Wondering what’s going to be included in the Creative Business in the Digial Era Course? Well, we’re working on the wiki to pull together the relevant materials. It’s been difficult to narrow it down to the essentials, as there’s a lot of really interesting topics we can cover, but so far we have:

• An overview of Intellectual Property
• Digital distribution methods
• A social media primer
• The importance of community
• A look at business model archetypes

We’re working on polishing up the case studies too, and hopefully they’ll start coming online soon.
If this whets your appetite, then get your application form to us sharpish!

There’s so much to think about when preparing this course, so much interesting material that we could add in, that we’re really having to focus our minds on what’s essential. To help us do that, and give you an idea of what you’ll be getting on the day long course, we’ve put together a tentative timetable.

9.00 - 9.30: Registration, pastries and tea/coffee
9.30 - 10.30: Introduction: What is Open IP? Open licences; business models; and distribution mechanisms.
10.30 - 11.15: Exercise: Discussion of Radiohead’s In Rainbows experiment.
11.15 - 11.30: Coffee
11:30 - 12.30: Building communities: The importance of community; social media.
12.30 - 1.30: Lunch
1.30 - 2.15: Overview of Case Studies 1 & 2: Magnatune; Where are the Joneses?; discussion.
2:15 - 2.30: Overview of Case Study 3: Tom Reynolds‘ Blood, Sweat and Tea.
2.30 - 3.15: Q&A with Special Guest (TBC)
3.15 - 3.30: Break
3.30 - 4.15: Complements and substitutes: How microeconomics applies to the way we think about creative works.
4.15 - 5.00: Exercise: Examining how different products and business models might work (or not!) together
5.00 - 5.30: Next steps: What will attendees do next?
5:30: End

We’d love your comments, especially if you were expecting to see something different, or think that we’re missing something important out!

Don’t forget to download our Application Pack if you’re interested in coming!

We’ve had several people email us since we announced the Application Pack for the Creative Business seminars last week. Many of them have asked us if we will be recording the seminars so that they can follow along at home.

We’ve thought hard about how best to do this, because the last thing I want is to make the attendees feel self-conscious when they are discussing new ideas. So we’ve decided that we’ll record just the presentations - not the exercises - hopefully in video, but if not in audio, and we’ll put them up online as soon afterwards as we can.

All of the course material will also be released as PDFs and pages here on the blog prior to the seminar so that all attendees can read up on it and be ready for what I hope will turn out to be a very practical and stimulating day! Essentially, we will freeze our materials - preserve them in amber, if you like - so that everyone is referring to the same versions, whilst the wiki continues to grow and change even after the seminar. That way, attendees know that they’ve all seen the same thing, and they’ll all know that they are up to date.

Of course, everything is being released under a Creative Commons licence, so if you want to, you can reuse it.

We’re very excited to be able to announce that the application process for the Creative Business in the Digital Era seminars has now begun! If you’d like to attend, please download our application form, (about which there is more information on our Application Pack page), print it out, and send it back to us. Yes, we know it’s rather old school to ask you to send us a paper form, but it’s easier than getting a whole new database set up, and when we’re done with your forms, we’ll shred them for you.

The seminars are subsidised, and therefore it’s free to all attendees. There are a maximum of 40 places available for the day course, and 50 places for each of the two evening courses. We are anticipating heavy demand for these courses, so we are asking all applicants to tell us a bit about themselves so that we can select a balanced group of attendees. We will in the first instance be looking at which sector you work in and your level of experience. We will then look for commitment to and interest in open content, as illustrated by the 100 word passage that we are asking each applicant to write. Remaining places will be filled by selecting applicants at random.

Please do make sure you get your form back to us by the deadline, 15 February 2008.

Meantime, Michael and I are working hard, getting all the course materials together. We have had Jordan Hatcher putting together the intellectual property module, which is going up on the wiki soon. And we’re busy drafting three case studies:

• Tom Reynolds’ book: Blood, Sweat and Tears
• Online interactive comedy: Where Are The Joneses
• Record label: Magnatune

And I’m also looking at exercises that we can do on the day, and also at business models and microeconomics. Keep an eye on this blog and the wiki for updates!

If you have any questions, please do email us.

With the release of The Future of Ideas under Creative Commons licence, that makes it a full house for Lawrence Lessig:

This means all four of my books are now CC licensed. Code (v1) was licensed under a BY-SA license; so too, Code (v2). And Free Culture and now The Future of Ideas are licensed under BY-NC licenses.

It will be interesting to see if Larry reports any spikes in sales because of this.

I’ve recently started using the video conversation site, Seesmic, which is currently in alpha (if you want an invitation code, email me). It’s a lot of fun, with a nice community of people chatting asynchronously by video.

The other day, I discovered that one Seesmic-er, Nik Butler, is an ORG supporter, and he called for more info from us from ORG:

To which Eric Rice responded:

So, I recorded a quick intro to ORG:

To which Nik replied:

And then yesterday, a quick intro to Creative Business in the Digital Era:

I’m going to try and do some more CBDE Seesmic videos over the coming week. The site is still quite buggy, but it’s a great community. If you want an invitation code, please let me know. I’ve given codes to Michael, Becky and Glyn, so hopefully they’ll show up on Seesmic soon too.

As noted by Chris Anderson, author Charles Sheehan-Miles is starting the New Year as he means to go on by giving away electronic versions of his new novel, Republic: A Novel of America’s Future. So far, it’s available as an Adobe Acrobat PDF, a Mobipocket/Amazon Kindle version, in HTML, and Rich Text Format, and all under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works licence (which means anyone can download it, read it, or distribute it).

Why?

I’m hoping that within the next few years, I’ll be making enough money from book sales that I’ll be able to write full time. Isn’t giving the book away somewhat counterproductive to that goal?

I don’t think so. Here’s why: the biggest challenge most authors face isn’t online piracy. It’s not people out there diabolically copying their works and distributing them for free. In fact most authors (including yours truly) suffer from a different problem entirely — no one has ever heard of them. After all, literally hundreds of thousands of new titles come out every year, and only a few hundred writers in the entire United States (if that many) actually live off their books full time. So, by giving away the book, I hope more people actually read it.

And Chris points out:

Tim O’Reilly was the first to say that the enemy of authors isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity. For the vast majority of authors, being read is actually reward enough. How to turn that recognition into a living is a whole other process, and not necessarily one that depends on the traditional book industry to deliver. Good thing, too, since it so rarely does.

But perhaps giving away books might help with that whole making a living thing too? Charles says:

Will giving it away cut sales and make me a poorer person? I don’t think so. There’s plenty of evidence out there that giving away the book will actually boost sales. If you don’t believe me, check out Eric Flint’s column in Jim Baen’s Universe, which actually runs the numbers and takes down some of the myths associated with Digital Rights Management, publishing, encryption, and copyright fanaticism.

And indeed, Eric’s column is well worth exploring as he takes some popular misconceptions and blows them out of the water with some real figures. I particularly like his disembowelling of the concept of “online piracy”.

It’s a good start to the year, and I hope it encourages others to consider that giving stuff away may not be so daft after all.