MediaWeek (Vol 2, No 53): Television, Amazon, Libraries, And a book about running.

Wasn't sure if I was going to do one of these this weekend but what the hey. Next week we start back at week one. I will be posting my 2010 predictions on Tuesday and I hope you find them interesting. The Independent gives us a heads up on some of the TV adaptations that may be coming our way. (As I mentioned last week a second series of Cranford is on its way here in January). Independent:

Book publishers have fallen on hard times but a new crop of festive television adaptations is luring in new readers and boosting sales. .... "A TV adaptation can be the best free advertising a book can get," said a spokeswoman for Waterstone's, which saw sales of John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps treble in the week after a festive screening in 2008. "Frequent Jane Austen adaptations garner remarkable sales and reintroduce new generations of readers to her books. Where the effect is most obvious, though, is with relatively obscure classics and with contemporary novels."

Sales of Elizabeth Gaskell's "lost classic" Cranford soared by more than 500 per cent at Waterstone's in the four weeks during and after its BBC airing in 2007, compared with the four weeks before the serialisation. The bookseller expects another, albeit less dramatic, sales rise after the bonnet drama's recent return.

Reuters suggests that Amazon's 'coyness' with respect to full disclosure of eBook and Kindle sales could come back to bite them if they begin to see a softening in the numbers. Currently, all good news but what if things backtrack and what will that do to their share price. I wonder if Bezos cares. (Reuters):

But investor patience with the lack of details has begun to wear thin, particularly as Amazon shares hit an all-time high in early December on expectations it will be one of the biggest winners in overall sales growth this holiday season.

That benefit of the doubt could be further tested in 2010 as more e-readers enter the market and challenge the Kindle.

"As long as Amazon continues to have the right margins and the right profit numbers at the end of every quarter, they can probably get away with that," said James McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research.

But if the Kindle's streak goes cold and Amazon continues to keep investors in the dark, they could turn on the stock.

"You may suffer a 10 to 15 to 20 percent correction because the uncertainty factor would be so high," McQuivey said. "It ensures that if there is bad news, people imagine the worst."

John Naughton at the Observer picks up the same theme on Sunday:

But the combination of the two "facts" has further ratcheted up speculation that 2010 will be the Year of the Kindle and the end is nigh for the printed codex.

If you detect a whiff of what philosophers call "technological determinism" in this, you're in good company. I have on my shelves a (printed) copy of The Myth of the Paperless Office by Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper, a wonderful antidote to the irrational exuberance of Kindlemania. The authors conducted an ethnographic study of how people actually use paper in order to reach an understanding of which of those uses might conceivably be eliminated by electronics, and which might not. It should be required reading for anyone showing the early symptoms of Kindlemania.

Do you think you've got the autobiographic goods? If so, your life story could become a bestseller in a competition to be run by the BBC and the Daily Mail:

As many as 15 true life stories will feature in a new five-part TV series called My Story, to be broadcast on primetime BBC1 next year. And every week, after each programme, one person's story will be published, with an advance of £20,000 from a leading publisher.

There's going to be some stiff competition if Petty Officer Parton is anything to go by. More from the Observer that suggests UK readers may be talking about India's Abraham Vergese's stunning story of Siamese twins in Ethiopia which will be getting a boost from a TV tie-in (Observer):

A novelist, even a well-reviewed one, may sell just a couple of thousand books. It is no way to make a living, unless of course you catch the attention of Britain's biggest literary star-maker, the television producer Amanda Ross.

Novels that find favour with Ross can be expected to achieve much, much more. The film The Lovely Bones, to be released at the end of this month, is based on the novel of the same name by Alice Sebold which shot up the bestsellers list after it was featured on the programme Ross devised, Channel 4's Richard & Judy. Cecilia Aherne's PS I Love You followed the same route to the cinema, while Victoria Hislop's The Island was plucked from relative obscurity by the show's regular book review slot.

The Guardian Blogs that playlists could do for books what they have done for music sites like Spotify (Guardian):

But perhaps there is more to the notion of the playlist than first meets the eye. Not long ago, I was mucking about on Spotify when a thought occurred me. The online music library's extensive catalogue impresses for obvious reasons, but what genuinely recommends the service is the public playlist facility, allowing individual users to curate and publish groupings of songs based on whatever criteria take their fancy. It's a fascinating way to discover music, to expand one's tastes, and the only limitation is the imagination of the curator. And I wondered: why not a similar facility for books?

Librarians in Aberdeen - and now online - are learning to combat information overload (Press & Journal)

This enormous mass of information (often conflicting) requires organising and managing in order to make some sense of it, and to enable others to make best use of it. These skills of information organisation go to the heart of what it means to be an information professional: a role found in a huge variety of different types of organisation.

It is a dynamic and challenging career path to follow, but one which is very rewarding. The department of information management at Aberdeen Business School at The Robert Gordon University delivers full-time and online master’s degrees in information management and information and library studies accredited by the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP).

Recently, the department has also developed a new and innovative course, the Access Foundation (Graduate Certificate) Information Studies (GCIS), to provide flexible access routes into its master’s degrees. The GCIS course is delivered entirely online over a period of nine months. It provides a new access route for students with experience of information work, but without the necessary educational qualifications for entry to postgraduate courses.

Several librarians take issue with how library's role in the Google Book Settlement has been characterised by Harvard's Robert Darnton (NYRB):

In his recent article criticizing the Google settlement ["Google and the New Digital Future," NYR, December 17, 2009], Robert Darnton fails to acknowledge the significant role that libraries have had in the creation of Google Book Search as well as the concrete steps they are taking to address the sorts of concerns he raises. Libraries are using Google-digitized volumes to create the "truly public library" that he seeks, and these same libraries are taking responsibility for the preservation of Google-digitized volumes. ... Libraries are much further ahead in the game than Darnton would have readers believe. Although there are disappointments for Google partner libraries in the settlement agreement, libraries have worked to secure important privileges, including significant influence over the commercial pricing of Google's Book Search product. The settlement also sanctions important uses of digital volumes, including those that are in copyright. These include providing access to content to users with print disabilities and using libraries' digitized volumes in large-scale computational research. Opening the enormous body of Google-scanned content to new user populations and methods of inquiry will have a transformative effect on our ability to produce and analyze knowledge about our society, our heritage, and the world. We invite Harvard to join us in this endeavor!

UK Libraries are in a mess and all kinds of suggestions are being offered. "Why shouldn't libraries sell books," asks minister Margaret Hodge raises prospect of libraries expanding role beyond lending books in major reconsideration of policy (Guardian)

A report on 2008 library statistics: The Academic Libraries: 2008 First Look summarizes services, staff, collections, and expenditures of academic libraries in 2- and 4-year, degree-granting post-secondary institutions in the 50 states and the District of Columbia (link). Tim Spalding from LibraryThing on a boon doggle to Christchurch, New Zealand in this video on social cataloging (Vimeo). A book about running (Observer)

Even though running is the world's most popular hobby, the running bookshelf is curiously empty. Of the few books on the subject in print, nearly all fall into one of two categories: either how-to tips or personal accounts of one man's perseverance against pain. Both share one weird feature: as celebrations of running they make running seem pretty awful. It comes across like performing home surgery – it'll hurt, require expensive equipment and leave scars. ... Gotaas combs the world for true running tales, and comes up with some beauties. Who knew that naked running was the vogue in 18th-century England, with men and women racing separately and thousands of spectators lining the race course? Or that in ancient Egypt, Ramses II legitimised his hold on the throne by performing a long-distance run every few years, a ritual he performed until he was over 90?

I ran a lot in 2009 and had some good race times. That's not a bad collection for the end of the year.

MediaWeek (Vol 2, No 52): Magazines, Stealing, Reader's Digest, SONY, Translations

A little late this week. Further compounding the mystery about consumers likes and dislikes and purchase patterns, is news that Martin Amis does indeed pass the free test (NYTimes):

Apparently the thieves have not yet read the “Thou shalt not steal” part — or maybe they believe that Bibles don’t need to be paid for. “Some people think the word of God should be free,” Bercu said. As it turns out, Bibles are snatched even at the Parable Christian Store in Springfield, Ore., the manager told me, despite the fact that if a person asks for a Bible, they’ll be given a copy without charge.

But this holiday season, the Good Book is hardly the only title in danger of being filched. At independent bookstores, thieves are as likely to be taking orders from Abbie Hoffman’s “Steal This Book” as from Exodus.

Fiction is the most commonly poached genre at St. Mark’s Bookshop in the East Village of Manhattan; the titles that continually disappear are moved to the X-Case, safely ensconced behind the counter. This library of temptation includes books by Martin Amis, Charles Bukowski, William S. Burroughs, Raymond Carver, Don DeLillo and Jack Kerouac, among others. Sometimes the staff isn’t sure whether an author is still popular to swipe until they return their books to the main floor. “Amis went out and came right back,” Michael Russo, the manager, told me.

At BookPeople in Austin, titles displayed with staff recommendation cards are a darling among thieves. “It’s so bad lately that I feel like our staff recommendation cards should read: ‘BookPeople Bookseller recommends that you steal ________.’ Apparently the criminal element in Austin shares our literary tastes, or are very prone to suggestion,” Elizabeth Jordan, the head book buyer, wrote in an e-mail message.

The Universtiy of Rochester has developed a vibrant translation publishing program (NYTimes):

Though it might have initially been conceived as a marketing device, Three Percent has turned into a lively clearing house for everything related to literature in translation, and logs more than two million page views a year, with obvious commercial benefits for Open Letter. Readers can post their own reviews and learn what foreign publishing houses are up to, and translators can discuss their craft and check to see which works are available and which have already been snatched up by colleagues.

“It’s very difficult in the present economic climate for a publishing house to be totally dependent on university funding, and in the press, editors have less space for reviews and translations,” said Peter Bush, vice president of the International Federation of Translators, who is translating a collection of short stories from Catalan for Open Letter. “But there are readers out there communicating with each other about translation, and through Three Percent, Open Letter is plugged into the new media and is using that space to find new readers and sell their books.”

Interview with Michael Lynton - he used to be in publishing but went on to greater things at SONY (TimesOnline):

Sony is a prime mover in the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem, a consortium that includes Warner Brothers and Fox — part of News Corporation, parent of The Sunday Times — which will let consumers store movies in “the cloud” to access them from a range of devices. The hope is that viewers will be happy to pay for the convenience.

Lynton hopes the collaboration will help the studios strike back at Apple. Analysts at Screen Digest predict its iTunes store will account for 60% of all US online movie transactions this year, even though it is only compatible with Apple’s own gadgets.

The studios’ historic markets are disappearing fast. Although cinema admissions are thriving in Britain, the value of DVD sales fell 7% in the first 11 months of the year, according to the British Video Association. Annual volumes are flat at about 250m units, even with the explosive growth of Blu-Ray discs.

Adam Peneberg in Fast Company thinks about the future of publishing (Fast Company)

For the non-fiction author therein lie possibilities to create the proverbial last word on a subject, a one-stop shop for all the information surrounding a particular subject matter. Imagine a biography of Wiley Post, the one-eyed pilot from the 1930s who was the first to fly around the world. It would not only offer the entire text of a book but newsreel footage from his era, coverage of his most famous flights, radio interviews, schematics of his plane, interactive maps of his journeys, interviews with aviation historians and pilots of today, a virtual tour of his cockpit and description of every gauge and dial, short profiles of other flyers of his time, photos, hyperlinked endnotes and index, links to other resources on the subject. Social media could be woven into the fabric of the experience--discussion threads and wikis where readers share information, photos, video, and add their own content to Post's story, which would tie them more closely to the book. There's also the potential for additional revenue streams: You could buy MP3s of popular songs from the 1930s, clothes that were the hot thing back then, model airplanes, other printed books, DVDs, journals, and memorabilia.

A long discussion in the NYTimes about the prospects for Reader's Digest - needlessly catty in places (NYTimes)

As Ms. Berner tries to persuade the world to rethink this company, she apparently also needs to re-educate employees. Much of her time and boundless intensity is spent prodding her staff out of its entrenched, slow-motion ways — no easy task, given the eccentric and insular culture of this company, a legacy of the long stewardship of DeWitt and Lila Wallace, the Reader’s Digest founders.

Beyond agitprop, Ms. Berner’s continuing internal campaign has included some let’s-put-on-a-show enthusiasm and some merciless cost-cutting. Lines of authority have also been redrawn, integrating the print and online realms. “Silo busting” is a phrase you hear a lot.

To lead this revolution, Ms. Berner has hired an impressively credentialed group of women to the company’s top jobs, a coterie known around the building collectively as “the blondes.” Strictly speaking, they’re not all blonde, but they have brought high-heel chic to a place that resisted, or actively shunned, that style for a long time.

“It was hilarious to see all those Prada shoes on that campus,” says Jackie Leo, the onetime editor in chief at Reader’s Digest magazine whom Ms. Berner eventually replaced. “It’s such a Manhattan group in such a suburban place.”

Hollywood remake eyes global hit for 'The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo' (CNN): I looked everywhere in London last week for the DVD but only found it on Ebay for $54! I think I would rather see this version than the 'remake':

The Swedish-language adaptation of Larsson's book released earlier this year, "Man Som Hatar Kvinnor" ("Men Who Hate Women") was sleeper hit, grossing nearly $100 million in Europe, according to Variety.

Now producers are hoping a star-powered English-language adaptation can turn the already successful Swedish adaptations of the "Millennium" trilogy into a truly global phenomenon.

"The English-language films will be a more international story than the Swedish ones," said Mikael Walleen, Managing Director of Yellow Bird Pictures, the company producing the original Swedish adaptations.

Magazines Get Ready for Tablets (The NYTimes):

The new approaches depend on two assumptions: that consumers will finally embrace the tablet computers that manufacturers have promised for years, and that they will want to read magazine-style content on them. Publishers are creating magazinelike products for these devices, but different mediums lend themselves to different reading styles, as the Web showed.

Thomas J. Wallace, the editorial director of Condé Nast, said he expected the design of the magazine app to evolve, reflecting how people used it. “As time goes on, we’ll find our way with this, but we need to have the thing — we need to have the consumer using the thing — to tell us what’s best. So we start with who we are.”

In the Esquire app, articles are recreated in documents that the reader scrolls through. A tap calls up more photos or video, a navigation screen or a search box. Because Mr. Granger has a sponsor — Axe — for the first three issues, he hasn’t had to figure out how to incorporate and measure print ads.

Mag Bag: 2009 Round-Up Of Magazine Closures (MediaPost):

These are just the latest in a long casualty list of magazines closed in 2009 -- a total of 433, if you include 64 titles that ceased print publication to go online-only. MediaFinder noted that this number is actually down from previous years -- 526 in 2008, 573 in 2007 -- but the victims include a larger proportion of big titles. Among the high-profile magazines to close this year were Country Home, Teen, Wondertime, Domino (January), Hallmark (February), Best Life and Blender (March), Portfolio (April), Nickelodeon and Vibe (June), Southern Accents (August), Gourmet, Cookie, Modern Bride, and Elegant Bride (October), Fortune Small Business, Metropolitan Home (November) and National Geographic Adventure (December).

MediaWeek (Vol 2, No 51): Cormac McCarthy, Cranford, Libraries/Google, eBooks, Magazines

All Cormac McCarthy as the film version of The Road finally makes it to the big screen. (I'm one book into the border trilogy myself). This weekend in addtion to a review of the film by Wil Self (here), The Observer profiles the author (here):

McCarthy spends a lot of his time at the Santa Fe Institute, near his home in New Mexico, a multi-disciplinary institution set up by the Los Alamos physicist Murray Gell-Mann to study "complex systems". McCarthy lunches there and counts a number of the scientists among his friends. When asked recently, in a conversation with the Wall Street Journal, about the nature of the catastrophic event in The Road, he answered by saying: "I don't have an opinion. It could be anything – volcanic activity or it could be nuclear war. It is not really important. The whole thing now is, what do you do? The last time the caldera in Yellowstone blew, the entire North American continent was under about a foot of ash. People who've gone diving in Yellowstone lake say that there is a bulge in the floor that is now about 100 feet high and the whole thing is just sort of pulsing. From different people, you get different answers, but it could go in another three to four thousand years or it could go on Thursday…"

By nature, you can't help feeling, McCarthy tends toward the latter timeframe. He is the great pessimist of American literature, using his dervish sentences to illuminate a world in which almost everything (including punctuation) has already come to dust. He once argued that he could see no point at all in literature that did not dwell on death. His touchstones are Dostoevsky and Melville; he hasn't much time for Henry James.

This evening (Sunday) in the UK a new series based on the Gaskell Cranford books starts: A second series of Cranford is coming. Apparently, no one has read the books so don't know then endings (Link)

Writer Heidi Thomas had again brilliantly fashioned the stories of Elizabeth Gaskell into something wonderful, greater than the sum of its parts. I get irritated when the show is dismissed as ‘costume drama’ as I see it as an original work by Heidi, based on classic short stories. I think the first series succeeded because viewers were surprised both by the narrative – as they had no way of knowing where the story was heading – and also by the boldly comic tone and versions of the bizarre events that Mrs Gaskell had witnessed in Victorian Cheshire. In television the term aspirational is used to describe shows such as Desperate Housewives, meaning viewers wish they could live like the characters. I think the same was true for Cranford: people wish they lived in a tight little community where people know your business and there are a set of rules and rituals to live by. I also think the audience welcomed a show dominated by strong, distinctive female characters.

Libraries have asked for help controlling what they expect will be high subscription prices for the Google Book Database (Link)

The American Library Association, the Association of College and Research Libraries and the Association of Research Libraries said that there was unlikely to be an effective competitor to Google's massive project in the near term.

It asked the government to urge the court to use its oversight authority to prevent abusive pricing of the online book project.

"The United States should carefully monitor implementation of the settlement, including the pricing of the institutional subscription," the library organizations said in their letter, which was dated December 15 but released on Thursday.

It was addressed to William Cavanaugh, deputy assistant attorney general for the Justice Department's antitrust division.

David Pogue in the New York Times questions whether eBooks should wear protection (Link):

All right. So: should e-books be copy protected?

As an author myself, I, too, am terrified by the thought of piracy. I can’t stand seeing my books, which are the primary source of my income, posted on all these piracy Web sites, available for anyone to download free.

When I wrote about my concerns a year ago, my readers took me to task. “For all you know,” went their counterargument, “the illegal copies are just advertising for you; people will download them, try them out, then go buy the physical book. Either that, or they’re being downloaded by people who would not have bought your book anyway. Why don’t you try a controlled experiment and see?”

Well, it sounded like it could be a very costly experiment. But I agreed. My publisher, O’Reilly, decided to try an experiment, offering one of my Windows books for sale as an unprotected pdf file. After a year, we could compare the results with the previous year’s sales.

The results? It was true. The thing was pirated to the skies. It’s all over the Web now, ridiculously easy to download without paying.

The crazy thing was, sales of the book did not fall. In fact, sales rose slightly during that year.

Stephen Covey's extends his already widely distributed publishing and promotional operations to include a digital rights deal with Amazon. The Guardian suggests this startles New York publishers (Link)

The move has put a chill over New York publishing houses already struggling to keep up with the ebook revolution. One of their big fears is that of becoming separated from their backlists, the titles that act as the cash cows of the industry, bringing in a steady and increasingly crucial income in the insecure digital world.

As jitters spread, some big publishers have moved to defend what they claim is theirs – the digital rights to the backlist.

Borders UK staff are expected to lose their jobs during Christmas week and as many as a 1,000 jobs will be lost as the chance of a last minute reprieve looks remote. (Link) Magazines are getting ready for tablets and there may be lots of benefits to be had (Link):

Publishers like the iPhone, but it has drawbacks, especially its small size. That’s where the tablet is expected to come in.

Few tablets are on the market today. (Mr. Wallace keeps a 10 1/2-inch piece of foam and paper on his desk, his best guess at what a tablet will look like.) Hewlett-Packard and other hardware companies are developing touch-screen tablets that are expected to look like a much larger iPhone. Apple, too, is rumored to be working on one.

“The technology will allow these magazines, and these advertisements, to look as good as they look on the magazine page,” said Louis Cona, senior vice president of the Condé Nast Media Group.

As good — or better. Wired’s mockup has elements like interactive graphics, links that take the customer to a floating window rather than a new page, and the ability to play video and audio. “You can put as many pyrotechnics in there as you want to,” Mr. Wallace said.

MediaWeek (Vol 2, No 50): Random House, Dissertations, Cormac McCarthy, Ian Dury

Random House is taking an aggressive stand on the rights they assume over digital versions of their backlists are reported in The Wall Street Journal:

In the letter, dated Dec. 11, Markus Dohle, CEO of the Bertelsmann AG publishing arm, writes that the "vast majority of our backlist contracts grant us the exclusive right to publish books in electronic formats." Mr. Dohle writes that many of the older agreements "often give the exclusive right to publish 'in book form' or 'in any and all editions.' "

and,

"I don't accept Random House's position, and I don't think anybody else will either," Mr. Sobel said. "You are entitled to the rights stated in your contract. And contracts 20 years ago didn't cover electronic rights. And the courts have already agreed with this position."

Stuart Applebaum, a spokesman for Random House, said, "We believe Random House has the right to publish our authors' backlist titles as e-books. We think we can do the best job for our authors' e-books."

The story was also covered by The NYT:

The discussions about the digital fate of Mr. Styron’s work are similar to the negotiations playing out across the book industry as publishers hustle to capture the rights to release e-book versions of so-called backlist books. Indeed, the same new e-book venture Mr. Styron’s family hopes to use has run into similar resistance from the print publisher of “Catch-22” by Joseph Heller. On Friday, Markus Dohle, chief executive of Random House, sent a letter to dozens of literary agents, writing that the company’s older agreements gave it “the exclusive right to publish in electronic book publishing formats.”Backlist titles, which continue to be reprinted long after their initial release, are crucial to publishing houses because of their promise of lucrative revenue year after year. But authors and agents are particularly concerned that traditional publishers are not offering sufficient royalties on e-book editions, which they point out are cheaper for publishers to produce. Some are considering taking their digital rights elsewhere, which could deal a financial blow to the hobbled publishing industry.

UC Berkeley: Paper is out, digital is in, when it comes to dissertations (Link)

For the last few years, Berkeley students have been able to file their ProQuest copy digitally, but Lemontt says few took advantage because they still needed to produce a perfect printed copy for the library. The move to all-electronic has been in the works for a year or more, according to Lemontt. The Graduate Council signed off on it in October.In addition to making Berkeley students' research far more widely available, going electronic is "a major step in line with campus 'green' initiatives" and also is in line with Chancellor Robert Birgeneau's directive to streamline business processes, according to an August memo from Graduate Dean Andrew Szeri to council chair Ronald Cohen.Revisions of the library's procedures made the cataloguing of electronic papers possible. The final hurdles were concerns that that research published instantly online might be more susceptible to plagiarism, and that some students might want to delay digital publication while they revise their dissertation into a publishable book.

There's a movie out about Ian Dury and an interview with his son Baxter. (Link) Cormac McCarthy talks about The Road The Road tops our pool of the decade’s best 100 books. In a rare interview, its author, Cormac McCarthy, talks about religion, fatherhood and the future of humanity. (Link)

The writer himself, however, has proved more elusive. He won’t be found at book festivals, readings and other places where novelists gather. McCarthy prefers hanging out with “smart people” outside his field, such as professional poker players and the thinkers at the Santa Fe Institute, a theoretical science foundation in New Mexico where he has been a longtime Fellow.

In recent years his circle has inched farther into Hollywood. Now, set for release in January, is a screen adaptation of The Road. As intimate as it is grim, the book tells the story of a man’s bond with his young son as the two struggle for survival years after a cataclysm has erased society. The novel won a Pulitzer Prize in 2007 and was promoted heavily by Oprah Winfrey as a surprising selection for her book club.

MediaWeek (Vol 2, No 49): E-Books, Australia, Brit Library, Amazon Warehouse, German Digital, Pearson Outlook

Again most of these have been noted on the twitter (@personanondata). This is almost an "International Edition" this week. Jeffrey Archer lands record £18m deal for a modern Forsyte saga TimesOnline. Last we heard he was rewriting his old books. (Telegraph) A JISC report on the uses of E-Books in education has been finalized (Link)

Observatory project final report published. The results of the two year project exploring the behaviours of e-book users and the impact of course text e-books on print sales are now available. The final report summarises the key findings of the project and the recommendations for future action.

The Sydney Morning Herald reflection on the Australian retail market and the proposed share listing of book retail holding company REDgroup and "its curious collection of bookshops and newsagents" (SMH)

With the fragile economics of the book trade clear for all to see and the looming presence of ebooks such as the Kindle you might have thought it's an odd time to even think of putting a $500 million diversified book business on to the sharemarket.

A cynic might suggest if you were a private equity group - in this case Pacific Equity Partners, controlling two book chains along with a chain of stationery and newsagency shops - it might be just the time to bring ''mum and dad'' into the loop and get your money out. After all, those Texan tearaways TPG managed to do just that at Myer.

Also my mate Richard Siergersma is quoted:

Richard Siegersma, chief of wholesale book operator Central Book Services, suggests, the protection debate was a sideshow. It is the arrival of a new supply chain in the form of online publishing that will mark the winners in the industry.

Siegersma says that where his business provides an electronic book option, up to half the sales are already electronic. The implication is that once devices such as Kindles offer Australians the same content as their local bookshop, online sales will soar.

FT reports that a consortium/JV of magazine publishers will be joined by NewsCorp in building a consumer platform for content: (FT):

News Corp, a frequent critic of how Amazon shares revenue and information on its Kindle e-reader, will throw its weight behind the consortium of magazine publishers, including Time Inc, Condé Nast, Hearst and Meredith, in the hope of luring newspapers publishers further down the line.

The new partnership aims to meet four objectives necessary to develop the next generation of magazines for mobile and digital devices and to ensure they become more profitable than publishers' current online efforts.

The group is working on creating a reading application, a "robust" publishing platform, a digital storefront for consumers and a new line-up of "immersive advertising opportunities", according to people familiar with the plan.

Berlin Plans Response to Google Books Project. (They could call it www.libreka.de - oh wait, that name's already taken). (DW)

The project, called the German Digital Library (DDB), would go online in 2011 and play a major role in the preservation of Germany's cultural identity, Neumann added. Initial funding of 5 million euros ($7.6 million) as well as annual costs of 2.6 million euros will come from a German economic bail-out program and be split by the federal and state governments. The German project is a response to the Google Book Search program, which the German government opposed, saying it lacked sufficient protections for copyright holders. The DDB will contribute its work to the Europe-wide Europeana database "The German Digital Library is a reasonable response to Google," Neumann said, adding that the German project would first seek copyright holders' approval before digitizing a work, rather than following Google's strategy of allowing copyright holders to have their works removed from the database after being digitized.

Robert Darnton: a long commentary on the New York Review of Books on the Google Book Settlement and he concludes (NYRB)

The most ambitious solution would transform Google's digital database into a truly public library. That, of course, would require an act of Congress, one that would make a decisive break with the American habit of determining public issues by private lawsuit. The legislation would have to settle ancillary problems—how to adjust copyright, deal with orphan books, and compensate Google for its investment in digitizing—but it would have the advantage of clearing up a messy legal landscape and of giving the American people what they deserve: a national digital library equal to the needs of the twenty-first century. But it is not clear how Google would react to such a buyout.

If state intervention is deemed to go too far against the American grain, a minimal solution could be devised for the private sector. Congress would have to intervene with legislation to protect the digitization of orphan works from lawsuits, but it would not need to appropriate funds. Instead, funding could come from a coalition of foundations. The digitizing, open-access distribution, and preservation of orphan works could be done by a nonprofit organization such as the Internet Archive, a nonprofit group that was built as a digital library of texts, images, and archived Web pages. In order to avoid conflict with interests in the current commercial market, the database would include only books in the public domain and orphan works. Its time span would increase as copyrights expired, and it could include an opt-in provision for rightsholders of books that are in copyright but out of print.

Tiger Woods apparently interested in Physics: drives sales of physics book sky-high. Maybe the titles should have been "Get a grip on the steering wheel" (Link). Just proves that book marketing is all about placement. Interesting video showing the new deep storage facility that is being brought on line by The British Library. (BBC) And if that's not enough, inside the Amazon UK warehouse as they prep for mega Monday. (Telegraph):

"Customers shopping habits have really changed in the past few years. They now do their research in store, and go home to find a cheaper price on the internet. Or they buy online and collect in store. And we are seeing an amazing number buying from their iPhones," he said.

It's a version of Christmas that will baffle many people – buying your family's presents by tapping a few buttons on a mobile phone – but it is a trend that has much further to go, even if it means that some of the romance is taken out of giving and receiving.

Recent studies suggest that prices are significantly cheaper on the internet than they are on the high street, and that includes the cost of postage and packaging.

Interesting blog post from Publishing Perspectives on the Spanish book market: Spain’s E-book Business Stuck in Beta (link)

Trikar pointed out that, fortunately, upstart companies have risen to fill this void: “Grammata is hoping to sell a lot of their reader Papyre this holiday season—they’re the only ones who offer free e-books,” he said. “Others hope to digitize books and then sell them through big retailers like El Corte Inglés or Casa de Libro, which have very little in the way of e-books to offer at the moment.” But, he added, “A lot of these companies are new projects and I can’t tell whether they’ll succeed.” Despite the promise of numerous new e-reading devices hitting the market in the next few months, there remains a dearth of legitimate sources of Spanish e-books. “And if there are no new releases for sale [through legitimate channels] readers will go elsewhere,” noted Trikar. Digital piracy dominated much of the discussion at the fair, in fact, as it has in all the public debate surrounding e-books in Spain. Like much of Europe, Spain has supported arguments in favor of copyright protection over those seeking universal access. The country has a particularly complex relationship to piracy—one widely cited statistic says the country has the second highest rate of digital piracy in the world—and fear of piracy has, say some observers, paralyzed the industry.

The ISBN agency want your feedback on ISBN use for ebooks. (Link) Pearson CFO sees U.S. schools very tough in 2010 (Reuters)

Freestone said Pearson, which also owns Penguin Books and the Financial Times, saw the U.S. schools market remaining hard next year, despite a bigger market for new book adoptions.

"It's going to be a very, very tough place to be next year. State budgets are still contracting, and state budgets account for about 93 percent of all education spend in the States," he said, adding that 2010 might be no better than this year.

Pearson has been gaining market share in North America at the expense of rivals such McGraw-Hill, mainly thanks to its wide range of testing and digital learning tools that provide feedback to students and help to raise standards.

MediaWeek (Vol 2, No 48): Robert Ludlum and Jason Bourne, OCLC, BBC

Robert Ludlum seems to be more popular in death rather than life - at least his character Jason Bourne however that's not entirely good according to David Samuels writing in The National (Abu Dhabi). It is a long article but worth it if a Ludlum fan; here is a sample (LINK)

The rise of the serial drama in the age of terror has given new cultural value to Ludlum’s greatest strength as a writer, his mastery of the 19th century theatrical apparatus. Where the postmodern novelists of the 1960s and 1970s enjoyed lampooning the shaggy dog mechanics of plot, Ludlum’s delight in orchestrating over-the-top scenarios is less an attempt to poke fun at the form of the novel than the overflow of an imagination that can’t stop making stuff up. Ludlum’s natural inclination as a writer is to keep adding more, and his books are stuffed with dramatic incident to a degree that would drive any professional screenwriter nuts. The only sensible way to turn Ludlum’s novels into movies is to do what the screenwriters and directors of the three Bourne movies did for Matt Damon – throw out the plots of the books while retaining the titles and the character of Jason Bourne. What is more difficult to fathom about Van Lustbader’s updated version of Jason Bourne is his decision to do away with the character’s paranoia, a choice that seems about as clever as casting Marilyn Monroe in a movie about nuns. That paranoia is not only the hero’s sole distinguishing psychological trait, it is also the way that Ludlum links Bourne’s inner life with the outside world. By toggling back and forth between the seemingly deranged nature of his hero’s perceptions and a reality in which people are in fact trying to kill him, Ludlum was able to manufacture a degree of real tension despite the overt silliness of his plots. The decision to undo the paranoid web in which Ludlum’s hero was stuck only reveals that Van Lustbader lacks a convincing account of how and why his characters act the way that they do. Faced with these questions, which are just as significant for authors of airport thrillers as they are for the writers of literary novels and horror stories, Van Lustbader draws a blank.

Library in a Phone Box makes the BBC news. The OCLC Library has begun a collection of studies on how libraries fit into people’s information-seeking behavior. Right now they are concentrating on published books, reports or dissertations, rather than articles, and are generally looking for items that cover more than a single library, though we’ve made some exceptions if the study is of significant interest. (LINK) Borders bookshops in the UK go into administration (Link) Google puts Iraq museum collection online (Link) BBC Worldwide can keep Lonely Planet, says Trust. BUT DON'T DO IT AGAIN! (Link)

"Our commercial operations are not exempt from the BBC's public mission. They must keep the public purposes at their heart, engaging carefully with markets globally to help 'bring the UK to the world and the world to the UK', whilst protecting and promoting the BBC's brand and reputation.

"We're satisfied that these changes will provide much-needed clarity and a greater alignment with the BBC's public purposes, without stifling Worldwide's ability to perform as a thriving and profitable entity."

Commenting on the BBC Trust's report into the BBC's commercial activities, the shadow culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt said: "This is a belated recognition of what everyone has been saying, namely that acquisitions like Lonely Planet are totally inappropriate. What is lacking, however, is any strategic vision as to what BBC Worldwide is actually there to do. Until this is resolved, putting new safeguards in place will have very limited impact."

MediaWeek (Vol 2, No 47): SharedBook, Virtual Classrooms, Google Legal

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.

MediaWeek (Vol 2, No 46): Elsevier, Hathi, Virtual Education, Downloading

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)

MediaWeek (Vol 2, No 45): Money Issue

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.

MediaWeek (Vol 2, No 44): Web Retailing, Future of Reading, Semantic Search, ChickLit, E-Books

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)

MediaWeek (Vol 2, No 43): Reviews, Kindle, Celebrity Authors, Jeff Archer, Pearson, Nabokov

(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