MediaWeek (Vo 14, No 3) Clarivate to buy Proquest in $5.3B deal, Remember Reading, RB Media Acquires, Controversial Book Deals

Clarivate (ex Thomson Reuters company) announced their intention to acquire Proquest.  From the press release:

Clarivate plc (NYSE: CLVT), a global leader in providing trusted information and insights to accelerate the pace of innovation, today announced a definitive agreement to acquire ProQuest,  a leading global software, data and analytics provider to academic, research and national institutions, from Cambridge Information Group, a family-owned investment firm, and other partners including Atairos, for $5.3 billion, including refinancing of ProQuest debt. The consideration for the acquisition is approximately $4.0 billion in cash and $1.3 billion of equity. The transaction, which is subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory approvals, is expected to close during the third quarter of 2021.

With a mission to accelerate and improve education, research and innovation, ProQuest delivers content and technology solutions to over 25,000 academic, corporate and research organizations in more than 150 countries. The acquisition will establish Clarivate as a premier provider of end-to-end research intelligence solutions and significantly expand its content and data offerings as the addition of ProQuest will materially complement the Clarivate Research Intelligence Cloud™. 

Why We Remember More By Reading (The Conversation)

The benefits of print particularly shine through when experimenters move from posing simple tasks – like identifying the main idea in a reading passage – to ones that require mental abstraction – such as drawing inferences from a text. Print reading also improves the likelihood of recalling details – like “What was the color of the actor’s hair?” – and remembering where in a story events occurred – “Did the accident happen before or after the political coup?”

Studies show that both grade school students and college students assume they’ll get higher scores on a comprehension test if they have done the reading digitally. And yet, they actually score higher when they have read the material in print before being tested.

Educators need to be aware that the method used for standardized testing can affect results. Studies of Norwegian tenth graders and U.S. third through eighth graders report higher scores when standardized tests were administered using paper. In the U.S. study, the negative effects of digital testing were strongest among students with low reading achievement scores, English language learners and special education students.

 New Order: Audio First (WSJ - Paid)

“The Bomber Mafia” is part of an effort by Pushkin Industries Inc., an audio company that Mr. Gladwell co-founded, to become a major provider of highly produced “original” audiobooks. Such projects sound more like podcasts than traditional audiobooks, since they often feature original scores, as well as archival and interview tape.

Industry giants including Bertelsmann SE’s Penguin Random House and Amazon.com Inc.’s Audible also produce high-production original audiobooks with sound effects and a cast of multiple actors, representing significant competition for Pushkin.

RBmedia Acquires McGraw Hill Professional Audiobook Publishing Business

RBmedia, the largest audiobook producer in the world, today announced the acquisition of McGraw Hill Professional’s audiobook publishing business, which includes its catalog of previously published titles, as well as a multi-year agreement to become the exclusive audio publisher for all of McGraw Hill Professional’s new titles.

“We are excited to participate more fully in the rapidly expanding audiobook category by partnering with RBmedia,” said Scott Grillo, President of McGraw Hill Professional. “Leveraging RBmedia’s unique abilities in spoken audio will help us reach business and trade professionals and all those striving to advance their education or careers. RBmedia creates exceptional audio productions that serve our authors well and will help them monetize audio rights at a high level. Our publishing program will be stronger because of this unique collaboration.”

Note: Overdrive purchased RB Digital the company's library platform in 2020 (Press Release) 

Who Deserves a Book Deal - Just about Anyone? (Vox)

Is the industry’s purpose to make the widest array of viewpoints available to the largest audience possible? Is it to curate only the most truthful, accurate, and high-quality books to the public? Or is it to sell as many books as possible, and to try to stay out of the spotlight while doing so? Should a publisher ever care about any part of an author’s life besides their ability to write a book?

These questions are becoming more and more urgent within the private realms of publishing, amid debates over which authors deserve the enormous platform and resources that publishers can offer — and when it’s acceptable for publishers to decide to take those resources away.

Within the media watering hole of Twitter, it can look as though these concerns are being imposed from the outside: by progressive authors calling on their publishers to abstain from signing right-wing writers; by angry YA fans and Goodreads readers; by petitions and boycotts and special interest groups. But the conversation about who deserves a publishing deal is also happening within the glass-and-steel walls of the industry itself.

Employed but Pissed at Simon & Schuster (The New Republic)

Inside Merger Mania: (The Wrap - Register)

On the tail of massive acquisitions in the entertainment and media space, such as AT&T’s $85 billion purchase of Time Warner in 2018, thew 2019 re-merger of ViacomCBS and Disney’s $71 billion acquisition of 21st Century Fox in 2019, major book publishers are embarking on their own consolidations in an effort to cement their place in an increasingly competitive environment. But are any of these major acquisitions anti-competitive, as critics have argued?

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Are you considering an investment in new technology?  Check out my report on software and services providers.  (PubTech Report)

PND: Digital Transformation: A Seminar for Management

PND: Blockchain for Publishers

PND: Technology News

PND: The Price is Right for Cengage  

PND: The Opportunity in 200MM Students

PND: Mediaweek Reports 

Michael Cairns is a business strategy consultant and executive.  He can be reached at michael.cairns@infomediapartners.com or (908) 938 4889 for project work or executive roles.

 

MediaWeek Report (Vol 13, No 16): Big Mergers - Simon & Schuster, S&P Global, Copyrights & Libraries, Pearson

Bertelsmann buying Simon & Schuster.

No doubt you've read about this acquisition and here are some of the articles.  Many are taking 'it's the Amazon problem' approach:

In The Atlantic: The merger isn't the gravest danger to the business.

NYTimes: The biggest publisher is about to get bigger

The Economist: A biblio-behemoth 

The New Republic: Heading towards monopolistic singularity

In other big media merger news:

WSJ - S&P Global agrees to buy IHS Markit for $44Billion combing two of the largest data suppliers to wall street firms.

Also Benzinga - The merger of the two companies will create a financial data behemoth.

I'm sure that's fine. 

According to Fortune a new copyright champion has arrived from the Internet Archive.  Are publishers on board with this I ask?

For Bailey, the debate is personal. Growing up in an artistic family of modest means on Long Island, she never encountered the Internet until arriving at Brown University in 1995. There, Bailey made friends with a circle of creative types thrilled by the culture and community they discovered on web, from the music-sharing bazaar Napster to blogging platform LiveJournal.

"The Internet seemed like this amazing new thing to distribute knowledge and information," she recalls.

After college, Bailey landed in the midst of New York's cultural elite with a job as an executive assistant to a creative director at magazine giant Conde Naste. But she soon became disillusioned, concluding the publishing industry prioritized money over artistic ideals.

 (Yes, Nast is incorrectly spelled).

Speaking of Random House, here is a good obit of Harold Evans - The Economist

People looked pityingly on him now. That was unbearable, so he left for the United States and a teaching job. His second wife, Tina Brown, soon joined him as editor of Vanity Fair, and he too took up the pen again, editing US News & World Report and founding Condé Nast Traveller before becoming, in 1990, president of Random House. There the copy on his desk was by Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer, William Styron and Richard Nixon, as well as the businessmen, artists and poets he added to the list. The glittering Manhattan literary scene revolved around their garden brownstone, enjoyably so. America performed its reinventing magic, and in 1993 he became a citizen. Yet the country’s deepest effect on him had happened years before, when he visited on a Harkness fellowship in 1956. He was already in love with newspapers; with the smell of printer’s ink, and with Hollywood’s depiction of brave small-town newspapermen standing up to crooks. Papers in America might be slackly edited and poorly designed, but they showed a crusading desire for openness that was still rare in Britain.

Bookstores are struggling but rich folk are buying first editions (Bloomberg)

The market for extremely rare books has been healthy for years, dealers say, but quantifying its ups and downs is difficult, because “if you’re talking about a book with many comparables over time, you’ve missed the top of the market,” says Darren Sutherland, a specialist in Bonham’s rare books department in New York.

“It’s so anecdotal,” agrees Christina Geiger, the head of the books and manuscripts department at Christie’s New York. “Everything depends on the quality of the material.” 

Still, consensus among dealers is that the overall market has sustained itself even as the rest of retail has been thrown into turmoil, and that the peak of the market has soared past many participants’ expectations.

UK University staff urge probe into e-book pricing 'scandal' (BBC)

"It's a scandal. It's public money," she said. "Students are shocked when I tell them just how much it costs to get them their texts.

"People just assume we can get books for the prices they see on Amazon and Kindle. It just doesn't work like that for universities.

"The academic publishing business model is broken, and as you can see from the number of people who have signed the letter we think it is time for an investigation," she said.

Lectures are increasingly having to be designed around what texts are available and affordable, not what is best for learning, Ms Anderson said.

Pearson Creates New Direct-to-Consumer Division (Pearson)

Pearson, the world's leading learning company, today announces the creation of a new direct-to-consumer division as it looks to further strengthen its focus on building a direct relationship with learners around the world.

The new division will be co-led by two senior executives: Ishantha Lokuge joined Pearson from Shutterfly last year and now steps up to the role of Chief Global Product Officer and co-President, Direct-to-Consumer.

 As always, more in my flipboard magazine.

MediaWeek (Vol 13, No 13): Bloomsbury, The Strand Bookstore, Ebooks & Libraries, Education & Academic Publishing

Roundup of publishing news from the past several months.

Harry Potter publisher says Covid has weaved magic over book sales (Guardian) 

“It is a complete surprise because we had as grim a beginning to the pandemic as everyone else in March when 100% of our customers shut down worldwide,” said Nigel Newton, the chief executive.

“And then we found that early on people showed short attention spans and were watching TV. But then reading reasserted its power and people found they could escape through books, and sales have been booming ever since.”

When New York’s Strand Bookstores asked for help, 25,000 online orders flooded in (WaPo) 

“How can I not love my book community for helping like this?” she said in a phone interview. “I really don’t think that we’re just a bookstore. I think we’re a place of discovery and a community center. When I ask for help and they respond this fast, it’s so heartwarming.”

She said in the interview that she hopes the store will survive through the end of the year, and then she’ll reevaluate its future.

Chinese censors target German publishers (DW)

As China tries to expand its influence abroad, it's going beyond politics and business to target literature and publishing. German publishers are among those that have been targeted by censors,

Publishers Worry as Ebooks Fly off Libraries' Virtual Shelves (Wired)

But the surging popularity of library ebooks also has heightened longstanding tensions between publishers, who fear that digital borrowing eats into their sales, and public librarians, who are trying to serve their communities during a once-in-a-generation crisis. Since 2011, the industry’s big-five publishers—Penguin Random House, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Simon and Schuster, and Macmillan—have limited library lending of ebooks, either by time—two years, for example—or number of checkouts—most often, 26 or 52 times. Readers can browse, download, join waiting lists for, and return digital library books from the comfort of their home, and the books are automatically removed from their devices at the end of the lending period.

Skyhorse Publishing’s House of Horrors (Vanity Fair)

“I was thinking about what makes Skyhorse different from other companies,” says Lyons, during a wide-ranging interview this spring, “and it goes back to being open to publishing books that other people might not publish for a variety of reasons.” Those reasons might include a short turnaround time, or disinterest from other publishers. They also, one could argue, include dubious scientific claims that toggle between the merely controversial and the outright inaccurate. Skyhorse has made millions by differentiating itself from traditional publishers, releasing books on a rapid schedule and courting controversies along the national divide, from cancel culture to freedom of the press to hallmarks of the misinformation age. But accounts from former employees paint a picture of a company with internal demons too: reports of a toxic workplace, everyday misogyny, and the human costs of mismanagement in an industry always anxious about its margins.

Profile of Penguin Random House and CEO Madeline Macintosh: Best sellers sell because they are Best sellers (NYT)

To almost everyone’s surprise, the answer to those unnerving questions, at least for the moment, has been: Yes. After a steep drop at the start of the pandemic, book sales not only recovered but surged. Unit sales of print books are up nearly 6 percent over last year, according to NPD BookScan, and e-book and digital audiobook sales have risen by double digits. Reading, it turns out, is an ideal experience in quarantine.

“People were watching a lot of Netflix, but then they needed a break from Netflix,” Ms. McIntosh said. “A book is the most uniquely, beautifully designed product to have with you in lockdown.”

As the industry’s Goliath — as big as the four other biggest publishers combined, analysts say, with authors from Barack and Michelle Obama to Toni Morrison — Penguin Random House has fared better than some of its rivals. Of the 20 best-selling print books of 2020, eight (by far the largest share) are Penguin Random House titles, according to NPD BookScan. It has had 216 New York Times best sellers this year. Penguin Random House’s U.S. sales grew 5.2 percent in the first half of the year, helping to soften a global sales dip of around 1 percent, according to an earnings report from its parent, the German conglomerate Bertelsmann. Overall sales at several other major publishers — Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt — all fell further, according to filings.

Corporate restructuring continues at Houghton Mifflin: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt cuts 525 jobs as COVID-19 accelerates online learning (Boston Globe)

Beyond workforce reductions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt said it will also save on manufacturing costs by shifting the business from print to digital offerings. The company plans to “retire” older systems and print-centric processes. Lynch said the new structure creates a “more focused company with increased recurring digital subscription revenue that produces higher margins and free cash flow.”

Other education publishers, including Pearson, Cengage, and McGraw-Hill, have also been shifting more of their business from printed textbooks to software and digital tools. The process has taken several years but is likely to be sped up by the pandemic’s impact on schools.

Moody's downgrades HMH (Yahoo) 

In the UK a group is asking the government to look in to academic publishing and eBooks:  Open letter calls for ‘investigation of academic publishing industry’ (RI)

The letter states: ‘The Covid-19 pandemic – where students and researchers have not been able to physically visit libraries and access paper books – has brought the many market issues regarding ebooks sharply into focus, as ebooks have become our only purchase option. As lockdown began in March we observed students borrowing as much of the print material that they needed as possible, but as libraries shut academic librarians then did their best to source digital versions. 

‘Due to UK copyright law university libraries cannot simply purchase an ebook in the way an individual can – instead we are required to purchase a version licensed specifically for university use. Public policy to support education and research should support a healthy ebook market, but we in fact see the opposite.’

Large-scale study backs up other research showing relative declines in women's research productivity during COVID-19. Inside Higher Ed

A new study of enormous scale supports what numerous smaller studies have demonstrated throughout the pandemic: female academics are taking extended lockdowns on the chin, in terms of their comparative scholarly productivity.

Online Test Proctoring Claims to Prevent Cheating. But at What Cost? (Slate)

While some aspects of the pandemic-era classroom translate just fine to a digital format, exams have become more complicated. Typically, students take the SAT, the GRE, or any number of midterms or finals in classrooms with proctors standing in the front of the room. But with students at home, some instructors have turned to proctoring software to ensure students aren’t using unauthorized notes, textbooks, or other tools to aid their test taking.

OCLC's Vision for the Next Generation of Metadata

From the OCLC report summary: 

Transitioning to the Next Generation of Metadata synthesizes six years (2015-2020) of OCLC Research Library Partners Metadata Managers Focus Group discussions and what they may foretell for the “next generation of metadata.”

The firm belief that metadata underlies all discovery regardless of format, now and in the future, permeates all Focus Group discussions. Yet metadata is changing. Innovations in librarianship are exerting pressure on metadata management practices to evolve as librarians are required to provide metadata for far more resources of various types and to collaborate on institutional or multi-institutional projects with fewer staff.

This report considers: Why is metadata changing? How is the creation process changing? How is the metadata itself changing? What impact will these changes have on future staffing requirements, and how can libraries prepare? This report proposes that transitioning to the next generation of metadata is an evolving process, intertwined with changing standards, infrastructures, and tools. Together, Focus Group members came to a common understanding of the challenges, shared possible approaches to address them, and inoculated these ideas into other communities that they interact with. 

Download pdf

EBSCO's Tim Collins on eBooks, Libraries and Search "has never been more important".

Interesting interview from Scholarly Kitchen with Tim Collins.  Here's a clip:

Many libraries are starting to see that, while they may spend less on ebooks for a couple of year by using STLs, they are often left with lower annual budgets (if they spend less in one year their budget declines the next) and a much less robust ebook collection to offer their users (as they don’t own as many books). While some libraries may feel like this is okay as they can enable their patrons to search ‘all’ ebooks via Demand Driven Acquisition (DDA) models without actually buying them, we worry about this logic as it assumes that publishers will continue to make all of their content available for searching via DDA at no cost to users. We don’t see this as a valid assumption as, if DDA results in reducing ebook budgets even further, we wonder whether publishers will be able to afford to make their ebooks available under this model.

We can see why book publishers worked with these models as they wanted to support their customers. But, if these models result in budget reductions, which result in publishers not being able to fulfill their mission of publishing the world’s research so that it can be consumed, we don’t see them being sustainable.   We understand that this view may not be welcomed or shared by all libraries, but we see the logic being sound. Business models need to work for both customers and vendors in order for them to be sustainable. There was much great discussion on this subject at the recent Charleston Conference and in related articles published in Against the Grain by both publishers and librarians.

UK Public Libraries to get Free Access to Academic Journal Content

Announced today (press release) by the Publishers Licensing Society (PLS-UK) is a pilot program that will make thousands of academic and scholarly content available to public library patrons.   The publishers making their content available for free include: ALPSP, Bloomsbury Publishing, Cambridge University Press, Dove Press, Elsevier, Emerald, IoP Publishing, Nature Publishing Group, Oxford University Press, Portland Press, SAGE Publications, Science Reviews 2000 Ltd., Springer, Taylor & Francis, Versita, Wiley and Wolters Kluwer Health.

This pilot program which is expect to run for two years follows a technical trial period which was completed earlier this year.  The initiative itself is the result of consultation between libraries, publishers and agencies that was instigated by the Finch report of 2012.  In that report, the parties were encouraged to provide access to peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings, free of charge, for ‘walk-in’ users at library premises.  The purpose of this access would be to (according to the report findings) enhance the ‘walk-in’ access already available at university libraries, and would enable anyone to have free access to a wealth of journal articles and conference proceedings at their local public library.

With UK public libraries under increased funding pressure over the past five years, it is assumed that providing patrons with this breadth of content and access will encourage more patrons to visit public libraries.

MediaWeek (Vol 6, No 41): Frankfurt Sessions, Libraries and Offsite Storage, State of Publishing from New Republic + More

Publisher's Weekly round-up of some of the early educational sessions at Frankfurt last week including mine on responsive web design. (PW)

Uncertainty is one big obstacle holding publishers back from outsourcing their distribution, observes CEO Gareth Cuddy of ePubDirect. “As the marketplace shifts, margins are squeezed on print, and industry reports showing e-book prices for bestsellers continue to average between $2.99 and $7.99, publishers are cautious about entering the e-book market. But distribution services such as ePubDirect not only share the digital publishing expertise but also allow publishers to access new markets, grow sales internationally and ultimately sell more books.”

And publishers do have a much stronger appetite to sell content directly to consumers nowadays, says executive director of publishing services Walter Walker of code-Mantra, attributing it “to either the U.S. Department of Justice’s decision on e-book price-fixing or simply the astonishing level of activities in the e-book retail business. But the XML-first mandate is one that many publishers find intimidating, and our goal is to use highly efficient plug-ins and templates at the prepress stage without disrupting the traditional Word-to-InDesign authoring environment.”

From the ALPSP blog an excellent set of notes from my session (thanks!)

It's complicated. Apple iOS has 6 different size/resolution combinations. HTC has 12. Even within these platforms there is significant deviation. And it is getting more complicated with the introduction of Microsoft and Asus tablets.
Cairn's advice on how to do RWD right starts with understanding your users and how they access and use your content. Prioritise your content based on the above, then build a site architecture that answers to these priorities. Design a site that provides content for users across device-types and contexts, with grids and typography and images that adapt.
What is responsive web design? It is where you maintain one website that services all devices and screen sizes. It provides complete support for all web pages and features, regardless of the device or screen size. And it enables you to implement changes across all devices.

And this one from the Frankfurt Bookfair blog:

As Bruce Lee said, “when you pour water in a cup, it becomes the cup. When you pour water in a bottle, it becomes the bottle.” So should be your online strategy…or so Michael Cairns, COO, Online Division at Publishing Technology, says.

In the “Pixel Imperfect: Serving an Online Audience with Responsive Content” presentation at CONTEC Frankfurt today, Cairns and Michael Kowalski, Founder, Contentment, discussed the need for publishers (both book and magazine) to create mobile-enabled content for the rising mobile reader. As one of those readers who is reading increasingly on my phone and less on my computer, tablet, or ereader, I appreciated that someone was trying to figure out something to fix all of those books, sites, and magazines I so love so I can read them on the go and not fumble through poorly-converted web-focused content.

From Eoin Purcell on the fair itself: (Blog)

If I was to put my finger on one key root cause though, I think that what’s going on is that publishers have, as an industry, come to terms with the fact that they are in the midst of a great disruption, one that they cannot individually predict the long term outcome of (and Michael Bhaskar spoke eloquently on this on Wednesday). There is general acceptance too that while individual companies retain huge power over their own destinies, the technology giants who have moved heavily into the content and media space, the rise of self-publishing and the general shift of digital distribution means that publishers are no longer the only forces in publishing and that increasingly they accept that they are not even the preeminent force in publishing.

From the Chronicle of Higher Education, as people return from summer vacation perhaps they are finding their libraries significantly changed. This is not a new story:

Talk of digital revolutions and bookless libraries notwithstanding, academic libraries around the country are feeling the squeeze as legacy collections outgrow shelves, and shelves give way to learning commons and shared study areas. Those twin pressure points—too many print books plus new demands on library real estate—have spurred academic libraries to try a set of state and regional experiments to free up library space to suit modern learning styles and still make sure that somebody, somewhere, hangs onto books that make up part of the intellectual record, even if those books haven't circulated in years.

For such experiments to succeed, librarians say, they should build off existing relationships among libraries, and they should draw on solid data—on persuasive and detailed analyses of what's in a collection and how it's used and whether those books are available somewhere else. The streamlining of collections has to be handled in a way that doesn't enrage faculty members who still cherish access to physical books. Many disciplines, especially the sciences, favor electronic resources, but print still holds powerful appeal for a lot of scholars

(No mention of NY public library)

Books Don’t Want to Be Free How publishing escaped the cruel fate of other culture industries from the New Republic.

Step back and look at books in a wider context, though, and the picture changes. If you’re in the business of selling journalism, moving images, or music, you have seen your work stripped of value by the digital revolution. Translate anything into ones and zeroes, and it gets easier to steal and harder to sell at a sustainable price. Yet people remain willing to fork over a decent sum for books, whether in print or in electronic form. “I can buy songs for 99 cents, I can read most newspapers for free, I can rent a $100 million movie tonight for $2.99,” Russ Grandinetti, Amazon’s vice president of Kindle content, told me in January. “Paying $9.99 for a best-selling book—paying $10 for bits?—is in many respects a very strong accomplishment for the business.” At the individual level, everyone in the trade—whether executive, editor, agent, author, or bookseller—faces threats to his or her livelihood: self-publishing, mergers and “efficiencies,” and, yes, the suspicious motives of Amazon executives. But the book itself is hanging on and even thriving.

From Twitter
Frankfurt Session on "What is a publisher" (#pubnow)
Book market gains new momentum http://dw.de/p/19w2r
Frankfurt Contec twitter feed (#contec13)

MediaWeek (Vol 6, No 35): The Cassette Tape, Birmingham Library, Google Glass, Economist Newspaper +More

Missed last week. Apologies.

Who knew the lowly cassette tape is celebrating 50 years of age.  Not much chance of making 60 I shouldn't wonder.  From the Guardian 10 Key Moments in Cassette history (Guardian)

Tape for audio storage was first showcased at the Berlin Radio Show in 1935, on the reel-to-reel Magnetophon machine, but it would take another three decades for the stereo compact cassette to arrive. Dutch manufacturer Philips got there first in 1963, alongside the first battery-powered lightweight cassette player.
Albums on cassette arrived in the US in 1966, with Nina Simone, Eartha Kitt and Johnny Mathis among the first artists on tape; the UK followed suit in 1967. Intriguingly, cassettes also made the album a more significant format. As it was harder to select tracks on cassette than on record, listening to an album serially, without skipping, became ingrained in music culture. Cassettes also allowed more time for the album than vinyl. The standard LP length was 45 minutes in total; compact cassettes allowed up to 45 minutes per side.

A lengthy review of the new library in Birmingham. (Guardian)

The new £189m Library of Birmingham, which calls itself the largest public library in Europe, is as grand a civic statement as that city has attempted for many years. It's also a product of the package and wrapping way of building. Its maker, ahead of its architects, is the project management company Capita Symonds. It was on board first, and made many of the decisions that would determine the experience of the finished building. It managed the process that led to the selection of the Dutch architectural practice Mecanoo. Once architects would win a competition with a design, and ways would be found to achieve it, but Mecanoo was partly chosen for the ability to work with a pre-existing process. The question is: can it be "the best library in the world", as was hoped for, and be built in this way?

From the New York Times magazine this weekend a discourse on Google Glass.

Ultimately it’s difficult to assess how a tool like Glass might change our information habits and everyday behavior, simply because there’s so little software for it now. “Glass is more of a question than an answer,” in the words of Astro Teller, who heads Google X, the company’s “moon shot” skunk works, which supervised Glass’s development; he says he expects to be surprised by what emerges in the way of software. Phil Libin, the C.E.O. of Evernote, told me that my frustrations with Glass were off-base. I was trying to use it to replace a phone or a laptop, but the way head-mounted wearables will be used — assuming the public actually decides to use them — will most likely be very different. “This is not a reshaping of the cellphone,” he added. “This is an entirely new thing.” He predicts that we’ll still use traditional computers and phones for searching the Web, writing and reading documents, doing e-mail. A wearable computer will be more of an awareness device, noting what you’re doing and delivering alerts precisely when you need them, in sync with your other devices: when you’re near a grocery store, you will be told you’re low on vegetables, and an actual shopping list will be sent to your phone, where longer text is more easily read. Depending on your desire for more alerts, this could be regarded as either annoying or lifesaving. But as Libin puts it, “The killer app for this is hyperawareness.”

The principal associations for higher ed (The Association of Research Libraries (ARL), the Association of American Universities (AAU), and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU)) announced the formation of a joint steering group to advance a proposed network of digital repositories at universities, libraries, and other research institutions across the US that will provide long-term public access to federally funded research articles and data.  (Press Release)

I know I've asked myself this question; "Why does the Economist call itself a newspaper?" (Economist)

The Economist, moreover, still considers itself more of a newspaper than a magazine in spirit. Its aim is to be a comprehensive weekly newspaper for the world. If you are stranded on a desert island and can have only one periodical air-dropped to you to keep up with world news, our hope is that you would choose The Economist. That goal is arguably more in keeping with the approach of a newspaper than a magazine. The latter term derives from the French word for storehouse and implies a more specific publication devoted to a particular topic, rather than coverage of current affairs.

From Twitter:
CourseSmart Rolls Out Digital Textbook Subscriptions for College Students Goodreader
Scientific American devotes a special report to digital reading. Scientific American
BBC News - Elmore Leonard, crime novelist, dies aged 87 BBC
Will copyright be extended 20 more years? An old debate returns Gigom  

The Death of the Copyright Agency

The combined impacts of technology, legislation and judicial decisions on copyright licensing are beginning to show how rights licensing agencies are likely to face a difficult time extending their current business models in the future. In Canada, Access Copyright (AC) has struggled to impose a new pricing model on universities which accords a high per student fee for unlimited access for publisher content covered by an Access Copyright agreement. Since AC imposed their new model about two years ago, the agency has lost out in court over the concept of ‘fair dealing’, with the practical impact being, that universities are now requesting significant revision to their AC agreements. Led by the University of Toronto which has refused to renew their current agreement, academic libraries in Canada believe that their content rights under the court’s interpretation of ‘fair dealing’ are already broad based and that the universities do not require a license anywhere as expensive (and potentially limiting) as the license imposed by CA. As a result of these interpretations it is a widely held belief that CA faces a very difficult future given their main revenue model has been significantly undercut by the courts.

For an interesting review of the legal situation in Canada here is a quote from an interview with Prof Ariel Katz, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto:

So does Access Copyright still have a role to play with universities?

It’s not clear at all. For one thing, it’s not that Access Copyright offers a very generous license. Even though it’s now well established that fair dealing could have a generous application in education, fair dealing doesn’t cover everything, it’s not a carte blanche that allows the free copying of everything. Therefore, educational institutions may still need licenses for activities that go beyond the scope of fair dealing, and they have always been willing to pay a lot of money for such licenses. The problem is that Access Copyright’s licenses do not offer a generous license at all. In fact, the licenses they offer are very restrictive – you can copy no more than 10% of a work or a chapter from a book, and this permission comes not only with payments but also with many strings attached. In fact, many believe that what AC offers for a fee would very likely be considered fair dealing anyway.

Are there any universities still subscribing now?

Yes. About half of Canadian universities (outside Quebec, which has its own collective) are still licensees of AC. U of T and Western were the first to sign new licenses outside of the Copyright Board proceeding tariff, but to their credit they signed a short term license, which expires by the end of this year. Both of them announced that they would not renew it, but invited AC to negotiate a new license on more favorable terms. It’s still unknown whether AC can or will be willing to offer something that would be worth paying for.

Technology is also enabling a shift away from permissions based commerce as more and more content is made available via publisher’s electronic platforms. As these platforms become more sophisticated and comprehensive (as well as easy to use), libraries are able to provide immediate access to content for their academic patrons as part of their base subscriptions. Content on these platforms is then integrated into course management systems and other similar distribution vehicles directly to students. Where in the past fees for this use needed to be negotiated (and the content retrieved), we are increasingly seeing ‘all you can eat models’ which include course pack use, researcher access and on/off campus access to name only a few of the options. Where publishers include these additional rights in their platform agreements, they enable a more functional site for users and will potentially begin to reduce the amount of content fees generated by collecting agencies such as copyright clearance center (CCC) and others.

In the US, CCC is a more-broad based collecting agency with less reliance on the educational segment and the blanket license approach followed by the UK, Canada and elsewhere has not been widely adopted by US academic institutions. In the US, the impact of technology as described above is likely to eat away progressively at their model as publishers place more of their content in easily accessible locations. That said, CCC is unlikely to face the issues that AC and the UK and Australian agencies are currently facing.

In Australia, as documented by fellow traveler Peter Donoughue, similar issues surround the interpretation of ‘fair dealing’ and the elimination in Australia of the so-called statutory license governing academic use of publisher content. As Peter states:

The next five or so years will see most educational publishers sign tailored subscription-based licenses with tertiary institutions and premium school customers. They will have the option of using newly developed Copyright Agency voluntary licenses for the rest if that makes sense.

Under these emerging business models publishers will have the freedom to offer comprehensive content offerings - primarily digital but inclusive of print. And the schools will demand liberal free use provisions as part of the deal, particularly involving content distribution in the classroom. Remunerable 'multiple copying' will be a thing of the past and the concept itself deemed quaint.

Such arrangements are the mainstream future. As content goes digital, primary exploitations (formerly sales of books) and subsidiary 'bits and pieces' (eg photocopying) will collapse into comprehensive content offerings via licenses.

Peter does believe the Australia copyright agency (CAL) will be able to support a business in this new environment; however, he does note that pending legislation in Australia may halve the amounts collected under the current permissions based program. With much less money to go around it will create a challenging environment for any agency like CAL.

Earlier this month I attended a user group meeting for the library permissions tool “Heron” which is one of my Publishing Technology business units. Heron helps libraries manage their permissions reporting obligations to Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) using PubTracker. Pubtracker is a simple tool which saves libraries days’ worth of time each month to compile content usage. At this meeting, there was a lot of discussion about the new CLA universal license which had recently been negotiated and agreed between CLA and academic libraries. Here the issue was less with the model and more about what was ultimately covered by this agreement. The view of most of the librarians in attendance was that CLA had misled the group with respect to the extent of content covered by the agreement. Indeed, most librarians believe the content covered was significantly less than the prior agreement with specific reductions in access to US based content. Some librarians were contemplating not signing this new agreement.

The UK Librarians were most angry about the impact the new limitations would have on their roles on campus. One librarian stated that they’ve been focused on educating lecturers about the appropriate use of content and to seek the right authorizations however; with the new CLA license they would be stuck trying to explain to a lecturer why last year authorization was available but this year it wasn’t (or was much harder to gain). They felt this would lead to more disobedience by lecturers. The crux of the issue is that US content may not be covered by the new CLA license and UK librarians will be forced to go directly to US publishers which almost by definition is a more cumbersome and frustrating process.

By far the most difficult situation is being faced by the Canadian Access Copyright office which has already downsized and faces stiff opposition from it’s’ user community. Other licensing agencies also face challenges related to technology advancement, legislation and judicial challenges, and as more and more content becomes digitally available, all these agencies will need to undergo comprehensive change in order to maintain their role and relevance.  Whether the experience of AC is a trend setter is an open question but there is certain to be much more on this subject over the coming years.