MOOCs, MOOCs and more MOOCs

Short on conclusions (but then this is all quite new) the Education section of the Times this weekend gushed about those Massive Open Online Courses (NYTimes)

“This has caught all of us by surprise,” says David Stavens, who formed a company called Udacity with Sebastian Thrun and Michael Sokolsky after more than 150,000 signed up for Dr. Thrun’s “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence” last fall, starting the revolution that has higher education gasping. A year ago, he marvels, “we were three guys in Sebastian’s living room and now we have 40 employees full time.”

“I like to call this the year of disruption,” says Anant Agarwal, president of edX, “and the year is not over yet.”

MOOCs have been around for a few years as collaborative techie learning events, but this is the year everyone wants in. Elite universities are partnering with Coursera at a furious pace. It now offers courses from 33 of the biggest names in postsecondary education, including Princeton, Brown, Columbia and Duke. In September, Google unleashed a MOOC-building online tool, and Stanford unveiled Class2Go with two courses.

Nick McKeown is teaching one of them, on computer networking, with Philip Levis (the one with a shock of magenta hair in the introductory video). Dr. McKeown sums up the energy of this grand experiment when he gushes, “We’re both very excited.” Casually draped over auditorium seats, the professors also acknowledge that they are not exactly sure how this MOOC stuff works.

“We are just going to see how this goes over the next few weeks,” says Dr. McKeown.

Changes in Educational Publishing: The Textbook in the 21st Century

A repost from July 13, 2006.  A still relevant post regarding the evolution of the textbook. 

As I have mentioned before, I believe educational publishing - particularly in College - to be an industry ripe with opportunity and therefore very interesting. Challenges obviously exist but educational publishers have an opportunity, facilitated by the internet, to build a virtuous circle connecting the publisher/author, student, educator, advisor and institution. (Even the parent could be part of this grouping). Traditional publishing content remains the 'glue' within this grouping but publishers are also building 'platforms' adding sophisticated testing and evaluative modules, administrative modules and ultimately a social networking component that will further facilitate a level of communication among the groups heretofore unheard of. I have spoken a little about this in an earlier post.

There will be many changes resulting from this different publishing paradigm not least of which the content itself. I doubt many publishers would contest the notion that the existing construct of the traditional published text book will remain the same for much longer. In the not too distant future the course textbook is going to have more in common with an online newspaper that it will with a physical print product encased in board. Editorial and authorship may become more important than it currently is since the product will become dynamic and subject to on-going news events, reinterpretations and the feedback from users. Incorporation of audio and video, blogging and chat also add a 'real time' component that will require monitoring and management.

What is interesting about this article in the NYT today is that it highlights the significant fallibility of the textbook unit when viewed from today’s 'instant update' environment. The article points out a number of things including the surprising similarity across texts, the apparent lack of motivation to change - evidenced by continuing to publish 'name' authors in updated editions even after they were decreased and the clear lack of feedback from user to publisher/author that allowed continued publication of the same material year after year.

In many ways the article makes publishers out to be dummies but there may have been important reasons to leverage a known author for many years. Profits. Institutions, Professors, etc. act conservatively and go with what they know. Rebuilding around a new author increases the risk that the customer may go to a competitor. In addition, from a publisher point of view it is easier to tweak an existing text than start over with a new one. (Although in reading this article you may gain the impression that none of them ever start from scratch).

All the big educational publishers - Wiley, Pearson, Harcourt, McGraw Hill are building online educational content that is - or will represent - a fully interactive educational product. For publishers to gain direct access to a student that enables the student to build an online bookshelf of educational material that they can carry with them forever, and furthermore to establish a relationship with the student after they leave college, is what these publishers are really looking for. Exciting stuff if you are a publisher. And great benefits for students and educators as well.

MediaWeek (Vol 5, No 30); MOOCs, Online Higher Ed Courses, Library Ideas, Research Needs,

Massive Open Online Courses or MOOCs are really getting some people excited and the sheer numbers are amazing - although is this a fad and or a function of supply?  From the NYTimes an interview with Anant Agarwal of MIT who's first class enrolled 150,000 students (NYTimes)

Did you expect so much demand?

With no marketing dollars, I thought we might get 200 students. When we posted on the Web site that we were taking registration and the course would start in March, my colleague Piotr Mitros called and said, “We’re getting 10,000 registrations a day.” I fell off my seat and said, “Piotr, are you sure you’ve got the decimal point right?” My most fearful moment was when we launched the course. I worried that the system couldn’t handle it, and would keel over and die. 

...

Most students who register for MOOCs don’t complete the course. Of the 154,763 who registered for “Circuits and Electronics,” fewer than half even got as far as looking at the first problem set, and only 7,157 passed the course. What do you make of that?

A large number of the students who sign up for MOOCs are browsing, to see what it’s like. They might not have the right background for the course. They might just do a little bit of the coursework. Our course was M.I.T.-hard and needed a very, very solid background. Other students just don’t have time to do the weekly assignments. One thing we’re thinking of is to offer multiple versions of the course, one that would last a semester and one that could stretch over a year. That would help some people complete.

And from The Atlantic a profile of Coursera which they suggest is the "Single Most Important Experiment in Education" (Altantic):

But the deals Coursera announced Tuesday may well prove to be an inflection point for online education, a sector that has traditionally been dominated by for-profit colleges known mostly for their noxious recruitment practices and poor results. That's because the new partnerships represent an embrace of web-based learning from across the top tier of U.S. universities. And where the elite colleges go, so goes the rest of academia.
Coursera has previously teamed with Stanford, Princeton, University of Pennsylvania, and University of Michigan to offer 43 courses, which according to the New York Times enrolled 680,000 students. It now adds to its roster Duke, Caltech, University of Virginia, Georgia Tech, University of Washington, Rice, Johns Hopkins, University of California San Francisco, University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne, University of Toronto, University of Edinburgh, and Switzerland's École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.
Only one school, the University of Washington, said it will give credit for its Coursera classes. But two others, University of Pennsylvania and Caltech, said they would invest $3.7 million into the enterprise, bringing the company's venture funding to more than $22 million. Literally, colleges are buying in.

Suggestions that independent bookstore protectionism works in other countries - should it be implemented in the US? (Atlantic)

Here in the U.S., most bookstores survive in tales of grassroots preservation or community campaigns. Price-fixing is undoubtedly the least likely American solution, though as Jason Boog has pointed out at NPR, booksellers and publishers actually did persuade FDR to enforce a price floor to prevent Macy’s from undercutting small book retailers with loss-leader pricing on Gone with the Wind during the Great Depression. (That policy was later declared unconstitutional, but it did throw a wrench in the Macy’s strategy.) This April, though, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit accusing Apple and several publishers of colluding to raise the price of e-books to compete with Amazon’s price-discounting. Don’t expect to see federal protection of local bookstores via price-setting anytime soon.

Possibly the worlds most bizarre library carrel but some interesting ideas for the future of libraries (Harvard):

In the seminar’s freewheeling atmosphere, ideas flew like cream pies at a food fight. What if behind-the-scenes work could take place in the open instead, suggested Matthew Battles, a fellow at the Berkman Center. “What if you set up somebody processing medieval manuscripts in Widener or Lamont—a processing station in a public space?” Battles had just come from a used-furniture depository, where he’d been scavenging for shelves that could be repurposed for use as curator stations, places where faculty members or librarians could be asked to curate small collections of books. “What about a mobile, inflatable library?” suggested Goldenson. “What would that do?” Or how about an “Artist in Reference,” he continued. “We could bring in experts in a particular subject to serve as guest reference librarians in their area of expertise.” Schnapp, running with the idea, noted that “Widener contains collections in fields that haven’t been taught at Harvard in a hundred years, where we have the best collections of materials.”

Is wikipedea looking to set up their own travel information and guide site (Skift):

Imagine a free TripAdvisor focused on travel destinations, where masses of travelers could update information during or after their hotel stay, tour or private meanderings around town, and share it with the world under the supervision of seasoned administrators.
The foundation’s board of trustees on July 11 approved a proposal [see Update below] to launch an advertisement-free travel guide [see Update below] and community members noted that 31 of the 48 administrators of the Internet Brands-owned Wikitravel have expressed interest in joining forces with the Wikimedia Foundation’s travel guide website.
Wikitravel is considered the current leader in travel wikis, but its advertisements and monetization efforts may turn off travelers and would-be contributors.
In addition, the introduction to a community discussion about the travel guide proposal argues that Internet Brands has failed to keep pace with the times and that Wikitravel suffers from a “lack of technical support/feature development.”

The Guardian Higher Ed team reports on a JISC study on student research needs 

The report's findings indicate that the greatest challenge to researchers is the difficulty of access to e-journals. It is easy to see why: doctoral students across all subjects told us that they predominantly look for secondary published resources to inform their research, and for over 80% of researchers, this means accessing full text journal articles.
These same materials are often subject to licensing restrictions and other limitations imposed by e-journals publishers and other information service providers. This appears to be an area of sharpening tension in the doctoral and broader research community, with the majority of students surveyed describing it as a 'significant constraint' in the research process, and one of the biggest frustrations affecting their work.
Despite the ongoing debate around open access in the media, the report's findings have told us that there is a significant level of confusion among researchers around what open access means, or even how reliable open access materials are.
Another finding from the report shows that as many as 35% of those researchers surveyed in 2011 did not receive any face-to-face training in research and information-seeking skills in the previous academic year, even though 65% of researchers ranked it as their most important training need. These outcomes are concerning, but fortunately they are also an area where significant improvements can be made, through increasing face-to-face training and support for researchers when they start their PhD programmes, but also much earlier as they enter higher education.

End of the Knowledge Network at the New York Times

A short piece in Inside Higher Ed two weeks ago announced the quiet demise of the New York Times' foray into online education and learning.  As reported in IHEd, Times spokeswoman Linda Zeban confirmed the news by saying "I can confirm that after July 31, Knowledge Network courses will no longer be available online,"

As I noted in 2007 (again referencing a report in IHEd) the venture looked both promising and a natural extension of their brand.  It is a pity they were not able to execute anything meaningful but then, over the past five years, the Times has had its share of issues to deal with so perhaps they can be excused (from class).

MediaWeek (Vol 5, No 26): AAUP Meeting, Summer Reading Lists, Magazines, The Guardian's Future +More

Last week the Association of American University Presses held their annual conference in Chicago, (where I attended and made two presentations but more on that later) and there were several write-ups.  First, the organizers added a session on the last afternoon about the Georgia eReserves case and here is a blow-by-blow of the session (Inside Higher Ed):

University presses are still unhappy with the outcome of the landmark copyright case, which centered on Georgia State University's practice of duplicating book material and making it available to certain students free through the universities' electronic reserve database. That much was clear at Wednesday’s session, during which Steinman repeatedly slammed Judge Orinda Evans’s legal reasoning in the decision to a chorus of exasperated groans from a packed room of university press workers and executives.

“This is a terrible decision, it’s poorly reasoned, the result is a poor one, it’s a terrible precedent to have on the books,” said Steinman, doubling down on the AAUP’s much milder statement last month, which merely asserted that Evans’s 347-page ruling “appears to make a number of assertions of fact that are not supported by the trial record.”

But collective disdain for the judge’s reasoning in her decision eventually gave way to a general agreement among the attendees that, in order to make the outcome workable, university presses need to mend fences with another key player on their campuses -- librarians.

And from Jennifer Howard at The Chronicle an overview of the entire meeting:

Be part of the conversation, mind your metadata, and use technology as a bridge to the world: That advice animated sessions at the annual meeting of the Association of American University Presses, held here this week.

This year marks the group's 75th anniversary, and attendance hit a record high, with 787 people registered. The numbers created some logistical hassles but gave the meeting energy, too, tempering nervousness about how to feed the growing e-book market and how to convince budget-obsessed administrators that presses are assets, not liabilities.

People talked somberly about the news that the University of Missouri plans to shut down its press. But so far Missouri has been the exception, not the rule. Most presses have survived the recession and budget cuts. Some, like Princeton University Press, had excellent years, according to Peter Dougherty, the Princeton press's director and the new president of the association.

What should the kids read over summer (NYTimes)

Reading literature should be intentional. The problem with much summer reading is that the intention is unclear. Increasingly, students are asked to choose their own summer reading from Web sites like ReadKiddoRead, where the same advanced Real World Fiction category includes “The Catcher in the Rye” and “Flipped,” by Wendelin Van Draanen, which centers on divorce and kissing. Both books can be enjoyed by middle schoolers, but how will the seventh grader determine which one to pick?

The issue is further compounded when summer assignments require students to write about what they read. The problem is that the tasks assigned are at once too open and too circumscribed to be of use. What summer reading needs to be is purposeful. But how do we ensure purposeful independent reading given the low accountability of summer assignments?

Some students will happily read off a recommended-reading list (which should include a companion list of resources to support understanding). They will head to the park with Dickens or Austen under their arms, so long as they can leave the Post-it notes at home. They should be permitted this luxury, to have their teachers treat them as independent learners capable of a first dip into a classic, with no destined-to-be-unread written responses required. Doing this allows the student who chooses tougher books to say, “I didn’t understand half of it.” What better time to allow students to struggle than summer, when no one is calling on them to interpret or explain?

How's the magazine business doing you ask? (Economist)

But among magazines there is a new sense of optimism. In North America, where the recession bit deepest (see chart), more new magazines were launched than closed in 2011 for the second year in a row. The Association of Magazine Media (MPA) reports that magazine audiences are growing faster than those for TV or newspapers, especially among the young.

Unlike newspapers, most magazines didn’t have large classified-ad sections to lose to the internet, and their material has a longer shelf-life. Above all, says David Carey, the boss of Hearst Magazines, a big American publisher, they represent aspirations: “they do a very good job of inspiring your dreams.” People identify closely with the magazines they read, and advertisers therefore love them: magazines, says Paul-Bernhard Kallen, the chairman of Hubert Burda Media, a large German publisher, remain essential for brand-building.

Also from More Intelligent Life (Economist Family) a look at The Guardian newspaper and how it might survive (I thought it was).

In terms of reach and impact, the Guardian is doing better than ever before. But its success may contain the seeds of its demise. Its print circulation is tumbling. In October 2005, boosted by a change to the medium-sized Berliner format, the average daily circulation was 403,297. By March 2012 it was down to 217,190. Those figures are not quite like-for-like, as the Guardian has sworn off the Viagra of giveaway copies and overseas sales (which tend to be counted less rigorously); but they are still bleak. Saturday sales remain sturdy, at 377,000, but, on a typical weekday, only 178,000 people buy the Guardian, while millions graze on it for nothing on their screens. In the financial year 2009-10, the national newspapers division of Guardian Media Group—which also includes the Observer, Britain’s oldest Sunday paper—lost £37m. The following year, it managed to cut costs by £26m, and still ended up losing £38m. In May, Rusbridger told me he was expecting a similar loss for 2011-12. So, for three years running, the Guardian has been losing £100,000 a day. This is not boom or bust, but both at once: the best of times, and the worst of times. 

At the Open Weekend, one event looked at whether journalism was a second-rate form of writing. In the audience of 50 or so was the white-haired figure of Nick Davies, taking a breather from his investigative duties. When the conversation turned to long-form journalism, he spoke up, sounding exasperated. “In 20 years’ time,” he said, “there won’t be any newspapers left to do this. All these millions of hits won’t pay our salaries. The internet is killing journalism.”

And from my twitter feed this week:

Rare aerial photographs of Britain go online Guardian

15 books that apparently make you "undateable" – happy to report I've read most Flavorwire

Libraries, patrons, and e-books Pew Report  

Top US universities create online platform BBC EdX worldwide initiative to deliver online course by Harvard & MIT

The French Still Flock to Bookstores NYTimes

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

Changing the way music stars are made (Economist):

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the Twitter:

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

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

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

MediaWeek (Vol 4, No 42): Frankfurt, CS Forester, Martin Amis + More

Exclaiming this is the time for start-ups the Frankfurt Book Fair concluded on Sunday with traffic slightly up and a continued expansion to more diverse attendees and exhibitors:

With many exhibitors and visitors, not only from the book industry, but also other related industries such as film, games, and information and communications technology, the Frankfurt Book Fair demonstrated that the sphere of interaction for members of the publishing industry has become significantly larger. Many new areas of specialisation – from digital publishing services and computer games production, to legal and financial consultants for crossmedial products – could be found at the Book Fair, spread between the different halls, professional areas and regional sections. In all, 7,384 exhibitors from 106 countries were present, and the more than 3,200 events attracted 280,194 visitors.

“This is now the time for start-ups, and the book industry is in a positive mood for renewal,” says Juergen Boos, Director of the Frankfurt Book Fair. Besides the electronic reading gadgets, visitors to the Book Fair witnessed a lively experimentation with new ideas, with new forms of storytelling and with multimedia formats. “An enormous diversity of ideas arises from the combination of enterprising spirit and technological opportunity. The international book and publishing industry has become a lot more multi-facetted.”

This year, the Frankfurt Book Fair also recorded a slight increase in the number of visitors, with about one per cent more people coming to Frankfurt in 2011 than in 2010. The interest in international training and networking events grew perceptibly, such as those offered in collaboration with the Association of German Publishers and Booksellers, under the umbrella of the new conference brand, the Frankfurt Academy. Here, the emphasis was on event-formats such as the all-media StoryDrive Conference and the Tools of Change Conference.

“The more globalised the books business becomes, the greater is everyone’s need to meet in person at least once a year – and that, of course, in Frankfurt. Conversations about people and books are indispensable,” says Professor Gottfried Honnefelder, President of the Association of German Publishers and Booksellers, and he adds: “Those involved in the market are optimistic. We’re not only talking about the e-book business, we’re already taking action. The face of the Frankfurt Book Fair is one of self-assurance. The framework exists; now each publisher and each bookseller needs to find the right path for itself.”

CS Forester has a new novel coming out (Observer):

The novel, which is complete and polished from start to finish, was accepted for publication in 1935 by his publisher, Michael Joseph, now part of Penguin. However, Forester and his publisher delayed its release, deciding that it would not be sensible to publish it between two Hornblower books. Forester then moved house and when his publisher was sold, The Pursued somehow disappeared.

Forester clearly felt its loss. Decades later in his autobiography he wrote: "The lost novel was really lost. It is just possible that a typescript still exists, forgotten and gathering dust in a rarely used storeroom in Boston or Bloomsbury."

He was right. It surfaced at Christie's in 2002, when Lawrence Brewer, a lifelong Forester aficionado, was astonished to find that the auctioneer was selling it as a "job lot" of 11 Forester-related items. "It was a pathetic little auction," said Brewer. "There was no … great publicity. Something should have been made of it."

Excited by the chance to own words by Forester that no one had read, Brewer bought the typescript with Colin Blogg, a fellow founder-member of the CS Forester Society, for just £1,500. "Goodness me!" Brewer exclaimed in pure Foresterese. "I found it. I was sky-high."

Martin Amis was interviewed at the Hay Festival in Mexico and didn't hold back on a variety of subjects. Here beginning is comments on empire's decline (Telegraph):

MA Yes, it’s satirical, but it is about what happens to countries when they’re in decline. We’re now seeing America beginning to cope with decline, and I don’t think they’re going to be anything like as reasonable about that decline as England was.

England went from being ruler of a quarter of the globe to a second-rate country in the course of the Second World War. They talk about the Second World War. They say “the big three”: Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill. Churchill wasn’t one of the big three. Stalin and Roosevelt could hardly bring themselves to stop giggling when Churchill said, “I think we should do this”, because we’d ceased to matter by then.

And somehow we got through it.

JG Ballard, the writer who was interned in China by the Japanese, returned to England at the age of 12, 13, and he said it looked as though England had lost the war. It was blackouts, rationing, everything sordid and dirty and depressed, and what we were doing was coping with this tremendous demotion from being a great power to being a minor power.

But we somehow got through, and I think we were very greatly helped by the ideology known as political correctness, relativism, levelism, because that was fiercely anti-imperialist. So as we were coping with decline – and it takes decades to do it – we had the ideology that was telling us that empires are s---, you don’t want an empire, you should be ashamed for having had one.

In the NY Times a review of some of the past movie adaptations of LeCarre's novels (NYTimes):

In retrospect it seems miraculous that the movies did so well by Mr. le Carré on that first go. The next couple of attempts, Sidney Lumet’s 1966 “Deadly Affair” (based on the novel “Call for the Dead”) and Frank R. Pierson’s “Looking Glass War” (1969), were largely bungled operations, though “Deadly Affair” benefits from the casting of James Mason as a version of Mr. le Carré’s most famous character, the mild-mannered and deceptively wily spymaster George Smiley. After “The Looking Glass War,” an adaptation roughly as successful as the invasion of the Bay of Pigs, Mr. le Carré withdrew from the field for better than a decade. He knew when it was time to come in from the cold.

What the failed adaptations of his books had made clear was that even in his relatively straightforward early novels his narrative techniques were a little too tricky for the movies to handle. Mr. le Carré is maybe the most eccentric constructor of fiction in English literature since Joseph Conrad. His stories are full of digressions and long flashbacks; he circles around his plots for the longest time, as if he were doing reconnaissance on them before deciding to go in for the kill. And the verbal textures of the books can be challenging too, because his spies tend to speak in their own special jargon, which seems like normal speech, but isn’t quite. It’s like one of those maddeningly elusive regional English dialects: you need to get the hang of it, and it always takes longer than you would have thought possible.

Stieg Larsson books are being adapted for the comics (Telegraph):

In a statement ahead of the Frankfurt Book Fair in Germany, the publisher behind Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman said its Vertigo imprint would work with Larsson's estate and Hedlund Literary Agency to adapt the books.

"Each book by Larsson will be presented in two graphic novel volumes that will be available in both print and digital formats," it said, starting withThe Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in 2012.

DC Entertainment co-publisher Dan DiDio said "the intricate characters and stories Larsson created in the Millennium Trilogy are a perfect match for the graphic novel format."

The diaries of a Holocaust survivor generated some interest this week and will be published in 2012 (Observer):

The story is one of many recorded in a concentration camp diary that was sold to publishers around the world at the Frankfurt book fair. The private journals of Helga Weiss are to be published in the UK for the first time next year by Viking Press, while foreign rights have been snapped up by publishing houses across the world.

Weiss, an artist in her early 80s who lives in Prague and is also known by her married name of Weissova-Hoskova, mentioned her journal during occasional public appearances, but until now public interest in her written story has always been overshadowed by her success as a postwar painter. The British publisher Venetia Butterfield heard of the diary's existence last summer when Weiss visited London for a concert at the Wigmore Hall commemorating fellow inmates at the Terezín camp in former Czechoslovakia. 

"I heard about the event and called someone in north London who knew Helga. They told me she was just about to get on a plane back to Prague, but that she was coming round for a coffee first," said Butterfield. "I raced up to see her and we talked for no more than 10 or 15 minutes. She is an amazing woman with a great, feisty attitude."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Plot Thickens:

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

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

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

Source Books CEO Dominique Raacah is profiled in Naperville Sun:

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the twitter:

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

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

oh, and something about butter fingers (Guardian)

Who Wants to Pay for “Content”? - REPOST

Repost Friday and this time from March 9, 2009 a repost that is still somewhat topical given the NYTimes announcement that they would implement a reader toll.

Suggestions newspapers charge for content ignores deeper questions about their value proposition, the fourth estate and democracy.

Reports that the owners of Newsday plan to charge users of their web site for access have been received with equal parts hilarity and incredulity, but this is only one of many public displays of desperation on the part of newspaper owners over the past two or three months. Almost simultaneous with the deluge of bankruptcy filings and threats of closure that have run through Philadelphia, Miami, Chicago, San Francisco, Sacramento and Seattle since Christmas, newspaper owners have been openly discussing the idea of charging for online access. As most readers and users (aka customers) of online news sources know, that approach is not going to work because there is simply no value proposition presented by 99% of the incumbent newspaper businesses.

At a base level, newspapers failed to understand how their customers’ needs had changed over the past twenty years. Instead, newspaper owners chose to focus on maintaining their margins and offering dividends at historically high levels, rather than in reinvesting in the future. Like many businesses, they made a simple but tragic mistake: They thought it would go on forever. Many large publishing companies were content to pat themselves on the back for attaining economies of scale across their trans-national companies which made newspapers in Salem, Oregon and Newport News, look and read virtually the same. In these mid-market locations, while consolidation had made many cities one-newspaper towns, the genesis of what has become one of the biggest dangers to survival of the newspaper industry has emerged. Community reporting, with the diligence and aggression that supported the development and growth of newspapers all the way back to late 17th century England, has been on the wain for years. Sadly, local journalism, as we traditionally know it, is disappearing and, with it, a measure of democracy - particularly as it relates to local, county and state government.

Last week, I was discussing this topic with an acquaintance who lives in a fairly affluent part of Central New Jersey. He noted that, in a wide swath covering eight to ten townships and a number of counties, he wasn’t aware of more than one journalist assigned to that market from the larger state-wide newspapers. In Hoboken (regional HQ for PND), where mayoral and city council budget incompetence has seen our property taxes increase 50% in the past six months, there is rarely any local media coverage nor any attendance at city business meetings by traditional media. And forget investigative reporting - even in a state where you could throw a rock in any direction and hit a shady politician. The lack of journalistic attention means that one of the mainstays of democracy (the fourth estate) is eroded and this is seen starkly in Hoboken, where private citizens are forced (on their own initiative) to file freedom of information requests to gain access to basic public interest materials such as meeting minutes and financial statements.

Recently, a number of New York and New Jersey newspapers announced they would be beginning a content-sharing network that might enable each to focus more on their local news reporting. However, MediaDaily believes cost-cutting is the focus:

The latest iteration of the new content-sharing model brings together The Record of Hackensack, New Jersey, The Star-Ledger of Newark, the Times Union of Albany, the Buffalo News, and New York Daily News, which apparently organized the consortium. According to the papers, the Northeast Consortium "will enhance each publication's coverage in the region by exchanging articles, photographs and graphics." But the club would probably be better described as a cost-cutting measure, given the dire circumstances of many of America's daily newspapers.

Few of the newspapers we currently recognize will survive in the US. It is just a fact, but the irony is that significant news and community markets exist. New entrants will address this market and, in numerous cases, they are already making in-roads to address particular market segments. This brings me back to the notion of charging for “content” which many newspaper companies are debating. Newsday might succeed but only if they are able to establish community, service(s) and context around the reporting they do. The reporting will need to be far deeper and almost, by definition, becomes unique: Both in terms of its relevance to the user and the fact of its collection (after all, no one else is doing it). That’s a tall order for an organization only thinking about slapping a fee on product that looks increasingly generic. In their case (and others are thinking the same thing), asking readers to pay for “content” will fail.

About three years ago, a curious guy set up a website named Hoboken411. He started going to all the council meetings and actually reporting, visiting and reviewing local restaurants, keeping up with local happenings, generally mouthing off and adding photos. The web site, now a virtual town square, appears to be providing Perry a decent wage but its popularity is really evidenced by the number of comments each article receives. Almost every post (of substance) garners 50 comments and often many more. The ‘discussions’ are often vitriolic and opinionated, but every local politician and concerned citizen of Hoboken now visits the site to understand what’s going on. Make no mistake - this is an ‘unprofessional’ site (all due respect) by old media’s definition, but Hoboken411 is a precursor of the emerging local journalism of the near-term future.

Traditional newspaper media companies are still consumed by “the machine”. Obstacles as intransigent as union rules preclude a journalist from carrying a video camera and recording equipment and delivering multi-media presented on the newspaper’s website. Perry and those like him have no such restrictions. Whereas actual newspapers could logically be considered a ‘platform’ for the delivery of content, these old-line publishers have no online equivalent. Real success in local reporting would require an ability to templatize and automate the presentation of their news no matter how local the segment. This would allow the newspaper publishers to extend technologies including mapping, photo uploads, comments, polls, groups/community and other services similar to those offered by companies such as yelp.com and craigslist. (In fact, it is hard to understand why there is no local/community news on either of those sites).

A few years ago, I predicted that the NYTimes would open their platform for other newspapers to use. In doing so, I saw the NYTimes had the potential to build a revenue stream as a service provider, as well as providing the company with a wider pool of potential product-development ideas. My thought was not that the Times license this technology to other large city newspapers but, rather, they do so to medium- and small-sized news organizations. Application of this technology would enable these local news organizations to focus on gathering hyper-local content and building community, while giving the NYTimes a much wider profile. And, obviously, the Times would benefit from important stories that surfaced up to their level from its wide variety of content partners. Last month, at an invitation-only open house for web developers, one of the attendees addressed this very issue and it seems the Times maybe thinking along these lines. How this idea develops will be interesting to watch. Regardless, the Times is something of a different beast even among large-city newspapers. In the US, the WSJ may be the only other paper that could do something similar.

In February, the Times launched two ‘hyper-local’ websites which could represent their first step in developing a more local approach and it remains to be seen how successful this will be. We know ‘viral’ is impossible to bottle and it is very likely that, when local journalism returns in some organized and coordinated way to the local communities of central New Jersey, its origins are more likely to be anarchic; however, if these ‘journalists’ (like Perry) have access to powerful tools and platforms such as those the NYTimes could offer them, we will see a revitalization of this significant cornerstone of democracy.

MediaWeek (Vol 2, No 40): Curating, Larsson, BooksEtc, Disney, Magazines

Interesting article in Sunday's NYTimes about curating content in the retail sense. Some relevance to book retailing and publishing although not specifically noted in the article (NYTimes):

The word “curate,” lofty and once rarely spoken outside exhibition corridors or British parishes, has become a fashionable code word among the aesthetically minded, who seem to paste it onto any activity that involves culling and selecting. In more print-centric times, the term of art was “edit” — as in a boutique edits its dress collections carefully. But now, among designers, disc jockeys, club promoters, bloggers and thrift-store owners, curate is code for “I have a discerning eye and great taste.”
Or more to the point, “I belong.”
For many who adopt the term, or bestow it on others, “it’s an innocent form of self-inflation,” said John H. McWhorter, a linguist and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. “You’re implying that there is some similarity between what you do and what someone with an advanced degree who works at a museum does.”
Indeed, these days, serving as a guest curator of a design blog, craft fair or department store is an honor. Last month, Scott Schuman, creator of The Sartorialist, a photo blog about street fashion, was invited to curate a pop-up shop at Barneys New York.

The Girl Who kicked the Hornets' Nest by Stieg Larsson is the final book in Stieg Larsson's posthumously published Millennium trilogy and seals his status as a master storyteller, says Nick Cohen of the Observer. Of course not available in the US until next year. (Observer):

I cannot think of another modern writer who so successfully turns his politics away from a preachy manifesto and into a dynamic narrative device. Larsson's hatred of injustice will drive readers across the world through a three-volume novel and leave them regretting reaching the final page; and regretting, even more, the early death of a master storyteller just as he was entering his prime.

In the UK Borders has announced that it will retire the BooksEtc and Borders Express brands (Independent):

Borders UK has confirmed it plans to remove the Books Etc and Borders Express brands from the high street. The bookseller – which in July completed a management buyout backed by the retail restructuring specialist Hilco – is trying to sell its remaining seven Books Etc shops and two smaller format Borders Express stores.

Books Etc has been a financial millstone around the neck of Borders UK for a number of years. The retailer's spokesman said: "I can confirm that our future strategy is single-brand." Earlier this month, Borders UK said it would close its Books Etc outlet in Staines, Surrey. The company, which has 36 core Borders stores, came close to collapse in July under its previous owner Risk Capital Partners, the private equity vehicle of Luke Johnson, the Channel 4 chairman.

Was Frankenstein too good to have been written by a woman? (HuffPo):

The debate has continued right up until the present day, most recently through the publication of John Lauritsen's The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein (Pagan Press, 2007). The logic of the doubters has not shifted noticeably for 200 years: Frankenstein is too good to have been written by a young woman, therefore it must have been written by a man.
Percy Shelley was indisputably present at the birth of the creature, who was born in the Swiss countryside during the unseasonably rainy summer of 1816. Mary and Percy Shelley were part of a group that included Lord Byron, Claire Clairmont, and John Polidori, Byron's personal physician. To beguile the hours, the group took to reading German ghost stories and decided to try and write their own. Mary was stuck for inspiration for several days when finally one night her dreams yielded up the image of a depraved scientist bringing to life a ghastly simulacrum of a man.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/victoria-rosner/co-creating-a-monster_b_301089.html

Disney launch a subscription based web site for children (NYTimes):

DisneyDigitalBooks.com, which is aimed at children ages 3 to 12, is organized by reading level. In the “look and listen” section for beginning readers, the books will be read aloud by voice actors to accompanying music (with each word highlighted on the screen as it is spoken). Another area is dedicated to children who read on their own. Find an unfamiliar word? Click on it and a voice says it aloud. Chapter books for teenagers and trivia features round out the service.
“For parents, this isn’t going to replace snuggle time with a storybook,” said Yves Saada, vice president of digital media. “We think you can have different reading formats co-existing together.”
Publishers, of course, have been experimenting with e-books for the children’s market for years. About 1,000 children’s titles are now available digitally from HarperCollins. Scholastic has BookFlix, a subscription service for schools and libraries that pairs a video storybook with a nonfiction e-book on a related topic. “Curious George” is available on the iPhone.

There may be a new service provider in the magazine space that would aggregate magazine content for readers using electronic devices such as the Kindle, Blackberry, and iTouch. (ATD):

The idea: The new company, which will operate independently from the publishers that invest in it, will create a digital storefront where consumers can purchase and manage their subscriptions, which can be delivered to any device. The pitch: Control a direct relationship with consumers while gaining leverage with heavyweights like Apple (AAPL) and Amazon (AMZN).
Industry executives briefed on Squires’s plan say it has been well received by Time Inc.’s peers and that several major publishers, including Hearst and Condé Nast, are expected to sign on for the JV, which isn’t scheduled to debut until 2010. No comment from Hearst, Condé Nast or Time Inc., a unit of Time Warner (TWX).

Newsweek looks at the 'controversy' over holding back big books from the eBook store and gets to the nub of the issue (NewsW):

Why isn't Amazon.com livid about this? After all, this technology firm is providing the beleaguered publishing industry a more efficient way to reach readers, and it's being stiffed on some big sellers. It may be that Amazon is losing money on many sales it makes of Kindle-ready books. With the Kindle, Amazon has inverted the old business model of giving away the shaver and selling the blades. Amazon is using the blades (cheap books, in this case) as a loss leader to induce people to pay up for the shaver (the $299 Kindle). As I understand it, Amazon pays the same wholesale price for Kindle books as it does for real books—generally 50 percent of the list price. For a typical hardback that retails for $26—say, E.L. Doctorow's Homer & Langley—Amazon pays $13 and then sells it for $9.99 on the Kindle, taking a $3 loss on each sale. (The longer-term strategy, publishers fear, is that once the Kindle gains significant market share, Amazon will negotiate lower wholesale prices for digital versions.) In the short term, though, this means that Amazon is likely to lose more money on more expensive books sold on the Kindle. It would have to pay $17.50 per "copy" of the digital version of True Compass, and $14.50 per copy for Going Rogue, but would sell them for significantly less. It may seem perverse, but once Amazon has sold a Kindle to a customer, it doesn't have all that much incentive to sell expensive books to the Kindle owner—unless it's willing to boost the prices of electronic books significantly.

The Kindle goes to Princeton to mixed reviews. However, in the comments students unload on the whiners (DailyP):

But though they acknowledged some benefits of the new technology, many students and faculty in the three courses said they found the Kindles disappointing and difficult to use.
“I hate to sound like a Luddite, but this technology is a poor excuse of an academic tool,” said Aaron Horvath ’10, a student in Civil Society and Public Policy. “It’s clunky, slow and a real pain to operate.”
Horvath said that using the Kindle has required completely changing the way he completes his coursework.
“Much of my learning comes from a physical interaction with the text: bookmarks, highlights, page-tearing, sticky notes and other marks representing the importance of certain passages — not to mention margin notes, where most of my paper ideas come from and interaction with the material occurs,” he explained. “All these things have been lost, and if not lost they’re too slow to keep up with my thinking, and the ‘features’ have been rendered useless.”

MediaWeek (Vol 2, No 31): Education, Oxfam, e-Readers, Journals

Some of these were on the twitter (@personanondata) this week.

The NYTimes looks at digital content in schools and recognise it is going to come faster to college level than school. (NYT):

Whenever it comes, the online onslaught — and the competition from open-source materials — poses a real threat to traditional textbook publishers.
Most of the digital texts submitted for review in California came from a nonprofit group, CK-12 Foundation, that develops free “flexbooks” that can be customized to meet state standards, and added to by teachers. Its physics flexbook, a Web-based, open-content compilation, was introduced in Virginia in March.
“The good part of our flexbooks is that they can be anything you want,” said Neeru Khosla, a founder of the group. “You can use them online, you can download them onto a disk, you can print them, you can customize them, you can embed video. When people get over the mind-set issue, they’ll see that there’s no reason to pay $100 a pop for a textbook, when you can have the content you want free.”

Publishing sales into the California educational market are way off given the state's budgeting issues (LAT):

California school districts spent at least $633 million on new books in 2007, according to the Assn. of American Publishers. More recent numbers are not available, but a representative of one publishing house who asked not to be named because of proprietary concerns said sales in the state -- the nation's biggest textbook market -- are off by 50% or more.

"We're all seeing a precipitous drop," said John Sipe Jr., vice president of K-12 sales in California for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Fewer than 200 California districts have bought reading/literature texts this year, compared with publishers' typical expectation of 600 to 700, he said.

"This is a staggering difference for our industry," Sipe said.

Long running controversy over high street bookshops run by Oxfam which receive their stock for free. The business also has antiquarian experts on staff who identify the gems that are unknowingly donated to the shops (Telegraph)

It has been estimated that 15 years ago, there were about 3,000 second-hand and antiquarian bookshops in Britain. By 2004, there were only about 1,500 left. Everyone in the trade knows someone who has had to close. In contrast, Oxfam opened its first bookshop in St Giles, Oxford, in 1987. Today, it has 130 outlets in Britain, which make an average of 21 per cent more than the regular Oxfam charity shops.
Working in a second-hand bookshop, it is hard not to be at least a little envious. Last year, Oxfam made £19 million from selling books. Its website boasts that it is the largest retailer of second-hand books in Europe, selling around 11 million books a year. As a charity, it gets an 80 per cent reduction in business rates. It has a slick PR team, it doesn't have to pay for stock and it attracts thousands of volunteers – some of them even celebrities. It can even afford to open shops in prime retail locations: it is common to see bookshops snuggled next to major high street brands, on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, or in Marylebone in London. The rest of us usually have to make do with less glittering locations.

Video interview with Larry Kirshbaum and Jane Friedman (GalleyCat):

Publishing giants Jane Friedman and Larry Kirshbaum shared a long, candid web video interview with Samantha Ettus--taking a blunt look at the future of publishing.
On the web show, Obsessed with Samantha Ettus, both publishing executives were frank about their leadership. "The truth is I always thought bigger was better. That was one of my mantras. Now what's happened is publishers have a bottom line to protect," explained Friedman, the former CEO of HarperCollins Publishers Worldwide. "And to protect that, they have to publish more and more books just to get that top-line revenue. That is so unhealthy."

Mediapost notes an NPD study on e-Readers:

The study found that 40% of those surveyed were only "somewhat interested" or "not interested at all" in buying an e-reader. How come? Of those who don't want one, 70% said it was because they prefer the feel of an actual book.
Among the 37% who were either "very" or "somewhat" interested in obtaining an e-reader, one of the main factors was the ability to buy and store multiple books, magazines, and newspapers. More than half of consumers were interested in features already offered in current devices like the Kindle's wireless capability and the Sony's Reader's touchscreen.
"Today's e-reader offerings are delivering capabilities that are in demand by consumers," said Ross Rubin, director of industry analysis at NPD, in a statement. "However, some features that could enhance the appeal of more popular content, such as color, remain on the drawing board."

An archived version of a PW hosted discussion on the Google Book Settlement is available (PW):

In a webinar first, the leaders involved with the crafting of the Google Library Project Settlement will share with the publishing industry the benefits of the agreement for publishers and authors. If approved by the Court in October, the agreement will create one of the most far-reaching intellectual, cultural, and commercial platforms for access to digital books for the reading public, while granting publishers unprecedented opportunities and protections. Presented in collaboration with Google, The Association of American Publishers, and Publishers Weekly, the web session is a must-attend event for publishers everywhere.

Ghostwritten scholarly 'research' papers may be a larger issue than first thought. Afterall, its not something you would promote (NYT):

The ghostwritten papers were typically review articles, in which an author weighs a large body of medical research and offers a bottom-line judgment about how to treat a particular ailment. The articles appeared in 18 medical journals, including The American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology and The International Journal of Cardiology.
The articles did not disclose Wyeth’s role in initiating and paying for the work.
Elsevier, the publisher of some of the journals, said it was disturbed by the allegations of ghostwriting and would investigate.The documents on ghostwriting were uncovered by lawyers suing Wyeth and were made public after a request in court from PLoS Medicine, a medical journal from the Public Library of Science, and The New York Times.

MediaWeek (Vol 2, No 20): Harpercollins, NYTimes, Long Tail,

In the NY Observer this week Debbie Stier from Harpercollins and Harper Studio is asked about social and digital media (Observer):

“Change is easier for some people than for others,” she said. "You know how some people are hoarders and they don't like to throw anything out? I'm the opposite: I get this weird thrill from throwing everything out and having nothing." Ms. Stier is the head of digital marketing at HarperCollins, as well as the associate publisher of HarperStudio, the small imprint there whose stated mission since it formed last spring has been to question conventional industry wisdom concerning advances and returns, and to experiment with untested methods of promotion. Ms. Stier is among the most visible and energetic believers in the idea that publishers must stop relying on critics, journalists and talk show hosts for coverage, and instead start finding creative ways of reaching readers directly through emerging social media tools like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.

“I’ve been running down the halls screaming ‘fire’ for a couple of years now, and you know, I feel like it’s only recently that people are starting to hear me,” Ms. Stier said. “It’s hard for me because I’m up here in my own little beehive of exciting stuff, and I forget that there’s a world of people out there in the rest of the industry who don’t believe. But there are definitely pockets of people who do, and those pockets are growing more and more, faster and faster, which is good.”

There is a lot of debate about the merits of the central arguments made by Chris Andersen in The Long Tail - that is, whether there is one. A new report (summarized here) looks at P2P and appears to debunk the Long Tail concept:

A study of P2P music exchanges to be revealed this week suggests that the ailing music business is shunning a lucrative lifeline by refusing to license the activity for money. Entitled "The Long Tail of P2P", the study by Will Page of performing rights society PRS For Music and Eric Garland of P2P research outfit Big Champagne will be aired at The Great Escape music convention tomorrow. It's a follow-up to Page's study last year which helped debunk the myth of the "Long Tail".

Page examined song purchases at a large online digital retail store, which showed that out of an inventory of 13 million songs, 10 million had never been downloaded, even once. It suggested that the idea proposed by WiReD magazine editor Chris Anderson, who in 2004 urged that the future of business was digital retailers carrying larger inventories of slow-selling items was a Utopian fantasy.

Via Mr Nash, here is the link to the whole document. (Link)

The brianiacs at the NYTimes are showing off some of their toys. (Nieman)

The R&D group is obsessed with the ability to seamlessly transition among web-enabled gadgets. They’re not convinced that the future will land on a single, multipurpose contraption — like some sort of Kindle meets Chumby meets Minority Report. Instead, they predict consumers will connect to the Internet through their cars, on their televisions, over mobile networks, and in traditional browsers, while expecting those devices to interact and sync with each other.

Reports in the Guardian from the Journalism Enterprise and Experimentation unconference in sunny Birmingham looked at hyper-local success stories (Guardian):

A session in a break-out room featured James Hatts talking about the London SE1 Community website. James was quite candid about getting different levels of support for the initiative from different organisations. Their patch covers Southwark and Lambeth. Southwark Council have, it seems, for years treated them as a news outlet on an equal footing with the traditional local media. By contrast, SE1 have found it difficult at times to even get Lambeth Council to send them press releases. Similarly, Hatt said that whilst Scotland Yard were forthcoming with information about serious crime in the area, the local police forces were more cagey.

The International Coalition of Library Consortia has weighed in on the OCLC data usage guidelines (ICOLC):

The member consortia endorsing this ICOLC statement add our recommendation to others in the library community calling for OCLC to withdraw the proposed policy and start anew to formulate a record use policy. Most notably we add our support to the January 30, 2009 Final Report to the ARL Board by the Ad Hoc Task Force to Review the Proposed OCLC Policy for Use and Transfer of WorldCat Records. It includes an extended review of the policy and six recommendations. We concur with the ARL report that OCLC develop a new policy based on widespread member library participation with a clear set of goals and explanations as to how the policy will achieve these goals and how member libraries will be affected operationally and legally.

Caroline Pittis from Harpercollins uses BookBusiness magazine to argue publishers must be less reclusive in order to thrive in the social economy (BookBus):

So, how do book publishers add visible value for their authors and consumers in new ways? What needs to change, and perhaps more importantly, what needs to stay the same? As both a publishing “insider” and a frequent reader of publishing’s critics, I am often struck by how the public discussion of these questions is fundamentally different than private ones, how the focus of those inside publishing houses is different from those in the blogosphere. Beyond publishers’ walls, the tremendous value editors and their publishing colleagues provide in helping an author create a publishable work is often unknown. Yet, the vast majority of publishing time and energy go into just this activity—the core of what publishers do.

In the blogosphere, some opine about how hidebound and irrelevant publishers now are, how slow to change and resistant to risks. It makes good copy sometimes—I know I always bite on the most critical headlines first! Rare are the critics, however, who have concrete, insightful, specific suggestions of how to evolve publishing without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Black-and-white thinking and talk of violent revolution distract many from the natural evolution that is both occurring and will likely be more sustaining for the “book” economy in the long run.

MediaWeek (Vol 2, No 16): OCLC, Television, NYTimes

OCLC gather bibliographic experts to discuss metadata needs and practices for publishers and libraries. From their summary press release:

This report is a high level summary of proceedings, outcomes and proposed next steps. Participant biographies, agenda, presentations, related reading and upcoming events can also be accessed from this Symposium website. Purpose of the Symposium: Explore current models for creation, distribution and maintenance of publisher supply chain and library metadata: Are they sustainable? What are the common needs? Are they subject to duplication of effort across communities? To what extent are they shared and interoperable? Explore new paradigms for metadata creation, distribution and maintenance that: Are more easily shared and interoperable, start upstream and allow metadata to evolve over time, engage multiple communities in the metadata lifecycle

Also, OCLC has updated the interface for worldcat.org and it looks pretty spiffy. Here is a link to an entry for The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford and one of my favorite books. OCLC also took an important step in creating a set of network services dedicated to the library community. Long in the making, OCLC has put some definition around how it sees its revised role in the library world. (This move by them requires a much longer post).

OCLC's vision is similar to Software as a Service (SaaS) but is distinguished by the cooperative "network effect" of all libraries using the same, shared hardware, services and data, rather than the alternative model of hosting hardware and software on behalf of individual libraries. Libraries would subscribe to Web-scale management services that include modular management functionality. Moreover, libraries would benefit from the network-level integration of numerous services that are not currently part traditional integrated library systems, e.g., Knowledge Base Integration, WorldCat Collection Analysis, WorldCat Selection, WorldCat Local, etc..

NYTimes (via GigaOm) points out the likely long term failure of international rights in the age of eBooks. (Well not really but that's at the core of this issue). NYT

So we see that Fictionwise is not the only retailer affected by these outdated licensing practices, and that’s exactly what is at play here. Publishers like Fictionwise and Amazon do not own the content they sell, they simply license it for sale just like you and I license it when we buy e-books. The archaic licensing system means that publishers have to make separate license deals for each country in which they want to sell e-books. This is something that is very difficult to do, even for the bigger houses like Fictionwise and Amazon.

BTW - Those DVD's that President Obama give to Gordon Brown a week ago don't work in the UK. (Guardian) In Newsweek, read about changes in Television that could presage changes in publishing.

For decades network TV has been about reach. Programmers traditionally chose shows with broad appeal, the better to get millions of viewers and, in turn, persuade national advertisers to buy those eyeballs. That era is essentially over and the networks are scrambling to adapt to a fragmented landscape where even popular shows are lucky to pull in 10 million viewers. "They have to rethink what they put on the air, how many hours they'll do it, everything in their playbook," says a former top executive who now produces TV shows.

LATimes festival of books and discussing the future of books. The always quotable Richard Nash: (LAT)

Nash noted that poetry micropresses are flourishing in this new, hectic publishing environment. With what may be the quote of the festival, he added, "Poetry, like porn, is a harbinger of culture."

Private Equity investment firm has taken a bath on NYTimes shares and maybe looking to off load them. Who would buy? Reuters

Interest has grown as Harbinger, which bought the shares as part of a campaign against the Times to change its business, reels from losses in its funds, the Journal reported.

Harbinger bought the Times stake over a period of weeks in 2007 and 2008, eventually pouring more than $500 million into the publisher. Since then, Times shares have fallen along with other newspapers, which are fighting for their lives as advertising revenue slumps.

Harbinger's stake is worth less than $160 million now.