Book publishing is getting expensive. Profits are way down. Readership is declining for printed books.

Ebooks, yes. POD books, yes. But books published by a profit-seeking publisher are limited to low-risk authors. High-return authors are best.

If you have something to say, blog it. After a few years of blogging, write your first book. You will have an audience.

If your blog does not attract an audience, neither will your book. Publishers know this.

Bottom line: Start a blog and prove you can attract an audience… If you’ve got traffic, you are infinitely more likely to get your book published.

Gary’s full post is, So, You Want to Write Your First Book. Here Is How to Do It.

In the “vision” stage of ebook adoption, which ended with the launch of the Kindle in November 2007, authors were virtually powerless. With ebook sales even for established books struggling to make triple digits, publishers were gunshy about accepting digitization costs for books other than the biggest sellers and it hardly made sense for authors to make the investment on their own.

Check it out: http://www.idealog.com/blog/aside-from-the-publishers-how-the-other-stakeholders-fare-as-ebook-adoption-continues

Newspapers aren’t dead here, but they’re definitely in decline. A check around me in this car has 8 people out of 120 reading a paper. Physical book reading is also down compared to my train rides three years ago.

Instead of books and newspapers I see iPhones and BlackBerry’s. There are tons of these devices, almost literally. But in three months I am yet to see a single Kindle.

Every seat one passes walking in or out has an occupant or two swishing their fingers across a touchscreen or wildly flailing thumbs on a keypad. Most people are reading on these devices, browsing web sites, consuming words.

Yesterday’s news about Kindle book downloads being 10% of amazon’s sales isn’t as surprising when looking at people’s device use, and is kind of a foreshadowing of what’s to come… If Kindle downloads were 10% of Amazon’s consumed books and the Kindle is <1% of the portable device market, what happens when iPhones, iPods, Sony eReader, and other media consumption devices cleanly support book and newspaper content?

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It’s been 4 days with a flow approach to receiving data. I skipped adding more people today and focused on getting used to the incoming content. It’s become easy to follow along, so I’ll be adding again. Last night I experienced a reading nirvana while reading Robert Scoble and Shel Israel’s Naked Conversations (on the Amazon Kindle)… My reading was faster than ever. Unexpected and a real thrill.

The amount of data one can ingest seems like it could become a real measure of intelligence, like a hybrid or modified number of pages one can read per hour. Unlike pages, characters or kilobytes are easily measured and this type of ingestion stat could become interesting.

Today Twitter’s XMPP went offline for a couple hours. It was odd to not see movement out of the corner of my eye. Having the flow is no longer distracting (except when it’s not moving). I have it on the right side of my right hand 24″ monitor, and I scan it for links and more interesting items when I spend time on email (once an hour or so).

The metrics for the day with 2200 friends (averaged over a period of 10 minutes – after the jump):

• 6:00AM EDT: 11 tweets per minute.
• 8:30AM EDT: 16 tweets per minute.
• 2:00PM EDT: 23 tweets per minute.
• 4:00PM EDT: 25 tweets per minute.
• 5:00PM EDT: 22 tweets per minute.

It’s easy, out of the corner of your eye, to see flow increase and decrease in speed as interesting topics pass by.

Dave’s blog mentions wanting a timed mute feature which doesn’t notify or remove a friend from your list. This would be so easy in an XMPP client. Just use the ‘off [username]‘ command via an AppleScript Adium Xtra. An iCal reminder could be set to reset it, or a more elaborate database could be built.

I’m still daydreaming of the perfect XMPP application for combining Twitter traffic and other features. A smooth-scrolling, highlighting based on friend rating (perhaps by popularity or personal setting), app with web service API harnessing contact management would be insanely useful.

To save Twitter’s servers from getting buried in XMPP traffic, I could see value in flows covering certain genres of people. This would basically be an XMPP rebroadcast people could subscribe to. XMPP could start getting traction because of this.

Google, with their search algorithms could be king in this space. I’d expect Yahoo! to be great here too with an XMPP version of Pipes. The whole flow experiment thus far feels like digging for information before Google came along and offered exactly what you wanted. Except in this case, you’re getting an obscene amount of what you want… And I can’t wait for more.

UPDATE & CORRECTION: In the original post I incorrectly identified Naked Conversations as being written only by Robert Scoble. Shel Israel co-authored the book with Robert and it was neglectful on my part to have not given him equal credit. I offer my sincere apologies and a thank you for the correction.

Additional links:

• Scoble’s take
• Dave’s block-with-timeout
• Steve Gillmor’s Swarmtracking

iofy has a subscription to the O’Reilly Safari. It allows complete online access to O’Reilly’s entire line of books, as well as books they still have in the works. As a tech company, we thrive on this.

Lately I’ve hooked up bookmarks on my iPhone to titles I like. At any time, a single click lands me in the book I left off on. It’s far more convenient to have books in a pocket, on a device one already keeps on hand, than to carry around a Kindle or hardback.

Continue for full-size screenshots…