Publishers
Seth Godin’s appearance in this talk show is constrained by the format: a talk show requires “controversial sound bites” and leaves little room for deep analysis of a given issue. That’s up to us, and the ideas he repeats here – “get ready for a ‘forever recession’ by reinventing yourself”, “learn by doing”, “go ahead and do it”, “take risks” – are worth considering during the weekend.
Today, on the 7th day of his passing, we remember Ruy Mendes Gonçalves, Vice-Chairman of Saraiva, who passed away on Saturday. He was a pillar of Saraiva’s success and an esteemed man for his strength of character and kindness. So on behalf of the entire team at Investidor Profissional and, we’re sure they would give us their permission to do so, on behalf of the shareholders of our funds: we’d like to send him a huge “Thank You” for all these years of dedicated service to Saraiva.
We posted some interesting links in Portuguese about Mr. Ruy Mendes Gonçalves at www.buysiders.com.br.
The Financial Times had a very interesting article about the differences between Chinese and Brazilian business cultures – and why it’s important that Brazilians learn about the other side, quickly. Also, Brazilian magazine Veja had a special on Amazon.com finally entering Brazil, initially via the book market. That they plan on doing so stimulating e-books for Kindle reveals challenges and opportunities for local publishers.
There’s a wealth of good articles trying to predict the future of reading. We’ll focus on Kevin Kelly’s latest post on publishing – What Books Will Become – which tries to take the logical steps beyond the Kindle and social reading revolutions to imagine where the “book” is going (social reading here enveloping social highlighting, bookmarking, commenting, additions/corrections). We also link to “trusty Kevin Kelly reverberator” Seth Godin and to other posts.
We often find relevant articles related to subjects we’ve already discussed at Buysiders.com, and we post them as updates while linking to the original post(s). While each update should be interesting on its own, the idea is to read the whole “thread”, especially as time goes by and we develop a sense of history. In IP’s case, our Intranet dates back to 2003 and back then we made an effort to find older articles about companies and sectors we were studying. Being able to tap into this rich history is quite valuable and we hope to build the same wealth of links at Buysiders.com. In today’s piece we’re posting two updates about different subjects: crowdsourcing and e-publishing/ the “Web is dead” debate.
An article called “Why the iPad should rival the Web” is another entry in the “The web is dead/ long live the Internet” debate. It’s a pretty interesting look at iPad magazines allowing immersion that web sites can only dream of. That people actually spend 45 minutes in an iPad magazine makes us envious in terms of the Buysiders readers’ experiences – which are not unlike that of other blogs – with its average of 1.96 pages per visit and average time on site of 2:50… But there’s more on the subject.
Increasingly the thinking is “If you can post it on your site and everybody can access it, why pay an intermediary?” – but having Microsoft “endorse” this is a big push. Even more interesting when one remembers that Berkshire bought a competitor to PR News Wire in 2006, Business Wire. This is too much of a niche to use this as evidence of “the online risk” to publishers, since in this case the “product” is a commodity with no added, proprietary content and is usually sold as one of the services in a bundle that can include I.R. (Investor Relations) site management, event handling/ recording and other aspects of a company’s IR efforts.
Trail-sniffing independent information providers with excellent business models, looking horizontally for opportunities. Some of these companies (Gartner, FactSet Research, ComScore, etc.) look like acquisition targets.
