Repost: The Beatles Bookstore and Reference Collections

Originally posted on January 19, 2010.


I may have the best collection of Beatles books for sale on Amazon. How? I recently read The Beatles, The Biography by Bob Spitz and in the back of the book were eight pages of bibliographic references. As I looked through these it occurred to me that all the work 'behind the book' is essentially hidden to the reader; more importantly this 'extra' content represents un-monetized revenue to the publisher. As more non-fiction titles are available on the web and as publishers attempt to build direct relationships with readers it would seem obvious that adding the 'raw' content that went into the creation of the work - all of which represents real, tangible material and research - could be made available to the consumer as a package of content. Let the consumer decide if they want to read only the finished book or delve into the primary research material.

At BookExpo last year, a publisher from a major house lamented a friend who had spent 10 years writing some social history book and dammed if they didn't have a right to sell the book for $35. It struck me the reader doesn't really care it took ten years of the authors life; it's always about value proposition, and because consumers are barraged with free content the $35 often doesn't appear reasonable. On the other hand, if the reader had access to a 'reference' collection of material that was effectively curated by the author and expansive beyond the traditional book suddenly the value proposition of that social history begins to justify a price differential between the basic book (at $9.95 for sake of argument) and a companion web based reference collection at $35.

Getting back to The Beatles and my bookstore. I took all the citations and added them to my Amazon bookstore and there they reside as a dedicated Beatles bookstore. (I haven't sold much). This really isn't close to representing the true potential value that a web based reference collection of The Beatles could represent, yet Spitz did the work: He took the notes, watched the videos, interviewed the people, read the books, etc. etc. This material is index-able, with a little bit of foresight the writing/editing process could support more efficient collection of the bibliographic material and collectively the material could be monetized. As a 'reference collection' the book then becomes a living thing, because as new material about the Beatles is written or material is written about The Beatles, The Biography by reviewers and readers, all additional material can be added to the 'reference collection' thus keeping the book relevant. Accordingly, developing additional (web) content around a book in this manner starts to challenge the idea of front and back list.

If the publisher doesn't want to invest the time and effort in developing their content in this manner then I am sure third parties would be interested in licensing the rights to take the authors primary material, marry it with the finished product and create a web reference collection as I described. Last year I read a biography of Sir Charles Wren, the architect of post-Great Fire London. I know London fairly well, but I had a devil of a time locating and visualizing all the buildings discussed in the book: Just think of all the city plans, architectural diagrams and 3d models that this book could support. An end product maybe not for everyone but enough that the 'premium' $35 price looks viable.

Cengage Learning Announces Streamlined Operating Structure

From their press release

Cengage Learning Announces Streamlined Operating Structure to Allow Greater Synergy, Focused Technology Investments and Increased Innovation Across Company

Incorporates Library/Reference, Academic/Professional and International Business Units to Provide Research and Learning Solutions Unmatched In Industry
STAMFORD, Conn., July 7

/PRNewswire/ -- Cengage Learning, a leading global provider of innovative teaching, learning and research solutions, today announced that the company will consolidate its business units into one streamlined operating group, a new structure that will allow for greater synergies, more focused technology investments and increased innovation both domestically and internationally. The move brings together the company's Academic and Professional Group (APG), including such well-known brands as South-Western, Delmar, Wadsworth and Brooks/Cole, with the market leading library/reference group, Gale, and the company's international operations. The transition will begin immediately, and is expected to be completed in September 2010.
"This is an exciting change for Cengage Learning and our customers, making it possible for us to provide a range of research and learning solutions that is unprecedented in our industry," said Ron Dunn, President and CEO of Cengage Learning. "Unlike any of our competitors, we can leverage the combined resources of Gale and APG to bridge the gap between the library and the classroom, developing innovative new solutions that combine Gale's unparalleled expertise in creating, organizing and distributing content with APG's deep understanding of pedagogy, teaching and learning styles, and assessment. This combination will allow Cengage Learning to better serve customers worldwide -- in classrooms, libraries, and anywhere else people engage in research and learning. It represents an alliance of abilities completely unique in our industry -- a blend of content, technology, and expertise -- drawn from more than half a century serving both classrooms and libraries."
As a result of the restructuring, Patrick C. Sommers, President of Gale will retire at the end of July, and Ron Mobed, President of the Academic and Professional Group will be leaving the company. Dunn's new Executive Committee will include: Adrian Butler, Executive Vice President, Human Resources; Ken Carson, General Counsel; Dean Durbin, Chief Financial Officer; Rich Foley, Executive Vice President, Sales and Marketing; Manuel Guzman, Executive Vice President, Learning and Research Solutions; and William Rieders, Executive Vice President, New Media.
About Cengage Learning
Cengage Learning is a leading provider of innovative teaching, learning and research solutions for the academic, professional and library markets worldwide. The company's products and services are designed to foster academic excellence and professional development, increase student engagement and improve learning outcomes. Cengage Learning's brands include Heinle, Gale, Wadsworth, Delmar, Brooks/Cole and South-Western, among others. For more information on Cengage

Metadata Everywhere

An interesting article in OCLC's NextSpace publication about the increasing importance of meta data. Music to bibliographers and catalogers' ears. (OCLC):

“Metadata has become a stand-in for place.”

So says Richard Amelung, Associate Director at the Saint Louis University Law Library. When asked to expand on that idea he explains, “Law is almost entirely jurisdictional. You need to know where a decision occurred or a law was changed to understand if it has any relevance to your subject.

“In the old days, you would walk the stacks in the law library and look at the sections for U.S. law, international law, various state law publications, etc. Online? Without metadata, you may have no idea where something is from. Good cataloging isn’t just a ‘nice-to-have’ for legal reference online. It’s a requirement.”

Richard’s point is one example of a trend that is being felt across all aspects of information services, both on and off the Web: the increasing importance and ubiquity of metadata. In a world where more and more people, systems, places and even objects are digitally connected, the ability to differentiate “signal from noise” is fast becoming a core competency for many businesses and institutions.

Librarians—and catalogers more specifically—are deeply familiar with the role good metadata creation plays in any information system. As part of this revolution, industries are increasing the value they place on talents and the ways in which librarians work, extending the ever-growing sphere of interested players.

Whether we are tracing connections on LinkedIn, getting recommendations from Netflix, trying to find the right medical specialist in a particular city or monitoring a shipment online, metadata has become the structure on which we’re building information services. And no one has more experience with those structures than catalogers.

Concluding:

“It is clear that metadata is ubiquitous,” Jane continues. “Education, the arts, science, industry, government and the many humanistic, scientific and social pursuits that comprise our world have rallied to develop, implement and adhere to some form of metadata practice.

“What is important is that librarians are the experts in developing information standards, and we have the most sophisticated skills and experience in knowledge representation.”

Those skills are being put to good use not only in the library, but in nearly every discipline and societal sector coming into contact with information.

Oxford University Press and the "Anti Google"

ArsTechnica reports on the launch of a new approach to patron and consumer research by OUP that will attempt to combat 'information overload' and the prevailing issue of 'authority'. This is a potentially revolutionary approach by a highly respected information publisher to draw back under a subscription model consumers of information who are increasingly dissatisfied with 'good enough' which is endemic to google and wikipedia.

From the article:

The OBO tool is essentially a straightforward, hyperlinked collection of professionally-produced, peer-reviewed bibliographies in different subject areas—sort of a giant, interactive syllabus put together by OUP and teams of scholars in different disciplines. Users can drill down to a specific bibliographic entry, which contains some descriptive text and a list of references that link to either Google Books or to a subscribing library's own catalog entries, by either browsing or searching. Each entry is written by a scholar working in the relevant field and vetted by a peer review process. The idea is to alleviate the twin problems of Google-induced data overload, on the one hand, and Wikipedia-driven GIGO (garbage in, garbage out), on the other.

"We did about 18 months of pretty intensive research with scholars and students and librarians to explore how their research practices were changing with the proliferation of online sources," Damon Zucca, OUP’s Executive Editor, Reference, told Ars. "The one thing we heard over and over again is that people were drowning in scholarly information, and drowning in information in general. So it takes twice as much time for people to begin their research."
...
To trust OBO's content, you have to trust its selection and vetting process. To that end, OUP is making the list of contributing scholars and editors freely available. Each subject area has an Editor in Chief who's a top scholar in the field, and an editorial board of around 15 to 20 scholars. The EIC and editorial board either write the bibliographic entries themselves, or they select other scholars to do the work.

Is There a Future for Bibliographic Databases? - Repost

The following was originally posted on April 2nd, 2007 and since John and I met for dinner in NYC last night I thought I would re-post his article.


I have commented a number of times on what I view is the future of bibliographic databases - particularly those similar to Books in Print and Worldcat - and in keeping with that theme I asked John Dupuis (Confessions of a Science Librarian) what his views were on the same subject. The following article is written by John Dupuis, Science Librarian, Steacie Science & Engineering Library, York University. He told me to mention he is on sabbatical.


A week or so ago, Michael asked me to do a guest post here on Personanondata about bibliographic databases, based on some of the speculations I've made on my own blog, Confessions of a Science Librarian, about the future of Abstracting and Indexing databases.

Here's how he put it in his email:

I have read your posts on the future of information databases and bibliographies etc. over the past several months and I was wondering whether you had a specific opinion of the future of bibliographic databases such as worldcat and booksinprint? ... [O]n my blog I have skirted around the idea that the basic logic of these types of databases is beginning to erode as base level metadata is more readily available and of sufficient quality to reduce the need for these types of bibliographic databases. Assuming that is increasingly the case then these providers need to determine new value propositions for their customers. So what are they?

How could I resist? I'm not sure if I exactly answer his questions or even talked about what he'd hoped I'd talk about, but at least I've probably provoked a few more questions.

In my blog post on the future of A&I databases, I basically came to the conclusion that in the face of competition from Google Scholar and its ilk, the traditional Abstracting & Indexing databases would be increasingly hard-pressed to make a case for their usefulness to academic institutions. Students want ease of use, they concentrate on what's "good enough" not what's perfect. Over time, academic libraries will find it harder and harder to justify spending loads of money on search and discovery tools when plenty of free alternatives exist. Unless, of course, the vendors can find some way to add enough value to the data to make themselves indispensable. I used SciFinder Scholar as an example of a tool that adds a lot of value to data. I think we'll definitely start to see this transition from fee to free in the next 10 years, with considerable acceleration after that.

Now, I didn't really talk about bibliographic/collections tools like Books in Print (BiP), WorldCat (WC), Ulrich's or the Serials Directory (SD). Why not? I think it's because those tools are aimed at experts, not end users. Professionals, not civilians. Surely if a freshman only wants a couple of quick articles to quote for a paper due in a couple of hours, then we librarians and publishing professionals are looking for good, solid, quality information and we're willing to pay for it. This distinction would seem to me to be quite important, leading to quite a different kind of analysis, one I wasn't really aiming at originally. So, I didn't really think about it at the time.

So, now it's time to put the thinking cap back on and see what my crystal ball tells me.

In my professional work as a collections librarian, I am a frequent user of all the tools I mention above. I think that BiP is the one I use the most. Over the last 5 or 6 years I've built up a specialized engineering collection mostly from scratch so I've needed a lot of help and BiP has been an enormously useful tool. I use keyword searches. I also use the subject links on the item records a lot to take me to lists of similar books.

WC I use less frequently, mostly only when I want to look beyond books that are in print and want to identify older and rarer items that I'll end up having to get on the used book market. I've used this to build up various aspects of our Science and Technology Studies collection on topics like women in science. On the other hand, WC seems to have already found a big part of its value proposition with non-experts. Look at it's partnership with Google Book Search. Also look at the really innovative things it's doing with products like WorldCat Identities. It's not perfect by any means but you can see the innovative spirit working.

Ulrich's and SD I mostly use to identify pricing issues for journals I might want to subscribe to, so I don't use them that often. With the ease of finding journal homepages, this function is probably falling fast in it's uses. As for identifying the journals in a particular subject area, that's still a useful function but I wonder what the future is if that's all they offer.

For our purposes here, I'll concentrate on the one I use most: BiP. I presume a lot of what I have to say will also more or less apply to the other specialized tools aimed at pros.

So, I definitely need quality information on books to do my job, now and in the future. But if I need quality information, what will the source be? Although of course I use BiP, I also use Amazon quite a lot to find information on books I want to order; the features that they have that I like best and use most come out of the kind of data mining they can do with their ordering and access logs. When I'm looking at an interesting item, Amazon can quickly tell me what other books are similar, what other books people that have purchased the one I'm looking at have also purchased. I find this to be an extremely important tool for finding books, a great time saver and an incredibly accurate way of finding relevant items. Also, when I search Amazon, I'm actually searching the full text of a lot of books in their database. This feature gets me inside books and unleashes their contents in a way that can't be duplicated by being able to view or even search tables of contents.

I also very much like the user-generated lists and reviews. On more than one occasion I've appreciated multiple user reviews of highly technical books, especially when there are negative reviews to warn me away from bad ones. The "Listmania" and "So you'd like to.." lists are great sources of recommendations. On the other hand, it has some significant problems that keep me from going to it exclusively. For example, most any search returns reams of irrelevant hits. The subject classifications that Amazon displays at the bottom of the page I also find next to useless as they are often far too broad.

For BiP, the features I appreciate the most, the ones that draw me back from Amazon, include very good linkable subject classification and good coverage of non-US imprints. When I do keyword searches, the results seem more focused and less cluttered with irrelevant items. I also like that it gives me very complete bibliographic information, including at least part of a call number. While Amazon isn't geared to let you mark then print out a bunch of items (why would they want you to be able to do this?), I appreciate being able to generate lists and print them out using BiP. On the other hand, BiP has been slow to make their interface as quick and easy to use as Google or Amazon, to make use of the tons of data they have, to mine it to find connections, to harness user input and reviews in a massive way to compete with the Amazon juggernaut. When for-fee is competing with for-free, the one that costs money has to be very clearly the best.

Another threat to BiP is Google Book Search. As I've recounted in a story on my blog, Google Book Search in an incredible tool for research, reference and even collections. Once again, the ability to search the entire text of books is an incredible tool for revealing what they're really about, to surface them and make me want to buy them. As Cory Doctorow has said, the greatest enemy of authors (and publishers) is not piracy, it's obscurity. Google Book Search is an amazing tool for a book to get known and,ultimately, to get bought. As more and more publishers realize this (and even book publishers are smart enough to realize this eventually), they'll make darn sure all their new books are full text searchable by Google (and, presumably, Amazon and others). How can BiP compete with that?

I think it's safe to say, it wouldn't take much for me to completely abandon the use of BiP and only use free tools such as Amazon and Google. What could BiP do to keep in the game? What is their value proposition for me? What is the value proposition for all bibliographic tools hoping to market themselves to library professionals now and in the future?

Some issues I've been thinking about.

• The changing nature of publishing What's a book? What's a journal? What does "in print" mean? Print journals vs. online? Ebooks vs. paper books? Fee vs. Free. Open Access publishing. Wikis. Blogs. To say that bibliographic databases have to be ahead of the curve on all the revolutionary changes going on today in publishing is an understatement. Look at all the trouble newspapers are in, the trouble they're having adjusting to a new business model. Well, the book world is changing as well, especially for academic customers. The needs of academic users are quite different from regular users. They don't necessarily need to read an entire book, just key sections. Search and discovery are incredibly important to these users, almost more important than the content. They also really don't care about the source of their content, what they really care about is having as few barriers between the content and themselves. How will BiP and other bibliographic databases help professionals like me navigate this mess? Easy. By continuing to provide one-stop-shopping, only for a much wider range of items. Paper books from traditional publishers, for sure, but how about all those Print on Demand publishers? Sifting through the chaff to get the rare kernel of wheat is an important task, one I know that they're already doing to some degree. But how about digital document publishers like Morgan & Claypool? O'Reilly's Digital PDFs? White papers and other documents from all kinds of publishers? How about the incredible amount of free ebooks out there? And other useful digital documents and document collections, both free and for sale (The Einstein Archives is an example)? And breaking down the digital availability of the component parts of collections like Knovel, Safari, Books 24x7 and all the others. Any tool that could help me evaluate the pros and cons of those repositories would be greatly appreciated. The landscape out there for useful information is clearly far larger than it used to be.
  
• Changing nature of metadata. Never underestimate the value of good metadata; never underestimate the value of the people that produce that metadata. It seems to me that one of the core issues is who should create metadata for books and other documents and how should that metadata be distributed to the people that want it, be it commercial search engines or library/bookstore catalogues. It would be great if all content publishers created their own metadata and that it was of the highest quality and free to everyone. There's a role for bibliographic databases to collect and distribute that metadata, maybe even to create it. The library world has a good history of sharing that kind of data, but I'm not sure how that model scales to a bigger world. It seems to me that there's an opportunity here.
  
• Changing nature of customers. I've publicly predicted that I will hardly be buying any more print books for my library in 10 years. Libraries are changing, bookstores are changing. Our patrons and customers are the ones driving this change. As my patrons want more digital content, as they use print collections less, as they rely on free search and discovery tools rather than expensive specialized tools, I must change too. As my patrons' needs and habits change, the nature of the collections I will acquire for them will follow those changes -- or I will find myself in big trouble. Anybody that can make my life easier is certainly going to be welcome. And that will be the challenge for the various bibliographic tools -- making it easier for me to respond to the changes sweeping my world. A good bibliographic service should be able to help me populate the catalogue with the stuff I want and my patrons need. I think a lot of progress has been made on this front in products like WC, but I think to stay in the game the progress will have to be transformative. There's lots of opportunity here.
  
• What's worth paying for. In other words, BiP, WC and their ilk have to be better than the free alternatives. And not just a little better. And not just better in an abstruse, theoretical way; if it takes you 20 minutes to explain why you're better, the margin may be too slim. Better as in way better on 80% of my usage rather than just somewhat better than on 20%. Better as in saving time, saving effort, saving more money than they cost, making my life easier.

To conclude, I can only say one thing. In times of intense change and uncertainty, evolutionary pressure is extremely intense. Only those products and services that can find an ecological niche, a way to satisfy enough customers, will survive. To thrive is another story. To thrive requires a redefinition of products and services, a way to jump ahead of competitors and to win new markets with something new and exciting. It's hard to tell where bibliographic databases will find their place: will they be dodo birds, or will they find a way to survive or even thrive in the coming decade. There's certainly a window to change. Nobody is going to cancel any of these core tools any time soon. But the window will close sooner rather than later.

John can be reached at the following email address: dupuisj@gmail.com

BISG Consumer Study

BISG announces the first of three studies that look at consumer attitudes to e-Book reading (BISG):

The first of three, all to be released in 2010, the initial Consumer Attitudes Toward E-Book Reading survey also found that the majority of print book buyers rank "affordability" as the #1 reason they would choose to purchase an e-book rather than a print book of the same title. Of less consequence when it came to their purchase decisions was the extent to which an e-book was searchable or environmentally friendly.

Additional findings include:

• Roughly 1/5 of survey respondents said they've stopped purchasing print books within the past 12 months in favor of acquiring the e-book editions.
• Most survey respondents said they prefer to share e-books across devices.
  
• Only 28% said they would "definitely" purchase an e-book with Digital Rights Management (DRM); men were more likely than women to say they would not buy an e-book with DRM.
• Survey respondents indicated a clear preference for e-reader devices used as of November 2009, with computers coming in first (47%), followed by the Kindle (32%), and other e-reader devices at roughly 10% apiece.
• Although certainly growing, 81% of survey respondents say they currently purchase an e-book only "rarely" or "occasionally."

Publishing Futurist: REPOST

Continuing my effort at regurgitation, here is a post from 1/8/2007 where I think about changes in education.

During an interview a few weeks ago, I was asked if I were to look at one segment of the publishing industry 10 years from now what would be my most radical forecast? It is a hard question because the rate of change in publishing is so rapid and all segments of the industry will see significant change in different ways over the next decade. Technology is fundamental and what often makes predictions like this difficult is to anticipate how technology can open new applications which are not immediately apparent on first exposure. For example, cameras on cell phones - have become widely used because they addressed a need in an unanticipated way.

Many people, myself included, thought that a camera on a cell phone was a worthless extravagance but because we never had access to this technology we couldn't understand where or under what circumstances it would be used. Now taken for granted, I take pictures with my phone all the time and soon I will be reading barcodes with it enabling me to access to product information as I browse through a store.

In publishing, social networking, wikis and blogs etc. will become the primary publishing platform for educational publishing. Currently, the environment is anarchic and it is hard to see how the formula heavy education market could leverage this technology to produce a better product. I think it is inevitable.

My answer to the question posed to me was that I envisioned an environment where there were no set textbooks, content or a curriculum for particular courses. Courses would have learning objectives both general and specific and the students would be required to obtain and/or demonstrate their understanding of the core material against these objectives. The student could obtain this knowledge and understanding via any means they wanted. In addition to demonstrating a mastery of the course objectives they would also have to justify the reference material and methodology they used to obtain their knowledge.

My comments are not unique and in a recent CNET interview, John Seely Brown (former chief scientist at PARC) suggested that,

"rather than treat pedagogy as the transfer of knowledge from teachers who are experts to students who are receptacles, educators should consider more hands-on and informal types of learning. These models are closer to an apprenticeship, a further-reaching, more multilayered approach than traditional formal education."

He also discussed a number of current examples of collaborative/social learning including a site at Brown University that brings together experts on Boccaccio.

Educational content will still be vitally important in any futurist vision of learning and education but it will not be delivered or published in forms we are currently familiar with. In my view, it is the current publishing paradigm that is slowing the development of online/ elearning methods. Publishers publish traditional book products and most of what they do is dictated by the format of a print product which does not travel well in the online world. The tasks publishers support for scoping, editing, veracity, testing, etc. will gain in importance as some other (non-value add) functions are eliminated.

Teaching methods will also change as educators spend more time and effort on critical thinking, research techniques and collaboration/mediation. Flexible teaching methodologies will allow students to learn more effectively. For example, for a student that learns by doing perhaps simulations will feature more with this student versus the student that learns by reading.

Who knows if my idea is relevant but without a doubt change comes rapidly to the manner in which children are being taught. As this gathers steam the children themselves could have more influence on the methodology and the supporting material than the traditional school, academic, publisher triumvirate.

Houghton Mifflin Invests

A profile of Houghton Mifflin in the Irish Independent references a €350m investment supported by Enterprise Ireland for digital learning products (Link):

From simple mathematics to the intricacies of the Pythagoras' Theorem, Stevens shows how through the use of laptops in the classroom, as well as at home in their own time via social networking, kids can absorb vital knowledge at a critical stage in their development. The lessons appear as visual quizzes, puzzles and games to keep young minds engaged. Teachers can monitor their progress and ensure that struggling students are supported. Entire education clouds where teachers can share knowledge, arrange lesson plans and file reports are now being used to manage millions of students in the US. "These platforms are not just delivering content," explains Fiona O'Carroll, executive vice-president at HMH in Dublin. "They instruct their young minds and also allow teachers to assess the children and provide them with individualised learning paths. Kids with particular needs can be ushered in the direction of individualised lessons."

In Support of the Google Book Settlement

It isn't unusual to hear from financial analysts here at PND HQ who offer all manner of crazy predictions over (in particular) eBook take-up and how the Amazon Kindle is going to take over the universe, so it was particularly welcoming this morning to read Jeffrey Lindsay's (Analyst, Global Internet at Bernstein) defense of the Google Book Agreement.

From Lindsay:

Google has just done something rather wonderful. It is on the verge of an astonishing achievement that will benefit the U.S. for generations, bridging a major part of the digital divide and giving the country a global lead in a key area – scholarship. Its reward: a lawsuit, public criticism from the hastily reconstituted and Orwellian-named “Open Book Alliance” (Microsoft, Yahoo! and Amazon) and scrutiny by the Justice Department. Imagine what might have happened had they had tried to destroy a competitor’s business model by bundling its product into an operating system or attempted to corner the e-book market by making a proprietary closed system to force users to buy online books only form them.

I like the irony. Lindsay alerts us to the effort by Microsoft (in particular) and their aborted effort to implement their own digitization program - one which in my view never really got off the ground. With a little bit of a dig, he seems to suggest that Microsoft didn't really have the consumers' or publishers' interest in mind when they unceremoniously canceled the Live Search Books program after their late and halfhearted approach last year. So under those circumstances is Microsoft a viable challenger to this agreement when they chose to abandon their effort?

Only Google stayed the course and so now only Google has the world’s largest digital book archive. So what is it going to do that is so terrible now that it has this archive? According to Google it is simply going to let people search it for free and if they want to buy the books direct them to a range of other sellers – hardly cornering much of the value of book digitization.

Lindsay does address three important objections - competition, BRR representation and privacy - and introduces these as follows:

Ignoring the competitively-motivated hyperbole there are some grounds for concern with the Google Book Rights Registry agreement. No legal agreement is perfect and given the way events have picked up speed since Google reached agreement with the Authors Guild, some concerns these do merit some serious consideration. The usual Google refrain "trust us, we do no evil" line may be well intended but the company has already had a couple of near misses on privacy; the Viacom-YouTube lawsuit for example (where Viacom subpoenaed and received full records of all videos seen on YouTube). Moreover Google already caved on censorship in China – clearly as a corporate entity it is susceptible to arm-twisting to a greater degree than the small but well documented number of brave librarians and book sellers in the U.S. who have turned down user reading list requests from the Police and FBI.

Moreover even assuming Google's current management team is well intentioned and trustworthy who can give guarantees about the actions of future generations of management? Considered objections from academics and public watchdog institutions such as the Center for Democracy and Technology fall into three broad categories: (1) lack of competition; (2) limited representativeness of the BRR and its potential for self interested behavior; and (3) Privacy

With respect to pricing he notes critics of the GBS use the pricing models of academic journal publishers as proof that Google will act with similar disregard for universal access and fairness; however, he does note that Google's behavior to date has been more 'altruistic' than the behavior exhibited by those same publishers. Despite this, he concludes that perhaps some type of regulatory oversight might be called for once the agreement is approved.

On the Book Rights Registry he comments,

The BRR in principle has no incentive to drive down the costs of knowledge and given its privileged position could actually act in self-interested ways – analogies to the Olympics venue selection committees have been made. In addition parallels have been drawn with the BRR's unique gatekeeper position relative to the fragmented base of book users prompting comparisons with the cable industry and health insurers.

Again the solution seems to be some sort of oversight of regulation to counter-balance market failure.The EFF position on privacy which I noted a few weeks ago is also referenced as an important issue in not only the debate over the settlement but the wider implications for how Google charts everything we see and do. Books of course hold a particular sacrosanct position in terms of privacy and librarianship and if nothing else many would want Google to act in a similar way to the stand taken by many librarians in the face of subpoena and the FBI.

Lindsey closes with a desire to see the settlement approved by the court noting that the access to knowledge afforded by the agreement exceeds any negative aspects of the deal especially if supervision is also prescribed. His final comments concludes,

With good regulation this repository of human knowledge and ideas could be kept accessible to millions at low or zero cost while ensuring the rights to knowledge and privacy set out in the Bill of Rights could be preserved for generations. What is the alternative? Forcing Google to destroy this database may delight a small number of extremely rich individuals in the Pacific Northwest, but would be one of the greatest acts of Luddite vandalism of modern time. We hope the regulators will be enlightened and bold in the upcoming hearings on October 7th.

CrossRef Sees Increase in DOI's For Books

CrossRef.org the membership organization supporting academic publishing content recently reported that DOI's assigned to books has continued to increase year over year:

As of July 2009, more than 1.8 million CrossRef Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) have been assigned for books. Each CrossRef DOI represents a citable book title, chapter, or reference entry that can be used to link references from scholarly content. Book deposits range from monographs with a single CrossRef DOI to massive reference works with tens of thousands of individual entries.

To encourage publishers to ramp up reference linking for scholarly books, and to explain how CrossRef DOIs for books work, CrossRef has published two documents. The first, Best Practices for Books, was created by CrossRef’s Book Working Group. The second is a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) document explaining the relationship between CrossRef DOIs and other DOI applications, such as the ISBN-A.

“We are very encouraged at the growth of books being used in CrossRef reference linking,” said Michael Forster, Chair of CrossRef’s Book Working Group, and Vice President and Associate Publishing Director, Physical Sciences, Scientific, Technical, Medical, and Scholarly Publishing, John Wiley & Sons, Inc. “We solicited feedback from the entire CrossRef membership before finalizing these guidelines. Our goal is to encourage reference linking among books, proceedings, and journal content, and to enhance the discoverability of professional, reference, technical, and scholarly books.”

The best practices document, available at http://www.crossref.org/06members/best_practices_for_books.html, includes suggestions for improving reference matching results. It identifies minimum and recommended book metadata for deposits and queries in the CrossRef system. Ways to handle editions and other types of versions, so important in book publishing, are also addressed.

Elsevier's Journal of The Future

Journal publisher Elsevier has announced a beta project to re-think the journal article. In collaboration with their journal Cell, the company's innovation team has set up two beta sites that solicit feedback on how technology can improve the experience of both the journal contributor and the consumer.

Elsevier is the world's largest publisher of scientific and medical content and its results from what they describe as the 'journal of the future' will be watched closely by subscribers and competitors.

The concept attempts to make impressive use of current technology to aid the navigation of the journal article content, to provide more graphical and multimedia content and enable better and more effective linking to related content.

In summary, there are some of the features the publisher notes on the Cell beta site:

• A hierarchical presentation of text and figures so that readers can elect to drill down through the layers of content based on their level of expertise and interest. This organizational structure is a significant departure from the linear-based organization of a traditional print-based article in incorporating the core text and supplemental material within a single unified structure.
• A graphical abstract allows readers to quickly gain an understanding of the main take-home message of the paper. The graphical abstract is intended to encourage browsing, promote interdisciplinary scholarship and help readers identify more quickly which papers are most relevant to their research interests.
• Research highlights provide a bulleted list of the key results of the article.
• Author-Affiliation highlighting makes it easy to see an author’s affiliations and all authors from the same affiliation.
• A figure that contains clickable areas so that it can be used as a navigation mechanism to directly access specific sub-sections of the results and figures.
• Integrated audio and video let authors present the context of their article via an interview or video presentation and allow animations to be displayed more effectively.
• The Experimental Procedures section contains alternate views allowing readers to see a summary or the full details necessary to replicate the experiment.
• A new approach to displaying figures allows the reader to identify quickly which figures they are interested in and then drill down through related supplemental figures. All supplemental figures are displayed individually and directly linked to the main figure to which they are related.
• Real-time reference analyses provide a rich environment to explore the content of the article via the list of citations.

Here is the link to the beta version of the journal itself. (Cell Beta).

Bloomsbury Launch Library Online

Adam Hodgkin has a post about a new and interesting initiative by Bloomsbury (UK) to tackle the library market.

Bloomsbury have held steady to their target of developing a service for libraries, initially primarily in the UK. It has turned out to be pretty much the project that they explained to us before Christmas. A shelf for libraries of some of the best books, from contemporary authors, which will grow and which will also serve to promote sales of the print books and public awareness of the authors selected. I suppose that there is, in this chosen vehicle, an element of quasi-political support for public libraries - a resource which publishers rightly hold to be key to the flourishing of a literary culture. Nevertheless it is interesting that one of London's leading Trade publishers should set such a priority on the support of public libraries, and that they should fashion such a service for a market which must be a tiny fraction of the market for their print publications.

Here is the Bloomsbury release:

Bloomsbury is set to transform the relationship between publishers and libraries, and between libraries and readers, with an innovative development in public lending: The Bloomsbury Library Online.

At a time when the British library system is under pressure to reach larger audiences with tighter budgets, and when the reading public is feeling the pinch, Bloomsbury is launching a unique, affordable and user-friendly online initiative.

In association with www.exacteditions.com and using existing technology in libraries across the country, Bloomsbury is rolling out a groundbreaking e-lending strategy which will allow readers toread collections of bestselling books at local library terminals or with the use of a library card on home computers and internet enabled devices.

The Bloomsbury Library Online will consist of a number of themed shelves: children’s books, sports titles, international fiction, Shakespeare plays, reference books and more. They will launch with a shelf of Book Group titles including Galaxy Book of the Year, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, by Kate Summerscale, Orange Prize longlisted Burnt Shadows, by Kamila Shamsie, word-of-mouth phenomenon The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Shaffer, and international bestseller The Death of Vishnu by Manil Suri. Embracing the advantages of the online format, users will be able to read the book, search the text, access author interviews, reviews, press features, and links to specially commissioned reading group guides.

How will it work?
• The Bloomsbury Library Online will be sold on subscription – libraries will subscribe to a bookshelf for a year at a time and will pay according to the size of population served.
• New titles will be added on a continuous basis – free of charge within the subscription year.
• Users will click through from the Library terminals or through an online portal accessible via any web browser (including those found on iPhone and Blackberry) anytime, anywhere in the UK.
• Text accessible through screen readers and therefore available to blind and partially-sighted users.

Macrovision Buys Muze

Muze, a company that supplies data information products supporting entertainment products such as music, video, books and games has been acquired by Macrovision for $16.5mm (all cash). Macrovision has been acquiring data companies (notibly TVGuide) and building its data products portfolio to support its business of "connected middleware, media recognition, interactive programming guides, copy protection and rich media, data and metadata on music, games, movies and television programming." From the press release:

Consumers' options are increasing as entertainment becomes digital. They can now enjoy their movies, music or other digital content in more ways, including numerous options online and on portable devices. All of these choices lead to an increased need for enhanced search and discovery capabilities to help consumers find entertainment content that matches their personal preferences. This process is powered by entertainment metadata.

"Macrovision believes that professional entertainment metadata is required for our customers to provide best in class consumer facing products," said Fred Amoroso, President and CEO of Macrovision. "The addition of the Muze assets will complement Macrovision's data solutions. It represents continued execution on our vision of delivering solutions that power a uniquely simple home entertainment experience."

Muze, which has been around since 1991 and is headquartered in NYC, has had a troubled history and was purchased in 2005 by a a private equity company that sought to establish more strategic focus, better cost containment and more professional management. In the years since 2005, Muze has acquired or allied with several companies and purchased the the assets of Loudeye for $11mm in cash in 2006.

In 2005, there was some excitement around the financial prospects for companies like Muze and AMG (another data supplier) and the multiples asked in sales prospectus' were relatively high. While terms were not disclosed on the 2005 Muze sale, some in the industry put the number at north of $30mm.

Swets Launch iPhone Access for 11,000 Journals

An interesting announcement from Swets that the contents of their journals database are available via the Apple iPhone and iTouch. Swets is a subscriptions management company serving the library and academic communities. It is not completely clear from this press release what additional functionality exists versus accessing the content via a browser.

Swets is pleased to announce SwetsWise Online Content can be accessed through the Apple iPhone and Apple iPod Touch. Powered by SwetsWise Subscriptions, SwetsWise Online Content is a single point of contact to one of the most extensive collections of electronic journals currently available in the scholarly information market.

SwetsWise Online Content provides users with access to direct links for more than 11,000 journal titles − all from a seamless Web interface and through the convenience of their Personal Digital Assistant. Information users can search relevant online content, utilize multi-level linking, download subscription lists and much more.

“I am delighted SwetsWise Online Content is accessible through the iPhone and iPod Touch,” states Jose Luis Andrade, Swets North America President. “Now, SwetsWise Online Content users can effortlessly gain instant access to e-journals. This is one of the many ways Swets is in-sync to the world’s ever-changing technologies and supplying information users with innovative electronic solutions that help further support their organizations.”

SwetsWise Online Content offers over 25 million searchable references along with links to full-text articles through an intuitive Web interface. This service also provides informative usage statistics on each title, and includes fast access set-up for new electronic journal subscriptions.

In addition to SwetsWise Online Content, SwetsWise Subscriptions is also available through the iPhone and iPod Touch. Information users can manage their subscriptions, view publication schedules, check the title status to thousands of print and electronic content and many other SwetsWise Subscriptions functions.

The Apple iPhone 3G also support WiFi, a standard wireless connection that allows SwetsWise Online Content and SwetsWise Subscriptions access using IP authentication. Customers can easily facilitate research and view e-content.

Bloomsbury Buys Wisden

I think Richard Charkin will be walking around the Bloomsbury offices this morning with a big smile on his face. Wisden is the official almanac for Cricket and Richard being a big cricket fan as well as Chief Executive of Bloomsbury is going to be well chuffed since they now have their hands on it.

From AP:

John Wisden & Co was bought by the billionaire Paul Getty in 1993. Since his death in 2003, the company has been owned by his son, Mark.

Published every year since 1864, the yearbook is known among cricket fans for its mixture of statistics, features and opinion pieces.

Bloomsbury Publishing chief executive Nigel Newton called the acquisition "a landmark event in the history of the company and an important step in our strategy to increase our presence in reference and sport publishing."

ABC-Clio Acquires Greenwood Publishing Rights

In a deal announced this morning, Houghton Harcourt Mifflin has agreed to grant ABC-Clio a perpetual license to use the imprints and publish the titles of Greenwood Publishing Group, including Greenwood Press, Praeger Publishers, Praeger Security International and Libraries Unlimited. The announcement goes on to say HHM will transfer certain intellectual property, contracts and assets to ABC-CLIO and that the agreement is effective immediately. Terms have not been announced.

From the announcement:

"By combining Greenwood Publishing’s impressive and extensive list of titles with our experience in publishing widely respected databases, reference books and eBooks, ABC-CLIO is expanding its role as a leader in the publishing industry,” said Ron Boehm, CEO, ABC-CLIO. “We believe that we will launch the next generation of high-quality reference, professional development and other resources for education and libraries.”

This looks like a good deal for ABC-CLIO. They gain a strong list of reference titles, a reputable publisher with a history of stable consistent operations and a reliable brand particularly in the library and educational community. Greenwood was part of Reed Elsevier for many years and was incorporated into the Harcourt business unit after Harcourt was purchased by Reed. That business was sold and Greenwood ended up at HHM.

Perhaps this is how deals will be done in the short term to compensate for the lack of credit.

E-Books: The End User Experience

Springer has published a white paper on the results of a study they undertook asking librarians and users about their views on ebook adoption and benefits. In two stages, the company spoke to librarians in 2007 and followed that study up with another focused on users in 2008.

The survey uncovered some encouraging results regarding eBook adoption. Most users were aware of eBooks and had accessed them at least once. Respondents also overwhelmingly said that eBooks are useful and that they would like to incorporate eBooks into their information experience more frequently. These positive findings are supported by additional Springer usage research and studies from independent organizations that have found a surprising level of uptake for eBooks given their relative newness.

Other items of interest from the study (and covered in the document in more detail):

• Users mostly access ebooks for research and study while reading reference and textbooks
• E-book usage appears less concentrated than online journal usage
  
• Users find ebooks equally via Google and their library
• Convenience, accessibility, and enhanced functionality are the primary benefits of eBooks
• Current users expect to prefer ebooks to other reading formats over time (next five yrs).
  

The study summarizes the findings as follows:

Users are not reading eBooks cover-to-cover in the traditional sense but instead approach them as a resource for finding answers to research questions. eBooks have the potential to stimulate new forms of book content usage and will require libraries to think differently about how to accommodate the needs of users as their eBook collections grow. Viewing eBooks through the lens of traditional print book usage might cause libraries to miss important opportunities for enhancing the user research experience.

Scanned! Libraries See the Folly in Proprietary Programs

The Open Content Alliance was established as a non-profit, non-proprietary program to aid libraries in developing their own book scanning efforts. It was partially a reaction to the far more renowned Google book program but some could argue it was a logical extension of the work of the Internet Archive program that the OCA founder Brewster Kahle also established. There are fundamental differences between the OCA approach and other digitization programs: Firstly, the library pays OCA for the scan, secondly, the content is limited to out of copyright material and thirdly, the library has no restriction on what is done with the scan.

This morning the NYTimes examines the developing resistance to commercial digitization programs such as Google and Microsoft and uses as an example the decision by a consortium of Massachusetts libraries not to go commercial.

But the resistance from some libraries, like the Boston Public Library and the Smithsonian Institution, suggests that many in the academic and nonprofit world are intent on pursuing a vision of the Web as a global repository of knowledge that is free of business interests or restrictions. Even though Google’s program could make millions of books available to hundreds of millions of Internet users for the first time, some libraries and researchers worry that if any one company comes to dominate the digital conversion of these works, it could exploit that dominance for commercial gain.

But Google continues to add libraries to their digitization program with regularity and why this continues is not really discussed here. Within the library community the disquiet regarding the Google program has been growing all year and the discussion as been as much about the restrictions as it has about the quality of the scans themselves. Less has been said about public trust and this aspect is not directly addressed in the Times article either.

As repositories of our collective knowledge and most often as beneficiaries of our tax revenues or public donations, libraries have an obligation to ensure that the general public has ready access to the content collected on our behalf. Perhaps this is a controversial point and perhaps this thought it not directly applicable in an academic context (unless it is a public institution) but the President of the Boston Public Library obliquely references this point when he says in the article:

"We understand the commercial value of what Google is doing, but we want to be able to distribute materials in a way where everyone benefits from it,” said Bernard A. Margolis, president of the Boston Public Library, which has in its collection roughly 3,700 volumes from the personal library of John Adams.

So what of the libraries in the Google program? Some are having second thoughts, some are entirely happy and some have made it work to their advantage. Generally, speaking it appears that everyone believes that all library content will eventually be freely accessible. If that means that works will have to be scanned again for those works that have restrictions placed on them by the original scanner then so be it. Since this second effort is likely to take some time, this content may be available in digitized form at a network level in advance as more and more libraries take advantage of 'open' programs like OCA.

I was intrigued by the last sentence of the article:

On Wednesday the Internet Archive announced, together with the Boston Public Library and the library of the Marine Biological Laboratory and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, that it would start scanning out-of-print but in-copyright works to be distributed through a digital inter library loan system.

"digital interlibrary loan system" sounds very interesting.

Sommers Named President of Gale

Pat Sommers who until recently was President & CEO of Sirsi/Dynix has been named as the new President of Gale Reference. He replaces Gordon Macomber who announced last week that he was leaving for Wolters Kluwer Education. Sommers will report directly to Cengage CEO Ron Dunn. From the press release:

"Pat Sommers is extremely well qualified to lead Gale. He has anoutstanding record of success in managing information service businesses,and I am confident that he will provide strong leadership to help Gale growand further solidify its position as the world's premier library referenceinformation business," said Mr. Dunn. "I am delighted to welcome Pat toCengage Learning and look forward to working with him to provideoutstanding products and services for Gale's customers."

He starts Monday.

Press Release.

Macomber appointed President & CEO Wolters Kluwer Health

Wolters Kluwer Health, a division of Wolters Kluwer, a leading provider of information and business intelligence for students, professionals, and institutions in medicine, nursing, allied health, pharmacy and the pharmaceutical industry, announced today the appointment of Gordon Macomber as President & CEO of its Professional & Education business unit, with responsibility for the Lippincott Williams & Wilkins product lines.

For the past four years, Macomber had been President of Thomson Gale Reference in Farmington Hills, MI.

"The appointment of Gordon Macomber brings us extensive publishing experience as well as the leadership skills and business proficiency to take our books and journals business into the next era of content-in-context," said Jeff McCaulley, President & CEO of Wolters Kluwer Health. "We could not be more thrilled to have Gordon join our leadership team."

Press Release