Get Poser 8 Now Click Here

The New Poser 8

“…with version 8, Smith Micro demonstrates that Poser is not only here to stay but is also obviously being incrementally strengthened for future expansion. … Simply put, Poser 8 is the most comprehensive pre-built 3D character modeling solution available.” —Mark Bremmer Microfilmmaker.com

“Poser 8 is a must-have for anyone working in 2-D or 3-D animation and rendering. If you’re a 2-D artist, you can user Poser 8’s models and existing pose library to create great looking 3-D elements for illustrations. If you’re a 3-D artist, you can use Poser 8’s models and tools, such as Walk Designer, to instantly create great-looking animations. What’s more, the library of objects included can be exported to many different formats such as Maya or LightWave…”
—Dan Ablan Macworld.com

There is no wizard to create with a wave of the hand this digital future. There are only mortals finding their way, by the slow, indirect, and uncertain means by which human beings have exploited previous paradigm shifts. To expect a practical business plan for unmediated electronic publishing to arise full blown from the existing industry would be to disregard the waywardness of human endeavor, the complexity of the emerging digital future, and the understandable, if quixotic, wish of today’s publishers to enter the digital future in approximately their present form. But to assume on the other hand that a reasonable business plan may not sooner or later emerge would be to ignore the persistence and ingenuity with which human beings have invented their world so far.

This is not to say that every powerful new technology necessarily becomes a viable business. The SST and high-speed rail travel in the United States may never overcome competition from cheaper or more convenient choices, while genetically altered and irradiated food are shunned by many consumers. No such obstacles confront the unmediated transmission of digital files whose cost per unit is minimal compared with the cost of distributing physical inventory, while the convenience of transmitting words electronically is evident to anyone who downloads e-mail attachments or receives faxes or has already bought a digital book. From the consumer’s point of view the experience of ordering a digital book selected from an on-screen catalog and printed at a nearby site will differ from buying a factory-made copy of the same book from an Internet retailer only in being nearly instantaneous, less likely to result in frustration if the physical book is out of print, and at a price that includes only a fraction of the retailer’s markup.

Because the obstacles to an unmediated digital future are not technological but institutional and emotional, the inevitable transformation will be contentious as new forms of production challenge old assumptions and practices. For example, the relatively greater value contributed by authors to digitized texts has already been noted by literary agents, who will expect authors’ future earnings from digital editions to be adjusted accordingly. But to increase the author’s share of revenues in keeping with the publisher’s minimized cost of digital production and distribution will, as digital publishing supersedes the conventional model, diminish publishers’ revenues, though not necessarily their net profits. To sustain profits, however, publishers must reduce or liquidate redundant facilities related to previous technologies, especially in the areas of marketing, sales, warehousing, and production. Book publishers, especially those dominated by their sales and marketing operations, will react defensively to such challenges to their boundaries. Meanwhile agents are coiled and waiting to strike.

Authors’ royalties traditionally represent between 10 and 15 percent of retail prices, or between 20 and 30 percent of publishers’ net revenues. Another 40 percent or so of revenue is absorbed by executive and other administrative costs and by the costs of printing, selling, and distributing physical books, costs which are irrelevant to digital publication. Therefore agents demanding 70 percent or more of digital revenues for their authors will open the bidding for new titles to upstart firms with no embedded customs or infrastructure to maintain. Under this competitive pressure traditional publishers will reduce their redundant functions in order to accommodate higher royalty payments or they will lose their authors, who, in today’s aggressive literary marketplace, are no more loyal to their publishers than their publishers are to them. Such adjustments are typical of the interregnum between a departing economic model and its successor and may help explain why today’s publishing conglomerates have approached the digital future with caution. Thanks for reading a Digital Future Blog

Even in today’s rudimentary digital marketplace some authors have linked their Web sites to sites of related interest, hoping to create their own expanding communities of loyal readers with each new book they write. Minor technological modifications will soon enable writers to sell their books to readers throughout the world directly from these Web networks, bypassing publishers who may have rejected their work, while established writers may choose to forego the security of a publisher’s royalty guarantee in exchange for keeping the entire revenue from the sale of their books. In today’s tightly structured publishing environment manuscript submissions are largely winnowed first by agents and then by publishers and booksellers before readers make the final decision. For readers accustomed to an orderly literary marketplace the much less disciplined digital future may seem as threatening as widespread literacy seemed to the priests of the fifteenth century. But the human capacity to discriminate what is readable from what is not, and over time to discriminate what is truly valuable from what is merely readable, is no more likely to be overwhelmed in a marketplace where anyone can claim to be a writer than the critical faculty was defeated by the torrential energies released when the secularization of literacy swept across Europe five hundred years ago.

Since digitized books occupy no shelf space they can remain in print and in stock as long as digital storage devices survive. And because digital texts can be transmitted directly to consumers, they can be sold for much less than books that are shipped physically from printers in Illinois or China to publishers’ warehouses in Maryland or Ohio and from there to regional chain store depots or wholesalers’ warehouses and finally to thousands of retail bookstores from which, after a few months, unsold copies are returned to their publishers and destroyed. Because books published digitally involve no physical inventory and will cost their publishers virtually nothing per unit to produce and deliver, authors will contribute relatively more value to the final product than publishers and can claim a larger share of proceeds than from books sold in today’s over concentrated and inefficient literary marketplace dominated by book chains rooted in the five-hundred-year-old Gutenberg system of centralized manufacture and physical distribution.

To the extent that unmediated electronic distribution of books printed on demand at point of sale with its greater efficiency and low costs replaces this archaic system, today’s book publishers will either devolve over time into decentralized teams of writers, editors, publicists, and Web site managers or be replaced by such groups. Thus book publishing may revert to the cottage industry that it had been before today’s homogenized retail marketplace, dependent on a steady supply of promotional titles, imposed a corresponding obligation on the publishing industry. Thanks for reading a Digital Future Blog.

The convergence of the Internet with the instantaneous transmission and retrieval of digital text is an epochal event, comparable to the impact of movable type on European civilization half a millennium ago, but with worldwide implications. In the digital future groups of writers, editors, publicists, and Web site managers anywhere in the world will combine to form their own Web-based publishing companies and sell their books directly to readers. Some may contract with specialist firms to manufacture and distribute physical books to traditional retailers which will coexist with their digital competitors as theaters, cinemas, videotapes, and DVDs all coexist today, and as today’s physical bookstores coexist with on-line competition.

Though factory-made paperbacks sold in bookstores at retail markups will be at a competitive disadvantage compared with paperbacks printed on demand and sold directly to readers, not everyone will prefer to order books on line.

The stock in trade of bookstores in the digital future is hard to foresee, but it is likely that shops offering carefully chosen inventories of new and used titles, especially books in hard covers, art books, and many kinds of childrens’ books which cannot economically be printed on demand will become neighborhood meeting places, while outlets that specialize in hardcover commercial best sellers will continue to do so. But many readers who may not have access to a well-stocked bookstore will depend on digital catalogs and online book sources for books they cannot otherwise find, as such readers now turn to Amazon and other on-line retailers.

A new future is underway in our Digital world. How we do our reading and where we get our books weather hard bond or virtual. Is all changing on a very fast pace. a Digital Future Blog is one example of how to educate yourself by reading online the latest Digital Future news. Thanks for reading a Digital Future Blog

If only there lived a mighty wizard with literary inclinations, readers today could use existing technology to download and read, either on an electronic screen or in a paper bound volume, any book or other text ever written. Scholars could instantly find their sources within a vast, multilingual virtual library, while even now some college students are reading textbooks on line, with audio-visual enhancements, interactively with their professors if they choose.

Today it is widely assumed that digitized books and other texts will be read mainly on computer screens or on hand-held reading devices such as Palm Pilots or Gemstar readers. But a significant market for books read on screens has not yet emerged, and who knows this may never become the major mode of distribution for books on line. The more likely prospect, perhaps, is that most digital files will be printed and bound on demand at point of sale by machines—now in prototype—which within minutes will inexpensively make single copies that are indistinguishable from books made in factories. Again this is only a prototype idea.

These neighborhood machines for making paper bound books can, like ATMs, be placed wherever electricity and supplies of paper exist—whether in Kinko’s, Starbucks, or high school and university libraries and residence halls, to name only a few possible sites. With them readers nearly everywhere with access to a computer screen may eventually search a practically limitless digital catalog linked to innumerable databases where digital files are stored; retrieve and browse the titles that interest them; and transmit the files they select to a nearby printing machine which will notify them when their books are ready to be picked up or delivered. From the time the reader makes a selection, the entire transaction can be completed within minutes. Given the durability and convenience of books printed on paper as well as the sacred status granted them by most cultures, readers may prefer—especially for books of permanent value—a volume printed and bound on these machines to transient images on an electronic screen. The exception will be dictionaries, atlases, encyclopedias, directories, and so on, which must be continuously updated. Their current data will probably be read on screens as needed.

This could really work and perhaps would be a good market to look into as nothing like this in our current Digital World really exists. a Digital Future will have many new Digital ideas that can involve the works of 3D artists for book covers. And Free lance writers for content. Using Blogs as a way to spread the word in this Digital world we all live in. Thanks for reading a Digital Future Blog.