Random House: In Dreams of My Data

It would be hard to imagine that a less equal business relationship exists than that between publishers and libraries.  Without even the semblance of discussion, negotiation or consultation Random House did what HarperCollins did last year and imposed a solution to mitigate a problem no one can even prove exists.  The problem: That loaning eBooks from a library is so easy that retail sales will be destroyed.  Curiously, Amazon and Barnes & Noble, both of whom would naturally have a problem with free books, have always been fairly mute about how libraries retain a competitive advantage over these retailing behemoths.

Random House’s solution is to triple down on the price of the book; the logic of the tripling is just as opaque as Harpercollins choosing 26 loans until their books ‘expire’.  As a cop out, Random House suggests that more data is needed and on the delivery of said data they may adjust their pricing accordingly.  Those with rose colored glasses will want to view that as a possibility that they will bring their pricing downwards; but, really?  The whole notion of use-data is both a canard and disingenuous.  For one, I’m not aware of any publisher sponsored research or collaboration (with ALA, OCLC, etc.) where the purpose was to define the library patron and their purchasing behavior.   
It’s not like the behavior hasn’t been there to study for 100 years.   In fact the data is available – certainly not in one database but in three or four; for example, circulation data from an OPAC, bibliographic information from OCLC, psychographic information from GfK Group and retail sales information from BookScam.  What’s missing is the willingness to do the hard work.

Sadly, libraries have very little negotiating leverage or power.  And it’s not like they can go to their cities or states for more money so that they can buy these more expensive eBooks.  What’s the last public sector anything that had their budget raised 300%?  So, libraries are dependent on public outrage and even there most people will shrug their shoulders and move along.  Current ALA President Molly Raphael's statement was part cajoling, part plea – and who can blame her?  There aren’t that many options:

“While I appreciate Random House’s engagement with libraries and its commitment to perpetual access,” Raphael said, “I am deeply disappointed in the severe escalation in ebook pricing reported today. Calling on our history together and our hope to satisfy mutual goals moving forward, the American Library Association strongly urges Random House to reconsider its decision. In a time of extreme financial constraint, a major price increase effectively curtails access for many libraries, and especially our communities that are hardest hit economically.

“Also, ALA appreciates the data gaps that exist, and we commit to work quickly and collaboratively to address this concern. We must have better data to inform decisions that have such wide and deep implications.

Random House did not jump on the band wagon with the other large trade houses when they all went over to the agency model but with this unilateral action they probably have every trade house cheering them on.  Random House is unlikely to ‘make it up in volume’ because most libraries are simply going to buy other publisher’s eBooks (until they go up as well), and I can say categorically – because I have no data to back this up – that they won’t see a corresponding increase in retail sales either.

Any willingness y publishers to really work with public libraries to work out a solution has been spotty at best.  The fact that the prime distribution avenue into the public library segment seems to act as much like a bumbling doofus as it does a concerned partner probably serves the publishers perfectly.  Fellow traveler Eric Hellman perfectly numbers the real issues associated with eBook distribution into public libraries but resolving these to any degree is probably beyond expectation.

MediaWeek (Vol 4, No 45): The New A&R, Problem Biographies, Scan your Books, Education, Libraroes + More

Changing the way music stars are made (Economist):

David Joseph, who runs the British arm of Universal Music, says A&R men used to be alchemists, discovering base talent and turning it into gold. “They made dreams come true,” he says.

These days they are venture capitalists. Particularly at big labels such as Universal, A&R executives increasingly expect acts to have built a self-sustaining, if modest, business before they offer them a recording contract. 

Large numbers of Facebook friends and Twitter followers help show that a band has traction. But record labels have become wary of social-media indicators. They know that desperate bands may chatter about themselves or hire marketing firms to inflate their online metrics. The labels also want to know whether a band is drawing a steadily growing number of people to its gigs. The bar rises constantly. Mumford & Sons (pictured), a successful folk-rock outfit from bucolic west London, had amassed a large live following and had released several EPs before signing with Island Records in 2009.

Louis Adler, CEO of Melbourne University Press reflects on the Julian Assange biography imbroglio (TheAge):

When publishers and authors resort to lawyers, injunctions, and secret book drops to bookshops, things have gone haywire. Demanding an advance is returned is rare, retrieving the cold, hard cash even less likely. Contracts, deadlines and copyrights may have legal force but the relationship always depends on good faith. One cannot bully a writer into delivering a manuscript good enough to publish or on time. That is why it is in the interests of both publisher and author to keep it ''nice'' and renegotiate when deadlines loom or the editorial direction differs from the original brief, or when the author wants to put ''your'' book on hold while they write another book for another publisher.

Scan all your books - yes, there's a service for that (Economist):

1DollarScan is the American outpost of the Japanese firm Bookscan, founded to solve the problem of scant space in Japan's poky urban dwellings and to prevent damage caused by bookshelf-toppling earthquakes. (Bookscan has no relation to Nielsen BookScan, an American retail-sales-tracking service). Ship your volumes to 1DollarScan, and the company will slice off the spine, and charge $1 for every 100 pages scanned. (The firm also scans routine documents and photos.) It uses high-speed Canon scanners, with optical-character recognition (OCR) software developed jointly by Bookscan and Canon. The process does not yet produce text in standard e-book formats; instead, customers receive PDF files that show the scanned image, but also have whatever text was successfully extracted in a separate, searchable layer. The resulting files are chunky: tens of megabytes per book, or 100 times bigger than Amazon's Kindle titles. But it is a start. 

Hiroshi Nakano, the boss of 1DollarScan, says a few thousand books have been received in the first month or so of operation. And that is before the firm has begun its marketing drive, or adapted its Japanese-language smartphone software (for reading and managing user accounts) for English speakers. One early surprise has been the linguistic diversity of books sent over: besides English, there have been Portuguese, Hebrew and Arabic titles, among others. Boxes of books are being shipped in from Europe, too, in English and other languages. (The firm uses slightly different OCR software depending on the language in question.) Another difference is the volume of individual orders. Where Japanese customers send batches of 150 books, the California-based service is seeing an average closer to 30.

Commentary on the Dot Earth blog at the NYTimes about developing a different approach to education:

As I’ve written here before, finding and disseminating education methods that foster creative, collaborative and resilient learning and problem solving is a prime path toward fitting human aspirations on a finite planet. Nicholas Kristof’s recent column, “Occupy the Classroom,” explores relevant terrain. This approach is also particularly useful in the face of prolonged economic uncertainty. 

Notably, the potential learning-by-doing role of American students and scholars in advancing human prospects in struggling regions came up today at a meeting organized by the United States Agency for International Development (which just celebrated its 50th anniversary) and hosted by theWoodrow Wilson Center. Alex Dehgan, the science and technology adviser to the agency’s administrator, said you’ll know we’re there “when we have students not asking what is your major, but what is your problem.” 

Current classroom norms, which Goyal described as the “culture of fill in the bubble tests and drill-and-kill teaching methods,” aren’t a good fit in a complicated, connected, competitive world.

Nic Kristof in the NY Times takes a look at Room to Read which is one man's approach to solving illiteracy around the world (NYTimes):

I came here to Vietnam to see John Wood hand out his 10 millionth book at a library that his team founded in this village in the Mekong Delta — as hundreds of local children cheered and embraced the books he brought as if they were the rarest of treasures. Wood’s charity, Room to Read, has opened 12,000 of these libraries around the world, along with 1,500 schools. 

Yes, you read that right. He has opened nearly five times as many libraries as Carnegie, even if his are mostly single-room affairs that look nothing like the grand Carnegie libraries. Room to Read is one of America’s fastest-growing charities and is now opening new libraries at an astonishing clip of six a day. In contrast, McDonald’s opens one new outlet every 1.08 days.

From the Twitter:

Talks under way to save UK's biggest music and drama lending library http://gu.com/p/335ka/tw

A jewel of an of obit, by Margalit Fox: Jimmy Savile, TV Personality, Dies at 84: http://nyti.ms/w0jozP

In sports: Sir Alex Ferguson describes his 25yrs as a fairy tale. http://bbc.in/vTSWAV

Misery Loves Company or Does It?

On the back of recognizing the success of a daughter over a mother in a law suit, The Guardian reviews the misery genre in UK publishing. Notably, having seen some success the publishers are now mining it for all it's worth with the predictable result; consumer exhaustion. That coupled with the general economic misery everyone is facing and readers may be less inclined to read about someones hardship. Next up happy books?

Here is a sample of the Guardian article:

The truth is that misery - or, as the trade prefers to put it, "inspirational" - memoirs have been on the decline since the beginning of the year, with sales of the top 30 titles this year down nearly 35% on 2007, according to Nielsen BookScan. Last year's bestseller, Don't Tell Mummy, sold over 300,000 copies over the course of the year, while its equivalent this year, Not Without My Sister, is just topping 152,000, according to the Bookseller.
"I think the public quite likes them but even the most miserable person in the world has got too much now," said publisher John Blake, who took the decision to pull out of the market six months ago after judging it to be saturated. "We used to do one a month, but every major publisher is doing two a month [and] we just can't compete. Really anything with a white cover and sad face is anathema to us."
"There was a lot of over-publishing and publishing of stories that weren't as good or well-written, and there have been a lot of problems legally with some of them," agreed Carole Tonkinson, a publisher at misery memoir powerhouse HarperCollins. "We are cutting back a bit."