MediaWeek (Vol 5, No 29): UK Frees Journal Articles, Amazon in Japan, Revising HigherEd, Blackboard Myths, Translations + More

UK is about to open up academic publishing.  (Guardian):

Though many academics will welcome the announcement, some scientists contacted by the Guardian were dismayed that the cost of the transition, which could reach £50m a year, must be covered by the existing science budget and that no new money would be found to fund the process. That could lead to less research and fewer valuable papers being published.

British universities now pay around £200m a year in subscription fees to journal publishers, but under the new scheme, authors will pay "article processing charges" (APCs) to have their papers peer reviewed, edited and made freely available online. The typical APC is around £2,000 per article.

Tensions between academics and the larger publishing companies have risen steeply in recent months as researchers have baulked at journal subscription charges their libraries were asked to pay.

More than 12,000 academics have boycotted the Dutch publisher Elsevier, in part of a broader campaign against the industry that has been called the "academic spring".

Why Amazon will have a hard time in Japan.  I guess we'll see if they're right.  (JapanTimes):

The problem they’re having in Japan is trying to negotiate that same kind of deal with domestic publishers. Like any long-established industry in Japan (or almost anything for that matter, from the nation’s government to even its foster care system), they are resistant to change. They don’t want to rock the boat, or experiment with new things. They don’t like the idea of cutting back on their wholesale prices, and thus reducing their profits. Especially to a big, foreign company from the U.S. Not after they’ve been doing things their own way for so long.

While Amazon is struggling to get publishers signed on for e-book distribution, Rakuten already has deals with a majority of them. A big part of that could be that Rakuten is a domestic Japanese company. They know what the publishing companies of their own country want and how far they’ll be willing to bend. Another factor could be that they’re not after drastically reduced wholesale pricing like Amazon is. Rakuten knows Japanese customers are used to paying high prices for media like books, music, and movies, and they’re not trying to change that. Besides, they’re already the equivalent of Japan’s own Amazon.com. They don’t need to revolutionize the book selling market to make their name, they’re just trying to break into the e-book market.

Interesting piece from Fast Company about revising the HEd curriculum (FastCo):

The opposition of “liberal arts” and “vocational education” carries with it a lot of residual 19th-century class snobbery as well as 20th-century quantitative bias. In the real world of the 21st century, there aren’t “two cultures.” We need both. As a cartoon circulating on Facebook would have it, “Science can tell you how to clone a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Humanities can tell you why this might be a bad idea.”

To get us thinking about the possibilities of real educational reform, I propose a Start-Up Core Curriculum for Entrepreneurship, Service, and Society (hokey, yes: SUCCESS). Neither a Great Books common core (which, however profound, rarely connects to a student’s specialized major) nor the duck, duck, goose model of distribution requirements (where students are left to make coherence from a welter of rhetoric, statistics, art appreciation, natural science, foreign language or other course offerings), the Start-Up Core Curriculum isn’t just about content mastery, but about putting deep knowledge along with basic skills into practice to address intractable real-world global problems.

Stop complaining: Five Myths about Blackboard (Inside HigherEd):

Myth #4 - Blackboard's Challenges Are Around Technology: It is easy to look at Blackboard's core Learn product, compare the platform against modern LMS's designed solely for cloud delivery (such as Instructure's Canvas), and conclude the Blackboard has a technology problem. The reality is that Blackboard has a large number of skilled developers and the capabilities to quickly design next generation cloud based learning services. Learning platforms that would benefit from all the Blackboard has learned about scalability, usability, and reliability. Blackboard's challenge is an installed user base of educational institutions that are reluctant to make big changes (for good reasons).   Everyone at Blackboard knows that mobile learning, interconnected platforms, and software as a service e-learning is the future. The key is figuring out how to help higher ed clients build that bridge between a legacy and modern e-learning infrastructure.  This is where the Services division will be so important, as change management is the most important and difficult component of increasing productivity (supported by technology) in higher ed.

From the Economist a look at book translations in Stories from Elsewhere (Econ):

The Illinois-based Dalkey Archive Press, which has been publishing international literature in English for 25 years, says the lack of literature in translation is a cultural crisis that is growing worse. Faced with such a homogeneous reading culture in her adopted Britain, Meike Ziervogel, a German native, started Peirene Press in 2008 in her north London home. She joins a handful of publishing pioneers such as New York’s Europa Editions and Rochester University’s Open Letter, which are working to chip away at the navel-gazing literary culture of Anglo-American letters. She publishes three novellas (each shorter than 200 pages) a year in English by celebrated European authors who are barely known outside their home countries.

From my twitter feed this week (slow week);

Hands-on: nearly instant photofinishing direct from your smartphone ArsTechnica

Library Groups, EFF Hit Back in HathiTrust Case http://www.PublishersWeekly

MediaWeek (Vol 5, No 27): Julian Barnes, eTextbooks Anyone? Inheriting eBooks + More

Julian Barnes writing in the Guardian about his life as a bibliofile:

By now, I was beginning to view books as more than just utilitarian, sources of information, instruction, delight or titillation. First there was the excitement and meaning of possession. To own a certain book – one you had chosen yourself – was to define yourself. And that self-definition had to be protected, physically. So I would cover my favourite books (paperbacks, inevitably, out of financial constraint) with transparent Fablon. First, though, I would write my name – in a recently acquired italic hand, in blue ink, underlined with red – on the edge of the inside cover. The Fablon would then be cut and fitted so that it also protected the ownership signature. Some of these books – for instance, David Magarshack's Penguin translations of the Russian classics – are still on my shelves.

Ten reasons students aren't actually using eTextbooks (Edudemic):

When e-textbooks were first introduced, they were supposed to be the wave of the future, and experts thought we’d see e-reader-toting students littering college campuses, and of course being adopted in droves by online university students.

But they haven’t taken off quite as expected: according to market research firm Student Monitor, only about 11% of college students have bought e-textbooks. So what happened? Here, we’ll explore several reasons why students aren’t yet warming up to the idea of e-textbooks today.

 Amanda Katz on NPR asks whether your grand children will inherit your eBooks (NPR):

In the age of the e-book, the paper book faces two possible and antithetical fates. It may become something to be discarded, as with the books that libraries scan and cannibalize. (In the introduction to another book, Unpacking My Library: Writers and Their Books, Price mentions the severed book spines that hang on the wall at Google, "like taxidermists' trophies.") Alternatively, it may become a special object to be preserved and traded. My grandfather's copy of War of the Worlds obviously falls into the second category — but very few of the millions of books published since the mid-19th century are ones you'd want to own. If Amazon has a "long tail" of obscure but occasionally purchased titles, the tail that goes back 150 years is near endless and thin as thread.

Meanwhile, the kind of "serial" book sharing (as Price describes it) that occurs over time is giving way to simultaneous, "synchronous" sharing. With the Kindle, you can see what thousands of other Kindle readers are highlighting in the book you're reading — a fairly astonishing innovation. But the passage of books from hand to hand, gathering inscriptions along the way, is not part of the e-book economy. Will your grandchild inherit your Kindle books? No one knows, but given password protection and the speed at which data becomes obsolete, that seems highly unlikely.

Real time language translation for in-class lectures is tested in Germany and could expand their pool of foreign students$  Maybe the could work on comprehension next (Chronicle):

The translation system could be an essential tool in making Karlsruhe and other German universities more attractive to international students, perhaps even allowing them to eventually abandon language requirements if it proves reliable enough.

Many students, in Germany and elsewhere, are also interested in translating from English into their own languages, especially Chinese, Mr. Waibel adds. “There’s tremendous potential for this,” both in classrooms and more generally, he says.

Even students who feel comfortable in the language in which a lecture is being delivered have said they find the automatic translator useful. Some have said they find that having a transcript in German helps improve their German and allows them to better follow a lecture, even if they don’t use the translation component.

Here's proof there's always a silver lining.  Sometimes in lace and satin.  And naughty.  (Observer):

"Once women see that sex shops are clean and then they visit again. Once they feel comfortable and realise that they are not the only people in the world trying to do something different they start asking the questions they would have asked years ago if they realised there was someone to ask."

Lesley Lewis, who first worked as a dancer in Soho in 1979 and now runs the famous French House pub, said the new generation of visitors were a welcome addition.

"Soho was always a place where people could be themselves. In the past it was gay men holding hands and if now it's women going to sex shops after reading Fifty Shades of Grey then that can't be a bad thing. Long may it carry on like that," she said.

From Twitter:

The Library of Congress curates 88 books that shaped America http://j.mp/Lc7bfU

Lectures go digital. NYTimes

The World's 54 Largest Book Publishers, 2012 PublishersWeekly 

OCLC & EBSCO Develop Partnership Offering Interoperability of Services 4 Libraries and Increased Options for Discovery Press Release

MediaWeek (Vol 5, N 20): Georgia State Opinion Round-Up

For those interested in how discussions are setting up around the Georgia State eReserves Case:

Kevin Smith at Duke (perhaps the first to write in detail about the opinion):

Overall there is good news for libraries in the decision issued late yesterday in the Georgia State University e-reserves copyright case.  Most of the extreme positions advocated by the plaintiff publishers were rejected, and Judge Evans found copyright infringement in only five excerpts from among the 99 specific reading that had been challenged in the case.
That means she found fair use, or, occasionally, some other justification, in 94 instances, or 95% of the time.
But that does not make this an easy decision for libraries to deal with.  Indeed, it poses a difficult challenge for everyone involved, it seems.  For the Judge, it was a monumental labor that took almost a year to complete.  She wrote 350 pages, working through a raft of legal arguments first and then painstakingly applying them to each of the challenged readings.  And for me, with a week’s vacation pending, I am trying to make sense of this tome before I leave, which is why I am writing this at four in the morning on a Saturday (please excuse typos!).

James Grimmelmann: Inside the Georgia State Opinion

Thus, the operational bottom line for universities is that it’s likely to be fair use to assign less than 10% of a book, to assign larger portions of a book that is not available for digital licensing, or to assign larger portions of a book that is available for digital licensing but doesn’t make significant revenues through licensing. This third prong is almost never going to be something that professors or librarians can evaluate, so in practice, I expect to see fair-use e-reserves codes that treat under 10% as presumptively okay, and amounts over 10% but less than some ill-defined maximum as presumptively okay if it has been confirmed that a license to make digital copies of excerpts from the book is not available.
The most interesting issue open in the case is the scope of any possible injunction. Given that Georgia State won on sixty-nine out of seventy-four litigated claims, while the publishers won on only five, I expect that the any injunction will need to be rather narrow. But given how amenable the court’s proposed limits are to bright-line treatment, it is likely that the publishers will push to write them in to the injunction.
My bottom line on the case is that it’s mostly a win for Georgia State and mostly a loss for the publishers. The big winner is CCC. It gains leverage against universities for coursepack and e-reserve copying with a bright-line rule, and it gains leverage against publishers who will be under much more pressure to participate in its full panoply of licenses.

 ARL: GSU Fair Use Decision Recap and Implications (PDF) Hat tip Brantley

In addition to the statutory factors, courts are required to consider how a
proposed fair use serves or disserves the purpose of copyright, which is to
encourage the creation and dissemination of creative works. The judge’s
reasoning here is perhaps the most compelling and shows that she took into
account some key facts about the academic publishing market that are often
overlooked in these discussions. Based on testimony from GSU professors, the
judge finds that academic authors and editors are motivated by professional
reputation and achievement and the advancement of knowledge, not royalty
payments, and that any diminution in royalty payments due to unlicensed
course reserves would have no effect on their motivation to produce
scholarship.8 Indeed, because the authors of such works are also the primary
users of course reserve systems, they would experience a net benefit from fair
use in that context. The court emphasizes that publishers receive so little income
from licensing excerpts as a percentage of their overall business that the slight
diminution caused by allowing unlicensed posting to course reserves would
have no cognizable effect on their will or ability to publish new works.
Unfortunately, these additional considerations do not enter into the individual
determinations. Rather, the court finds that any uses that stay within her
framework will serve the purposes of copyright, and those that stray beyond it
will disserve them.

 In Some Leeway, Some Limits over at Inside Higher Ed:

While the legal analysis may take time, both publishers and academic librarians have reacted strongly throughout the case. Publishers argued hat their system of promoting scholarship can't lose copyright benefits. Judge Evans in her decision noted that most book (and permission) sales for student use are by large for-profit companies, not by nonprofit university presses. But the Association of American University Presses has backed the suit by Cambridge and Oxford, saying that university presses "depend upon the income due them to continue to publish the specialized scholarly books required to educate students and to advance university research."
Many librarians, meanwhile, have expressed shock that university presses would sue a university for using their works for teaching purposes. Barbara Fister, a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College and an Inside Higher Ed blogger, tweeted Friday night: "It still boggles my mind that scholarly presses are suing scholars teaching works that were written to further knowledge."
The reserve readings at the crux of the dispute are chapters, essays or portions of books that are assigned by Georgia State professors to their undergraduate and graduate students. (While the readers are frequently referred to as "supplemental," they are generally required; "supplemental" refers to readings supplementing texts that the professors tell students to buy.) E-reserves are similar to the way an earlier generation of students might have gone to the library for print materials on reserve. The decision in this case notes a number of steps taken by Georgia State (such as password protection) to prevent students from simply distributing the electronic passages to others.

The Chronicle of Higher Ed: "Mostly favors Georgia State":

"My initial reaction is, honestly, what a crushing defeat for the publishers," said Brandon C. Butler, the director of public-policy initiatives for the Association of Research Libraries. Given how few claims the publishers won, "there's a 95 percent success rate for the GSU fair-use policy." The ruling suggests that Georgia State is "getting it almost entirely right" with its current copyright policy, he said.
The three publishers brought their suit in April 2008. The Association of American Publishers and the Copyright Clearance Center, which licenses content to universities on behalf of publishers, helped foot the bill.
In their complaint, the plaintiffs alleged that Georgia State went well beyond fair use in how much copyrighted material it allowed faculty members to post online for students. The university denied the claim and overhauled its e-reserves policy in late 2008, after the lawsuit was brought. As a state institution, it also invoked sovereign immunity, which meant that the publishers would have a harder time seeking damages.

Publisher's Weekly: AAP Statement on the Opinion

At the same time, we are disappointed with aspects of the Court's decision.  Most importantly, the court failed to examine the copying activities at GSU in their full context.  Many faculty members have provided students with electronic anthologies of copyrighted course materials which are not different in kind from copyrighted print materials.

In addition, the court's analysis of fair use principles was legally incorrect in some places and its application of those principles mistaken.  As a result, instances of infringing activity were incorrectly held to constitute fair use. Publishers recognize that certain academic uses of copyrighted materials are fair use that should not require permission but we believe the court misapplied that doctrine in certain situations.

The Court’s ruling has important implications for the ongoing vitality of academic publishing as well as the educational mission of colleges and universities. Contrary to the findings of the Court, if institutions such as GSU are allowed to offer substantial amounts of copyrighted content for free, publishers cannot sustain the creation of works of scholarship. The resources available to educators will be fundamentally impaired.

 Ars Technica: Fair Use is Hard

So—crushing victory for Georgia State, whose professors can now dance gleefully through the ash of their foes in publishing? Not quite. After years of litigation, the case came down to 75 particular items that the publishers argued were infringing. Five unlicensed excerpts (from four different books) did exceed the amount allowed under factor three above. These books include The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research in both its second and third editions, along with The Power Elite and the no-doubt-scintillating tome Utilization-Focused Evaluation (Third Edition).
While the university had issued a 2009 guide designed to help faculty know when they needed a license for excerpts, the judge found that the policy "did not limit copying in those instances to decidedly small excerpts as required by this Order. Nor did it proscribe the use of multiple chapters from the same book."
Still, copyright and fair use can be murky, and the judge found no bad faith on the school's part, concluding: "The truth is that fair use principles are notoriously difficult to apply."

 Inside Higher Ed With Some Updates

Update, 5/15: In a conference call with reporters, Rich, along with Tom Allen, the president of AAP, disputed the popular notion that the publishers had "lost" the lawsuit. Before the publishers brought the suit four years ago, Georgia State's standards for e-reserve copying were far more permissive. Only afterward, in anticipation of a court trial, did Georgia State tighten its e-reserves policies, Rich said. During the trial, Judge Evans said she would only consider the fair use merits of instances of alleged infringement that occurred during a specific period after Georgia State had overhauled its practices.
Therefore, the judge's ruling was based on legal parsing of examples "that nobody thought would be the focal point of this lawsuit when it was brought,” Rich said. “So for Georgia State to declare victory as to those kinds of works is a false trail.”
While the scorecard might not have favored the publishers, the lawsuit forced Georgia State to shore up its e-reserve practices and confirmed that publishers' copyright protections do indeed apply to e-reserves. And that, Rich said, is not small victory. The lawsuit "was never about drawing the line at this point or that point, but to address a system that basically snubbed its nose at copyright," he said. “At a very fundamental level, that issue has been affirmatively addressed."

My contribution: Georgia Opinion - I see opportunity

Judge Evans has plainly stated that if a publisher's chapter is readily and easily available and the permission is set at a "reasonable price" then the law comes down on the publisher's side.  She notes specifically, Copyright Clearance Center which can deliver a permissions fee to the user (faculty, librarian, etc.) via Rightslink and, although CCC does not hold the actual content, publishers will be motivated to create digital repositories at a disaggregated level.

Background to the Case:

Chronicle of Higher Ed: What's at Stake in the Georgia Case (2011):

A closely watched trial in federal court in Atlanta, Cambridge University Press et al. v. Patton et al., is pitting faculty, libraries, and publishers against one another in a case that could clarify the nature of copyright and define the meaning of fair use in the digital age. Under copyright law, the doctrine of fair use allows some reproduction of copyrighted material, with a classroom exemption permitting an unspecified amount to be reproduced for educational purposes.
At issue before the court is the practice of putting class readings on electronic reserve (and, by extension, on faculty Web sites). Cambridge, Oxford University Press, and SAGE Publications, with support from the Association of American Publishers and the Copyright Clearance Center, are suing four administrators at Georgia State University. But the publishers more broadly allege that the university (which, under "state sovereign immunity," cannot be prosecuted in federal court) has enabled its staff and students to claim what amounts to a blanket exemption to copyright law through an overly lenient definition of the classroom exemption. The plaintiffs are asking for an injunction to stop university personnel from making material available on e-reserve without paying licensing fees. A decision is expected in several weeks. The Chronicle asked experts in scholarly communications what the case may mean for the future:

 Library Journal (2010):

According to a ruling on October 1, the closely watched Georgia State University (GSU) ereserves lawsuit will come down to whether the named defendants participated in the specific act of "contributory infringement," as two other original accusations were removed from the case.

This narrows the scope of the charges lodged by the publisher plaintiffs—Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, and SAGE Publications—and has Fair Use advocates cautiously optimistic as the case moves closer to trial.

In a blog post, library copyright watchdog and Duke Scholarly Communications Officer Kevin Smith wrote that he was "surprised at how favorable the ruling issued yesterday is to Georgia State; even though the Judge clearly expects to go to trial, there is a lot in her ruling to give hope and comfort to the academic community."

Barring a narrow settlement, the case could have a broad effect on academic library practice. If GSU's current policies are affirmed, libraries nationwide with similar digital reserves policies will be reassured if not emboldened. Should the plaintiffs prevail, however, there is likely to be a considerable chill on Fair Use deliberations as libraries reconsider the digital access they grant to copyrighted materials.

Two levels of infringement tossed out
Judge Orina Evans of Federal District Court in Atlanta ruled against all of the plaintiffs' motions for summary judgment, and granted two of the defendants' three counter-motions.

This ruling essentially holds there to be insufficient evidence to show that the named defendants (GSU's president Mark Becker, provost, associate provost for technology, and dean of libraries, Charlene Hurt) committed any acts of infringement, thus ruling out a charge of "direct infringement."

Likewise, Judge Evans similarly determined that there was no evidence of any profit directly from infringement committed by librarians under their supervision, excluding "vicarious infringement." 

MediaWeek (Vol 4, No 41): Frankfurt 2011, Indian Authors, Digital Rights,

Frankfurt has always been my favorite of the trade shows I've visited.  There's such a variety of people, customers and potential business partners that its unlike any other book show.

It is a gloomy day today and rain is forecast for tomorrow but the threat of industrial action may be less imminent since the government has become directly involved in getting the parties to negotiate. 

A delegation from India is presenting a collection of indigenous Indian works for translation as reported by India's Daily News and Analysis:

In a first showcase of Indian indigenous writing, a literary panorama featuring works by over 30 language writers will be on display at the Frankfurt Book Fair in a pilot exhibition for readers and publishers from Europe, the US and other countries.

The literary panorama, initiated by the union culture ministry under the 'ILA: Indian Literature Abroad' project, will be held Oct 12-16.

The project aims to carry the diversity of contemporary regional Indian literature from the grassroots to the world through source translation, which involves creation of original work directly to foreign languages in an attempt to remove dependence on English translation, a top ILA official said.

Initially, the focus of translation is on six UNESCO languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish.

“The project requires patience and nurturing. It is (in the) long term. We want to understand the kind of Indian language books the international market likes and the market dynamics. We are looking at source language translations - like from Tamil to French," writer Namita Gokhale, the member secretary of Indian Literature Abroad project, told IANS.

"Translating a regional literary work first into English and then into a foreign language results in loss of textual matter,” she said.

“Different cultures appreciate different kind of literature,” she added.

Gokhale heads the delegation carrying the Indian literary showcase to Frankfurt Tuesday.

A discussion, 'Romancing the Languages: Indian Literature's Journeys' will debate on the future of Indian regional language writing and its global positioning Oct 13.

The Bookseller doesn't expect the slow global economy to impact the US business at Frankfurt (Bookseller):

Meanwhile, organisers are expecting 7,500 exhibitors at the fair, as the halls reach capacity. FBF spokesperson Katja Boehne said there will be 761 exhibitors from the UK and 604 from the US, with between 280,000 to 290,000 visitors set to come through the doors—of which around 150,000 will be trade visitors. She said: "We will see at this book fair what publishers have made of the digital options. There will be lots of enhanced e-books and multimedia projects, some of which we don't have a name for. There will be a large dollop of creativity and new ideas."

Boehne added that the numbers of exhibitors and visitors was "more or less" the same as last year, as the fair has "come to the end of capacity; there is no space left for extra exhibitors".

In Publishers' Weekly Rachel Deahl suggests this years Frankfurt will be about digital rights just like last year and the year before and she concludes, (PW):

And then there’s the growing concern and confusion over e-books and the open market. Under the reigning territorial model, the open market right allows publishers to sell English-language books in European countries outside the U.K. Whether the open market can, or should, be preserved in the digital world is a recurring question. A recent court ruling, outside the book world, may also be a topic of conversation in Frankfurt. In Football Association Premier League Ltd. et al. v. QC Leisure et al., an E.U. court just ruled that a British pub owner was not legally allowed to use a decoder to air Greek soccer games in her bar; without the decoder she would have had to pay a licensing fee to Sky Sport. The ruling had to do with the fact that Sky Sport had negotiated an exclusive licensing fee with the Premier League to air its games in the U.K., and, although the decoders are legal, they cannot be used to show the games to a group. Attorney C.E. Petit, who blogs about publishing and the law at Scrivener’s Error, picked up on the case and noted that the judgment might have implications in the book world. Since Europe is now under a more unified copyright law, with the establishment of the E.U., there could be a case about multiple English-language editions being sold in Europe. In other words, there could now be legal ground for stamping out the open market in publishing.

A not well known Irish author Flann O'Brien gets and appreciation from More Intelligent Life:

Despite the pseudonym, everyone in Dublin’s incestuous literary circles knew him. When he started openly mocking the civil service and expressing political opinions—a serious transgression for an employee of the state—he was invited to retire at age 42, in 1953. His pension, together with the slender income from his writing, might have let him succeed as a novelist. But O’Nolan was better at self-sabotage than self-promotion, and he died at 54 of cancer and alcoholism. He still left behind five novels, three of uneven quality and two, “At Swim-Two-Birds” and “The Third Policeman”, that are among the greatest accomplishments in English-language fiction.

He finished “At Swim-Two-Birds” when he was 28 and sent it off to Longmans, a London publisher, where by a rare stroke of good luck Graham Greene was reader. “I read it with continual excitement, amusement and the kind of glee one experiences when people smash china on the stage,” recalled Greene, who urged publication. From Paris, James Joyce, in a blurb written to help promote the book, pronounced its author “a real writer, with the true comic spirit.” O’Nolan was cautiously optimistic. But the cosmic balance was soon restored. War broke out and in 1940 the Luftwaffe destroyed the London warehouse in which the entire print run of the novel was stored; fewer than 250 had been sold. Then in 1941 Joyce, who had promised to help with publicity, suddenly died, along with O’Nolan’s hopes for the book. “[I]t must be a flop,” he wrote, wallowing in gloom. “I guess it is a bum book anyhow.”

From the twitter this week:

The adventures of Tintin – and CGI http://gu.com/p/32etq/tw

Armour to stand down as Reed finance chief - FT.com - Mediahttp://on.ft.com/nHFHnJ

Stars Will Read Amazon Unit's New Audio Book Series:http://nyti.ms/nWdh4E

MediaWeek (Vol 4, No 37): Scholarly Publishing, Project Gutenberg, Literary Festivals, Lawsuits, + More

The New York Times takes up the issue of "pricy" scholarly journals and leads with their view point (NYT):

After decades of healthy profits, the scholarly publishing industry now finds itself in the throes of a revolt led by the most unlikely campus revolutionaries: the librarians.

Whoever pays the bills, publishing is not free. Under the traditional business model most of the costs were met by subscribers, though some journals do also charge contributors, making scholarly publishing one of the most consistently profitable, if least noticed, corners of the business. Elsevier, for example, reported profits of £724 million on revenues of £2 billion last year alone. According the Mr. Suber converting to open access “will involve some cost shifting, But also considerable cost savings” for libraries and university budgets.

The traditional model does have its defenders. After George Monbiot, a British academic and journalist, published an article in The Guardian newspaper last month calling academic publishers “ruthless capitalists,” Graham Taylor, director of academic publishing at the London-based Publishers’ Association, told the journal Times Higher Education that all publishers “aspire to universal access” but that it would take time to find a “sustainable, scalable, funded” way to achieve it.

Writers at the Scholarly Kitchen blog, who are mostly involved in the less commercial end of publishing, said that although subscriptions for popular titles might be expensive, the cost for each individual reader remained very low.

They also noted that many titles with high fees for American or European readers were available free or at lower costs to researchers in the developing world through the Hinari program, a partnership of the World Health Organization and several major publishers including Elsevier, John Wiley and Blackwell.

Sir John Daniel, president of the Commonwealth of Learning, an organization that helps developing countries improve access to education, said such efforts did not go nearly far enough. “One of the major obstacles to education in the developing world is the lack of high quality teaching materials,” he said. “The countries we work with can’t afford journals; they’re already paying an arm and a leg for textbooks.”

“I’ve seen it from both sides,” said Sir John, who was once briefly on the board of Blackwell. “I saw the vast industry built up from publicly funded research, and it was never clear to me what value was being added. But if you needed the material, they had you over a barrel.”

On the whole this article meanders and doesn't offer any insight. The author notes the Elsevier profit numbers as de facto proof that academic publishers are blood-suckers.

Appreciation for Michael Hart the founder of Project Gutenberg from the Observer:

Those who knew him testify that Michael Hart was an extraordinary individual – idiosyncratic, original, humane, determined and generous to a fault. He never made much money, repaired his own car, had scant faith in medicine and built most of his own electronic gear from stuff he picked up in garage sales. On Saturday mornings over breakfast in the local diner, he would work out the optimum route to cover the maximum number of garage sales that day; it was his version of the travelling salesman problem in mathematics.In his obituary of Hart, his colleague Gregory Newby described him as an "unreasonable" man, in George Bernard Shaw's celebrated use of the term. "Reasonable people," wrote Shaw, "adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people."

From the Economist: It's good to have gatekeepers (Economist):

The more general question, however, is whether publishers like Amazon (and particularly Amazon) represent a threat to the older magazine model, in which a variety of articles are bundled together and sold for a price that, even on the newsstand, is lower than what a reader would expect to pay if buying everything piecemeal. Part of the reason readers buy magazines is because they are comfortable outsourcing some of the decision-making about content delivery, and welcome the fact that magazines curate the news. The last issue of the New Yorker, for example, included articles about Mr Perry, the gold standard, tarot cards, Wikipedia, Syria, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife Virginia, and Rin Tin Tin.

According to the Economist there are a raft of regional literary festivals going on in Asia. I need an invite. (Economist):

In contrast to bleak conditions in Western book markets, the Indian divisions of international publishers are busy signing up new authors. London’s literary agencies have opened offices in India. Namita Gokhale, a novelist and one of the Jaipur festival’s organisers, says that South Asia is having a “literary moment”. It is “exploring its place in a new world” in English, while also maintaining traditions in the region’s native languages. She believes making sense of South Asia’s many upheavals has something to do with the outbreak of writing and reading.

Fellow traveler Peter Brantley is now writing for Publishers Weekly. Here on defining "library" (PW):

We are now engaged in acts of social reconstruction. Just as digital networks have forced us to deeply question the role of publishers, they also force us to reconsider the role and purpose of libraries, which developed in the modern era around the presumption of the Industrial Age book right along with publishing. A library fills many needs in its community; it is an after-school day care and gaming center, an employment hall and meeting space, offering shelter and privacy. It has also been a place with shelf upon shelf of CDs, newspapers, magazines, and books. Indeed, our understanding of libraries is so bound up in the physical world that their presumptive value has most often been measured through a single proxy: how many books they hold.

Statement from Paul Courant of the University of Michigan in response to the Authors Guild suit against scanning (UM):

“The University of Michigan library has been digitizing books for more than 20 years Sections 108 and 107 of the federal Copyright Act provide the guidance and the authority for this work, which supports our ability to preserve and to lawfully use the collections that we have purchased and maintained. Moreover, our digitization efforts enable us to make works accessible to people who have print disabilities because the overwhelming majority of works have never been available in an accessible format.

And from the twitter this week.

From InfoBoy: New Report from EU: Electronic Clearance of Orphan Works Significantly Accelerates Mass Digitization: Link

IBM starts its own NYC high school: http://bit.ly/qvl4Ad

Pearson buys virtual school co for $400 million | Reuters uk.reuters.com/article/2011/0…

....

And in sports, Lancashire County Cricket Club which hasn't won a championship for 77 years won one this week on a squeaker end to the season. For Mr PND Senior who is Chairman of the Club, I think this is almost a crowning achievement. And, they get to go to the Palace. (MEveningNews)

Silos of Curation - Repost

Originally posted on April 29, 2009.


Publishers curate content but they don’t really do it well. And that’s a shame, because curation will be a skill in high demand as attention spans waver, choices proliferate and quality is mitigated by a preponderance of spurious material. That’s why companies such as LibraryThing, Goodreads, Shelfari, weread, BookArmy and others like them may be positioned to leverage communities of interest that mimic the ‘siloed’ offerings that larger and more mature publishing companies have successfully been offering their customers in law, tax and education for many years.

Trade ebook sales are only 1% of total revenues and, while they are growing rapidly, they may take as long as five years to reach 5%. In other publishing segments, this growth curve would be viewed as a failure as information and education publishers actively manipulate the market to their advantage to force faster adoption of e-content. In pushing adoption of eBooks, trade publishers do not have many of the advantages that information and education publishers have. Generally speaking, information content is more transactional: Looking up a reference, seeking a specific citation or definition or article. Educational content is modular with material that is created for specific purposes but which can also be “rebuilt” for other purposes. In both cases, the producers of these products exert some control over their delivery and have impressed on their markets a platform for delivery. (I have discussed this platform approach here).

There are several reasons information and educational publishers are able to pull off the platform approach. One is that they have successfully aggregated content around discrete segments: law, tax, financial, higher ed, k-12, etc. This, in turn, has enabled them to clearly identify their markets and build solutions that match their customers’ needs precisely. That is not the case in trade publishing.

Trade publishing can be anarchic and it is not uncommon for a publisher of primarily gardening and lifestyle books to publish three or four mysteries as well. While aggregation into silos of content – becoming the Science Fiction or the Christian publisher (as West and Lexis became the legal content silos, for example) – is possible it may not be likely. While this strategy may appear logical, I don’t believe there is a sense of purpose within trade as there is in Information and Education. And as publishers continue to be preoccupied with their own corporate brands, the desire to focus on content silos becomes less apparent. Since content is the foundation of the ‘platform’ approach evidenced in the other segments, a similar strategy will not apply in trade.

Something similar to the platform approach may take shape in a different way with intermediaries playing the role of curator. This is an approach that companies such as Publisher’s Weekly or The New York Review of Books might have adopted if they had been more prescient. The capability to guide consumers to the best books, stories and professional content within a specific segment (without regard to publisher or commerce) may come to define publishing in the years to 2020. (See Monday’s post). Expert curation can simplify the selection process for consumers, aggregate interest around topics and build homogeneous markets for commerce. As an added benefit to these intermediaries’ customers, publishers will chose to focus intensely on each segment and offer specialized value-adds particular to that segment. As content provision expands – witness the delivery of all the books in the Google Book project – readers will become increasingly confused and looking for help. It seems inevitable that intermediaries between publisher and e-commerce will meet that need.

BookArmy was launched by Harpercollins earlier this year while the other companies have been around for a while. BookArmy has taken a (thus far) universal approach and lists all books rather than those only published by Harpercollins. BookArmy may or may not be successful, and it is intensely difficult to launch a site like librarything or Goodreads that grips the imagination and passion of its audience, but that is what makes these sites ideal incubators for new thinking and new approaches to publishing. In their current states most (all) of the curation is provided by the community and tends to be post-publication focused. Having said that, it would not be too difficult to see a new ‘layer’ of curators emerging who could provide direction and recommendations to readers on forthcoming titles. And, in addition, these curators could manage their subject “silo” to help readers better understand and explore their subject without regard to the publisher. Experiments in this area have started with, for example, LibraryThing working with publishers to provide a reviews program for forthcoming titles.

Readers don’t really care how many books are published in a year but they do care about knowing which titles they should read based on their interests. Increasingly help will be on the way but it is most likely to be presented as agnostic of publisher and curated around logical subject classifications.


See also Brand Presence - some earlier thoughts on publisher branding.