30 Clients Using Computer-Generated Stories Instead of Writers

Forbes has joined a group of 30 clients using Narrative Science software to write computer-generated stories.

Here’s more about the program, used in one corner of Forbes‘ website: “Narrative Science has developed a technology solution that creates rich narrative content from data. Narratives are seamlessly created from structured data sources and can be fully customized to fit a customer’s voice, style and tone. Stories are created in multiple formats, including long form stories, headlines, Tweets and industry reports with graphical visualizations.”

The New York Times revealed last year that trade publisher Hanley Wood and sports journalism site The Big Ten Network also use the tool. In all, 30 clients use the software–but Narrative Science did not disclose the complete client list.

…The Narrative Science technology could potentially impact many corners of the writing trade. The company has a long list of stories they can computerize: sports stories, financial reports, real estate analyses, local community content, polling & elections, advertising campaign summaries sales & operations reports and market research.

Here’s an excerpt from a Forbes earnings preview story about Barnes & Noble, written by the computer program:

While company shares have dropped 17.2% over the last three months to close at $13.72 on February 15, 2012, Barnes & Noble (BKS) is hoping it can break the slide with solid third quarter results when it releases its earnings on Tuesday, February 21, 2012.

What to Expect: The Wall Street consensus is $1.01 per share, up 1% from a year ago when Barnes & Noble reported earnings of $1 per share.

The consensus estimate is down from three months ago when it was $1.42, but is unchanged over the past month. Analysts are projecting a loss of $1.09 per share for the fiscal year.

The company originated with two electrical engineering and computer science professors at Northwestern University. Here’s more about the company: “[It began with] a software program that automatically generates sports stories using commonly available information such as box scores and play-by-plays. The program was the result of a collaboration between McCormick and Medill School of Journalism.

To create the software, Hammond and Birnbaum and students working in McCormick’s Intelligent Information Lab created algorithms that use statistics from a game to write text that captures the overall dynamic of the game and highlights the key plays and players. Along with the text is an appropriate headline and a photo of what the program deems as the most important player in the game.”

This, to me, is more game-changing for the publishing industry than all of the innovations in e-books and e-readers combined. Think of genres (like bodice rippers and some sci-fi or children’s books) could be written with some basic narrative inputs! Think of sports recaps or breaking news stories that could easily be generated with a few inputs! 

I’m not saying this is ideal, because I can certainly see there would be a large margin of error with any program like this (not even touching on the whole job loss issue and fact that these stories would lose the “human” touch of writing and much personal opinion), but it’s interesting to see how programs like this will play out in the future.

Can bells and whistles save the book?

Attempts to invigorate books with video and other digital bells and whistles keep bumping up against this fundamental problem: You can’t really pay much attention to anything else while you’re reading, so in order to play with any of these new features, you have to stop reading. If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, then the attentional tug of all these peripheral doodads is vaguely annoying, and if you’re not engaged by the story, they aren’t enough on their own to win you over.

This article makes a great point. Given our already-scattered and very distracted reading/TV watching/web browsing, we really can’t stand to have yet another distraction to pull us away from a book or e-book’s main feature: the text.

Has anyone else had similar issues with their “enhanced e-books”? 

Traditional books, dressed to kill…

The immediate future of the book is clear. E (electronic) is for easy; P (print) is for posterity. Book readers today are leading double lives. We are faithful to our libraries at home, but stray towards the delights of digital the moment we board a plane, train or automobile.

The pleasures of E means downloading the new book we fancy, from reviews, word-of-mouth or plain curiosity. The satisfactions of P come from acquiring lovely print editions for our bookshelves. In due course, but not quite yet, the world’s writers and their agents will work out how fully to monetise this double market.

One unintended consequence of this irreversible trend has been to give the hardback a new lease of life. If the ebook is all about ease, and short attention spans, the ink and paper book must satisfy not just the thrill of reading, but the deep aesthetic pleasure associated with owning, holding and even scenting a favourite text. Already, there are signs that some publishers have cottoned on to this.

Not since the palmy days of late-Victorian publishing has so much care and attention been lavished on the hardback. Go into any bookshop now and you will find piles of brand-new hardbacks sporting coloured endpapers, scarlet silk bookmarks, heavy, deckle-edged paper and elaborate laminated boards. If Stevenson, Kipling or Conan Doyle were to wander into Waterstone’s today, they would feel quite at home. Selling to high-end readers, admittedly a smaller market, allows the publisher to charge £35, even £40, for the new edition destined for the library shelf…

The e-publisher’s riposte to beautiful books has time and technology on its side. This is also the age of the book app. 2011 was a milestone year in lots of ways (Arab spring, death of Bin Laden, English cricket revival), but never more so than with Faber’s launch of TS Eliot’s The Waste Land as a book app.

Even the most devout print-conscious bibliophile could hardly fail to be impressed by the possibilities of reading, and listening to, this great poem in many different formats, including two recordings by the poet himself. Agreed: this treatment works especially well with a long poem, but Jamie Oliver also understands, and is profiting from, the market for the book app.

In every Darwinian struggle there must be a loser, an injured beast that slinks away into the undergrowth to die, alone and forgotten. Amid the celebrations for the brave new world of E, we should not forget that other kind of P, the trashy, mass market paperback. That’s where the future’s murky, and where the corporate publishers are really worrying.

I agree with most of McCrum’s stance on the relationship between ebooks versus print books, but I would also add that the mass market paperback may be dying in print, but it is certainly surging in the ebook market.

New Study Shows E-Textbooks Saved Many Students Only $1

Despite the promise that digital textbooks can lead to huge cost savings for students, a new study at Daytona State College has found that many who tried e-textbooks saved only one dollar, compared with their counterparts who purchased traditional printed material.

The study, conducted over four semesters, compared four different means of textbook distribution: traditional print purchase, print rental, e-textbook rental, and e-textbook rental with an e-reader device. It found that e-textbooks still face several hurdles as universities mull the switch to a digital textbook distribution model… Even students who adapted to the technology quickly sometimes struggled to open up the digital course materials during lectures. Wireless networks in classrooms where several students were using e-textbooks at once sometimes became overwhelmed, making access to publishers’ sites inconsistent. As a result of these hiccups, more than half of survey respondents expressed dissatisfaction with the e-textbooks.

However, most said they would still be willing to try e-textbooks—if the price were right. Specifically, respondents said they would consider the switch as long as they could obtain their materials for $35 or less.

Selling Books by Their Gilded Covers

Even as more readers switch to the convenience of e-books, publishers are giving old-fashioned print books a makeover.

Many new releases have design elements usually reserved for special occasions — deckle edges, colored endpapers, high-quality paper and exquisite jackets that push the creative boundaries of bookmaking. If e-books are about ease and expedience, the publishers reason, then print books need to be about physical beauty and the pleasures of owning, not just reading.

“When people do beautiful books, they’re noticed more,” said Robert S. Miller, the publisher of Workman Publishing. “It’s like sending a thank-you note written on nice paper when we’re in an era of e-mail correspondence.”

Reasons Not to Self-Publish in 2011-2012: A List

…there’s the always-chilling question: With mounting pressure to turn a profit, how do editors justify publishing an amazing book that might not speak to a large audience? Talented authors — new and mid-list — are bound to get lost in this system.

And yet. And yet. I read good books by large publishing houses all the time, books that take my breath away, make me laugh and cry and wonder at the brilliance of humanity. I trust publishers. They don’t always get it right, but more often than not, they do. As I said in the piece that started me off on this whole investigation: “I want a reputable publishing house standing behind my book; I want them to tell you it’s good so that I don’t have to.”

For Their Children, Many E-Book Fans Insist on Paper

As the adult book world turns digital at a faster rate than publishers expected, sales of e-books for titles aimed at children under 8 have barely budged. They represent less than 5 percent of total annual sales of children’s books, several publishers estimated, compared with more than 25 percent in some categories of adult books…

Children’s books are also a bright spot for brick-and-mortar bookstores, since parents often want to flip through an entire book before buying it, something they usually cannot do with e-book browsing. A study commissioned by HarperCollins in 2010 found that books bought for 3- to 7-year-olds were frequently discovered at a local bookstore — 38 percent of the time….

Some parents do not want to make the switch for even their school-age children. Alexandra Tyler and her husband read on Kindles, but for their son Wolfie, 7, it is print all the way.

“Somehow, I think it’s different,” she said. “When you read a book, a proper kid’s book, it engages all the senses. It’s teaching them to turn the page properly. You get the smell of paper, the touch.”

There are many software programs that profess to help children learn to read by, for example, saying aloud a highlighted word or picture. Not all parents buy in; Matthew Thomson, 38, an executive at Klout, a social media site, has tried such software for Finn, his 5-year-old. But he believes his son will learn to read faster from print. Plus the bells and whistles of an iPad become a distraction.

“When we go to bed and he knows it’s reading time, he says, ‘Let’s play Angry Birds a little bit,’ ” Mr. Thomson said. “If he’s going to pick up the iPad, he’s not going to read, he’s going to want to play a game. So reading concentration goes out the window.”

Amazon's Kindle lending library is contract breach, say US authors

With more than 5,000 titles available, including Michael Lewis’s Liars’ Poker, Suzanne Collins’s bestselling young adult series The Hunger Games trilogy and Howard Jacobson’s Booker-winning novel The Finkler Question, the books, said Amazon in its announcement, come from a range of publishers under a “variety” of terms. The “vast majority” are there following an agreement with the publishers to include the books for a fixed fee, while “in some cases”, Amazon said it was purchasing the title under standard wholesale terms each time it is borrowed, “as a no-risk trial to demonstrate to publishers the incremental growth and revenue opportunity that this new service presents”.

Literary agents were quick to condemn the project, releasing a statement saying “it is difficult to see how this programme is in the best interests of our clients”.

Now authors themselves have also moved to criticise it, with US writers’ body the Authors Guild describing it as a “mess”, asking if any of the books in the programme are there legitimately and accusing Amazon of launching it to push the Kindle Fire as it fights an “unexpected ebook device battle” with Apple and Barnes & Noble.

The Authors Guild claims that the six largest US trade book publishers, Random House, Simon & Schuster, Penguin, HarperCollins, Hachette, and Macmillan, refused to participate in the lending library, with the next tier of publishers mainly also refusing. “No matter. Amazon simply disregarded these publishers’ wishes, and enrolled many of their titles in the programme anyway. Some of these publishers learned of Amazon’s unilateral decision as the first news stories about the programme appeared. How can Amazon get away with this? By giving its boilerplate contract with these publishers a tortured reading,” said the Guild.

Amazon’s belief that it does not need permission to include the books, that it is just required to pay publishers the wholesale price of the titles which are downloaded, is “nonsense”, said the Authors Guild. “Publishers did not surrender this level of control to the retailer. Amazon’s boilerplate terms specifically contemplate the sale of ebooks, not giveaways, subscriptions, or lending,” it said. “Amazon, in other words, appears to be boldly breaching its contracts with these publishers. This is an exercise of brute economic power. Amazon knows it can largely dictate terms to non-Big Six publishers, and it badly wanted to launch this programme with some notable titles.”

Publishers who have agreed to participate in the Kindle lending library, meanwhile, “do not have the right to do so without the prior approval of the books’ authors”, according to the writers’ body, which is advising authors whose books are in the programme without their permission to contact their publisher to register their objections.

Sounds like just a complete mess to me. The only winners here are Amazon and Kindle owners.

What confuses me though is why Amazon needs to have this program with all of its problems when they now allow users to borrow library ebooks on the Kindle for free. Is this just about having more time to finish a book (since the lending program involves no due dates)? It seems like a hefty price to pay for such a small benefit.

Amazon Introduces Kindle Lending Library

Amazon has introduced a new lending library for Kindle owners that lets them borrow one ebook a month for free, if they have an Amazon Prime membership.

Amazon is offering more than 5,000 titles, including New York Times bestsellers, that Prime members can borrow. The offer, however, requires you own a Kindle, Kindle Touch, Kindle Keyboard or Kindle Fire — you can’t borrow books if you use a Kindle app on another mobile device.

The book and online retail giant seems to be stretching the definition of “borrow” for the new feature since there are no due dates. What you’re getting in effect from Amazon is a free ebook per month. You can, however, only borrow one book at a time.

This, in addition to now being able to access library books on the Kindle? Way to step up your game in free-access, Amazon.