Personanondata

CCC Podcast on Google Book Settlement Revision

2009-11-23T16:35:00.003-05:00

Copyright law expert Lois Wasoff discusses the most important changes and revisions to the Google Book Settlement in a PodCast (here). Some of her main points include:

the underlying structure of the agreement and many of the economic terms of the agreement have not changed
the revised proposal makes it more difficult for Google to simply decide a work is not commercially available and start to use it for display uses
procedurally, the parties really have taken a step back by asking the court for preliminary approval of the settlement and of the class, which is something that they had gotten for the prior version a year ago. However, coupled with that request is a proposal for a fairly aggressive timeline moving forward, keeping this agreement review and approval process moving

A complete transcript can also be seen here.

Media Week 47: SharedBook, Virtual Classrooms, Google Legal

2009-11-22T12:12:00.002-05:00

Sunday Papers:

Observer: The Martin Beck crime series and the queen of crime http://bit.ly/8dkNBn
TimesOnline: The conversation: James Ellroy http://bit.ly/7T7P1B - Author reads from his book and tells of his breakdown, divorce and drugs
London Times Review: THE JUNIOR OFFICERS’ READING CLUB http://bit.ly/6L0M4b And what fighting in Afghanistan is all about - pretty grim.
The Age on The Cornwell factor http://bit.ly/5xIr7T That's Patricia Cornwell.

SharedBook (via SharedDoc) has launched their document commenting platform in beta and is looking for testers (Techcrunch):

SharedDoc is an online document platform that lets anyone upload a document online and then share the file to a community, so they can add comments. We have 500 free invites for TechCrunch readers here.

Once you upload a Word or Google Docs document to SharedDoc’s platform, you can send email invites to a friends or colleagues to comment on the document. In order to comment, a user needs to set up an ID. Users can then highlight portions of the the document where they’d like to leave a comment and post their input.

Comments can be seen by by everyone invited on the document and commenters can respond to others comments. Each comment carries the ID of the user, and the date of posting. SharedDoc also creates a permanent record of the comments by saving or printing the document with the comments as footnotes.

Virtual classrooms get some attention from the New York Times:

Teacherless or virtual-teacher learning is described by enthusiasts as a revolution in the making. Until now, they say, education has been a seller’s market. You beg to get in to college. Deans decide what you must know. They prevent you from taking better courses elsewhere.

They set prices high to subsidize unprofitable activities. Above all, they exclude most humans from their knowledge — the poor, the old, people born in the wrong place, people with time-consuming children and jobs.
Champions of digital learning want to turn teaching into yet another form of content. Allow anyone anywhere to take whatever course they want, whenever, over any medium, they say. Make universities compete on quality, price and convenience. Let students combine credits from various courses into a degree by taking an exit exam. Let them live in Paris, take classes from M.I.T. and transfer them to a German university for a diploma.
“This is putting the consumer in charge as opposed to putting the supplier in charge,” said Scott McNealy, the chairman of Sun Microsystems, the technology giant, and an influential proponent of this approach. He founded Curriki, an online tool for sharing lesson plans and other materials, and was an early investor in the Western Governors University, which delivers degrees online.

Google launches legal search tool within Google Scholar and a shot across the bows of West and Lexis. (Blog):

Starting today, we're enabling people everywhere to find and read full text legal opinions from U.S. federal and state district, appellate and supreme courts using Google Scholar. You can find these opinions by searching for cases (like Planned Parenthood v. Casey), or by topics (like desegregation) or other queries that you are interested in. For example, go to Google Scholar, click on the "Legal opinions and journals" radio button, and try the query separate but equal. Your search results will include links to cases familiar to many of us in the U.S. such as Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Education, which explore the acceptablity of "separate but equal" facilities for citizens at two different points in the history of the U.S. But your results will also include opinions from cases that you might be less familiar with, but which have played an important role.

We think this addition to Google Scholar will empower the average citizen by helping everyone learn more about the laws that govern us all. To understand how an opinion has influenced other decisions, you can explore citing and related cases using the Cited by and Related articles links on search result pages. As you read an opinion, you can follow citations to the opinions to which it refers. You can also see how individual cases have been quoted or discussed in other opinions and in articles from law journals. Browse these by clicking on the "How Cited" link next to the case title. See, for example, the frequent citations for Roe v. Wade, for Miranda v. Arizona (the source of the famous Miranda warning) or for Terry v. Ohio (a case which helped to establish acceptable grounds for an investigative stop by a police officer).

Resource Shelf has a complete discussion of the new database.

Dan Brown helps Random House to $23m e-book sales (Bookseller)

Gartner sees 2010 and the real year of the eBook (Softpedia):

Gartner Technology Business Research Insight reached the conclusion that even all the heavy promotion of e-book readers during 2009 wouldn't be able to match what 2010 would bring. According to Gartner, e-books and their e-readers haven't become as popular as they can be because of multiple factors.

One factor is the limited features of e-readers. Namely, most such gadgets are exclusively built for allowing the reading of books in the electronic format. Although this is their intended purpose and they have perfectly carried out this task, Mr. Weiner believes that e-reader applications are and should be a focus of the manufacturers.

“Book applications for smartphones have the potential to become a bridge to other devices such as tablet readers and netbooks. Apple, for example, could migrate the more than 500 book applications in the iTunes store to a tablet device and Google, which recently announced a browser-based e-reader, could offer applications for Android-based devices of various form factors,” Mr. Weiner shared.

What this implies is that fixed devices, namely those built solely for reading, such as Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s family of devices, should not be considered even close to being the final stage of evolution of these gadgets.

Identifying My Package (Repost)

2009-11-20T03:12:00.001-05:00

Every Friday I will reach into my archive and re-post an article. The following was originally posted on October 18, 2007.

Identifying My Package

As publishers we remain committed to defining for our readers and users the ‘package’. At the Frankfurt supply chain meeting last week as I listened to another “history of the ISBN” and other bedtime stories I was stuck by our insistence as publishers to define for our customers just how they should consume our content. This was manifested in our approach to identifiers for segments of content. I include myself in this criticism as a proponent of ISBN, DOI, ISTC and other alphabet defying groupings over the past 10 years. Three or more years ago, I think we were on the right track but in today’s user defined world the consumer is telling us what parts they want to consume and we will need to come up with easy to use flexible solutions that can identify the content and use.

On the Exact Editions site a user can select, by highlighting, a piece of text they want to use from any number of the journals and magazines hosted by EE. (The tool is named The Clipper). It is a fun and useful tool but in its implementation it doesn’t restrict the user in any way (other than a limitation on the amount of content). If a similar solution were implemented in a research context (within Refworks for example) I would like to see a persistent identifier created on the spot who’s syntax could be partially defined by the user. This is a perfect implementation for a DOI (one of the few perhaps) that enables the user to select a segment of the content they want, makes it persistent, creates a record for the publisher and enables any necessary reporting to take place.

It would seem to me that formatting a programmatic standard syntax to represent paragraphs, chapters, images etc. is a backwards approach simply because we will never fully anticipate how our users will use the content. We also continue to use the printed page as a construct which is fast diminishing in the online context and further undercuts the current standards approach. Attempts to build out a standard by unilaterally assigning executable identifiers to works (books) will be a waste of time and I simply don’t see the benefit of this approach; moreover, I don’t see anyone paying for it. It is not even clear publishers would welcome this approach.

Several implementations of technology that places at the point of need an easy to use script has proven that users want and are willing to purchase or gain approval for the use of content. CCC and O’Reilly are two differing examples of this concept. In the same manner, enabling an easy to use [citation] solution that provides a user with a simple pop-up window tied to the content they are interested in is a far more flexible and appropriate solution to identifying content. Avoid proscriptions: Let the user decide. (More)

Your Price May Vary

2009-11-18T12:50:00.005-05:00

I was enamored with the airline industry as I grew up and close readers will know I’ve always traveled a lot. Out of business school I interviewed with three airlines in their pricing departments where newly hired MBA’s went to learn the business. In that role, staff managed pricing of airline seats to maximize revenue per flight. Remembering that once a flight left the gate any open seat amounted to zero revenue for the airline, this activity was potentially highly stressful as the job also required close comparison with competing airlines’ pricing.

All this activity is now done with sophisticated real-time analytics and people rarely enter into the equation. Contrast this reliance on deep data analysis that helps the airlines maximize their revenue and the approach that media companies have used to price their products. For the most part, in the media business pricing is homogeneous across format with little consideration to the popularity (or lack) of the artist, author or show in question. Rather than a pricing model constructed on maximizing the revenue from individual products the content owner places a band of pricing across the range of their content. This is particularly the case in trade publishing, and in this model each artist is considered equal in their ability to generate revenue. Historically, publishers and other media companies ‘jimmied’ this lack of sophistication by assuming long backlist life, format sales – trade paper, mass-market, video rental, etc. – but those options look increasingly unworkable as the market migrates to e-Content.

Publishers in particular are gun shy about experimenting with pricing; opting to use the blunt instrument of scarcity rather than more sophisticated options. Numerous big name titles this year have been ‘held back’ from ebook distribution in deference to their print versions. This approach has already caused consternation among the consumers who have already made the transition to eBook content and want the newest titles when (even before) everyone else gets them. At some point many of these e-Book owners will look upon this situation as a ‘first mover’ penalty.

As e-content becomes more ubiquitous pricing should become more science than current practice would dictate. For the health of all parties in the publishing supply chain, it is vital that the price paid by consumers maximizes revenue. Understanding how the demand curve arcs is critical to pricing accurately and many factors (some more important than others) play into this calculation including the author’ brand, time from publication, exclusive content, competition, etc. Obviously, knowing how much someone is willing to pay for something (at a point in time) is difficult but think about how airlines do this: A seasonal traveler has far different characteristics than an executive who just has to get to Miami tomorrow. They both end up on the same flight but pay significantly different prices.

Publishers can be forgiven for a lack of understanding of the metrics of pricing in a print based world with many intermediaries and little ability to gather empirical data. Online things have changed and The Economist recently reported on research published by two economists at the University of Pennsylvania which examined pricing for on-line music. In this research, the authors looked at iTunes and attempted to determine whether students would be more or less willing to pay a different price per song than the rigid 99cents per tune. (There may be some correlation here between what Apple did with music and what Amazon is attempting to do with Kindle titles, and maybe Publishers should ask the researchers to expand the analysis.) The authors of this study found that the market could sustain a higher uniform price and knowing (via the results) the higher uniform price they were then able to expand their analysis to look at per song pricing and make some other extrapolations. The authors also experimented with a subscription type model that had a fixed price component with a per-use fee, and this model appeared to be more effective at maximizing revenue and value for both retailer and consumer.

Pricing is complicated: publishers can approach this in an unsophisticated manner but in doing so they are unlikely to maximize their revenue. More analysis is likely to show that a variable approach to pricing and packaging will generate more revenue. For example, in an approach the authors suggest for music, a publisher with a selection of 10 political/legal thrillers could generate more revenue selling the package for $29.95 than relying on selling each separately for a total of $79.00. The other advantage for both publishers and consumers is that more content can be purchased thereby increasing the market and customer base. Regardless, the decisions around pricing are worth spending more time on rather than reactively applying old pricing models to new circumstances. Perhaps we will see ‘Pricing Analyst’ as a new publishing job title.

Media Week 46: Elsevier, Hathi, Virtual Education, Downloading

2009-11-15T07:19:00.004-05:00

Elsevier continues their 'article of the future' experiment with some new functionality (link):

The Cell-Reflect pilot is the next step in Elsevier’s ongoing Content Innovation effort with the scientific community to determine how a scientific article is best presented online. This follows Elsevier’s recent launch of an initial ’Article of the Future’ prototype with Cell, where the traditional linear journal article is displayed in a much more useful format for life scientists.

IJsbrand Jan Aalbersberg, Vice President of Content Innovation for Elsevier Science & Technology Journal Publishing, commented, “Whereas the ‘Article of the Future’ prototype focused on the internal presentation of an article, the Cell-Reflect pilot connects the scientific article to its external scientific context. Tools like these have the potential to revolutionize the use of scientific research.”

Inside an article, ‘Reflect’ tags and colors gene, protein, or small molecule names on any web page, usually within seconds, without affecting the article itself or its web page layout. Clicking on a tagged or colored item opens a popup, showing a concise summary of contextually important features, such as sequence (for proteins) or 2D structure (for small molecules).

PND Journal of the Future Post

Hathi trust published an update report and noted among a number of items ongoing discussions with Google and Open Archive about injesting scanned works and with OCLC about the Hathi trust catalog. (Pdf)

A summary of sessions at the World Association of Newspapers meeting with summaries of presentations from a wide variety of international newspaper companies (Link). A comment from an Indian newspaper publisher:

"Thanks to watching the US and Europe, we had the benefit of hindsight and we didn't let go of classifieds. We didn't want a Craigslist or a Monster taking away our strength, and so we created sites like M4Marry - a matrimonial site capitalising on a niche audience, but one that today has more than 300,000 profiles, and it's subscription-based so profitable in its own right, as well as bolstering our print classifieds. The way it works in India is that the paper edition builds credibility, but the transactions are enabled through the website." M4Marry is only one of a number of niche products playing to the hyperlocal market in Kerala (another surprise success turned out to be the obituaries section), all of which are beefed up with blogs and UGC.

"The next big thing in India is mobile," explained Mathew, pointing out that SMS shortcodes and downloadable apps for online content have already proved highly profitable, a situation capitalised on by Manorama's use of both media-specific sales team and Junction K - its cross media integrated sales team that spreads campaigns across all platforms and enables the paper's claim that 'you talk to us and you talk to Kerala.'

The Heyward library in California is to experiment with a NetFlix like model (LJ):

“In my nine years talking to library customers on the front lines and in management I’ve learned that the vast majority of library users who get fined are basically responsible people who wanted to return their library books on time, but for whatever reason, didn’t,” Reinhart told LJ. "I know so many people who have given up on libraries either because they have too many fines, or because they want to avoid getting fined in the first place. The system doesn’t fit their schedule, so they don’t use the resource. So I asked myself, why can’t the library let people have a limited number of items for an unlimited length of time in exchange for a monthly fee, just like Netflix?”

The New York Times suggests that virtual classrooms will create a marketplace for knowledge (NYT):

Teacherless or virtual-teacher learning is described by enthusiasts as a revolution in the making. Until now, they say, education has been a seller’s market. You beg to get in to college. Deans decide what you must know. They prevent you from taking better courses elsewhere.
They set prices high to subsidize unprofitable activities. Above all, they exclude most humans from their knowledge — the poor, the old, people born in the wrong place, people with time-consuming children and jobs.
Champions of digital learning want to turn teaching into yet another form of content. Allow anyone anywhere to take whatever course they want, whenever, over any medium, they say. Make universities compete on quality, price and convenience. Let students combine credits from various courses into a degree by taking an exit exam. Let them live in Paris, take classes from M.I.T. and transfer them to a German university for a diploma.

From Inside Higher Ed, there may be bookless libraries but there will always be librarians (IHEd):

“Now, in the fourth generation, we’re really seeing the library as a place to connect, collaborate, learn, and really synthesize all four of those roles together,” said Luce. “How do you do that without bricks and mortar?”

One audience member commented that libraries are defined more by what they do than what they look like. While new technologies might be replacing print collections, she said, they are not replacing librarians — whose roles as research guides have become more even important as available resources have multiplied.
“I think it’s important to look at the type of reference question that’s asked,” she said. “If you look at the READ Scale, which is a tool used to assess the complexity of a question that is asked, the number of directional and simple … questions has dropped, because we’ve provided the tools to make answering those questions easy.
“If you look at the number of more difficult, research-oriented questions,” she continued, “we find it has grown as the complexity of the tools to provide answers to those questions has become more intense.”

A UK report suggests those who illegally download music spend the most on music (Independent):

People who illegally download music from the internet also spend more money on music than anyone else, according to a new study. The survey, published today, found that those who admit illegally downloading music spent an average of £77 a year on music – £33 more than those who claim that they never download dishonestly.

The findings suggest that plans by the Secretary of State for Business, Peter Mandelson, to crack down on illegal downloaders by threatening to cut their internet connections with a "three strikes and you're out" rule could harm the music industry by punishing its core customers.

Anonymous blogger responsible for a book and television show about high class prostitution has revealed herself to be a science researcher - with a Phd - (Times):

Magnanti is a respected specialist in developmental neurotoxicology and cancer epidemiology in a hospital research group in Bristol. Six years ago, in the final stages of her PhD thesis, she ran out of money and turned to prostitution through a London escort agency, charging £300 an hour. Already an experienced science blogger, she began writing about her experiences in a web diary that was adapted into books and a television drama starring Billie Piper.

There has been huge speculation about Belle’s real identity, including a theory that she was a well-known author because of the quality of her writing. The blog and books were also criticised for suggesting prostitution could be glamorous. Last week Magnanti contacted one of Belle’s sternest critics, India Knight, the Sunday Times columnist, saying she wanted to reveal her identity.

Pearson maybe looking to acquire Santillana, the $1.4 billion (£838m) Latin American textbook publisher (Times)

My Education Space: 'Ed-Space' (Repost)

2009-11-13T03:03:00.000-05:00

Each Friday I am going to reach into 'my archive' and re-post articles. Here is one from October 17, 2006. Conceptually related is an initiative at JISC on e-Portfolios which I just read about.

My Education Space: 'Ed-Space'

Did you ever wonder what it would be like to re-visit some of the projects and papers you wrote in college or recall some of the essays you either wrote or read for books you are now re-reading? If you are like me, you probably don't care about everything you were studying in school but for some of the material it could be fun to experience again the material that is still meaningful to your interests. When we experience life we generally do not take time to gather the detrius that reminds us years later of the experience or enables some recent connection to the earlier experience. As time goes on we often regret not being more careful about some of this stuff. At least I do.

The social networks that My Space, Friendster and others create have not yet reached their potential in terms of the functionality and services that these sites could deliver. One area in particular that I believe we will see more application of the My Space experience is education. In the not too distant future I believe students at universities will have thier own 'Ed-spaces' that will be hosted by their institution and will provide access to all university services, course content, testing and comprehension applications, lecture notes, text material and other ancillary services such as administration modules. Additionally, this 'Ed-space' will also host all the content the student produced - test papers, essays, writing assigments, presentations, etc - during their education. The textbook material will be maintained as an electronic bookshelf which the student can access for as long as they retain the relationship with institution.

The establishment of this university 'Ed-space' will create a long term conpact with the student that will tie the student to the insitution. In effect, the educational institution will become an accessible repository for the student which will in turn support a long term mutually beneficial relationship between the student and the insititution. Perhaps the student maintains some limited functionality or access immediately after graduation but as they age they are able to participate at different levels that enable greater functionality and access to more content and services.

Once the student graduates, this 'Ed-space' will become the basis for all allumni relations, social networks with classmates, job and message boards and the like. For the institution this would become a powerful tool for life-time learning, alumni relations and fund raising. As the student's interests develop and grow over the ensuing years the 'Ed-space' would allow access to educational content, library materials and academic experts provided by the insitution. The student would also benefit from the relationships with other ex-students who were interested in similar subjects. The community would also enable new services that the university could sponsor such as conferences, field trips and webinars particular to alumni interests. All of which would strengthen the relationship with alumni and also generate additional revenues for the institution.

This model would also mean that educational institutions could wrest control of the student away from publishers who are also trying to establish long term relationships with students. Publishers would be able to market their life-long learning materials and perhaps engage in specific community development but it would all be in the confines of the instituional 'Ed-Space' paradigm. Naturally, students would be suspicious of aspects of this model but encouraging a degree of freedom while also serving as their access point for their personal content repository and enabling access to content and a social network would be material benefits to them.

My occasional other posts on educational publishing: Ads in Textbooks, Is the College Store Doomed? and Changes in Educational Publishing .

Veterans Day for Animals

2009-11-11T13:32:00.002-05:00

PND - The Interview

2009-11-10T09:23:00.004-05:00

David Wilk at Writerscast (and numerous other things) has started an interview/pod cast program and I was the first candidate. Here is the introduction and the link:

In this new series of interviews, I have set out to talk to book industry professionals who have varying perspectives and thoughts about the future of publishing, books, and culture. This is a period of tremendous disruption and change. Publishing has been a crucial part of human culture for as long as people have been writing and reading. How will publishing evolve as our culture is affected by technology, climate change, population density, and the ebb and flow of civilization and its economics? Many people are thinking deeply - and some acting on - the nature of change and the challenges and opportunities that face us all. Publishing Talks tries, in a small way, to get at and illustrate some of what is going on today, and perhaps to help us understand, even if only generally, the outlines of what is happening, and how we might ourselves interact with and influence the future as it unfolds.
Publishing Talks gives people in the book business a chance to talk about ideas and concerns in a public forum that are often only talked about “around the water cooler,” at industry conventions and events, and in emails between friends. I hope this series of talks will give people inside and outside the book industry a chance to hear about some of the thoughts, ideas and concepts that are currently being discussed by engaged individuals within the industry.

My first interview in this series is with Michael Cairns, who has been active in publishing for many years and is currently working with Louis Borders’ start up content venture, MyWire.com.

To get the interview you need to go to the site.

Segmenting Publishing Strategy

2009-11-09T01:28:00.001-05:00

There is a self-publishing conference in NYC this weekend which reminded me of a project I worked on several years ago. After reading an interesting article in the Harvard Business Review about defining a company's corporate strategy, I decided to use the ideas in the article to spur discussion about my client's strategy. The HBS article Charting Your Company's Future is available from the HBS site and is summarized as follows:

Few companies have a clear strategic vision. The problem, say the authors, stems from the strategic-planning process itself, which usually involves preparing a large document, culled from a mishmash of data provided by people with conflicting agendas. That kind of process almost guarantees an unfocused strategy. Instead, companies should design the strategic-planning process by drawing a picture: a strategy canvas. A strategy canvas shows the strategic profile of your industry by depicting the various factors that affect competition. And it shows the strategic profiles of your current and potential competitors as well as your own company's strategic profile--how it invests in the factors of competition and how it might in the future. The basic component of a strategy canvas--the value curve--is a tool the authors created in their consulting work and have written about in previous HBR articles. This article introduces a four-step process for actually drawing and discussing a strategy canvas. Readers will learn how one European financial services company used this process to create a distinct and easily communicable strategy.

The process begins with a visual awakening. Managers compare their business's value curve with competitors' to discover where their strategy needs to change. In the next step--visual exploration--managers do field research on customers and alternative products. At the visual strategy fair, the third step, managers draw new strategic profiles based on field observations and get feedback from customers and peers about these new proposals. Once the best strategy is created from that feedback, it's time for the last step--visual communication. Executives distribute "before" and "after" strategic profiles to the whole company, and only projects that will help move the company closer to the "after" profile are supported.

My client was a medium-sized publishing company in a rapidly growing market and we met to brainstorm about redefining the organization's business strategy. Using the HBR article as a guide, we constructed a set of 'straw-man' profiles describing our client base and key characteristics. Firstly, we constructed the following customer type segmentation as follows:

Professional nave either a track record of selling titles and/or have commercial interests, such as a seminar business, where the book is a component (but not the main source) of revenue. In the latter case, the author/publisher may be less concerned with the commercial success of the title but retain a strong desire to produce a quality published product in the traditional sense. This group is likely to understand the publishing business.

Amateurs may have significant misconceptions about the industry and their capacity to be successful. They will require significant education and (possibly) even motivation to complete their “product.” They may develop a personal relationship with the publisher rather than a business relationship and will become more demanding of time and effort than the Professional.

Non-Commercial versus Commercial could be a choice of the publisher as well as a representation of the commercial potential of the product. For example, to a "pragmatist", a book could be a 'give-away' that supports some other aspect of their business and is thus 'non-commercial' but to an amateur the book may be 'non-commercial' because it doesn't have a market. My client's customer base had expectations about the commercial merits of their products, which often, did not match reality and this was important for my client's management to recognize.

Most of our customers in the lower-left quadrant would place themselves much further to the right on the commercial spectrum than reality would dictate. We also recognized that placing customers into the lower right quadrant could not be planned with a degree of accuracy and depended on the willingness of the client to promote and market their title aggressively. Realistically, we felt it was next to impossible to anticipate success in this quadrant.

In the upper-right quadrant, we would most likely find established authors, professional speakers and back-in-print titles. (We didn't look at profitability in this exercise but that would be an obvious additional task).

We then selected a spectrum of key attributes that we believed the publisher's customers valued: Price, speed, contact, quality, control, product sales, community, education, ease of use, reputation. Using these attributes (which would be confirmed by research later), we attempted to plot how our customers in each quadrant valued each attribute. Importantly, we understood these drivers to be 'valued' differently by the customers in each quadrant.

The resulting chart for Pragmatists plotted for the client and one of their competitors looked like this:

Pragmatists: This draft profile suggests key areas of differentiation from one player to the other. The competitor (black line) operates at the top of the chart for the drivers that their customers view as critical and give low consideration (limit time and effort) on those that do not and which don't support their strategy. In my clients case, we believed customers valued education highly but we also knew this aspect of the business cost a lot to deliver.

Dreamers:

We also looked at the 'dreamer' segment and chose a different competitor which had made a conscious decision to build sales volume with clients in that quadrant.

To support this strategy their revenue model was partially driven by unit sales (of the finished book), and they determined that many of their authors did not care about quality in the same way a traditional publisher/ author would. The competitor believed that ‘Dreamers’ were interested in receiving the end product as soon as possible.

In contrast, my client publisher sought to actively engage with the ‘dreamer’ to produce a better end product. Paradoxically, in the case of the competitor the ‘dreamer’ may remain blissfully ignorant but happy, while in the case of my client the customer may be dissatisfied because the process took longer, the interactions with staff were frustrating and the choices overwhelming. Same type of customer - "Dreamer" - but different approaches produce different customer experiences and expectations.

Strategy: As we discussed these 'straw-man' profiles we recognized that, for our business, there was a lot of revenue in delivering services to the lower left quadrant if we could get the business driver mix just right. Our challenge was to understand how to produce that revenue profitably. One obvious solution was to withdraw/eliminate costly services the author/customer is uninterested in. Over-delivering to this segment is pointless (which is a philosophy that one of our competitors practiced.)

We also recognized that classic business strategy suggests that companies endeavor to move their customers in the direction of the upper right quadrant. In the self-publishing market it would be virtually impossible to turn ‘Dreamers’ into ‘Moneyed’; however, it may be possible to move a small number into ‘lotto winners.’ The assumption would be that these authors have a product with a ‘hook’ that is somehow unique, and they are willing to work actively on the book to improve it and support it in the market. An added bonus would be one if the author was willing/able to publish additional titles. Rather than expend effort building marketing, promotion and editorial services (add-ons) for clients in the lower left, one potential strategy would be to expend this effort on the select titles/authors that showed promise in moving these titles/authors to the right along the commercial spectrum.

Using the framework we hashed out over an afternoon, our next step was to confirm the key customer drivers by segment (Professionals, Amateurs), to plot our position and our competitor's, and then identify our ideal profile. Once we defined this ideal profile, we would build a strategy focused on moving the company from the 'old' curve to the 'new' one.

In implementing this approach it is important to recognize that customers dictate and research is likely to identify a new driver and confirm that one or more suggested drivers are not important at all. Substitutions could occur and research should be tailored to uncovering these ‘unknown’ drivers not just confirming the ones the staff identifies.

Lastly, communicating the strategy internally is important and using a visual tool like this strategy map makes this easier. Once the ‘big-picture’ strategy is defined, then other tactical aspects of the strategy should be easier to define. This can be both a fun exercise and one critical to the future success of an organization.

Media Week 45: Money Issue

2009-11-07T10:48:00.003-05:00

Several publishers reported earnings this week.

Simon & Schuster (CBS)

Publishing revenues for the third quarter of 2009 increased 2% to $230.4 million from $225.0 million for the same prior-year period reflecting the timing of the release of titles. Best-selling titles in the third quarter of 2009 included Arguing with Idiots by Glenn Beck and Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger. In constant dollars, Publishing revenues increased 4% over the same prior-year period.

OIBDA for the third quarter of 2009 increased 10% to $28.4 million from $25.8 million for the same quarter last year and operating income increased 14% to $26.6 million from $23.4 million for the same prior-year period primarily due to revenue growth, partially offset by higher write-offs of advances for author royalties.

Hachette (Reuters) and The Bookseller:

Publishing revenues for the nine months to end September 2009 were €1,694m, up 8.3% on a reported basis and 8.8% on a like-for-like basis. Sales grew again in the third quarter of 2009, rising by 5.1% on a like-for-like basis. Other "main growth drivers" in the US included True Compass by Edward Kennedy, Say You're One of Them by Uwem Akpan, Lies My Mother Never Told Me by Kaylie Jones and Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers.

There was further sales growth in the United Kingdom but Spain reported a slight dip, mainly due to lower sales in education, Lagardère said. Lagardère said its publishing business faced "a particularly challenging fourth-quarter comparative", as the success of the Stephenie Meyer saga drove like-for-like sales growth to 6% in the fourth quarter of 2008.

ThomsonReuters (Press Release):

Glocer commented that 'the worse may be over'
Revenues from ongoing businesses were $3.2 billion, a decrease of 2% before currency and 4% after currency. IFRS revenues were down 4% after currency against the prior year period.

Underlying operating profit was up 3% to $711 million, with the related margin up 140 basis points, driven by the benefit of currency, integration-related savings and a continued commitment to strong cost management.

Adjusted earnings per share were $0.43 compared with $0.47 in the third quarter of 2008. The decline was due to higher integration-related spending, which is included in adjusted earnings but not underlying operating profit.

Borders announced that they would close the remaining mall stores by early 2010 (PR):

As part of Borders Group's ongoing strategy to right-size its Waldenbooks Specialty Retail segment and emerge with a smaller, more profitable mall chain in fiscal 2010, the retailer will close approximately 200 mall stores in January, leaving approximately 130 mall-based locations open. The list {of closures} is not final and is subject to change pending finalization of agreements over the coming weeks. Importantly, today's announcement regarding the mall business does not include Borders superstores or the company's seasonal mall kiosk business, which includes over 500 Day by Day Calendar Co. units, among other mall-based retail concepts.

Newscorp reported their results including improved results at Harpercollins (PR):

HarperCollins operating income of $20 million increased $17 million versus the same period a year ago due to higher sales at the Children's and General Books divisions, as well as reduced operating expenses from restructuring efforts in the prior year. First quarter results included strong sales of Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak, The Vampire Diaries by L.J. Smith and the paperback edition of The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski. During the quarter, HarperCollins had 47 books on The New York Times bestseller list, including four books that reached the number 1 spot.

Torstar the parent of Harlequin reported (PR):

Book Publishing operating profit was $22.9 million in the third quarter of 2009, up $4.2 million from $18.7 million in the third quarter of 2008, including $2.0 million from the impact of foreign exchange. Year to date, Book Publishing operating profit was $63.1 million, up $9.9 million from $53.2 million in the first nine months of 2008, including $5.1 million from the favourable impact of foreign exchange. Underlying results were up in North America Direct-To-Consumer and down in North America Retail for both the third quarter and year to date. Overseas was down in the quarter but up year to date.

K-12 Online Learning to exceed 10.5mm students by 2014

2009-11-05T10:25:00.002-05:00

A report recently conducted by is bullish on the growth of online learning suggesting that the number of K-12 students taking online courses will jump from 2mm currently to over 10.5mm by 2014. The results we discussed in a webinar and the full report is available for $4K (LINK):

The information was presented in a Webinar that coincided with a new report from Ambient Insight focusing on the growth of the electronic learning market (in terms of dollars spent on products and services) from 2009 to 2014. Titled "US Self-paced eLearning Market," the new report highlighted some of the dominant segments in online learning. Of the individual segments spotlighted in the research, healthcare was projected to see the most growth over the next five years. But K-12 and higher education growth followed in second and third position, respectively, for a combined academic projected growth percentage greater than that of healthcare. K-12 was projected to grow about 18 percent by 2014; higher education was projected to grow more than 8 percent. Healthcare was projected to grow a little less than 20 percent over the next five years.

In addition, I found these comments from M. Gozaydin from Turkey (in the comments section) to be quite interesting:

Wed, Nov 4, 2009 Muvaffak GOZAYDIN Turkey Dear Laura Believe me nobody in the world can afford brick and mortar school anymore. Even USA and even Switzerland. Brick and mortar requires building, land, heating, cooling, maintenance, administraters, water, electricity, cleaning, desks, chairs, papers, pencils , and TEACHERS ( usually they are not well trained and well paid )etc etc. ONLINE : you spend only once $ 1.000.000 per 100 session per year course. If it is accessed by 100.000 students per year, cost is only $ 10 per student. If you amortise it in 5 years cost is only $ 2 / student / year. And quality is perfect. Prepared and develeoped by the BEST teachers of the world in Washington DC. Cost of cheapest face to face education is $ 20.000 / year/ student in USA and almost anywhere in the world. If it is less than that, we do not call it school. It is a schack. How can you compete. Coming to socilising. You can have and even today you have, many clubs for sporting, musics, photography, sailing, fun clubs etc etc. They much cheaper than brick and mortar school. Plus you choose with whom you want to be. I try convince my American friends that GOOD ONLINE is 10 times better than face to face. Not commercial online. First thing USA should do 1.-Prepare a National curriculum in DC 2.- Have a contest for ONLINE COURSES Development 3. Choose 1 or 2 content to be used all schools in USA If we we in Turkey had done it so USA can do it. Best regards. By the way USA namely Caltech and Stanford educated me for 8 years. mgozaydin@hotmail.com

Wed, Nov 4, 2009 Muvaffak GOZAYDIN Turkey Dear Dave Nagel : Thanks for such a nice report. I think there is some small mistake in the Nacol anouncement. It says Preschool ONLINE will reach to 10 million or so. I am from Turkey. I work for online for the last 15 years even before many schools in the USA. Now we have in TURKEY, in Turkish and in English a National Curriculum ONLINE courses for 15.000.000 K12 students FREE FREE FREE. First in the world. I was the initiator of that project in 1995. All Turkey is covered by ADSL. Only shortage is now netbook for everybody. We have 1.500.000 somehow computers at schools + about 1.000.000 at homes of better of families. We are ready to export about ONLINE courses in English to USA. It is proven project. Only obstucle now is training of teacher for online. Students, believe me , even learn faster than their teachers. Our online program train the teachers in their subject as well. In the USA there are 55-56 million K12 students and only less than 1.000.000 students can take ONLINE Courses. Too bad. MAIN PROBLEM IN USA IS SCHOOL DISTRICTS MODEL. USA MUST HAVE A NATIONAL CURRICULUM MADE BY THE BEST EDUCATORS OF THE WORLD IN Washington DC Now we need ONLINE PRESCHOOL Content and KNOWHOW from you. Can you help me mgozaydin@hotmail.com of Turkey +90 - 532 - 291 96 76

Maggwire.com: The iTunes of Magazines?

2009-11-04T19:30:00.000-05:00

I've been going to monthly meetups for the NY Tech group for the past year and they are a lot of fun (I've mentioned one of two presentations shown there in the past year - Snooth is one). At these meetings start-up companies are given five minutes to present their company and answer questions from the audience. The response from the audience is generally positive; however, the audience are not afraid to challenge the presenters over some aspect of their offering and worse not ask any questions if the company has failed to inspire. Each monthly meeting has about 700 attendees.

Last night one of the presenting companies was Maggwire.com which was started earlier this year by a group of ex-bankers. The company is attempting to aggregate magazine content into one experience so that a user can subscribe via one service to multiple content sources. The user then pays a low monthly payment to access the content. Currently, the product is in beta but the founders said the monthly fee could be as low as $1.99 for a base package with an extra fee per additional content source. If this reminds you of cable television then you're on the right track. At Mywire.com where I have been spending a lot of my time in the past two years we have a similar model however our monthly fee is $4.99 and we plan to offer a wider variety of content and only content that is unavailable free.

Maggwire is currently hosting aggregated content the is 'in the public domain' which is a troubling way of putting it but the company is in discussions with all the media companies about forming what amounts to distribution deals for their content. Unless the publishers restrict availability to their content - raise pay walls for example - Maggwire and other companies like this are unlikely to gain traction with subscribers. There is just too much free content and consumers will be unhappy if they find content they think they are paying for on the open web. The convenience of one location for content is a benefit that will only go so far.

Digital Book World Conference in January

2009-11-04T10:02:00.003-05:00

There is an upcoming conference that seeks to break the mold of your traditional digital media conference and I hope you can join us in January at Digital Book World. Below is an update on our progress and a discount code you can use based on my role as an adviser to the conference.

We're gaining some tangible momentum as we close in on our early registration deadline. In the next 2+ months leading up to the January conference, we will continue to offer insightful content and resources that are relevant to both the specific topics covered in our conference sessions, as well as in areas not being specifically addressed in the program. Over the next two months, look to the conference web site for additional webinar topics and/or contributions of white papers, case studies, best practice tips, and op/eds that will help the publishing community navigate the tricky path of transforming our business models to profitably move into the digital era.

Our early registration deadline is November 20th and to thank you for your early support of Digital Book World 2010, you can register with the promo code DBWadvisor, and receive the lowest registration price available: $999/person. (Standard registration rate is $1295). This discount code is good until the November 20th deadline.

We also have some exciting news to share with you:

* Shiv Singh, Ad Age Media Maven and Global Social Media Lead for Razorfish has been confirmed as our keynote speaker.

* The Book Industry Study Group has signed on to be a Supporting Association, and we look forward to them debuting the results of their latest consumer research at the January event.

* New York University has just signed on as a supporting sponsor of Digital Book World, and we are working them to involve the next generation of publishing leaders in this event.

* Our first webinar, The Truth About eBooks: Devices, Formats and Pirates (Oh My!), drew nearly 900 registrants and 500 attendees. The slides from this insightful session may be found at the Digital Book World blog and on SlideShare.

Our second free webinar, Marketing in the Digital Age: Batteries Not Included, will take place on November 11 at 1:00p.m EST.

Christopher Walken Reads Lady Gaga

2009-11-02T16:23:00.002-05:00

And if you haven't seen Chicken with Pears it is worth a look:

Link PND

USS New York on The Hudson

2009-11-02T08:38:00.006-05:00

Revisiting Scan this Book

2009-11-02T05:19:00.001-05:00

I was clearing out my file draw this weekend - 'back in the day' I actually used to save print articles of interest - and I came across the Kevin Kelly article about the Google Book Scanning project which he wrote in May, 2006. Still an interesting read as he concludes (NYT):

Search opens up creations. It promotes the civic nature of publishing. Having searchable works is good for culture. It is so good, in fact, that we can now state a new covenant: Copyrights must be counterbalanced by copyduties. In exchange for public protection of a work's copies (what we call copyright), a creator has an obligation to allow that work to be searched. No search, no copyright. As a song, movie, novel or poem is searched, the potential connections it radiates seep into society in a much deeper way than the simple publication of a duplicated copy ever could.

We see this effect most clearly in science. Science is on a long-term campaign to bring all knowledge in the world into one vast, interconnected, footnoted, peer-reviewed web of facts. Independent facts, even those that make sense in their own world, are of little value to science. (The pseudo- and parasciences are nothing less, in fact, than small pools of knowledge that are not connected to the large network of science.) In this way, every new observation or bit of data brought into the web of science enhances the value of all other data points. In science, there is a natural duty to make what is known searchable. No one argues that scientists should be paid when someone finds or duplicates their results. Instead, we have devised other ways to compensate them for their vital work. They are rewarded for the degree that their work is cited, shared, linked and connected in their publications, which they do not own. They are financed with extremely short-term (20-year) patent monopolies for their ideas, short enough to truly inspire them to invent more, sooner. To a large degree, they make their living by giving away copies of their intellectual property in one fashion or another.

Media week 44: Web Retailing, Future of Reading, Semantic Search, ChickLit, E-Books

2009-10-31T21:11:00.008-04:00

Ex- Borders head of e-Commerce Kevin Ertell has some pointers for web retail (IR)

Because our sites and customers are complicated, figuring out how to solve for the gap between intention and action requires the analysis of millions of variables, which can include a broad range of possibilities like how fast page content loads and the size and location of Buy buttons. For example, when our analysis at Borders highlighted issues with search, we followed up with a question about what would make our site search more useful. We found that using words rather than icons for some search results display options, like “cover view” or “list view,” made a significant difference in customers’ successful use of our search results.

Tom Peters at Library Journal shares some thoughts on the Future of Reading (LJ):

Reading always has been multisensory. The look, feel, smell, and heft of a printed book all contribute to the overall experience of reading. Reading probably will become more sensational throughout this century, as multimedia information objects become intertwined into digital texts. While visual reading (in private, in a comfy chair) may be considered by many to be the platonic ideal of reading, perhaps the growth areas of reading in this century will rely on other senses. The eyes don't have it. Tactile reading, such as Braille, and auditory reading of audiobooks already have achieved prominence—Braille among the blind and audiobooks throughout the general population—and olfactory reading, drawing on our sense of smell, and gustatory reading, based on our sense of taste, may not be outlandishly impossible. Digesting a good book could become literal. Romance writer Jude Deveraux already has embraced these ideas. As Motoko Rich writes in the New York Times (9/30/09), “Ms. Deveraux said she envisioned new versions of books enhanced by music or even perfume. 'I'd like to use all the senses,' she said.”
.....
Reports of the death of reading are premature. Readers are resilient and inventive. What worries me is not so much that reading will become an attenuated, marginalized field of practice but that the developmental paths of librarianship and reading will diverge in the 21st century. We may wander off from our power base, or it will evolve away from us.

Information Today looks at a recent implementation of semantic search at LexisNexis (IT):

LexisNexis has seriously addressed this "black box" perception of semantic search. Users enter search input text of up to 32,000 characters-perhaps substantial content of a target patent document. That input can be searched immediately (feeling lucky?), a process that may take several minutes, or it can be sent for semantic analysis prior to carrying out the search. The technology analyzes input sentences or search terms and creates a set of 20 weighted search terms presented as a "QueryCloud" for review and editing by the searcher. Terms can be replaced with alternative terms, and weighting may be adjusted from 4 for a mandatory concept in the search results; 3, 2, and 1 for varied prominence in the search results; 0 for an ignored concept; to -1 for a concept prohibited in search results. When the user is satisfied with the search concepts and weighting, the semantic search is conducted with the search statement corresponding to the terms of the QueryCloud.

Interesting book review by Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker on a book by Cass Sunstein regarding how interests align in media (TNY)

And what holds true for the news sites is even more so for the blogosphere, where it’s possible to spend hours surfing without ever entering new waters. Conservative blogs like Power Line almost always direct visitors to other conservative blogs, like No Left Turns, while liberal blogs like Daily Kos guide them to others that are also liberal, like Firedoglake. A study of the twenty most-visited blogs in each camp in the months leading up to the 2004 Presidential election found that more than eighty-five per cent of their links were to other blogs with similar politics. When the study’s authors charted the links in graphic form, they came up with a picture of non-interaction—a dense scribble on one side, a dense scribble on the other, and only the thinnest strands connecting the two. In 2006, Sunstein performed his own study of fifty political sites. He found that more than four-fifths linked to like-minded sites but only a third linked to sites with an opposing viewpoint. Moreover, many of the links to the opposing side’s sites were offered only to illustrate how “dangerous, dumb, or contemptible the views of the adversary really are.”

Traveling for Books: Rare Books Don’t Always Live in Glass Cases (NYT):

But these books are not just for scholars. They are also on view for the average visitor, albeit one with a decided interest in the sciences who makes a pilgrimage to western Missouri, where the sprawling red-brick library sits majestically on a 14-acre urban arboretum just a five-minute walk from Kansas City’s Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.
The Linda Hall is among dozens of libraries across the United States that house dazzling collections and often mount eccentric exhibitions but largely remain unfamiliar to the public.
“What is fun is to become aware of these marvelous libraries that, though open to the public, are not well known and are filled with wonderful treasures,” said Robert S. Pirie, a prominent book collector who lives in Manhattan and has his own library of several thousand volumes.

An e-Book cheat sheet listing all (I think) the features of current e-Books (DealNews)

DeepDyve announces rental model for scientific research materials (DD):

But DeepDyve sees their service as reaching to a unique potential user groups that have generally been underserved by academic publishers including individual knowledge workers and small businesses. Indeed, the recent study of small and medium UK enterprises on their uses and desires for the professional and academic literature revealed that the price per article charged by many publishers was deemed excessive, considering that users can’t preview the full-text before purchase and that abstracts were often “uninformative or misleading,” requiring potential readers to “purchase blind.” The rental model reduces the economic risk to the paying reader.

E-books helping surge in UK library members (Telegraph):

Fiona Marriott, at Luton Libraries, said: "In recent weeks the number of ebook downloads has been increasing fast, and there are people emailing us from all over the country and even abroad asking if they can join as members online."

She said there had been a sharp increase in members, as a result, with more than 250 new users signing up, even though only local residents could join the service. Other librarians agreed more people had become members since e-books became available, though no official figures are yet available.

Chick Lit for the weight challenged seems to be a developing phenom (Guardian):

"This new genre is proof that women are finally learning to love each other and themselves – warts and all. Chick lit is finally holding a real mirror up to its readers, and they can't get enough of it."
A slew of books in which the protagonist is not just "curvy" or "voluptuous" but is actually "fat" are about to hit the bookshops. As well as The Pi**ed Off Parents Club, there is The Wife's Tale by Lori Lansens, bestselling author of The Girls, which was the Richard & Judy Best Read of the Year in 2006 and a finalist for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction.
"It's classic wish-fulfilment: readers want to read about women learning to love themselves whatever their weight, because then they don't have to go through that pesky world of dieting themselves. There's a big market of people who want to hear that message," said Julia Llewellyn, author of Love Nest, to be published in February by Penguin, in which one of the central characters is overweight.

John le Carré: A man of great intelligence The celebrated author and former spy's popular books display a masterly understanding of moral complexity. His recent decision to switch publishing houses should see them firmly esconced as modern classics. (Guardian):

Like his early hero, Graham Greene, le Carré is at home in the company of diplomats and adventurers, at high tables and low dives. In his best, and most morally complex, work, he is acutely sensitive to thwarted idealism and human failing. He is married to Jane, with whom he has a son. His first marriage to Ann Sharp, which produced three children, did not long survive his change of profession in 1964. "I've had an untidy love life," he said a few years back, "and am now settled."

And some more about why he may have moved from Hodder (Guardian)

Media week 43: Reviews, Kindle, Celebrity Authors, Jeff Archer, Pearson, Nabokov

2009-10-25T21:46:00.005-04:00

(I know I have been remiss in posting this week - I hate it when work intrudes). Most of these have not appeared on the twitter (by me at least).

Sir Peter Stothard, Editor of the Times Literary Supplement, visits Princeton for a discussion on book reviews (TLS):

I brought some figures to the meeting, prepared in London by our Managing Editor and writer on contemporary poetry, Robert Potts, assisted, I should say, by some numerate summer interns. The team had taken for analysis a twelve month period to April this year and four other loosely comparative titles, the New York Times section, the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books and The Guardian.
These showed that of the 1832 books reviewed by the TLS in this time, 73 per cent were not reviewed by any of the other publications, 20 per cent were reviewed by one other, 5.6 per cent by two, one per cent by three - and that only seven books were reviewed by all five papers. I had not intended to publish these, being no statistician myself and ever nervous of the ill use that such numbers can be put. But one of our hosts was keen that I should - and to hosts as generous as those here it would be ungracious to say no. So there they are.

The small number of books reviewed by all was a surprise. Probably it would benefit from deeper appraisal. Seven shared titles is a strong counter to those who accuse book reviewers of a herd mentality to all review the same things. It would suggest,however, that there may be too little acceptance of a common canon, too little confident gate-keeping. Those newspaper owners and editors who cut back on book coverage might be more impressed if there were greater agreement on what is good.

I may have commented on this one before, nevertheless here is commentary on a book about Evelyn Waugh and the background to Brideshead Revisited (TLS):

This is particularly unfortunate because the reader’s faith in Byrne’s reliability is undermined by a number of errors and misapprehensions in her text. She claims that there was no Baedeker for Berlin in 1931 (an English-language edition, frequently revised, had been available since 1903); believes the Lord Chamberlain controlled film censorship; and imagines “crabs” to be “a sexual disease” rather than an infestation of lice. Noël Coward was not, as she states, a Roman Catholic, and Forthampton Court was the family home of Henry Green, not of his “in-laws”. More worrying, her grasp of Waugh’s work is not always as sure as it ought to be. She repeatedly describes the Arts and Crafts chapels of both Madresfield Court and Brideshead Castle as “art deco”, and refers to the Flytes’ “startling beauty (like faces carved out of Aztec stone)” – an image inexpertly appropriated from the novel’s description of Sebastian’s less attractive older brother who has “the Flyte face, carved by an Aztec”. Paul Pennyfeather’s mistress in Decline and Fall, Margot Beste-Chetwynde, who is at least ten years his senior, is referred to as “the upper-class girl he adores”, and Apthorpe in the Sword of Honour trilogy is inexplicably bracketed with Trimmer and Brideshead’s Hooper as “the symbol of the new age of the common man – half-educated, blasé, an insensitive bore”.
Though clearly entranced by Waugh’s world, Byrne is not entirely at home in it, and her book contains some jarring failures of register.

The Times takes a look at Amazon's European strategy for the Kindle and is frustrated (TimesOnline):

Why it is so hard for Amazon to price its product locally, and at least ship a load to the UK remains a bit of a mystery. Apple seems to manage all right, selling iPods for pounds, and a conversation with Amazon’s Steve Kessel, the company’s senior vice president of Kindle business, leaves the caller none the wiser. He simply repeats how Amazon is focused on a “great customer experience” — indeed — and how it is a major achievement to create a device that can download electronic books and newspapers over the air in 100 countries without any cost to the Kindle owner in terms of phone bills. The last point is fair enough, but it doesn’t really absolve Amazon the responsibility of trying to flog the Kindle on its UK website, or even, dare one say it, Tesco, where it might just attract a few more owners. But perhaps Amazon is desperate to cut costs.

10,000 less words probably makes this more appealing: Jeff Archer rewrites Kane and Able. In the interests of full disclosure, I did consume this in the summer of 1979 sitting by the pool and importantly, I was entertained. (Telegraph)

To celebrate the milestone, Archer has returned to the novel, and substantially re-written it. He has explained that, with the benefit of 30 years’ experience in the writing game, he can see that the pacing and prose needed tightening. This “re-crafting” of the book took him nine months and involved cutting nearly 10,000 words. He has switched around the order of chapters, but is keen to make it clear that the plot remains exactly the same.

I'm a celebrity get me a book deal! Controversy over the 'success' of Katie Price et al (Telegraph):

Even before La Plante got to the microphone, McCutcheon’s appearance had made our toes curl. Alan Davis, the host for the evening, asked her how she had found the experience of writing her novel. She said something like: “Yeah, it were great.”

They do this, you see. When asked in interviews how they managed to find the time, what with their busy schedule of OK! spreads and premieres, these celebrities — Sharon Osbourne, Coleen Nolan and Cheryl Cole are also bringing out novels — will happily babble on about how they had to discipline themselves to write the customary 1,000 words a day. As if. The novel, or rather the literary novel, is an art form, and writing one requires a degree of creativity, intellectual engagement and, yes, discipline, with a writer often spending many soul-searching years getting it right.

Pearson upgrades forecasts after boost to education (Telegraph)

Dame Marjorie Scardino, chief executive, said: "We began 2009 in a cautious mood, wary of the impact of the global economic crisis. We have now seen enough of it to say that, though no part of Pearson has been untouched, the company as a whole has proved its strength."

The final twist in Nabokov's untold story (Guardian):

Vladimir Nabokov was one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. Now, 30 years after his death, his last novel is finally to be published. But should it be? On the eve of his death, fearing it was imperfect, he instructed his wife to destroy the manuscript, sparking a fierce controversy that embroiled family, friends and the literary establishment, writes Robert McCrum

Ian Rankin goes bar hoping in Edinburgh (Guardian):

Edinburgh has always seemed to me a furtive place. Throughout history it has made its money from invisible industries such as banking and insurance. And while the city has been known to celebrate its success stories (the Scott Monument) and flag up folly (the unfinished "Parthenon" on Calton Hill), it is not a place where people flaunt their talents. You don't see many Ferraris – the wealth sits quietly behind the New Town's thick Georgian walls.
It was once called a city of "public probity and private vice" and this still rings true, though the "probity" tag has lost some lustre since the near-collapse of Royal Bank of Scotland, one of the city's biggest employers. But visitors to Edinburgh, if they stick to the main tourist routes, will be seeing only the city's most public side. Travel just a little further afield and you can widen your appreciation. That's why, on a blustery day, I set out from the Oxford Bar for a walk

Images of Afghanistan

2009-10-19T17:30:00.000-04:00

The NY Times found some images from Kabul sent in by journalists - not photographers -taken in the 60-70s. (NYT)

Mr. Salisbury’s evocative and smartly composed photos, taken in and around Kabul in 1961, were among the surprising images that greeted Darcy Eveleigh, a Times photo editor, as she peered into old file cabinets in the photo archive to find illustrations for Elisabeth Bumiller’s article on Afghanistan before 1978 in the Week in Review.
“When I opened up the folders, I was floored,” she said. In contact sheet after contact sheet, print after print, Afghanistan’s golden era of stability had been recorded for The Times by staff members better known for their bylines as correspondents: A. M. Rosenthal, Ralph Blumenthal and William Borders among them.

The PND archive is also throwing up some interesting images - although the photographer in this case wasn't particularly skilled. (Flickr)

Media Week 42: GBS Frankfurt Panel, Libreka, FTC

2009-10-18T08:16:00.001-04:00

In the waning Friday of the Frankfurt bookfair there was a contentious, apparently somewhat 'anti-google' discussion of the Google Book Settlement as reported by Richard Nash on the fair's blog:

The impact of the Google Book Settlement, in whatever form it might eventually take, promised to be one of the most controversial panels at this year’s Fair and the participants, especially Prof. Roland Reuss, author of the Heidelberg Appeal, a vehement critique of the Google scanning project, did not disappoint. He denounced as “garbage of hysterical propaganda” the claims by Google that they were enhancing access, maintain that “if you want to finance production, you have to shelter the ones who produce,” not those that consume, and that moreover any student who is completely dependent on the Internet for “must be stupid.”
....
Reuss was largely unmoved. “It has always been possible for scholars to get the information,” he said, “since the 5th century.” He believes that the focus on access is inappropriate, “fetishistic,” and that the true issue with scholarship is to produce, not to access.

Reuss' comments seemed to be as much against the internet as against the issue of copyright, nevertheless there appeared to be some in the audience who applauded his commentary. The panel discussion sits neatly as a bookend to Chancellor Merkel's per-Frankfurt oration in the perils of the Google Book Settlement and the institution of German copyright. Curiously not a subject I would have expected a head of state to draw attention to but then perhaps the subject was thematic with respect to the opening of the fair.

Richard noted the German Bookseller and Publisher supported site Libreka which was launched three (possibly four) years ago (PND) to great fan fair and has managed to amass 120,000 books available for full-text search. Libreka was created to provide a platform for German published full-text content and continues to announce content and publisher deals. Through the significant discussion of Merkel's comments - where they valid, where they informed for example, no one mentioned Libreka which speaks to its' irrelevance and lack of traction. A review of Libreka's web traffic report seems to support the last point. The Börsenverein is both the operator of the Frankfurt bookfair and the 'publisher' of Libreka and perhaps this relationship suggests a more practical motivation for Merkel's copyright comments.

The Interactive Ad Bureau has asked the FTC to rescind their recent statement on blogger disclosure statements saying (Reuters),

"What concerns us the most in these revisions is that the Internet, the cheapest, most widely accessible communications medium ever invented, would have less freedom than other media," said Mr. Rothenberg, "These revisions are punitive to the online world and unfairly distinguish between the same speech, based on the medium in which it is delivered. The practices have long been afforded strong First Amendment protections in traditional media outlets, but the Commission is saying that the same speech deserves fewer Constitutional protections online. I urge the Commission to retract the current set of Guides and to commence a fair and open process in order to develop a roadmap by which responsible online actors can engage with consumers and continue to provide the invaluable content and services that have so transformed people`s lives."

Google launched or re-launched their on-line bookstore that will initially contain 500,000 titles. Some commentators have gone so far as to suggest that Amazon.com - absurdly - is smoke. (Guardian):

Editions is set to launch in the first half of 2010, potentially giving readers in America and Europe access to around half a million titles including best-sellers and back catalogue books. Crucially, the store will be compatible with a number of devices - including mobile phones, computers and ebook readers - that could allow it to market services to millions of people worldwide.
Under Google's plans, readers will be able to download texts straight from Google Books website, or from the websites of book retailers or directly from publishers who choose to work with the Silicon Valley company. Executives said they are targeting partnerships with major retailers such as WH Smith and Blackwell - many of which already have existing partnerships with the site.

Bookriff and Chunks.

2009-10-18T07:14:00.002-04:00

Richard Nash on the Frankfurt Blog notes a new product that enables chunking of content:

Still in beta is Bookriff—it was not presented in the Book Fair programming, but the company principal Mark Scott was meeting with publishers to establish partnerships and I stopped by to talk to him. Effectively Bookriff allows publishers to upload chunks of content, most likely chapters and short stories, to a database. A users can then search the site for interesting chunks and create her own anthology which can then be submitted automatically to a print on demand facility. So it is a make-your-own-book service, perfect for travel books where you only need to buy those chapters you want for your itinerary, permitting the creation of custom readers for academic coursework, allowing non-profits to create premium products. (Publishers set their own licensing fees…)

Fairey Lied About Origin of Obama Photo

2009-10-17T17:48:00.005-04:00

A battle that had all the elements of a David vs. Goliath grudge match, has ended in ignominy as Shep Fairey has had to admit that it was the AP photo that he used for the iconic Barack Obama poster Hope. This is an appalling circumstance that should never have reached this point: AP was vilified by fair use advocates for stomping on the little creative guy.

Obviously, the outcome doesn't address any fair use question and AP may be accused of other misdemeanors but to paraphrase the man: Where do they go to get their reputation back? (NYT)

Mr. Fairey admitted that in the initial months after the suit and countersuit were filed, he destroyed evidence and created false documents to cover up the real source. He said he had initially believed that The A.P was wrong about which photo he used, but later realized the agency was right.
“In an attempt to conceal my mistake, I submitted false images and deleted other images,” Mr. Fairey said in a statement, released on his Web site. “I sincerely apologize for my lapse in judgment, and I take full responsibility for my actions, which were mine alone.”
Mr. Fairey’s lawyers said they intended to withdraw when he could find new counsel.

Same Day Delivery on Sales Tax

2009-10-15T14:56:00.004-04:00

Amazon.com is rolling out same day delivery in select cities for orders placed between 1oam and 1pm (NYTimes) As B&N steps up its online and e-Reader activities, Amazon is not standing in place and looks to be offering this service to counter one of the primary benefits that the bricks and mortar bookseller retains. But Amazon has also been battling states over the collection of sales tax and has pulled operations out of states that have sought to require them to collect sales tax. One of those battleground states has been New York and the NY attorney general has been looking into this matter with respect to Amazon in particular. In reaction Amazon began closing their affiliate relationships in the state to mitigate any argument that they had nexus in the state requiring them to collect state tax. As an internet retailer, Amazon has never agreed that they should collect sales taxes if they don't have substantial operations in a particular state but as of August they appear to have been collecting sales tax in New York.

This announcement could have more implications than just same day delivery.

LATimes

Front Page News: Libraries To Kill Trade*

2009-10-15T03:41:00.000-04:00

Motoko Rich (NYTimes) takes a look at eBook lending in libraries without discovering anything particularly new - at least to anyone with even a passing interest in the topic. While the article does note Overdrive and Netlibrary have been addressing the market, Rich suggests publishers have no business model and specifically mentions S&S and Macmillan as companies that refuse to sell their eBook titles into the library market. Her assertion that libraries "across the country" are filling their "shelves" with eBooks would seem to contradict the suggestion that publishers are holding back their titles because they "have not found a business model that works for us and our authors" (according to S&S). But addressing that contradiction is less interesting than the idea that libraries are havens for free-loaders who will eventually tear the trade publishing industry asunder.

Certainly holding back your eBook titles is not a strategy. In contrast, Overdrive and Netlibrary both have business models that have seen uptake from large trade publishers. In the future, these models may or may not facilitate eBooks being loaned en mass by libraries (though I am by no means suggesting that these models, as they currently exist, are ideally suited to the time when eBooks become a significant segment of the market); but today they represent working models for which publishers have signed up. Libraries already purchase vast amounts of eContent (serials, databases, etc.) licensed by publishers, the majority of whom had legacy print businesses. Some of these same publishers also make their educational and sci/tech book titles available electronically. Why, then, has the professional and scientific publishing community been able to build multi-million dollar-eContent businesses in the library market while trade publishers can't find a business model?

The sci/tech model may not be directly adaptable to trade, but that segment of the industry underwent its own experimentation process as its business model matured. You won't get from Rich a primer on how the trade segment might effect a similar transition; instead, we're offered only a passing reference to the academic segments' subscription models--but this is only to enforce the notion that access is experimental and limited. In conclusion, we're left to believe that libraries represent a challenge to the whole notion of paid content and will eventually erode the trade publishing model: "In libraries, readers are attracted to free material," she avers, and "buying doesn't make sense" says a library patron.

This article doesn't do anyone any favors, casting library patrons as free-loaders and assuming trade publishers are bereft of innovative ideas for addressing the library market. Neither is an accurate reflection of the relationship across the spectrum of libraries and publishers.

* Note: The article was on the front page of the Times...

Take all of Springer

2009-10-14T17:37:00.002-04:00

Springer CEO Derk Hannk is quoted by Reuters suggesting the entire company is in play (Reuters)

The private equity firms Candover (CDI.L) and Cinven [CINV.UL], the owners of German academic publisher Springer Science and Business Media, are considering a full sale of the company, Chief Executive Derk Hannk said on Wednesday.
"For a while we were considered underleveraged, now we are considered overleveraged ... a straight sale is the preferred option," Hannk told Reuters on the sidelines of the Frankfurt Book Fair on Wednesday.

"We are owned by private equity and they have had a very good run for their investment for five, six years," he said, adding it may be time for new equity.