It seems that the 21st Century Digital Revolution, as it may someday be called, is getting bigger and bigger with each passing month. As is well known, financial losses faced by the movie industry and the music industry are increasing monthly as bootlegs made possible by digital versions proliferate. New digital models that could not have been predicted a decade ago are supplanting traditional business models so quickly that both of these industries are in very real danger of collapsing altogether.

Now, however, another, more unlikely victim may be added to the list: The publishing industry.

The New York Times recently ran a story profiling Philip Parker, an entrepreneur who has invented a way for books to be written by a computer algorithm. Or, rather, a way for books to be “compiled”. He doesn’t simply distribute existing books online; he’s created a business where the books themselves are written not by people but by a computer program.

From the article:

But these are not conventional books, and it is perhaps more accurate to call Mr. Parker a compiler than an author. Mr. Parker, who is also the chaired professor of management science at Insead (a business school with campuses in Fontainebleau, France, and Singapore), has developed computer algorithms that collect publicly available information on a subject — broad or obscure — and, aided by his 60 to 70 computers and six or seven programmers, he turns the results into books in a range of genres, many of them in the range of 150 pages and printed only when a customer buys one.

If this sounds like cheating to the layman’s ear, it does not to Mr. Parker, who holds some provocative — and apparently profitable — ideas on what constitutes a book. While the most popular of his books may sell hundreds of copies, he said, many have sales in the dozens, often to medical libraries collecting nearly everything he produces. He has extended his technique to crossword puzzles, rudimentary poetry and even to scripts for animated game shows.

And he is laying the groundwork for romance novels generated by new algorithms. “I’ve already set it up,” he said. “There are only so many body parts.”

The technique isn’t perfected yet; and the end result at this point does leave something to be desired:

While nothing announces that Mr. Parker’s books are computer generated, one reader, David Pascoe, seemed close to figuring it out himself, based on his comments to Amazon in 2004. Reviewing a guide to rosacea, a skin disorder, Mr. Pascoe, who is from Perth, Australia, complained: “The book is more of a template for ‘generic health researching’ than anything specific to rosacea. The information is of such a generic level that a sourcebook on the next medical topic is just a search and replace away.”

When told via e-mail that his suspicion was correct, Mr. Pascoe wrote back, “I guess it makes sense now as to why the book was so awful and frustrating.” Mr. Parker was willing to concede much of what Mr. Pascoe argued. “If you are good at the Internet, this book is useless,” he said, adding that Mr. Pascoe simply should not have bought it. But, Mr. Parker said, there are people who aren’t Internet savvy who have found these guides useful.

It is the idea of automating difficult or boring work that led Mr. Parker to become involved. Comparing himself to a distant disciple of Henry Ford, he said he was “deconstructing the process of getting books into people’s hands; every single step we could think of, we automated.”

He added: “My goal isn’t to have the computer write sentences, but to do the repetitive tasks that are too costly to do otherwise.”

Should authors be worried? Probably not, at least not yet. There’s a wide gap between what a computer can compile and the nuanced hand of a skilled artist. Still, this news is a bit unsettling to those employed in the creative arts. And, taking the music industry as an example, it doesn’t seem well advised to underestimate this sort of development. It’s the kind of trend that could as easily become a dead end as an overnight sensation. Either way, it’s worth consideration.

Click here for the original story. More on the Digital Revolution in the coming days. Stay tuned.

“Technologies want to survive, and they reinvent themselves to go on.” (Paul Saffo, technology forecaster in Silicon Valley.)

Technology expert Steve Lohr, writing in yesterday’s New York Times, shares a fascinating theory centered around the fact that, contrary to popular opinion of recent years, many of yesterday’s technologies aren’t dead yet; they’re alive, kicking, and often still turning a profit for their respective manufacturers.

To prove this theory, Lohr explores the state of the mainframe, I.B.M.’s classic contribution to technological hardware. The company released a new version of the mainframe last month; remarkable, given that the equipment was famously predicted to be put out of its misery by 1996. The author then uses this example to shed light on history’s other obsolete technologies that just never went away.

Today, mainframe sales are a tiny fraction of the personal computer market. But with the mainframe facing extinction, I.B.M. retooled the technology, cut prices and revamped its strategy. A result is that mainframe technology — hardware, software and services — remains a large and lucrative business for I.B.M., and mainframes are still the back-office engines behind the world’s financial markets and much of global commerce.

The mainframe stands as a telling case in the larger story of survivor technologies and markets. The demise of the old technology is confidently predicted, and indeed it may lose ground to the insurgent, as mainframes did to the personal computer. But the old technology or business often finds a sustainable, profitable life. Television, for example, was supposed to kill radio, and movies, for that matter. Cars, trucks and planes spelled the death of railways. A current death-knell forecast is that the Web will kill print media.

What are the common traits of survivor technologies? First, it seems, there is a core technology requirement: there must be some enduring advantage in the old technology that is not entirely supplanted by the new. But beyond that, it is the business decisions that matter most: investing to retool the traditional technology, adopting a new business model and nurturing a support network of loyal customers, industry partners and skilled workers.

The unfulfilled predictions of demise, experts say, tend to overestimate the importance of pure technical innovation and underestimate the role of business judgment. “The rise and fall of technologies is mainly about business and not technological determinism,” said Richard S. Tedlow, a business historian at the Harvard Business School.

To survive, technologies must evolve, much as animal species do in nature. Indeed, John Steele Gordon, a business historian and author, observes that there are striking similarities in the evolutionary process of markets and biological ecosystems. Dinosaurs, he notes, may be long gone, victims of a change in climate that better suited mammals. But smaller reptiles evolved and survived, and today there are more than 8,000 species of reptiles, mainly lizards and snakes, compared with about 5,400 species of mammals.

It’s a fascinating article; click here to read it in its entirety. And, as always, let us know your thoughts in the comments section.

Today we continue our run-down of the best of 2007 with picks for the year’s best software and web services, courtesy of BNET Insights.

Rick Broida, writing for BNET Insight’s “Business Hacks” section, lists his favorite software apps for 2007:

GIMP 2.4: Photoshop-caliber image editing without the high price. In fact, there’s no price at all: GIMP is an open-source (read: free) application.

ODIR: The Outlook Duplicate Items Remover does exactly what it promises: finds and removes duplicate entries in your contact list, calendar, note pad, task list, and inbox. Indispensable.

PPT to YouTube: This handy bit of freeware turns PowerPoint presentations into YouTube-compatible MP4 or WMV files and optimizes them for online viewing.

Revo Uninstaller: Faster, easier, and more thorough than Windows’ own uninstaller, Revo sends unwanted software packing — and stray Registry entries along with it.

Startup Delayer: My single favorite app of 2007, Startup Delayer makes Windows boot faster by delaying selected programs so they don’t run immediately on startup.

Mr. Broida also provides a list of his favorite web services from the past year:

Google Everything: I can’t pick a single Google product. Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Maps, Google Notebook… shall I go on? Although these aren’t new services, they’ve all shown improvement this year …

Meebo: For many users, instant messaging is an integral part of business life. Meebo puts a robust IM client right inside your browser, meaning there’s no intrusive chat program to install, and lets you log into multiple systems simultaneously: AIM, GTalk, MSN, Yahoo, etc. And, of course, you can log in from any computer. This is the way IM was meant to be.

SplendidCRM: Businesses can spend a small fortune on CRM. Or not, if they leverage this free service. SplendidCRM manages your customer and sales data inside an attractive, tab-based interface.

Yapta: The travel site of the year, Yapta helps you get an airfare refund or credit voucher if the price of your flight drops after you buy your tickets. Just enter your trip’s confirmation code and Yapta will alert you if and when you’re eligible for money back. New plug-ins let you track airfares right inside your browser.

Zoho Writer: Sure, Google Docs gets all the glory, but if you want the Web’s most robust browser-based word processor, look to Zoho Writer. This year brought a wealth of new features, including a Word plug-in for easily importing and exporting Zoho Writer documents.

What do you think? Do you agree with this take, or do you think it’s missing the boat? Were any of your favorites left off, or do you disagree with some of the choices Mr. Broida made? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section.

To read the original articles, click here for the Top Software of 2007, and here for the Top Web Services of 2007.

Happy New Year from Aplus.Net!