Missing Mike Shatzkin

Mike Shatzkin who passed away last week was a friend of mine.  Mike was a walking encyclopedia of the publishing industry and if he didn’t recall something he would call on his father’s long publishing experience to make a point or correct some bit of information. I first met Mike in the mid-1990s when he was working with Vista Computing to organize and present expert knowledge sessions about the industry. We didn’t interact at these sessions, but I recall immediately recognizing that Mike had a gift in thinking about big ideas and then determining what the consequences of those ideas would be.  Later, when I was newly installed at Bowker, he called me up with one of his signature lines, “I have an idea” and so he and Jim Lichtenburg came out to New Providence. 

Bowker had inherited a website named Bookwire from Publisher’s Weekly and Mike wanted to take it over from us and build it into a book and reader information hub. We already had traffic, but we had no idea what to do with this site. Mike saw the future: His vision for Bookwire in 1999 was Goodreads and Shelfari in 2005 but of course we never did the deal and Bookwire eventually disappeared.

As many of us who worked with Mike know, he prefaced may interesting and thought-provoking things with, “I have an idea” which was frequently followed by, “You know, wouldn't it be interesting (or great) if….” It is a testimony to Mike’s knowledge, intelligence, and persistence that he had (and held for years) the ears of many publishing leaders from John Ingram to Steve Riggio to Markus Dohle to Peter Wiley and it is such an incredible thing that Mike’s council and advice was so well received by the leaders of this industry.

We met for lunch many times and we met regularly at conferences, and he was always on point. He invited me to lunch after I was bounced from Bowker to see what I was planning to do. Lunch with Mike was always challenging and informative but at the end of the meal he asks “Why do you think you were fired?” and I say “Because I didn't kiss the owner's ass enough.” Mike says, “Well that wasn't very smart was it?”  He was often funny and practical. 

Many of you reading this will not know that Mike debated starting his own blog and, as hard as it is to believe if you know Mike, he wasn't sure if he could keep up with regularly posting!  It is impossible to believe Mike wasn't confident he had enough to say on a regular basis. I had launched PND a few months before and I was generating some attention (now dissipated), so he asked me if he could post to PND as an experiment. I had no hesitation in agreeing and this is where his first Shatzkin files post post was made (and 2nd). Needless to say, the stats were good, his responses and interactions were positive, and the rest is history. PND benefited from the attention but Mike’s influence via his long running blog was hugely significant to understanding the industry and the forces at play over the past 20 years.

During the Google book digitization controversy, Mike reached out to me with one of his “Wouldn’t it be interesting” ideas about trying to determine how may book license orphans existed.  At the time there were many wild estimations, but Mike and I thought about how I could come up with an estimate using some of the data Bowker and others had collected over many years. By now, I was long gone from Bowker, but this eventual report and PND post still generates consistent web traffic and for me, the work generated many conference appearances and notoriety.  This was a great example about Mike’s willingness to engage others in his work and refer work to other consultants like me. Mike knew what he was good at, and he also knew what bored him and he regularly referred potential and sometimes actual consulting clients to me. For this I am forever grateful.

Some of you will recall his keynote speech at one of the early Digital Book World (or Information Pays) conferences where he really commanded the audience and spoke expansively about the publishing business and the impact of digital workflows and reading. A week or so before that speech he invited me to his office (and for some reason the illusive Mrs. PND came along, and Martha was also there) because he wanted to run through the speech with me and get my feedback. I recall this often because I see how this showed how much he respected my input. There was one invite I wish I was able to make and that was a reunion of the band he used to manage – just hilarious if you can imagine it, but I was out of town that week.

I miss Mike and of course I can only regret that I didn’t follow up the last time we met over a year ago when we parted and agreed to do lunch again. Which never happened. Mike is kicking back now reading digitally – on a flip phone or e-reader it doesn’t matter, and by now has confirmed that there is no god. Mike, we miss you and love you and it is very likely many of us will be seeing you soon.

Farewell friend.

Publishing Technology Report 2021

A fully revised version of my Publishing Technology Software and Services Report is now available at a special price of $499.00. To complete this report my team and I identified more than 200 software and services companies popular with publishers and conducted in-depth interviews with more than 31 of the most relevant companies. We also spoke with customers to apply their views and opinions about the market and these suppliers.

Here is a link to preview the entire report on slideshare

Click on this paypal link to purchase:

In this 170 page report we cover many operational and functional areas served by these companies including Order to Cash, Financials, Title (Product) Management, Contract Rights and Royalties, Editorial, Production and Scheduling, Subscription Management, Digital Asset Management, Digital Asset Distribution and Content Management Services. 

To produce this report, we interviewed more than 31 companies and approximately 50 people in total. Each interview was approximately 60 mins. We transcribed these interviews and created 3-5 page profiles of each company and included company product information and, in some cases, graphics provided to us by the company.  We have also created our own supplemental information to support the analysis.

This report is informative and relevant for any publisher with technology requirements.

The following companies were profiled in detail:

ARPHA/Pensoft

Aliant/Real
Aries Systems
Advantage Computer Systems

Cadmore Media

CCC
censhare
Consonance
CyberWolf/ACUMEN

Global Publishing Solutions Ltd (GPSL)
FADEL
FilmTrack

Firebrand
Klopotek

Lumina DataMatics
Highwire/MPS

Iptor/IP1
MetaComet
MultiPub
Naviga/Media Services Group

ORBIS 

PageMajik
PubFactory

RSG Media

Rightszone
Schilling A/S
Silverchair 

Trilogy Group
Typefi Systems
Tizra
Virtusales

 

See how we put together the Subway map here.

The First 100 Days - Framework for a new CEO

 

The First 100 Days: A Planning Framework for the CEO from Michael Cairns

It’s a Beeping Problem

 

Mick Jagger says “When you call my name, salivate like Pavlov’s dog.”  He could have said “When the toaster pings…

The relentless beep-beep-beeping of electrical appliances has become the soundtrack of our daily lives. And it’s not that these notes are soft and soothing; they seem designed to strike deep in your central cortex. The sound is not even rhythmic, more like an overeager nine-year-old banging away at the triangle in the annual school concert. And, honestly, we all know they were always the least talented.

From microwaves to washing machines and toasters to seat belts, machines are all hard coded to create the worst kind of interruptions. Machines are not sentient (yet, so they say) but, somehow, they’ve gained a capability which engenders blind rage in plain ordinary householders. These buzzers, pings and beeps cannot be turned off. Call customer service and they tell you: “It can’t be done, Mr. Pavlov. It is considered a feature, not a bug.”

The sound of a bell triggered salivation in Pavlov's dogs and, in a direct correlation, the ping, beep, buzz of an appliance signals that – somewhere somehow – you’ve screwed up. Forget to remove the laundry: Buzz. Left your tea in the microwave: Ping. Sitting in an exit row: Beep! Who’s really in charge? The machines have undergone their own bizarre form of behavioral training and we are running around the house all day chasing beeps.

Why does the microwave feel compelled to announce its victory so loudly? Perhaps it believes that, without fanfare, we mere mortals would be unable to muster the responsibility or recall necessary to retrieve our leftovers. Every laundry cycle is punctuated with a series of beeps even less meaningful than those from the toaster. Maybe they’re communicating with each other?

Anyway, perhaps there's a deeper lesson to be gleaned from the incessant beeping of our household appliances. Just as Pavlov's dogs learned to associate the sound of a bell with the promise of food, we too have formed an attachment to the beeps that punctuate our daily routines. They serve as markers of progress, reminders of tasks completed and signals of impending action. In a world filled with chaos and uncertainty, the predictable rhythm of electronic beeps provides a sense of order and control, however fleeting it may be.

Nooo!!! That paragraph was written by the chat machine. They’re conspiring!  Make it stop!

I often wonder if the engineers and designers of these machines actually use them themselves. Perhaps they’re all washing their clothes down the river and making toast on a fire. It cannot be that they are not irritated as all fuck by the incessant buzz, ping, tings just like us ordinary folk. It’s enough to endure the quirks and idiosyncrasies of modern living without these ridiculous “emergency” signals making us salivate like a dog. Please make it stop.

Time for A Publisher ID?

 

In the 1870s R.R. Bowker began publishing The American Catalog which collected publisher titles into one compendium book. The first edition of this book was surprisingly large, but its most useful aspect was that it organized publisher books into a usable format. The concept was not sophisticated: The Bowker team gathered publisher catalogs, bound and reprinted them so that they were more or less uniform. In subsequent years Books In Print became three primary components: The Subject Guide, Author Guide and Publisher Index (or PID). Each was separated into distinct parts, but it was the PID which held everything together.

When a user found a title in the author or subject index they would also be referred to the PID index to find specific information about the publisher including (the obvious) how to order the book. At some point, Bowker began applying an alphanumeric “Bowker Id” to Publisher names so that the database could be organized around the publisher information.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the ISBN was introduced to the US retail market and Bowker was (and still is) the only agency able to assign ISBN numbers in the US. Included in the ISBN syntax was a “publisher” prefix such that a block of numbers could be assigned specifically to one publisher. The idea, while good in concept, did not work well in practice. For example, in an effort to encourage adoption of ISBNs the agencies assigned some large publishers a small two digit publisher prefix which resulted in a very large block of individual ISBNs (seven digits plus the check digit). Even after 50 years, many of these blocks are only partially used (and wasted) because the publisher output was far less than anticipated. A second problem was that publishers, imprints and lists were bought and sold which made a mess of the whole idea. (In the above image the prefix is 4 digits).

At Bowker, we recognized that our Publisher Information Database was a crown jewel and a key component of our Books In Print database. Despite many requests we never licensed this data separately and this was a significant reason retailers such as Barnes & Noble, Borders, Follett and others licensed Books In Print. Because the information was so important, we spent a lot of time maintaining the accuracy and the structure of the data.

Publishers who acquired ISBNs from the Bowker agency were a key input to this database – beginning in the 1980s but continuing to the present. Not all new ISBNs go to small independent publishers and there remains consistent demand from established publishers for new numbers even today. To be useful, this publisher information needs to be structured and organized accurately and is only possible with continued application of good practice. During my time at Bowker, the editorial team met regularly with publishers to both improve the timeliness and accuracy of their book metadata but also to confirm their corporate structure. We wanted to ensure that all individual ISBNs rolled up to the correct imprint, business unit and corporate owner. This effort was continuous and sometimes engaged the corporation’s office of general counsel and was frequently detailed and time consuming.

A few years after I left Bowker, one of my consulting clients presented me with a proof of concept to programmatically create a publisher id database. In concept it looked possible to do; however. I pointed out all the reasons why this would become difficult to complete and then to maintain. They went ahead anyway but after a year or so abandoned the work because they could not accurately disambiguate publisher information nor confirm corporate reporting structures.

Today there is no industry wide standard publisher id code but the idea comes up frequently as one the industry should pursue. As with many new standards efforts it will be the roll out and adoption of the standard which will prove difficult. Establishing an initial leap forward could represent a promising start by using data which might already be available or available for license.

Bowker (and all global ISBN agencies) are required to publish all new publisher prefixes each year and this information could also be a useful starting point. Bowker is not the only aggregator with publisher data (we were just the best by a significant margin) and another supply chain partner might be willing to contribute their publisher data as a starting point. This could establish a solid foundation to build on, but realistically any effort will fail if the maintenance aspect of the effort is not understood and recognized, and a strong market imperative isn’t widely agreed and supported.

When (I)SBN was launched in the UK in the late 1960s it succeeded because the largest retailer (W.H. Smith) enforced the strong business case for its adoption. Globally ISBN has gone on to become one of the most successful supply chain initiatives in (retail) history and the entire industry is dependent on this standard. (It has even survived Amazon’s cynical ASIN). If there is a business case for the publisher id this needs to be powerful, obvious and accord universal benefits: Mutual interest and money can be powerful motivators but having a policeman like W.H. Smith will help as well.

More:

The ISBN is Dead

ChapGPT "thoughts" on the history of identifiers.

Note: I ran R.R. Bowker for a while and was also Chairman of ISBN International.