Frankfurt: Selections from the Show Dailies

Highlights from the show Dailies:

PW Show Daily October 10th:

Interview with James Daunt of Waterstones (Page 12)

So is Daunt’s new boss happy with the way things are going? The Managing Director in whose steady hands so much rests points out that Alexander Mamut, a long-time customer of Daunt Books, lives in Moscow and isn’t here that much, but yes, he’s pleased. Was it a big decision to step back from the chain he founded and had so lovingly created to take on the nightmare that was Waterstones? He turns slightly mischievous. “Waterstones was about to disappear and I don’t think that was going to be great for the British book trade. I’m not sure how Daunt Books was going to survive in that environment. Random House doesn’t run a warehouse to supply the likes of Daunts; it’s to supply Waterstones. Where would we have been a year on from there being no Waterstones? I don’t know.” A thought bubble seems to hang over Daunt’s head. “Waterstones not being there was going to be extremely damaging to our ecosystem. A world of supermarkets and online would have been a pretty bleak one. Independents would have found it very hard to carry on. The writing was on the wall for a very long time. Somebody had to do something.”

Doug Wright on the Future of Content Delivery (Page 34):

Professional networks are increasingly being used to provide services that give real value to the community and improve engagement, alongside content delivery. Examples of this credentialed, peer-to-peer approach include the Researcher Exchange from GSE Research. It has the facility for members to comment on journal content via the open peer-review model or to ask questions of their peers ;and it enables corporations to find expert consultants, and authors to find collaborators, via a sophisticated author search whereby a user can pinpoint experts within a particular field within a particular organisation

Cory Doctorow urges publishers to support ideas such as the Humble eBook Bundle (Page 38)

Yet, one of the biggest surprises to me in curating the HumbleEbook Bundle has been some publishers’ unwillingness to experiment with just one or two DRM-free titles in a new kind of promotion that carries a proven track record of success in a related field.I understand the industry is concerned that the perceived value of an ebook is a matter of credit and psychology, and that no one among the Big Six American houses wants the “fair price” for an ebook to drop. But I also don’t think they can do much about this: there are, by orders of magnitude, more amateur and independent ebooks entering the marketplace than the Big Six produce, and many of them are at low price points. At the same time, the Humble Indie Bundles have a record of enticing people to pay more, on average, than they would pay for the unbundled items. Sure, some people pay nothing. But why not experiment? Isn’t the idea of a successful business to make as much profit as possible; not as much profit as possible from each separate customer

PW Show Daily October 11th:

Michael Bhaskar: Working Together - Digitally (Page 8)

Here’s the rub. Digital is difficult and expensive. Simply to compete with all the other digital media producers out there means constantly raising the bar. We are in a kind of functionality and design arms race, where coming out with what wowed people last week bores them the next. You have to constantly push the envelope and you have to do this in a blizzard of competition in an environment of colossal risk, where abject failure is worryingly common. You are dealing with high upfront costs, at best uncertain demand, unstable, usually low pricing necessitating a high volume of sales and much control ceded to giant technology corporations. Yes, it’s like books–only more so.

Nikko Pfund - A Billion Dollar Process (Page 10):

PW:
Speaking of OSO, you’ve now expanded it into University PressScholarship Online (UPSO), and inked deals with publishers, including major presses such as California and Chicago. What is it like to be sharing your platform with publishers who are technically competitors?
NP:
It has been far more natural and uncomplicated than we’d dared hope. It helps that t he university press world is one of mutual support and commonality of purpose. Ultimately, I think the benefits to the scholarly and the university press community–in terms of access, learning, collaborating with other mission-driven not-for-profits, and tackling some challenges together as a community–far outweigh any competitive advantages that may be derived from our platform. So I don’t fret about the competitive aspect of UPSO at all. Technology is important, but university presses have strong personalities

Making Copyright Work in a Digital Age (Page 22)

The aim of the LCC is that through interoperability, the use of existing open standards (such as the International Standard Text Identifier and the International Standard Name Identifier , and commonality in the area of rights management, to produce a cross-media framework for a standards-based communications infra-structure that will enable businesses and individuals to man-age and communicate their rights more effectively online. The idea is for an automated rights clearance system in which content from all sectors is tagged and can be identified with a single click. The system would then allow users to request permission for specific uses and access the appropriate licences.

Open Access or Open Season (Page 46)

The burning question for publishers is how this greater open access might be achieved without causing the collapse of the publishing industry. One of the options considered by the Finch committee was the mandatory across-the-board introduction of the Green Delayed Access model after a six-month embargo, regardless of the discipline served by the journal or its estimated half-life. The Publishers Association and the Association of Learned, Professional and Society Publishers together commissioned a piece of work to try to ascertain what the likely effect of this would be on academic journals subscriptions (available at www.publishingresearch.net); its headline findings are displayed in the graphs.

PW Show Daily October 12:

Prepare for the Subscription Economy (Page 28)

We talk about data a lot in publishing: “Data is the New Oil” was the mantra of the BICNew Trends Summer Seminar in London. But when print publishers talk about data, theyare talking about product data: metadata. And metadata is crucial to the supply chain. But what we have missed is that when t he rest of the world talks about data, they are talking about “big data”: personal data, customer data, usage data, transactional data etc. They are talking about using data to reach and be relevant to individuals. We need to wake up to this; and when we do we are going to wake up to an unholy mess in our back offices. We already find it difficult enough to use data well at re-seller level (not customer or use level) let alone monetizing on a use basis (unless it is via an aggregator saving us the pain of ever getting to grips with new transactional business models). And it is this that makes Zuora (used by Pearson, by the way) so fascinating to me. They have understood that the internet has changed the whole context and therefore the fundamental basis of commercial transactions.

Publishing Perspectives:

E-Books Offer Silver Lining for Australians:

And all this despite the Fifty Shades of Grey dividend: the three books in the trilogy have sold 2 million copies this year, or over 5% of all sales. Without E. L. James’ enlivening of Australian marital life, volume sales would have been down by over 15%.
Two tough years back-to-back has created casualties. Last month, one of Australia’s hitherto most dynamic trade publishers, Murdoch Books, finally gave up the fight and has been bought by the largest local publisher, Allen & Unwin, with a large number of jobs lost. Specialist R&R Publications has gone into liquidation, and Melbourne University Publishing posted a $2.1 million loss. Sales forces and lists are being trimmed, while one of Australia’s two remaining book printers, OPUS Group (which missed out on printing Fifty Shades), is also downsizing after posting large losses. Adding to the gloom, major educational bookseller Education Works has gone into liquidation following an unsuccessful brush with venture capitalism.

IPA’s Global Ranking of Publishing Markets—US, China on Top

B&N in Frankfurt: We Come in Peace

Why no B&N branding? Because their team was there representing an entirely new company, Nook Media, armed with $300 million from Microsoft and another $305 million committed over the next several years.
“Microsoft?” you say, “I thought they were dead, doomed to second-tier status by Apple.” Yes, well, as we noted last week, users of Microsoft devices are the most active buyers of book content on mobile devices, so it would make sense that they would invest in the book business (after, it must be noted, killing off their own book digitization project several years ago).

Not for Nothing - PW and Publishing Perspectives make it purposefully difficult to collect, cite and link to this content. Well done!

MediaWeek (Vol 5, No 43): McGraw Hill, Springer, Hilary Mantel, Amazon, Metadata +More

The tires are being kicked at McGraw Hill Education by a predictable group of private equity players (Cengage is backed by Apax) but the asking price looks steep (Reuters):

McGraw-Hill Companies Inc's (MHP.N) education unit is expected to draw final bids from private equity firms Bain Capital and Apollo Global Management (APO.N) as well as rival Cengage Learning Inc, in a deal that could fetch around $3 billion, several people familiar with the matter said.

Cengage, the No. 2 U.S. college textbook publisher, and the two private equity firms are working on final offers for McGraw-Hill Education, the world's second-largest education company by sales, with the bids due later in October, the people said.

McGraw-Hill, which is running the auction as an alternative to its planned spin-off of the business, wants to get more than $3 billion and could still decide against a sale if the bids fail to meet its price expectations, the people said this week.

Note - If you read my post this week about Pearson the Apollo Group owns for profit University of Phoenix making me some kind of fortune teller.

Journals publisher Springer is up for a recapitalization based on reports from Reuters:

The company has performed well and earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) have risen to around 330 million euros, bankers said, from 310 million in 2011, which was quoted on EQT's website.
Although there is no urgency for the company to do anything as its debt does not mature until between 2015 and 2017, conditions in Europe's leveraged loan market are such that it could be good time to do an opportunistic deal.
There have been a number of such deals recently as banks and private equity firms seek to make money and take advantage of stronger market conditions, after a lack of deal activity over the summer, including dividend recapitalisations by the RAC and Formula One.

Hilary Mantel interviewed in The New Statesman:

Mantel wondered if she was being too demanding. But then she thought that to adjust her style in any way would be not only a loss, but patronising (“You simply cannot run remedial classes for people on the page”). Some will be lost along the way, but she doesn’t mind. “It makes me think that some readers read a book as if it were an instruction manual, expecting to understand everything first time, but of course when you write, you put into every sentence an overflow of meaning, and you create in every sentence as many resonances and double meanings and ambiguities as you can possibly pack in there, so that people can read it again and get something new each time.”

She can sound arrogant, Mantel, assured of her abilities and candid about them in a way that seems peculiarly un-English. But even the arrogance is purposeful. It is one of her pieces of advice to young authors: cultivate confidence, have no shame in being bullish about your ideas and your abilities. She was patronised for years by male critics who deemed her work domestic and provincial (one, writing about A Place of Greater Safety – the French 800-pager – dwelt on a brief mention of wallpaper). So she makes no apologies for her self-belief.
...

After all the research, the reading, the note-taking, the indexing, the filing and refiling, it is a question of tuning in. Alison, she says, is how she would have turned out if she hadn’t had an education – not necessarily a medium, but not far off, someone whose brain hadn’t been trained, and so whose only (but consi­derable) powers were those of instinct, of sensing, of awareness. Mantel describes herself as “skinless”. She feels everything: presences, ghosts, memories. Cromwell is researched, constructed and written, but he is also channelled. Occupying his mind is pleasurable. He is cool, all-seeing, almost super-heroic in his powers to anticipate and manipulate. (Craig thinks Mantel made the mistake of falling in love with her leading man and that her version of Cromwell is psychologically implausible for a man we know tortured people.) Mantel relishes his low heart rate, the nerveless approach to life, a mental state unbogged by rumination. She says that when she began writing Wolf Hall, first entering this mind, she felt physically robust in a way she hadn’t for years.

Amazon chief Jeff Bezos was on a promo tour in the UK this week and was interviewed in The Telegraph:

He says the business quickly realised that if they wanted to make ebooks work, they needed to make hardware. Eight years later, the Kindle is into its fifth generation. The latest, film and music playing, multimedia tablet takes on Apple’s iPad and is, on pre-orders alone, the site's number one best seller.

Bezos, though, doesn’t want to take on Apple at their own game. “Proud as I am of the hardware we don’t want to build gadgets, we want to build services,” he says. “I think of it as a service and one of the key elements of the service is the quality of the hardware. But we’re not trying to make money on the hardware – the hardware is basically sold at breakeven and then we have a continuing relationship with the customer. We hope to make money on the services they buy afterwards.”

And make money they do, but Amazon is still not Apple’s size. Would Bezos like it to be? “Even though this device is only £159, in some ways it's better than a £329 iPad – way better wifi, the iPad only has mono sound and the Kindle bookstore is by far the best electronic bookstore in the world.”

Colin Robinson writing in the Guardian suggests ten ways publishing can help itself. Extra points if you can find anything either new in this list (Guardian):

This year, on the face of things, it's been business as usual at the Frankfurt book fair, with some 7,500 exhibitors setting up shop in the gleaming white Messe. But scratch beneath the surface and a tangible unease about the future of the industry is evident: book sales are stagnating, profit margins are being squeezed by higher discounts and falling prices, and the distribution of book buyers is ever more polarised between record-shattering bestsellers and an ocean of titles with tiny readerships. The mid-list, where the unknown writer or new idea can spring to prominence, is progressively being hollowed out. This is bad news not just for publishing but for the culture at large.

Three magazine publisher's experience with Apple's Newsstand (Journalism UK)

When Goldsmith delivered presentations on Newsstand at publishing conferences a year ago, he said he would be asked a common question.  "The first question from the audience would be 'aren't you cannibalising your own sales?' And that question would come from our editors as well."  "But 80 per cent of sales are overseas, 90 per cent of customers are new to the brand." And 40 per cent of all of sales are for subscriptions. "That's brilliant, because it is offsetting that sad decline in print.
It is a similar story for Conde Nast. "We are reaching a new audience, we are able to target them in new ways, we are able to market to them in new ways, it's a pretty exciting new development for us," Read said. "It means that the overall circulations of our magazines in these particular instances are growing very healthily so that we are seeing very big increases in circulation with titles such as Wired and GQ." Overseas sales vary from title to title, Read added, "A magazine like Vanity Fair will see quite a big proportion of its iPad sales coming from overseas, something like 60 to 70 per cent will be international, but that applies to print as well.

Metadata on Stage at Frankfurt reported by Publisher's Weekly:

Indeed this is the thrust of their exchange—the ever-increasing numbers of books and the faulty metadata being circulated about them—over the next half hour. The transition from print to digital has made metadata—which can mean anything from an ISBN to customer ranking on Amazon—not just simply useful, both Dawson and O’Leary emphasized, it is now critical to the ability to find and sell a book. The rise of digital publishing, and the lowering of barriers to entry for just about anyone—from professional publisher to newest self-publisher—has resulted in an explosion of metadata of all kinds. And apparently a sizeable chunk of it is either inaccurate or missing outright, compounding the problem of book discoverability. 

“When it was only the print bookstore, BISAC was a luxury,” O’Leary said, “but with all the digital products, we need accurate and granular metadata. It’s what we need to make book discovery possible.” The explosion in the amount of digital book content, “puts pressure on the metadata,” said Dawson, who pointed out that once inaccurate metadata is published online, “it’s there forever. If you’ve ever tried to correct a mistake in the metadata you know it’s a game of Whack-A-Mole.”
In fact in the olden days of print, O’Leary said, “It used to be that once you shipped the book, that was the end, the metadata was done. But with digital it never stops, there are constant updates and changes.” And as more consumers around the world go online they encounter information on all kinds of books, many of which they will want—but will be unable to buy. “Today, every book you publish is visible everywhere, even if you can’t buy it [because of territorial rights],” O’Leary said, “This encourages piracy, because if people do try to buy it, they find out they can’t.”

From Twitter this week:

From the fashion and style section of the NYTimes (??) The Education of Tony Marx head of NYPL.  (NYTimes)

Pearson's Future of Education - No Longer Traditional

In the US, Suzie co-ed may be looking at graduating with over $100k in tuition debt and, it’s even true that her younger brother is going to end up with considerably more since tuition rises inexorably each year.  Seen in this context, it may be hard to understand why publishers get beaten up each year over the $4,000 that a student may spend on educational content over the course of their four years in College.  Despite being asked to spend just 4% of their educational ‘budget’ on content, students (and to some extent their parents) frequently voice their opposition to the high price of textbooks and often gain the attention of media and government.  Publishers may be excused for wondering ‘why us’ when the cost of tuition continues to grow year over year but the annual value of the textbook market has remained stagnant at approximately $7.5billion.  Why textbooks are viewed this way is hard to define: Perhaps the student pays for their textbooks out of their own pocket versus tuition paid by parents or, the utility of the textbooks assigned by professors is questioned when they are not used in full or, the shortened shelf life of textbooks means students can’t resell their books.  Maybe all of the above and other reasons as well.

For publishers the dissatisfaction is problematic but they may not actually care too much about the student even though it is the student that makes the purchase.  Their customer is the faculty member.  After all, the professor is often making an annuity-like decision to select one textbook over another and that decision can often stand for several years meaning recurring revenue for the publisher. Increasingly the institution where the faculty teaches is also important and, while the professor remains vital publishers may be increasingly interested in the $100K spent for tuition.

A number of years ago, I made a presentation at theFrankfurt Bookfair Supply Chain Interests Group where I used the example of Reed Elsevier to show how a business could realign its’ business to compete in a much larger market where the opportunities were potentially significantly greater.  Jack Welsh ex-CEO of General Electric, (when not suggesting conspiracy theories) used to challenge his executives to look beyond their traditional markets to expand their opportunities to grow revenue.  As Reed evidenced, it may better to be a smaller player in a $40billion market than to dominate a $100million market.  Strategically redefining your business can’t be done easily but becomes the driver in business planning and over a defined period a business can move itself into one with significantly more opportunity.

At a conference earlier this year, when the student spending numbers were discussed it occurred to me that fighting over an annual spend of $1,000 per student versus an opportunity to grab some of the $25K spent per year would be a strategic win for a publisher.  With the education market expanding – both in pricing and market penetration – and traditional the textbook market flat, where else could a publisher go?  A strategic rethink and change in direction may appear beyond comprehension for the average book publisher but this is what business strategy is all about.  When we were defining Bowker’s business in 2001/2 we could have stayed in low-margin, low-growth metadata management for libraries and struggled.  Instead the company moved into high-margin, high-growth transaction businesses and market intelligence for publishers and we were able to grow the company.  Strategically for Bowker, this transition was logical but was only achieved by stabilizing the legacy business and making a series of strategic acquisitions.

In publishing, there is a more impressive example in the manner in which Pearson looks to be rethinking how they define their educational market.  Pearson has long been the leader in education publishing both in K-12 and Higher Ed since the big acquisitions from Simon & Schuster in the late 1990s.  Indeed in recent interviews, Majorie Scardino the outgoing CEO of Pearson, recalled realizing education was the growth vehicle for Pearson soon after she became CEO 15 years ago.   During her tenure, the company realigned their operations, redefined their market, invested in content transformation and made many strategic acquisitions thereby broadly expanding the content and services customers in k-12 and higher ed can now purchase (and license) from Pearson.  One only need look at the chart below from their recent annual report to recognize how fundamental has the change in market approach been for Pearson.

Pearson PLC Annual Report: Competitors

The companies we in the ‘publishing’ market would consider their historical competitors – McGraw Hill, Cengage, HMH – are only bit players in comparison with Apollo, Benesse, Kaplan and others.  Pearson is not only a content producer but they are also (via a series of key acquisitions) a distribution point for educational learning on par with Kaplan and the University of Phoenix.  Pearson recently won a contract to deliver “Cal State Online” for the California State University System (CSU) which will enable the delivery of a selection of undergraduate degree and professional master’s programs.   In competing to deliver this solution for CSU it is unlikely that Pearson was competing with their ‘traditional’ publisher competitors.

Other publishers may be starting to take notice and John Wiley’s recently announced acquisition of an educational provider is evidence of this attention.  Yet, Pearson looks to have a significant head start and looking at this chart it’s interesting to speculate what the impact of mergers and acquisitions may have on these players over the next few years.  It seems logical that for some the fastest way to catch up to Pearson would be to merge with someone else.  For example, Kaplan doesn’t have much owned content but wide market penetration; whereas, Cengage is a content developer focused on traditional education delivery.  This type of strategic combination may make sense as these players begin to re-think their markets.

An interesting aspect of the discussion about Scardino’s departure has been focused on what Pearson’s new CEO may divest as though divesture at Pearson is something new.  That’s not the case, as Pearson has divested many businesses over the past ten years.  Whether the company divests the Financial Times or Penguin seems far less interesting to me in contrast to what their education business can become over the next five years.  Leveraging what is increasingly a content platform for creation and delivery looks far more interesting and compelling for Pearson in my view and is a direct result of how they re-thought their market to go beyond the parameters of the traditional publishing market.  Looking at the chart from their annual report, all educational companies are going to struggle to keep up.

MediaWeek (Vol 5, No 42): Pearson, Library of Congress, Education & Technology + More

(Frankfurt - Come by Hall 8.0 R 928)

The Telegraph reviews Majorie Scardino's 15 year run as head of Pearson plc (Telegraph):

Part of the joy for Dame Marjorie was reshaping Pearson from a bewildering rag-bag of a business, which included Madame Tussauds wax museum, half of investment bank Lazard and a sizable cache of Château Latour wine, into today's publishing and education empire. Its current portfolio includes the Financial Times newspaper and Penguin Books, as well as a growing number of English language schools and universities in China and South Africa.

Dame Marjorie, a former rodeo rider, is known within the company for acting on instinct rather than starting out with forensic analysis. Some decisions have been misplaced - she laughs remembering the pink FT mobile phone launched in the late 1990s - but canny investments in digital initiatives and emerging markets have helped the group navigate its way through two recessions, a dotcom meltdown and the structural decline of print media. Pearson's share price has climbed almost 90pc under her 16-year stewardship. Meanwhile, revenues have tripled to £5.9bn and Pearson delivered record operating profits of £942m last year.

The Library of Congress had launched (or evolved based on their explanation) a new magazine and fittingly they are discussing themselves (LOC):

The War of 1812, often called the Second American Revolution, resulted in the burning of the U.S. Capitol and most of its contents. The Library of Congress arose from those ashes to become the largest library in the history of the world. Our premiere issue discusses our history as well as the services we offer to Congress and to researchers today. (Issue-pdf)

Over at Inside Higher Ed, Alexandra Logue writes about evolving idea about how technology continues to change education but it's been going on for a while (Inside):

Although we can all agree that college students are certainly not the same as casino attendees or lab rats, we can also all agree that technology, designed and used correctly, can facilitate instruction through personalization as well as through motivation. (The popular appeal of many online role-playing games is one example of that.)

The teaching techniques and tools discussed here have been promoted by behavioral psychologists for the past century. What lessons can we learn from this? One is that it is possible to facilitate learning using the techniques discussed here, such as personalized instruction, without ever having to use the latest (very expensive) technology. There are times when a relatively cheap programmed textbook will help someone learn, perhaps not as well as the best online programs, but very well.

I've been reading Philip Kerr's Bernie Gunther series since he released his first back in 1989 (or so). Here's an interview with him in The Economist. News that there is an HBO series in the works is worth looking forward to (Economist)

“PRAGUE FATALE” is the latest novel in the Bernie Gunther series by Philip Kerr, a British crime writer. This is the eighth book featuring Bernie, a sardonic Berlin detective with a fondness for cigarettes and women, since he first appeared in 1989. In the books, Mr Kerr skillfully combines noir-crime plots with authentic historical background placing Bernie in volatile times from the 1930s to the cold war.

In “Prague Fatale”, set in wartime Berlin and Prague, Bernie is dropped into his most morally ambiguous case yet. He accepts an invitation to a country-house gathering with Reinhard Heydrich, Hitler’s architect for the final solution (it would be unwise to refuse). During the weekend, one of Heydrich’s adjutants is found murdered. Bernie’s mettle is tested when he must unravel a whodunit involving some of the most savage characters in the Nazi leadership. HBO is in talks to adapt these taut, atmospheric murder mysteries into a TV series.

From Twitter:
George Pelecanos on what makes a good story, which of his books you should start with, & where to eat in DC http://bit.ly/QeeUf5

Booker judge says book bloggers drown out serious criticism, to the detriment of literature Publisher's Weekly”  

Annual Veronis Suhler Stevenson Media Forecast

Some snips from the annual VSS media forecast:

“Digital’s influence is now a constant and significant factor in every sector, segment and sub-segment of the US Communications industry,” said John Suhler, Co-Founder and President of VSS. “At the same time as digital technology and innovation continue to spur growth in the industry or propel the communications industry forward, emerging digital media and services are significantly changing consumption habits among both institutional and consumer end-users. These developments will drive digital-related expenditures to constitute nearly 40% of the overall U.S. Communications Industry spending by 2016.”

In the Business & Professional Information & Services sector, spending will rise 7.2% to $204.43 billion in 2012 and post a 7% CAGR in the forecast period, fueled by solid growth in both Business & Professional Information and Business & Professional Services, particularly those relating to marketing, financial & economic and scientific & technical Information, as well as technology services, such as wireless data access, Software as a Service (SaaS) and cloud computing.

VSS projects spending on Education & Training Media & Services will increase 4.4% to $252.46 billion in 2012 and post a 4.2% CAGR in the forecast period. Solid gains in College Media and Outsourced Corporate Training will offset more modest growth in K-12 and declines in For-Profit Postsecondary Educational Services.

Spending on Entertainment & Leisure Media will increase 4.9% to $293.49 billion in 2012, with strong gains in Subscription TV spending expected to offset weaker growth in Entertainment Media and declines in Consumer Books. Steady growth in Subscription TV spending and a resurgent Entertainment Media will produce a 4.9% CAGR in the forecast period despite protracted declines in Consumer Book spending.

Education Panel at Frankfurt Tools of Change

Sheila Bounford who is chairing our panel discussion at Tools Of Change next week posted this about our panel session:

Greater than the Sum of Our Parts:

We’ve been talking between us for some time about how best to run this 50-minute session. The Frankfurt Tools of Change audience is infamously diverse, knowledgeable and yet hungry for insight, which – in combination with the sheer rapidity of technological, educational and commercial change – presents a challenging mix for speakers and panelists. Just as the changing style of pedagogy means that college and university tutors are engaging with students differently – we also need to break away from the conventional PowerPoint x3 and Q&A format.  At risk of sounding dangerously Rumsfeldian – our expert panel know what they know. What they don’t know is what you know, don’t know and want to know. So here’s your chance to tell us.

The format we’re adopting is for each panelist to make some brief opening remarks about how they currently see change in action in the textbook arena. Then we’re throwing it open to you to ask questions, make comments, and get involved. We’ll be taking questions from the audience in advance and during the session through Twitter hashtags #tocffm #digtxt, (and I’m at SheilaB01) or by email to SheilaB@otpi.co.uk. I’ll be producing a post-conference write-up to share online with all participants. We’re aiming for an outcome that’s greater than the sum of its parts – but that’ll only happen if you pitch in.

 More here

Open Letter from ALA on Digital Book Lending

Last week ALA President Maureen Sullivan published an open letter to the library and publisher community regarding the refusal of Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, and Penguin to provide access to their e-books in U.S. libraries.   It could have been better planned with Macmillan and Grand Central taking tentative steps to address this market in a more comprehensive way.

The open letter states:

It’s a rare thing in a free market when a customer is refused the ability to buy a company’s product and is told its money is “no good here.” Surprisingly, after centuries of enthusiastically supporting publishers’ products, libraries find themselves in just that position with purchasing e-books from three of the largest publishers in the world. Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, and Penguin have been denying access to their e-books for our nation’s 112,000 libraries and roughly 169 million public library users.

Let’s be clear on what this means: If our libraries’ digital bookshelves mirrored the New York Times fiction best-seller list, we would be missing half of our collection any given week due to these publishers’ policies. The popular “Bared to You” and “The Glass Castle” are not available in libraries because libraries cannot purchase them at any price. Today’s teens also will not find the digital copy of Judy Blume’s seminal “Forever,” nor today’s blockbuster “Hunger Games” series.

Not all publishers are following the path of these three publishers. In fact, hundreds of publishers of e-books have embraced the opportunity to create new sales and reach readers through our nation’s libraries. One recent innovation allows library patrons to immediately purchase an e-book if the library doesn’t have a copy or if there is a wait list they would like to avoid. This offers a win-win relationship for both publishers and library users since recent research from the Pew Internet Project tells us that library users are more than twice as likely to have bought their most recent book as to have borrowed it from a library.

Libraries around the country are developing mobile applications and online discovery systems that make it easier to explore books and authors on the go. Seventy-six percent of public libraries now offer e-books — double the number from only five years ago — and 39 percent of libraries have purchased and circulate e-readers. Public libraries alone spend more than $1.3 billion annually on their collections of print, audio, video, and electronic materials. They are investing not only in access to content and devices, but also in teaching the skills needed to navigate and utilize digital content successfully.

Librarians understand that publishing is not just another industry. It has special and important significance to society. Libraries complement and, in fact, actively support this industry by supporting literacy and seeking to spread an infectious and lifelong love of reading and learning. Library lending encourages patrons to experiment by sampling new authors, topics and genres. This experimentation stimulates the market for books, with the library serving as a de facto discovery, promotion and awareness service for authors and publishers.

Publishers, libraries and other entities have worked together for centuries to sustain a healthy reading ecosystem — celebrating our society’s access to the complete marketplace of ideas. Given the obvious value of libraries to publishers, it simply does not add up that any publisher would continue to lock out libraries. It doesn’t add up for me, it doesn’t add up for ALA’s 60,000 members, and it definitely doesn’t add up for the millions of people who use our libraries every month.

America’s libraries have always served as the “people’s university” by providing access to reading materials and educational opportunity for the millions who want to read and learn but cannot afford to buy the books they need. Librarians have a particular concern for vulnerable populations that may not have any other access to books and electronic content, including individuals and families who are homebound or low-income. To deny these library users access to e-books that are available to others — and which libraries are eager to purchase on their behalf — is discriminatory.

We have met and talked sincerely with many of these publishers. We have sought common ground by exploring new business models and library lending practices. But these conversations only matter if they are followed by action: Simon & Schuster must sell to libraries. Macmillan must implement its proposed pilot. Penguin must accelerate and expand its pilots beyond two urban New York libraries.
We librarians cannot stand by and do nothing while some publishers deepen the digital divide. We cannot wait passively while some publishers deny access to our cultural record. We must speak out on behalf of today’s — and tomorrow’s — readers.The library community demands meaningful change and creative solutions that serve libraries and our readers who rightfully expect the same access to e-books as they have to printed books.

So, which side will you be on? Will you join us in a future of liberating literature for all? Libraries stand with readers, thinkers, writers, dreamers and inventors. Books and knowledge — in all their forms — are essential. Access to them must not be denied.

MediaWeek (Vol 5, No 40): Newspapers, UK Publishing, Magazines + More

Mrs. PND returned from London this weekend with a pile of papers including The Times which I don't read now because of their pay wall.  The higher brow UK papers like The Times, Independent, Telegraph and Guardian have always been a joy to read whenever I am back in the UK.  On weekends it is not uncommon to go through four editions of some combination of these newspapers where perspectives are generally different and there is always some long form article that grabs.  Each of these also carry magazines which are a read all of themselves.

This Saturday The Times had a long excerpt from Mr. Pete Townshend's upcoming bio and the magazine is always in addition to the thick review section that covers all forms of popular media each week.  All the major newspapers cover popular culture to a concentrated degree you don't really see in the US market.  With the Rowling book out this week, most of the papers devoted space to articles oriented around her and the book (Telegraph).  That aside, there were other snippets of interest but one of the more amusing items in The Times (which I wouldn't have heard about otherwise) was a short call-out to Haynes Publishing.  Haynes publishes automotive manuals (and other manuals).  Apparently, business is off and in their recent quarterly results update they attribute the declines in their automotive manual business to the following:   "There is little doubt that during the period retail purchasing budgets were tight and that much of those available budgets went towards the phenomenally successful Fifty Shades series." (FT)  Perhaps a side to your local car mechanic that you didn't otherwise know about.

Also in the Telegraph was a review of Chris Ware's book Building Stories which is - for want of a better term - an adult comic book, although it looks like a lot more than that.  Reviewer Jake Wallis-Simons is quite taken with how Ware has stretched this medium into something new and original.

Just occasionally, a writer or artist – or both in one – emerges who is so astoundingly original that everything else suddenly seems like a facsimile of what has come before. Chris Ware, the 45-year-old American comics artist, is one of these. Widely hailed as one of the foremost practitioners working in the medium today, his new book, if one can call it that without being reductionist, is a work of such startling genius that it is difficult to know where to begin.

And that is part of the point. Take the “cover”, for instance. The work is presented in a large, rectangular box covered in seemingly random letters and fragments of images. It takes a while to trace a path through the puzzle and reveal the hidden title: Building Stories. This creation of a luscious vista of words and pictures that the reader must decode using a variety of subtle threads and directions is typical of Ware; abandon yourself to the process and enlightenment gradually dawns.

The Observer spent some time brooding for the poor UK publishing industry where they believe most of the big books of the season have already been released in advance of  the 'book-world's biggest day of the year' which they peg as October 11.

It is therefore possible that the big day has already been and gone, and this uncertainty reflects the mood in the industry, said Philip Jones, the editor of the Bookseller magazine. "Super Thursday is a cock-up and an irritating one at that. It is not planned. Publisher's publicity teams focus on single titles, not lists — and particularly not other publishers' lists," he said.
Nevertheless, this annual bonanza shifts a vast number of copies, as Jones admits: "According to Nielsen Bookscan, 242 hardbacks were released on Super Thursday last year [September 29] and 34 went on to sell more than 10,000 copies by the end of the year, 15 over 50,000 and eight over 100,000. No other date matched that."
What is certain is that 2012 is the year when Britain will acknowledge its "national treasures". A series of reassuring memoirs from popular heroes and heroines, such as Camp David, by David Walliams, the entertainer, writer and charity swimmer; Bond on Bond, by Sir Roger Moore, the avuncular actor, and Is It Me? by Miranda Hart, the jolly comic actress, are all jostling for attention. A run of Olympic gold medallists will also be competing for glory, while the autobiography of the nation's favorite television presenter, Clare Balding, called My Animals and Other Family, came out this month and sits near the top of the non-fiction charts. The Necessary Aptitude, the memoir of accessible comic poet Pam Ayres, got an even earlier start at the end of August.

There are some signs that magazine publishing is on the cusp of some significant resurgence.  Ask any magazine publisher whether they are better off now than they were in October 2008 and the answer for those still in the business has to be a resounding 'yes'.   Recent articles about how some magazines are seeing opportunities in the Apple Newsstand show that migration to digital is now becoming more predictable.  Matthew Ingram in GigaOM takes a look at Atlantic Media and why there are five reasons other publishers should pay attention:

The New York Times has drawn a lot of interest because of its paywall, something that has made it a kind of flag-bearer for that method of trying to generate revenue, and the Washington Post and The Guardian are on the opposite end of the spectrum, since they remain adamantly opposed to paywalls and are both trying to find other means of dealing with the digital disruption the newspaper industry finds itself in. And on the magazine side, publishers like MIT’s Technology Review have rejected the popular “apps will save us” mantra and decided to pursue a different approach.
Atlantic Media is interesting in part because of the sheer breadth of things it is doing when it comes to digital, and also when it comes to alternative forms of monetizing its content. And it’s not just experimentation for the sake of experimentation: at a time when declining print revenue is flashing a giant red warning signal for print publishers of all kinds, the company also appears to be growing both its traditional revenue and its digital revenue — and by significant amounts. Digital ad revenue grew by almost 50 percent this year. According to owner David Bradley, the company’s revenue has doubled in the last four years to $40 million, and about 65 percent now comes from digital.

From Bloomberg Business Week an article on how a grade school teacher made herself a millionaire selling teaching content and aids to other teachers on the social site TeachersPayTeachers.  How about those apples? (BBW)

Jump is just one of some 15,000 teachers currently marketing their original classroom materials through the online marketplace, TeachersPayTeachers (TPT). Since signing on to the site, she has created 93 separate teaching units and sold 161,000 copies for about $8 a pop. “My units usually cover about two weeks’ worth of material,” she says. “So if you want to teach about dinosaurs, you’d buy my dinosaur unit, and it has everything you need from language arts, math, science experiments, and a list of books you can use as resources. So once you print out the unit, you just have to add a few books to read aloud to your class, and everything else is there, ready to go for you.”
To be fair, no one else on TPT has been as wildly successful as Jump, but at least two other teachers have earned $300,000, and 23 others have earned over $100,000, according to site founder Paul Edelman. “Of the 15,000 teachers who are contributing, about 10,000 make money in any given quarter,” he adds.

Frankfurt.  Next week come by our stand R928 in Hall 8.0.

Don't forget also if you are still considering registering for Tools of Change you can use my speakers discount.   Conference organizers have set up a promotional code for a 20% discount which you can take advantage of which is TOCPartner20TSpeaker

From the twitter this past week:

Queue the swoons...BBC News - Julian Fellowes to write Downton Abbey prequel BBC
George Pelecanos on what makes a good story, which of his books you should start with, & where to eat in DC DailyBeast

In Sport:  Quite a Golf competition this weekend. Guardian.  (In one of the above mentioned newspapers from Saturday there were nine pages devoted to the Ryder Cup).

Château de Chanteloup August 1966

Château de Chanteloup, (Martell) France 1966

It really hasn't changed much and you can still have dinner there.


Another weekly image from my archive. Click on it to make it larger.

In addition to the images I've posted on Flickr and those I've periodically posted on PND, I have now produced a Big Blurb Book: From the Archive 1960 -1980 of some of the images I really thought were special.

I now have an iPad version of this book for sale ($4.99) on the Blurb site which you can find here: STORE


I have to say, even on the iPad the book looks pretty good.

Your Price May Vary

Re-post from November 19, 2009

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.

MediaWeek (Vol 5, No 39) Coursera, Changing Academic Publishing, Project Muse, Libraries + More

MOOC Coursera continues to add providers to its platform with a big expansion noted in the Chronicle of Higher Ed.

The new partners come in a mix of shapes and sizes, comprising state flagships like the University of Maryland at College Park, liberal-arts colleges like Wesleyan University, specialized institutions including the Berklee College of Music, and foreign institutions like the University of Melbourne, in Australia. The speed at which colleges are joining is remarkable: The company began operations only in January.

Most partners will offer only a handful of free courses each to start out; Coursera officials recommend that each partner offer five at first. The colleges consider the efforts an experiment, with plans to review them in the near future and decide whether they want to continue to offer the free courses. The agreement between each institution and Coursera is nonexclusive, so the colleges are free to work with other MOOC providers as well.

One benefit for participating colleges is marketing: Coursera courses typically attract tens of thousands of students each. So far, the company says, more than 1.3 million students have signed up for at least one course. Many of the students sign up but then never watch the lecture videos or complete the homework assignments, but even so, the colleges are offering a sample of their best professors’ teaching to a wide audience.

Commentary by Hugh Gusterson in the Chronicle under the title "Want to Change Academic Publishing?

When I became an academic, those inconsistencies made a sort of sense: Academic journals, especially in the social sciences, were published by struggling, nonprofit university presses that could ill afford to pay for content, refereeing, or editing. It was expected that, in the vast consortium that our university system constitutes, our own university would pay our salary, and we would donate our writing and critical-reading skills to the system in return.

The system involved a huge exchange of gifted labor that produced little in the way of profit for publishers and a lot in the way of professional solidarity and interdependence for the participants. The fact that academic journals did not compensate the way commercial magazines and newspapers did only made academic publishing seem less vulgar and more valuable.

But in recent years the academic journals have largely been taken over by for-profit publishing behemoths such as Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley-Blackwell. And quite a profit they make, too: In 2010 Elsevier reported profits of 36 percent on revenues of $3.2-billion. Last year its chief executive, Erik Engstrom, earned $4.6-million.

One reason those companies make good profits for their shareholders and pay such high salaries to their leaders is that they are in a position to charge high prices. The open-access debate has focused mainly on the exorbitant fees for-profit publishers charge libraries for bundles of journal subscriptions, but I am struck by what they charge ordinary citizens to read my individual articles.

For example, anyone without access to a university library who wants to read a nine-page article I wrote (free) for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists last year will have to pay Sage $32 to get electronic access to it for one day—more than it would cost to buy and keep a printed copy of either of my most recent books. Needless to say, Sage passes none of the $32 on to me.

Also interesting is this exchange in the comments about Project MUSE:

ieubanks: This is a great article, and it's about time someone mentioned this elephant in the room. I do, however, agree with the comments here that question the wisdom of charging referee fees. The problem, as I see it, is not always the fault of the journal or the publishing house.

I edit a peer-reviewed journal, and we have precious little income. What we garner from subscriptions goes to the publishing house, which is a university press that subsidizes much of what it publishes.

The problem here is that the databases, such as ProjectMuse, JSTOR, and worse still, Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, and others mentioned in the article, often pay a relatively small fee to the publishing houses and then turn around to charge libraries tremendous access fees. Therefore, the best solution would be for the authors of the articles to grant one-time printing rights and NON-TRANSFERABLE electronic rights to the journals and publishing houses. This would protect both open-access and subscription-only journals while preventing the databases from making a profit off free labor without violating intellectual property rights.

Furthermore, there should be a class-action suit against the databases. I feel certain that they are selling work they don't have permission to sell. I have found some of my own work in those databases, when I am sure that I never signed away electronic rights for those works. Meanwhile, large portions of library budgets go to the databases as tuition continually rises and faculty are downgraded to armies of over-qualified adjuncts.

Sand6432: This statement is misinformed about how what are incorrectly called "databases" like Project Muse operate. In fact, as I can testify as former director of Penn State University Press, which put all of its dozen journals into Project Muse as soon as it became open to journals from other publishers besides Johns Hopkins, that aggregation soon came to provide two thirds of the overall revenue for operating our journals program, which could not have transitioned into e-publishing without it. Project Muse limits its content to journals published by non-profit entities, by the way. I have never heard any librarian complain that its subscription fees were excessive. After all, it was established as a joint project of the press and library at Johns Hopkins, so has always been library-friendly.---Sandy Thatcher

ieubanks: Thank you for clarifying. My point is that people are selling the intellectual property of others without compensating them for it. I work with Project Muse, and they are guilty of it, although I agree that they are perhaps one of the least unscrupulous aggregators. The way it works is pretty simple, as far as I can tell. Here is how it works with the journal I edit: Libraries pay for access to material provided by Project Muse, who in turn pays a small sum to our publishing house for each journal. Neither the journal nor the authors ever see a penny of that. On the contrary, the authors must fund the journal themselves by joining the academic society responsible for producing the journal (i.e., the authors must subscribe in order to publish), and that money must be handed over to the publishing house to pay for publishing costs.

abbistani: While I was almost willing to accept the title of "least unscrupulous aggregator," I'm afraid that a little more information about how Project MUSE works might be in order. We currently return more than 75% of our gross revenue to our participating publishers. How much they pass on to their journals depends on the agreement between the publisher and the the journal. The amount of money that each journal earns for it's publisher is the result of a formula that includes things like usage, and as you might expect, there is a wide variance. I will submit that we return significantly more money to our journals than any other aggregator, and many earn more money from us than they do from selling subscriptions. ieubanks, email me if you want to talk about your particular situation.

Brian Harrington
Project MUSE
brian@jhu,edu

Barbara Fister wrting in Inside Higher Education on What Libraries Should Be:

In the case of libraries, I worry that we are abandoning or at the very least absent-mindedly mislaying our values and our capacity to improve the lives of those who use our libraries by taking too utilitarian an approach (“our job is to deliver the information people want”). We design our systems to deliver the goods and bolster “productivity,” but not necessarily to encourage making connections or thinking deeply and critically. Consuming and producing take the place of creation and contemplation (such old-fashioned terms). As Don M. Randel put it in a recent issue of Liberal Education, “The Market Made Me Do It.” We compete against one another as businesses and sports teams do and, in the process, we contribute not to the habits of mind and heart that Delbanco lays out, but instead to widening inequality. When we put delivery of information to our communities first, we neglect our broader interest in equalizing access to information.

In the Atlantic Maria Konnikova contemplates how easy it is becoming to erase books that cause problems (Atlantic):

Readers are increasingly reliant on digital sources for information—and they are increasingly reliant on these sources to be accurate. Of course, it's impossible to wipe out altogether the digital record of a book's existence. There will always be articles, analyses, used copies (you can still, for instance, get Imagine at Indiebound and Powell's). But the principle itself is a frightening one. Not only can you remove physical content—Orwell hasn't been the only one to disappear off of a Kindle device—but you can change, in a sense, the digital record. And what happens when there actually aren't any physical books behind those electronic versions—and then a publisher or retailer not only removes all links to the book in question, but then proceeds to remove the already purchased book from your reading device? Imagine: When all of your books are in digital form, what is the backup system if they are of a sudden removed?

From Twitter:
Apple Exec Jony Ive to Design One-of-a-Kind Leica Camera Mashable

Google Teams Up With Harris Interactive To Launch New Self-Service Consumer Research Tool Techcrunch

Book sculpture flows out of Museum Meermanno Flickr

Chart: Top 100 iPad Rollouts by Enterprises & Schools (Updated Sept. 15, 2012) ZDNet