MediaWeek (Vol 3, No 50): Google eBooks, Smelling Books, Spooky Retail Practices, Manga Censorship

TechCruch has a snarky piece about the Google eBookstore and some of the commentators see through the bias (TC):

Many hopes and dreams were projected onto Google Editions’ vaporware. It would index every published word since the dawn of humanity, and make it possible to search your personal library, and deep-link to individual chapters, sections, and paragraphs. It would somehow singlehandedly resurrect the dying bookstore trade. Instead, when the fog finally cleared, all we got was Kindle Lite.

Oh, it does what it does well enough. You can buy books from Google and read them on your Android, iWhatever, e-reader, or the Web; authors and publishers can upload their own books, with or without DRM; and it’s all been expertly implemented. But now that you can read Kindle books on the Web, Google’s new eBookstore is little more than a carbon copy of Amazon’s Kindle ecosystem — except that you can’t (yet) read DRMed Google ebooks on a Kindle (which remains, I note, the world’s most popular e-reader) or email them as gifts.

From "Thrilled" Checked out some of my favorites Dickens titles. Looked at the sample, changed settings from scan to flowing text, adjusted font size, line spacing. Decided this is a must for my dad to get his books. Sorry that they've not served markets/authors with copyright issues, but this is a profound value for many. How is it that such a monumental effort to get books into available electronic format is denigrated because one segment of authors (which have multiple layers of legal concerns) is not well served?? From Khalid: To be fair to Google, this is version one and they tend to make improvements to their services very quickly. Granted, some content will be held-back because of the legal situation, but ultimately the service will very likely be much better soon. Worst case, Google Books doesn't do very well. But already Amazon are talking about a full Kindle web application and with it the ability for any site to sell books through Kindle. Those features were almost certainly pushed out there or made a higher priority because of Google. So, at the least, the competition has made and will continue to make Kindle better. And "Harry" I believe the true "problem" is expertly sandwiched into the article: "The best is that you get public-domain books for free, though they seem to have missed the Creative Commons train: neither of the books I’ve released for free appears in their catalog. " Oh....Now this article makes much more sense.

Michael Powell is enthusiastic about the Google eBook store and speaks to Forbes:

I’ve been reading for months that Google, the resident behemoth here, would partner with local booksellers when they launched their eBookstore. Sure enough, it’s happening. And maybe I’m just to used to the old tales, but I’ve found it hard to grasp the plot point. Sure, Amazon.com uses neighborhood booksellers to address scarcity, especially for used books, but ebooks magically eliminate such concerns. Why wouldn’t Google just stomp to the fight with Amazon, flattening those little bricky stores along the way? When you need an answer from someone with bookstore cred you can do a lot worse than one of Google’s most notable partners — Powell’s Books in Portland, Ore. So I spent the past week emailing with Darin Sennett, Director of Web Stuff at Powell’s. He explained why stores like his and Google are ready to write the eBook of love, not war. When I think about partnerships between Google eBookstore and publishers, it makes sense. But I have to admit that when I saw Powell’s partnering with Google eBookstore, it made me scratch my head. So let’s start there. What’s the advantage of this partnership for your store? Our core competency is bookselling. Building an ebook distribution infrastructure from scratch is a gigantic undertaking – not something an independent bookseller has the resources to do. Then there’s keeping up with all the future devices people will want to read on, which means continual focus on technological development. Having Google take care of the heavy lifting lets us concentrate on being a fantastic bookstore.

Number 16 in the reasons to love New York from NY Magazine:

Because We’re Home to Not Only the Publishing Industry But Also to a Woman Who Spends Her Days Smelling Books: After artist Rachael Morrison, 29, started working at the MoMA library, she’d joke that she was “smelling books” all day. She loves being surrounded by all these books in an increasingly digitized age—they already seem like artifacts. She began wondering what it would be like not to be able to smell them anymore. “When you read a book, you become immersed in this way that feels very special and individual,” she says. Unlike when you read something online, where “I always have this sense that whatever I am reading is being read by millions of other people.” So six months ago, she decided to spend her lunch breaks chronicling the unique scent of each book in the MoMA stacks.

(And for my many readers who like pork - check this out in the same issue). A popular theme at the moment: How eBooks, iPad, etc, etc are changing the whole idea of the book. From the Observer:

These two developments – the Economist's app and Eagleman's "book" – ought to serve as a wake-up call for the print publishing industry. The success of Amazon's Kindle has, I think, lulled print publishers into a false sense of security. After all, they're thinking, the stuff that goes on the Kindle is just text. It may not be created by squeezing dyes on to processed wood-pulp, but it's still text. And that's something we're good at. So no need to panic. Amazon may be a pain to deal with, but the Kindle and its ilk will see us through.If that's really what publishers are thinking, then they're in for some nasty surprises. The concept of a "book" will change under the pressure of iPad-type devices, just as concepts of what constitutes a magazine or a newspaper are already changing. This doesn't mean that paper publications will go away. But it does mean that print publishers who wish to thrive in the new environment will not just have to learn new tricks but will also have to tool up. In particular, they will have to add serious in-house technological competencies to their publishing skills.

Who will be the last book readers from Geoff Pevere at The (Toronto) Star on his visit to The Written Word Festival:

Admittedly, the Written Word Festival is not the best place to find kids who don't read, who are presumably those kids so neurally corrupted by Facebook and cellphones that reading is beyond them. However, it's a terrific place not only to meet kids who do read but to learn how they read. Katherine Drotos is 17. She says she'll read “pretty much anything” as long as it grabs her, and if it does she's hooked to the last page. She finds the stuff most likely to grab her on lists: online lists at Indigo and Amazon, and favourite lists posted by avid readers. As for e-books, there's no way. “I can't stand looking at a screen when I read.” Reading, it is commonly believed, is in crisis. Just google these three words (reading in crisis) and you'll find articles, studies and columns worrying that people, kids in particular, are reading less than ever. The implication is clear: if it weren't for all those addictive, instantly gratifying, ADD-generating electronic distractions, kids would be curling up with 700-page novels. Not uncommon is this sort of sentiment, found in the 2008 book The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future by Mark Bauerlein: “Young (Internet) users have learned a thousand new things, no doubt. They upload and download, surf and chat, post and design, but they haven't learned to analyze a complex test, store facts in their heads, comprehend a foreign policy decision, take lessons from history, or spell correctly.”

Salon has an interesting article about how web stores not only know who you are but manipulate their prices accordingly. Why are we surprised? (Salon):

Online retailers also alter prices, deals, and offers on regular goods that do not traditionally have much price volatility. Groups like Consumers Union periodically track shopping sites to see how and how often they change prices, and find fairly frequent instances of dynamic pricing. "While surfing Barnes and Noble's site, we selected a new hardcover book," the watchdog noted in a 2007 investigation. "[We] placed it in our online 'cart' at a cost of $20.80. We added several other books as well but didn't finalize the sale. Two days later, using the same browser, we found the cart had been emptied. We selected the same titles…[it] now cost $26.00." Ditto for shoes on Zappos and a number of other products. It is impossible to know exactly what stores change prices for customers after they have clicked to put a product in their shopping cart—or which stores change a price on a customer depending on their browser or cookies. Shoppers despise the practice, understandably, so stores rarely cop to it unless caught red-handed. But many offer disclaimers implying they are aware of price discrepancies. Pottery Barn, for example, answers the question, "Why is the price of an item in my saved shopping cart different from when I selected it?" on its site. The answer? "Prices are subject to change—including temporary reductions as well as permanent increases. The prices of items in your cart represent the current price for which you will be charged." In short: Dynamic pricing.The practice, if mysterious, is not new. Mega-retailer Amazon offered the same DVD for different prices to different customers in 2000, creating a public-relations disaster. The company claimed it was performing A/B price testing—seeing how many more folks would buy the DVD at a higher price—and said it would always give all customers the lower price at sale. But the incident fostered widespread concern about dynamic pricing, and spurred the first thorough study of the practice.

Clamping down on 'extreme manga' in Japan (Independent):

Japanese comics, which are read by adults and children, are part of mainstream culture and often explore complex subjects, including business, war and politics. A manga version of Marx's Das Kapital recently made it into print, joining Tolstoy's War and Peace, Hitler's Mein Kampf and Shakespeare's King Lear. But although the country's shelves groan with romance and literary manga, it is the genre's hardcore fringe that has long upset conservatives. Debate has raged for years on the impact of such material on children. Violent manga and anime have been cited in the trials of several notorious Japanese serial killers, but sexual and violent crimes are comparatively rare in Japan. Exports of comics, animated movies and games have mushroomed in the last decade. Former Prime Minister Taro Aso was a famous manga -fan and the government has bundled popular culture into its "Cool Japan" strategy, which focuses on the commercial and soft-power potential of the industry abroad. Prime Minister Naoto Kan recognised the industry's importance this week when he blogged on the censorship dispute. "Upbringing of youth is an important matter. But it's also important to present Japan's anime to the world," he wrote.

Charming... From the Twitter: Smithsonian Celebrates 50 Years of COBOL AOL "Nerdy memorabilia" From Google and Harvard, a New Way to Analyze the Written Word - NYTimes Columbia Journalism Review: Media Policy in the Digital Age PND And in sports, normal service was resumed in the cricket world (BBC).

MediaWeek (Vol 3, No 49): Genre Fiction, Aptara Report, Salinger Obit

In the Observer Ed Docx tries to explains quality is in the eyes of the beholder and in the process proves his point (Observer)

It's worth dealing with the difference again, since everyone seems to have forgotten it or become chary of the articulation. Mainly this: that even good genre (not Larsson or Brown) is by definition a constrained form of writing. There are conventions and these limit the material. That's the way writing works and lots of people who don't write novels don't seem to get this: if you need a detective, if you need your hero to shoot the badass CIA chief, if you need faux-feminist shopping jokes, then great; but the correlative of these decisions is a curtailment in other areas. If you are following conventions, then a significant percentage of the thinking and imagining has been taken out of the exercise. Lots of decisions are already made.

So it follows that genre tends to rely on a simpler reader psychology. If you have a body on the first page, then you raise a question: who killed it and how did it get there? And curiosity will power readers a surprisingly long way. As will, say, a treasure hunt (Brown) or injustice (Grisham) or the locked room mystery format (Larsson). None of this is to say that writing good thrillers is easy. It is still incredibly difficult. But it is easier.

These are the reasons, too, why a bad thriller or detective novel or murder mystery will feel so much better than a bad literary novel – why it might even thrive. Even in a bad genre book, you've still got the curiosity and the reassuring knowledge that the writer will eventually deliver against the conventions. Bad literary fiction, on the other hand, is mostly without such fallback positions and is therefore a whole lot worse.

Short item about Indian publisher and retailer (The Hindu)

In 1903, Motilal Banarsidass (MLBD) began as a tiny store of spiritual books, built on a capital of Rs. 27. Over the next century, it developed into one of the world's foremost publishers of scholarly works on Indology, with a formidable catalogue of priceless works — 100 volumes of the Mahapuranas, 50 volumes of the ‘Sacred Books of the East' edited by Max Mueller... Today, the 107-year-old Delhi-based publishing company, still run by the descendants of Motilal Jain, its founder, retains its focus on Indian culture and spiritual heritage, but is evolving to meet the changing needs of the 21st Century. Speaking to Rajendra Prakash Jain, one of the five brothers who currently run MLBD, what emerges is the picture of a company that straddles the old world and the new, combining tradition with modernity.

The Observer is revisiting their Obits from 2010:

The JD Salinger I knew, by Lillian Ross American author JD Salinger died, aged 91, on 27 January 2010. Here, his long-standing friend Lillian Ross, a staff writer at the New Yorker since 1945, tells of the generous author who could keep her laughing for hours

Technology vendor Aptara released a survey of more than 600 publishers across the Trade, Professional, and Education markets reveals the latest impacts of eBooks on the publishing industry (SFGate):

The survey, conducted this summer, reveals that 64% of publishers are now offering titles in eBook format. Though, the majority are still struggling to maximize profits from the fast-growing eBook market as a result of inefficient print production processes that require transformation in order to support scalable, affordable digital output. The second in a year, this survey is one of a series being conducted by Aptara to document the evolution of book publishing in the face of the burgeoning eReader market and consumers' changing reading behaviors.

The most significant findings from this survey include:

• A widespread inability to calculate return on investment (ROI) from eBooks - 62%, and of those able to calculate ROI, only 14% are recognizing a stronger ROI from eBooks than print. These stats confirm that most publishers are not employing scalable digital workflows, but rather retrofitting print production process and forgoing significant cost savings.
• The main eBook production challenge facing publishers is still eReader/content compatibility issues. Even with the near universal EPUB eBook format standard, today's fragmented eReader market makes quality eBook production a moving target, with expert, manual manipulation required to retain consistent formatting across device-types.
• Almost a quarter of publishers producing eBooks are employing XML, indicating a positive shift to scalable, digital workflows in support of efficient eBook production across all eReaders.
• Only 7% of publishers are implementing enhancements to their eBooks, suggesting that most publishers are not aware of the EPUB standard's inherent support for content enhancement, including audio and video.

From the twitter (@personanondata) LA Times: Why is Len Riggio Publishers Weekly's man of the year? JacketCopy Google Books launched (Blog) Slow week... In sports, England crushed Australia in the second Ashes test (BBC)

MediaWeek (Vol 3, No 48): World Book Night, Obit Purushottama Lal, M/A: Reed & WoltersKluwer, Cengage Declines

World Book Night in the UK: One million books to be given away (Telegraph):

The idea was dreamed up by Canongate MD Jamie Byng, who has a knack for discovering talent (the young unknowns Barack Obama and Philip Pullman have long been part of his stable), and whose entire life appears to be an attempt to prove that nothing is as infectious as enthusiasm. World Book Night is a wildly ambitious extension of that theory.

Here’s how it works: Between now and January 4, members of the public are being asked to choose one book they love from a list of 25 pre-selected titles (see the full list below). They – you! – fill in a form saying, in 100 words, why they would like to give this book to others. The recommendation must be personal, and passionate. Each of 20,000 “givers” will then be sent 48 copies of that book to hand out on the night of March 5 at the venue they have chosen, resulting in what promises to be a national, simultaneous frenzy of book-loving.

Monsoon Systems has signed a contract with REDGroup Australia:

"This strategic alliance with Monsoon Commerce Solutions enables Borders.com.au to integrate with the leading marketplace and offer our Australian customers a massive selection of products. In doing this, we become Australia's largest online bookstore, and possibly even Australia's largest online store. Providing the broadest range of media and entertainment products is at the core of our strategy, together with offering unbeatable value to our customers, which this marketplace offer enables us to do. This is key to helping us grow in this competitive and rapidly growing market," said James Webber, managing director of REDgroup Online Pty Ltd. "This offer allows our customers to re-sell their used books on our web site, as well as purchase used and rare books not readily available elsewhere."

Continued Webber, "This is an important addition to the Borders.com.au web site and strengthens its position as one of this region's strongest e-tailers. With an unparalleled range of books and eBooks available, a price guarantee that ensures we are more than competitive with Amazon.com, and the recent extension of our offer into CDs, DVDs, and general gifts, Borders.com.au is uniquely positioned to capitalize on the massive growth in online spending by Australian consumers."

"Monsoon Commerce Solutions is committed to helping sellers and retailers grow their businesses online. Adding marketplace functionality with REDgroup's Australian and New Zealand retail operations dramatically extends their selection and increases customer loyalty. Broadening our reach in this way is another step forward in our commitment to helping sellers grow their business," stated Brian Elliott, CEO of Monsoon Commerce Solutions.

Obit of Purushottama Lal, poet and publisher of Calcutta in the Economist:

Professor Lal’s business was publishing Indian writers in English. Of the great old works he made masterly translations; new writers he encouraged. When he began, ten years after independence, the practice was controversial. Although English was one of India’s official languages, writers in it were often mocked as colonial remnants, “caged chaffinches and polyglot parrots”. He passionately disagreed. His love of English had begun in boyhood and was crowned with his long tenure at St Xavier’s College in Calcutta, to which his landowning family had come from the Punjab. Mention an English poet—Donne, Swinburne, Keats—and “Profsky”, as all his friends called him, would launch into reciting. Give him a word, and he would burrow joyously into its etymology. He was determined to keep the best English writing alive and well in India. And that meant making space for new creative writers, too. Each of the 3,500 titles he published contained, at the back, his “credo”. English book publishing in India, he complained, was governed by a “nexus” of “high-profile PR-conscious book publishers, semi-literate booksellers, moribund public and state libraries, poorly informed and nepotistic underlings in charge of book review pages…and biased bulk purchases of near worthless books by bureaucratic institutions”. He, on the other hand, survived “without plush foundations”, publishing then-unknown authors purely for the love of it. Letters were always answered promptly, in the beautiful hand and with the Sheaffer pen. Manuscripts were accepted, as often as not, just to try their luck in the “loving clutches” of the free market. He made no money at it, and the authors might not either, because they were required to buy 100 copies of their work in advance. Some grumbled, but Writers Workshop was a beacon, not a charity.

Reed Elsevier continues to carve off pieces of its business. This time the Congressional Information Service and University Publications (PR):

Among the acquired product lines' best known works is the Congressional Collection, a one-of-a-kind resource that enables simple access to the full text of the breadth of governmental output -- congressional publications, bills, laws and other research materials – and award-winning Statistical Insight, which captures data produced by U.S. Federal agencies, States, private organizations, and major intergovernmental organizations. The microfilm vault of government documents encompasses text of congressional hearings dating from 1789, providing rich content for ProQuest’s continuously expanding digital archives.

“As LexisNexis continues to transform its portfolio of products and services, we are very pleased to place this business unit with ProQuest as it is an excellent fit for them and their customers,” said Mike Simmons, senior vice president of Specialty Businesses at LexisNexis. “We look forward to working with ProQuest – including licensing back certain legislative content sets from ProQuest for our legal professional customers.”

On the other hand, LexisNexis acquired State Net to add to their collection of government database products and applications (Marketwatch):

LexisNexis, a leading global provider of content-enabled workflow solutions, today announced that it has acquired State Net(R) -- the premier provider of legislative and regulatory content and tools in the United States. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. "Through the acquisition of State Net, LexisNexis has secured critical content and tools needed by legal and business professionals to rapidly monitor and analyze the policy decisions being made by Federal and State governments and regulatory agencies across the US on a daily basis," said Bob Romeo, senior vice president of Research and Litigation Solutions at LexisNexis. "Access to this critical information means our customers are at an advantage when assisting their clients in finding, analyzing and planning for those decisions." State Net collects, normalizes and editorially enhances all bills introduced in the 50 U.S. state legislatures, the District of Columbia and the U.S. Congress, as well as all agency regulations from every state. The service also provides timely delivery of data, legislative intelligence and in-depth content and tools reporting on the actions of government institutions.

SkyRiver (competitor to OCLC) was granted the right to deliver subject headings for adoption and approval to the Library of Congress (LJ)

Wolters Kluwer Health has entered into an agreement to acquire Pharmacy OneSource (CMIO)

Pharmacy OneSource is a healthcare software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider that helps hospitals manage patient safety, compliance and efficiency. Pharmacy OneSource, of Bellevue, Wash., currently works with more than 1,200 hospitals globally, and assists with medication tracking, pediatric dosing, drug interaction checking, managing formularies, documenting and monitoring clinical interventions, and avoiding medication errors and adverse drug reactions via the web or handheld computer, as well as managing checklists to facilitate accurate and consistent compliance reporting.

Cengage Learning reported their first quarter a few weeks ago which saw a $52mm (7%) decline versus 2009. Here is their management summary for the three months ended September 30 (Cengage):

• Revenues decreased by $52.0, or 7.5%, to $641.8 for the three months ended September 30, 2010, including a $3.0 favorable impact from acquisitions and a $0.6 unfavorable impact from foreign currency translation. The revenue decline was driven by gross sales decreases in the higher education and career channels due to changes in customer ordering patterns that accelerated certain orders into the fourth quarter of fiscal 2010 from the first quarter of fiscal 2011, as well as our Research business within our Domestic segment, partially offset by higher sales in our International segment.
• Operating income from continuing operations decreased by $33.3, or 13.1%, for the three months ended September 30, 2010, due to lower revenues and restructuring charges, partially offset by lower variable costs, amortization of pre-publication costs and employee and consulting services cost.
• Adjusted EBITDA decreased by $37.2, or 10.4%, for the three months ended September 30, 2010, due to lower revenues partially offset by lower direct product and other variable costs, as well as lower employee and consulting services cost.

From the twitter this week (@personanondata): Why the Library of Congress Is Blocking Wikileaks « Library of Congress Blog JoongAng Daily: U.S. publisher @MarcusLeaver views Korea as trendsetter in e-book growth Google Editions: Faster Forward - Google readies Google Editions e-book store WAPO Onnesha Roychoudhuri: Books After Amazon Boston Review

MediaWeek (Vol 3, No 47): Digital Collections, Moleskin, Amazon & Tax, Author Interviews, National Digital Library

This edition slightly shorter than normal given the Thanksgiving weekend. Check out these job opportunities if you didn't see them last week (PND). From the LA Times a short article on digital libraries (LAT):

Equipped with imaging equipment far more powerful — and often less expensive — than a decade ago, libraries of all sizes are transforming their physical collections into virtual ones. The ultimate goal is to digitize troves of books and documents long hidden in basements and to share them with the world in electronic form. "Name an institution, and if they have books they're looking to digitize them," said Nick Warnock, president of Los Angeles-based Atiz Innovation Inc., which sells a variety of scanning rigs that allow library technicians to scan as many as 800 pages a minute. The final result is a digitally bound book made from images of the original. Warnock said his business has doubled this year as more libraries and other organizations become aware of the value of scanning older documents. The company says it has sold more than 2,000 of its scanning stations to libraries and government agencies around the world, including Stanford, UCLA and the Getty Center. The lowest-cost Atiz rig, called the BookDrive Mini, sells for around $6,000 without the pair of cameras. Canon models that go with it range from $500 to $7,000 each for high-end models.

And what is note book producer Moleskin up to you ask? (PrintMag):

Despite Moleskine’s understandable support of print, the company has been trying to reach into the digital world. In 2009, it introduced MSK, a program that formats web pages for printout so they can be tucked inside notebooks. It’s not the most elegant system, but it’s a first step toward envisioning a digitally minded Moleskine. The next step is the iPhone app that was initially scheduled to be released last summer. It is now on hold, but the company says it will be a digital correspondent to the paper notebook. A draft press release suggested it would “take geopositioned written or visual notes and share them on social networks.” The layout could be changed to match users’ favorite Moleskines, and notes could be put in MSK formatting and printed out. Users would launch the app by plucking a digital version of the elastic band.

Amazon's Lack of Tax Issue (Salon):

Sales tax is a touchy subject for Amazon. Local retailers have long protested that online stores' tax-free status gives them an unfair price advantage. Amazon, wary of provoking state or federal authorities, has played down this advantage. It doesn't tout tax savings anywhere on its site or in other marketing efforts. In a brilliant report on Amazon's tax strategy, Michael Mazerov of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out that company representatives have long argued that Amazon's tax advantage is not a big deal. "People shop online for convenience, for huge selection and great prices, and not because of any sales tax issue," a spokesman said in 1999. And an executive once told a group of state tax administrators that "we don't consider tax as a competitive advantage." (The company didn't respond to my inquiries about its tax policies.) But Mazerov argues that Amazon's actions suggest that taxes have always been a primary consideration. Jeff Bezos, Amazon's founder, moved from New York to Seattle to start the company. "We could have started Amazon.com anywhere," he told Fast Company in 1996. "We chose Seattle because it met a rigorous set of criteria." Among other things, Seattle had lots of talented tech people, it was a nice enough place to attract many more smart people, and it was close to a big book warehouse. This was true of the San Francisco area, too, which Bezos had also considered for Amazon's headquarters. But Bezos saw one major problem with San Francisco—it's in a big state with high taxes, meaning lots of customers would be subject to sales tax if they bought stuff from Amazon. "I even investigated whether we could set up Amazon.com on an Indian reservation near San Francisco," Bezos told Fast Company. "This way we could have access to talent without all the tax consequences. Unfortunately, the government thought of that first."

David Rothman on Creating a National Digital Library System (Atlantic). The article is long but here is a sample (and the comments are useful also):

A library plan and related initiatives should include the actual collections, not just for traditional education and research but also for job training; tight integration with schools, libraries, and other institutions; encouragement of the spread of the right hardware and connections; and the cost-justification described in the stimulus proposal. Multimedia is essential, and Kindle-style tablets will almost surely include color and video in the future, blurring distinctions between them and iPads. But the digital library system mustn't neglect books and other texts. Old-fashioned literacy, in fact, rather than e-book standards, should be the foremost argument for a national digital library system--as a way to expand the number and variety of books for average Americans, especially students. Without basic skills, young people will not be fit for many demanding blue-collar jobs, much less for Ph.D.-level work, and economic growth will suffer (PDF). Even recreational reading of fiction, not just nonfiction, can help develop the comprehension needed for the job-related kind. But by the end of high school, most young people in the United States no longer read for fun. E-books and other technology could expand their reading choices and make books more enticing, through such wrinkles as Kindle-style dictionaries and encyclopedia links to help students better understand the words in front of them. The need is there. Decades ago when I worked the poverty beat at a factory-town newspaper in Lorain, Ohio, on Lake Erie, west of Cleveland, I did not see even pulp-fiction titles in the apartments of typical welfare mothers. Most middle-class homes also tended not to teem with books--probably true in New York or Boston as well. And this antediluvian era was years before distractions such as super-cheap video games, $67 color televisions from WalMart, cellphones, social networks, and, of course, other sites on the World Wide Web. The 2010 Kids and Family Reading Report sponsored by Scholastic says more than half of the surveyed children read for pleasure between six and eight years of age, but that the statistic drops to a quarter for those between 15 and 17. For 15-17-year-old boys, the fraction of recreational readers is a mere fifth--maybe one reason why so many men are falling behind women in earning power.

A great collection of audio interviews with authors on the BBC website:

Great writers have always fascinated their readers. We want to know how they create the characters we love or hate, the evocative settings, and the plots that have us reading late into the night, desperate to know what happens next. Throughout its history, the BBC has aimed to help audiences delve into the imagination of writers. This collection of interviews with some of the 20th Century's most read authors reveals something of those imaginations and the personalities which lie behind some of the greatest modern novels.

From the twitter (@personanondata): Norwegian publishers offer reward to solve William Nygaard case: Guardian Book Industry Study Group Webcast - Digital Books: A New Chapter for Reader Privacy. Nov 30th, 1pm BISG New media and the future of books-Interview with Chi Young-suk (Elsevier, IPA) JoongAng Daily

MediaWeek (Vol 3, No 47): Tolstoy's Family, Hornby's Kids, King James Bible, Brighton Rock.

Leo Tolstoy's impressive family tree (Independent):

But it’s not just his work that has spread across the globe – it’s also his descendents. Leo and his wife Sofia had, during their long and tempestuous marriage, 13 children (five of whom died young). During the revolution, members of this large family fled Russia. In the hundred years since his death, the Tolstoy diaspora – now numbering over 300 – has fanned out, with family clusters in France, Italy and Sweden, and descendants to be found as far afield as Uruguay, Brazil and the United States. The importance of family to Tolstoy was enormous, according to Orwin. “For him, the family was the lynchpin that brought together nature and civilization, happiness and duty.” Tolstoy’s work itself often features pretty hefty family dynasties: War and Peace includes characters based on Tolstoy’s own relations (Princess Mary and Nicholas Rostov, for example, were modelled on his parents). Orwin adds that “he could never have written Anna Karenina without his family experience. When Tolstoy describes Anna’s clandestine visit to her son Seryozha, he is drawing on his personal observations of the love between mother and child at Yasnaya Polyana.” Rosamund Bartlett, author of new biography Tolstoy: A Russian Life, adds: “In his earlier life, family meant everything to Tolstoy - although he withdrew from family life in his later years. He was forever seeking in his fiction to recreate the lost paradise of his early childhood, which is one reason why his family estate Yasnaya Polyana was so important.”

Tolstoy in Worldcat Inside Nick Hornby's Ministry of Stories (Observer)

Author Nick Hornby and art entrepreneurs Ben Payne and Lucy Macnab open the first Ministry of Stories centre in east London. Based on Dave Eggars' San Francisco project 826 Valencia, the volunteer-run Hoxton Street Monster Supplies aims to inspire children in creative writing. It has already found favour with David Cameron and his 'big society' agenda.

Robert McCrum in the Observer takes a look at the King James bible as it turns 400 (Observer):

As well as selling an estimated 1bn copies since 1611, the KJB went straight into our literary bloodstream like a lifesaving drug. Whenever we put words into someone's mouth, or see the writing on the wall, or go from strength to strength, or eat, drink and be merry, or fight the good fight, or bemoan the signs of the times, or find a fly in the ointment, or use words such as "long-suffering", "scapegoat" and "peacemaker" we are unconsciously quoting the KJB. More astounding, compared to Shakespeare's prodigal 31,000-word vocabulary, the KJB works its magic with a lexicon of just 12,000 words.More than this enthralling matrix of linguistic influence, there's the miracle of the translation itself, a triumph of creative collaboration (54 scholars in six committees), outright plagiarism and good old English pragmatism. The Authorized Version's mission statement was a masterpiece of lowered expectations. Its aim, it declared, was not "to make a new Translation, nor yet to make of a bad one a good one, but to make a good one better, or out of many good ones, one principal good one, that hath been our endeavour".

Movie trailer for the remake of Graham Green's Brighton Rock (Guardian) Lonely Planet has identified their list of the world's greatest bookstores (LP):

Bookshops are a traveller’s best friend: they provide convenient shelter and diversion in bad weather, they’re a reliable source of maps, notebooks, and travel guides, they often host readings and other cultural events, and if you raced through your lone paperback on the first leg of your trip, the bookshop is the place to go for literary replenishment. Taken from Lonely Planet’s Best in Travel 2011, here are our picks for the best spots to browse, buy, hang out, find sanctuary among the shelves, rave about your favourite writers and meet book-loving characters.

From the twitter (@personanondata) Elvis Costello's list of the 500 Greatest Albums Ever: http://tinyurl.com/2taw3s iPad 'newspaper' created by Steve Jobs and Rupert Murdoch Guardian UWash Report - How Students Use of Information in the Digital Age PND Can't Pick a College Major? Create One - WSJ Wolters Kluwer buys Lexis Nexis Germany from Reed Reuters

And in sports a great article charting the launch of the (un)Manchester United team FC United of Manchester (Observer). Things are looking good for Man Utd at the moment (BBC) though we should have won at least four more games.

MediaWeek (Vol 3, No 46): Hay-on-Wye, Commercial Libraries, Bush Critics, Random House Film & Words.

The Telegraph will partner with the Hay-on-Wye book festival for the next three years (Telegraph):

Over the next three years, in these pages and throughout the Telegraph, you’ll be able to enjoy writers and thinkers of this calibre, and experience some of what the organisers of Hay have put on for those who have visited since it began. When I suggest to Florence that he is immune to the old parlour game about fantasy dinner guests because he’s had his fantasy several times over, he replies: “Yes, except it’s not dinner, it’s a picnic.” The green fields of Hay are “great levellers”, he says. The Hay organisers operate in the belief that a child who lives on the border between Herefordshire and Powys is entitled to the same world-class entertainment as a child who lives in Hampstead and attends Westminster School. And locals are now, he says, blasé to the point of comedy about celebrity. Twenty years ago, one writer Florence had invited to Hay turned him down, on the grounds that his project was implausible – literature in Britain, the author replied, was simply not good enough to sustain a 10-day festival. Now Hay welcomes not just hundreds of thousands of people over 10 days in May, but hundreds of thousands more across the globe, trading in intellectual dynamism and productive mischief. Hay’s expansion internationally is both an important part of its future and entirely in keeping with its founding concerns. It’s a way, Florence says, of “finding out about the world through its writers”. The guiding spirit of the festivals has always been, he adds, “scepticism, inquiry, going beyond what you’re told. Think again. Look twice.” Nothing, we feel, could better match the perceptiveness and curiosity of Telegraph readers.

The Chronicle Review has a thought provoking article on the commercialization of libraries (Chron):

Libraries have already drifted too far down the commercial path: Research and educational values must be restored to their primacy of place. "Good enough" and one-stop shopping are no substitutes for systematic research. Technology cannot replace human expertise. The business world has many valuable tools and resources to offer, but libraries must insist that scholarly requirements take precedence over commercial interests. The need to realign library values is especially urgent in the realm of monographs. Electronic publishing of academic monographs is still at an early stage, but it is growing fast. As it is developing, e-monographic publishing is following the path of e-journals and will, therefore, reproduce many of the same problems—spiraling prices, homogeneous collections, greater numbers of low-quality monographs. Libraries will provide access to titles owned by the publishers, who will offer them up in preset packages accompanied by complex licensing agreements that constrain their use. (Existing e-book licenses, for example, generally prohibit interlibrary loans.)

And what about the Bush book from several UK perspectives (Independent):

Tony Blair: 'Some of our allies wavered. Tony Blair never did'Seven years after the invasion of Iraq, George Bush and Tony Blair remained joined at the hip. Sorry is the hardest word for both of them. The former US president seems to have studied the former prime minister's appearance before the Chilcot Inquiry on Iraq in January. A headline flashed danger signals in Mr Blair's mind as he was asked whether he had any regrets. He did not want the headline to be "Blair apologises for war" or "Blair finally says sorry." So he said merely that he took responsibility for his actions. Mr Bush has been through the same thought process. "I mean, apologising would basically say the decision was a wrong decision," Mr Bush told NBC. "And I don't believe it was the wrong decision." Unlike his soulmate, Mr Bush does not do emotion. In his own memoirs, Mr Blair pleads for understanding from his critics, saying: "Do they really suppose I don't care, don't feel, don't regret with every fibre of my being the loss of those who died?" In contrast, Mr Bush says: "It doesn't matter how people perceive me in England. It just doesn't matter any more. And frankly, at times, it didn't matter then." Mr Blair was ready to ignore political opinion. Mr Bush offered Mr Blair a last-minute opt-out from the Iraq invasion when he realised it could bring his closest foreign ally down, saying he wanted regime change in Baghdad, not London.Revealingly, Mr Blair replied: "I'm in. If it costs the Government, fine." That unquestioning loyalty might have surprised some observers at the time. But Mr Bush already felt he had a sense of his British ally's character. It was a judgement he had come to on Mr Blair's first visit to the US president's Crawford ranch in 2001."There was no stiffness about Tony and Cherie," he writes. "After dinner, we decided to watch a movie. When they agreed on Meet the Parents, a comedy starring Robert De Niro and Ben Stiller, Laura and I knew the Bushes and Blairs would get along."Andrew Grice, Political Editor

Random House have launched a web site dedicated to movies and television made from their books (Word & Film) From the twitter this week (@personanondata) Elsevier Releases Image Search; New SciVerse ScienceDirect Feature Enables Researchers to Quickly Find Visual content. Press Release The Australian: Local publishers invited to Apple's iBookstore. Telegraph: Pearson to double number of language schools in China. paidContent: Why Publishers Are Tracking The Costco v. Omega Supreme Court Case MediaPost: NY Appeals Court Reinstates Amazon Sales Tax Suit 11/09/2010

MediaWeek Report (Vol 3, No 45a): Recent Publishers' Financial Headlines- Peason, Hachette, Simon & Schuster

The past few weeks have seen a resurgence of sorts in the fortunes of some of publishing's biggest players. Here is a summary: Pearson noted that their markets were 'subdued' however they continued to produce market gains their competitors probably envy (Press Release):

Demand in some of our markets remained subdued in the third quarter, and the macroeconomic outlook is still uncertain. Even so, Pearson increased sales by 7% and adjusted operating profit 15% in the first nine months of 2010*. All parts of the company continued to perform strongly, with sales growth of 5% in Penguin, 7% in education and 11% at the Financial Times Group. ...

In North America, this strategy enabled us to gain share and grow faster than our market, with sales growth of 5% in the first nine months. Our Higher Education business grew strongly once again. Its market remains healthy (industry sales up 10% in the first eight months, according to the Association of American Publishers) and our leadership in digital learning continues to produce market share gains. More than 3.5m students have enrolled in an online course provided by eCollege in the first nine months, an increase of almost 39% over last year. More than 6.5m college students have registered for our subject-specific digital learning tools (MyLabs), an increase of almost 34%. Our Assessment and Information business remained resilient as we won or renewed a number of contracts including a teacher certification contract in Pennsylvania and student data systems in Utah. The breadth of our School Curriculum business and its strength in digital is enabling us to grow despite weakness in state and local funding and uncertainty around the impact of new Common Core standards. We are planning on the basis that school funding remains under pressure in 2011 and that the total new adoption opportunity will be lower than in 2010. We are accelerating the transformation of our School business, investing to broaden the range of products and services we offer to schools to help them boost student performance and institutional efficiency. Sales in International Education are up 8% after nine months. We are benefiting from strong demand in developing markets and for assessment services, English Language learning in China and digital, while developed markets and school publishing are generally soft. In the first nine months, MyLab registrations outside North America were up almost 40% on the same period last year to more than 460,000. ....

At Penguin, sales are up 5%. Physical retail markets are tough, but are offset for Penguin by strong publishing and rapid growth in eBook sales (which have increased threefold). Penguin continues to lead the industry in innovation in digital publishing, with 16,500 eBook titles now available and a number of children’s apps for bestselling brands. The Fry Chronicles by Stephen Fry became a bestseller in five formats (hardback, ebook, enhanced ebook, app and audio), a publishing first. The fourth quarter is an important selling season in consumer publishing and Penguin has a strong line-up of bestselling authors including Tom Clancy, Patricia Cornwell, Barbra Streisand and Nora Roberts in the US; and Michael McIntyre and Jamie Oliver in the UK.

Hachette (Grand Central Books) reported declines attributed to reduced sales of the Stephanie Meyer 'saga' (Press Release):

As expected, the erosion in sales of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight saga (Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse and Breaking Dawn) had a marked impact on revenue trends not only in the United States, but also in France and the United Kingdom. In France, the postponement of deliveries of secondary school textbooks from the third quarter to the fourth quarter (due to the late announcement of new curriculums) also had a temporarily negative effect. And in Spain, the Education market was more challenging than last year.

After a like-for-like revenue fall of just 4.5% in the first half of 2010, there was a more marked fall (of 6.8%) in the nine months to end September; this was largely due to the sharp decline in the Stephenie Meyer phenomenon and the non-recurrence of the sale of the international rights to the saga, booked in the first half of 2010.

However, revenues for the first nine months of 2010 are slightly ahead of those for the comparable period of 2008, demonstrating the remarkable resilience of the Lagardère group. Numerous literary successes - James Patterson and Nicholas Sparks in the United States, David Nicholls and Sarah Waters in the United Kingdom, and Jacques Attali and Erik Orsenna in France - are testimony to the dynamism of our publishing houses.

Sales of e-books remain strong, accounting for some 9% of revenues in the United States in the first nine months of 2010.

Simon & Schuster (Part of CBS)

For the three months ended September 30, 2010, Publishing revenues decreased 6% to $217.7 million from $230.4 million for the same prior-year period reflecting lower book sales in the adult group from the soft retail market, partially offset by growth in sales of digital content. Best-selling titles in the third quarter of 2010 included The Power by Rhonda Byrne and Obama's Wars by Bob Woodward. For the three months ended September 30, 2010, Publishing operating income increased 11% to $29.4 million from $26.6 million and OIBDA increased 10% to $31.1 million from $28.4 million for the same prior-year period reflecting the impact of cost containment measures, lower royalty expenses and lower production costs from a change in the mix of titles. Nine Months Ended September 30, 2010 and 2009: For the nine months ended September 30, 2010, Publishing revenues decreased 3% to $559.1 million from $573.5 million for the same prior-year period reflecting the soft retail market, partially offset by growth in digital sales of Publishing content. For the nine months ended September 30, 2010, Publishing operating income increased 47% to $44.9 million from $30.6 million and OIBDA increased 36% to $49.9 million from $36.6 million for the same prior-year period reflecting the impact of cost reduction measures and lower production expenses from a change in the mix of titles, partially offset by higher royalty expenses. Restructuring charges of $1.8 million incurred during the nine months ended September 30, 2010 reflect severance costs associated with the elimination of positions.

NewsCorp is done separating out the Harpercollins unit from their other publishing assets. (SeekingAlpha)

McGraw-Hill Education and Professional publishing reported as follows (Press Release):

Education: Revenue for this segment increased by 5.5% to $1.1 billion in the third quarter compared to the same period last year. Including a $3.8 million pre-tax gain on the divestiture of a secondary school business in Australia, the operating profit for the third quarter grew by 19.9% to $357.5 million. Cost controls contributed to the increase in the segment's operating margin to 33.9%, the best third-quarter performance for McGraw-Hill Education since 2007. Foreign exchange rates had an immaterial impact on revenue and operating profit in the third quarter. Revenue for the McGraw-Hill School Education Group increased by 6.7% to $534.7 million in the third quarter versus the same period last year. Revenue for the McGraw-Hill Higher Education, Professional and International Group grew by 4.3% to $520.0 million in the third quarter, compared to the same period last year. A strong performance in the state new adoption market was the major factor in McGraw-Hill School Education Group's third quarter results. The McGraw-Hill School Education Group is on track to capture approximately 30% of the estimated $825 million to $875 million state new adoption market in 2010. In 2009, the state new adoption market was about $500 million. ... In professional publishing, online sales of books and digital products produced solid growth in the third quarter. Double-digit e-book sales were a bright spot in the sluggish retail book market, which continues to be buffeted by difficult economic conditions. More than 5,000 McGraw-Hill professional titles are now available to customers as e-books.

Harlequin a division of TorStar is often beset by forex changes (PR)

Book Publishing operating profit was $23.0 million in the third quarter of 2010, up $0.1 million from $22.9 million in the third quarter of 2009, as $1.4 million of underlying growth offset a negative $1.3 million from the impact of foreign exchange. Year to date, Book Publishing operating profit was $66.1 million, up $3.0 million from $63.1 million last year as $6.2 million of underlying growth more than offset a negative $3.2 million from the impact of foreign exchange. In both the quarter and the year to date, operating results were up in the North America Direct-To-Consumer and Overseas divisions and down in the North America Retail division.

Earlier this month Wolters Kluwer reiterated their full year guidance (PR)

In the third quarter, growth in online and software solutions continued in all divisions. With improving retention rates across the business, subscription revenues, which represent 72% of total revenues, showed improvement over the prior year, especially for electronic revenues. This growth helped to offset the impact of print publishing declines and the continued pressure on advertising and pharma promotional product lines. Book performance improved in the third quarter driven by strong results in legal education and health book product lines. The Health & Pharma Solutions division performed well, with strong growth noted at Clinical Solutions, Ovid, and books. Within Tax & Accounting, new sales and retention rates for software solutions grew at a solid rate which helped offset pressure on print-based publishing. Financial & Compliance Services saw double-digit growth in its audit risk and compliance product lines and cyclical revenues associated with mortgage lending improved in the third quarter. In the Legal & Regulatory division, transactional revenues at Corporate Legal Services continued to grow, reflecting the steady economic recovery underway in the U.S. While online and software products grew globally within Legal & Regulatory, macro economic conditions continue to put pressure on publishing and cyclical product lines such as training, consulting and advertising, particularly within Europe, offsetting the positive trends for electronic revenues.

MediaWeek (Vol 3, No 45): Attention and Information, British Museum Manuscripts, Irish Shorts, Audio Books, Renting Textbooks, Cooks Source

I don't normally quote blogs on these weekly round-ups (for no real reason) but I came across this post by The Aporetic questioning whether we are really suffering from over abundance of information versus what our ancestors faced:

Rus­tic sim­plic­ity, except that the farmer in charge has labor man­age­ment problems–who are these work­ers, how is he com­pen­sat­ing them? He has to man­age the horses–how is their health? Do they need feed­ing and water­ing? He’s got to get the har­vested wheat stored prop­erly: he’s check­ing the weather all the time–just imag­ine how much infor­ma­tion is involved, in an age before reli­able fore­casts, in guess­ing the weather! He’s scan­ning the crop itself, to see how much he lost to insects or dis­ease. He’s got a good idea of crop prices in Chicago and whether they’re trend­ing up or down. The scene was information-dense, and if you click on the image, you can see how the orig­i­nal title frames the scene. The mod­ern farmer climbs into the air con­di­tioned cab of a com­bine har­vester, and turns on the radio. The radio fills the atten­tion spaces left by, say, read­ing the weather signs or man­ag­ing the work­ers or the animals. ... But the argu­ment about atten­tion here is that atten­tion is a constant–it just directs itself, when freed, to whatever’s avail­able. The arrival of online archives gives us “sur­plus atten­tion.” What do we do with our­selves now that the time required for basic research has been (in many cases) so dras­ti­cally reduced?

I visited the Ritblat Gallery at the British Library in October which contains a wide variety of original manuscripts and other material on permanent display. It is well worth the trip and in this article Andrew Motion, chairman of the Booker Committee takes us on a tour (IL):

The gallery is easy to take for granted. Compared with the visual arts, the thrill and beauty of manuscripts are not widely celebrated, but this single mid-sized room, with its black walls, lowered lights and atmosphere of something approaching reverence, is one of the world’s great treasure-troves. It is a place of delight as well as learning, and of astonishment as well as understanding. Whenever I have a group of students, I insist that they come here: it’s an Eng Lit version of the geography field trip. Some parts of the collection are on permanent display—the material relating to Lewis Carroll and the “Alice” books, and the manuscripts of several songs by the Beatles. These songs are as good a place to start as any, as they abolish any idea that displays of this sort are somehow dusty, or of narrow academic interest. The Beatles’ music and words continue to live in the world as few other kinds of writing have ever managed to do. Yet their composition, judging by the evidence here, depended on a similar blend of luck and labour. Paul McCartney’s “Michelle” turns out to be based on a tune he first tried to get down when he was at school, “in an attempt”, the label says, “to write a French-sounding song at the time when the bohemian Parisian Left Bank was a fashionable influence on art students”. Several years later John Lennon suggested that if Paul wanted it to sound French, he’d better use some French words—hence “ma belle” and so on. It was hardly Proust, but it did the trick, and the song was included on “Rubber Soul”. It became the only Beatles track to be named Song of the Year at the Grammys.

Anne Enright in The Guardian looks at the Irish short story and tries to fathom why they are so good at it (Guardian):

Perhaps Irish writers, like Irish actors, rely more than is usual on personality in that balance of technique and the self that is the secret of style. The trick might be in its suppression, indeed, an effort that must fail, over time. John Banville, Edna O'Brien, McGahern, Tóibín – these writers become more distinctive as people, even as their sentences become more distinctively their own. It is a jealous kind of delight to find on the page some inimicable thing, a particular passion, and if the writer is dead, it is delightful and sad to meet a sensibility that will not pass this way again. The shock of recognition runs through this anthology. As much as possible I have tried to choose those stories in which a writer is most himself. A writer has many selves, of course, and an editor has many and mixed criteria – some of them urgent, as I have described, and some more easy. The selection is from writers who were born in the 20th century (cheating a little for Elizabeth Bowen, who was born in 1899); I wanted to put together a book that was varied and good to read, with a strong eye to the contemporary.

Audio books are on the upswing in the UK as reported by the Independent:

According to the most recent sales figures from the Publishers Association, downloads of audio books grew by 72 per cent between 2008 and 2009. Sales of talking books on CD, cassette and DVD also grew to an annual £22.4m, according to the sales monitoring company Nielsen BookScan. It all began very differently. Exactly 75 years ago today, audio books were first produced as a public service for soldiers blinded in the First World War. The Talking Books Service, an audio library run by the Royal National Institute of Blind People, was launched in 1935, when Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was recorded on to LPs and distributed to users, along with a large record player. Modern technology – particularly MP3 players – and a growing roster of high-profile narrators, have given the format a dramatic boost.

From the WaPo: Textbook rental programs offer no relief to rising textbook prices (WaPo):

In the end, students will decide how they get their textbooks - and they have an ever-expanding galaxy of choices. They can buy them new, shrink-wrapped at campus stores. They can search online for discounted used copies at numerous websites like Amazon.com or Bigwords.com. They can download them to their computers or rent them - from their campus bookstore, from online websites and even the publishers themselves. Two of the largest bookstore operators, Barnes & Noble and Follett Higher Education Group, have spent millions to build their own Internet rental portals in the face of competition from websites, stocking up on inventory and developing tracking software. Yet for all of the innovation from digital media and the Internet, prices are still set by publishers, who market directly to faculty. Faculty, in turn, decide titles for study, often without considering cover prices. That means students are still paying hundreds of dollars each semester.

For entertainment value alone the controversy over Cooks Source lifting a blogger's article was enough to keep your attention and to get an idea cast your eye over their facebook page to see how the internets are taking to it. Far afield the Sydney Morning Herald takes a bash at explaining it (SMH):

That's what Cooks Source was relying on. The New England-based bottom feeder lifted Gaudio's piece, gave it a few tweaks, and reprinted it as new copy without attribution. Exactly the same sin of plagiarism for which Helen Darville/Demidenko was finally run out of publishing about 10 years ago. When Gaudio discovered the theft –for that's what it was, not inadvertent borrowing, or sub editing error, her work was stolen– she contacted the editor of Cooks Source, Judith Griggs, asking for a correction and an apology. As a show of good faith, just to prove she wasn't some sort of egomaniac greed head, she asked the magazine to make a $130 donation to the Columbia School of Journalism rather than to pay her. Some of you will already be aware of what happened next. Griggs sent a frankly amazing e-mail, full of legal errors, claiming the Internet to be entirely public domain, a place where copyright did not apply, and told the freelancer she should be happy the magazine didn't lift the entire article before putting somebodyelse's name on it. In a deliciously droll passage which was either completely clueless, or shaded with cartoon villainy, the Cooks Source editor informed Gaudio that this was standard practice online and happens "clearly more than you are aware of".

From the twitter (@personanondata) this week:

British Library hints at videogame archiving plan Independent Grand Theft Cataloging..

JSTOR and Serials Solutions Partner to Enhance Discoverability of Resources Nov. 4, 2010 PRNewswire

Online Learning Is Growing on Campus - NYTimes Bricks and Mortar a thing of the past?

Times's paywall figures don't add up to a new business model Guardian

And in sports, Jenson Button is welcomed to Sao Paulo (Independent)

MediaWeek (Vol 3, No 44): Library demands, 30 Day Novels, D.H. Lawrence, Education, Internet Archiving

The demand on libraries grows and grows (The Economist):

The weak economy is forcing libraries to redefine their role. Close to 70% of America’s public libraries now say their staff help patrons complete job applications online, and the same number offer help with résumés. “Workforce Solutions”—as the state of New Mexico calls the dole—requires a weekly check-in. For many people, long queues or long journeys means it is only practical to do this online. Lynne Fothergill, a head librarian at Erna Fergusson, says she noticed an increasing number of online check-ins in early 2009; they are now a primary function of the library’s two 15-minute computer terminals.

Nationally, the number of libraries reporting that they help patrons with e-government services has risen by almost half. As with private employers, when state and local governments save money by moving services online, they actually shift some of those costs to the point of access: for many of those most likely to need jobs and benefits, this is the local library.

Perversely, computers are often more expensive for public libraries than for individuals, and harder to buy. In Albuquerque, any city purchase over $500 requires approval by a technical review committee. A single library desktop, with all of the officially necessary licences and security and session-management programmes, costs the city a whopping $1,800.

Write a novel in a month? (Independent):

And although there are plenty of tales of great novelists spending years crafting their masterpieces – Joseph Heller took eight years to write Catch-22 – many of the literary world's most popular works were knocked out in a few weeks, such as Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol. Lindsey Grant, who helps run NaNoWriMo, said that 55 novels written under the scheme have gone on to publication. These include Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants, which spent 12 weeks in The New York Times best-sellers list in 2006. "The idea is to get the rough drafts of the novels down," Ms Grant said. "But so many people then go on to rewrite."Two years ago, Birdsong author Sebastian Faulks wrote a James Bond thriller, Devil May Care, in only six weeks – following the work pattern of Bond's creator, Ian Fleming."I enjoyed the rush," he said. "There was a way in which my own race to the finish line mirrored the chase of the plot. Novels that have been written quickly can retain a slightly torn-off, uneven quality – like life. This is certainly one of the miraculous things about Jean Brodie, where the story zooms back and forth through time. There is a careering, out-of-control feeling, which is exhilarating. The main danger is that the writer hasn't worked out his/her theme. They don't really know what the novel's about."

Behind The trail of Lady Chatterley's Lover (Independent):

Some were eager, and duly stepped into the witness box. E M Forster, for instance, wrote to Mr Rubenstein, calling the book "a literary work of importance", adding, "the law tells me that obscenity may deprave and corrupt, but as far as I know it offers no definition of depravity or corruption." With some willing to testify, there were complications. Aldous Huxley, for instance, wrote: "Lady Chatterley's Lover is an essentially wholesome book." But the long journey from his American home, and his request for $1,000 expenses meant he was kept in reserve, as were Iris Murdoch and T S Eliot. Eliot had, in the early Thirties, dismissed book and author, but now thought better of both and was prepared to appear. During the trial, he was on the defence team's substitutes' bench, and legend has it that, for several days, he sat outside the court in a taxi, the meter ticking all the while.Among prominent refuseniks were Evelyn Waugh and Robert Graves. Waugh's letter to Mr Rubenstein described the book as dull and pretentious, one whose publication would serve no private or public good. He ended with the verdict: "Lawrence had very meagre literary gifts." Graves's letter said of Lawrence: "I won't have a book of his on my shelves."

Even Field and Stream got into it:

The review read in part: "This fictional account of the day-to-day life of an English gamekeeper is still of interest to outdoor-minded readers, as it contains many passages on pheasant-raising, the apprehending of poachers, ways to control vermin, and other chores and duties of the occasional gamekeeper. "Unfortunately, one is obliged to wade through many pages of extraneous material in order to discover and savour these sidelights on the management of a Midlands shooting estate, and in this reviewer's opinion the book cannot take the place of J R Miller's Practical Gamekeeper."

How to Fix our Schools a Manifesto (WaPo):

Just as we must give teachers and schools the capability and flexibility to meet the needs of students, we must give parents a better portfolio of school choices. That starts with having the courage to replace or substantially restructure persistently low-performing schools that continuously fail our students. Closing a neighborhood school -- whether it's in Southeast D.C., Harlem, Denver or Chicago -- is a difficult decision that can be very emotional for a community. But no one ever said leadership is easy. We also must make charter schools a truly viable option. If all of our neighborhood schools were great, we wouldn't be facing this crisis. But our children need great schools now -- whether district-run public schools or public charter schools serving all students -- and we shouldn't limit the numbers of one form at the expense of the other. Excellence must be our only criteria for evaluating our schools. For the wealthiest among us, the crisis in public education may still seem like someone else's problem, because those families can afford to choose something better for their kids. But it's a problem for all of us -- until we fix our schools, we will never fix the nation's broader economic problems. Until we fix our schools, the gap between the haves and the have-nots will only grow wider and the United States will fall further behind the rest of the industrialized world in education, rendering the American dream a distant, elusive memory.

Two e-Learning companies to begin selling online remedial courses to community colleges (Inside HE):

K12 has made only a few inroads in higher education; last summer one of its subsidiaries was rebuffed by an accrediting agency when it tried to take over operations at Rochester College, a four-year liberal arts college in Michigan. (K12’s collaboration with Middlebury College to deliver language instruction as part of a summer program has been more successful.) Davis said he will be pleased this time to have, in Blackboard, a co-pilot with a huge network of existing higher-ed clients.For Blackboard — which has sold online learning platforms and other services for years, but never courses — the deal also represents a new sort of business. Both sides say K12 will do most of the heavy lifting on course design and provide the labor from its stable of 2,700 instructors, while Blackboard will focus mainly on the technology. But the two companies say they will work together on all aspects of the product. Small, the chief business officer, said Blackboard does not currently sell courses past the remedial level. “Outside of this very targeted effort, we have no plans to move into the general areas of curriculum and instruction,” he said.

The Economist looks at efforts to archive the web (The Economist):

The biggest problem, for now, is money. The British Library estimates that it costs half as much to store a digital document as it does a physical one. But there are a lot more digital ones. America’s Library of Congress enjoys a specific mandate, and budget, to save the web. The British Library is still seeking one.

So national libraries have decided to split the task. Each has taken responsibility for the digital works in its national top-level domain (web-address suffixes such as “.uk” or “.fr”). In countries with larger domains, such as Britain and America, curators cannot hope to save everything. They are concentrating on material of national interest, such as elections, news sites and citizen journalism or innovative uses of the web.

The daily death of countless websites has brought a new sense of urgency—and forced libraries to adapt culturally as well. Past practice was to tag every new document as it arrived. Now precision must be sacrificed to scale and speed. The task started before standards, goals or budgets are set. And they may yet change. Just like many websites, libraries will be stuck in what is known as “permanent beta”.

From The Twitter this week - follow me @Personanondata: Conrad Black fails in attempt to clear his name Guardian DOI To Become Backbone of New Entertainment Content Registry Press Release Amazing Kindle book sales stats from The Bookseller Cornwell: "The tyranny of the Epos [computerized book tracking] can make it very difficult for the beginner." Guardian

MediaWeek (Vol 3, No 43): Islamic Superheros, Shakespeare and Co, Terrorist David Hicks, eMagazines,

Now we're in for it. Islamic superheros (Guardian):

She, along with her fellow crime-fighters, a vast team of characters from around the world, including Jabbar the Powerful from Saudi Arabia and Hadya the Guide from London, collectively known as "The 99", are the world's first Islam-inspired superheroes. And this week, in what is perhaps the ultimate comic-book accolade, they will join forces with Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. DC Comics, the US publishing giant, will publish the first of six special crossover issues in which The 99 will be fighting crime alongside the Justice League of America, the fictional superhero team that includes Superman and Batman.

What's even more remarkable is that The 99 only came into being in 2007 with some remarkable firsts: the first comic book superheroes to have Muslim names and be directed at an international audience and the first to come out of the Middle East. Crossovers don't happen often and even less often with characters that are just three years old. Even The 99's creator and mastermind, a Kuwaiti-born, American-educated psychologist and entrepreneur called Naif al-Mutawa, seems to be having some trouble believing the Superman link-up.

Profile of bookstore Shakespeare and Company (Independent):

At Shakespeare & Co, there's not enough space for a stockroom, so it's a constant merry-go-round of books bought and books sold; tourists flock here to take photographs of the higgledy-piggledy interior, with books stacked from floor to ceiling. This is the place, after all, where in the Fifties the Beat poets hung out, and, more recently, where Ethan Hawke is filmed in the opening scenes of cult movie Before Sunset (and, indeed, where Meryl Streep in last year's Julia & Julia was seen to wander, in search of a cookbook). There's a wishing well in the floor that holds a plenteous supply of coins; in times gone by, it had a gas pipe which owner George Whitman was inclined to light on occasion (once, the story goes, when he was feeling particularly rakish, he accidentally set a hair-model's long tresses on fire). Upstairs, at the top of the winding staircase, there are all sorts of places for readers to loll. One room is a library, with literary donations to Whitman from Simone de Beauvoir's personal collection, and an eclectic selection of his own books – what remained, anyway, after a horrendous fire a number of years ago destroyed thousands of words. That's the room with a piano (and a fire extinguisher). When I visit, most customers aren't shy about playing it; although one man, too bashful to perform, is unable to resist sitting at the stool – he mimes playing for 10 minutes, fingers never touching the keys.

From AdAge, mixed results reported for eMagazines (Poynter):

Nat Ives writes that six months into the magazines-on-iPad experiment, sales have ranged from mixed to disappointing. Perhaps not surprisingly, tech-focused titles seem to be faring better than fashion magazines:

• Popular Science: average monthly sales of 14,034 from April through JulyWired: 105,000 sales in June; 31,000 in July; 28,000 in August; 32,000 in SeptemberMen's Health: average sales of 3,174 for April, May, June and July/August issues
• People: 10,800 downloads per weekly issue (includes print subscriber downloads)Glamour: 4,099 sales for its September issueGQ: average sales of 13,310 from April through August (includes iPhone and iPad editions)
• Vanity Fair: average monthly sales of 8,925 from June through September (includes iPhone and iPad editions)

Full AdAge Article Controversy in Australia where the government is being advised not to challenge the ability of convicted terrorist David Hicks to keep the profits from the sale of his memoir Growing Up Taliban (not the title). Random House Australia is the publisher and the title is available on the Kindle store but not in the US. (The Australian)

In 2001, Hicks was with the Taliban in Afghanistan when he was captured by US forces. He spent 5 1/2 years in Guantanamo Bay before serving the final seven months of his sentence in Adelaide.The federal government has received advice that the guilty plea made by Hicks before the military commission meant he had been convicted under a foreign law -- which triggers the proceeds-of-crime legislation. But Professor Williams said an Australian court would still need to order that Hicks be stripped of his profits, and this was likely to mean that a judge could question the legitimacy of the military commission process. The original military commissions were struck down by the US Supreme Court and were reconstituted before the plea agreement with Hicks.But Professor Williams questioned their legitimacy. "Whether or not he did it, he pled guilty to a kangaroo court and it is inescapable that the process was flawed in many ways," he said. Even if a judge accepts the legitimacy of the military commission process, the Proceeds of Crime Act means Hicks could retain his profits if the judge considers that his book has "social, cultural or education value" or is in the public interest.The doubts about the effectiveness of the Proceeds of Crime Act coincide with intense criticism of the Hicks book in the US.

And in Music: Apple - The short, strange blossoming of The Beatles' dream (Independent)

To the music business at large, an industry not best known for altruism, this was the hippie ideal gone truly mad. If Dick James, the head of Northern Songs, the company that published the Lennon and McCartney catalogue of music, had needed any encouragement in his plan to sever his links with The Beatles following the death of manager Brian Epstein a year earlier, this had to be it. Within months the songs had been sold to Lew Grade at ATV. As it turned out the cynics were quickly proved at least partly right. Staffed by many of the group's old friends from Liverpool, few of whom had any real business acumen, Apple quickly became a financial whirlpool as money was sucked away to places unknown. Perhaps the group's first venture outside music, a fashion boutique in nearby Baker Street, should have been a warning, quickly turning into a Beatle-takeaway as, in the absence of much in the way of security, customers simply helped themselves to the designs and walked out without paying. If it was an omen it wasn't spotted. As a character known as Magic Alex was given funding to build a new recording studio, which didn't work, and grotesque bills for drinks, food, taxis and flowers began to rain in, accountants were soon trying to trace an Apple-owned Mercedes that had simply vanished off the face of the earth. Within a year, with John Lennon joking he was "down to his last 10,000 [pounds]" and they'd "all be broke within six months if this carried on", American Allen Klein was introduced to sort out the mess. Another big mistake: Klein quickly dropped James Taylor's contract and lost them millions. Meanwhile the sackings began: the dream was over, as Lennon used to sing.

From the twitter (@personanondata): It has come to this: Talking meerkat is the latest in a line of animals to publish their 'memoirs Independent This will be cool: “Amazon: 14-Day Lending Coming to Kindle ‘Later This Year’” Mashable Cengage's Dunn Says Learning Enhanced by Digital Media: Video Youtube Michael Wolf (not that one) at GigaOm thinks Starbucks will be a big eBook retailer. I don't. Prize though for the most ironic title in a long while.