MediaWeek (Vol 6, No 28): Turow and Authors, Library Incinerator, Open Access, Apple Decision, Responsive FT, Linguistic Rowling + More

Gene Schwartz writing in Book Business magazine about Scott Turow's advocacy for the lowly author (Book Business):

Copyright protection has now become a two edged sword. Not requiring registration, ownership is vested from the moment of the first scribble. Large corporate copyright holders who can afford policing these provisions, are now benefiting a few authors at the expense of the many, by constraining the ability of journeymen and aspiring creators to excerpt and cite from other works without going through daunting procedural barriers, at the risk otherwise of what could be draconian punitive penalties (the threat of up to $150,000 in statutory damages) and outsized processing and permissions costs.

So, Turow’s main point has traction with me, that our institutions work against the author’s interests: legal decisions such as the first sale doctrine applied by the Supreme Court to the recent Wiley case – albeit confirming what has been going on for over fifty years; regulatory interventions such as that of the Justice department upsetting a settlement supervised by the courts, and agreed to by the Authors Guild, major publishers and Google.

Turow also made a point that with Amazon’s patent for the resale of e-Books, non-drm protected works would need very few original sales in order to create an unlimited copyable inventory for the resale market. This forecast may seem a bit extreme, but I think it suggests is that Scott Turow’s lament is not without foundation. Unless the industry and the legal system is prepared to re-visit how creators can extract a legally and technologically enforced portion of the economic value of their intellectual output, very little economic value will remain after first publication.

That big train crash in Canada destroyed a library (Metro)

The fatal train disaster that obliterated much of Lac-Megantic also destroyed the local library, including irreplaceable items outlining the history of the town and the surrounding area. Nothing is left of the building — which bordered the railway tracks — except ash. Including books, some 60,000 items are gone. The library was next door to the Musi-Cafe, where dozens of patrons and employees died after the July 6 tragedy. The archives were personal — more than two dozen families had donated various documents, items and heirlooms since the library opened in 1991. Diane Roy, chairwoman of the library’s board of directors, said the archives included letters penned by her uncle dating back to the Second World War. Other items included some of the oldest photos in existence of Lac-Megantic as well as the negatives. Also gone forever are a few hundred works of art — reproductions, originals and some that were being housed on loan.

Michael Clark writing in Scholarly Kitchen on the Apple court decision (ScholarKitchen):

What this means is that anyone wishing to enter the ebook distribution space will face an ebook pricing war against an entrenched competitor that is willing to sell at a loss, propped up by a seemingly limitless supply of cash from investors who do not seem to care about margins so long as market share is growing.

The result is likely to be an ebook market (at least in trade publishing – professional and scholarly publishing is a different matter) with little innovation – why would anyone bother? Not only must a new entrant invest in new technology, negotiate complex, multi-national rights agreements with publishers, and market their new product to consumers, they must then slog it out in a price war. And while a very few entrants such as Kobo are trying, one of the few companies with the cash hoard to withstand Amazon is Apple (Google is another and Microsoft, reported to be flirting with the idea of purchasing Barnes & Noble’s Nook business, is a third), though a price war goes against their DNA and it is not clear that ebooks are important enough to them to be worth the cost.

In case anyone thinks that this is overstating the bleakness of the situation, I direct you to the recent departure of Barnes & Noble’s CEO, William Lynch, a former Palm executive who was brought into the company to grow their reader business, in what Reuters called “an acknowledgement that its digital division Nook has failed to compete successfully in the e-reader and tablet markets“. Furthermore, after reporting that Nook sales dropped 34% last quarter, the company announced it was pulling the plug on its hardware division.

Interesting business case review of the Financial Times responsive design approach (SmashingMag):

In order to stay competitive, a digital product needs to evolve, and as developers, we need to be prepared for this. When the request for a redesign landed at the Financial Times, we already had a fast, popular, feature-rich application, but it wasn’t built for change. At the time, we were able to implement small changes to features, but implementing anything big became a slow process and often introduced a lot of unrelated regressions.

Our application was drastically reworked to make the new requirements possible, and this took a lot of time. Having made this investment, we hope the new application not only meets (and even exceeds) the standard of the first product, but gives us a platform on which we can develop faster and more flexibly in the future.

Why Open Access makes no sense (Guardian):

There can be no such thing as free access to academic research. Academic research is not something to which free access is possible. Academic research is a process – a process which universities teach (at a fee). Like it or not, the primary beneficiary of research funding is the researcher, who has managed to deepen their understanding by working on a particular dataset. The publications that result from the research project are only trivially a result of the research funding, they come out of a whole history of human interactions that are not for sale. Not even in a slave society.

For those who wish to have access, there is an admission cost: they must invest in the education prerequisite to enable them to understand the language used. Current publication practices work to ensure that the entry threshold for understanding my language is as low as possible. Open access will raise that entry threshold. Much more will be downloaded; much less will be understood.

Nerd Alert: Heard on the Radio The linguistics professor who unmasked Rowling (BBC):

Prof Peter Millican of Hertford College, University of Oxford, helped unmask JK Rowling as debut crime writer Robert Galbraith. An expert in computer linguistics, the professor developed software to analyse and compare texts. He analysed The Cuckoo's Calling against Rowling's other novels, The Casual Vacancy and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. He spoke to BBC News about how he arrived at his conclusions. "I was given some text by The Sunday Times - I had two known texts by JK Rowling, two by Ruth Rendell, two by PD James and two by Val McDermid. "What I did was clean up the texts, put them into my software and do a battery of tests to see what similarities there were.

From twitter:
Amazon shares hit another record on strong sales data Reuters
Blackboard Announces New MOOC Platform,By Jeffrey R. Young /The Chronicle Chronicle
Vital Source Launches E-Textbook Building Block for Blackboard Learn Platform PRWeb
Copyright actually keeps many books off the market, study says Fortune

Justice Department declares emphatic victory in price fixing case against Apple eBookstore

In a decision which will undoubtedly be appealed but which opens the possibility of hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties and restitution, Apple was found guilty of conspiring with publishers to raise eBook prices.  Personnally, I thought Apple had a good case but Judge Denise Cote noted that Apple facilitated the conspiracy, took advantage of the publishers paranoia regarding Amazon and also leveraged the impending launch of the iPad that caused higher pricing for eBook consumers.

For the Department of Justice - them of the spider-web of telephone conversations - this was an opportunity for a victory lap and some degree of hyperbole (DoJ)

“This result is a victory for millions of consumers who choose to read books electronically.  After carefully weighing the evidence, the court agreed with the Justice Department and 33 state attorneys general that executives at the highest levels of Apple orchestrated a conspiracy with five major publishers – Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin and Simon & Schuster – to raise e-book prices.  Through today’s court decision and previous settlements with five major publishers, consumers are again benefitting from retail price competition and paying less for their e-books.

 

“As the department’s litigation team established at trial, Apple executives hoped to ensure that its e-book business would be free from retail price competition, causing consumers throughout the country to pay higher prices for many e-books.  The evidence showed that the prices of the conspiring publishers’ e-books increased by an average of 18 percent as a result of the collusive effort led by Apple.

  “Companies cannot ignore the antitrust laws when they believe it is in their economic self-interest to do so. This decision by the court is a critical step in undoing the harm caused by Apple’s illegal actions. 

“I am proud of the outstanding work done by the trial team.  The Antitrust Division will continue to vigorously protect competition and enforce the antitrust laws in this important business, and in other industries that affect the everyday lives of consumers.”

Other reports:

Reuters
Telegraph
WSJ - No comment from Amazon.

MediaWeek (Vol 5, No 50): MOOC Business Model, Popova Profile, Tim Cook, Printing 15th Century + More,

Wondering where the business model is for MOOCs? Some providers are now charging for access to student data (Chronicle):

On Tuesday, Coursera, which works with high-profile colleges to provide massive open online courses, or MOOC's, announced its employee-matching service, called Coursera Career Services. Some high-profile tech companies have already signed up—including Facebook and Twitter, according to a post on Coursera's blog, though officials would not disclose how much employers pay for the service. Only students who opt into the service will be included in the system that participating employers see, a detail stressed in an e-mail message that Coursera sent to its nearly two million past or present students on Tuesday.

Each college offering a course through Coursera is also given the chance to opt out of the service—meaning that if a college declines, then no students in its courses can participate in the matchmaking system.

"Some universities are still thinking it through, so not all have said yes," Andrew Ng, a co-founder of Coursera, said in an interview on Tuesday. "I don't think anyone said, 'No now and no in the future,'" he added. "This is a relatively uncontroversial business model that most of our university partners are excited about."

Udacity, another company that provides free online courses, offers a similar service. Udacity works directly with professors to offer courses, rather than signing agreements with colleges.

Profile of Maria Popova (Brain Pickings) in the NY Times:

She has faced criticism, of course. She has been dismissed as elitist and condescending. An initiative she helped start last spring, the Curator’s Code, which called for more respect and attribution in the Twittersphere, was harshly criticized. Ms. Popova responded in a blog post that began, “In times of turmoil, I often turn to one of my existential pillars of comfort: Albert Einstein’s ‘Ideas and Opinion.’ ” She ended with this thought: “There is a way to critique intelligently and respectfully, without eroding the validity of your disagreement. It boils down to manners.”

Old-fashioned, indeed.

As for her future, Ms. Popova said she had little interest in expanding her brand. “I get asked all the time, ‘How’s it going to scale?’ ‘What’s next?’ ” she said. “What I do is what I do, and I don’t think I’m ever going to change that.” The woman who rails against her contemporaries for turning their backs on old books said she had no interest in writing one. “That’s such an antiquated model of thinking,” she said. “Why would I want to write something that’s going to have the shelf life of a banana?”

Long interview with Tim Cook of Apple in Businessweek:

The key in the change that you’re referencing is my deep belief that collaboration is essential for innovation—and I didn’t just start believing that. I’ve always believed that. It’s always been a core belief at Apple. Steve very deeply believed this.

So the changes—it’s not a matter of going from no collaboration to collaboration. We have an enormous level of collaboration in Apple, but it’s a matter of taking it to another level. You look at what we are great at. There are many things. But the one thing we do, which I think no one else does, is integrate hardware, software, and services in such a way that most consumers begin to not differentiate anymore. They just care that the experience is fantastic.

So how do we keep doing that and keep taking it to an even higher level? You have to be an A-plus at collaboration. And so the changes that we made get us to a whole new level of collaboration. We’ve got services all in one place, and the guy that’s running that has incredible skills in services, has an incredible track record, and I’m confident will do fantastic things. Jony [Ive, senior vice president of industrial design], who I think has the best taste of anyone in the world and the best design skills, now has responsibility for the human interface. I mean, look at our products. (Cook reaches for his iPhone.) The face of this is the software, right? And the face of this iPad is the software. So it’s saying, Jony has done a remarkable job leading our hardware design, so let’s also have Jony responsible for the software and the look and feel of the software, not the underlying architecture and so forth, but the look and feel.

I don’t think there’s anybody in the world that has a better taste than he does. So I think he’s very special. He’s an original. We also placed Bob [Mansfield, senior vice president of technologies] in a position where he leads all of silicon and takes over all of the wireless stuff in the company. We had grown fairly quickly, and we had different wireless groups. We’ve got some really cool ideas, some very ambitious plans in this area. And so it places him leading all of that. Arguably there’s no finer engineering manager in the world. He is in a class by himself.

Some interesting ideas (relevant for books) on better magazine publishing for digital from Craig Mod:

A Subcompact Manifesto:

Subcompact Publishing tools are first and foremost straightforward.

They require few to no instructions.

They are easily understood on first blush.

The editorial and design decisions around them react to digital as a distribution and consumption space.

They are the result of dumping our publishing related technology on a table and asking ourselves — what are the core tools we can build with all this stuff?

They are, as it were, little N360s.

I propose Subcompact Publishing tools and editorial ethos begin (but not end) with the following qualities:
Small issue sizes (3-7 articles / issue)
Small file sizes
Digital-aware subscription prices
Fluid publishing schedule
Scroll (don’t paginate)
Clear navigation
HTML(ish) based
Touching the open web

Two interesting data modeling/visualization projects:

The expansion of Printing across Europe during the 15th century (The Atlantic):

Harvard's metaLAB is "dedicated to exploring and expanding the frontiers of networked culture in the arts and humanities," pursuing interdisciplinary research like this fascinating look at the spread of printing across Europe in the 1400s. Drawing on data from the university's library collections, the animation below maps the number and location of printed works by year. Watch it full screen in HD to see cities light up as the years scroll by in the lower left corner. Matthew Battles, a principal and senior researcher at metaLAB and past Atlantic contributor, describes the research and technology that went into the visualization in an interview below.

And Bombsite, a project that shows where bombs fell on London during the Blitz.

The Bomb Sight project is mapping the London WW2 bomb census between 7/10/1940 and 06/06/1941. Previously available only by viewing in the Reading Room at The National Archives, Bomb Sight is making the maps available to citizen researchers, academics and students. They will be able to explore where the bombs fell and to discover memories and photographs from the period.

The project has scanned original 1940s bomb census maps , geo-referenced the maps and digitally captured the geographical locations of all the falling bombs recorded on the original map. The data has then been integrated into 2 different types of applications:

And a good day in Sport:

Manchester United and a very exciting game (Guardian)

England Cricket win (Guardian)

MediaWeek (Vol 5, No 47): App Developers, Saylor Education, 'Stealing Content', Free Apps + More

Why the App Developer's life is like an author's: lonely, expensive and (generally) anonymous (NYTimes):

For many of the developers not working at traditional companies, moreover, “job” is a misnomer. Streaming Color Studios, a game developer, did a survey of game makers late last year. The 252 respondents, while not a scientifically valid sample and restricted to one segment of the app market, indicated what many people had suspected: the app world is an ecology weighted heavily toward a few winners.
A quarter of the respondents said they had made less than $200 in lifetime revenue from Apple. A quarter had made more than $30,000, and 4 percent had made over $1 million.
A few apps have made it extremely big, including Instagram, the photo-sharing app that was bought by Facebook in April for $1 billion. When app developers dream, they dream of triumphs like that.
Most developers, however, make their money when someone buys or upgrades their app from Apple’s online store, the only place consumers can buy an iPhone or iPad app.
Apple keeps 30 percent of each app sale. While its job creation report trumpets the $6.5 billion the company has paid out in royalties, it does not note that as much as half of that money goes to developers outside the United States. The pie, while growing rapidly, is smaller than it seems.
“My guess is that very few developers make a living off their own apps,” said Jeff Scott, who runs the Apple app review site 148Apps.com and closely tracks developments in the field.

Can Michael Saylor turn education free? (Chronicle):

Academic editors hired by the foundation edit the curated content, which is then posted online. The course then undergoes another round of review by a panel. The result is a curated list of education links that Mr. Saylor and his colleagues say add up to the equivalent of a college major. Since open-source textbooks are difficult to find, the foundation has awarded $20,000 each to four textbook authors willing to relicense their textbooks under Creative Commons.
Despite Mr. Saylor's enthusiasm, the foundation has not gained much momentum yet, said Richard Garrett, vice president of Eduventures, an education consulting company. Though the site offers high-quality academic content, he said, the largely self-paced nature of the courses and the lack of peer engagement could drive students to other online programs instead. "The question is, is it a sufficiently engaging and immersive experience and sufficiently social to command mainstream rather than marginal interest?" he said. "We may be coming to the point now, with the MOOC's commanding so much attention, where we need a bit more glitz and glamour and personality around Saylor to compete."

In New York magazine Boris Kachka disects the Jonah Lehrer (the guy who stole content from himself) but doesn't come up with much of a conclusion (NYMag):

If Lehrer was misusing science, why didn’t more scientists speak up? When I reached out to them, a couple did complain to me, but many responded with shrugs. They didn’t expect anything better. Mark Beeman, who questioned that “needle in the haystack” quote, was fairly typical: Lehrer’s simplifications were “nothing that hasn’t happened to me in many other newspaper stories.”
Even scientists who’ve learned to write for a broad audience can be fatalistic about the endeavor. Kahneman had a surprise best seller in 2011, Thinking, Fast and Slow. His writing is dense and subtle, as complicated as pop science gets. But as he once told Dan Ariely, his former acolyte, “There’s no way to write a science book well. If you write it for a general audience and you are successful, your academic colleagues will hate you, and if you write it for academics, nobody would want to read it.”
For a long time, Lehrer avoided the dilemma by assuming it didn’t apply to him, writing not for the scientists (who shrugged off his oversimplifications) or for the editors (who fixed his most obvious errors) but for a large and hungry audience of readers. We only wanted one thing from Jonah Lehrer: a story. He told it so well that we forgave him almost ­everything.

In The Atlantic, are we living in a fools paradise where much of what we value is free? How long will this last?. This is mostly interesting for the comments. (Atlantic)

But what's distinct about many of these innovations is that, unlike the generation of inventions that came out of the 1930s, they're basically free. Phones cost money, data plans are expensive, and Internet connections aren't cheap. But the software products and smart phones apps that some of this generation's smartest young men and women are dedicated their lives to building cost nothing or next to it. Users might considers that observation obvious. And it is. But it's also really, really weird.
The app economy -- a basically free technology revolution that costs nothing to users except our attention -- happened to arrive as millions of people had very little to pay for new products. It was the perfect tech revolution for the perfect moment: Software being the cheapest means of reaching a wide audience; venture capital firms being hungry for hot new services and apps that used software to capture millions of users; and then dangling somewhere in the distant future, the promise of monetization.

From Twitter:

Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner, aims to build bridges to Kabul with new book The Guardian

Traditional surnames are becoming extinct: farewell to the Footheads and Pauncefoots via  Telegraph

'I am bitterly, bitterly disappointed': retired naval officer's email to children in full Telegraph

Pippa Middleton book number one in Kensington and Chelsea as friends rally round Telegraph

Vacation next week - Have a happy Thanksgiving!

MediaWeek (Vol 5, No 18): Cloud Education, Navigating LBF, NYPL Rennovations, Pottermore + More

Is the cloud the future to revolutionizing education?  Gordon Freedman in the Chronicle proposes some interesting ideas (Chron):

The problem with many academic systems is that they are "dumb" to who their users are, what they are doing, and what other systems they are using. This is largely because colleges have different buyers for different functions—learning management, student-information systems, digital-content management, campus analytics, and e-mail systems.
While there are single sign-on systems to get to all of these systems with one log-on, that does not make them "smart." A smart system integrates all of these functions to do two things: serve the end user (students, faculty, administrators) and interpret the data to improve performance.
At the moment there is no clear path to smart systems in higher education. The big data and identity engines of Silicon Valley are not idling, however. They are starting to accelerate, with the higher-education market squarely in their sights. While private equity is rearranging many of the traditional education-technology and content players, mostly on the East Coast, a new breed of venture-backed education start-ups are taking what their founders learned at Google, Facebook, Zynga, and Twitter and focusing on education.

How goes the London Book Fair?  Mark Medley from Canada's National Post follows Canadian publisher House of Anansi Press around the fair (NatPo):

There isn’t much trembling at the fair, at least on the surface. The London Book Fair makes you forget about the paper-thin profit margins, closing bookstores, and falling advances. Walking through Earls Court’s cavernous main hall, one is transported to an alternate-universe where the popularity of books is at an all-time high. It is a circus atmosphere: a man on stilts distributes leaflets; pirates welcome visitors to the L. Ron Hubbard display; a half-naked man hands out copies of 50 Shades of Grey. While there are plenty of smaller displays, the larger publishing houses have all built lavish shrines to the printed page. Wiley’s booth is equipped with 23 individual meeting desks and looks more like a stock market trading floor than a book fair display; Hachette’s multi-tiered mansion rises two storeys in the air, like a middle finger, and Little, Brown, part of the Hachette empire, flaunts an oversized photo of J.K. Rowling, as if to remind other publishers that they, and not you, are publishing her upcoming novel.
“We keep it in the basement, I guess, and wheel it out for every London Book Fair,” says Stuart Williams, an editor at The Bodley Head, an imprint of Random House UK, when I ask where the booths come from.
Over in Earls Court Two, which opened in 1991, adding 17,000 square metres of floor space, the Chinese contingent dominates the centre of the mammoth hall. Nearby is the sleek and minimalist Digital Zone, where attendees wait for the day they take over the main space. Dozens of individual countries are present, from Romania to Saudi Arabia to Turkey, next year’s market focus. The Sultanate of Oman is housed in a castle. There are also booksellers, textbook and university publishers, business books, children’s publishers, travel guides, accessories for e-readers. There are even booths advertising other book fairs, such as the Sharjah International Book Fair, which takes place in the U.A.E.

The debate over the New York public library's house cleaning continues (IHE):

Efforts to spin the news are to be expected. Much more of a problem with the proposed changes is the lack of transparency. The actual Central Library Plan itself had not been made public last year, when The Nation published Scott Sherman’s long report on the proposed changes. Four months later, it still isn’t. Nor are officials responsive to serious questions. When the New York writer Caleb Crain was invited to join an advisory panel concerning the Central Library Plan, he assumed it meant the administration would be forthcoming about details. At least he cleared up that misunderstanding pretty quickly. “I don't think anyone should expect this advisory panel to have much investigative authority or capacity,” Crain wrote on his blog two weeks ago. “I've pressed as hard as is consonant with civility, and I'm afraid I don't have much to show for it publicly. I've been given private answers to some of my questions, but I worry that unless the answers are offered to the public, there's no way to recruit outsiders to help fact-check them, and no way to hold the library accountable later for promises implicit in its reassurances.”

 The Economist on Pottermore and the power of Rowling.  I continue to believe Pottermore is a storefront and platform for a lot more than the Potter franchise. (Econ):

“With great power comes great responsibility,” is a lesson learned by Harry Potter, Frodo Baggins and Peter Parker. High expectations are the price of Pottermore’s guaranteed success. Ms Rowling knows full well that she, like The Boy Who Lived, does not abide by ordinary rules. Already she has changed the e-book retailing model. By retaining her own e-book rights, and then forcing Amazon and others to sell them via Pottermore, as well as offering vastly extended access to libraries and schools, she is evening the playing field. Fans responded by buying $1.5m in e-books in the first three days, particularly the seven-book set. The sales are fundamental, Mr Redmayne says, to financing the free Pottermore platform, which can be accessed in a variety of languages.
Whether Ms Rowling and her team can bring this same disruptive innovation to the Pottermore world itself, and sustain the momentum of the original series remains to be seen. How fast, and how creatively, the site builds out will determine the answer. An entire world of linking interactivity between the digital books and the online universe of Pottermore is possible. The medium is in its infancy. One thing is certain: if there’s anyone who can turn an e-reader into a device that “apparates” from the everyday into the truly magical, it will be Harry Potter.

Thinking about NetFlix and their changed business model that generated so much aggro (S&B):

In October 2011, one of the great backflips in the annals of business strategy took place. Netflix Inc., the most prominent video rental service company in the world, had begun to charge separately for its DVD-by-mail service and its streaming service in July, which in effect had increased prices by 60 percent for customers who used both services. Then, in September, Netflix had gone further, announcing it would split those services into two separate businesses, renaming the DVD-by-mail operation Qwikster. Consumer protests, conducted largely over the Internet, forced the retraction in October; Netflix announced it would revert to providing a combined service under one brand. By November, the company’s market cap had dropped by 70 percent and more than 800,000 subscribers had fled. The online mea culpa that CEO Reed Hastings wrote to customers only added fuel to the flames. In January 2012, a group of investors sued the company for loss of profits. Clearly, a bit of the company’s luster as a Silicon Valley darling has been lost, and Reed Hastings’s reputation as a strategically adept CEO has been damaged.

From the twitter this week (PND):

Flipboard is ‘head-on competitor’ on Economist’s road to all-digital Paidcontent

Apple's iBooks Author: the iTunes of self-publishing apps? Arstechnica

The digital world has invigorated publishing, not doomed it Guardian 

If Harvard Can’t Afford Academic Journal Subscriptions, Maybe It’s Time for an Open Access Model Time

Pearson says first-half profits will dip - FT

Fight heats up between John Wiley and patent lawyers over journals Paidcontent

U of M opens up to open source textbooks MINN Public Radio

Outsell Report: Where Next for Textbooks?

Outsell spoke to us about the changes going on in education specifically in the development of custom textbooks and interviewed me for the report.

Here is the summary:

The digital textbook buzz has increased over the past two years, leaving no doubt that the usage of digital textbook content in the education market will increase substantially – predictably at the expense of their print equivalents. This report looks at changes in the textbook market over the last two years and forecasts market developments over the coming five years. The report also provides case studies of some of the key market offerings, discusses how both K-12 and higher education markets for textbooks and content are developing, and examines the potential opportunities and pitfalls for existing players and new market entrants. This report contains:
- Analysis of the textbook market, including graphs, according to format, market subsegment, and geography (Americas, EMEA, Asia Pacific);
- Graphical representations of the impact of digital textbooks on both the K-12 and higher education supply chains;
- Case studies of some key players: Apple, Cengage Learning: MindTap, CourseSmart, Flat World Knowledge, Kno, Inkling, and Nature Education: Principles of Biology;
- Discussion of market dynamics and key trends, plus market opportunities and threats;
- Essential actions for publishers.

The report is $895 available from Outsell.

An Apple for the Teacher

To the average Apple aficionado, today’s spectacle on Apple’s entry into the education space would have seemed just par for the course.  Hype is about everything Apple does in these coordinated announcements and today was no different.  To the average textbook publisher today’s hype would have seemed of another world; that another entity – Apple yet? - would view the staid, traditional and, let’s face it, relatively small textbook publishing business as an opportunity to do big things must seem odd. I also thought, there was some irony today because a company I recognize as possibly one of the first brands ever to enter my consciousness - KODAK - declared bankruptcy.  KODAK sold film and processing and their cameras (hardware) were secondary to the revenue they got from film.  In context of today’s announcement Apple’s model is the opposite and it is unlikely textbook companies and other content providers will see themselves as the ‘KODAK’ in this relationship.  How healthy that approach may be for publishers only time will tell.

According to the National Association of College Stores the average price of college textbooks approaches $70.  Many people make value judgments about college textbook pricing but how does this very real data point jive with the desire of Apple to sell much cheaper college textbooks?  According to the presentation today, Apple plans to hold pricing of k-12 texts at less than $15.  Why would traditional publishers participate in a model that undercuts their business model to such an extent?  While I admit to assuming their pricing strategy will be consistent from K-12 to college, my conclusion is based on a primary premise of their presentation which was that textbooks are expensive.  In education today, what is clear is that there’s significant interest in ‘reinventing’ education from the content perspective and who can argue with the attention that a company like Apple can bring to a slow moving business like textbook publishing?  How sustainable their attention will be is another matter entirely.  Let’s not forget that the hype that preceded the Google bookstore and the Apple iBook store did not result in any appreciable changes in the business.  Apple’s motivations are also suspect: They are motivated by selling more hardware (unlike KODAK) and are only interested in content to the extent that it is cheap and plentiful and helps to drive hardware sales.  A content model with imposed low pricing, just like iTunes, will help sell more units.  I don’t believe Apple’s 30% cut of $14.95 will ever be significant relative to their sales of iPads at $500 a pop (give or take).

While the twitter feed this morning was overwhelming at times it was interesting that some very critical questions were quick to arise regarding Apple’s new self-publishing platform.  Fundamentally, the platform does (will) attempt to address a desire by educators for more control in the content they assign for their students.  That’s a good thing.  This desire/need of faculty is very much in nascent form; however, this may have more to do with expectations - what they see as their options given the concentration of content around less than five large publishers – than true desire to create their own material.  Motivated faculty will want to build their own content for their classes and if they can do this cost effectively and easily so much the better.  Whether they will do this on the Apple platform remains to be seen.

Offering an ‘open’ platform for faculty and others to build their content poses many potential problems.  (Since this is an Apple platform technically it isn’t ‘open’).  The functionality of the platform could be very impressive but, what’s the guessing the ‘store’ becomes full of crackpot theories, spurious pedagogy and denier/revisionist historians unless Apple ‘censors’ (a more polite favorite word could be ‘curate’) the content.  And, if they censor, what will the basis of the censorship?  I am a believer in self-publishing, and it often throws up gems on the trade side, and there is no reason why it won’t on the education side; however, the cost may be a lot of dross (or worse).  Frustration will simply drive people way.

One of the other items quickly identified as a potential problem was the management of copyright; specifically, what’s to stop someone uploading content that they don’t have rights to?  The user will be contravening copyright in using material if they haven’t cleared it appropriately and plan to pay the copyright owner for use.  Most publishers price their content at a level that inclusion in a product that can’t be priced above $15.00 makes the (legal) inclusion uneconomical.  So, that begs the question: Who will clear content properly if they categorically won’t make it up in volume?  If there is a check on copyright what will the process be that enables the use of this content which at the same time doesn’t cause the entire self-publishing process to unravel?

There are more questions over this Apple initiative in addition to those I raise above; however, I believe the only objective Apple wants to achieve is to sell more hardware.  The Education initiative is a smokescreen and we shouldn’t forget that Apple sold a school management platform named PowerSchool that they developed to Pearson in 2006.  At the time, they didn’t find the education market attractive enough even though PowerSchool was considered an impressive tool.  Interestingly, some commentators on the twitter felt the Apple education announcement represented an attack on Blackboard and other LMS platforms.  I’m not sure I see that either.

I believe the involvement of Apple in education will be a good thing for all the players in education and will spur new investment and new initiatives.  This is a dynamic space at the mmoment with technology companies, content companies and wholesalers and distributors all vying for advantage.

MediaWeek (Vol 4, No 52): Year in Review

Looks like I only missed three editions this year:

Week 51: ChromeBooks, Durrell eBooks, Hitchens & Dogs, Unbound & Vogue

Week 50: Khan Academy, Academic Libraries, Harvard Business School, Consumer Reports + More

Week 49: Revamping GED, HS Corporate Marketing, Book Blogging, Pretty Books + More

Week 48: Orwell on Police Actions, Dickens and Economist Book Festival + More

Week 47: Lobbying for On Line Learning, Loan Bubble + More

Week 46: WW I Archive Goes Online, Mrs Beeton's 150, Silicon Valley's Daily, Cookbook Aps +More

Week 45: The New A&R, Problem Biographies, Scan your Books, Education, Libraroes + More

Week 44: Books in Browsers, Photography, Drivel + More

Week 43: Tom Waits, Children's Books, The Booker, "Close the Libraries", Textbooks & Education + More

Week 42: Frankfurt, CS Forester, Martin Amis + More

Week 41: Frankfurt 2011, Indian Authors, Digital Rights,

Week 40: Scholarly Models, Literary Translations, Library usage Data, Fading Creative Class +More.

Week 39: Robert Harris, Dickens, Cultural Decline (or not), Colm Toibin + More

Week 37: Scholarly Publishing, Project Gutenberg, Literary Festivals, Lawsuits, + More

Week 36: Amazon Digital Library, Piracy, Newspaper Disruption, Private Blackboard + More

Week 35: Distance Learning, Libraries and E-Books, Digital Textbooks + More

Week 34: Content Management Systems, Student Knowledge, Textbook Rentals, Archives + More

Week 33: The Chronicle of Higher Ed on the 10th Anniversary of 9/11

Week 32: Digital Storytelling, Report on Graduate Earning Power, Citation of Wikipedia, Forsyth's Jackal + More

Week 31: Financial resutls: Pearson, Wiley, Wolters Kluwer, Reed Elsevier

Week 30: Arundhati Roy, JSTORE Illegal Downloads, Kaplan's $1.6mm Bill, High Journal Prices, Three Rules of Reviewing + More

Week 29: Library of Congress, Bertelsmann, Michelin Guides, Bookstores, P.G. Wodehouse, Education Funding Report + More

Week 28: Hacking May Cost $100mm, Potter's Last-Not so Fast, Blackboard, Harvard & Social Hot water, Catch22 + More

Week 27: ProPublica's Newspaper Apps, Hemingway, EMI + More

Week 26: Books In Print, Journal Publishing, Joyce, Education and Technology, Area 51 and more.

Week 24: Georgia Copyright Case, Blackboard, HW Wilson, David Mamet's PR Campaign + More

Week 23: Romance or Not, Grief in The Killing, The Value of College, Nordic Crimewave + More

Week 22: Patriot Act, ALA Preview, Revolution Writing + More

Week 21: End of World Edition - An Essay on Privacy, Books & Marketing, Libraries + More

Week 20: Ebooks in the Classroom, Writers Life, Libraries Matter, Bob Marley

Week 19: EBooks on Campus, Jeffrey Archer, LexisNexis Sued, Archiving the Web

Week 18: Higher Ed, Author Promotion, Harper Lee, Libraries + Others.

Week 17: Morrissey, King James, Big Content, Sneering at Genres, Hitch, + More

Week 16: Alberto Vitale, Arab Market eBooks, B2B Magazines.

Week 15: Borders, Indigo

Week 14: Long Distance Learning, OpenSource Textbooks, CCC, Harpercollins

Week 13: Bookclub for the Homeless, Plagiarism or "Creative Reuse", Hollywood, Gallimard, Jean Auel

Week 12: Hay Festival, Reviewers, Heart of Darkness, Alice in NYC,

Week 11: UK Copyright, The Killing, History in the UK.

Week 10: Spy Magazine, Hiaasen, Casino Royale, Curious George and Ryan Giggs

Week 9: Information Concierge, Future of Education Publishing, Blackboard, The $16K/mth Sideline, Blurbs,  Marilyn Monroe

Week 8: Demise of Research Libraries, Online Education, Sir John Soane, Cuban Bookfair

Week 7: Underused eBook features, UK Tuition, Mills&Boone, Coin Art

Week 5: Eadweard Muybridge, Open Courseware, Education Aps, Lexis, Mother Russia, Taschen

Week 4: Changing Higher Ed. Book Awards, Pippi, 007, Forecasting Technology, Michael Lewis

Week 3: UK Libraries, Perceptions of US Libraries, Pearson Acquires, Wolters Kluwer Partner, Libraries in the Cloud

Week 2: ISBN Identification, UK Libraries under threat, Historian Hobsbawm, The Internet and Authors

Week 1: Digital Media Experiments, Murakami, Literary Illusion and Political Correction, Predictions, Cliche

MediaWeek (Vol 4, No 46): WW I Archive Goes Online, Mrs Beeton's 150, Silicon Valley's Daily, Cookbook Aps +More

An archive trove of documents relating to the first world war is to go online (Guardian):

Living witnesses to the war may no longer be with us, but British archives still hold a wealth of original documentation from those years and, although much of it is in danger of crumbling away, the range of testimony held by the British Library helps to broaden understanding of the war.
In an unprecedented effort to make this material available to the widest possible public, the library is to join forces with 12 European partners – including national libraries in Rome, Berlin, Paris and Copenhagen – to put key documents and images on the internet. The new three-year project, Remembering the First World War, will be finished in time for the ceremonies to mark the centenary of the outbreak of war in 2014. 

More than 400,000 first world war source materials, many of them rare and highly fragile due to the deterioration of the paper on which they are printed, will be freely available online for the first time. Those interested in finding out more about the conflict will no longer have to apply to see documents in person in the reading rooms of Europe.

"It is particularly important that this project includes organisations that were involved in different sides of the conflict," said Jamie Andrews from the British Library, who is leading the British project.

Mrs Beeton's cookbook is 150 years old. How do the recipes stand up? (Intelligent Life):

Beeton was a hard-pressed journalist rather than a practised cook: her biographer, Kathryn Hughes, says there is no evidence “that Isabella was interested in cooking”. Compiled under pressure of deadline, the recipes were shamelessly purloined from other cookbooks. Beeton’s claim in advertisements for the book that every recipe was tested seems doubtful, judging by her odder instructions. She maintains that large carrots should be boiled for 1 3/4 to 2 1/4 hours and macaroni for 1 1/2 to 1 3/4 hours. Oddly, her recipe for haricot mutton contains no haricot beans, and she suggests that Brussels sprouts “may be arranged on the dish in the form of a pineapple”.  

On the plus side, “Household Management” is punctuated with background information about food. We learn that black turkey “approaches nearest to the original stock and is esteemed the best”. Beeton’s advice on fresh-cooked lobster could scarcely be bettered for precision. It should have “a stiffness in the tail which, if gently raised, will return with a spring”. Current culinary opinion has come back to her view on butter, “nutritious and…far more easily digested than any other of the oleaginous substances sometimes used in its place”. And the book as a whole provides a magnificent panorama of food in the middle of the 19th century. Along with items that have remained mainstays of British cuisine—rib of beef, pork pie, Welsh rarebit and bread-and-butter pudding (“better for being made about two hours before it is baked”)—there are numerous other recipes that have been forgotten.

The Columbia Journalism Review notes some sloppy citations on the Poynter Romenesko blog and all hell brakes loose (Poynter):

One danger of this practice is that the words may appear to belong to Jim when they in fact belong to another.

This style represents Jim’s deliberate choice to be transparent about the information’s origins while using the source’s own words to represent his or her work. If only for quotation marks, it would be exactly right. Without those quotation marks, it is incomplete and inconsistent with our publishing practices and standards on Poynter.org.

A long discussion of the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley’s own daily, which as CJR notes was poised to ride the digital whirlwind. What happened? (CJR):

Dave Butler has been a newspaperman since 1972, a self-described journeyman who became the editor of the Mercury News in 2008. The paper had been sold two years earlier by its longtime parent company, Knight Ridder, to the McClatchy Company. McClatchy in turn quickly sold it to MediaNews Group, whose chairman, Dean Singleton, put Butler in charge. Three months into the job, Butler wrote a memo to the staff, outlining a vision that could essentially be boiled down to a simple premise: the past could no longer animate the Mercury News. The days of four hundred people in the newsroom, revenues of $300 million and profit margins north of 30 percent, a bureau in Hanoi, aPulitzer for foreign news, Spanish and Vietnamese language editions, and a Sunday magazine, were gone. The staff of the Merc, now about half the size it was at its peak in the late 1990s, had no choice but to press on with vigor and a sense of mission: “Let’s carve some new trails in the jungle of journalism!”

Butler has the advantage of having missed his paper’s past, and so is unencumbered by the memory of what the place had been, not so long ago. Randall Keith knew. He had arrived earlier, in 1998, just in time to watch the great tech bubble inflate, carrying the Merc along with it. He had left a job as city editor of the Quincy, Massachusetts, Patriot Ledger to join a paper with a national reputation both for its journalism and its profitability. Time magazine had several years earlier dubbed the Merc the nation’s most tech-savvy newspaper. Its revenues from classified advertising—especially recruitment ads for all those many high-tech companies whose every product roll out and inevitable IPO were covered by the paper’s burgeoning business staff—had fueled ever more revenue, $288 million the year Keith arrived.

From the Observer: Ahmed Mourad was Hosni Mubarak's personal photographer and a thriller writer. (Observer):

"I was ready to explode because I had been living a dual life for five years, like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde," says the dapper, quietly spoken Mourad. "During the day, I spent hours working with Hosni Mubarak – a man who had been burying the dreams of Egyptians for three decades – and at night I was with my friends, who were cursing him and wishing he would disappear. What was really making me angry was that I knew the Egyptian people were destined to live better and he was the reason why that wasn't happening." 

So was Mourad in fear for his job – or, indeed, his life – when Vertigo appeared? He does not answer the question directly. "I didn't think it would be published, but I would never have forgiven myself if I hadn't written down what I was thinking, if I hadn't joined the revolution," he says. "I would have regretted my silence."

I'll have an App for Christmas dinner (Observer):

Yet those domestic chefs who have long treasured their dog-eared copies of classics by Elizabeth David, Madhur Jaffrey or Delia Smith may find it difficult to accept a technological upgrade. Whether a favourite cookbook is marked with telling splashes and scribbled comments, or is merely read in bed, performing the function of a familiar comfort blanket, it still delivers something that the food writer and television presenter Jay Rayner suspects cannot be replaced.

"A cooking app is a brilliant thing, until you have to turn the page with hands caked in dough. A stained cookery-book page is a mark of commitment; a stained smartphone is a trip back to the shop," he suggests.

To develop the look of the new apps, publishers have brought in designers to draw up cartoon-like cooking aids that avoid the high production costs of filming a live chef working in a kitchen. Early internet services, such as the innovative British website Videojug, are still proving popular, but new, stylish, illustrated apps are coming up fast. From next summer even the prestigious Culinary Institute of America in New York will require its students to come equipped with a tablet computer pre-loaded with the school's new app.

From Twitter:

The future of books? Publishing by numbers: IrishTimes

Self publishing textbooks online saves Minnesota school district $175,000 (Link)

Australia gives up battle protecting its publishers, will reduce timeframe for retention of territorial copyright (PW)

Alec Baldwin hands over $250 Large to East Hampton public library. (EHampton)

MediaWeek (Vol 3, No 24): Freak Show, Penguin's Canadian Problem, Textbook Reinvention

On the road with an economist. Steven Dubner and the Superfreakonomics show (Observer):

It's bizarre to think that the crash might have made economics sexy.

I'm thinking it was less like sex appeal and maybe more like a sexually transmitted disease: it made people pay attention. There are a lot of guilds in the world still, professions that want to make their work appear as complicated as possible to protect their ability to charge a price for it. Lawyers, obviously. And macro-economists certainly. They want to seem like the Wizard of Oz. What the crash showed is that the magic doesn't work as well as they wanted us to believe.

Malcolm Gladwell pioneered this kind of roadshow; does he have a lot to answer for?

We owe Malcolm Gladwell a great debt. The Tipping Point made the world safe for a book with many different tales in it that are connected. I like to think we took it one stage further: we have no grand unifying theme. We don't even have a thesis.

Anthony Bourdain: My war on fast food (Observer) and an extract from his recent book:

McDonald's has been very shrewd about kids. Say what you will about Ronald and friends, they know their market – and who drives it. They haven't shrunk from targeting young minds – in fact, their entire gazillion-dollar promotional budget seems aimed squarely at toddlers. They know that one small child, crying in the back seat of the car of two overworked, overstressed parents, will more often than not determine the choice of restaurants. They know exactly when and how to start building brand identification and loyalty with brightly coloured clowns and smoothly tied-in toys. From funding impoverished school districts to the instalment of playgrounds, McDonald's has not shrunk from fucking with young minds in any way it can.

The Toronto Star's headline says it best regarding the resignation of the head of Penguin Canada (Star):

The Plot Thickens:

Last Tuesday, Davidar announced he was stepping down from his position to pursue writing and planned to relocate to his native India. The announcement shocked literary observers who saw the move as a sign the company was retreating from the Canadian publishing scene. Three days later, Penguin and Davidar, clarified the circumstances around his abrupt departure. In a statement Friday, Penguin Canada said Davidar was “asked to leave the company last month.” Davidar went a step farther: “The truth is that a former colleague accused me of sexual harassment and Penguin terminated my employment.”

Lionel Shriver (We Need to Talk About Kevin) is not happy with book prizes and the industry generally (Independent):

"It'd be totally hypocritical to discourage people from joining my profession, which was good to me in the end, but I have qualms about being encouraging. The odds are stacked against you. I want to give people enough of an idea of the capriciousness of the industry." She went on to cast aspersions on the successes of some best-selling authors whose writing was simply not very good, she thought, but whose books were aided by the benefit of the powerful publishing publicity machine – citing Bret Easton Ellis' latest book, Imperial Bedrooms, as one such example. "There are a lot of books that end up selling that aren't very good. I've just read Bret Easton Ellis' new book and it's awful but it's had a big publicity campaign. "I'm writing a 1,500 word review of it – the size of which alone will overwhelm what I say. It's not a case of cream rising to the top but skimmed milk rising – of the 'no fat' kind. The book doesn't deserve the attention. It's ghastly. In the meantime, there are lots of books that will not be reviewed," she said. Shriver's Orange Prize-winning novel has gone on to sell over 600,000 copies in Britain since publication and is currently being adapted as a film starring Tilda Swinton.

Source Books CEO Dominique Raacah is profiled in Naperville Sun:

Sourcebooks was launched in 1987 and has produced more than 2,000 titles in its history, including a number of New York Times best sellers. But in the past two years, the company has been positioning itself to move into the digital age -- a time that Raacah says "we as a company have been very communicative about."

"The subject of the digital transformation of books is something we have been engrossed in and find the work very compelling," she said. "We've wanted to be aggressive about the digital era and were the sixth publisher of over 20,000 in the nation to sign on with Apple allowing access downloads of our titles on the iPad. The digital era will be a very important one for publishing."

In Inside Higher Ed: Reinventing the textbook (IHEd):

The higher education industry should at least agree on one thing when it comes to textbooks: the current system for publishing, distributing and pricing them is rather broken. The challenge lies in reimagining the textbook so that faculty construct the right set of learning materials that engages their students in deep learning, without bankrupting them. The open educational resources movement is already laying a foundation for that type of radical change. We need to move beyond and away from the textbook concept altogether.

In its place I recommend the term Curricular Resource Strategies (CRS), which I first heard used by Mark Milliron, deputy director for postsecondary improvement at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, to describe the new thinking in learning materials. CRS affords faculty greater freedom of choice and flexibility in delivering learning material to their students, offers the possibility of using everything across the content spectrum from costlier traditional print texts to the latest open digital formats, is drastically more affordable for students, allows faculty greater control of their intellectual property -- and still offers revenue streams for traditional textbook publishers and college bookstores.

While it may require more personal effort from faculty, the reward is a unique opportunity to create a new model for publishing academic learning content that avoids the mistakes of the old system. Faculty can learn from their librarian colleagues, whose past experiences in managing scholarly communication offers a lesson in how not to structure a publishing model.

From the twitter:

Demi Moore memoirs set for 2012 BBB news $2mm from Harpercollins.
Why Apple’s iBooks Numbers Are Meaningless - NYTimes
Self-pub and online services, e-books, and digital demand printing are joined into a new and powerful sector. Book Business Mag

And in Sport, Lancashire opened the first stage in their their redevelopment plan (Crains)

oh, and something about butter fingers (Guardian)

Big Kindle Goes to School (Shrug)

The launch of Big Kindle looks like another round in the continuing Apple vs Amazon cage fight. Amazon looks to be on the defensive as they rush out a larger version of the Kindle for the education market in advance of Apple's proposed Tablet PC. Jobs may think that people don't read but he does know that children are educated, and education is an arena Apple has traditionally done well in. The developing convergence of education and book e-commerce is what Amazon may see as a threat: A captured market of educational materials that, should Apple enter with a tablet PC type device, Amazon could be locked out of.

For Amazon however, Big Kindle will still be giggled over by those in Cupertino. Will the Apple tablet be any better? It is certain to have a far better form factor. Whether it will be expressly suited to delivering educational content in a dynamic and forward thinking manner remains to be seen. That is certainly not within the capabilities of Big Kindle.

Several universities participated in the launch of Big Kindle and the hype around the launch hid a troubling question; namely, why these schools were in-bed with the retailer at all? On a list serve I questioned,

Don't the participating universities appear to be endorsing a hardware platform (not to mention a specific retail channel). You could argue (possibly strongly) that allowing the bookstore to be managed by B&N or Follett or even the adoption of college textbooks themselves to be little different; however, doesn’t the changed paradigm suggest an opportunity to operate on a more open field of play or is this more of the same leading to more student frustration, higher prices and deadened innovation in education?

In other words, why would the universities want to continue the (essentially) old way of doing business when most observers believe we are on the cusp of a renaissance in educational learning. The Kindle doesn't do multimedia, it doesn't do color and most importantly it doesn't do networking because the Kindle is a closed system. This is a short sighted collaboration between schools and Amazon that doesn't really suggest any major change.

As I thought about the Big Kindle development it struck me that there could still be a more interesting development. Content media companies suddenly developing a hardware delivery platform are growing like weeds from NewsCorp to Hearst, and there could be an opportunity for collaboration between the news/magazine world and education. What if CourseSmart or Safari joined one of these efforts? That would be a far more interesting and potentially game changing development than selling text book content on a Big Kindle. By definition, the hardware to support a digital magazine will be capable of all the aspects necessary in delivering a changed educational experience.

Will that happen? As it turns out some of the partners involved in CourseSmart are also participating in the Big Kindle roll out; but, what is CourseSmart if it isn't a new way to deliver educational materials to learners? That doesn't seem to be what students will be getting with Big Kindle. There may be all kinds of reasons why CourseSmart (or even an publisher themselves) won't be launching a device: The predominant reason may be the amount of print revenue tied to Amazon, and therefore from my perspective Big Kindle and education is more about marketing hype than anything fundamental. We await more developments with keen interest.

Amazon Versus Apple: Is This A Cage Fight?

Amazon is buying Audible.com for $300mm: This changes everything. Audible is already a destination site for Audio books (and content) what more appropriate gateway exists to boost the growing (e-)book content that Amazon is selling via their Kindle? As I speculated a few weeks ago, the Kindle will be a delivery platform for content (not just e-books), and it doesn't take too much imagination to see how Audible's content fits very nicely with the Kindle strategy. Audible has also taught their users about the benefits of subscribing to content and have proven that this model can be successful. So, not only does the Audible acquisition have the potential to bring new customers to the Kindle platform (on the basis of a subscription model for content), Amazon.com will also gain the expertise of staff at Audible who has built up this program. Extending a subscription model to content presages the resurrection of the Book Club model. Didn't we all know it would come back? (Well maybe not, but Bertelsmann were spied coming out of Madame Radzwilli's House of Fortunes just the other day).

Strategically, this acquisition makes fundamental sense at the product level alone. Coupled with an increasing need for Audio versions of text (what with our aging population) with the already loyal Audible customer base there is little to argue about. And I do believe, it will escalate a change in business model for trade (consumer) publishing content.

How publishers react to the news will be interesting to watch. Most will not see the significance and many will be happy at the increased exposure that audio books will get as part of the Amazon.com empire. Where there is concern, it will orient itself around the realization that even greater market power will be exerted (either overtly or not) by Amazon. Given my comments above, this acquisition could represent an end-run of the order of I-Tunes. Look how music publishers are now tied to the $0.99 cents per song model. It just snuck up on them. Will the same happen to book content?

Which brings me to my last comment: It is all out war with Apple. (In fact, I would not be surprised to see a competing offer for Audible. I know Apple are not in the content owning business but they might do it to be mischievous or to protect a budding position in the book market). There has been some speculation about whether Apple would develop an e-reader device as part of the I-Phone. Despite his comments to the contary, I believe Jobs was planning some development here and I speculate that Amazon thought so as well. Amazon will do everything they can to keep Apple out of the content distribution/platform business. Apple for their part don't want Amazon's movie and music distribution (or the Kindle) to challenge iTunes. How this rivalry plays out will be very interesting to watch. They both come at the issue from completely different starting points.

NYTimes

Jobs Kicks the Kindle

In the bits blog on the NYTimes Steve Jobs gets it right for the Kindle but for all the wrong reasons:

Mr. Jobs can be like that when he assesses the competition.

Today he had a wide range of observations on the industry, including the Amazon Kindle book reader, which he said would go nowhere largely because Americans have stopped reading.

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

Unfortunately, that's hard to take seriously and I would have expected better. I would always have given Apple and Jobs more credit in understanding market dynamics and trends. On the surface his comment is partly accurate, but there is no cause and effect here.

Does this mean we aren't about to see books on the iPhone in quantity? Of course, it could be misinformation.

From another perspective, it has been the media industry and the publishing community specifically that has kept this company (Apple) relevant for the past 15years (at least) via their loyal devotion to the Mac platform. To all those dedicated authors, marketing and design professionals in the publishing industry locked into the Apple mystique this comment should come as a kick in the processor.

E-book Reader for IPhone

Via teleRead an application for the IPhone that enables the reading of over 10000 books on the IPhone.

Adam at Exact Editions will be excited.

Note one of the comments (not sure if it applied to the IPhone or not):

Having played around will all the current iPhone ebook “solutions”,
including the one mentioned here, I’m afraid none of them will really fit the
bill for a serious ebook reader. There are two major problems:
1. Lack of local storage. If the book is stored on a server then the reader is pretty much out of luck in areas of poor cell or wifi coverage.
2. Inconvenience. Reading a book in a browser doesn’t work well because you can’t bookmark your page. Several times I’ve had Safari quit on me and then had to re-open the book and scroll through 250 pages to get to my place. Storing the ebook as part of the url solves the local storage problem, but doesn’t solve this one.

Do we have an e-book winner: Exact Editions thinks so

Exact Editions stepped up the pressure on Steve Jobs by suggesting that the "iphone is the best ebook ever" not just the best iPod ever. I spied someone waving their hand over one of these things this morning as though it was some kind of weegee board. Their absorption was complete and I suspect (and effectively agree) that e-books will be one of the collateral winners in the i-Phone launch.

Adam raises an interesting idea about what the interface for books (catalog front end) will look like on the I-Phone but I don't like any of his suggestions as to who will develop one. On the other hand it does have one thinking....

Apple ebook reader for iPod - What a Cool Idea

I found this link to a 'design proposal' that would combine an IPOD with a tablet like e-book reader. It is a pretty cool concept. Apple has been rumoured to be considering an ebook reader but nothing has materialized.

IPhone: The best IPOD we have ever made

Walt Mosberg interviews Steve Jobs about the Apple business - well worth watching.

"we are in three businesses and a hobby" Apple MAC and iTunes Music business generate $10billion each and the third business they are about to get into is the phone business (he calls it "handsets") and the hobby is Apple TV.

Where is the MAC business? Growth is about 3x the market growth rate and greater if US is stripped out.

Jobs: IPhone is the best IPod we have ever made. Available on the last day in June.

Reason 2 cingular did the deal: Existing Phones are not capabile of taking advantage of 3G phones particularly in how users access the interent. They get the 'baby internet'

Zillions of independents are looking to offer DRM free music: many more by end of year.

Mosberg asks about 'lock-in': Jobs notes that less than 25 songs on average IPOD were purchased via Itunes store. Given average user has hundreds of songs on their IPOD. Clearly not getting the majority of their music from Itunes and not even getting a medium sized minority. Suggestion "we have a lock in is ridiculous." "IPOD wins because it is the best music player".

Mosberg: is the IPhone a wireless Ipod? Jobs: It is three things, the best Ipod ever made, the best (and incredibly good) phone and "the internet in your pocket" If it were any one of the three it would be sucessful.

Itunes software versus number of IPODs: 300mm + copies of Itunes versus 100mm Ipods. Makes Apple one of the largest windows developers. Jobs: "we get cards and letters from people that say we are their favorite app on windows," and "Its like giving a glass of ice water to somebody in hell."








Link via Paid Content.

Amazon To Launch DRM Free Music Store

The days of DRM protected music are definitely numbered. Amazon.com is announcing that they will launch a DRM free music store later this year which will include thousands of songs in MP3 format. As such these files will be playable on virtually any music player.

“Our MP3-only strategy means all the music that customers buy on Amazon is always DRM-free and plays on any device,” said Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com founder and CEO. “We’re excited to have EMI joining us in this effort and look forward to offering our customers MP3s from amazing artists like Coldplay, Norah Jones and Joss Stone.”

Some pundits have started to suggest this is an Apple I-Tunes killer but what is more likely is for Apple to renegotiate their music deals (where applicable) and come out with a similar service before Amazon.com launches their site. Since Apple are very much the incumbent music download and hardware vendor they have a distinct advantage. (Not to mention the potential impact of the Apple I-Phone). It should be pointed out that sales at the Apple store have never been huge but a change in the DRM rules could be the catalyst that Apple and Steve Jobs have been looking for.

No word on pricing or specific launch dates from Amazon.com

Press Release