Time for A Publisher ID?

 

In the 1870s R.R. Bowker began publishing The American Catalog which collected publisher titles into one compendium book. The first edition of this book was surprisingly large, but its most useful aspect was that it organized publisher books into a usable format. The concept was not sophisticated: The Bowker team gathered publisher catalogs, bound and reprinted them so that they were more or less uniform. In subsequent years Books In Print became three primary components: The Subject Guide, Author Guide and Publisher Index (or PID). Each was separated into distinct parts, but it was the PID which held everything together.

When a user found a title in the author or subject index they would also be referred to the PID index to find specific information about the publisher including (the obvious) how to order the book. At some point, Bowker began applying an alphanumeric “Bowker Id” to Publisher names so that the database could be organized around the publisher information.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the ISBN was introduced to the US retail market and Bowker was (and still is) the only agency able to assign ISBN numbers in the US. Included in the ISBN syntax was a “publisher” prefix such that a block of numbers could be assigned specifically to one publisher. The idea, while good in concept, did not work well in practice. For example, in an effort to encourage adoption of ISBNs the agencies assigned some large publishers a small two digit publisher prefix which resulted in a very large block of individual ISBNs (seven digits plus the check digit). Even after 50 years, many of these blocks are only partially used (and wasted) because the publisher output was far less than anticipated. A second problem was that publishers, imprints and lists were bought and sold which made a mess of the whole idea. (In the above image the prefix is 4 digits).

At Bowker, we recognized that our Publisher Information Database was a crown jewel and a key component of our Books In Print database. Despite many requests we never licensed this data separately and this was a significant reason retailers such as Barnes & Noble, Borders, Follett and others licensed Books In Print. Because the information was so important, we spent a lot of time maintaining the accuracy and the structure of the data.

Publishers who acquired ISBNs from the Bowker agency were a key input to this database – beginning in the 1980s but continuing to the present. Not all new ISBNs go to small independent publishers and there remains consistent demand from established publishers for new numbers even today. To be useful, this publisher information needs to be structured and organized accurately and is only possible with continued application of good practice. During my time at Bowker, the editorial team met regularly with publishers to both improve the timeliness and accuracy of their book metadata but also to confirm their corporate structure. We wanted to ensure that all individual ISBNs rolled up to the correct imprint, business unit and corporate owner. This effort was continuous and sometimes engaged the corporation’s office of general counsel and was frequently detailed and time consuming.

A few years after I left Bowker, one of my consulting clients presented me with a proof of concept to programmatically create a publisher id database. In concept it looked possible to do; however. I pointed out all the reasons why this would become difficult to complete and then to maintain. They went ahead anyway but after a year or so abandoned the work because they could not accurately disambiguate publisher information nor confirm corporate reporting structures.

Today there is no industry wide standard publisher id code but the idea comes up frequently as one the industry should pursue. As with many new standards efforts it will be the roll out and adoption of the standard which will prove difficult. Establishing an initial leap forward could represent a promising start by using data which might already be available or available for license.

Bowker (and all global ISBN agencies) are required to publish all new publisher prefixes each year and this information could also be a useful starting point. Bowker is not the only aggregator with publisher data (we were just the best by a significant margin) and another supply chain partner might be willing to contribute their publisher data as a starting point. This could establish a solid foundation to build on, but realistically any effort will fail if the maintenance aspect of the effort is not understood and recognized, and a strong market imperative isn’t widely agreed and supported.

When (I)SBN was launched in the UK in the late 1960s it succeeded because the largest retailer (W.H. Smith) enforced the strong business case for its adoption. Globally ISBN has gone on to become one of the most successful supply chain initiatives in (retail) history and the entire industry is dependent on this standard. (It has even survived Amazon’s cynical ASIN). If there is a business case for the publisher id this needs to be powerful, obvious and accord universal benefits: Mutual interest and money can be powerful motivators but having a policeman like W.H. Smith will help as well.

More:

The ISBN is Dead

ChapGPT "thoughts" on the history of identifiers.

Note: I ran R.R. Bowker for a while and was also Chairman of ISBN International.

Some Book Returns are Good: Managing Returns an Upcoming BISG Webinar

Book returns have long been the nemesis of warehouse and fulfillment managers and, sometimes conflict, when challenging the optimism of the sales team. Historically, it was the trade market where returns were (and remain) a significant component of the sales process to the exception of other publishing segments. However, this has changed significantly as the retail market – in education in particular – has become less structured. Whereas students used to purchase textbooks exclusively at the college store they are now as likely to buy their books ahead of time from Amazon for delivery to the dorm as they are to buy them at all.

As most publishing people know, managing returns and addressing the ‘returns problem’ is a perennial issue but it has been up to individual companies to act to improve their returns issues. In the US there has not been a direct industry led initiative to tackle returns but that is not the case in the UK. As far back as 1999, the industry began an initiative to understand the issue, identify the costs of returns and propose a set of progressive supply chain improvements in an industry led attempt to manage down the cost of returns. This initiative brought together all major players including publishers, retailers, wholesalers and other intermediaries, and gained traction approximately five years ago with the agreement on a set of resolutions or ‘rules of the road’ which govern interactions across the industry.

In the US, the UK initiative looks like an interesting model for us to study. The BISG has scheduled a webinar for July 20th to do just that and it is open to members and non-members.  In advance of the meeting, I have been asked to interview a group of supply chain participants (retailers, wholesalers, publishers) on behalf of BISG to determine how they have approached the returns issue(s) within their own businesses, their objectives in addressing returns and solicit their input on how BISG could support the industry to address returns.

At the webinar in July, we will tell the story of the UK experience and deliver the feedback I have gathered from our interviews. We will then solicit feedback from the attendees (and members) as to how BISG might support initiatives to improve the returns issue. So far, I can report that there are some interesting ideas and process improvement suggestions already being used by those addressing this issue and I expect we can discuss these at the meeting in July.  I hope you can join us.  If you would like to offer comments on this issue please do so below.

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

PND: Taking the Temperature: How Publishing Technology Firms View the Future

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.

Taking the Temperature - How Publishing Technology Firms View the Future after COVID

I spent the last several weeks interviewing companies for the next edition of my third annual Publishing Technology report and it was interesting to hear similar themes on their business outlook, staffing challenges and the impact of COVID-19.

My report won’t be published until late summer, but here’s a sampling of what technologists and CEOs are telling me about their products and the market...

The Band Played On: I interviewed more than 25 companies and virtually all of them had the same story: As we entered the shutdown in March 2020, business slowed down for a quarter but then began to pick up to almost normal levels by the end of the summer. Technology projects already underway were slowed or delayed as companies established work from home, but then resumed quickly. RFP processes and project kick-offs were also put off but companies did not see many outright project cancellations. As we near the middle of 2021, the companies I spoke to are experiencing strong sales and project activity, and companies said 2020 was one of their best years ever. The belief that COVID-19 would negatively impact 2021 seems to be exaggerated.

More and More Content: As companies rushed to launch online customer experiences they also - either by design or necessity – created new content. At first many businesses created this content as a stop gap organized to maintain contact with customers but, over time, most are recognizing that podcasts, webinars, interviews and educational materials are valuable new initiatives to be maintained. In many instances these new ‘publishing’ activities will continue as COVID recedes, adding to the toolkit publishers use to engage their customers. My interviewees saw this trend reflected in the requests they received from customers to make this new content readily available to consumers on their platforms. 

Of particular note were associations, which in the past had relied on in-person meetings, seminars and conferences for educational and accreditation purposes, now realizing the long-lasting value of materials created to bridge the gap created by COVID.

A Bigger Audience: Most of the membership organizations supported by the technology companies I spoke to also noted that the replacement of in-person annual conferences with fully on-line versions broadened their market. Many online association conferences saw participation outside the US explode. We expect this change to stick and, in the future, more content and programming may be created specifically for non-US markets.

Everyone is Doing More: Across the board, the tech firms I spoke with were amazed at the performance of their staffs last year - not only in stepping up and adapting, but also in the sheer amount of work completed. Staff productivity increases were common across this group and some companies even mentioned that managers needed to step in and encourage staff to have good work/life balance. Few companies mentioned a need to downsize during the past 18 months and were bullish on staffing needs as we go ‘back to normal.’

Going Back Will be Hard and Easy: Surprisingly though, there is no consistency among these companies on an approach once offices open up fully. In Germany, all staff will be back in the office. In the UK, no one is sure what will happen. In the US, companies predict a slow ramp up but will also allow staff to remain in their work-from-home state as long as they like. Clearly, more formal policies will be enacted as time goes on and it is more than likely that more flexible arrangements for both employee and employer will emerge with a new ‘employee compacts’ created over time. Many of the software businesses in the publishing technology segment are small with low capitalization; employees are their biggest expense so if they can create new employment models for employees while saving on office space – all while maintaining productivity – then they will likely do so. 

COVID has produced a new trust model between employee and employer to the benefit of both. In software development in particular, this flexible work-from-home/work-in-the-office model will become commonplace. Employees will be required to come in to the office occasionally for collaboration and team building but new on-line facilitation tools will also emerge over time to minimize this. Most managers were unconcerned about how staffing would work as COVID receded.

Finally, some companies noted they now had new hiring options post COVID. Where once they forbade work from home (thereby segmenting their hiring pool) or imposed geographic restrictions (often due to tax reasons), COVID quickly forced the elimination of many restrictions and opened up hiring practices for many.

My report, A Market Survey of ERP and CMS Software Solutions for Publishing Companies, is now in its third edition and will be published in late summer. The second edition is available here and, if you purchase the 2020 version now, I will provide the 2021 version free of charge.

*******

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 (Vol 13, No 5): Pandemic Books, Hate Publishing on Amazon, College Returns?

I pulled together a quick list of pandemic books a few weeks ago and here is a CNN article about a rejected book (by publishers) which is now getting a lot of attention from the market

A pandemic thriller, once rejected by publishers for being unrealistic, is now getting a wide release (Amazon).

The book, which was rejected by publishers at the time for being too unrealistic, was finally published on Thursday. The thriller is set in London, the epicenter of a global pandemic that forces officials to institute a lockdown. The story isn't entirely based on May's imagination. He used British and US pandemic preparedness documents from 2002 to make it was as realistic as possible. (CNN)

On Amazon and how they don't police hate publishing from their outlets:

Propublica: The Hate Store: Amazon’s Self-Publishing Arm Is a Haven for White Supremacists.

“Kindle will publish anything,” a third user chimed in. They were basically right. It takes just a couple of minutes to upload one’s work to Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), Amazon’s self-publishing arm; the e-book then shows up in the world’s largest bookstore within half a day, typically with minimal oversight. Since its founding more than a decade ago, KDP has democratized the publishing industry and earned praise for giving authors shut out of traditional channels the chance to reach an audience that would have been previously unimaginable.

A crazy political 'dirty tricks' effort in Australia where a high ranking advisor to the Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison pirated the unpublished biography of the prior Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. (Guardian)

Some of the biggest names in politics will be drawn into the controversy over pirating of Malcolm Turnbull’s autobiography after his publisher reached a settlement on the issue.  On Tuesday evening Hardie Grant reached a settlement with Scott Morrison’s adviser Nico Louw over claims he distributed unauthorised copies of Turnbull’s book, A Bigger Picture, before its formal release on Monday.
“An undisclosed sum was settled for and he’s given us where he got [the digital copy] from and where it went to,” the chief executive of the publishing house, Sandy Grant, told Guardian Australia Wednesday.

Also from Australia a state of the market from The Guardian

Interesting effort by Digiday to offer services to publishers challenged by todays events.

Joint announcement by the ABA, AAP and Authors Guild urging readers to help save bookstores:

“Sadly, after a decade of recovery and growth that affirmed the importance of reading, writing, and publishing, bookstores are suddenly facing a moment of monumental crisis at the hands of the COVID-19 pandemic,” the three women write. “In some instances, these beloved institutions, which mean so much to so many communities, face the very real possibility that they will never open their doors again.
“We cannot let this happen because we need bookstores now more than ever. As award-winning poet and writer Jen Campbell wrote in her book The Bookshop Book, ‘Bookshops are dreams built of wood and paper. They are time travel and escape and knowledge and power. They are, simply put, the best of places.’”

PEN America sends a letter to demand an end to access fees for eBooks in Prisons:

We, the undersigned, are a coalition of groups and individuals concerned with the rights and dignity of incarcerated people, as well as with their access to reading materials alongside other sources of information and recreation. We write to ask that you waive your fees for incarcerated people to access digital content on your tablets during this pandemic. 
As we speak, millions of Americans are confined to their homes in order to stop the spread of COVID-19. Yet, they have a multitude of options to continue to engage with the outside world through educational and recreational access to information. In fact, several major companies that offer digital content–like Audible, JSTOR, and Cengage–have taken steps to make more of their content freely available during the pandemic, to help lessen the burden of isolation on readers.

Schools around the world are coming to the realization that things will never be the same:
From WAPO:

College students want answers about fall, but schools may not have them for months

From SMH:

Australia's school system will be forever changed and possibly improved by what we learn from the COVID-19 closures. Parents will develop a renewed appreciation for the critical role of teachers, and outdated educational practices will be questioned.
Worldwide, there will be a rethink of education when we come out the other side. We may discover through this process that there are other ways to better engage children and develop more attractive styles of learning in this technological age.

Do schools really need to operate from nine to three for 200 set days of the year? Do we still need to rely on the HSC as the major way of credentialing students for future pathways? I think this crisis will force us to think differently.

Flipboard Magazine

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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

MediaWeek (Vol 12, No 11): Merger News, Mega-Journals, Bookstores and Alexa.

Opposition to the McGrawHill Cengage merger is taking form with the DOJ:

In its section titled “The Textbook Market is Broken,” SPARC explains that college textbooks are sold in a “captive market” because students are forced to purchase the materials selected by their professors. This system “effectively hands the three major companies who currently dominate the market a blank check to develop expensive materials without regarding the preferences, needs, or financial circumstances of students. The textbook industry’s current state of dysfunction results from years of consolidation, unsustainable practices, and lack of price competition.” SPARC points to textbook pricing as an example of this dysfunction, as prices “have increased 184% over the last two decades — three times the rate of inflation.”
In a separate letter sent to the DOJ at the end of July, U.S. PIRG Education and student leaders from colleges across the country raised similar concerns. Specifically, the students explain they have “directly felt the impacts of skyrocketing textbook prices, further exacerbated by Cengage and McGraw-Hill’s efforts to remove cost-cutting options for students by undermining used book markets,” and that “[t]o maintain profit margins, publishers have put out custom or frequent new editions to make it difficult to find a used book for our classes ….” Citing a rather shocking statistic, the students claimed that “65% of students have skipped buying a book at some point in their college career because of cost despite 94% of them knowing it would hurt their grade.” (NatLawReview)

Open Access Mega-journals Losing Momentum:

Based in San Francisco, California, PLOS ONE grew to become the world’s largest journal, publishing more than 30,000 papers at its height in 2013 and spawning more than a dozen imitators—but megajournals have fallen far short of Binfield’s aims. From 2013 to 2018, PLOS ONE’s output fell by 44%. Another megajournal, Scientific Reports, surpassed PLOS ONE in size in 2017 but saw its article count drop by 30% the next year, according to data in publisher Elsevier’s Scopus database. Growth in new megajournals has not offset the declines. In 2018, PLOS ONE, Scientific Reports, and 11 smaller megajournals collectively published about 3% of the global papers total.  
PLOS ONE and Scientific Reports have also slipped on other measures of performance. Publication speeds, a key early selling point, have fallen. And a study published in August showed that by certain citation-based measures, the journals’ connection to science’s cutting edge has frayed. (ScienceMag)

Online bookstore to benefit Independents:

The creators of Bookshop have worked with ABA, independent booksellers, Ingram, and book and magazine publisher partners to launch a site that will provide websites, authors, indie stores, magazines, and bookstagrammers an easy way to promote and purchase the books they love online without driving sales to Amazon.
Bookshop, a B-Corp business, is targeting online customers who are not currently buying books on indie bookstore sites by creating a national platform that allows socially conscious consumers an alternative that supports their values while offering one-click purchasing; an easy, intuitive interface; and two-day shipping. Bookshop will also guide book buyers with human recommendations and personality, not algorithms. (Bookweb)

Amazon's Alexa platform is introducing an education "skills" API:

Amazon has introduced the Alexa Education Skill API, a new application programming interface that gives developers the ability to integrate Alexa skills into their education technology services. The skills range from K-12 (allowing parents to check in with teachers about their child's grades and behaviors in school) to higher education (enabling students to ask Alexa questions about assignments and check their overall progress in courses).
Developers will be able to incorporate Alexa skills into their learning management systems, student information systems, classroom management tools and massive open online course platforms. Students and parents will be able to retrieve information from multiple skills at the same time by only making one request.  (CampusTech)

 According to 3.5million books women are beautiful and men rational (theswaddle)

Pearson's share price fell after announcing textbook sales were lower than expected (Barron's)

Read more articles on my Flipboard magazine:

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.

*******

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

 

PND: The Price is Right for Cengage  

PND: The Opportunity in 200MM Students

PND: The New McGraw-Hill.  Where is Education Textbook Publishing Headed?

PND: Pearson's Future of Education (2012)

PND: Pearson's Blue Sky Project (2012) 

PND: Open Education Resources Gain (2018)

MediaWeek (Vol 12, No 10): Flipboard Magazine, Trump Book Slump, Textbook Transformation, Mind the Gap + Others

View my Flipboard Magazine.

Articles:
Book Publishing's Trump Slump
The Radical Transformation of the Textbook
Amazon's Plan to Conquer the World of Publishing
Mind the Gap
A Database of Six Million Syllabi

*******

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 (Vol 12, No 9): Amazon Juggernaut & Dilemma, Open Source Publishing, Digital Textbooks, Elsevier

The Amazon Publishing Juggernaut: What does the e-commerce giant want with the notoriously fickle world of publishing? To own your every reading decision. (Atlantic)

"Founded in 2009, Amazon Publishing is far from the tech giant’s best-known enterprise, but it is a quietly consequential piece of the company’s larger strategy to become a one-stop shop for all your consumer decisions. As Amazon Studios does with movies, Amazon Publishing feeds the content pipelines created by the tech giant’s online storefront and Amazon Prime membership program. At its most extreme, Amazon Publishing is a triumph of vertical engineering: If a reader buys one of its titles on a Kindle, Amazon receives a cut both as publisher and as bookseller—not to mention whatever markup it made on the device in the first place, as well as the amortized value of having created more content to draw people into its various book-subscription offerings. (One literary agent summed it up succinctly to The Wall Street Journal in January: “They aren’t gaming the system. They own the system.”)

The Amazon dilemma: how a tech powerhouse that fulfills our every consumer need still lets us down. Despite increasing criticism, Amazon refuses to acknowledge many of the unintended consequences its rise to dominance has spawned. (ReCode)

"Let’s start with Amazon’s power. Its roots can be traced back to a potent cocktail of vision, fortuitous timing, relentlessness, and a knack for exploiting loopholes — from state tax laws to a dearth of regulation that could have prevented it from acting simultaneously as retailer, retail platform, and consumer brand kingmaker."

Fake Journal publishers: OMICS, Publisher of Fake Journals, Makes Cosmetic Changes to Evade Detection. Following a public outcry over their proliferation, paralleled by a media exposé together with regulatory pressures in some countries, fake journals have appeared to be cleaning up their act. (TheWire)

Mind the Gap: The landscape of open-source publishing tools (report)

The number of open source (OS) online publishing platforms, i.e. production and hosting systems for scholarly books and journals, launched or in development, has proliferated in the last decade. Many of these publishing infrastructure initiatives are well-developed, stable, and supported by a small but vigorous distributed community of developers, but promising new ventures have also recently launched.

The notable increase in the number of OS platforms suggest that an infrastructure ‘ecology’ is emerging around these systems. Distinguishing between systems that may evolve along competitive lines and those that will resolve into a service ‘stack’ of related, complementary service technologies will help potential adopters understand how these platforms can or should interoperate.

Hummm, The radical transformation of the textbook (Wired)

“Digital text, digital work, is often engaged with at a lower level of attention. By moving everything online, it’s going to become even more decontextualized. Overall, I think there’s going to be less deeper learning going on,” Trakhman says. “I believe there’s a time and a place for digital, but educators need to be mindful of the time and place for using these resources. Rolling out these digital suites is not really the best for student learning.”

Battling Elsevier:  University of California’s showdown with the biggest academic publisher aims to change scholarly publishing for good (The Conversation)

The UC-Elsevier showdown made headlines because it’s symptomatic of the way the internet has failed to deliver on the promise to make knowledge easily accessible and shareable by anyone, anywhere in the world. It’s the latest in a succession of cracks in what is widely considered to be a failing system for sharing academic research. As the head of the research library at UC Davis, I see this development as a harbinger of a tectonic shift in how universities and their faculty share research, build reputations and preserve knowledge in the digital age.

Inclusive (textbook) access at the University of Arkansas (News) and at Austin Peay (News)


Read more articles on my Flipboard magazine:

*******

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 (Vol 12, No 8): Wiley, Indian Tariffs, UK Textbooks + More

Wiley buys Zyante Books for $56MM in cash (press release)

Zyante was founded in 2012 and its zyBooks platform has served over 500,000 students across 500 institutions. The company targets some of the fastest growing and in-demand STEM disciplines, bridging the gap between classroom and career, and enhancing lifelong productivity and employability. Degree demand in these disciplines has grown by 8% between 2013-2017 according to the National Center for Education Statistics, and jobs in Information Technology and Engineering have grown by 17% and 14%, respectively, since 2016 according to Burning Glass. Revenue for 2019 is expected to be $14 million, a 37% increase over 2018.

India's new government has imposed a 5% tariff hike on imported books to 'encourage domestic publishing and printing' IndiaToday.  There are skeptics:

"I don't think levying 5 per cent custom duty on imported books is going to benefit our local publishers. If one really wants to help publishers here, the rising costs of paper should be brought down. The scarcity of paper should be addressed and removed," he said.

The Publishers Association reports that UK textbook sales declined 6% last year despite some strong promotion (TES)

Sales of school textbooks in the UK fell by 6 per cent in 2018 despite a drive to increase their use.  The Publishers' Association said "the continuing squeeze on school budgets" had resulted in teachers not being able to afford "the learning resources children need”.

The slow death of the Hong Kong independent bookseller (Asian Review)

When Bao, 52, entered the book-publishing trade in 2005 it was still crowded with competitors. Now he is a lonely holdout with dwindling revenues, still publishing books critical of the Communist leadership of China and touching on mainland political taboos such as 1989 Tiananmen crackdown.
His most recent book, "The Last Secret: The Final Documents from the June Fourth Crackdown," unearthed speeches by 17 top Communist Party leaders and elders at a secret internal meeting 30 years ago, discussing the aftermath of the violent suppression of unarmed students and citizens in Beijing.

India is addressing the predatory journal issue (again) (Nature):

Last month, India launched its latest salvo against the ‘pay and publish trash’ culture that sustains predatory journals. Over several months, more than 30 organizations representing universities and academic disciplines have vetted journals to release a reference list of respectable titles. Predators sabotaged our last attempt. We hope this better-curated list will help to cut off the supply of manuscripts to the unscrupulous operators that profit financially by undercutting academic quality.

 Read more articles on my Flipboard magazine:

*******

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 (Vol 12, No 7): Universal Music archive in flames, No law in the Amazon, Bad data, Faber&Faber

From the NY Times magazine a cautionary tale about managing archives via the experience of Universal music which saw an entire warehouse of music archives go up in smoke.  The Day the Music Burned

Eventually the flames reached a 22,320-square-foot warehouse that sat near the King Kong Encounter. The warehouse was nondescript, a hulking edifice of corrugated metal, but it was one of the most important buildings on the 400-acre lot. Its official name was Building 6197. To backlot workers, it was known as the video vault.

...

Before long, firefighters switched tactics, using bulldozers to knock down the burning warehouse and clear away barriers to extinguishing the fire, including the remains of the UMG archive: rows of metal shelving and reels of tape, reduced to heaps of ash and twisted steel. Heavy machinery was still at work dismantling the building as night fell. The job was finished in the early morning of June 2, nearly 24 hours after the first flames appeared.

...

These reassuring pronouncements concealed a catastrophe. When Randy Aronson stood outside the burning warehouse on June 1, he knew he was witnessing a historic event. “It was like those end-of-the-world-type movies,” Aronson says. “I felt like my planet had been destroyed.”

No law in in the Amazon:  How rampant is book counterfeiting on Amazon? And it doesn't stop there. NY Times 

But Amazon takes a hands-off approach to what goes on in its bookstore, never checking the authenticity, much less the quality, of what it sells. It does not oversee the sellers who have flocked to its site in any organized way.

That has resulted in a kind of lawlessness. Publishers, writers and groups such as the Authors Guild said counterfeiting of books on Amazon had surged. The company has been reactive rather than proactive in dealing with the issue, they said, often taking action only when a buyer complains. Many times, they added, there is nowhere to appeal and their only recourse is to integrate even more closely with Amazon.

Hey Jeff, in college they have this thing that can check whether a paper has been written by the student in question.   Think about it.  Turnitin.

A history of Faber and Faber one of the UK's most iconic publishing houses in The Guardian:

All publishing houses have archives, but for anyone interested in 20th-century literature the archive of Faber & Faber is a fabled treasure house. This is the firm that was, as Toby Faber puts it, “midwife at the birth of modernism”. In 1924 Faber’s grandfather, Geoffrey Faber, aspiring poet and fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, had been installed as chairman of the Scientific Press, recently inherited by another All Souls fellow, Maurice Gwyer. It published mostly books and journals for nurses. Geoffrey Faber renamed it and started making it into a literary publisher. Within his first year he had installed TS Eliot as a fellow director and acquired his backlist.

Tracking the results of bad data.  A report from Dun & Bradstreet:

A new report from Dun & Bradstreet reveals businesses are missing revenue opportunities and losing customers due to bad data practices. Almost 20 percent of businesses have lost a customer due to using incomplete or inaccurate information about them, with a further 15 percent saying they failed to sign a new contract with a customer for the same reason.

The way that data is structured appears to be a significant barrier in many organizations, with indications that data is often poorly structured, difficult to access and out of date.

"Businesses must make data governance and stewardship a priority," said Monica Richter, chief data officer, Dun & Bradstreet. "Whether leaders are exploring AI or predictive analytics, clean, defined data is key to the success of any program and essential for mitigating risk and growing the business."

Winning bidders were announced recently for the remaining assets of F&W Media (Folio)

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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.