” and turned them into links. My, what a convenience! As a reader, I no longer have to waste a lot of mental energy figuring out which phrases in a book are interesting. It’s all been pre-calculated for me! Here we have a preview of what happens when engineers begin to recreate books, and the experience of reading, in the image of the web. The algorithmical mind begins to run roughshod over the literary mind.

Needless to say, there are also commercial angles here. Clicking on an “interesting phrase” will no doubt eventually trigger not just Wikipedia and Shelfari articles but also contextual advertisements as well as product recommendations from Amazon’s store. Removing the edges from a book also serves to reduce friction from the purchasing process.

It’s intriguing to think that books — one of the simplest-yet-most-complex expressions of the human experience — will now be subject to the same algorithmic slice and dice that reduced online words to “content” and dumbed the Internet so far down that content farms were actually winning the battle for the public’s eyes.

I’m on board with digital distribution, but I’ll take mine unaltered (if you want to throw in a video of the author, I’m down with that).

Read the rest of Carr’s typically insightful commentary here.

Nicholas Carr on the "Value" of Content (or, Why You Should Build Value For Yourself)

April 28, 2008, by 8 comments

In a prior post, I wrote about the growing commercial value of high-quality content — and why content-based marketing offers long-term opportunities to new copywriters.

Now — Nicholas Carr (who remains a favorite online read) — points out why you don’t want to be somebody else’s free content generator (a point also made by Brian Clark in in this perceptive Copyblogger post).

Carr said:

Bebo founders Michael and Xochi Birch are the latest Web 2.0 entrepreneurs to cash in on user-generated content. A little over a week ago, the Birches sold Bebo, the third largest social network, to AOL for $850 million, about $600 million of which will reportedly go into the pockets of their jeans.

As for the millions of members who have happily served as sharecroppers on the Birches’ plantation, they’ll get the satisfaction of knowing that all the labor they donated to their "community" did indeed create something of tangible value.

Carr’s point is simple; the people whose content "built" Bebo received marginal (if any) value for their efforts while the site owners pocketed a cool $600 million.

InBebo’s case, musicians largely built the site by posting music (mostly in the vain hope of a big break). The real "value" they received? Not much, for the most part.

It’s a good illustration that "user-generated" has fast become a corporate code phrase for "free."

Given that copywriters are increasingly being asked to write for nothing more than the "exposure," you need to look hard at your non-paid writing efforts.

I’ve done articles for free in the past — and I’ll certainly do it again — but I always ask myself this: Am I significantly furthering my career, or investing my time building value for someone else?