Moderator: Robert Andrews, Senior Editor, International, paidContent/GigaOM:   Thomas Bella, CEO,Piano Media:   sets up paywall for two countries in Europe.  When pay get premium content for all other newspapers they handle.   Created to lower the barrier to payment.  Split revenue with producers based on where the payment was made and what the user looked at.  Like cable TV in the US.  They make 30% and rest goes to publishers.  Have about 1% on online users in Slovakia.  When  put in paywall did not see users decline.  Found that even those who don't want to pay will stay on the site and...

Moderator, Staci D. Kramer, Editor and Senior Writer, paidContent/GigaOM Jon Miller, Chief Digital Officer, Chairman and CEO, Digital Media Group, News Corp.: Investing quietly in early stage companies in China for about a year.  Took a 20% position in a public film company in China recently.  Seeing some light at the end of the tunnel in MySpace. New media companies, like MySpace, are not as stable as traditional companies and when you get a bit behind it is very hard to catch up because everyone else moving so fast. Yahoo needs big answers and not many of them at a given time....

Moderator, Tom Krazit, Senior Writer, paidContent/GigaOM:   Rob Malda, Chief Strategist and Editor-at-Large, Labs Team, Washington Post: Have projects on all sides of the debate.  Have apps and HTML5 and agnostic as to which to use.  Pick whatever work with the content.  If want your stuff to work everywhere then HTML5 is the way to go.  Unless have a very specific reason to go native code then will be much faster to go to HTML5.  A lot of folks will go hybrid.  Can do this if have enough employees to go native plus HTML5, but not good for start-up with few people....

Got the following email from Paolo Amoroso: Italian engineering Professor JuanCarlos De Martin @demartin has found that the Italian Constitution downloadable from the official government site is effectively crippled with DRM. It's a PDF document that prevents content copying (not even for accessibility) and search engine indexing. Some details are available in this blog post:   http://ildebugger.com/2012/05/23/la-costituzione-drm-governo/   machine translation via Google Translate http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=it&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fildebugger.com%2F2012%2F05%2F23%2Fla-costituzione-drm-governo%2F&act=url   This is especially ironical considering that Michael Hart started Project Gutenberg by sharing the US Declaration of Independence.   This was pointed out to me by Giovanni Salvatori @borsista.   Regards,     Paolo Amoroso ...

Moderator, Larry Kramer, President and Publisher, USA Today:   Jim Bankoff, Chairman, CEO, Vox Media:  Only in the digital arena in sports and tech coverage.  Started with advantage of starting with clean slate, but have the disadvantage of not having the cash flow of older companies. Model is to find web-native talent and empower them.  Are a start-up but have grown to be one of the top 10 publishers on the net.  In sports area didn't want to "build a brand" because there are some very good brands already out there.  Decided that fragmentation was the way to go. SEO for Google...

Moderator, Robert Andrews, Senior Editor, International, paidContent/GigaOM Nick Bogaty, Director of Busines Development, Digital Publishing Group, Adobe Systems:  Started software project with Wired three years ago.  Great initial excitement when iPad come out.  But now are at the point of growing real businesses with real content, real advertising and real subscribers.  Provide software creation tools but also act as a distributor.  Now distribute 120,000 publications a day and last year served 26 million publications.  Shows that the business is real.  Producing the Wired magazines was a total collaborative experience.  Actually slept at Wired to see how they put out the magazine....

Moderator: Staci C. Kramer, Editor and Senior Writer, paidContent/GigaOm Bob Sauerberg, President, Conde Nast:  Conde Nast needed to think differently and figure out how to go digital.  Gourmet digital was their leap forward and now has 1 million plus users.  Digital magazines have been a great business.  Is a stand-alone business now. Half a million monthly subscribers at this point.  Provides a great revenue stream long term.  $20 million revenue stream.  But the format for most users is print.  They want to be agnostic as to print versus digital. Industry trained the consumer to look for low prices in consumer magazines.  Conde Nast...

James McQuivey, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research:  It is an iPad world right now.  34% of the US population will have a tablet  by 2016. That's 112.5 million tablets.  No other device in the history of consumer electronics has achieved such a high penetration in such a short time. Future will not be made only of tablets.  Now have 35 million ereaders and 30 plus million say they are thinking about getting one. Over 70 million iPads out there.  Kinnect for Xbox 360 has sold 22 million devices.  Means that Microsoft can move into the market. Apple two years to sell 1...

From the press release: Diesel eBooks has just rolled out a suite of new mobile products designed to deliver more choice and freedom, and to counteract what it sees as a totalitarian eBook environment which tethers customers to specific devices and eBook Stores. In addition to the new Diesel Reader software for iPad/iPhone and Android, the launch includes a universal mobile app called the “eFreedom” app http://www.diesel-ebooks.com/static/educz-devices_freedom/1.html. “Our customers have increasingly shared their frustration with eBook devices being isolated to a specific store,” said L. Scott Redford, Founder and CEO of Diesel eBooks. “In response, we’ve built the eFreedom app which can be reached...

From the press release:  A slew of best-selling electronic books helped boost profits at Britain's Bloomsbury Publishing (BLPU.L) as the book industry continues its shift to digital, and the firm said it would look to academic titles for a larger part of future growth. Bloomsbury, the publisher of the "Harry Potter" series by author JK Rowling, also said it was counting on a new Rowling three-book box set tied into the Potter series, and a non-fiction account of spies in World War II to support sales in the coming year. Pretax profit at the publisher rose 13.6 percent to 4.8 million pounds ($7.6...

Friday, May 4th was the fourth International Day Against DRM, and wow — what a day! We were supported by our friends at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Creative Commons, the Accessible Computing Foundation, Fight for the Future, APRIL, and our sister organizations, FSF France, FSF India and FSF Europe. Our focus for this year's day was the threat of DRM on ebooks, and so we also welcomed support from several publishers. Libre Graphics Magazine, O'Reilly, No Starch, Angry Robot and others had their own sales on DRM-free ebooks, encouraging authors and readers alike to step up and vote with their wallets. Additionally, we...

Tools of Change interview with Travis Alber of ReadSocial.   Social reading is gaining momentum. There are quite a few startups involved in this space, and most of them simply assume your Facebook friends share the same reading interests you do. ReadSocial is different. In this TOC interview, we hear from ReadSocial co-founder Travis Alber (@screenkapture) on why they're building their platform without tying it to your social graph. ...