PicApp - Free Professional Stock Images?

Image details: Cannes: Blindness - Premiere served by picapp.com

If you run a website that needs lots of stock photography, particularly pictures of celebrities, it can get very expensive. It means licensing photographs or waiting until you get a cease and desist legal threat from the owner. PicApp aims to solve this problem by making stock photographs free.

Registration is free and not actually necessary, but I would recommend you do.

What’s the catch? You don’t get a clean image, the photograph has some “stuff” along with it that actually pays for the use of the photograph. You have to decide if this is a good trade off yourself. Take a look at the example top left of this page to see what you think.

First you get the dashboard where you can search for “creative” or “editorial” pictures. Creative pictures are the “man in suit” variety, while editorial are pictures from the news, like celebrities. It’s the latter that can really hurt the old bank balance and therefore where the main interest lies.

PicApp - the best content for the best publishers

Once you have your results you can take a closer look at the images that came back
PicApp - natalie portman images

Selecting a particular image allows you to embed, in a manner a lot like Flickr or YouTube

PicApp - Image of Cannes: Blindness - Premiere

Verdict

I absolutely would NOT use this service for “creative” images. The prices at istockphoto are so low I would much prefer an image without any cruft around it. The one role I see this playing is in the celebrity field. Searching for “Natalie Portman” on stock sites either comes back with nothing or pricey. Hopefully the in-your-face aspect of the service will be worked on so the frame doesn’t detract so much from the picture, it’s early days and I know they are listening to feedback.

One element that might interest you though is in future publishers will be able to share in the proceeds. As a way to make some side money while adding some colour and interest to our pages, this could be an interesting service to watch.

The End of the Ebook?

Kindle Ebook Reader Yesterday I had a debate with my friend Ryan about the future of ebooks.

I had just uploaded my audio and PDF transcript and was seeing subscribers coming along nicely. I was suggesting the same tactic for another project we were working on together.

You might already know, I am a big fan of ebooks. I buy them, I read them, I give them away, I even plan to sell them.

Ryan doesn’t believe in them. He thinks bloggers should do series posts instead. In fact, he doubts ebooks have much of a future.

I can see his point. Ebooks are about reading a large amount of material in one package. Most I imagine get read online rather than printed out or downloaded to a reading device such as Amazons Kindle.

Then look at prominent bloggers such as Aaron Wall and Brian Clark, their content has been turned into member sites rather than ebooks. Aaron in particular is surprising as for years he made a good income out of his SEOBook but now his content is delivered as an SEO Training Course.

It is easy to see the attraction of a member site for content producers. First off is obviously the recurring revenue. One sale versus monthly income. After that it is also about lifetime value, a one-off book purchase versus an ongoing relationship with all the opportunities that implies.

For the customer, with a member site you get not just words and pictures but video, audio, discussion, web conferencing, chat, and maybe tools and utilities also. An ebook is capable of more than words and pictures but rarely is.

The downsides to ebook delivery is clear also. Ebooks are routinely copied and shared, it is so easy to do and largely untraceable. The more people try to prevent it, the more damage is done to legitimate customers by applying restrictive DRM and other draconian measures.

Is this the beginning of the end for the humble ebook or is there life in the old dog yet?

Please share your thoughts in the comments …

UK Viewers Get Raw Deal in BBC/iTunes Linkup

What do you call it when someone tries to sell you something you already own?

As you might know, in the UK we have a Television Tax called the “TV License Fee”. Yes, if you want to watch a television in the UK you have to pay a mandatory, enforced tax. This money goes to the BBC. Even if you never watch a BBC channel.

The plus side to this tax is we pay for lots of lovely BBC programming which makes the content world class (in theory). It used to be that we would get advertising-free content but that only applies to the main two BBC channels and Radio it seems.

Seeing as we have already paid once for this programming you would expect in this intertubes age that they would offer programs for download, and that is exactly what they plan to do with their iPlayer service. While much criticised for using Microsoft DRM and excluding non-Windows users, it has been very successful with over 3.5 million programmes enjoyed since launch.

All good? Yes, until you find out that if you miss your window with iPlayer (or have an incompatible computer) you are going to have to pay iTunes £1.89 for the pleasure. Double what our friends in the USA pay (US$1.99) and even at that price it would be expensive seeing as we already paid for it with the TV tax!

I can understand having to pay for DVD’s. There is manufacture costs, packaging, shipping, storage and such. Should we really pay for digital delivery of already aired tax-funded programming? In Norway they are putting popular shows on Torrents for anyone to download gratis. Why not the BBC?

Initially a small set of series will be trialled. Rumour has it these will include popular shows such as Dr Who and Torchwood. So nearly two pounds an episode for an iPod scale video or by 13 episodes for around the same price in full rippable DVD format along with extras and a nice box. I’d probably choose the latter.

Most people I think would choose to Torrent it. It can’t be stealing, after all … we paid for it already.

Update: It’s now official - Read more over at BBC News.

PicApp - Free Professional Stock Images?

Verdict

The End of the Ebook?

UK Viewers Get Raw Deal in BBC/iTunes Linkup

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