Clarivate Report Proquest Financials: Raise $1Billion in Equity

On May 17, Clarivate announce a proposed deal to acquire Ann Arbor based Proquest.  (See here).  In the last few days, Clarivate has reported more details including 2020 full year financials for Proquest.

Here is a summary:

• Assets of $1.3B with $629mm in goodwill
• $1B in long term debt
  
• Revenues of $862mm
• Operating Income of $84mm
• Net Income of $3.4mm (Includes unrealized loss of $31mm)
• Cash provided by operations $199mm
• Net cash expended on acquisitions of $225mm
• During 2020, the Company distributed $168.3mm to ProQuest Holdings, primarily related to distributions to shareholders
  

Management fees of $7mm were fairly modest.

More to be found here.

In addition, Clarivate also reported details on a $1B equity raise which some portion of which will go to fund the acquisition of Proquest.

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

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

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

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

Why We Remember More By Reading (The Conversation)

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

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

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

 New Order: Audio First (WSJ - Paid)

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

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

RBmedia Acquires McGraw Hill Professional Audiobook Publishing Business

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inside Merger Mania: (The Wrap - Register)

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

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

PND: Digital Transformation: A Seminar for Management

PND: Blockchain for Publishers

PND: Technology News

PND: The Price is Right for Cengage  

PND: The Opportunity in 200MM Students

PND: Mediaweek Reports 

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

 

Is GoodReads A Good or Bad Thing For Books?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Questioning My Education: Five Strategic Trends Changing Higher Ed

Perhaps the only surprise in the fact that major changes and dislocations are taking place in educational publishing is that they took so long to exhibit themselves.  The more recent change is the aggressive growth of all-access textbook deals sold to students – frequently via the institution – which provide students access to the entire content catalog published by a textbook publisher.   Cengage put the wind up most educational publishers two years ago when they launched their program, which they now claim has been sold to more than one million students.

Other publishers (including Wiley, Pearson and others) have followed Cengage and that company’s very public proselytizing about the model is a strong validation of the strategic importance that digital delivery and subscription models have to the future of this market.   While the Cengage business model represents a fundamental market change it is only one of several strategic interrelated changes now affecting the market for education content.  The infrastructure supporting the way textbook and educational content is sourced, delivered and developed is heading for significant disruption which will displace some current market incumbents and fortify others.

Here are five trends I see driving the market:

First all-access products developed by publishers are unlikely to be widely adopted on an exclusive basis by institutions.  Just as there has never been a requirement for academics to source print textbooks from specific publishers, faculty independence will continue.  However, this is likely to necessitate interoperability across textbook database products.  Publishers with a poor user interface and experience, unable to support single sign on, remote access will be at a disadvantage especially compared to more experienced database vendors.   This suggests there will be a bias towards aggregation as dealing with multiple, non-compatible products can be complex for administrators, faculty and students.

Second, aggregators are already a significant presence on campus via the library.  EBSCO, Proquest and Gale, for example, already support student development and include textbook content as database products.  Textbook content is a natural product extension for these companies and they operate a business model very familiar to campus librarians and provosts.  Aggregators act as wholesalers of textbook content which can be a valuable market channel for many textbook publishers.  Notably, there is no reason to believe that textbook sales will eventually not be subject to the same type of consortia price negotiation which governs other academic content sold to universities.

Three publishers in particular – Wiley, Taylor & Francis and WoltersKluwer – may have advantages because they publish academic (journal) products sold directly to campus libraries.  Their advantage over aggregators and other publishers would be to integrate this content effectively to enable the delivery of comprehensive educational products.  WoltersKluwer has long hosted their textbook content on OVID (their online product) for example.

Third, the global textbook market is dominated by large publishers and represents an aggregation of sorts, although many publishers retain distinct ‘franchise’ products supporting specific content disciplines.  While publishers are selling all access to all their products, smart publishers will also attempt to ‘carve out’ branding opportunities around these franchises and create online ‘centers of excellence’ which extends the branding of these franchise products.  This trend is important because creating an all-inclusive all-access product may level set all author brands to the detriment of the publisher’s strong legacy author franchises.

Four, it is hard to see where the traditional on-campus bookstore fits in to this paradigm.  College stores are a profit center for the institution and most bookstores are operated by Barnes & Noble, Follett or independent operators under contract from the institution.  The relationship these retailers have with the publishing industry diminishes in importance as more content is delivered online and, as these stores are disintermediated, bookstore contracts become a diminishing asset for bookstore managers.  As these store contracts come up for review, more institutions will be rethinking their entire retail strategy and will invite more general-purpose retailers to compete for these contracts.  Importantly, most college bookstores already sell far more general merchandise than textbooks.

Fifth and last is perhaps the most contentious issue: Who will ‘control’ the valuable data “exhaust” which is produced by students and researchers interacting with online content.  This data about students, faculty, research activity and other collectable information represent a significant competitive asset.  Institutions are slowly awakening to the inherent value in this information and are being chased by innovative start-ups to gain access to the data.   While individual institution data has value, more value may be gained by aggregated data from multiple intuitions and these “cohorts” may become data sharing collectives.  In turn, these institutions may sell data to publishers and other parties for their use.  Naturally, there are concerns about how this data is collected and leveraged and industry groups are calling for governance in this area.

Strategists have long anticipated the death of the print textbook but we are now finally in the midst of a massive transformation of this market.  Some textbook publishers have positioned themselves to take advantage of these changes; however, no publisher is guaranteed a successful outcome given the comprehensive challenges they face.  Some big-name publishers will exit the textbook market rather than gamble that they can make these transitions successfully.

 Read more articles on my Flipboard magazine:

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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)

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

MediaWeek Report (Vol 10, No 2): PND Media news update - Subscriptions, Copyright and Acquisition News.

Solving the crossword puzzle: Rebuilding a print habit on digital devices

Sometimes, I’ve learned, you have to take opportunity where you least expect it. And in the end that’s what happened to us. Nieman Labs

Lack of copyright support in India may require radical publisher rethink:

Mr Bisht runs Delhi University’s photocopy shop, a crowded room crammed with photocopiers and computers where students queue to get their entire course material copied for a fraction of what it would cost to buy the books.   Following the decision in March of three international publishing companies — Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press and Taylor & Francis — to drop their legal case against Mr Bisht, his business is functioning with impunity.  The trio claimed his photocopying business undermined their intellectual property, but the Delhi high court ruled that it was not in students’ interests to shut him down. The companies appealed but later dropped the case, citing “longer-term interests”. Executives say they had given up hope of winning, but believed they could still make money in the country long term.

FT

Global library cooperative OCLC has signed agreements with distinguished publishers from around the world to add metadata for high quality books, e-books, journals, databases and other materials that will make their content discoverable through WorldCat Discovery.

OCLC has agreements in place with 315 publishers and information providers to supply metadata to facilitate discovery and access to key resources relevant to researchers, faculty and students.

WorldCat Discovery provides over 2.8 billion records of electronic, digital and physical resources, including articles, books, dissertations and audiovisual materials in support of libraries and information seekers.   Metadata from many of these publishers will also be made available to users through other OCLC services based on individual agreements. Details about how this metadata may be used in library management workflows will be communicated to OCLC users as the data is available.  By providing metadata and other descriptive content, these partnerships help libraries represent their electronic and physical collections more completely and efficiently. More about WorldCat Discovery and OCLC partnerships is on the OCLC website.

Link to More

The New York Times Sees Record Newsletter Subscriptions and Open Rates.

Times free newsletters have always been popular with readers. However, growth remained fairly flat for a number of years. A team of newsroom editors, product managers, designers and engineers began taking a more systematic approach, including making better use of analytics, new tools and promotional strategies. The Times’s newsletter subscriptions have more than doubled to over 13 million in April 2017, from 6 million newsletter subscriptions in April 2014.

The Morning Briefing newsletter has more than 1.3 million newsletter subscriptions with a 60%+ open rate (an additional number of readers access the Briefing on Times apps and on the web). Other Times newsletters, including Today’s Headlines and Cooking, also boast more than a million newsletter subscriptions and many have especially high open rates: NYT Australia, Booming, Nicholas Kristof, California Today, Vietnam ‘67 and the Interpreter all have open rates of 80% or higher.

 New York Times

Academic publisher Taylor & Francis Group has acquired colwiz, an innovative, early stage digital research services firm, as part of its ongoing investment in technology and digital capabilities that support the use and discoverability of content. colwiz launched in 2013 from the University of Oxford's Isis Software Incubator.

colwiz launched in 2013 from the University of Oxford’s Isis Software Incubator. It provides interactive digital collaboration and reference management services for researchers in academia, industry and government around the world.
colwiz’s current suite of tools allows researchers to read and annotate PDF-based academic content wherever they are, manage and store research drafts, share citations and data and connect and collaborate within research groups around specialist content in an efficient and user-friendly way.

As part of the Taylor & Francis Group, the team from colwiz will in the first instance work on the launch of wizdom.ai, a cutting-edge and comprehensive proprietary research knowledge graph. wizdom.ai uses artificial intelligence and big data to generate continuously-updated analytics on scientific developments, delivering new insights into academic knowledge to inform how researchers advance their work.

More  

Sheridan, a provider of print, publishing services and technology solutions to publishers, has acquired PubFactory, the industry-lauded online publishing platform for journals, books, and reference works, from O'Reilly Media. PubFactory will continue to be based out of Boston, MA, and will blend seamlessly into the Sheridan stable of publisher technology products and services.

The PubFactory team has been developing and delivering scholarly publishing technologies since 1999. In 2010, the PubFactory platform officially launched with the deployment of several major Oxford University Press products. This was quickly followed by the International Monetary Fund’s eLibrary and De Gruyter’s journals, books, and database products launching in 2011. Notable publishers including Bloomsbury Publishing, Brill, Edward Elgar Publishing, Harvard University Press, Peter Lang, and others have since joined the growing list of PubFactory customers.

PubFactory’s configurable suite of front-end and back-end capabilities allows for optimal support across content types, making it a truly content agnostic platform that is host to 1400+ journals, 400,000+ books, and numerous database and reference work products.

“We are delighted to offer our journal and book publishers this proven and comprehensive hosting and publishing platform,” said Gary Kittredge, Managing Director of Sheridan Journal Services. “PubFactory will propel Sheridan into a new level of engagement with our customers as we extend our range of services from high-touch editorial production and print solutions to hosting our customers’ content – a complete package.”

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Leading Companies, Trade Associations Launch Corporate Committee for Library Investment to Save Federal Library Funding (PR)

Many of America's leading information, software, publishing and other businesses as well as multiple national trade associations today unveiled the Corporate Committee for Library Investment to advocate for federal library funding.

As Congress turns to funding the government beyond next September, CCLI launches against the backdrop of Administration proposals to eliminate most federal library funding and the agency that distributes those funds to every state. Members of CCLI are united by the common belief that America's libraries are business-building, job-creating, workforce-preparing engines of the U.S. economy in every corner of the country. The group formed to tell that story to Congress and other federal policy makers who control library funding and to encourage every American business to do the same.

CCLI today delivered a letter, which remains open to signature by any business of any size, to all members of the United States Senate. (Eight companies made a similar delivery in their own names on May 11.) The letter expressly asks senators to sign two letters to their colleagues on the Appropriations Committee calling for $186.6 million in FY 2018 funding for programs under the Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) and $27 million for the Innovative Approaches to Literacy program (IAL). LSTA funding goes primarily to a population-based matching grant program that puts states in charge of how federal funds are spent. IAL allows school libraries and non-profit groups to buy books and educational materials for the nation's neediest children.

CCLI also will work to: rapidly reauthorize the Museum and Library Services Act, which created LSTA; and assure that any infrastructure investments authorized by Congress both include library facilities and leverage the nation's 120,000 libraries to make high-speed broadband service available in every corner of America, especially in rural and other underserved communities.

CCLI was co-conceived by Gale, a Cengage company, and the American Library Association, which will provide logistical support for the group. Founding members include Baker & Taylor, bibliotheca, Candlewick Press, Corporate Graphics International, EBSCO Information Services, Encyclopedia Britannica, Findaway, Follett, Gale/Cengage, Information Today, Jamex, Mackin, Macmillan, ­­OverDrive, Peachtree Publishers, Pearson, Penguin Random House, Prendismo, ProQuest, Public Information Kiosk, The RoadRunner Press, Rosen Publishing, SirsiDynix, the American Booksellers Association and the Software and Information Industry Association.

Clarivate Analytics has announced the acquisition of Publons and its leading global platform for researchers to share, discuss and receive recognition for peer review and editing of academic research. The acquisition brings together the world's preeminent citation database and the world's largest researcher-facing peer-review data and recognition platform.

Clarivate is developing and delivering innovative analytics and workflow solutions that increase efficiencies across the entire research lifecycle; from idea to experiment, to peer review, to publication, dissemination and assessment. The acquisition of Publons, its platform and data, increase the value of multiple Clarivate Analytics products, while supporting researchers as they manage their careers and work across the ecosystem of funders, publishers and institutions.

"The Clarivate Analytics citation network and researcher tools, including flagship products like Web of Science, EndNote and ScholarOne, are some of the most widely used tools in research," said Andrew Preston, co-founder of Publons. "Daniel and I founded Publons with the core belief that peer review is at the heart of research. As the pressures on scientific publishing continue to grow, we see an opportunity for Publons to have an even greater positive impact on peer review. The global scale and impartial position of Clarivate Analytics, combined with Publons, will allow us to further develop the platform, creating the tools and services that the research community needs."

The combined strengths of Clarivate and Publons will address critical research challenges in the $1.7 trillion global research market, including fraudulent scientific research, inefficiencies in peer review that slow down research and identifying and understanding top research as funders increasingly demand demonstrable impact and proof of contributions to the research environment. Peer review is at the heart of solutions to these challenges and will drive future improvements across the research ecosystem.

More

Skip Prichard Named to Succeed Jay Jordan at OCLC

From their press release:

Mr. Prichard has led multi-national organizations that serve libraries across the full spectrum of library services and content needs. Most recently, he was President and CEO of Ingram Content Group Inc., which provides a broad range of physical and digital services to the book industry. Prior to his service at Ingram, he was President and CEO of ProQuest Information and Learning, a respected global publisher and information provider serving library, education, government and corporate markets with offices around the world.
Mr. Prichard will succeed Jay Jordan, who will retire June 30 after 15 years as OCLC President and CEO. Mr. Prichard will serve as OCLC President-elect, effective June 3, and will officially become President and CEO on July 1.
"Skip Prichard is a proven leader with an outstanding record of accomplishment," said Sandy Yee, Chair, OCLC Board of Trustees, and Dean, Wayne State University Libraries and School of Library and Information Science. "He has guided leading library services organizations through eras of significant change, from print to electronic and from local to global. His experience and commitment to libraries will help us continue our work to move library services and cooperation forward—in the cloud, on mobile devices and through the collaborative work of libraries and partners around the world."
"OCLC has a long tradition of strong leadership and vision, and I consider myself fortunate to have the opportunity to lead the cooperative into what promises to be an exciting and challenging future," said Mr. Prichard. "OCLC and member libraries are using the newest technologies available to move library services to the cloud where they continue to collaboratively build resources and infrastructure to share. I look forward to working with the talented OCLC staff and membership to ensure that we build on that momentum, and provide the resources necessary for libraries and librarians around the world to meet and exceed the increasing expectations of their users."

MediaWeek (Vol 6, No 11): Phoenix Flames Out, Pompeii Exhibit, Springer, MOOCs + More

The Boston Phoenix closed down last week. (CJR):

But nobody was expecting the guillotine. I certainly wasn’t. As a longtime Phoenix reader and part-time Boston resident, I’m shocked and disconsolate. The Phoenix is and was one of the best alt-weeklies in the country. From its smart reporting on state and local politics to its tough, nuanced coverage of social justice issues, the Phoenix consistently exemplified the best of the alternative press. Staff writer Chris Faraone’s you-are-there coverage of the Occupy movement was honest, unsentimental, and indispensable; during last year’s presidential campaign, political writer David S. Bernstein offered valuable insight into the Romney cotillion. The paper’s departments were memorable, too—David Thorpe’s loopy The Big Hurt music column; Robert Nadeau’s authoritative restaurant reviews; Barry Thompson’s “Meet the Mayor” series of interviews with various local Foursquare “mayors;” the tenacious local arts coverage. All were lively and occasionally brilliant; all will be missed. 

That’s not to say that the paper was flawless. No publication is. But, from my perspective, the Phoenix’s successes far outnumbered its failures. More to the point, the Phoenix was a legitimately independent weekly in a space largely dominated by conglomerate corporate media. While other alt-weeklies across the country were acquired by national chains, the Phoenix remained resolutely rooted in New England. (The Boston Phoenix had two sister papers in Providence, RI, and Portland, ME, both of which will continue to publish.) Now, the only true alt-weekly in Boston is the wisecracking Weekly Dig, which has a huge opportunity if it plays its cards right. (Many current Phoenix staffers began their careers at the Dig.)

Looks like a fascinating show at the British Museum (where the world comes to see their stuff) about domestic life in Pompeii and Herculaneum (FT):

Paul Roberts, the exhibition’s curator, talks me through the lessons of the double portrait, found at the site of a bakery. “We assume he is the bakery owner. He wears a white toga, which may mean he is a candidatus for political office. But his wife is the amazing one. She is the one with the reckoning tablet. They are equal, and they are shown equal, standing together, members of a confident, mercantile class.  

“And this was the reality of life for a lot of Roman women. They wouldn’t have been little old ladies sitting at home. They were highly visible in society.” Roberts plays down their disenfranchisement. “Think of Edwardian England: no vote, no ability to stand for office but tons of money and tons of influence.”  This is the most complete show, Roberts believes, to illustrate the domestic life of the two cities. It is designed to show the riches that would have adorned the typical prosperous Roman household: its gardens, its dining rooms; its private jokes and its grandiloquent statements of self-importance. The Italian addiction to bella figura, he says, can be traced to the flamboyance of ancient Rome.

Also in the FT, the Springer sale is off earlier than expected since the offers from some selected potential buyers were less than expected. This can mean only one thing. (FT)

But earlier this year, EQT hinted that it may wait until later in the year to start a formal process, after price indications from potential buyers including German media group Bertelsmann fell short of expectations, people with knowledge of the matter said then.
The fact that it is now accelerating the sale process highlights a dramatic shift in sentiment among the largest private equity firms in Europe over the past two months, as debt funding for acquisitions increases amid an investors rush into high yield bonds.
However this time, Bertelsmann says it won’t bid for Springer Science. After signalling for months that it would have a look at the publisher if it went on sale, the German media group said it was no longer interested.

Slightly biased research (which they admit to) on how faculty feel about the MOOCs they have taught (Chronicle):

The findings are not scientific, and perhaps the most enthusiastic of the MOOC professors were the likeliest complete the survey. These early adopters of MOOCs have overwhelmingly volunteered to try them—only 15 percent of respondents said they taught a MOOC at the behest of a superior—so the deck was somewhat stacked with true believers. A few professors whose MOOCs have gone publicly awry did not respond to the survey.

But the participants were primarily longtime professors with no prior experience with online instruction. More than two-thirds were tenured, and most had taught college for well over a decade. The respondents were overwhelmingly white and male. In other words, these were not fringe-dwelling technophiles with a stake in upending the status quo.

Therefore the positive response may come as a surprise to some observers. Every year the Babson Survey Research Group asks chief academic administrators to estimate what percentage of their faculty members "accept the value and legitimacy of online education"; the average estimate in recent years has stalled at 30 percent, even as online programs have become mainstream.

Professors at top-ranked colleges are seen as having especially entrenched views. For years, "elite" institutions appeared to view online courses as higher education's redheaded stepchild—good enough for for-profit institutions and state universities, maybe, but hardly equivalent to the classes held on their own campuses. Now these high-profile professors, who make up most of the survey participants, are signaling a change of heart that could indicate a bigger shake-up in the higher-education landscape.

Also from Wired: Where are MOOCs really going? (Wired):

The initial MOOCs came from a “process business model” where companies bring inputs together at one end and transform them into a higher-value output for customers at the other end — as with the retail and manufacturing industries.

But over time, an approach where users exchange information from each other similar to Facebook or telecommunications (a “facilitated network model”) will come to dominate online learning. This evolution is especially likely to happen if the traditional degree becomes irrelevant and, as many predict, learning becomes a continuous, on-the-job learning process. Then the need for customization will drive us toward just-in-time mini-courses.

And from the twitter feed this week:
How International Pricing Strategy Affects Publisher Profitability EPubDirect
OCLC launches WorldShare Interlibrary Loan service in the US KnowledgeSpeak
Historical audio: Unforgotten songs Economist
Ray Cusick Economist The genius who invented the Daleks. They got him.
ProQuest to Distribute NewspaperARCHIVE to Libraries Worldwide Link

MediaWeek (Vol 6, No 10): Grey House, Student Data, Amazon, Newspapers +More

There's still a lot of money in print. Grey House is taking over print titles from EBSCO (PW) and has made a business of taking over legacy print titles from a range of publishers including EBSCO, Bowker and Proquest.

Grey House Publishing will become the publisher of the print editions of the H.W. Wilson product line under a new exclusive license between EBSCO Publishing (EBSCO) and Grey House. Wilson publishes a range of reference work for the library markets and is best known for Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature, first published in 1901. The deal with Wilson comes shortly after Grey House and EBSCO announced that Grey House would become the publisher of the print editions of the Salem Press product line. First titles to be published under that agreement are currently at the printer.

Big data pool of student achievement information is being created. Where's the concern? Reuters

The database is a joint project of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which provided most of the funding, the Carnegie Corporation of New York and school officials from several states. Amplify Education, a division of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, built the infrastructure over the past 18 months. When it was ready, the Gates Foundation turned the database over to a newly created nonprofit, inBloom Inc, which will run it. States and school districts can choose whether they want to input their student records into the system; the service is free for now, though inBloom officials say they will likely start to charge fees in 2015. So far, seven states - Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Massachusetts - have committed to enter data from select school districts. Louisiana and New York will be entering nearly all student records statewide. "We look at personalized learning as the next big leap forward in education," said Brandon Williams, a director at the Illinois State Board of Education.

Why do we trust Amazon - from New York Magazine:

Amazon is good at sorting and ranking things—we understand that. It knows exactly how many boxes of diapers my kids have ever used. It knows every book I’ve considered. It’s also clear that Amazon doesn’t care about what it sells; it just cares about the selling. To Amazon, a book isn’t really a book. It’s the result of a database query that Amazon will seamlessly transmit over its Whispernet or via USPS to your doorstep, if that’s still your thing. To the shopper, Amazon, with its records of browsing and buying, is not a store nor a website, but more like a ghost limb, for grabbing whatever is needed or wanted.

A long look at Advance Communications changes to the way they run their newspapers with a focus on the Times-Picayune (CJR)

American newspapers have lost more than half their advertising dollars in the last five years, an existential threat to an industry that in 2007 depended on ads for three-fourths of its revenue. The Times-Picayune is no exception to the trend. Its advertising has plunged 42 percent since 2009, according to an analysis of figures its publisher gave The Wall Street Journal in September.

There is no sure answer for what to do about this. Still, by now, most major newspapers have begun moving to strategies that play to their strengths: charging core readers online while allowing casual visitors 10 or so free stories a month; increasing the price of the paper, sometimes by charging an upsell fee for bundling digital access with print; shoring up Sunday circulation; and attempting to convert ad departments into marketing-services operations that provide more holistic solutions to local promotion, like website creation, social-media help, app creation, and the like. These and similar strategies are based on the value of the content, and on a hopeful bet that newspapers can keep significant subscription revenue in the coming all-digital future.

Advance is following the industry into marketing services. But mainly it has stuck by what was conventional Web wisdom from before the recession—chasing clicks. In the new NOLA model, editors push reporters to increase “inventory,” more content with fewer journalists. And more of its remaining resources are in sports and entertainment. In this system, a distracted click on a story that says, in its entirety, “Hornets officially announce their nickname will be changing from Hornets to Pelicans,” is worth as much as one on, say, a prison exposé. More, actually, since the former comes with less time and effort.

From my Twitter stream:
Bertelsmann takes control of BMG - FT
Online data errors cost US groups $10bn -FT
At South by Southwest Education Event, Tensions Divide Entrepreneurs and Educators Chronicle
Launch of Digital Public Library of America Chronicle
Ebooks: newspapers should capitalise on their archives Guardian
Comixology launches online self-publishing platform for comic books The Verge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From my twitter feed this week:

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

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

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

OCLC's WorldCat Local Building Content Resources

OCLC recently announced how much their efforts to include access to publishers content has developed. Here from their press release:

An expanding collection of authoritative content from leading academic publishers is now accessible through WorldCat Local, the OCLC discovery service that offers users integrated access to electronic, digital and physical library materials.

WorldCat Local provides access to more than 750 million items, including books, journals and databases from international publishers; the digital collections of groups like HathiTrust, OAIster and Google Books; open access materials; as well as the collective resources of libraries worldwide through WorldCat.

OCLC continues to negotiate access to critical library content on behalf of the cooperative to ensure access to libraries’ most popular resources. To view a full list of the nearly 1,200 databases and collections available through WorldCat Local, visit the website.

Databases recently added to the WorldCat Local central index include:

• American Psychological Association: PsycARTICLES, PsycBOOKS, PsycCRITIQUES
• Alternative Press Center: Alternative Press Index, Alternative Press Index Archive

Content providers that will soon add databases to the WorldCat Local central index include:

• Accessible Archives
• Oxford University Press
• Taylor & Francis
• CABI
• OECD
• Sabinet
• Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)

Databases now available in WorldCat Local through remote access:

• Gale: Contemporary Authors, ¡Informe!, Making of Modern Law, Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center
• EBSCO: ATLA Religion Database ™ with ATLASerials ™ , PsycEXTRA, PsycINFO
• H. W. Wilson: Book Review Digest Retrospective: 1905-1982, Essay & General Literature Index Retrospective

WorldCat Local now offers vendor record sets from:

• ProQuest: ProQuest U. S. Executive Branch Documents, 1910-1932
• ProQuest: Gerritsen Collection of Women’s History, 1543-1945 (six collections in varying formats)
• Cassidy Cataloguing: Lexis I – E-treatises

The WorldCat Local search experience also grows richer with the ongoing addition of article-level metadata to WorldCat.org. When this metadata is added to WorldCat.org, it is automatically made part of WorldCat Local. Article-level metadata for the following resources have been added recently to WorldCat.org:

• ISIS Current Bibliography of the History of Science
• Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine

For more information, visit the WorldCat Local website.

MediaWeek (Vol 4, No 1): Digital Media Experiments, Murakami, Literary Illusion and Political Correction, Predictions, Cliche

From the Independent: Digital media offer unbounded opportunities for writers to experiment with form and conventions. So why do so many still allow themselves to be imprisoned by the traditional codex format of the book, asks Joy Lo Dico (Independent):

Pullinger started working in online fiction with the TrAce Online Writing Centre, based at Nottingham Trent University, a decade ago. "I was asked to teach online creative-story writing," she says. "Back in 2001, this was new to me. I only really used the internet for booking flights and sending emails. But after teaching the course, I found that it's a useful environment for focusing on the text, and that I had a kind of affinity for it." Since then she has been experimenting, often in collaboration with the electronic artist Chris Joseph, on several major projects. "Inanimate Alice", which came out in 2005, is a sequence of stories about a young girl who exists between real and digital worlds. The written narrative is deliberately minimalist and built into a rich audio-visual experience. Then came "Flight Paths", begun in 2007, which Pullinger describes as a "networked novel". It was inspired by the news story of an illegal immigrant who had stowed away behind the landing wheel of an aircraft, only to fall to Earth in suburban London. In addition to her own resulting short story, Pullinger invited others to contribute their own takes on the theme. "The third phase of 'Flight Paths' is now about to come together in digital and print," says Pullinger. "The first phases were open to discussion; the third is about closing it." Her most recent project, "Lifelines" – autobiographies of young people around the world put into historical and geographical contexts – has been specifically made as an educational tool.

Haruki Murakami in the year end issue of the IHT magazine (IHT):

There has been an especially noteworthy change in the posture of European and American readers. Until now, my novels could be seen in 20th-century terms, that is, to be entering their minds through such doorways as “post-modernism” or “magic realism” or “Orientalism”; but from around the time that people welcomed the new century, they gradually began to remove the framework of such “isms” and accept the worlds of my stories more nearly as-is. I had a strong sense of this shift whenever I visited Europe and America. It seemed to me that people were accepting my stories in toto — stories that are chaotic in many cases, missing logicality at times, and in which the composition of reality has been rearranged. Rather than analyzing the chaos within my stories, they seem to have begun conceiving a new interest in the very task of how best to take them in. By contrast, general readers in Asian countries never had any need for the doorway of literary theory when they read my fiction. Most Asian people who took it upon themselves to read my works apparently accepted the stories I wrote as relatively “natural” from the outset. First came the acceptance, and then (if necessary) came the analysis. In most cases in the West, however, with some variation, the logical parsing came before the acceptance. Such differences between East and West, however, appear to be fading with the passing years as each influences the other. If I were to pin a label on the process through which the world has passed in recent years, it would be “realignment.” A major political and economic realignment started after the end of the Cold War. Little need be said about the realignment in the area of information technology, with its astounding, global-scale dismantling and establishment of systems. In the swirling midst of such processes, obviously, it would be impossible for literature alone to take a pass on such a realignment and avoid systemic change.

From the WSJ Adam Kirsch on literary illusion in the age of Google (WSJ):

What this means is that, in our fragmented literary culture, allusion is a high-risk, high-reward rhetorical strategy. The more recondite your allusion, the more gratifying it will be to those who recognize it, and the more alienating it will be to those who don't. To risk an unidentified quotation, you have to have a pretty good sense of your audience: Psalms would be safe enough in a sermon, "The Waste Land" in a literary essay or college lecture, Horace just about nowhere. In the last decade or so, however, a major new factor has changed this calculus. That is the rise of Google, which levels the playing field for all readers. Now any quotation in any language, no matter how obscure, can be identified in a fraction of a second. When T.S. Eliot dropped outlandish Sanskrit and French and Latin allusions into "The Waste Land," he had to include notes to the poem, to help readers track them down. Today, no poet could outwit any reader who has an Internet connection.

And Kirsch again on the editing for political correctness (whatever that is) NYT:

“Huckleberry Finn” was intended, of course, as an attack on racism. In its most famous scene, Huck hides the runaway slave Jim from a party of slave-hunters, and then feels guilty for having done so. “I knowed very well I had done wrong,” he says, though the reader, and Twain, know he has done right. It’s a searching demonstration of the way conscience is not just innate but also learned, and how confusing it can be to do right in a society dedicated to wrong — the same kinds of questions that bedeviled Hannah Arendt at the Eichmann trial. ... This is also the promise of American history, and above all of the Constitution. Unlike Twain’s novel, that classic American text was written in the expectation that it would be corrected. And it needed correction, or amendment, for the same essential reason: the framers’ imagination of the people they led was not full enough. It took a devastating civil war, whose sesquicentennial we are now observing, to revise the Constitution in the direction of justice. When the House readers decided to skip the parts of the Constitution that reveal its original limitations, they were minimizing that history, pretending that our founding document was flawless from the beginning.

IBM's top five predictions for 2015 (Kurzweil):

IBM has unveiled its fifth annual “Next Five in Five” — five technology innovations that have the potential to change the way people work, live and play over the next five years:

• You’ll beam up your friends in 3-D
• Batteries will breathe air to power our devices
• You won’t need to be a scientist to save the planet
• Your commute will be personalized
• Computers will help energize your city

IBM’s fifth annual “Next Five in Five” is based on market and societal trends expected to transform our lives, as well as emerging technologies from IBM’s Labs around the world that can make these innovations possible. (Hat tip: Above the Fold)

Is “follow” the new economic model poised to take on “search”? (BOIC)

Therefore the problem (Generating wealth from the web) is far more complex, multifaceted and inter-twangled, as there is unlikely to be a single source.

• Do I want to be directed by people I trust but I may not be able to determine their source – Follow
• Do I want to be directed by an unknown algorithm that can change at any time and could be biased to their own needs – Search
• Do I want to be directed by Brands – Marketing/Ads
• Do I want to be directed by the media/ editors/ critics where I may be able to determine their bias – Broadcast/ News
• Do I want to be directed by the fashion/ celebrity – Sales

This complex dependency is an issue that editors and bloggers have faced time over. Do I post based on what people want to read, based on clicks and response data or what I find interesting – are we (am I) adaptive or reactive, do we want to be individual or loved or make money or provide democracy or lead?

I really don’t need to know what you had for lunch and I don’t have to follow you. Follow would put me in control and can seek out value from the community and not some bland algorithm that controls what part of the web I can see. However the issue facing follow is how will I pay the platform that underpins the service?

Wrapping up This long Viewpoint started with the idea that “follow” is the new economic model poised to take on “search” and I believe that there is value in “follow.” Reading that Google offered $3bn for Twitter makes be believe that there are other strategists who are struggling with the same issues and the value!

The war on Cliche's is not going well according to Holroyd at the Guardian:

To my mind, it is Amis's campaign against the clichés on which our outrage feeds that has failed. Is there any meaning whatever in the repeated words we hear? "Fantastic" and "incredible" seem to parody or refute the statements they are intended to strengthen. Many of our newly minted clichés have a touch of violence added to them – such as "kick-start" instead of the quicker, simpler "start", and the aggressive coating of "batter" which (as if taking orders in a totalitarian restaurant) all cricket commentators suddenly began using one morning. Several of the phrases used by media people suggest in Big Brother style the exact opposite of what they say – radio as well as television presenters claiming they will see us again in the next hour, day or week when surely it is we who may see or hear them. And everywhere there is the sound of single-syllable words, such as other people's "mums" or the soldier "boys" who are tragically killed in battle, which signal our everlasting child-status. We need to be particularly careful when examining the language of bureaucrats and economists. I think I can see through "transparency" pretty well, but I cannot remember the words we used before "infrastructure" came into being – probably they were simple words such as "roads". "Efficiency", I realise, means spending as little as possible on something and, by not "throwing money at it", doing it on the cheap. So the word "efficiency" has come to mean almost the opposite of "competence". The phrase I particularly dislike, because I believe it to be deliberately misleading, is "taxpayers' money", which is used whenever the government is making absolutely certain nothing will happen. It is a bogus phrase because it generally refers to money which actually does not belong to the individual taxpayer such as you and me. What we are legally obliged to render unto HM Revenue and Customs belongs to our elected government. The taxpayer's money is what is left in her bank after her Revenue cheque has been cashed – but that is not what politicians mean when they use that phrase as an excuse for positive inactivity.

Q Magazine's top Albums from the past 25yrs (Q) From the Twitter (@personanondata): New ‘Huckleberry Finn’ Edition Does Disservice to a Classic - http://nyti.ms/fMUc1g The Irish Times: What shops have to do when their products go digital http://bit.ly/g7oURD Announcement: ProQuest acquires eBrary http://bit.ly/fqVX3R Girl gang's grip on London underworld revealed http://t.co/LhNFm2K via @guardian.

MediaWeek (Vol 3, No 48): World Book Night, Obit Purushottama Lal, M/A: Reed & WoltersKluwer, Cengage Declines

World Book Night in the UK: One million books to be given away (Telegraph):

The idea was dreamed up by Canongate MD Jamie Byng, who has a knack for discovering talent (the young unknowns Barack Obama and Philip Pullman have long been part of his stable), and whose entire life appears to be an attempt to prove that nothing is as infectious as enthusiasm. World Book Night is a wildly ambitious extension of that theory.

Here’s how it works: Between now and January 4, members of the public are being asked to choose one book they love from a list of 25 pre-selected titles (see the full list below). They – you! – fill in a form saying, in 100 words, why they would like to give this book to others. The recommendation must be personal, and passionate. Each of 20,000 “givers” will then be sent 48 copies of that book to hand out on the night of March 5 at the venue they have chosen, resulting in what promises to be a national, simultaneous frenzy of book-loving.

Monsoon Systems has signed a contract with REDGroup Australia:

"This strategic alliance with Monsoon Commerce Solutions enables Borders.com.au to integrate with the leading marketplace and offer our Australian customers a massive selection of products. In doing this, we become Australia's largest online bookstore, and possibly even Australia's largest online store. Providing the broadest range of media and entertainment products is at the core of our strategy, together with offering unbeatable value to our customers, which this marketplace offer enables us to do. This is key to helping us grow in this competitive and rapidly growing market," said James Webber, managing director of REDgroup Online Pty Ltd. "This offer allows our customers to re-sell their used books on our web site, as well as purchase used and rare books not readily available elsewhere."

Continued Webber, "This is an important addition to the Borders.com.au web site and strengthens its position as one of this region's strongest e-tailers. With an unparalleled range of books and eBooks available, a price guarantee that ensures we are more than competitive with Amazon.com, and the recent extension of our offer into CDs, DVDs, and general gifts, Borders.com.au is uniquely positioned to capitalize on the massive growth in online spending by Australian consumers."

"Monsoon Commerce Solutions is committed to helping sellers and retailers grow their businesses online. Adding marketplace functionality with REDgroup's Australian and New Zealand retail operations dramatically extends their selection and increases customer loyalty. Broadening our reach in this way is another step forward in our commitment to helping sellers grow their business," stated Brian Elliott, CEO of Monsoon Commerce Solutions.

Obit of Purushottama Lal, poet and publisher of Calcutta in the Economist:

Professor Lal’s business was publishing Indian writers in English. Of the great old works he made masterly translations; new writers he encouraged. When he began, ten years after independence, the practice was controversial. Although English was one of India’s official languages, writers in it were often mocked as colonial remnants, “caged chaffinches and polyglot parrots”. He passionately disagreed. His love of English had begun in boyhood and was crowned with his long tenure at St Xavier’s College in Calcutta, to which his landowning family had come from the Punjab. Mention an English poet—Donne, Swinburne, Keats—and “Profsky”, as all his friends called him, would launch into reciting. Give him a word, and he would burrow joyously into its etymology. He was determined to keep the best English writing alive and well in India. And that meant making space for new creative writers, too. Each of the 3,500 titles he published contained, at the back, his “credo”. English book publishing in India, he complained, was governed by a “nexus” of “high-profile PR-conscious book publishers, semi-literate booksellers, moribund public and state libraries, poorly informed and nepotistic underlings in charge of book review pages…and biased bulk purchases of near worthless books by bureaucratic institutions”. He, on the other hand, survived “without plush foundations”, publishing then-unknown authors purely for the love of it. Letters were always answered promptly, in the beautiful hand and with the Sheaffer pen. Manuscripts were accepted, as often as not, just to try their luck in the “loving clutches” of the free market. He made no money at it, and the authors might not either, because they were required to buy 100 copies of their work in advance. Some grumbled, but Writers Workshop was a beacon, not a charity.

Reed Elsevier continues to carve off pieces of its business. This time the Congressional Information Service and University Publications (PR):

Among the acquired product lines' best known works is the Congressional Collection, a one-of-a-kind resource that enables simple access to the full text of the breadth of governmental output -- congressional publications, bills, laws and other research materials – and award-winning Statistical Insight, which captures data produced by U.S. Federal agencies, States, private organizations, and major intergovernmental organizations. The microfilm vault of government documents encompasses text of congressional hearings dating from 1789, providing rich content for ProQuest’s continuously expanding digital archives.

“As LexisNexis continues to transform its portfolio of products and services, we are very pleased to place this business unit with ProQuest as it is an excellent fit for them and their customers,” said Mike Simmons, senior vice president of Specialty Businesses at LexisNexis. “We look forward to working with ProQuest – including licensing back certain legislative content sets from ProQuest for our legal professional customers.”

On the other hand, LexisNexis acquired State Net to add to their collection of government database products and applications (Marketwatch):

LexisNexis, a leading global provider of content-enabled workflow solutions, today announced that it has acquired State Net(R) -- the premier provider of legislative and regulatory content and tools in the United States. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. "Through the acquisition of State Net, LexisNexis has secured critical content and tools needed by legal and business professionals to rapidly monitor and analyze the policy decisions being made by Federal and State governments and regulatory agencies across the US on a daily basis," said Bob Romeo, senior vice president of Research and Litigation Solutions at LexisNexis. "Access to this critical information means our customers are at an advantage when assisting their clients in finding, analyzing and planning for those decisions." State Net collects, normalizes and editorially enhances all bills introduced in the 50 U.S. state legislatures, the District of Columbia and the U.S. Congress, as well as all agency regulations from every state. The service also provides timely delivery of data, legislative intelligence and in-depth content and tools reporting on the actions of government institutions.

SkyRiver (competitor to OCLC) was granted the right to deliver subject headings for adoption and approval to the Library of Congress (LJ)

Wolters Kluwer Health has entered into an agreement to acquire Pharmacy OneSource (CMIO)

Pharmacy OneSource is a healthcare software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider that helps hospitals manage patient safety, compliance and efficiency. Pharmacy OneSource, of Bellevue, Wash., currently works with more than 1,200 hospitals globally, and assists with medication tracking, pediatric dosing, drug interaction checking, managing formularies, documenting and monitoring clinical interventions, and avoiding medication errors and adverse drug reactions via the web or handheld computer, as well as managing checklists to facilitate accurate and consistent compliance reporting.

Cengage Learning reported their first quarter a few weeks ago which saw a $52mm (7%) decline versus 2009. Here is their management summary for the three months ended September 30 (Cengage):

• Revenues decreased by $52.0, or 7.5%, to $641.8 for the three months ended September 30, 2010, including a $3.0 favorable impact from acquisitions and a $0.6 unfavorable impact from foreign currency translation. The revenue decline was driven by gross sales decreases in the higher education and career channels due to changes in customer ordering patterns that accelerated certain orders into the fourth quarter of fiscal 2010 from the first quarter of fiscal 2011, as well as our Research business within our Domestic segment, partially offset by higher sales in our International segment.
• Operating income from continuing operations decreased by $33.3, or 13.1%, for the three months ended September 30, 2010, due to lower revenues and restructuring charges, partially offset by lower variable costs, amortization of pre-publication costs and employee and consulting services cost.
• Adjusted EBITDA decreased by $37.2, or 10.4%, for the three months ended September 30, 2010, due to lower revenues partially offset by lower direct product and other variable costs, as well as lower employee and consulting services cost.

From the twitter this week (@personanondata): Why the Library of Congress Is Blocking Wikileaks « Library of Congress Blog JoongAng Daily: U.S. publisher @MarcusLeaver views Korea as trendsetter in e-book growth Google Editions: Faster Forward - Google readies Google Editions e-book store WAPO Onnesha Roychoudhuri: Books After Amazon Boston Review