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MediaShift’s first two titles are How to Self-Publish Your Book (80 pages, $3.99) and Your Guide to Cutting the Cord to Cable TV (50 pages, $2.99). (I have to point out here that GigaOM’s also got a cord-cutting ebook, written by our own Janko Roettgers.) The titles are available through Kindle and the iBookstore for now and will eventually be available through Nook; print-on-demand editions will also be released, priced at $4.99 to $6.99.

Mark Glaser, the executive editor of MediaShift, says he’s planning on releasing 10 to 20 ebooks this year, depending on how well the first titles sell. “This is a test for us and PBS,” he said, “so we will learn as we go and adjust prices, length, subject matter and more.”

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At a paidContent Live session hosted by Slate chairman Jacob Weisberg, three media companies described a new breed of creators who are equally at ease with content and technology. This has led to the emergence of non-traditional media influencers such as comment communities at Reddit, and at Vox Media sites The Verge and SB Nation.

“In the day, if you wanted to create media, you had to start as an intern making coffee,” said Vox CEO Jim Bankoff, adding that now anyone with $100 can make a movie. He explained that this democratization of content creation has resulted, in some cases, of Vox hiring people on the basis of their comment contributions.

This has led to a culture of empowerment in which everyday people are as fluent in media as many traditional journalists. More and more, they are taking to public platforms to not just report, but to take part in the news.

Erik Martin, GM of Reddit, cited “random acts of pizza” — a community on the site that sends pizza as a gesture of support, most recently to emergency workers in Boston.

But does this new culture of public participation also has a dark side? Slate’s Weisberg pointed to Reddit’s current efforts to identify the Boston bomber, including posting a suspect’s photo on the site, as approaching vigilante justice.

“Reddit may be creating the next Richard Jewell,” said Weisberg, referring to a police officer who foiled an Atlanta Olympics bombing plot only to be falsely accused as a suspect in a traumatizing “trial by media.”

Martin said he regarded the role of Reddit employees as “groundskeepers” who helped discrete communities determine their own standards.

Dan Roth, a former Fortune editor who now oversees news on LinkedIn Today, offered a further example of how non-journalists are creating media. He described how executives like Virgin Airlines CEO Richard Branson are now writing regular columns in their own voices. While such contributions in traditional media typically amounted to no more than press releases, Roth said that readers’ ire at inauthenticity has forced even corporate executives to reevaluate how they write.

Check out the rest of our paidContent Live 2013 coverage here, and a video embed of the session follows below:

A transcription of the video follows on the next page

Go to page 2 (of 2) on GigaOM .

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Key highlights in this report include:

• For publishers, the first step to monetizing something is to be able to measure it. The analytics tools now available make it possible to track the spread of content on social platforms closely.

• Until now there has not been a marketplace where those potential buyers and sellers of content could meet. Nor were there adequate tools to enable verifiable transactions between them. Tools like Cascade and Ricochet are helping put the foundations of such a market in place.

• Both publishers and licensees will need to seize the sort of ad hoc syndication opportunities that arise online and on social media networks. One of the major tasks facing publishers over the next three to five years will be to structure their repositories of content so they can be searched, sorted, customized, repackaged, and accessed in real time via standardized APIs.

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Books have always been Amazon’s bread and butter, and much of Amazon’s ebook strategy has focused on finding more ways and identifying new devices for people to enjoy the pastime of reading. The car is the logical next step, considering how much time people spend their automobiles on their daily commutes and simply running errands. In fact, a lot of drivers already do plenty of reading in their cars with audiobooks, using both physical and digital media. Some people have even managed to cram Amazon’s Audible books into their car stereos using USB drives or auxiliary ports.

Amazon stands to gain plenty by embracing that trend, and I don’t just mean by selling audiobooks in the car. (In case you’re wondering, it’s not possible today to stream an Audible book through Cloud Player). While there is a healthy segment of readers who just want audiobooks, I bet there’s a far bigger market of people who normally read their books in ink — in either the printed or digital variety — but would like the option of switching to audio when they get behind the wheel.

No large-scale development required

For Amazon to make that work it would have to supply its books in dual-media formats. You would then read from your Kindle or Kindle smartphone app when otherwise unoccupied, but once you stepped into your vehicle the device would automatically pair with the Kindle app in the car, which would immediately start reading your book aloud at the exact point you left off.

Amazon already has much of this technology in place. Last year, Amazon introduced Whispersync for Voice, which allows you to pair an Audible book with an ebook for a few extra bucks. Amazon isn’t just selling the same media in two formats, it’s integrating them. A narration feature allows you to listen along as you read from the Kindle — after each word is spoken the text is highlighted on the screen. Customers can switch between audio to visual-only formats with just a touch of the button.

It would be cinch for Amazon to integrate that technology into the car. It would merely have to develop software for the Kindle and Kindle apps that would integrate with the various automakers’ connected car interfaces, just as it’s done for Cloud Player on Sync AppLink.

It could also tap into the automakers’ speech recognition systems, allowing readers to pause the audio stream or navigate their books with simple voice commands. Amazon has invested plenty in voice and speech interface technologies over the last two years, buying both Ivona and Yap. Those acquisitions could come in handy when developing any new connected car technology.

Amazon stays mum

I should say now that we have no specific knowledge that Amazon is working on Kindle for the car, but just to be sure we put the question to the company itself. While an Amazon spokesperson confirmed that the company today has the technology to seamlessly switch between book formats, Amazon wouldn’t comment on any future connected car plans. The spokesperson said as a matter of policy Amazon doesn’t comment on future product plans.

That’s pretty much what we expected to hear, but if Amazon does wind up pursuing this technology, I for one would buy it. Today I have an uneasy relationship with ebooks. I download the occasional tome on iBooks or Kindle, but for the most part, I still have an irrational attachment to paper books. I can get away with that attachment because today I can read a physical book in the same places I can read an ebook — on a train or in plane, while camping or lying around on the couch — but one place I cannot read a physical book is in the driver’s seat of a car. By creating a connected car app, the Kindle and ebooks in general would become immensely more valuable to me.

It’s not just consumers who would get excited about Kindle for the car. The automakers would fall all over themselves lining up to support it. One of the reasons the automakers have proceeded so cautiously with app development is a concern over safety — distracting apps could cause accidents. But the auto industry has been quick to sign off on any audio-only multimedia service, as evidenced by all of streaming music and radio apps that populate connected car dashboards.

In fact, audiobook apps have already made their way into many cars. Harman’s Aha content platform has already made into Honda’s connected car platform HondaLink, offering audio book libraries among its many channel choices. I’m actually surprised Audiobooks.com, a cloud-based streaming service, hasn’t launched a connected car app already.

Featured photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Rob Byron

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According to the memo, which Advertising Age has published in full, the former head of Gawker’s sponsored content business — which includes the sponsored conversations that Denton launched last year as part of the network’s new Kinja discussion platform — has left Gawker to run his own digital marketing firm, and former Conde Nast ad sales manager Andrew Gorenstein is taking over:

“We’re reaching for 40 percent revenue growth this year, an acceleration from 26 percent in 2012. We had six clients spend over $1M with us last year. Andrew’s new threshold is $5M. In recognition of Andrew’s success, he is being promoted to Chief Revenue Officer, responsible for traditional advertising, our content work for clients and the exploding e-commerce business.”

Denton said last year that ecommerce would be a focus for the company — noting that it was one of the original business models for Gawker but “we didn’t have the scale then to make it work” — but his latest memo makes it clear that the network is going full steam ahead in that direction. Gawker has posted a number of job listings for what it calls “commerce specialists” for sites like Kotaku (devoted to video games) and the female-focused site Jezebel.

Gawker is looking to hire “commerce specialists”

The job listings describe the position as “a new type of service journalism” that includes “everything from posts about the cheapest deal on something our readers need to introducing them to new things they’ve never seen,” and notes that Gawker will be deriving revenue from those posts (if you’re interested in alternative methods of monetization for media, we’re going to be discussing that on a number of panels at our paidContent Live conference in New York on April 17). As the listing describes it:

“Your beat is helping readers buy things. You’ll be delivering content about products that Kotaku readers know, love, or should own. You’ll have both a daily writing assignment and the freedom to pursue your own content ideas. If you’re interested in things like deal forums, coupon codes, giving your friends product advice, and Amazon.com, you’ll use all of those as inspiration to create your own new commerce content product.”

Gawker’s move towards what might be called “commerce journalism” (a term Denton says he doesn’t like using) is just part of the broader trend within a number of digital-media entities of trying to expand their monetization methods away from the declining banner ad business. Sites like BuzzFeed and Gawker are promoting their sponsored content offerings as the solution — although some see that approach as an ethical minefield and point to examples of poor judgment like The Atlantic‘s recent widely criticized Scientology feature.

In a sense, Gawker’s move is just another variation on “native advertising,” which tries to make ad-related content look as much like a site’s traditional fare as possible. Whether the network runs into Atlantic-style problems with this new type of service journalism or advertorial remains to be seen.

This post was updated on February 15 to clarify that the term “commerce journalism” is not one that Nick Denton uses to describe what Gawker is doing with its affiliate link posts.

Thumbnail image courtesy of Shutterstock / Gl0ck

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Internet curmudgeon Nick Carr attacked this particular question in a recent post on his blog, and got into an interesting debate with digital-media theorist Clay Shirky via the comments. Ironically, while Shirky is often criticized as a purveyor of wishful thinking about media, it is Carr who argues there is something ineffable and mysterious about the format we know as the book, while Shirky’s argument seems more based in reality

(Note: we are going to be discussing the future of the book and potential business models for book-related content at our paidContent media conference in New York on April 18, with a panel discussion featuring Atavist founder Evan Ratliff and Dominique Raccah of Sourcebooks).

In his original essay — entitled “Will Gutenberg laugh last?” — Carr notes that research shows e-book reading is still on the rise, but also shows that print reading continues to command a large share of the market, and that printed book sales are “holding up relatively well.” Some publishers and distributors have even noticed a slowdown in e-book sales, says Carr, who then goes on to propose some reasons why that might be the case, including:

“We may be discovering that e-books are well suited to some types of books (like genre fiction) but not well suited to other types (like nonfiction and literary fiction)… the e-book may turn out to be more a complement to the printed book, as audiobooks have long been.”

Shirky says even e-books themselves are transitional

Among those who showed up to comment on Carr’s piece was Shirky, who argues that it is more likely the book format itself is simply going to die out as a result of the web and other developments — and not just the printed book, but the whole concept of a book, which he describes as nothing more than a “production unit” for content, like the album was for music.

As Shirky puts it:

“Maybe books won’t survive the transition to digital devices, any more than scrolls survived the transition to movable type… what the internet portends is not the end of the paper container of the book, but rather the way paper organized our assumptions about writing altogether.”

In a comment of his own, Carr responds that whatever might happen to reference works like encyclopedias or phone books — which he agrees would make more sense in digital form — books that consist of an “extended narrative, either fictional or factual and almost always shaped by a single authorial consciousness and expressed in a single authorial voice” would always remain, even if it is in digital form, because there is more to it than just being a convenient container for content.

“Your desire to see cultural artifacts as mere technological artifacts, as “production units,” leads you to jump to the conclusion that because the narrative art of the book is resistant to digital re-formation, the narrative art is doomed to obsolescence.”

In a follow-up comment, Shirky maintains that the novel — fictional or not — is a content model that is “pretty decisively wrapped up in the affordances and limitations of print,” from their length to the idea that all of the content has to be delivered at the same time and for a single price. He argues that given the “native grain of the internet,” those features would not be transferrable to an online environment in the long term. In other words, e-books themselves might be just an interim step towards something else.

“If I’m right about this, the fate of the printed book will have less to do with competition from ebooks (at least in their ‘digital copy of print’ versions) than from competition with Longreads and New Inquiry for the time and attention of the reader of extended narratives.”

Will books follow the epic poem into oblivion?

This doesn’t sit well with Carr, however, who responds with a comment that (among other things) accuses Shirky of having an almost nihilistic approach to cultural artefacts like books, and of failing to see that in some cases having a new product or platform replace an old one might be a loss for humanity rather than a gain:

“I’m certainly not suggesting that uniquely valuable forms of media, or the modes of thinking or expression that they promote, are immune to destruction or alteration by historical forces, particularly ones driven by utilitarian concerns. But if such a medium is lost or diminished by technological or economic change, we shouldn’t simply say ‘who cares; other shit will come along.’”

In a response to an email from Wired magazine founder and author Kevin Kelly on the subject, Carr gives some examples of valuable forms of media that he believes have been lost or diminished: namely, “the oral epic poem, the symphony, the silent film with live musician accompaniment, the dramatic play, the short-form cartoon, the map [and] the LP.” And he argues that the book, the movie and the video game could also fall into this category.

In the end, Carr’s argument comes down to a belief that old forms of expression like the traditional book are better than anything that might have come along to displace them from their position of dominance in our culture — and his belief forms part of the argument in his book The Shallows, which argues that digital media is actually changing the way we think, and in general making us more stupid (a view I have argued against).

Are we seeing the rise of new artistic forms that will be as beneficial to humanity as the epic poem was, or the symphony, or the silent film? I think we are, and Clay Shirky seems to as well, but Carr clearly disagrees. Who is right won’t be known for some time, if ever.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Marcus Hansson, retro writer and Frederic della Faile

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