MediaWeek (Vol 14, No 9) Pearson vs. Chegg Legal Issues, Bookstore eBook Sales + More

Legal Experts On Pearson V. Chegg And Why It Could Be A Huge Deal (Forbes)

The essence of Pearson’s legal claim is that Chegg is engaging in “massive” violation of copyrights held by Pearson because Chegg has published, and sold, answers to the tests and practice questions Pearson has in its textbooks. Pearson argues that the questions and answers belong to it and it should be able to decide when and how they are used.

If Pearson prevails, it could damage not only Chegg’s business model but the enterprises of several other companies that sell answers to academic questions written by text publishers, professors or professional licensing bodies. Those companies include illicit cheating services, file sharing companies that sell access to tests and answers, as well as the respectable tutoring and test preparation companies.

With More Bookstores Open, Soaring E-books Sales Fall Back to Earth, NPD Says

“With brick-and-mortar stores closed last year, e-books were simply easier to buy than print books,” said Kristen McLean, books industry analyst for NPD. “The digital format allowed for frictionless, virus-free purchasing. Now that bookstores are open again, we expect full-year 2021 e-book volume to fall below 2020 levels, with the caveat that supply-chain disruption could cause another lift, if key books are unavailable during the holidays. Regardless, the e-book format will definitely remain a vital ongoing part of the U.S. book market — and a key format for certain categories.”

How Students Fought a Book Ban and Won, for Now (NYTimes)

But what began as an effort to raise awareness somehow ended with all of the materials on the list being banned from classrooms by the district’s school board in a little-noticed vote last November. Some parents in the district, which draws about 5,000 students from suburban townships surrounding the more diverse city of York, had objected to materials that they feared could be used to make white children feel guilty about their race or “indoctrinate” students.

The debate came to a head with the return to in-person classes at the start of the current school year. The Sept. 1 article in The York Dispatch quoted teachers who were aghast at an email from the high school’s principal listing the forbidden materials.

Spotify for readers: How tech is inventing better ways to read the internet (Protocol)

After all, what does Spotify do? It takes a corpus of stuff (music) and finds endless new ways to show it to users. Users can save the stuff they know they like (a library), explore things curated by other users (playlists) or turn to the app's machine-learning tools for ultra-personalized recommendations (Discover Weekly and the like).

So now imagine a reading app. You can save all the articles, tweet threads, PDFs and Wikipedia pages you want into your library. You can follow other users to see what they're saving, or check out what a curator thinks you might be into. The more you read, the more the app begins to understand that you like celebrity profiles, you're learning a lot about NFTs right now, you worship at the altar of Paul Graham and you'll read anything anyone writes about "The Bachelorette." Now, every time you open the app, it's like a magazine made just for you.

Watch my PodCast on Business Transformation (Link)

Business Transformation and Technology Improvement – podcast with Michael Cairns Michael Cairns is the CEO and founder of Information Media Partners, a business strategy consulting firm. With a wide career span in publishing and information products, services, and B2B categories, Michael has held executive roles at several publishing companies including Macmillan, Berlitz, and R.R. Bowker.

How to remember more of what you read (MarieClaire)

After three decades in the tech world, former Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior—a self-proclaimed “obsessive reader” as a child—has turned a new page in her career journey. In July 2021, she founded Fable, a social reading platform. According to Warrior, complaints about reading often fall into three categories: People don’t know what to read, they don’t have time to read, or they want to read with other people. Unlike existing platforms that try to focus on just one of those pain points, Fable seeks to tackle all three. 

*****

Publishing Technology Software Report:

A fully revised version of my Publishing Technology Software and Services Report will be formally published on September 15. To complete this report we identified more than 200 software and services companies popular with publishers and conducted in-depth interviews with more than 31 of the most relevant companies. We also spoke with customers to apply their views and opinions about the market and these suppliers.

Bookstore Founder Sylvia Beach's Digital Archive

In Paris, during the 1920s and 30s, Sylvia Beach's bookstore was the center of English (and French) literary life.  When she died, Princeton University collected all her personal items from her apartment above the store and added them to their special collections library.   Princeton has just announced that some of this material (and presumably more to come) is now available digitally.

Visitors can search the website for a library member, such as Hemingway, to see which books he borrowed and the dates he withdrew them and returned them. Clicking “cards” reveals images of the handwritten notes kept by the store’s clerks who recorded his loans. Hemingway was a library member, on and off, from 1921 to 1938 and borrowed more than 90 books, including P.T. Barnum’s Barnum’s Own Story, which he kept for a few weeks in the fall of 1927, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which he kept for just eight days in September 1929. He borrowed Bull Fighting by Tom Jones in 1926. One also can view his purchases — he bought a copy of his novel A Farewell to Arms at the store — and the addresses where he lived in Paris. 

Fans of an author can use the website to “read the books they read and see who else read those books,” said Joshua Kotin, an associate professor of English at Princeton and the project’s director. “We hope this will be a resource for scholars and nonscholars.”

Hat tip Gary Price

MediaWeek Report: (Vol 13, No 3): Some Bookstore Reactions to Covid - 19

From BBC:

So, it feels especially painful that during this global pandemic, bookshops – at least physically – have become increasingly out of bounds. As Covid-19 spreads around the world, many countries are entering periods of total lockdown, with all but essential services closed and people ordered to stay inside. Even where official lockdowns are not in place, social distancing and avoiding unnecessary contact is urged. Many people are choosing to self-quarantine because they are at high-risk or want to help stop the spread.

....

“Booksellers are among the most resilient, warm and resourceful of people, and bookshops have been swift to adapt to the obstacles of social distancing and self-isolation to provide incredible services for their customers,” says Meryl Halls, managing director of the Booksellers Association of the UK and Ireland. But she says it’s vital to remember that, while many bookshops are demonstrating pragmatism and optimism, they still desperately need the support of the public, the publishing industry and their governments to weather this new landscape.

....
It’s not just adult readers affected by bookshop closures, but children too. In the town of Kyneton in Victoria, Australia, Squishy Minnie is used to up to 100 kids cramming into the shop for a weekly story hour – some feat for a place with a population of 6,000. When owner Kristen Proud made the decision to shut up shop, she wanted to keep the community connected, so they have moved their story-time to YouTube. “After our first one went live we had an overwhelmingly positive response, with many people in self isolation contacting us with photos of their children enjoying it and people thanking us for keeping some routine in their lives.”

From The Guardian:

The British businessman, who is self-isolating after recently returning from the US, said Waterstones was “providing a real social benefit” and was not “slave-driving our booksellers into working against their will”.  Hours later, Daunt told staff he was closing the stores “with great regret” and “having heard from many booksellers that they feel obliged to continue to work as long as the shops are open”. He said shop-floor staff had responded heroically in exceptionally difficult times.

From Vox:

What did I learn from making this list? That perfect murders, at least the artful kind we find in books, are all about concealment and misdirection. They have a lot in common with well-executed magic: it’s all about fooling the detectives (and the readers), making us look away from where the crime is happening. Agatha Christie’s The ABC Murders, another book on Malcolm’s list, is a textbook example: it appears as though a psychopath is bumping off victims according to the initials of their names, but the truth is something else altogether. Poirot, naturally, is not misled, and the world can be set to rights.

From Goodreader:

Barnes and Noble is in a precarious position due to the Coronavirus. Dozens of stores already have closed and it is inevitable that the chain will fully close in the coming days. B&N CEO James Daunt told his staff that, should store locations have to close their doors, staffers will “first make use of their Paid Time Off.” After that, employees with a year or more of service will receive “up to” two weeks of pay. “Temporarily, and with sincere regret, on closure we lay off all those employees impacted with less than 6 months employment on the day of closure.”

From Campus Technology:

VitalSource is offering free access to digital learning materials through the remainder of the Spring 2020 semester, to aid those students attending colleges and universities that have closed in response to COVID-19. Beginning today and going through May 25, 2020, students may access "an expansive catalog" of digital content if they attend a participating institution.  With Barnes & Noble.

From Boston.com:

20 books local experts recommend while you’re social distancing

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

The end of the year...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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