Bookstore Founder Sylvia Beach's Digital Archive

In Paris, during the 1920s and 30s, Sylvia Beach's bookstore was the center of English (and French) literary life.  When she died, Princeton University collected all her personal items from her apartment above the store and added them to their special collections library.   Princeton has just announced that some of this material (and presumably more to come) is now available digitally.

Visitors can search the website for a library member, such as Hemingway, to see which books he borrowed and the dates he withdrew them and returned them. Clicking “cards” reveals images of the handwritten notes kept by the store’s clerks who recorded his loans. Hemingway was a library member, on and off, from 1921 to 1938 and borrowed more than 90 books, including P.T. Barnum’s Barnum’s Own Story, which he kept for a few weeks in the fall of 1927, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which he kept for just eight days in September 1929. He borrowed Bull Fighting by Tom Jones in 1926. One also can view his purchases — he bought a copy of his novel A Farewell to Arms at the store — and the addresses where he lived in Paris. 

Fans of an author can use the website to “read the books they read and see who else read those books,” said Joshua Kotin, an associate professor of English at Princeton and the project’s director. “We hope this will be a resource for scholars and nonscholars.”

Hat tip Gary Price

True digital transformation requires a customer-first perspective

I was asked by trade mag Digital Content Next to write an article based on my Digital Transformation seminar.  Here is an excerpt:

Over the past 20 years, the “digital transformation” of the publishing industry has been—for the most part—a slow, incremental process. For too long, the publishing industry was mostly concerned with digital replicas, ebooks, and other superficial “transformation” efforts which, in fact, didn’t so much transform the business as copy legacy models in electronic form.
Suffice it to say that legacy media models are oriented around the process of producing a book, magazine, or newspaper and not necessarily based on the experience and circumstances of the digital consumer. As digital transformation enters a new, more advanced phase, many publishers are recognizing they have an opportunity to provide products that raise the value proposition to customers.

What does it all mean?

The term digital transformation can be defined as a multitude of activities and attitudes that a business could potentially pursue. But what digital transformation really requires is that business owners adopt the customer’s viewpoint and change their business philosophy accordingly – from a process orientation to one that is customer-centric.
Publishers in education, reference and professional segments are beginning to execute operational change which supports this evolving viewpoint. And of course, there are “born digital” media organizations that aren’t wedded to legacy models. However, some of the best examples come from sectors outside media. Amazon.com is frequently cited as a proponent of the customer-centric view and their willingness to continue to rethink their operations from the customer perspective results in initiatives such as ‘one-click’ ordering to their recently announced wireless checkout process. Payment is made automatically via the Amazon app as the customer leaves the store. And we’ve seen what Amazon-owner Jeff Bezos has done in terms of transforming processes at The Washington Post since he acquired it.

Read the rest of this article Here;

Digital transformation: A seminar for senior management

This presentation represents a full day workshop for senior executives designed to help define and execute digital transformation programs within their businesses.

Digital transformation: A seminar for senior management from Michael Cairns

Personanondata Magzine: Articles on Digital Publishing and Media

View my Flipboard Magazine.

The Giant List of Publishing Predictions for 2016

Here is a listing of some interesting predictions for 2016 across the publishing and media sector:

Trade and Self-Publishing

Mark Coker from Smashwords provides a comprehensive exploration of trends for 2016 with particular focus on the Amazon subscription model and its impact on traditional publishers.  His post also includes extensive follow-up and comments: 2016 Book Publishing Industry Predictions: Myriad Opportunities amid a Slow Growth Environment

Jonathon Sturgeon as flavorwire suggests "Books by Committee, Self-Published Books by Computers" may be something we need to watch out for during 2016: From Adult Relaxation to Prole Erotica: Book Publishing Predictions for 2016

Blogsite Bookworks presents: 2016 Predictions for the Self-Publishing Industry

Digital Book World asked Tom Chalmers for his 10 Industry Predictions for 2016

Jane Friedman has 5 Industry Issues for Authors to Watch in 2016

Publisher'sWeekly: What Does 2016 Hold for Digital Publishing?

LA Times: 6 book trends for 2016: Look into the future

Academic and Scholarly Publishing

From Publishing Perspectives five predictions for open access academic publishing

From Scholarly Kitchen: Ask The Chefs: What Do You See On The Horizon For Scholarly Publishing In 2016?

General and Digital Media:

Deloitte Media: Telecommunications and Technology predictions for 2016 report

MediaPost: The Mobile Revolution Accelerates

From Talking New Media Five digital publishing predictions from Arazoo Nadir

From Publishing Executive magazine:  2016: The Year Ahead for Publishing in 12 Words

From MediaShift:  VR Heats Up, Publishers Wise Up to Fraud and 10 Predictions for Media Metrics

Techcrunch: Predictions on the future of Digital Media

What's new in publishing: Digital Publishing Predictions for 2016 

From Mequoda: 3 Subscription Website Publishing Predictions for 2016

A Gartner report Top Strategic Predictions for 2016 and Beyond:  The Future Is A Digital Thing. (but requires registration)

Millward Brown: Digital and Media Predictions 2016

equimedia: Digital media predictions for 2016

Fred Wilson: 2016 Predictions

Top Indian publishers predict digital publishing trends for 2016

Newspaper/Journalism:

Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, released a new report: Media, Journalism and Technology Predictions 2016. 

From Neiman Labs: Predictions for Journalism in 2016

At Forbes and short set of suggestions: Who Will Win The Publishing Battle In 2016? Early Predictions For What's Next

There's more than enough here to keep anyone busy well into 2016.  For my predictions from years past click on this link to list all of them.

MediaWeek (Vol 6, No 15): Digital Minds, Mendeley, Cal State Edx, Le Carre, + More

Fun to experiment - View this in Flipboard: http://flip.it/GoiH1

From the digital minds pre-conference at London Book Fair over the weekend this summary from The Bookseller:

Author Neil Gaiman, in a wide-ranging and complex talk, said people in the book business needed to become more like 'dandelions', experimenting by spreading numerous seeds around and accepting that most would fail. "The model for tomorrow is try everything, make mistakes, fail, fail better."
Gaiman took his analogies back to prehistoric days saying that print books could be like sharks, an animal that evolution has never bettered, but that there were still some dinosaurs in the business, for whom digital could be the end. "Books (some) may be sharks", but "home libraries" and "encyclopedias" were not, with both displaced by the web and portable reading devices. He said he recognised that the e-book was here when he daughter started reading off an early version of the Kindle on a trip to Hungary where printed English-language books were not available. For older readers he said the ability to increase font-size was the "killer app".
Gaiman said we were moving from a world where gatekeepers were necessary, to one where guides were essential. Gaiman said he would "sign anything", and said discoverability was best achieved not through a commercial transaction. "We don't normally find the people we love most by buying them, we discover them." Gaiman said he never wanted to go "to war" over this, instead he promoted "word of mouth".

From The New Yorker a view on the Mendeley/Elsevier tie up:

Elsevier has two reasons to buy Mendeley. One is to squash it—to destroy or coöpt an open-science icon that threatens its business model. Many critics fear that’s the case. The other reason is to possess the aggregated data that Mendeley’s users generate with all of their searching and sharing. Mendeley is still growing, with two million three hundred thousand users sifting through over a hundred million references. Their use patterns reveal who is reading what, which papers are popular, what lines of research are surging, which disciplines and journals are crucial, and a lot of other extremely valuable information.
No one has that kind of data at the scale of Mendeley. Mendeley had been selling access to segments of that data to publishers and other institutions, including Elsevier, as part of its business model. Now Elsevier owns all of that data. But if it wants users to continue generating streams of data, the company will have to play nice, which leaves it with something like the Facebook model: create software and a huge social network in which people share information that it can profitably harvest, and be just conciliatory enough about privacy, anyway, to repel fewer people than it attracts.

And Salon thinks about the data:

One common link is obvious: powerlessness in the face of corporate greed. But there’s another, slightly more subtle connection. When we use online services to gather together and share information, whether it be about our favorite romance novels, or most useful sets of bibliographic citations, we create persistent and accessible agglomerations of data. The more popular such services become, the more valuable that data becomes, and sooner or later, a big fish is going to come around and gobble it up. We personally may have never intended to sell out, but together we managed to create something that was bound to be sold. Inevitably, that data will be used to target us.

Techcrunch reports that Cal State is aggressively expanding their MOOC style offerings:

It appears that San Jose edX course is experiencing results similar to when universities switch from boring old lecture-style teaching, to a more interactive form. For instance, one University of California, Los Angeles biochemistry class experiment found a roughly 18% pass rate boost when it ditched lectures [PDF].
But, one-off experiments can often seem much more promising than reality, once they are brought to scale. When new-age pilots are broadened to environments with less-than-enthusiastic teachers and students, things can fall apart.

In the Guardian John LeCarre speaks about the genesis of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold but thinking who Leamas may have been in today's world:

The merit of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, then – or its offence, depending where you stood – was not that it was authentic, but that it was credible. The bad dream turned out to be one that a lot of people in the world were sharing, since it asked the same old question that we are asking ourselves 50 years later: how far can we go in the rightful defence of our western values, without abandoning them along the way? My fictional chief of the British Service – I called him Control – had no doubt of the answer:
"I mean, you can't be less ruthless than the opposition simply because your government's policy is benevolent, can you now?"
Today, the same man, with better teeth and hair and a much smarter suit, can be heard explaining away the catastrophic illegal war in Iraq, or justifying medieval torture techniques as the preferred means of interrogation in the 21st century, or defending the inalienable right of closet psychopaths to bear semi-automatic weapons, and the use of unmanned drones as a risk-free method of assassinating one's perceived enemies and anybody who has the bad luck to be standing near them. Or, as a loyal servant of his corporation, assuring us that smoking is harmless to the health of the third world, and great banks are there to serve the public.

From my Twitter feed:
Publishers May Pay To Preserve Saturday Delivery http://ow.ly/jXB2I
Google Death: A Tool to Take Care of Your Gmail When You're Gone - Rebecca J. Rosen - The Atlantic TheAtlantic 
Massive Volunteer Collective Proofreads 25,000 Public-Domain Books http://flip.it/bSV69 
BBC News - 'Pompeii of north' being unearthed in London BBC 
MOOCs and Libraries: Introduction,by Merrilee Proffitt /HangingTogether HangingTogether

In RE Books: Conference on law and the future of Books

I'll be going to this on Friday and Saturday.  It may already be full but looks interesting from New York Law School.  More details HERE:

MediaWeek (Vol 5, No 39) Coursera, Changing Academic Publishing, Project Muse, Libraries + More

MOOC Coursera continues to add providers to its platform with a big expansion noted in the Chronicle of Higher Ed.

The new partners come in a mix of shapes and sizes, comprising state flagships like the University of Maryland at College Park, liberal-arts colleges like Wesleyan University, specialized institutions including the Berklee College of Music, and foreign institutions like the University of Melbourne, in Australia. The speed at which colleges are joining is remarkable: The company began operations only in January.

Most partners will offer only a handful of free courses each to start out; Coursera officials recommend that each partner offer five at first. The colleges consider the efforts an experiment, with plans to review them in the near future and decide whether they want to continue to offer the free courses. The agreement between each institution and Coursera is nonexclusive, so the colleges are free to work with other MOOC providers as well.

One benefit for participating colleges is marketing: Coursera courses typically attract tens of thousands of students each. So far, the company says, more than 1.3 million students have signed up for at least one course. Many of the students sign up but then never watch the lecture videos or complete the homework assignments, but even so, the colleges are offering a sample of their best professors’ teaching to a wide audience.

Commentary by Hugh Gusterson in the Chronicle under the title "Want to Change Academic Publishing?

When I became an academic, those inconsistencies made a sort of sense: Academic journals, especially in the social sciences, were published by struggling, nonprofit university presses that could ill afford to pay for content, refereeing, or editing. It was expected that, in the vast consortium that our university system constitutes, our own university would pay our salary, and we would donate our writing and critical-reading skills to the system in return.

The system involved a huge exchange of gifted labor that produced little in the way of profit for publishers and a lot in the way of professional solidarity and interdependence for the participants. The fact that academic journals did not compensate the way commercial magazines and newspapers did only made academic publishing seem less vulgar and more valuable.

But in recent years the academic journals have largely been taken over by for-profit publishing behemoths such as Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley-Blackwell. And quite a profit they make, too: In 2010 Elsevier reported profits of 36 percent on revenues of $3.2-billion. Last year its chief executive, Erik Engstrom, earned $4.6-million.

One reason those companies make good profits for their shareholders and pay such high salaries to their leaders is that they are in a position to charge high prices. The open-access debate has focused mainly on the exorbitant fees for-profit publishers charge libraries for bundles of journal subscriptions, but I am struck by what they charge ordinary citizens to read my individual articles.

For example, anyone without access to a university library who wants to read a nine-page article I wrote (free) for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists last year will have to pay Sage $32 to get electronic access to it for one day—more than it would cost to buy and keep a printed copy of either of my most recent books. Needless to say, Sage passes none of the $32 on to me.

Also interesting is this exchange in the comments about Project MUSE:

ieubanks: This is a great article, and it's about time someone mentioned this elephant in the room. I do, however, agree with the comments here that question the wisdom of charging referee fees. The problem, as I see it, is not always the fault of the journal or the publishing house.

I edit a peer-reviewed journal, and we have precious little income. What we garner from subscriptions goes to the publishing house, which is a university press that subsidizes much of what it publishes.

The problem here is that the databases, such as ProjectMuse, JSTOR, and worse still, Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, and others mentioned in the article, often pay a relatively small fee to the publishing houses and then turn around to charge libraries tremendous access fees. Therefore, the best solution would be for the authors of the articles to grant one-time printing rights and NON-TRANSFERABLE electronic rights to the journals and publishing houses. This would protect both open-access and subscription-only journals while preventing the databases from making a profit off free labor without violating intellectual property rights.

Furthermore, there should be a class-action suit against the databases. I feel certain that they are selling work they don't have permission to sell. I have found some of my own work in those databases, when I am sure that I never signed away electronic rights for those works. Meanwhile, large portions of library budgets go to the databases as tuition continually rises and faculty are downgraded to armies of over-qualified adjuncts.

Sand6432: This statement is misinformed about how what are incorrectly called "databases" like Project Muse operate. In fact, as I can testify as former director of Penn State University Press, which put all of its dozen journals into Project Muse as soon as it became open to journals from other publishers besides Johns Hopkins, that aggregation soon came to provide two thirds of the overall revenue for operating our journals program, which could not have transitioned into e-publishing without it. Project Muse limits its content to journals published by non-profit entities, by the way. I have never heard any librarian complain that its subscription fees were excessive. After all, it was established as a joint project of the press and library at Johns Hopkins, so has always been library-friendly.---Sandy Thatcher

ieubanks: Thank you for clarifying. My point is that people are selling the intellectual property of others without compensating them for it. I work with Project Muse, and they are guilty of it, although I agree that they are perhaps one of the least unscrupulous aggregators. The way it works is pretty simple, as far as I can tell. Here is how it works with the journal I edit: Libraries pay for access to material provided by Project Muse, who in turn pays a small sum to our publishing house for each journal. Neither the journal nor the authors ever see a penny of that. On the contrary, the authors must fund the journal themselves by joining the academic society responsible for producing the journal (i.e., the authors must subscribe in order to publish), and that money must be handed over to the publishing house to pay for publishing costs.

abbistani: While I was almost willing to accept the title of "least unscrupulous aggregator," I'm afraid that a little more information about how Project MUSE works might be in order. We currently return more than 75% of our gross revenue to our participating publishers. How much they pass on to their journals depends on the agreement between the publisher and the the journal. The amount of money that each journal earns for it's publisher is the result of a formula that includes things like usage, and as you might expect, there is a wide variance. I will submit that we return significantly more money to our journals than any other aggregator, and many earn more money from us than they do from selling subscriptions. ieubanks, email me if you want to talk about your particular situation.

Brian Harrington
Project MUSE
brian@jhu,edu

Barbara Fister wrting in Inside Higher Education on What Libraries Should Be:

In the case of libraries, I worry that we are abandoning or at the very least absent-mindedly mislaying our values and our capacity to improve the lives of those who use our libraries by taking too utilitarian an approach (“our job is to deliver the information people want”). We design our systems to deliver the goods and bolster “productivity,” but not necessarily to encourage making connections or thinking deeply and critically. Consuming and producing take the place of creation and contemplation (such old-fashioned terms). As Don M. Randel put it in a recent issue of Liberal Education, “The Market Made Me Do It.” We compete against one another as businesses and sports teams do and, in the process, we contribute not to the habits of mind and heart that Delbanco lays out, but instead to widening inequality. When we put delivery of information to our communities first, we neglect our broader interest in equalizing access to information.

In the Atlantic Maria Konnikova contemplates how easy it is becoming to erase books that cause problems (Atlantic):

Readers are increasingly reliant on digital sources for information—and they are increasingly reliant on these sources to be accurate. Of course, it's impossible to wipe out altogether the digital record of a book's existence. There will always be articles, analyses, used copies (you can still, for instance, get Imagine at Indiebound and Powell's). But the principle itself is a frightening one. Not only can you remove physical content—Orwell hasn't been the only one to disappear off of a Kindle device—but you can change, in a sense, the digital record. And what happens when there actually aren't any physical books behind those electronic versions—and then a publisher or retailer not only removes all links to the book in question, but then proceeds to remove the already purchased book from your reading device? Imagine: When all of your books are in digital form, what is the backup system if they are of a sudden removed?

From Twitter:
Apple Exec Jony Ive to Design One-of-a-Kind Leica Camera Mashable

Google Teams Up With Harris Interactive To Launch New Self-Service Consumer Research Tool Techcrunch

Book sculpture flows out of Museum Meermanno Flickr

Chart: Top 100 iPad Rollouts by Enterprises & Schools (Updated Sept. 15, 2012) ZDNet

MediaWeek (Vol 5, N 37): University Press Publishing, Georgia Copyright, MOOCs, + More

Three directors of University Presses take to Inside Higher Ed to discuss the realities of publishing in today's academic environment (IHEd):

It is self-evident that the books and journals we publish benefit faculty in their roles as authors, researchers, and teachers. Less evident is that our conduct of peer review and the luster of our imprints together support the tenure and promotion system that has characterized American higher education for generations. Sadly, this system has allowed colleges and universities without presses to "free ride" on the backs of those that have them; it costs them no more than the university press books and journals they choose to buy. Any solution to university press support might do well to address such freeloading.

Less recognized in the academic world is the degree to which university presses, through their publications, serve students. It is true that few presses publish core textbooks such as “Introduction to Economics” (though that’s an area where we are helping in the development of open-access texts), but a very large proportion of the books read either alongside or in lieu of a core text are university press publications. Indeed, our lifetime best-selling books are virtually always those read in undergraduate and graduate courses.

University presses have become the leading regional publishers in the country. State university presses in particular have played a major role in publishing books that help citizens recognize and celebrate what makes home, home. From histories to natural histories to cookbooks and sports books, we help give American citizens a better sense of who they are.

Somewhat expected, publishers are appealing the Georgia e-Reserves case from a few months ago (Chronicle):

In a conference call with reporters, publishers’ representatives emphasized the need to protect their authors’ intellectual property, and described the legal action as regrettable but necessary. Blaise R. Simqu, president and chief executive officer of SAGE Publications, said that “engaging in litigation with a fellow member of the academy is not taken lightly.” But “we believe that authors entrust publishers with their intellectual property,” he said. “We consider this to be a very, very sacred trust.”

Mr. Simqu said he had personally contacted more than 50 SAGE textbook authors to sound them out on whether to appeal the decision. “All but two of the authors not only were supportive but felt very strongly, very passionately that it was critical SAGE continue with this appeal,” he told reporters.

Niko Pfund, academic publisher and president of Oxford University Press, expressed similar discomfort with the situation. “We are obviously in an uncomfortable position being in an adversarial position with a library,” Mr. Pfund said. “I want to stress that, as a community, we really, ardently do believe in fair use.”

Mr. Pfund also presented the decision to appeal as regrettable but necessary. Many university presses operate “with razor-thin budgets,” Mr. Pfund said. “What enables us to keep operating is our backlist titles.” He added, “Our concern is that this decision would cut us off at the knees in that regard.”

MOOC's are very much the rage in education at the moment. The Atlantic takes a look at Stanford's new online education program by interviewing their new vice provost of Online Learning John Mitchell. (The Atlantic):

What do you think is the most exciting thing going on in online learning right now?

I think the MOOCs are the tip of the iceberg in a sense. That's the most visible, most wide- reaching phenomenon so far. But really, there is much more to this. I think we'll see an evolution of a range of different ways of using technology, and probably some expansion of the set of options that a student has. Instead of going off to college, maybe some students will live in their parents' homes or elsewhere and take a first year or two online. Or they'll spend two years in college and finish two years online as they work. There will be different, in effect, educational programs coming out of this phenomenon that offer credit, certification, job placement, and other things beyond the self learning that MOOCs provide. So I think we really are going to see a transformation in the way teaching and learning are developed and delivered.

At the same time, we may in 5 years understand what is different and what isn't different. And maybe some fundamentals will stay the same. Just as video conferencing hasn't put the airlines out of business, I think we're still going to see people going off to college in some form. When possible, it's just great to talk with someone one-on-one in person -- by video, by Skype, by some other medium. I don't think that prepared, canned video is itself the one major answer to the future of education.

Also from Campus Technology an article that references a study into what the future of education may look like in 2020. (CT)

It has been a while since there has been a Stieg Larsson related article so how about this one from the Economist (Schumpeter):

The first lesson is that the next big thing can come from the most unexpected places. Scandinavia is probably the most crime- and corruption-free region in the world: Denmark’s murder rate is 0.9 per 100,000 people, compared with 4.2 in the United States and 21 in Brazil. Scandinavians are also lumbered with obscure and difficult languages. A succession of mainstream British publishers rejected “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”, Larsson’s first book, before Christopher MacLehose decided to publish it. Mr Indridason at first had poor sales because people found it hard to grapple with Icelandic names.

Yet Scandinavia has a number of hidden competitive strengths: a long tradition of blood-soaked sagas; an abundance of gloomy misfits; a brooding landscape; and a tradition of detective writing (Per Wahloo and Maj Sjowall, a husband-and-wife team, enjoyed local success in the 1960s with their ten-volume Martin Beck series). There are prizes and classes galore to help crime writers on their way: Ms Lackberg started by taking an all-female crime-writing class. Even before the current boom, crime writing was so remunerative that it sucked in talent from everywhere. Mr Mankell started out writing mainstream plays and novels. Mr Nesbo was a footballer, stockbroker and rock musician before creating his hard-bitten detective, Harry Hole.

I just read The Snowman and it was gory but enjoyable.

A long report from Booz Hamilton on Digitization and Prosperity reproduced in Strategy+Business. Here are the intro paragraphs:

Policymakers today face an environment transformed by information and communications technology (ICT). More people today have access to a mobile phone than to electricity; the amount of data generated globally is expanding exponentially. In every country, leaders of government and business are deciding — through their policies and strategies for ICT, Internet access, communications media, and digital applications — how to promote and structure the digitization of their economies. These choices have enormous consequences. Countries that have achieved advanced levels of digitization, defined as the mass adoption of connected digital technologies and ICT applications by consumers, enterprises, and governments, have realized significant economic, social, and political benefits. For them, digitization is a pathway to prosperity. Other countries are falling disproportionately behind.

The difference among countries was a core finding of a recent study conducted by Booz & Company, “Maximizing the Impact of Digitization.” Other studies on ICT and prosperity have focused primarily on Internet access: whether people are able to connect to wireless and broadband technologies. But by looking more closely at the ways people use digital technologies and applications, we found that the greatest social and economic benefits depend on factors related to adoption and usage: such as pricing, reliability, speed, and ease of use. In any geography, these factors determine the level of digitization, which in turn has a proven impact on reducing unemployment, improving quality of life, and boosting citizens’ access to public services. Digitization allows governments to operate with greater transparency and efficiency, and it has a dramatic effect on economic growth, but not all at once. Countries at the most advanced stage of digitization derive 20 percent more in economic benefits than do those that are just beginning.

From the twitter:
Thank God Someone Finally Stepped In and Explained the Internet to Women - Rebecca J. Rosen - The Atlantic The Atlantic
Amazon vs. Penguin HuffPo
Watch Charles Bukowski Recount the Worst Hangover of His Life Youtube
BISG Unveils Powerful New Bookstats Features, By Eugene G. Schwartz  Book Business

Managing Born Digital Archives

NYTimes looks at the archiving challenges for librarians dealing with born digital archives and in doing so they also speak to the unique presentation opportunities that digital archives enable for scholars (NYTimes):

Some of the early files chronicle Mr. Rushdie’s self-conscious analysis of how computers affected his work. In an imaginary dialogue with himself that he composed in 1992 when he was writing “The Moor’s Last Sigh,” he wrote about choosing formatting, fonts and spacing: “I am doing this so that I can see how a whole page looks when it’s typed at this size and spacing.

“Oh, my God, suppose it looks terrible?”

“Oh, my God, yeah. And doesn’t this look wrong?”

“Where’s the paragraph indent thing?”

“I don’t know. I will look.”

“How about this? Is this good for you?”

“A lot better. How about fixing the part above?”

At the Emory exhibition, visitors can log onto a computer and see the screen that Mr. Rushdie saw, search his file folders as he did, and find out what applications he used. (Mac Stickies were a favorite.) They can call up an early draft of Mr. Rushdie’s 1999 novel, “The Ground Beneath Her Feet,” and edit a sentence or post an editorial comment.

“I know of no other place in the world that is providing access through emulation to a born-digital archive,” said Erika Farr, the director of born-digital initiatives at the Robert W. Woodruff Library at Emory. (The original draft is preserved.)

To the Emory team, simulating the author’s electronic universe is equivalent to making a reproduction of the desk, chair, fountain pen and paper that, say, Charles Dickens used, and then allowing visitors to sit and scribble notes on a copy of an early version of “Bleak House.”

“If you’re interested in primary materials, you’re interested in the context as well as the content, the authentic artifact,” Ms. Farr said. “Fifty years from now, people may be researching how the impact of word processing affected literary output,” she added, which would require seeing the original computer images.

Works Progress for Scanning

Carl Malamud blogging on the Radar O'Reilly blog speaks eloquently about the need for a coordinated approach to digitizing the nations print content and one that doesn't "lien on the public domain, preventing the public from accessing these vital materials." He concludes (O'Reilly):

If the government invested a mere $100 million of our stimulus package (we've already spent over $72.6 billion), that means 2 billion pages of paper or microfiche would get scanned. For $500 million, we're talking a huge chunk of our national backlog being digitized, a task that would result in an enduring digitial public work for our modern era, something that would prove immense use to future generations, and would also save the government tremendous amounts of money in storage costs and other facilities expenses.

What would it take to get the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, the Government Printing Office, the National Archives and Records Administration, and the National Technical Information Service all singing off the same page and working together? There is a tremendous opportunity for White House leadership here, bringing the parties together and creating a compelling case on why we should launch and fund a 5-year $500 million effort to create a National Scan Center. Both the CIO and the CTO in the Executive Office of the President have talked about the tremendous "moral authority and convening power" of the White House, and I believe that this issue is of sufficient importance that it would be worthwhile to pursue.

Five Questions with Bondi Digital and the Playboy Archive

The first DVD archive of all the 1950's issues of Playboy magazine will be released at bookstores and retail outlets by Bondi Digital Publishing on November 2nd. (It is now available for presale at www.covertocover.com). Long considered an icon of 20th century publishing the eventual full set of DVDs will cover every Playboy issue since the title launched in 1953. Bondi Digital Publishing has undertaken the task of truthfully representing each page of the magazine so that buyers of the set will be able to see the magazine as it was originally published.

The first set of Bondi Digital Publishing's Cover to Cover Series covers the launch of the magazine in 1953 with the now unforgettable Marilyn Monroe featured as Playboy's first centerfold, up through the beginning of 1960.

Included with the box set is a 200 page 'behind the scenes' companion book covering the highlights of Playboy's humble launch by 27-year-old Hugh Hefner and the rise of the magazine during the conservative 50s. The box set also includes a complete reprint of the famous first issue featuring Marilyn Monroe.

David Anthony is co-founder of Bondi Digital Publishing and I recently sat down with him and asked him my five questions.

1. You also did a similar project for The New Yorker. Tell us how these three projects came about.
   
   There was a fellow who worked at the New Yorker named Andy Pillsbury, who I had known for years, long before he was with The New Yorker. I had shown him some interactive magazine viewing technology that I was working on in the late 90s. So fast forward 5 or 6 years, and he is now at the New Yorker and he and Ed Klaris, their general counsel, are talking about doing a complete digital archive of all 80 years of the New Yorker. He looks me up and contacts me, and in the meantime I had started a DVD design and production company with Murat Aktar – which was actually great background for what the New Yorker had in mind. At the DVD company, we had been thinking about and designing all these DVD interfaces, including things like the Rolling Stones Four Flicks box set, so when it came to thinking through how people might like to experience half a million pages of a magazine, I think we brought a very unique perspective to the project. It was, of course, on one hand a huge technical challenge, but in a very real sense I believe the greatest challenge of these kinds of projects is trying to help people make sense of the vastness of the media, while at the same time making sure that the digital experience is fast, intuitive and hopefully fun and useful, all at the same time.
   
   Coming off of the New Yorker project, we thought, hey this is kind of cool. I wonder what other magazines might like to have complete digital archives? Right off the bat we were thinking about Rolling Stone and Playboy. They are both very innovative magazines, and both had a rich and long history – and they had these visionary founders who were still at the helm. Besides, we are both long time readers of the publications. So it made a lot of sense to talk with them – and low and behold both loved the idea and we were able to work out deals with them.
   
   
2. Were the projects similar? What have you learned from one project to another?
   
   From a publishing perspective, the big difference with the Rolling Stone, Playboy and The New Yorker, is that beginning with Rolling Stone Cover To Cover: The First Forty Years and Playboy Cover To Cover: The 50s, we launched Bondi’s publishing arm and are bringing these out under ourselves. While Bondi developed the software platform for the Complete New Yorker, it was published and distributed by The New Yorker and Random House.
   
   All three magazines are very different, so a big challenge that we have in any of these projects is to first analyze each magazine’s format and create a schema for its database that makes sense of all the idiosyncrasies of each magazine’s particular formatting characteristics.
   
   As far as the software platform goes, the Bondi Reader, which is what we are calling it now, has continued to evolve quite a bit. We now support full text search, using a very powerful indexing engine. This is a great step forward and has sped up our searches to the point where the local experience compares favorably to online searches. Also we are adding the ability to import and exchange reading lists, which will allow two people who own the same archive to share what they find very easily.
   
   
3. There is a lot of interest in the Playboy products because the magazine is such an icon for our times. Tell us about the conception for the product – breaking the titles into decades – and the thinking behind the design.
   
   Each decade of Playboy has a unique tone and feel, and by publishing the magazine’s archives decade by decade, Bondi is able to offer distinctive features for each digital archive collection. Playboy Cover-to-Cover: The 50s will not only include all of the magazine’s issues on DVD, but it will also include Playboy 50s – Under the Covers, a 1950s-focused companion book that is absolutely chock full of never-before-published photos and letters from Hef’s personal library and archive. As well we have created a page-for-page reissue of the very first Playboy from 1953 with its iconic Marilyn Monroe cover.
   
   
4. What most excites you about the products? (Rolling Stone, NYer, Playboy)?
   
   I guess it is seeing all these amazing stories, photos and ads come back to life – in their original context. I for instance did not know that Annie Leibovitz had taken that great cover shot of John Lennon curled up with Yoko but a few hours before he was taken from us. That is a hugely important fact in helping to understand the impact and importance of that cover. But that was 1980 and I was only 13 years old – so I never experienced the magazine itself. I, like I imagine a lot of people, have only ever experienced that shot as a stand-alone photo. We have seen that cover reprinted over the years, but without seeing it in the context that it was originally published you might never understand its true significance. And that is extremely exciting to me – that we might be playing a part in not only preserving these magazines legacies, but also allowing for people to understand these very real cultural events in a full and clear way.
   
   Not having been alive in the 1950s it was also a real eye-opener to see the Playboy issues from the 50s. From the first issue, the voice and outlook are clear. But at the same time you begin to see the role that Playboy played in both women’s rights and also civil rights. In the 50s women didn’t work out of the house, let alone have a sense that they should be allowed to own their sexuality. And as I found from working on the project, the publishing of Playboy was a bit of a watershed moment in the turning of society’s views on women’s rights, and then also civil rights. So all of that is exciting to us. And then to see that Hefner from the beginning courted writers like Hemingway, Ray Bradbury, Jack Kerouac and Steinbeck – well you get the point. Turns out there is a reason for all the jokes about the articles.
   
   
5. What is next for Bondi? Are you looking at any other implementations you can tell us about?
   
   At the moment we are concentrating on finishing up the software production for both the Playboy Cover to Cover and Rolling Stone Cover to Cover products. Then we focus on deals with several other magazines. As excited as we are about the success of the Complete New Yorker and the release of our Cover to Cover series, I don’t think that the general public really understands what a searchable digital archive of a magazine is yet. And so it is important that this not be a category of one or two products. Our focus for the time being is working with other magazine publishers to develop similar Cover To Cover products. We are just about ready to announce Playboy Cover To Cover, The 60s, which will bring our Cover to Cover series to three. By the holiday 2008 season, we hope to have six - eight Cover To Cover titles in the line.

Bondi PR is being handled by Catherine Lewis at The Rosen Group: http://www.rosengrouppr.com/

Playboy Archive & Bondi Digital

Update: This post was made a few months ago and this morning The New York Times comments on both the Playboy and the Rolling Stone DVD archive coming soon from Bondi Digital.

Since posting the following, I have seen the packages and they are impressive.


In October, I found myself in a cold gloomy basement antique store in Omaha, Nebraska. It was a fairly large room with variable content including a collection of magazines and books. The books were not special - although there was one first edition I knew was worth over $100 except that some moron had made a square cut in the dust jacket. The magazines included hundreds of Playboy magazines and I wish I had taken a photo of them as they were impressive and in much disarray. No doubt many old geezers like me spent time in that area.

At around the same time, I met David Anthony of Bondi Digital who was just wrapping up an agreement with Playboy Publishing to digitize the entire run of Playboy magazines. It is an exciting project and they hope to have the first products in stores for Christmas. They will approach the project by creating decade long sets of the magazine which will be available on discs packaged in large format book like packages. Each package will also include a booklet reflecting on the content on the disc which will be an exact replication of the print product - cover to cover. The content will be searchable and there will be an index.

"This digital archive is a first in the mass consumer magazine andmen's category," says Hugh M. Hefner, Playboy Founder, Editor-in-Chief and Chief Creative Officer. Playboy magazine has a tremendous legacy. With ourloyal readership, which has always shown a real interest in our archival issues, we knew this would be the perfect opportunity to offer Playboy fans what they have wanted for years."

Given this initiative (it follows Bondi's work with The New Yorker Archive) those interested in Playboy (and you know who you are) will not have to skulk around in basements anymore to find missing issues. By the end of next year the full set should be completed to the eternal enjoyment of all Playboy 'readers'.

Rolling Stone Post