Media Week (Vol 14, No.7): B&N Education Reports, Book TikTok, Teaching Reading, Must Read-TV,

Barnes & Noble Education Reports (Edgar)

Financial results for the fourth quarter and fiscal year 2021show severe impact of COVID.  Over two years revenues are down $500mm.

• Consolidated fourth quarter sales of $222.8 million decreased 13.3% as compared to the prior year period; consolidated fiscal year sales of $1,433.9 million decreased 22.5% as compared to the prior year.
• Consolidated fourth quarter GAAP net loss was $(44.4) million, compared to a net loss of $(40.3) million in the prior year period. Consolidated fiscal year GAAP net loss was $(131.8) million, compared to a net loss of $(38.3) million in the prior year
• Consolidated fourth quarter non-GAAP Adjusted EBITDA loss was $(31.4) million, compared to a non-GAAP Adjusted EBITDA loss of $(20.7) million in the prior year; consolidated fiscal year non-GAAP Adjusted EBITDA loss was $(65.6) million, as compared to non-GAAP Adjusted EBITDA of $42.2 million in the prior year.
• Consolidated fourth quarter non-GAAP Adjusted Earnings was $(32.8) million, compared to non-GAAP Adjusted Earnings of $(28.1) million in the prior year period; consolidated fiscal year non-GAAP Adjusted Earnings was $(89.0) million, compared to non-GAAP Adjusted Earnings of $(21.1) million in the prior year.
• Total fiscal year 2021 borrowings increased by only $2.9 million to $177.6 million as compared to the prior year period, led by working capital improvements, the sale of logo and emblematic merchandise inventory to Lids, and the strategic equity investment in BNED by Fanatics and Lids. 

Operational highlights for fiscal year 2021:

• BNC First Day® digital course delivery model year-over-year revenue increased 94%, benefiting from the accelerated move to digital courseware.
• Reached agreements for 64 campus stores to support the BNC First Day® Complete courseware delivery program in Fall Term 2021, representing approximately 300,000 in total undergraduate enrollment; up from 12 campus stores and 43,000 in total undergraduate enrollment in Fall Term 2020.
• Gained over 300,000 gross subscribers for the bartleby® suite of services in fiscal 2021, with DSS revenue increasing 15.7% for the same period.
• Launched beta release of bartleby Expert Live Chat, a text-based tutoring offering that connects students to our expert network for students who have follow-up questions on a bartleby solution, need more clarity on a textbook question, or want to speak to a tutor as soon as possible.
• Continued to attract new clients and generate new business growth, signing over $103 million in gross new business in fiscal year 2021 and expanding BNED’s footprint by 52 institutions and 31 K-12 schools.
• Entered into a long-term strategic omni channel merchandising partnership with Fanatics and Lids (FLC), forging an alliance with the two retail and ecommerce leaders in the licensed sports and emblematic merchandise category. Significant joint go-to-market activity planned with Fanatics and Lids to attract new business through enhanced offering.
  

Book Tik Tok (Evening Standard)

TikTok doesn’t seem like an obvious destination for book buzz but that hasn’t stopped it from booming. The #BookTok hashtag has racked up over 5.8 billion views, and some authors have seen a tenfold increase in book sales for works that are often decades old.

Even bookstores are jumping on the trend. The Barnes & Noble website now has a “BookTok” page dedicated to the most popular books on TikTok and its American stores have introduced allocated sections displaying titles that have gone viral on the platform.

Also - The Rise of BookTok (Guardian)

Teaching Reading Right (The Economist)

The consequences of this are striking. Less than half (48%) of all American adults were proficient readers in 2017. American fourth graders (nine-to ten-year olds) rank 15th on the Progress in International Literacy Study, an international exam. And that was before covid-19 closed schools. According to UNESCO, American schools were closed either fully or partially for 56 weeks, compared with 47 in Canada and 27 in the United Kingdom and China. In theory the need to make up for lost schooling could be an opportunity to try something new. But America remains stuck in debate about teaching children to read that has been rumbling on for decades.

Wiley's "Tech-Enabled" Publishing (SiliconAngle)

“It’s been amazing to be part of education and research during this pandemic, during a time when these things have never really been more important. For a long time, we’d been building these online and computer-based education platforms and really trying to get folks to move there. And that’s been a long, long process. The pandemic has really accelerated that,” Mack stated.

Wiley has seen a profound increase in the usage of its online education platforms with the onset of the pandemic — but it has definitely not been the only one. With the number of businesses that have been given a “digitization boost” by the pandemic, maybe there’s a bit of opportunity in every tragedy after all.

Making writing more working class (The Economist)

The entire publishing industry has been colonised by the middle and upper classes. A study last year of literary types found that only 13% came from a working-class background. So Ms Carthew has launched the “Nature Writing Prize for working-class writers”, now in its second year, to “burst the stereotype of what it means to be a nature writer” and allow other species to thrive.

Emoting in the open air might seem an egalitarian pursuit. Fields are free, while pens and paper cost mere pennies. It is not so simple, says Ms Carthew. One cannot wander lonely as a cloud if one is working in a call centre, and it is easier to write about the questing vole in a plashy fen if one owns the fen. Such accusations make the publishing industry squirm: like most liberal elites, publishers are happier to be seen as liberal than elite. Steps therefore are being taken. Surveys have been conducted, working-class networks have been launched, hands have been wrung. There remains an uncomfortably large number of people in the industry called Sophie.

 The Rise of Must-Read TV (The Atlantic)

All of this has had a profound effect on the literary world. As you might expect, becoming a TV show increases a novel’s popularity enormously. Adaptations can drive book sales, as in the case of this winter’s breakout hit Bridgerton. The Regency-era bodice-ripper is not alone: A number of backlist titles, such as The Queen’s Gambit, have enjoyed a late-in-life revival thanks to Netflix’s attention.

We see evidence of the adaptation effect in other measures of literary success as well. We compiled a list of about 400 21st-century novels that met certain criteria—inclusion in top-10 best-seller lists, critics’ picks, publishers’ comp titles, and so on. Within this group, a novel that becomes a show will receive about four times as many ratings on Goodreads.com as a novel that has never been adapted to TV or film. (Film still has a bigger effect, boosting a novel’s Goodreads ratings more than 1000 percent; TV nonetheless dramatically improves the fortunes of a novel.)

Emerging formats in Scholarly Publishing (Research Information)

Making content easily discoverable is vital to create an impact. Embracing digital transformation is key to survival in the current scenario. The publishing industry is contending with the availability of free content, declining readership, and switching to various content delivery platforms. Forward-looking organisations must embrace the digital revolution to meet changing customer needs. New and more effective content formats, like infographics and video summaries can help researchers, particularly those working in multidisciplinary fields, discover more relevant studies.

 

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See more headlines from past MediaWeek posts - going back to 2006.

 

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

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

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

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

Why We Remember More By Reading (The Conversation)

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

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

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

 New Order: Audio First (WSJ - Paid)

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

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

RBmedia Acquires McGraw Hill Professional Audiobook Publishing Business

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inside Merger Mania: (The Wrap - Register)

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

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

PND: Digital Transformation: A Seminar for Management

PND: Blockchain for Publishers

PND: Technology News

PND: The Price is Right for Cengage  

PND: The Opportunity in 200MM Students

PND: Mediaweek Reports 

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

 

MediaWeek Report (Vol 14, No 1): Book Prices, JK Rowling, African Comics, Digital Textbooks.

You might ask yourself: Why do books have prices printed on them? Marketplace

Why are books actually marked with a price on them? Music isn’t. Movies aren’t. Most retail items that I could think of that you would find at resellers aren’t in fact.

Textbooks in the digital age.  More on Cengage's digital textbook offering. (Boston Globe)

Textbook publishers had been trying to shift from paper to digital for years. Then along came the COVID-19 pandemic, giving many reluctant educators and students the nudge they needed to make the leap to online course materials. In Cengage’s case, digital sales now represent 68 percent of total revenue, up from 58 percent three years ago. About half of its sales are to college students, and digital represents 82 percent of the higher-ed revenue now for Cengage.

African comics and their growing market (The Economist)

Kugali is part of a small but vibrant industry. As in many areas of African popular culture, Nigerian brands are prominent; others include Comic Republic and Vortex Corp. But animators are thriving elsewhere, too. Afrocomix, an app for reading comics, was made by Leti Arts, a video-game developer based in Ghana and Kenya. In 2019 “Mama K’s Team 4”, written by Malenga Mulendema, a Zambian artist, and co-produced by a South African studio, became Netflix’s first African-made animated series. Etan Comics is the publisher of the first Ethiopian superhero comic books, “Jember” and “Hawi’’.

J.K. Rowling gets a profile in Vulture (NY Mag) and it isn't that flattering (Vulture)

One of the fans most devoted to Rowling’s exhaustive world building was a former Michigan school librarian named Steven Vander Ark. His website, The Harry Potter Lexicon, had won Rowling’s praise; it catalogued the minutiae of her books in such detail that she said she occasionally consulted it to fact-check her work as she wrote. In the months after the series concluded, Vander Ark contracted with a local publisher to turn his site into a print volume, and Rowling’s appreciation soured. Suing Vander Ark’s publishers for copyright infringement, she said, “I believe that this book constitutes the wholesale theft of 17 years of my hard work.”

Representing Vander Ark’s publisher, the executive director of Stanford Law School’s Fair Use Project pointed out that publishing companion guides to existing works was a practice that had been accepted “for hundreds of years.” But Neil Blair, one of Rowling’s agents, said that people who wished to produce such companions typically approached Rowling’s representatives first. Before publishing anything, they would seek her approval and make changes where requested; they would, in other words, “fall in line.” The judge ruled in Rowling’s favor, awarding $6,750 in damages. Vander Ark had broken down in tears as he testified, but after the trial, he avowed that he would always be a Harry Potter fan.

Many publishing folk take exception to any potential ex-trump officials getting book deals (Guardian)

Put together by the author Barry Lyga, the letter, which is continuing to add names, has been signed by bestselling writers including Celeste Ng, author of Little Fires Everywhere, Holly Black and Star Wars author Chuck Wendig. Titled “no book deals for traitors”, it opens by stating that the US “is where it is in part because publishing has chased the money and notoriety of some pretty sketchy people, and has granted those same people both the imprimatur of respectability and a lot of money through sweetheart book deals”.

More from my Flipboard magazine

Making 2020 Hindsight: Reflections, Recommendations and Running

For the first time in probably 40 years I did not have a seat on an airliner in 2020. Each year, I'd expect to travel to the UK at least once to see family and trips to Europe and other sundry trips in the US would round out my normal travel schedule. In December 2019, I had just returned from a trip to London not realizing it would be a long time before I was back, and I already had firm upcoming travel plans for Florida and Seoul. I've had years where I've overdone my travel, such as the three years I commuted to Oxford (which turned out to be a complete waste of time), but I realize now how much I miss air travel even if to places I have visited frequently. Of course, perspective is important: The planes and the places will be there in the coming months (and years) and it's a small consideration given the plight we are in due to COVID. The PND household's circumstances are hardly catastrophic and I am more than comfortable with the restrictions and it is stunning to me how many people believe they are above even simple sacrifices. Even the people making the rules!

As a by product of the above I took perhaps a quarter as many photos (400) in 2020 than in a normal year. Notably many fewer photos of New York (and none of London). I spend decent amount of time in arm chair travel looking at my past photo collections.

When gyms closed in March I was still of the mind that COVID wasn't a big deal and I was at the gym the day before they all closed. Within days, my attitude radically changed as the NY news reported on the body bags being carried out to mobile refrigerator trucks. So the gym was off limits which meant outside exercise was the only viable option and I upped my running game. I track my running activity and in a normal year I usually run between 1000 and 1100 miles. In the past 24 years of diligently tracking my running, I've run as much as 1,200 miles and as few as 500. 

In 2020 I ran 1,400 miles - which is a lot! My goal next year will be a little less but if I do it I will have run 25,000 miles in 25 years. But don't be intimidated because I get slower and slower as the years go by and each year more and more other runners pass me. Occasionally, I'll get a friendly wave from a cute girl who I know is thinking that "it's nice to see the old guys out here." Cold bothers me less than when I was younger but as you get older it is harder to deal with the heat. Bodies can't cool down as quickly as you get older. I am not entirely sure if I will ever go back to New York Sports Club.

As a consultant, working from home is often the norm but had it not been for COVID I would have been spending some time each week in a client office. I miss this more than I would have anticipated and the casual conversation, connections and serendipity that are always part of the work environment is very difficult to create in Zoom. I do think workers will continue to adapt and evolve to this new model but I don't see businesses continuing to be fully online once the restrictions are lifted. COVID will have a lasting influence on work conditions and experiences leading to more flexible arrangements and benefits for both employers and employees. I think it will be more incremental than revolutionary. Dry cleaners will struggle though.

Despite the lack of commuting, there wasn't a lot of extra free time. Placing a m/in/law in care and fixing up her house for rental in the middle of a pandemic didn't help. Mrs PND also spent a lot of time saving democracy with phone banking and writing postcards. I think it helped.

In most years I will read 20+ books a year and this year was similar; however, I read more non-fiction in 2020 than in other years. In December 2019, I was wandering around Politics and Prose and resolved myself to read more political history during 2020. I achieved this and read about Henry VIII, FDR, Grant, Carter, Churchill and others. I interspersed these books will my more normal roster of espionage and crime books. My five favorite books this year were:

About the first year of Churchill's prime ministership, the book interested me because it added in a lot personal history about the personalities and relationships of the people surrounding WSC at this time. I've read some of Martin Gilbert's biography of WSC but this book - by no means as detailed - filled in some gaps. I have many mixed feelings about Churchill and see the American infatuation with him as distinctly odd. Later in the year, I read FDR (below) and it was interesting to read about the same time period from FDR's perspective.

Alter's book is engaging and really well written. He clearly likes Carter but he is also critical about the President which leads to a balanced and interesting narative. My family came to the US in 1977 and we had watched news reports and election news during 1976 from an external perspective. Carter to me was the peanut farmer and little more. As the late seventies progressed my impressions of Carter as a failed leader were cemented and like many others I saw the comparison with Reagan a stark. As it turns out, Carter by many criteria, was one of our most effective Presidents with many initiatives which were either (or both) ahead of his time or long in impact. By chance, one of my last 2020 books was a fictionalized espionage story of the Shah's downfall which also played large in Alter's book.

I read a review of this book in The Economist and as a fan of Conrad, I thoroughly enjoyed the book. Jasanoff places Conrad in context which adds scope and perspective to many of the titles he wrote.  Later in the year, I also read King Leopold's' Ghost about how the King of Belgium carved an empire out of central Africa. In the latter book, there are many references to Conrad and Heart of Darkness which aided my understanding of both stories.

This book is long and while comprehensive and well written I thought it was a light read. JE Smith is well known for this book and while I enjoyed it, I thought it was more an appetizer than a full blooded investigation of one of the most successful US presidents. As a side note, as outrage grew over trump's supreme court appointment and calls to pack the court accelerated, one of the more interesting sections of this book concerned FDR's court packing scheme and how it torpedoed his mandate. What a powerful personality. It was a tragedy how his doctors ignored is health issues. With better care he would have lived far longer.

The last in the Cromwell trilogy, I hope Mark Rylance comes back to film this book as well. I enjoyed this book but found it labored at times. Mantel is such a master of language that it is difficult to criticize but I thought the first two titles seemed to flow easier than this one. Perhaps it was because of the inevitable outcome. It is still a compelling story.
 

 

If interested, here are my books on Librarything.

The ability to binge video and tv shows has been one of civilization's greatest inventions. To be untethered to the network schedule and eliminate advertising in the process is real progress! Some highlights this year included:

Call My Agent - Based around on the offices of a french film star agenting business. (Netflix) 

Better Call Saul - Possibly the best written show on tv at the moment (AMC)

Marvelous Mrs Maisel - Housewife turned comedienne (Amazon)

Rake - Australia show which follows the antics of an unconventional attorney (Netflix)

The Queen's Gambit - About chess (Netflix)

After Life - From Ricky Gervais about a widower. (Netflix)

 

 

 

 

For more see my year end newsletter.

Looking forward to a better 2021.

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Michael Cairns is a publishing and media executive with over 25 years experience in business strategy, operations and technology implementation.  He has served on several boards and advisory groups including the Association of American Publishers, Book Industry Study Group and the International ISBN organization.   Additionally, he has public and private company board experience.   He can be reached at michael.cairns@infomediapartners.com

Is GoodReads A Good or Bad Thing For Books?

It's been a very long tome since Amazon bought up all the viable book recommendation sites - GoodReads included - but over in The New Statesman Sara Manavis suggests that Goodreads is not all good for books. Bad actually.

Apparently the one thing which unifies Goodreads users is that they all agree that the user experience sucks. I always believed Amazon buying these book recommendation and social networking sites was  cynical in the first place: Nothing should stop the Amazon juggernaut from dominating your book discovery and reading experience. Amazon were never really interested in the functionality or site 'experience' of these sites, they just wanted the enthusiasts and they were not going to let a potential competitor grow nor allow a real competitor buy up these companies.  In 2008, Amazon purchased Shelfari and in 2013 completed the Goodreads deal.  There was shock demonstrated at the time and commentators and users felt the sellers had sold out to the bad actor. Many felt betrayed.  But, according to the Manavis article there are still more than 90million users which is considerably more than the 16mm members back in 2008.

Since 2008, web design has changed considerably. No surprise there. However, to confirm the thesis that Amazon wasn't really interested in this product per se, the Goodreads website is virtually unchanged since 2008.  Manavis notes the frustration of users,

Goodreads today looks and works much as it did when it was launched. The design is like a teenager’s 2005 Myspace page: cluttered, random and unintuitive. Books fail to appear when searched for, messages fail to send, and users are flooded with updates in their timelines that have nothing to do with the books they want to read or have read. Many now use it purely to track their reading, rather than get recommendations or build a community. “It should be my favourite platform,” one user told me, “but it’s completely useless.”

Minavis suggests that the negative feedback has reached some type of breaking point, and I believe there is room in the market for other online booksellers of scale.

When I became CEO of Ingenta, the company was planning a commercial B2C book retail store. We had conversations with publishers, built some wire frames and developed a product concept. We planned to use existing technology (subsequently proven unstable). I had to squelch this initiative to concentrate on saving the company and delivering to current customers. It was actually a very crazy idea given our circumstances stoked by the high (and bizarre) interest of our board. Ingenta had a closet full of ill-conceived poorly executed projects and this would have been a spectacular example.

Looking around for other book recommendation sites, I still use LibraryThing but even they have some corporate overlords. LibraryThing is majority owned by the founder Tim Spalding but he counts both Amazon and Proquest as partial owners. LibraryThing hasn't changed much over the years either but I don't have anything like the frustration some of the Goodreaders seem to have.  Maybe they should come over.

A Book Subscription Service - Resilient Old Ideas

From an article in the Guardian:

From chocolate to coffee to beer to grooming products, subscription boxes are big business, and books are no exception. There are countless online companies that ship out a monthly read, some adding artisan teas, hot chocolate, or an adaptation on DVD of the book. But Heywood Hill’s subscription is as bespoke as possible: each package is individually tailored to the reader’s tastes following a conversation between the subscriber and a bookseller. Camille Van de Velde, one of Heywood Hill’s five subscription booksellers, takes me down a rickety staircase into the basement from where the scheme is run. Staff are at work in a series of pokey interlocking rooms, stacking titles on shelves, ready to be wrapped, packed and shipped. They won’t be specific about numbers, but each has hundreds of people to choose for each month, and it has, by all accounts, transformed the business.

MediaWeek (Vol 6, No 9: ISBNs, Books & Commuting, Course Guides, Music Money + More

The Economist readers in the group may have seen that the lowly ISBN made it into the newspaper this week. It wasn't a particularly good article and I said so. (Economist):

This is a curious article: In some cases, it misses the point and, in others, it misinforms the reader about how the publishing industry currently works.

There is no doubt that the ISBN--as a global standard for the identification of physical product--is facing, or will soon face, a challenge as physical books become eBooks but its irrelevance is still a fair distance off. A mix of formats (electronic and paper)is likely to exist for many years (particularly with the variability in markets around the world for adoption of the eBook) and the use of the ISBN is long and deeply embedded in all significant publishing systems from editorial to marketing to royalty accounting.

Further, it is hard to agree with your statement that the ISBN hampers small publishers when the past ten years have seen the most significant growth in small- and medium-sized publishers in history. Both Bowker and Nielsen report these numbers each year for the US and UK markets. One circumstance you allude to is that in 'olden times'--when we had more than two significant bookstore chains (in the US)--there was no question as to whether to obtain an ISBN; however, a publisher today could make a perfectly valid decision not to acquire an ISBN and simply sell their book or eBook through Amazon . . . and they could do okay with that. But why would any publisher with a book offering legitimate sales potential want to exclude all other retailers? That would be hard to understand.

Assigning an ISBN to a book never guaranteed 'mainstream' publication - it's not clear what you mean by that. Certainly, retailers would not (do not) accept a book without an ISBN but, by the same token, B&N won't accept your book simply because it has an ISBN. There's a little bit more to it than that. I wrote about the prospects for the ISBN back in 2009 and reflected on the ASIN situation. It's not new and it was never altruistic. Here it is, if interested: http://personanondata.blogspot.com/2009/08/isbn-is-dead.html

The other identifiers you note are interesting but don't really apply or fit with the requirements of the book (e- or p-) supply chain. There's no question the industry needs to think differently about identifiers but I don't think that's a point you end up making. Even if a book can be easily downloaded and paid for, someone still has to do the accounting and make sure the right publisher gets the right payment so they can the pay the author and contributors their share. Individuals and small publishers could possibly do without an ISBN but, in doing so, they may only be limiting their opportunities.

Commuting on the Underground: John Lanchester rides the London Underground (Guardian):

This is an academic finding that hasn't crossed over into the wider world. I've never seen a film or television programme about the importance of commuting in Londoners' lives; if it comes to that, I've never read a novel that captures it either. The centrality of London's underground to Londoners – the fact that it made the city historically, and makes it what it is today, and is woven in a detailed way into the lives of most of its citizens on a daily basis – is strangely underrepresented in fiction about the city, and especially in drama. More than 1bn underground journeys take place every year – 1.1bn in 2011, and 2012 will certainly post a larger number still. That's an average of nearly 3m journeys every day. At its busiest, there are about 600,000 people on the network simultaneously, which means that, if the network at rush hour were a city in itself, rather than an entity inside London, it would have the same population as Glasgow, the fourth biggest city in the UK. The District line alone carries about 600,000 people every day, which means that it, too, is a version of Glasgow. 

There are quite a few novels and films and TV programmes about Glasgow. Where are the equivalent fictions about the underground? New York has any number of films about its subway – The Warriors, the John Carpenter movie from 1979, is one of the best of them, and explicitly celebrates the network's geographical reach across the whole city, from Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx to Coney Island. New York also has Joseph Sargent's The Taking of Pelham 123, an all-subway-located thriller, among many other cinematic depictions. Paris has the Luc Besson film Subway, and plenty of other movies. London has next to nothing. (Let's gloss over the Gwyneth Paltrow vehicle Sliding Doors – though not before noting that the crucial moment when she either does or doesn't catch the train is on the District line, at Fulham Broadway. Spoiler alert: in the version in which she rushes and successfully catches the train, she dies. A District line driver would call this a useful reminder that this isn't the national rail network, and there will be another one along in a minute.) There's a wonderfully bad Donald Pleaseance movie from 1972 called Death Line, set entirely in Russell Square underground station; there were some episodes of Doctor Who in the 60s, which seemed scary at the time, about the tube network being taken over by robot yetis. To a remarkable extent, though, that's it. London is at the centre of innumerable works of fiction and drama and TV and cinema, but this thing at the heart of London life, which does more to create the texture of London life than any other single institution, is largely and mysteriously absent.

American Public University and their course guides is an interesting project (CampusTech)

The online course guides project is an award-winning academic technology initiative to match every one of APUS's online courses with an online library course guide, a new approach to offset the high cost of traditional print text books. Now that the project has successfully completed guides for a little over half of the university's course offerings, further practical metrics may be applied to the initial statistical analytic framework to widen the project's focus from course guide completion rates to higher levels of quality assurance and sustainability.

Analysis on data reported on the music industry indicates that some music artists can make money (Atlantic):

Last month, Northwestern University law professor Peter DiCola released the results of a fascinating survey that tried to discern exactly how much income most working musicians make off of people actually paying for their recordings (or in some cases, their compositions). His very broad answer was between 12 and 22 percent, depending on whether you counted pay from session playing (shown as "mixed" below). If that doesn't sound like real money to you, consider how you'd react if your boss suddenly said you were getting a 10 percent pay cut tomorrow.

DiCola's study isn't perfect. It analyzes answers from roughly 5,300 musicians who volunteered for the survey, meaning it lacked the element of random sampling that most social science work strives for. The participants were overwhelmingly white (88 percent), male (70 percent), and old (the largest demographic was 50-to-59-year-olds). Almost 35 percent were classical musicians, and another 16 percent were jazz artists. In short, this isn't going to offer a crystal clear financial portrait of your up-and-coming Pitchfork darling.

Nonetheless, the results do offer insight into how workaday guitarists, saxophonists, singers, songwriters, and timpani players -- 42 percent of the group earned all of their income from music-related work -- earn a living. And music sales (or streams) are usually a small but by no means insignificant piece of the picture.

Do we own our eBooks? Covering old ground at Salon:

Switching devices presents another headache for readers. Late last year, independent booksellers made a deal with Kobo, an e-book retailer that also sells its own e-reader devices. The indies now sell both the devices and Kobo e-books. People who want to support their local independent bookstore might contemplate switching from the Kindle to the Kobo, but if they do they’ll have to leave their (DRM-protected) Kindle books behind on their old device. If you are an early e-book adopter who wants to keep and reread the books you bought for your Kindle, you’re locked into the Kindle platform.

Tablets like the iPad are slightly different. The tablet’s owner can install numerous proprietary apps to read a variety of e-book formats, but the titles have to stay in their own walled gardens. You can’t move your Kindle books into your iBook library, for example. This is a minor annoyance, but annoying all the same! When I got my first iPad, I mostly bought Kindle e-books because Amazon’s app was more versatile. Since then, iBooks has outstripped the Kindle app, especially when it comes to working with books used for research, and I would much rather read and organize all my e-books in iBooks. I can’t. Given such restrictions, it’s debatable whether or not I truly own them.

From my twitter feed this week:

PressBooks Goes Open Source To Let Authors Create Book Sites In Seconds Techcrunch

Not the Same Old Cup of British Tea NYT Watch. 
RR Donnelley results hit by $1bn impairment charge http://ow.ly/i6Qkk
OCLC and ProQuest Collaborate to Enhance Library Discovery. PRNewswire 
What the Library of Congress Plans to Do With All Your Tweets Time 

In sports:
Lancashire County Cricket sign path-breaking 10-year deal ESPNet PND Senior in the news - Congrats & Great News!
 

MediaWeek (Vol 5, No 52): New York Public, Big Data, Independent Bookstores, Denialbility

The end of the year...

From New York magazine an envisioning (without the hysteria) of what the rennovated NYPL will look like.

Now we finally have schematic drawings by Foster + Partners, and though they’re far from final, it’s wonderful to see intelligent architecture trump panicky rhetoric. Since the day the library opened in 1911, anyone, from the barely literate to the Nobel laureate, could pass between the friendly lions and climb the imperial-scale stairs to the third-floor reading rooms, with their profusion of sunlight and carved timber, and their great oak tables burnished by millions of elbows. But temples grow shabby, books decay, funds run short. The architects and administrators are tackling an inescapable trilemma: You can safeguard the library’s mission, its books, or its physical structure, but you can’t keep all three exactly as they are.

Recently, I clattered down a metal staircase into the claustrophobic and endless honeycomb where 4 million volumes molder away in a warm, damp fug. This is both the library’s heart and its skeleton. Thickets of iron columns and seven levels of tightly gridded shelves, held in place by ornamental cast-iron plates, support the upper floors. The library’s habitués harbor a great affection for this ink-and-paper habitat—or for the idea of it. The research collection’s stacks are almost mythically inaccessible: whenever a call number is dropped into the building’s bowels, a library page (aptly named) scampers down the aisles and places books on a conveyor belt like hunks of coal in a mine. None of that needs to change, except that the books — and the pages — will both enjoy a better quality of air.

Business leaders are beginning to see 'big data' as the fourth factor of production (FT):

As the prevalence of Big Data grows, executives are becomingly increasingly wedded to numerical insight. But the beauty of Big Data is that it allows both intuitive and analytical thinkers to excel. More entrepreneurially minded, creative leaders can find unexpected patterns among disparate data sources (which might appeal to their intuitive nature) and ultimately use the information to alter the course of the business.

More cautious, analytical leaders, on the other hand, might find solace in new and multiple sources of information to bolster an existing strategy, for example taking the temperature of the market by collating public opinion on social networks.

More often than not, effective analysis of Big Data involves both a subjective and an objective judgment, i.e both intuitive and analytical thinking. A hotel chain might already base its pricing on analytics, for example (setting prices by linking occupancy rates to the time remaining - much like budget airline price their seats). It might make the intuitive decision to raise prices for a special event, the London Olympics, let’s say.

ChaChing: Jury Awards Carnegie Mellon $1.17Billion in patent infringement case (Chronicle):

A federal jury in Pittsburgh on Wednesday found that the Marvell Technology Group and Marvell Semiconductor Inc. infringed on patents stemming from the work of a Carnegie Mellon University professor and a former student, and awarded the university roughly $1.17-billion in damages, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

How "mistakes were made" pervades everything even accidentally on purpose (The Nation):

As the first-ever government agency with deniability written into its charter, the CIA was from the beginning a storytelling machine. It was no coincidence that in its early days the organization was full of literature students and writers recruited by influential scholars of English, or that for decades it operated as perhaps the most generous literary patron in the West, funding scores of novels, translations and literary journals. And so it is oddly apt that most Americans know most of what they know about the covert sector—or, more accurately, half-know most of what they half-know—not from fact-oriented discourses like journalism, history and the law, but instead from novels, films, TV shows, comic books and narrative video games: in other words, through fictions, some of them quite outlandish, some chock-full of accurate information and insight, most somewhere in between, and all of them more or less dismissible as “just fiction.”

Melley’s boldest suggestion is that fiction about the covert activity assumes an outsize role not only for members of the general public, but also for most individuals within the covert sector. This is, he argues, a natural consequence of the secret government’s size and “hypercompartmentalization,” itself a natural outcome of its foundational obsession with deniability. The covert sector is so large, so fragmented into agencies, subdivisions, private contractors and shell companies—often competing with each other for funding and operational jurisdiction—that it can be difficult, if not impossible, for any one of the beast’s many tentacles to know what the rest have in their clutches. This is exacerbated by complex classification schemes that parcel out information—even of a single operation—piecemeal on a “need to know” basis, a process that can leave even those with high-security clearances in the dark. Often, Melley claims, those at the top of the totem pole are the most ignorant of all, because what is required of them is not knowledge but its opposite: public expressions of shock when, against the odds, this or that unsavory activity comes to light. Even if those technically “inside” the covert state know a bit more than John Everyman, it is certainly plausible that they hanker to know more—to view the monster from above, and to see its many tentacles writhing at once. Like the rest of us, some often have nowhere better to turn than fiction.

Such a proposition is difficult to prove, but Melley attempts to marshal compelling evidence. In the 1960s, he notes, CIA employees reportedly watched Mission Impossible each week in search of ideas for new gadgets. JFK loved Ian Fleming novels and wanted America to find “our James Bond.” The “ticking time bomb scenario,” so endlessly invoked in recent debates over the efficacy and morality of torture, has apparently never occurred in real life but famously first appeared in Les centurions, a 1960 French thriller in which French soldiers use torture to extract information from Muslim members of the Algerian resistance. Today, the book is a favorite of US counterinsurgency professionals, including (by his own admission) David Petraeus, until recently the director of the CIA. After 9/11, the Pentagon and Department of Homeland Security started recruiting artists—
including thriller author Brad Meltzer—for Red Cell, a project dedicated to imagining how the terrorist attacks of the future might play out. The Pentagon ran a similar program. And in 2008, Defense Intelligence Agency recruits started training on Sudden Thrust, a video game written by a Hollywood screenwriter.

More about Ann Patchet's bookstore in Nashville (Atlantic);

Meanwhile, back in Nashville, Karen and Mary Grey had hired a staff, and together they washed the warehoused Borders bookshelves again and again while they waited for the paint to dry and the new flooring to arrive. In a burst of optimism, we had hoped to open October 1. Lights were still missing when Parnassus finally did open on November 16. We had forgotten to get cash for the register, so I ran to the bank with my checkbook. That morning, The New York Times ran a story about the opening, along with a photo of me, on page A‑1.

Imagine a group of highly paid consultants crowded into the offices of my publisher, HarperCollins. Their job is to figure out how to get a picture of a literary novelist (me, say) on the front page of The Times. “She could kill someone,” one consultant suggests. The other consultants shake their heads. “It would have to be someone very famous,” another says. “Could she hijack a busload of schoolchildren, or maybe restructure the New York public-school system?” They sigh. It would not be enough. They run down a list of crimes, stunts, and heroically good deeds, but none of them are A-1 material. I can promise you this: kept in that room for all eternity, they would never land on the idea that opening a 2,500-square-foot bookstore in Nashville would do the trick.

My Year in Reading 2012

Looking at what I wrote on this subject last year I am almost appalled that I failed to keep my promises regarding my expected reading for 2012.  Still, the Amanda Foreman title about the American Civil war sits above my desk with not one of the 800 pages having been cracked and, in addition, none of the Dickens books from the Penguin Classics collection have been read either.  In the case of the Dickens books, my excuse is that they are bound so nicely I don't want to spoil them.  I will get to all of these soon enough.  I read 19 books this year which is the same as last year and several books took me a while: Something Happened by Joe Heller and Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel both of which I found very slow going.  In the case of Wolf Hall, I know a lot about the history and I recognize the fine writing but I found it dense and I'm not sure I'll be reading the next one.  (Accidentally, we started watching The Tudors on the TeeVee box which is far more enjoyable but of course more sudsy.)

As in other years, The Millions keeps asking people what they've enjoyed reading in the past year and their link is here.

Here's my list in reverse order and check out my LibraryThing and my Bookstore

Re Imagine - Tom Peters
Fault Line - Robert Goddard
The Prague Cemetary - Umberto Eco
Waging Heavy Peace - Neil Young
Iron War: Dave Scott & Mark Allen in the Greatest Race - Matt Fitgerald
The Power of Habit - Charles Duhigg
Wolf Hall - Hilary Mantel
Mr. Timothy - Louis Beynard
The Snowman - Jo Nesbo
The Mulberry Empire - Philip Hensher
Mr. Paradise - Elmore Leonard
Mission to Paris - Alan Furst
Death and Life of Bobby Z - Don Winslow
Penguin Book of Fights, Fueds, Hart felt Hatreds - Philip Kerr
Unfamiliar Fishes - Sarah Vowell
Before the Poison - Peter Robinson
Stone's Fall - Iain Pears
Royal Charles - Antonia Fraser
Something Happened - Joe Heller

Neil's book was very enjoyable - discursive - but he showed a lot more of himself in this book than I thought he would.  My other favorites from this list were Iron War, The Power of Habit, Mission to Paris and Royal Charles.

Iron War tells the story of the intense rivalry between triathletes Dave Scott and Mark Allen which had its apotheosis (for those like me who deify supreme athleticism) in the 1989 Kona Iron Man where the two men swam, rode and ran literally side by side for 138 of 139 miles.  Not only do I recall seeing this on television at the time but when I was in high school on Maui in the early 1980s I recall hearing about a crazy bunch of guys who had done the first Kona race and I recall laughing at the whole idea.  I have run 15 marathons and I can't conceive of how hard a triathlon is and to do one in the manner in which Scott and Allen did that day is just unbelievable to me.  By the way, between them they won Kona 12 times.

One of my Random House friends gave me The Power of Habit which I enjoyed and it made me think about how triggers and rewards help me manage my activities and priorities.  What I found interesting were things I do to organize my life which fell into the methodology Duhigg spoke about in his book.

Royal Charles was immensely enjoyable and tells the history of the second King Charles who ascended the thrown not only after Parliament had killed his father, he had escaped death several times, wandered around Europe almost penniless all while the country underwent a revolution and the dictator (Cromwell) tried to pass the mantel to his son.  Once eventually crowned King he was largely successful in stabilizing government but sadly died before the succession could be fixed and we ended up with James who was a complete ass.

In 2013, the Forman book and those Dickens books will feature again on my list as will several other books that have remained unread for a very long time.  By way of example, the Royal Charles book was a gift from Mrs PND in 1993.  As was the case this year, newer titles not currently on my shelf will interrupt the balance but not, I hope, to the extent that I push Foreman to 2014.

Happy New Year.

LOC: International Summit of the Book

A 1 1/2 day summit event at the Library of Congress next week which they hope to turn into "an annual global meeting of minds to discuss and promote the book as a crucial format for conveying societies' scholarship and culture" (LOC).

Here is the schedule (apologies for the formatting).

Thursday, Dec. 6, 2012
Coolidge Auditorium, Thomas Jefferson Building

2:00-2:20 p.m. Welcome: Hon. John Larson (CT), U.S. House of Representatives and Hon. Jack Reed (RI), U.S. Senate
Introduction: James H. Billington, The Librarian of Congress
Announcement of Library of Congress Literacy Awards Program:
David M. Rubenstein, Managing Director, Carlyle Group
Remarks: Robert Forrester, President & CEO, Newman's Own Foundation

2:20-3:00 p.m. Keynote: Ismail Serageldin, Director, Bibliotheca Alexandrina

3:00-3:45 p.m. Perspectives on the History of the Book: A Conversation with Elizabeth Eisenstein
Elizabeth Eisenstein, historian of early printing
Daniel DeSimone, Rosenwald Curator,
Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress

3:45-5:00 p.m. National Library Perspectives on the Past, Present and Future of the Book
Moderator: Sarah Thomas, Bodley's Librarian, University of Oxford
Commentator: John Van Oudenaren, Director, World Digital Library
Caroline Brazier, Director of Scholarship and Collections, The British Library
Glòria Pérez-Salmerón, Director, National Library of Spain
Ramón Mujica Pinilla, Director, National Library of Peru
Anton Likhomanov, Director General, National Library of Russia
John Kgwale Tsebe, National Librarian of South Africa

5:00-5:45 p.m. The Law Through the Book
Emily E. Kadens, Professor of Law, University of Texas at Austin

5:45-6:30 p.m. The Enduring Legacy of Thomas Jefferson's Collection
Mark Dimunation, Chief, Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress

Friday, Dec. 7, 2012

Coolidge Auditorium, Thomas Jefferson Building

9:30-10:15 a.m. Welcome: James H. Billington, The Librarian of Congress
Reading is Not an Option: A Conversation Between Walter Dean Myers, National Ambassador for
Young People's Literature and John Y. Cole, Director, Center for the Book, Library of Congress

10:15-11:15 a.m. The Role of Cultural Institutions in Fostering the Future of the Book
Moderator and Commentator: Sir Harold Evans, Editor at Large, Reuters; Author, “The American Century”
Jim Leach, Chairman, NEH
Carla D. Hayden, Chief Executive Officer, Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore
Ira Silverberg, Literature Director, National Endowment for the Arts

11:15-12:00 p.m. Copyright and the Book: A Conversation about Authors, Publishers and the Public Interest
Moderator: Maria Pallante, Register of Copyrights & Director, U.S. Copyright Office
Tom Allen, President & CEO, Association of American Publishers
James S. Shapiro, Shakespearean Scholar, Columbia University; Vice President, Authors Guild
Peter Jaszi, Professor of Copyright Law, American University

1:30-3:00 p.m. The Publishing World Yesterday and Today
Moderator: Marie Arana, Author; Literary Critic; Senior Consultant, Library of Congress
Nan Talese, Senior Vice President and Publisher, Doubleday
Geoffrey Kloske, President and Publisher, Riverhead/Penguin Books
Karen Lotz, President and Publisher, Candelwick Press
Niko Pfund, President and Publisher, Oxford University Press

3:00-4:30 p.m. Using Lessons of the Past to Guide the Future
Moderator: Michael Suarez, University of Virginia Professor and Director, Rare Book School
Karen Keninger, Chief, National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped
Thomas Mallon, Novelist, Critic, Director Creative Writing Program, George Washington University
Fenella G. France, Chief, Preservation, Restoration & Test Division, Library of Congress

4:30-5:00 p.m. “Passing the Torch” Ceremony
Hon. John Larson (CT), U.S. House of Representatives
James H. Billington, The Librarian of Congress
Robert Forrester, President & CEO, Newman's Own Foundation
Tommy Koh, Ambassador-at-Large, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Singapore
Elaine Ng, CEO, National Library Board Singapore

MediaWeek (Vol 5, No 48): History & Future of Books - Video with O'Reilly, Friedman, Auletta on Charlie Rose, Follett CEO, The Friendly Intenet + more

A discussion about the history and future of books with Tim O'Reilly, Jane Friedman, Jonathan Safran Foer, Ken Auletta, and David Kastan




Library Journal (Digital Shift) reports on the appointment of Mary Lee Schneider to CEO of $2.1Billion Follett Corporation.

In a signal that Follett Corporation is stepping up its digital efforts, the company’s board of directors has unanimously appointed Mary Lee Schneider to the position of president and chief executive officer. Schneider, who takes the reins on November 26, will be the first CEO in the $2.7 billion, privately-held company’s nearly 140-year history who is not a member of the Follett family and one of a handful of women to head a corporation of Follett’s size.
Schneider was previously president, digital solutions and chief technology officer at RR Donnelly. In that role, she was in charge of growing the Premedia Technologies business, a provider of digital photography, color management, and digital asset management services. She has also served on the Follett board of directors for 11 years.
What does Schneider’s appointment mean for the 65,000 elementary and high schools that rely on Follett for print and digital learning materials, library resources, and school management systems?

Penguin announces their plans to expand eBook lending notible for their selection of B&T rather than Overdrive or 3M (NYTimes):

The Penguin Group plans to announce on Monday that it is expanding its e-book lending program to libraries in Los Angeles and Cleveland and surrounding areas though a new distribution partner. In a pilot program that will begin this year, Penguin has worked with Baker & Taylor, a distributor of print and digital books, to start e-book lending programs in the Los Angeles County library system, which will reach four million people, and the Cuyahoga County system in Ohio.
The terms of lending will be the same as those they have been testing through 3M systems in New York public libraries since September: Penguin will sell any book to the libraries for lending six months after its release date, each book may be lent to only one patron at a time and at the end of a year the library must buy each book again or lose access to it.
Tim McCall, Penguin’s vice president for online sales and marketing, said the company was happy with the 3M pilot, which will continue and expand. “We are learning every month, but I think we have a model that works.”
Through a third partner, OneClickdigital, Penguin will also begin lending digital audiobooks to any library that is interested.

How did the internet get so nice? From NY Magazine:  I Really Like That You Like What I Like

Ten years ago, the web offered the worldview of a disaffected apparatchik and the perils of a Wild West saloon. Brawls broke out frequently; snideness triumphed; perverts, predators, and pettifoggers gathered in dark corners to prey on the lost and naïve. Now, though, the place projects the upbeat vigor of a Zumba session and the fellow-feeling of a neighborhood café. On Facebook, strangers coo at photos of your college roommate’s South American vacation. Op-eds—widely praised—are generously circulated. And warmth flows even where it probably shouldn’t. Today, you find that 27 human beings have “liked” an Instagram photo of your little sister’s breakfast muffin. You learn your best and smartest friend in high school—a girl you swapped big dreams with before falling out of touch—just married some guy with enormous bags under his eyes and the wild, deranged grin of Charlie Sheen. You are vaguely concerned, but the web is not. “Congratulations!!!” someone has written underneath the face of Crazy Rictus Man. “luv you guys!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” enthuses someone else. You count the exclamation points. There are sixteen. You wonder whether there is any Advil close at hand.

On Twitter, where the wonks and witty people are supposed to live, you find yourself lost again on a great plain of goodwill. John Doe, crossing the Twitter threshold, becomes “the brilliant @JohnDoe,” doing “wonderful” things. Videos that crop up are “amazing” or “hilarious”—sometimes both—and “excited” feelings prevail, especially when people are doing things that you cannot. (“Excited to be chatting with the brilliant Marshall Goldsmith at Per Se!!”) Inspiration triumphs. (“Sitting with Angelina Jolie @ #SaveChildren event! So inspiring, people helping humanity.”) Even when it doesn’t, though, people give thanks. (“Thank you needed this!!!” “no thank YOU!”) If you are in a mood to spread the love, which, probably, you are, it’s no problem to pass along your favorite tweets, nicely neutralized. “Retweets aren’t endorsements,” people say, like a newspaper claiming to run George Will’s column just because it happened to be lying around. The more you look, in fact, the harder it seems to find anything on the web that doesn’t read like an endorsement. It’s enough to make a web curmudgeon desperate for a little aloofness or even a few drops of the old bile. When did the Internet get so nice? 

From Twitter:
Much-loved Australian author Bryce Courtenay has died. His publisher has issued a statement: Penguin Australia

BBC - Future - Technology - Will the internet become conscious? BBC Future

My Year in Reading 2011

As I have on prior years, I've followed the lead of The Millions and thought about the books I read this year. In terms of quantity 2011 was a slower year for me mainly because I slogged through a book that had remained on my shelf unread for 10 years or so.  This was Q by "Luther Blissett" a novel about the insurgencies and guerrilla warfare that followed Martin Luther's declarations in the 1500's.  It was a dense novel and one of those that would have been better drunk in several long sessions rather than piece meal prior to falling asleep in bed.  Nevertheless, while I found it a difficult read I still think about it and coincidentally an article in the year end Economist last week wouldn't have interested me at all if I hadn't read Q.  The Economist article suggested that social networking as we know it today was similarly prevalent in the Reformation driven by easy access to printing technology.

"Scholars have long debated the relative importance of printed media, oral transmission and images in rallying popular support for the Reformation. Some have championed the central role of printing, a relatively new technology at the time. Opponents of this view emphasise the importance of preaching and other forms of oral transmission. More recently historians have highlighted the role of media as a means of social signalling and co-ordinating public opinion in the Reformation.

Now the internet offers a new perspective on this long-running debate, namely that the important factor was not the printing press itself (which had been around since the 1450s), but the wider system of media sharing along social networks—what is called “social media” today. Luther, like the Arab revolutionaries, grasped the dynamics of this new media environment very quickly, and saw how it could spread his message."

Another slower read was also a book that sat on my shelf for a while was the Claire Tomalin bio of Samuel Pepys.  She's a vibrant and interesting writer and I'm looking forward to reading her bio of Dickens.

As I mentioned above, 2011 was a down year in terms of volume:  My total this year was only 19 books against 27 in 2010, 22 in 2009, 17 in 2008 and 25 in 2007.  It has been my desire over the past five years or so (and it has taken me that long) to clear out as many of my unread books as possible.  I am happy to say that I've done very well at that task.

The book I most enjoyed this year was The Northern Clemency which wasn't technically on my shelf but Mrs. PND had been telling me for a while that I would really enjoy it.

Here is my full list and these are in my 'bookstore' (PND Bookstore)

The Dealer and the Dead - Gerald Seymour

Found Wanting - Robert Goddard

Piece of My Heart - Peter Robinson

Life - Kieth Richards

Field Grey - Philip Kerr

Innocent - Scott Turow

Close to Home - Peter Robinson

Q - Luther Blissett

The Northern Clemency - Philip Hensher

The Tenth Man - Graham Greene

Strange Affair - Peter Robinson

Friend of the Devil - Peter Robinson

Snowdrops - A. D. Miller

The Fear Index - Robert Harris

Prague Fatale - Philip Kerr

The Cut - George Pelecanos

Deniable Death - Gerald Seymour

Blood of Victory - Alan Furst

Samuel Pepys - Clair Tomalin

In the UK there was a lot of hype about Snowdrops by A.D. Miller which was a Booker nominee.  It was a good read and entertaining but it wasn't on the same level as Hensher's Northern Clemency which was short listed for the Booker in 2008.

Looking to 2012, I've already added another of Hensher's titles (The Mulberry Empire) from PND senior's shelf, Wolf Hall from Mrs. PND and my own selection Amanda Foreman's A World of Fire about the American Civil War from the English perspective.  In addition to those I've already got 10 others and Mrs. PND got me six very nicely bound Dickens classics from Penguin for Christmas, so it will be another busy reading year.  Just how we like it.