MediaWeek (Vol 5, No 21): Internet Commons, Mass 'Professoriat", IP Markets, New ASCAP/BMI Model + More

In The Atlantic, Bill Davidow wonders whether like the sea, the internet will be 'over fished' (The Atlantic)

Free markets are the most efficient and best mechanism for managing most economic activity. But when they operate in arenas in which they can exploit the commons, the logic of the free market dictates that they will destroy it. Virtual retailers, for instance, live off their bricks-and-mortar brethren. They encourage customers to search for clothes that fit properly in retail stores that pay property taxes and other overhead costs, and then to buy them online. In the process, they get fat off the bricks-and-mortar commons.
One of the areas I see being chewed up at an alarming speed is privacy -- a vital aspect of our personal commons. We spend hours filtering out junk email, updating passwords, and worrying about stolen identity.
In the physical world, laws protect our privacy, and the cost of gaining access to us is high. (It costs a lot to send physical mail.) Physical spying is expensive. But in the virtual world, we have few property rights, few laws to protect us, and spying is almost free.

Give all the negative public relations that Elsevier has faced recently is a very different model on the horizon?  (The American Interest):

But the thought does occur to one: while it is relatively easy to see how public universities might want to support academic research in the natural sciences and economics, just how much do the taxpayers want to contribute toward the production of research of questionable utility in softer fields? And if the answer is, as I suspect it will increasingly be, that the taxpayers don’t want to shell out for these costs, how many fewer professors will our university systems employ?
It is much more fun to complain about the pirates of Elsevier than it is to think about the future of the mass professoriat, but I suspect that university faculties might soon find it necessary to adjust to a new set of public priorities. Fifteen years ago journalists thought that the internet wasn’t a serious issue for their field; today many of the journalists who once scoffed at the net are now unemployed.

A fascinating look at a new way to 'market' and trade intellectual property (Economist):

All of which makes this a good time to launch a new approach to trading intellectual property, says Gerard Pannekoek, the boss of IPXI, a new financial exchange that lets companies buy, sell and hedge patent rights, just like any other asset. The idea is to offer a patent or group of patents as “unit licence rights” (ULRs), which can be bought and sold like shares. A ULR grants a one-time right to use a particular technology in a single product: a new type of airbag sensor in a car, say. If a company wants to use the technology in 100,000 cars, it buys 100,000 ULRs at the market price. ULRs are also expected to be traded on secondary markets.

Capturing the 'data exhaust' from satellite transmissions to reinvent the way music royalties are made (WSJ):

So in 2009 , he and business partner and composer Chris Woods launched TuneSat, a startup that uses digital technology to monitor satellite TV signals from around the world and keep track of how music is being used in theme songs,  advertisements, background soundtracks and other broadcast situations. Schreer is CEO and Woods is COO of the company. The value of the new Big Data driven part of his business has the potential to eclipse revenue from the core business of composing and producing music.
Beyond that, they say TuneSat may help disrupt the performing rights business, an industry with $2 billion in revenue in U.S. and $9 billion worldwide, by putting powerful algorithms directly in the hands of copyright owners that allow them to scour and analyze the use of their work across the entire national TV market. A web-based application allows subscribers to access TuneSat’s servers and its proprietary analytic tools, in the process allowing them to bypass traditional royalty rights organizations, if they choose.

Stop sending free textbooks complains higher ed faculty (IHEd):

When I arrived at my office door one morning, arms full of books and lunch and workout clothes, and found my path blocked by an unsolicited box of books, the sales rep found my breaking point. I replied with a sharply but politely worded cease-and-desist message, making as clear as possible that I would disqualify unsolicited texts from consideration for adoption in our program because of my concern.

There are probably 50 pounds of never-requested and never-to-be-used textbooks in my office. I’d prefer 50 pounds of just about anything else. Fifty pounds of in-the-shell roasted peanuts to eat in my office; 50 pounds of water balloons to rain down on the heads of students who smoke under my frequently open office window.

From the twitter:

Is the New York Public Library Seizing the Future or Renouncing Its Past? NYTIMES

Amazon consumer book reviews as reliable as media experts Guardian

University of British Columbia opts out of Access Copyright agreement UBC 

Carlos Fuentes' Worldcat Identity page Worldcat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the twitter this week (PND):

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

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

The digital world has invigorated publishing, not doomed it Guardian 

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

Pearson says first-half profits will dip - FT

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

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

MediaWeek (Vol 5, No 15): NYPublic remodels, Creative Thought, Gunter Grass, Pew eReader Study + More

The New York Public library is undergoing a renovation of sorts and will be moving a large segment of its' print collection to off-site storage.  Many large academic libraries (in particular) have or are under-going similar realignments among them the British Museum, Stanford, NYU and Ohio State.  Naturally, there are some who just don't like the idea (Guardian):

The removal of the books – some to a site underground in adjacent Bryant Park, the rest to a facility in suburban New Jersey that the NYPL shares with Princeton and Columbia universities – is part of a gargantuan $300m reorganisation aimed at lugging the central library into the 21st century.
Eight storeys of Carnegie steel stacks will be ripped from the central library building's interior to make room for a new public space designed by star architect Norman Foster, whose firm designed London's city hall and the reichstag in Berlin. The library has said that the books in the stacks are showing signs of environmental wear and will be better preserved elsewhere.
The sleek new interior space – two city blocks long, eight storeys high and a quarter of a block wide – will come equipped with banks of new computers and, for the first time in two generations, a lending library. It will give a dramatically more modern look and feel for the system's central branch.
"We are aiming to create the greatest library facility in the world," Anthony Marx, the library's CEO and president, told the Guardian. "And we are as committed as the scholarly community to ensure that it continues to be a great research facility."

Interesting article on the creative thought process (Guardian):

Every creative journey begins with a problem. It starts with a feeling of frustration, the dull ache of not being able to find the answer. When we tell one another stories about creativity, we tend to leave out this phase of the creative process. We neglect to mention those days when we wanted to quit, when we believed that our problems were impossible to solve. Instead, we skip straight to the breakthroughs. The danger of telling this narrative is that the feeling of frustration – the act of being stumped – is an essential part of the creative process. Before we can find the answer – before we probably even know the question – we must be immersed in disappointment, convinced that a solution is beyond our reach. It's often only at this point, after we've stopped searching for the answer, that the answer arrives. All of a sudden, the answer to the problem that seemed so daunting becomes incredibly obvious.
This is the clichéd moment of insight that people know so well from stories of Archimedes in the bathtub and Isaac Newton under the apple tree. When people think about creative breakthroughs, they tend to imagine them as incandescent flashes, like a light bulb going on inside the brain.
These tales of insight all share a few essential features that scientists use to define the "insight experience". The first stage is the impasse. If we're lucky, however, that hopelessness eventually gives way to a revelation. This is another essential feature of moments of insight: the feeling of certainty that accompanies the new idea. After Archimedes had his eureka moment – he realised that the displacement of water could be used to measure the volume of objects – he immediately leaped out of the bath and ran to tell the king about his solution. He arrived at the palace stark naked and dripping wet.

Gunter Grass in stepped in it again with a poem decrying the military first strike mentality specifically referencing Israel's supposed intention to bomb Iran's nuclear sites. (THR):

The poem is, to put it bluntly, morally obtuse and politically embarrassing. Having reversed the arrows of causation, Grass says nothing about the hatred of Israel that the Iranian regime has publicly expressed since 1979, about its specific threats to “wipe it off the map” in the past decade, or the vicious Jew-hatred that is a steady diet of its propaganda. Apparently he has not read the most recent reports of the International Atomic Energy Agency that confirm Iran’s efforts to build nuclear weapons. Nor does Grass understand that the purpose of missile-carrying submarines is to ensure the credibility of a second strike should Iran or any other power attack Israel first. These submarines are essential for a stable system of deterrence. No Israeli leader has spoken about delivering a first strike with nuclear weapons that would “extinguish” the Iranian people. All of this comes from a man who was “silent” for five decades of his very successful literary career about the fact that as a young man he was a member of the Waffen SS at the end of World War II.
The idea, put forward by Grass, that there is a taboo in German intellectual and political life about criticizing Israel and its policies has been a favorite theme of Israel’s critics since the 1960s. But the taboo does not exist. There has been no silence in Germany, especially in such places as Der Spiegel or the Süddeutsche Zeitung, not to mention among intellectual and political forces to their left, for many decades. On the contrary, hostility to both Israel and the United States, and the view that these two countries are the major threat to world peace, became embedded in the German left-wing and left-liberal mainstream many decades ago. In this sense, Grass’s diatribe is part of a long established conventional wisdom. It takes neither courage nor intelligence to run with the mob. Grass’s poem seeks to make the mob yell even louder.

Pew Study on e-Reading confirms some interesting trends.  Among them (Pew):

30% of those who read e-content say they now spend more time reading, and owners of tablets and e-book readers particularly stand out as reading more now. Some 41% of tablet owners and 35% of e-reading device owners said they are reading more since the advent of e-content. Fully 42% of readers of e-books said they are reading more now that long-form reading material is available in digital format. The longer people have owned an e-book reader or tablet, the more likely they are to say they are reading more: 41% of those who have owned either device for more than a year say they are reading more vs. 35% of those who have owned either device for less than six months who say they are reading more.

The average reader of e-books says she has read 24 books (the mean number) in the past 12 months, compared with an average of 15 books by a non-e-book consumer. Some 78% of those ages 16 and older say they read a book in the past 12 months. Those readers report they have read an average (or mean number) of 17 books in the past year and 8 books as a median (midpoint) number.

 

 Will Self takes a look at Twitter (New Statesman):

Is all this human twittering in any meaningful sense crazy? Not, I'd argue, if you see it for what it is - but if it's considered to be an advance of some kind in the sphere of human relatedness, that has to be nuts. I spent a great deal of the 1970s avoiding bores with slide carousels who wanted their holiday slides writ large on suburban walls - why on earth would I want to reacquaint myself with such tedium in the form of Facebook's petabytes of snapshots? I think it was the anthropologist Robin Dunbar - one of the proponents of the "social mind" conception of human cognitive evolution - who theorised that language developed as an outgrowth of the group cohesion that other great apes cement by picking parasites from each other's fur.

Speaking of which, from the twitter this week:

Essay defending the planned changes at New York Public Library Inside Higher Ed:

New post: My exciting new job at Elsevier: Inaugural editor-in-chief of The Journal of Applied Publishing Experiments: http://bit.ly/HIZxHP

Is making books social a good thing or a bad thing? Gigaom

We've been giddy here in the PND sports department over the past month and it's looking like delirium in Salford and weeping in the City.  Man Utd are closing in on number 20 and the boss pays tribute to Paul Scholes (MEN)