Publishers Lunch Launch Bookstore Maps

Announced today is an ambitious and long needed new bookstore locator product from Publishers Lunch. The database product pulls together store location information from 4200 bookstores selling new titles across the US.

If you are not a subscriber to Publishers Lunch (and face it who isn't) this should provide the motivation you need. Here is more information from their press release:

We are now live at PublishersMarketplace with our latest database project, one of our most ambitious and most essential compilations yet. Charting the landscape of physical retailers that support the entire business, we have compiled and vetted data on over 4,200 stores selling new books across the country.

The database presents basic information for each store, while also cataloging hundreds of associated bookstore websites. Most dramatic of all, we have made the information visual as well, displaying it on Google-powered maps.

A variety of search options make it easy to access the data in multiple ways: You can scan by state, 33 major metropolitan areas, zip code, and store type (chain; indie; etc.), or browse a number of specialty stores (children's; mystery; etc.) Stores are color-coded to easily and quickly distinguish among the four largest chains, general indies, college bookstores and specialty stores.

And special features add utility of particular interest for "trade" use: newly opened and recently closed stores are specially tagged, and we recently added the ability for stores to contribute rich information about the kinds of special events and readings they offer and whom to contact about author bookings.

An "add/update/remove a store" link on the main Bookstore Maps page makes it easy for stores to contribute and correct data and submit information for those Events fields so that publishers can learn more about their capabilities. We also need to bolster the lists of specialty stores and are eager to hear from organizations with comprehensive, vetted data.

Right now this resource is viewable only via PublishersMarketplace, though we are working on variety of additional uses, including a free-standing version for general users. Among the special uses we would be delighted to explore with any of you are:

* Using the database as an always up-to-date and comprehensive "store finder" to run on any publisher's web site, to help support the entire ecosystem of physical and online retail

* Generating national Tour Maps for particular authors, to embed on author sites and pages

* Developing a variety of proprietary in-house versions, using our visual interface as a way of storing your own data about accounts, a way to test visual mapping of POS data, and more

(We're already looking at incorporating feeds of data about author appearances, but help/ideas are most welcome.)

Needless to say, this feature is the culmination of a tremendous amount of work by many people. We are particularly grateful for the generous assistance of Barnes & Noble, Borders Group, the American Booksellers Association, the directors of all of the regional booksellers associations, the folks at publishing houses who viewed our demos and offered feedback, and the many freelance researchers who worked with us in compiling and correcting the data. We look forward to your suggestions for improving and employing this new resource, and to community contributions to the data itself.

To check out Bookstore Maps, just go here: http://www.publishersmarketplace.com/stores
[we'll add it to the PM menu bar shortly]

To view sample events data, visit these store links and click the "Events" tab:
Northshire Bookstore, Manchester Center VT

Third Place Books, Lake Forest Park WA

The Globe Corner Bookstore, Cambridge MA

Stanford University Bookstore, Stanford CA

When Bowker was sold by Reed, we lost American Book Trade Directory and American Library Directory once the dust had settled. Had we kept them I would like to think we could have done something like this with those data base products. Assuming PL carves out this bookstore information as a separate product I don't see how other databases could compete on quality or price. Now, Bowker should do somthing similar with the Publisher's Wholesalers and Distributors database in advance of someone beating them to it.

A Cool New Reading Device

My friends at Rosetta sent me a link to a presentation by a company named Plastic Logic who demonstrate their proto type for a new e-Reader targeted at business users. Looks very cool.

Here is the video (link) and the product is slated for launch early next year.

BISG Announce "Start With XML Project"

BISG is pleased to announce its sponsorship and support of an exciting and important new venture, the StartwithXML project.

This project, co-presented by O'Reilly Media and The Idea Logical Company, is an industry-wide, multipart initiative to present and disseminate the information that publishers need in order to move forward with a StartwithXML workflow. Mike Shatzkin of The Idea Logical Company was a featured speaker at the recent BISG Annual Meeting, where he discussed the project and the importance of XML to the publishing world (click here to see his presentation).

Survey Now Open

The first part of the project involves a survey of current publishing and production processes. BISG urges its publisher members to participate in this survey; the information gathered from the industry is vital to the success of the program. click here to connect to the survey.

Sign Up for the January Event

A one-day forum is scheduled for January 13, 2009, at the McGraw-Hill Auditorium in New York. Through panels and presentations, you'll spend the morning understanding the “Why” of XML, and the afternoon learning about “How” to move forward. CLICK HERE for more information and registration details. BISG members will be eligible for a $100 discount off the full-day event, and $50 off for the half-day session; contact the BISG office (info@bisg.org) for discount codes.

Additional Features

The project will also include a detailed research report and an online community. The research report will include information, case studies, best practices, technology and vendor profiles, and interviews with industry experts discussing the factors that make a StartWithXML workflow both useful and tricky. The supporting online community will feature a blog, an open comments section for the report outline, and a discussion forum.

We invite all BISG members to participate in StartwithXML, starting with the survey!

StartwithXML is sponsored by

Code Mantra Klopotek Publishing Dimensions Rosetta Solutions, Inc.

Investing in the Long Tail

At the BISG annual meeting on Friday Anita Elberse presented finding from her research into the effects and impacts of the long tail of revenue opportunities that were extolled by Chris Anderson. In summary, she has found (empirically) that there is no evidence for some of the major tenets of his book. Her presentation was enlightening and here is a link to the article she published in the Harvard Business Review:

Should You Invest in the Long Tail?
It was a compelling idea: In the digitized world, there’s more money to be made in niche offerings than in blockbusters. The data tell a different story.

Elberse is Associate Professor of Business Administration at HBS.

Updated: Here is a link to the presentation given at the BISG meeting. Link

The Future of Media

Media Post held a roundtable to discuss the future of media. Some quotes:

Jane Friedman: I spent my career as a book publisher, and do I believe that there will be hardcover and paperback books forever? Yes, I do, because I think that the library's something that identifies the individual. All of us have gone into friends' homes and, very often, the first thing we look at is what's on the bookshelf.We are seeing in the book industry mainly what is just another form of reading, which is reading on the screen. And what that will do is make the kinds of books that are being published ones that can be read on the screen, and be read in book form, and put onto the library shelf. That's where the distinctions will come in.

Bonnie Fuller: Will we all be reading on a device?

Friedman: I believe so, because we all have generations behind us who do everything on a device and find nothing uncomfortable about a device. And I think that when we in the book industry face the fact that this shift is going to happen automatically, everything will change in the book-publishing world.

Everything comes back to the beginning. I want you, David, to recommend omething to me. I don't necessarily want your product manager to represent that he or she thinks that that product is what I want. If you know me, you can tell me what it is that I want. I think that's what's happening here. It's interesting to kind of stand back a little bit, because my form of media, meaning book publishing, is very different than a lot of what we're talking about here. You read an author's book. You like that author's book. You go to the author's backlist, where you look for his or her next book. Again, that's part of community and the new brand. And I think today the consumer is smarter, and great. I mean, there are too many books out there. There are too many videos out there. There are too many toothpaste products out there. The consumer wants to make his or her choice. My goal would be to influence those consumers from a marketing standpoint and give them what they want, when they want it and how they want it.

Brian Napack: The textbook is an appalling way to deliver information. It's extremely time-intensive to develop. It's extremely expensive to produce, extremely
expensive to warehouse, extremely expensive to load to the marketplace. The students don't like it. The professors don't like it. It's bad access of information. You never have it where you want it. You have a bunch of students in K to 12 and in college who have right shoulders that are lower than their left shoulders. Everybody hates it. We hate it because we sell it. It goes into the marketplace and it comes into the used marketplace. So every time we sell a textbook once, it gets sold three or four more times, and I don't make any money on it. So, I'm looking forward to a digital transition. But in this case - and this is why I'm dwelling on education - education is migrating in a very elegant fashion, a methodical and elegant fashion not just toward new and additional products, but toward products which are better for all parties involved, with the exception of the used-book industry. So what we're moving from is from a content metaphor, where the content is king, to online where you have, yes, the content, but more important, you have tools, you have community, you bring students together with teachers, students together with each other.

The whole article is very interesting.

MediaWeek (Vol 1, No 37):

CEO of Indigo Books in Canada Heather Reisman answers some questions for Canadian Business. It was less interesting for me until I got to this:

Indigo has a policy created on Day 1. To the best of our knowledge, we will not sell child pornography or material with detailed instructions on how to build weapons of mass destruction. And we will not sell any material that has as its sole intent the incitement of society toward the annihilation of any group. We will sell anything else. Electronic books will have less of an impact on publishing than digital media had on music distribution. People will always want to have traditional libraries. I can’t imagine not being surrounded by my books.

I would say that gives them a lot of latitude! Bonnier is has bought Templar a children's publisher in the UK. The Bookseller The 'F-Bomb' and Batman. (I gots to get my hands on one of these copies). LATimes.

DC Comics has pulled back tens of thousands of copies of "All-Star Batman and Robin" No. 10 due to a printing error that put two R-rated words into word balloons in the story. Which words? Well, one begins with "F" and the other begins with "C" -- and, yes, it's that C word. The issue was written by Frank Miller who didn't even know about the dustup until we called him. "This is the first I've heard of it. I have no idea how this awful thing happened. It's just one of those terrible and glorious things that happen from time to time in publishing."

An interesting article by Bob Guccione Jnr. (yes that one) on the future of media in MediaPost:

Secondly, there is the wisdom of the market, which has been gradually forgotten in the intoxicating Second Coming of New Media. People are presumed to be a guaranteed audience, no matter how many times the cell of an idea divides into multiple copies. But people are not chickens in a yard that you can throw a handful of grain at and watch them scurry around pecking at the dirt to find it all. People try most things that are new for a while and then gravitate to what really matters to them, especially when overwhelmed. They will choose what they want and won't turn up in as many actual places as they do on business plans. The amount of choice will tremendously raise the bar of quality and performance for competing media. Once again, a golden opportunity for experienced brands.

Reed continues to do all it can to off load the magazines with financing. Guardian American Booksellers Association is doing something that may actually benefit their members. They have organized a POD program with Applewood Press. Future Perfect if:Book has a long post on Publishing in a Networked Era.

The emergence of the web turned this vision of the book of the future as a solid, albeit multimedia object completely upside down and inside out. Multimedia is engaging, especially in a format that encourages reflection, but locating discourse inside of a dynamic network promises even more profound changes Reading and writing have always been social activities, but that fact tends to be obscured by the medium of print. We grew up with images of the solitary reader curled up in a chair or under a tree and the writer alone in his garret. The most important thing my colleagues and I have learned during our experiments with networked books over the past few years is that as discourse moves off the page onto the network, the social aspects are revealed in sometimes startling clarity. These exchanges move from background to foreground, a transition that has dramatic implications.

This guy advocates stealing. Is that true for the Boston Globe?

I was heartened to learn that college kids are wielding the same Internet piracy tools they used to bring down the recording industry to download textbooks. Although the textbook oligopolists are fighting back mightily - the Association of American Publishers uses Covington & Burling, a take-no-prisoners law firm in Washington, D.C., to hunt down malefactors - there are at least two sites still around offering books: Textbook Torrents tends to be shut down, and moves around the Web, but the last time I checked, thepiratebay.org was offering such books as - well, you'll see.

Database Bookselling

Mick Sussman (NYTimes) pens an interesting essay on the application of book databases to retailing and the particular impact on second hand and antiquarian bookselling.

Indeed, the state of the art in used-book selling these days seems to be less about connoisseurship than about database management. With the help of software tools, so-called megalisters stock millions of books and sell tens of thousands a week through Amazon, AbeBooks and other online marketplaces. Some sellers don’t even own their wares. They just copy other sellers’ lists and then buy the books as necessary, pocketing the markup (though none acknowledge the practice, since it is banned on most commercial sites). To small sellers like Joe Orlando of Fenwick Street Used Books and Music in Leonardtown, Md., megalisters treat books as “simply a widget that they can make a few bucks on.” The megalisters — a name originally intended as a term of abuse but now accepted by the accused — don’t quite disagree. “What we’re trying to do is provide cheap books for everybody,” said G. Seth Beal, the president and chief operating officer of Thrift Books, which lists three million books and has 180 employees. Beal says he personally loves handling and collecting old volumes, but his business model is based on achieving economies of scale through automation.

An interesting essay which ends on a positive note suggesting there is still a role for old fashioned book intelligence (even if it may be aided by blogging and list-serves) and that 'if you know what you are doing' as a seller you will win out against the megalisters.

Johnny Temple and Akashic Books

I first learned about Akashic books by picking up a copy of their DC Noir anthology many years ago and only then because it was edited by George Pelecanos one of my favorite authors. Since then they have released several more in the series but I also started reading some of their crime novels set in Cuba. I've read several and had a few more sitting on the 'to be read' shelf These books are thoroughly enjoyable: Tango for A Torturer , Outcast.

Johnny Temple set up Akashic Books and here he is speaking to the Gothamist.

This is the intro:

Yesterday we sent some questions about the festival over to Johnny Temple, who chairs the fiction programming. Though many know him as the bassist for Girls gainst Boys, Temple has roots in the D.C. post-hardcore scene and, as comes with the territory, a passion for all things independent. His Akashic Books publishing house is dedicated to nurturing urban fiction and political non-fiction that mainstream publishers ignore. Their motto? "Reverse-gentrification of the literary world." So it's no wonder Ian MacKaye and Thurston Moore will also be holding forth in downtown Brooklyn Sunday.

We Should be Insulted.

John McCain insulted everyone Democrat and Republican in chosing Gov Palin as his VP choice. I wonder if in flying a mission over Viet Nam he would have chosen a deck hand as navigator?

Publishing Trends Survey

Publishing Trends informed me they have started their annual publishing survey. If you follow the link make sure you vote for PND as your favorite blog.

Welcome to the second annual Publishing Trends Industry Survey! You’re receiving this e-mail because we want to know your thoughts on your job and on the publishing industry in general. What’s your favorite thing about working in publishing? What’s the last book you read? And what drink do you unwind with at the end of the day? Results will appear in the October 2008 issue of Publishing Trends and on our Web site.

Please take the survey here:

The survey is open through Friday, September 19. It’s completely anonymous and should only take a few minutes (and we think it’s fun, too!). At the end of the survey, you’ll have the option of receiving a free 3-month trial subscription to Publishing Trends (or extending your subscription if you are a current subscriber).

Watery Death

Rail Cars on their way to off-shore New Jersey where they will become artificial reefs.

DOT Project Development Process

It may be a sad reflection perhaps of my work interests that over beers last night with some ex-PWC collegues, we giggled over this process map. What a f'ing mess. The sad thing is someone (or a department) had to spend the hours and hours necessary to putting this down on paper. Humm, I wonder if there is any connection between this and our transportation infrastructure falling apart.

And what's with the stupid little pictures? My favorite is the three people huddled over an IBM XT like they're trying to understand Lotus123. I bet they still use interoffice mail envelopes.

From New York Magazine.

Meet Me at Michael's

Long the favourite lunch spot for media types, Michael's has the reputation for media executive sightseeing par-excellence. If anyone wants to announce some new alliance or potential hire whether officially or not all they need to do is have lunch together at Michael's and the pr work is done. It is expensive as you might expect and contrary to expectation it is apparently not the place for consistently good food. From Frank Bruni in the NYTimes:

Then I had this restaurant’s jumbo shrimp appetizer. The shrimp were entombed in a dense, soggy beer batter and interred in an almost monochromatic landscape of goat cheese, puddles of dark miso aioli and shavings of summer truffle that might have been shavings of summer rubber for all the flavor they had. California cuisine? More like gloppy, affected pub grub, for which Michael’s charges $25. That’s what happens when a restaurant starts throwing truffles around, and that’s probably one reason this restaurant does it. Until that dinner I thought Michael’s prided itself on produce. Then I had its appetizer of peekytoe crab with spears of white asparagus, which might as well have been spears of white wax for all the flavor they had.

He notes the excellent Cobb salad which I agree is worth ordering although over breakfast I have had (inadvertently) some $12 orange juice.

Facebook: Who's Your Friend?

A few weeks ago I did some house cleaning. I looked over both my Facebook friends and Linked contacts and deleted many. Don't worry it wasn't personal, but while the deletions in Linkedin were relatively minor I reduced my Facebook friends by more than half. I am not completely sure I was brutal enough.

Most of those I deleted were also Linkedin contacts which is sort of the point. I am not so sure I want my business associates to know I was listening to The Sex Pistols yesterday or someone from high school noted some particularly debauched evening back in 1980 on my 'wall'. My brother might be tempted to say something even worse and as a consequence the whole mystique would be ruined. I jest somewhat.

I see two separate constellations of friends and business associates and it is not that they are always mutually exclusive but for me I believe that any overlap is an exception rather than the rule. Of the two social networks I am more interested in Linkedin. I have found Facebook to be useful in finding old friends from high school (mainly) and thus placate my curiosity but I remain skeptical that it will ever be a true communication platform for me. I may be different - and many have said so - but I also see in Facebook the potential to be a huge time drain. And I have more interesting things to do. From a professional perspective, it is important to maintain awareness and contact with social networks like Facebook which is why I won't shut it down. But I do get tired of the "cocktails" and other pointless prods.

Linkedin on the other hand is useful although I think it is still a blunt tool. Searching for 'publishing consultant' returns way too many to be useful and I often wonder how my profile has come up in any search. The site needs more effective taxonomy/ontology but also more opportunities to create micro-sites around either industry or competence (or both). The 'group' function doesn't seem to work so well and these seem to be more ad-hoc than particularly useful.

One other thing in my experience with respect to both networks is the level of penetration. In the case of Linkedin I still have more than 40% of my contacts who do not have a profile or don't appear to actively use the site. Ignoring my house-cleaning in Facebook, I would estimate that could be more than 5x as many friends I could add if they had a Facebook page. My survey of one seems to tell me that in both cases they can still grow their networks by significant amounts regardless of their aggressive growth paths.

Join me on linkedin (or facebook if you dare). Michael.Cairns @ infomediapartners.com.

Tennis

Saturday' s tennis was memorable for one thing the weather wrought. That was the shriek of jet engines over Queens which other than the lack of a green court and quick camera views of Mayor Dinkins reminded us of how far the US Open has come. Federer is vulnerable but Nolo offered only passable resistance. In the booth during Federer's quarter final, Boris Becker and John McEnroe conversed in some of the best tennis analytics I have ever heard. Discussing how Federer is less confident, is playing several feet back from the base line and far less confident he can overwhelm his opponents. Far better discussion than the tedious repetition about about Uncle Tony, rankings, and Andy Murray's muscles.

Oh, by the way GB (o.k. Scotland) has a tennis player in the finals of the US Open. I feel very sorry for Rafa: given his year I would have loved to see him take the US Open as well. Que Lastima.

MediaWeek (Vol 1, No 36):

Someone (Michael Birch, founder of Bebo) thinks they can reinvent the dictionary: Telegraph

The site will feature traditional word definitions, etymologies, quotations and pronunciations, but will also include professional and user-generated video content. Baker is known to have filmed hundreds of videos of people defining their favourite words during this year's Edinburgh Festival. Wordia will launch into a crowded marketplace, with the likes of dictionary.com, owned by US publishing group InterActiveCorp, and Oxford University Press' Oxford English Dictionary already active on the internet.

Informa shares fell 7% as investors reacted negatively to the rejection of a lower than expected bid from a private equity consortia bid led by Blackstone. Timesonline. Pluck, which is a social media services company has signed a 'wide- ranging' deal with the Chicago Sun Times. MediaPost.

Pluck positions itself both as a provider of white-label social networking tools for enterprise clients like USA Today and now the Sun-Times, while also running BlogBurst, a vast blog syndication network which connects newspapers and other media sites to a network of some 5,500 selected blogs. "We're providing publishers with the tools to bring online conversations into their own networks, where they can best monetize it," said Dave Panos, CEO of Pluck and EVP of Demand Media, which acquired Pluck earlier this year. Pluck SiteLife service helps online properties engage site visitors with a range of social media capabilities including user comments, ratings, recommendations, reviews, photo and video sharing, forums and social networking profiles called Personas. SiteLife includes widgets and a set of platform-level APIs for publishers to tailor a social media experience to their audiences. Pluck's social media services are presently live on some 300 top brand, media and retail sites, including those of Circuit City, Condé Nast, The Guardian and USA Today, serving more than 2.5 billion interactions each month.

Age Banding on Children's books has been a contentious issue in the UK over the past year. The argument pits publishers against publisher and author against publisher. Here Scholastic's Kate Wilson suggests the approach may not have been flawless (Guardian):

"I would suggest – and I am speaking entirely as myself, rather than as the representative of anyone else or anybody here – that there were some regrettable errors in how publishers went about the introduction of age guidance," said Scholastic group managing director Kate Wilson. "I think most of them, if they had their time again, would do it differently and in greater consultation with authors." She was the only representative of the publishing industry who accepted an invitation to a specially-organised debate at the Children's Writers and Illustrators conference at which Philip Pullman condemned the initiative, branding the labels "not true" and questioning the research which motivated their introduction. Wilson, responding as an individual publisher, albeit one which has supported the policy, was conciliatory on the principle of consultation. But she was vigorous in her defence of the research and the need for children's books to find a more competitive edge against other forms of spending on children. "Age guidance isn't perfect but it is another ingredient added to the marketing mix that the majority of book buyers surveyed said they'd welcome."

In the US, some children's and YA titles receive 'lexile' measures that are intended to describe the reading comprehension level of the materal. So a 20 year old with a 'reading comprehension' of an 8 year old can readily find (or be given) a book that is appropriate, and let's face it that's a lot better than recieving a book that has printed ont the spine "for eight year olds." Not only would that be embarrasing but it would deflate any enthusism the individual had for improving their reading. (This is just as true if the reader were 10 not 20). Robert Giroux has died. Many have noted he picked The Catcher in the Rye but wasn't allowed to publish it. (NYTimes)

More than a year later, Mr. Salinger sent Mr. Giroux the manuscript of “The Catcher in the Rye.” Mr. Giroux was all set to publish it, certain it would be a winner. Then Harcourt’s textbook department intervened, saying “Catcher” wasn’t right for the house. Mr. Giroux retreated, forced to reject what turned out to be one of the great successes of the century. Furious at the interference, Mr. Giroux began looking to move to another house, and in 1955 he joined Farrar, Straus & Company as editor in chief. Almost 20 of his writers at Harcourt eventually followed him, among them Eliot, Lowell, O’Connor and Malamud. It was a display of loyalty returned; Mr. Giroux was known for the care he lavished on his writers, whether visiting Stafford in the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic while she recovered from a breakdown or insisting that Eliot raise his fee for poetry readings.

Bloomsbury announced an academic imprint. The Bookseller.

Bloomsbury is making a bold move into academic publishing with the launch of an "on demand" imprint that will publish titles online for free. Bloomsbury Academic will be run by publisher Frances Pinter, making a return to UK publishing, with Jonathan Glasspool m.d.

Informa Bid Disappoints

The Private Equity bidders looking to grab Informa have been told in no uncertain terms to sharpen their pencils. On the basis of initial interest that pegged the value of the company over £2.obillion, the formal offer made today is significantly lower. The Times reports that the Blackstone, Carlyle and Providence Equity bid of £1.87Billion is much lower than what management expected when they allowed prospective bidders to look at their books:

The source said: “Nothing at all has changed since July to make the company believe its worth has fallen so by so much. The board agreed to open its books at an offer of 506p and that is what they think it’s worth.”

Derek Mapp, Informa’s chairman, said: “The board believes that the revised offer significantly undervalues Informa. Informa has attractive future prospects and is continuing to deliver growth across the business even in the face of a weaker economic environment.” The company confirmed that it had continued to trade in line with its expectations. Shares in Informa closed down by almost 8 per cent at 414½p yesterday.

If a deal is to be done, then this consortium looks most likely to complete it; however, it is likely that negotiations will result in only a slightly higher price if the deal goes down. There doesn't appear to be any other bidders although having said that perhaps others on the sidelines will be encouraged by a slightly lesser price.

Harlequin Launch Reader Panel

There is a dearth of valuable primary research in publishing and Harlequin has decided to take matters into their own hand by creating a reader panel to advise on product development and new ideas. From their press release:

Tell Harlequin is an online advisory panel designed to enhance Harlequin's relationship with its readers through an ongoing dialogue whose insights will help guide the evolution of the publisher's business and allow Harlequin to publish the best in women's fiction. Participants on the Tell Harlequin panel can make their voices heard on topics such as cover designs, new miniseries ideas, new series concepts, new promotional ideas and more. The staff at Harlequin will then consider Tell Harlequin suggestions along with the publisher's own plans as it develops editorial for the future. Contributors to Tell Harlequin receive free Harlequin novels and sneak peeks at upcoming books, participate in entertainingonline surveys and exchange opinions and ideas with other readers.

There are fundamental difficulties in managing programs like this. Harlequin will need to mitigate the natural 'need to please' of its participants who in the case of Harlequin love the brand so much they may not be cold hearted, critical or incisive enough for this to be valuable. On the other hand, assuming there is an awareness of the difficulties then this program could benefit the company as it is vital that direct communication with customers supports product development.

Informa Bid Likely to Go Ahead

Reuters is reporting that Carlyle has secured financing for the acqusition of Informa. From the report:

Carlyle and Providence have now assembled a group of around twelve banks to provide a leveraged loan of around 1.5 billion pounds that will finance the purchase, along with a large equity contribution, several senior bankers said. "On the Carlyle side the financing is in place. The financing is already largely done," a senior leveraged banker said.

The report goes on to suggest that a competing bid/financing package might be unlikely given that some of Informa's existing banks are included in the financial team Carlyle has organized and the general difficulty in getting financing for any deals is problematic at this time.

DailyLit And Tom Peters

DailyLit is a pathfinder in the selling of books in serial format. The company has only been around for a short time but already has an inventory of over 1,000 classic and contemporary titles available for free or for a small fee. Readers sign up for the service via their web site, select the titles they wish to read and specify the time that the content is delivered to them. Each short book installment is sent via e-mail or RSS feed to arrive in the readers in-box where they can be read on a mobile device or laptop.

The company already has a phlanx of dedicated readers who can download a wide array of content from romance to business titles. The company announced today that they have signed a deal with Random House to feature several of management guru Tom Peters' books in serial form:

The books now available in short installments include The Brand You50, The Professional Service Firm50, The Project50 and The Pursuit of Wow!—titles geared to make employees and management more competitive in the evolving workplace of the twenty-first century. The books, originally published by Alfred A. Knopf, are available for $4.95 each on DailyLit. "I am thrilled to be serializing these Tom Peters books on DailyLit," said Susan Danziger. "His work has currency and relevance, and our format—with a workforce that has a computer, Blackberry or iPhone almost always within reach—suggest this is a natural fit for us. Published in short installments—many of which can be read in 30 seconds—these titles are perfect for any busy professional. I am also excited to be featuring Knopf titles on DailyLit as Knopf is an imprint I have greatly admired since my days working at Random House."

Open Text Book Revolution

Wired Magazine takes a look at start-up Flat World Knowledge that is looking to revolutionize the College textbook business:

The idea behind open textbooks began with people frustrated with the industry, Frank says. The movement then led to non-profit aggregation platforms like Connexions at Rice University and the Global Text Project at the University of Georgia. But he believes they are one of the first to turn this into a commercial venture. "On the surface they're (traditional publishers) doing OK, but underneath the surface there are lots of problems," says Frank. "The internet has caused so much disruption in the distribution that there are so many used books and international books and pirated copies out there that after about two years, publishers have to bring out new editions in order to capture revenue again."
Frank says the firm is also in the process of releasing a version for Amazon's Kindle, but is working out several technical hurdles before finalizing anything. Amazon is thought to be toying with the idea of a Kindle marketed to the college crowd, and wired.com readers have been somewhat vocal about the need for textbook support in the device. Official launch is not until next January, when the company plans to offer eight textbooks, each written for Flat World by scholars who have also produced texts for some of the major publishing companies. It will test its
business model over the next semester in a private beta with more than 20 U.S. universities.

MediaWeek (Vol 1, No 35):

The E-Book comes to England and Timesonline is there to mark the occasion:

Electronic books have had a lot of false dawns. People have had the ability to download books to their computers, phones and other handheld devices for years but so far, in the West at least, few have chosen to do so. This week Waterstone’s will be hoping to usher in a new chapter in reading when it helps to bring the Sony Reader to the UK. The Reader is smaller than a hardback, can store up to 160 e-books, comes with a screen that is more restful to read than a computer’s and a battery good for 6,800 continuous page turns — enough power to read War and Peace five times.

German publisher Bauer is a little known lesser version of Bertelsmann (Guardian):

Given the size of the company - in 2007 it was projected to turn over €1.79bn - it is surprising just how little leaks out of Bauer; publicly available information could fit on a side of A4. In fact, one morning after the takeover, Emap employees found a company biography of exactly that size on their desks: Bauer is a family-run company that owns 238 magazines in 15 countries and is now the largest consumer magazine publisher in the UK. It has TV and radio interests internationally too, with 12 million listeners in the UK following the Emap acquisition - and Magic in particular is now performing well at breakfast time with Neil Fox. They have been told little else since.

Apollo enters the bidding for Reed Magazines (Reuters). And they have apparently allowed the bidders to re-submit their order of magnitude estimates of purchase price. Certain bidders said this was needed because not enough information was available. Bids all fell but no indication that this had anything to do with current business performance. (Guardian)

The re-bids, not officially a second round, were allowed because bidders felt they were not provided enough information on the business in the first round, the sources said. After being presented with more information, the newer bids came in "slightly lower" than those in the first round, one of the sources said. All bids were non-binding. Yet more information on the unit is expected to be provided to bidders in the next few days, and a final round of offers will likely be due in early October, one source said. Reed put the unit on the block in February to reduce exposure to cyclical advertising markets.

If I had less important things to do I would have commented on how everyone is falling over themselves to anticipate Kindle revenue or where they will strike next. (Almost) Thankfully no new Kindle this year. NYTimes:

Talk of a new version of the Kindle e-book reader, aimed at college students, has been echoing around the blogosphere and has even reached your dutifully vacationing Bits correspondent. I asked Craig Berman, Amazon’s chief spokesman, for comment on a possible Kindle 2.0, and Thursday he responded

Why would a student who carries their whole life around on their Mac want to augment that with the (un)iconic Kindle? Jobs must be laughing his head off. More from ArsTechnica before Amazon announced there would not be a new Kindle.

It's this "new" version of the Kindle that will appeal to students the most, assuming Amazon decides to go ahead and pursue that market. There are other changes that have to happen with not only the Kindle but the e-book market in order for a "textbook" Kindle to be a hit with students, however. Continued price drops for e-books will help, as they'll be more attractive to students who currently resell their used textbooks at the end of each semester. A large inventory of textbooks will also help (there's no use in getting a Kindle for textbooks if you can only get one or two books on it), and the addition of student-friendly features (such as the ability to make annotations) would round out the list of things that would make such a thing appealing to students. Oh, and a low price would help too.

I don't get why a) this needs to be a 'special' version and b) why this is an opportunity given the lack of formatted content and c) I guess trade isn't actually driving millions in unit sales? For the educational publishers however a bonus, since they will have watched from the sidelines as trade publishers have performed muppet like as they annouced sucessive Kindle initiatives. Lastly this from Frank Rich in the NYTimes:

We [Journos], too, are made anxious and fearful by hard economic times and the prospect of wrenching change. YouTube, the medium that has transformed our culture and politics, didn’t exist four years ago. Four years from now, it’s entirely possible that some, even many, of the newspapers and magazines covering this campaign won’t exist in their current form, if they exist at all. The Big Three network evening newscasts, and network news divisions as we now know them, may also be extinct by then. It is a telling sign that CBS News didn’t invest in the usual sky box for its anchor, Katie Couric, in Denver. It is equally telling that CNN consistently beat ABC and CBS in last week’s Nielsen ratings, and NBC as well by week’s end. But now that media are being transformed at a speed comparable to the ever-doubling power of microchips, cable’s ascendancy could also be as short-lived as, say, the reign of AOL. Andrew Rasiej, the founder of Personal Democracy Forum, which monitors the intersection of politics and technology, points out that when networks judge their success by who got the biggest share of the television audience, “they are still counting horses while the world has moved on to counting locomotives.” The Web, in its infinite iterations, is eroding all 20th-century media.

Bloomsbury Reports

Commenting on his company's results and prospects Bloomsbury CEO, Nigel Newton, said:

“We have had a good first half performance, particularly, in the UK Adult and Specialist Divisions. As well as continuing to enjoy notable success from long-running bestselling titles such as The Kite Runner, we are also well positioned with strong publishing lists for the second half and beyond. We are now seeing the benefits of our focused strategy, which is positioning us well for the rest of the financial year and the longer term.”

Other points from the press release:

• Profit before investment income increased 6.1% to £3.5m (2007, £3.3m)
• Investment income increased to £1.9m (2007, £0.6m)
• Earnings per share increased 41.2% to 4.97 pence (2007, 3.52 pence)
• Interim dividend up 7.1% to 0.75p per share (2007, 0.70p)
• Strong list for second half including Alice Schroeder’s biography of Warren Buffet; The Snowball; Just Me by Sheila Hancock; The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer; and, on December 4, JK Rowling’s The Tales of Beedle The Bard
• Net cash balances increased by 13.0% to £53.8m (31 December 2007, £47.6m)
• Well positioned for further organic and acquisition-related growth
• Strongest ever first six months sales performance from the UK Adult trade division

Newton in further comments noted that:

The programme of digitising our entire English language catalogue has been completed. This will enable us to increase significantly the range of electronic products we can offer both to individual buyers and to resellers serving the library and institutional markets, where we have already made encouraging sales of e-book collections. Digitisation also enables us to make our titles more easily available as print on demand (“POD”), a particularly appropriate model for specialist publishing where a wide range of titles are sold in small numbers consistently over a long period of time. In addition to digitising the in-print backlist, we are engaged in an active process of digitising out of print titles in order to offer them POD and in a variety of electronic formats.

Bloomsbury intends to expand the academic part of its Specialist Publishing Division and a number of acquisitions under consideration. We have appointed Jonathan Glasspool as Managing Director of Bloomsbury Academic. The recent growth of the Methuen Drama list, many titles of which sell to higher education students and lecturers, illustrates how well Bloomsbury can reach the academic and higher education markets.

Our sharing of copyrights across the Atlantic and other initiatives have resulted in a considerable year-on-year improvement in the results of Bloomsbury USA, with sales growth of 10% and a 60% reduction in operating losses.

Lagardere Reports

Corporate owner of Hachette UK and Grand Central Publishing reported their first half results yesterday. Here are some relevant parts from their press release:

Lagardère Publishing– Net sales for the first half of 2008 were €908m, an increase of 1.3% on a reported basis and 4.5% on a like-for-like basis. The business achieved a respectable performance in the United States, the United Kingdom and Spain, but there was a further decline in Literature in France. Part-works were affected by a drop in French and Italian sales, partly offset by good performances in the United Kingdom and Japan.

EBIT before associates [amortization of goodwill] of €71m, unchanged from the 2007 first-half figure, with an improved operating performance canceled out by negative currency effects. Good contributions from the United Kingdom (other than in educational books) and from Education in Spain offset a decline in profits from General Literature in France and Part-works. The contribution from the United States rose by over 10%, driven by an excellent performance in Fiction/Non-Fiction.

OCLC's Copyright Registry

Earlier this summer at an industry conference OCLC 'announced' that they would begin work on a Registry of Copyright for published works. I had some involvement in this project last year and I am glad to see that they are formally announcing the launch of the registry. The ways and hows are covered by fellow traveller Peter Brantley:

I had a long talk with Bill Carney yesterday at OCLC; Bill is the "owner" of this product. Although OCLC is concerned about the sustainability of this service, I stressed the need for an open and free api that would permit use of the contents of the registry by any (machine) comer, providing at least essential information -- perhaps OCLC could offer payment tiers with fuller, more complete data, for example including rights-holder provided notes.Bill was definitely supportive of such an api, and is actively soliciting feedback from others about the registry's desired functionality. An api (of any sort) does not yet exist, but OCLC has discussed its need, and is giving it at least a modest priority (lagging, I believe, behind constructing the necessary authorization infrastructure for user-submitted write updates). If you wish to provide feedback to OCLC, it can be left at the OCLC CER website.

Read the whole post. (Unsure why I neglected to mention this before).

Michael's Gotta Gun

Was anyone else more than slightly taken aback to find out that Simon & Schuster Editor in Chief Michael Korda has an assault rifle? Buried in this silly promo NYT's piece on his upcoming book, author Peter Manson lets us all know we better call ahead before we show up at Michael's house:

Mr. Manso called the weapon “a literary affectation” that he bought legally, before a change in gun laws made it illegal to possess, after seeing one owned by Michael Korda, the longtime Simon & Schuster editor in chief, who edited Mr. Manso’s Brando biography. “Listen, Michael Korda had one, Hunter Thompson had one, I thought it would be cool,” Mr. Manso said.

I have to get me one of those "literary affectations." I could do some target shooting out the window of PND towers. This morning there may be several S&S employees thinking twice about that request for a raise.

The other thing amusing about this article (and it was pointless other than to let us know he is in the process of uncovering the dark under belly of corruption in Provincetown and writing a book about it) was that Manso has lived there on and off for 60 years and suddenly the 'corruption' is a surprise. He should come to Hoboken. There's enough here for several books.

On The (Internet) Radio Tonight

I have been invited to speak on web radio about the publishing industry and Personanondata - in 15mins! There is a call in feature so if you are inclined follow the instructions below:

The Interview starts at 8:30 EST (8/27). Call in to talk to me on the show by dialing 646-200-4071. The show is aired LIVE at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/Circle-Of-Seven and an active chat session is online. After the show is aired, it is available for download at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/Circle-Of-Seven. Take a look at http://www.cospradio.com/ to learn more about COSP Radio.

Borders 2Q Loss Improves

On their call this morning Border's management sounded far more confident and at-ease in contrast to previous calls over the past several quarters. In the current economic environment and given the rebuilding effort going on at Borders their results were encouraging. From the press release:

Borders reported results for the second quarter, ended Aug. 2, 2008 and reported a second quarter loss from continuing operations of $11.3 million or $0.19 per share, representing an improvement over the same period last year when Borders Group recorded a loss of $18.1 million or $0.31 per share.

Borders Group achieved second quarter consolidated sales from continuing operations of $749.2 million, a decrease of 6.9% over 2007. As stated, the second quarter loss from continuing operations improved to $11.3 million or $0.19 per share compared to $18.1 million or $0.31 per share a year ago. The improvement was due primarily to expense reductions, lower interest expense and a tax benefit. Excluding non-operating adjustments, the second quarter loss from continuing operations improved to $10.5 million or $0.18 per share from $12.1 million or $0.21 per share a year ago.

CEO George Jones indicated that the Borders rewards program now has 28mm members. It has been very successful and email programs have great 'open-rates' and integrating with Internet site is generating great customer response. They are becoming more sophisticated in how they use the data associated with how their rewards customers buy - they are not just sending e-mail blasts. Since July when the Internet store "really got going" they have generated $7mm in revenue. Jones also said that they are in process of implementing interactive kiosks in the stores and that these will integrate with internet site.

CFO Wilheim noted that they are "sitting in a very comfortable position" from a cash and debt perspective. Jones stated that they have significantly improved the financial position of the company with respect to both debt (balance sheet) and expense reduction. They feel very proud of what they have done and confident that at least their commitments over the next 6-12mths will not pose a problem to the operations of the company. The company has really attacked their operating expenses and also successfully reduced inventory carry by 14%. The inventory reduction was done by eliminating titles that sold 1 copy per year per store.

The results were released yesterday after the close and their share price was up 13% in after hours trading.

Amazon.com Buys Shelfari - Updated

Via Paid Content. Hot on the heels of their acquisition of ABE books, Amazon has purchased the rest of Shelfari. Amazon had invested in the company some two years ago and had hoped it would come to rival librarything in popularity. Interestingly, librarything now also counts Amazon as an investor in it thanks to the investment ABE made in librarything 3-4 years ago. It is likely that librarything owner Tim Spalding will negotiate with Amazon to buy back the share they now own (and I would assume there was a 'change of control' provision in his original deal with ABE). It will be interesting to see who he jumps into bed with next - if anyone.



Personanondata Bookstore

Universal Mccann Review of Social Networking Trends

Universal Mccann International Social Media Research Wave 3

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: socialmedia research)

MediaWeek (Vol 1, No 34):

TimeOut wants BBC out of Publishing (TOLine):

Tony Elliott, the owner of Time Out, the entertainment listings magazine, called for a break-up and sale of the BBC’s commercial division yesterday as he accused the corporation of overreaching itself with the £75 million acquisition of the Lonely Planet travel guides. The magazine proprietor said that Time Out, publisher of its own travel guides, could not compete with the BBC’s promotional muscle - and that the BBC should not publish books and magazines.

The TimesOnline profiles City Lights in San Francisco:

It was established in 1953 by poet and ‘beatnik’ Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter D. Martin to provide a progressive, all-paperback alternative to books available at the time. It’s where the Beat Generation laid their hats and where publishing and selling Allen Ginsberg’s Howl got Ferlinghetti and bookseller, Shigeyoshi Murao, arrested in 1957 on obscenity charges. Their victory in court guaranteed the sale of other previously banned books – including D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. (Three years later British readers achieved similar rights after the failed prosecution of Penguin for publishing Lady Chatterley’s Lover.)

Enid Blyton rocks and is the subject of a preview in TOL:

With its sense of adventure and advice on derring-do for juniors, The Dangerous Book for Boys was the sort of “how to” manual that could have been dreamt up by Enid Blyton, the creator of the Famous Five, the Secret Seven and a host of other dearly loved children’s characters. Now the inevitable has happened. Booksellers are eagerly awaiting the launch on September 4 of the Famous Five’s Adventure Survival Guide, a similar tome but with the bonus of a brand-new mystery starring the ginger-beer-loving youngsters.

For my librarian friends a comparison of JCR and Scopus Impact Factors: LINK

Impact factors for journals listed under the subject categories "ecology" and "environmental sciences" in the Journal Citation Reports database were calculated using citation data from the Scopus database. The journals were then ranked by their Scopus impact factor and compared to the ranked lists of the same journals derived from Journal Citations Reports. Although several titles varied significantly in impact factor and rank, the Journal Citation Reports and Scopus lists had a high degree of statistical similarity.

Common Sense contractual terms from Random House via BoingBoing:

Random House is asking some of its authors of young adult books to sign contracts with "morality clauses" that allow the publisher to take back your advance and cancel your book if you're caught doing anything that "damages your reputation as a person suitable to work with or be associated with children, and consequently the market for or value of the work is seriously diminished."

BusinessWeek ad topic pages NYT. NYTimes has been doing this for years. (NYT via Blogrunner). ExLibris was sold by one fund to another. PR Slow week....

Publishers Worry About Amazon

Mike Shatzkin and I were intereviewed for an article published by SNL/Kagan about Amazon.com's relationship with publishers in light of the Hachette UK situation, Booksurge and the Kindle.

Excerpt:

Mike Shatzkin, founder and CEO of the publishing advisory firm The Idea Logical Co., said in a June 26 interview with SNL Kagan that Amazon is likely not getting those titles from publishers for under $9.99 and is probably taking a loss on those books. But Shatzkin added that situation could change if Amazon succeeds in establishing the Kindle as the dominant e-book platform. "If the Kindle reaches a critical mass, Amazon will have the ability to tell publishers that if they want their books available on the Kindle, they will have to sell them to Amazon for $6 or less," Shatzkin said. "That's going to be pretty rough." One reason it is so hard for publishers to meet Amazon's demand for increasingly lower prices, Cairns said, is because they must continue to offer their authors competitive advances and royalty packages to ensure they get the best titles. "Particularly for the brandname authors, publishers have to pay a very high price for that content," Cairns said. "It would be difficult for publishers to go back to their authors and say 'Give me a better price for your books.'" As a result, when Amazon asks for steeper discounts on titles, publishers are left trying to maintain their margins in other ways — such as by putting their marketing and distribution expenses. "And in this day and age, many of the larger publishers have already sweated out as much expense out of those cost areas as they possibly can, so there's not very much room left at all for them to do that," Cairns said. "It's very tight."

B&N Reports: Operating in Soft Retail Environment

B&N reported slack sales typical of many retailers this morning and even excluding the huge impact of Harry Potter in the comparable quarter numbers were down versus last year. Here is their press statement:

Sales for the second quarter decreased 1.6% to $1.2 billion largely due to last year’s record sales of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Barnes & Noble store sales decreased 1.6% to $1.1 billion, with comparable store sales decreasing 4.7% for the quarter. Barnes & Noble.com sales were $99.8 million for the quarter, a 3.6% comparable sales increase. Excluding prior year sales of the Harry Potter book, comparable sales decreased 1.5% in stores and increased 13.9% online. Bestselling titles during the quarter included Stephenie Meyer’s Breaking Dawn, Randy Pausch’s The Last Lecture, Lauren Weisberger’s Chasing Harry Winston and David Wroblewski’s The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. Second quarter net earnings were $15.4 million or $0.27 per share. Included in second quarter net earnings was an after tax benefit of $0.12 per share, resulting from a more favorable physical inventory shortage rate than previously estimated and accrued. Excluding this benefit, second quarter net earnings were $0.15 per share, higher than guidance of $0.08 to $0.13 per share. Despite the softer sales environment, the company’s management of operating expenses and higher than forecasted gross margins enabled it to exceed its second quarter earnings per share guidance. Gross margin was stronger than expected due to greater utilization of the company’s distribution centers and a lower markdown rate.

Other points from the conference call:

• Last year for the same period comp store increase of 4.4% and online increase of 17.9% for a total sales increase of 7.6%
• This year 1.6% decrease versus last years 7.6%.
• Excluding Harry Potter effect same store sales declined 1.5% this quarter
• Opened 10 and and closed 4 B&N stores for 723 total. Continued to close Dalton stores for a total of 73.
• Sales at B&N.com were $99.8mm for the quarter up 3.6% on top of last years 17.9% increase. The company noted that excluding HP sales at B&N.com were up 13.9% and this quarter was the 7 straight quarter of increased sales.
• Gross margins were up 150 basis points as a result of less highly discounted HP books and an significant quarterly improvement in stock shrinkage. (after tax benefit of 12cents per share)
• Guidance: The company is lowering its full year comp sales to slightly below 1%. Keeping EPS at previously issued guidance based on improved financial performance.

The company may have got off easily on the question period. No one asked about the recent resignation of Marie Toulantis (CEO of B&N.com) especially in light of the continued performance gain. Riggio commented that internet sales "were clearly a bright spot in the quarter" and traffic to the site, conversions and sales are up. In addition, the company continues to improve the site and is experimenting with web only offers. Given this performance is there a risk factor introduced with the departure of Toulantis and if she was asked to leave what do they want to do differently given this track record of continued improvement? No one asked about the competitive threat from the launch of Borders.com which based on the following chart could be a factor.



Lastly (and thankfully) no asked about their decision not to go after Borders but someone did ask about thoughts on the Kindle which they deflected.

Social Recommendations

In Business Week, author Sarah Lacy has some suggestions for publishers on how to develop, market and sell books by taking advantage of Web 2.0 opportunities. This is only one of her five suggestions:

Create stars—don't just exploit existing ones.When an author is established, publishers have to do less to make a book sell. So bidding wars start. As a result, even some best-sellers aren't very profitable. Instead, publishers should take a page from the handbook of Gawker founder Nick Denton and create stars. Find micro-celebs with a voice, talent, a niche base of readers, and most important—enthusiasm. Then leverage the publisher's brand (and the techniques I advocate, of course) to blow them out. Require as part of the contract that the author blog, speak on panels, attend events. Give them incentives for delivering—say, though Web traffic of the number of followers they amass on Twitter. Sure, publishers would have to spend more on promotion. But because they're spending less on an advance—say, $50,000 for a lesser-known writer than the hundreds of thousands of dollars (or more) they'd spend on a star—they can afford the bigger promotional budget. "It's taken some time for publishers to recognize that a successful site is as
strong a 'platform' as a magazine, newspaper, or TV gig," says Patrick Mulligan,
my editor at Gotham.

Bertelsmann Interested in Reed Business

Reuters reports that Bertelsmann's magazine unit Gruner & Jahr maybe in the mix to acquire the RBI unit from Reed Elsevier. Reuters learned of the tip via a German newspaper. In the report, Reuters also notes that indications of interest for the RBI business unit have been received and offers range between £1.0bill and £1.25bill. If correct, this range appears to match Reeds initial expectations for the deal. Reuters expects final bids to be submitted in October. Followers of Bertelsman may recall they have created a sizable fund with some PE companies with the express view to make some large (or one very large) deal. They objective was to be able to participate in the bidding process for these large media deals and not be priced out by pure PE deals. As a case in point they were very interested in the Cengage auction last year and by some accounts came quite close.

Reuters

Melbourne, City of Literature

Sydneyites (namely my cousin) used to say the only good thing to come out of Melbourne was the Hume Hwy. Unfair and untrue and in reflection of its world status, the city has been named a City of Literature (The Age).

Three days before the opening of the Melbourne Writers Festival, UNESCO has named Melbourne as its second City of Literature. Edinburgh became the first in 2004. The United Nations' cultural arm responded to an ambitious bid by the State Government that has as its centrepiece the establishment of the Centre for Books and Ideas at the State Library of Victoria. Arts Minister Lynne Kosky said the decision was confirmation of the value of a lot of people who have been working in the literature industry - writers and publishers and those who support writing and publishing.

Melbourne is a great place and this is well deserved in my view. Thanks to my Australian stringer for the tip.

Another Obama Book Controversy

No doubt Chelsea Green publishing thought they had come up with a reasonable marketing concept when they agreed to POD their upcoming Obama title (Obama’s Challenge: America’s Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency) with Booksurge and offer Amazon a three week exclusive sales window. Whether this promotion had its genesis in an inefficient editorial and manufacturing process that failed to deliver what must be their single most important title in the company's history on a date that's been on the schedule for months, becomes immaterial when considered against the antipathy that has resulted. The small company has succeeded in upsetting both independents and B&N by giving Amazon this exclusive.

B&N has now cancelled their order for the non-POD version and will only sell the title on their web site via special order. Admittedly, my immediate reaction would have been much the same: Cancel the orders. On reflection however, why didn't B&N double the order and publicise that they would honor the discount coupons once the book hit the stores? Even better, offer a special discount on pre-orders. Secondly, surely the number of attendees at the convention who will actually purchase the book is small compared to the market spread of customers walking into B&N stores across the country.

The publicity surrounding this book may now have more to do with the B&N reaction (perhaps more so within the publishing community) but assuming the publicity and enthusiasm continues to grow for this book, B&N's reaction will seem increasingly ridiculous. With a little more perspective and strategic thinking B&N could have stolen a lot of the thunder from Amazon; that is, if it even existed before B&N made such a big deal about it. On a larger point, if this is how non-Amazon retailers react, how soon will it be before Amazon, encouraged by this reaction, can claim that their retailing competitors don't have the product spread they do. I don't think that is a vortex any retailer wants to be on the cusp of.

Unprecedented!

The Gossip Girl book is being packaged as part of a DVD release of the TV show. The NYTimes notes the 'unprecedented' twist on how 'publisher's hitch their wagons to Hollywood projects:

Now, however, the DVD set “Gossip Girl: The Complete First Season,” which goes on sale this week, includes a free electronic version of the original novel by Cecily von Ziegesar on which the show is based. But — OMG! — it is totally not a book that you read! It is, rather, an audio book narrated by Christina Ricci, with other bonus material like scenes that were not broadcast and “LOL: Gag Reel.” The three-hour abridgement of the novel, which Hachette Audio first released in CD format in 2003, can be transferred to an iPod. This collaboration, by Hachette Audio and Warner Home Video, which made the DVD, is an unprecedented twist on how publishers hitch their wagons to Hollywood projects. With films, publishers typically reprint a paperback with movie-poster artwork, and audio divisions similarly repackage audio books.

The article goes on to briefly discuss why audio books don't appeal to youngsters which would have been a far more interesting analysis than suggesting publisher's product development is dependent on ride-alongs with Hollywood.

First Chapters Grows in The UK

Dial a Book which owns First Chapters has announced the addition of a major UK partner in Gardners. DAB will be licencing all 210,000 first chapter files to Gardners for their use with their publishing and retail partners. From the press release:

Dial-A-Book Inc, the largest creator and distributor of book text excerpts in the United States and Gardners Books Ltd., the largest book wholesaler in the United Kingdom, have announced a joint book excerpt distribution program.

The excerpts of US books which Gardners will distribute in the UK and throughout the world contain full bibliographic data, tables of contents and five to nine pages on initial text.

"Gardners are pleased to bring this invaluable sample material, which has reviously only been available within the USA, to retailers, librarians and book buyers, through our Digital Warehouse. Giving professional book buyers in retail and libraries, and consumers buying on our customers retail websites, access to sample content prior to purchase will greatly enrich their buying decision." said Bob Jackson, Commercial Director of Gardners Books Ltd.

Stanley R. Greenfield, President of Dial-A-Book Inc. indicated that the extended distribution of this book data will means more widespread sales of US works in the global marketplace.

MediaWeek (Vol 1, No 33):

The NYTimes looks at The Daily Show's Jon Stewart. NYT. Gannett is the latest Newspaper to cut headcount. SFGate. A very interesting application of Anti-Span technology used to translate text. TimesOnline

Captchas are little boxes on web pages which show a squiggly set of letters and numbers that the user is required to transcribe correctly in order to register or enter the site. They were devised eight years ago as a way of preventing computers from setting up e-mail accounts automatically which could then be used to send out spam, but a clever tweak means they are now being used to transcribe newspapers dating from the nineteenth century and earlier. Instead of displaying a random collection of letters and numbers, the newly designed Captchas present the user with a word from an old manuscript that a computer, somewhere, is having trouble deciphering.

The Telegraph reports on a half dozen interested parties moping around the Reed Business Assets. And the Informa deal is still generating some interest and the Telegraph notes Blackstone's interest in perhaps joining an existing consortium. And more from Reuters and an earlier Telegraph report. Jemima Kiss at The Guardian reports on an interesting new application in the printing industry. "In the same way that you'd use Expedia to find flights from many airlines, you'd use our service to buy exactly the prints you need from any print provider on the network." It's never too late to write that book. From the Guardian. "A raunchy novel with a dauntless heroine has transformed the lives of a 93-year-old author and three of her friends who were living in nursing homes. Pushed by her daughter-in-law, who found the manuscript and couldn't put it down, Lorna Page has become one of the oldest debut writers on record, with equally unusual social results." We did so much for everyone but now they're all against us and we were always misunderstood. The world according to Mrs. Conrad Black. TimesOnline.

But if the rich and well-connected cannot get justice, what chance for anyone else — a question I asked in columns about the law long before I married Conrad. What chance for the orange jump-suited, marginalised young men I saw shuffling in front of the judge in Chicago, silent while their court-appointed attorneys negotiated their freedom away in that tight little legal world, where a client’s fate never disturbs the bonhomie between lawyers. If ostensibly privileged defendants like us can be baselessly smeared, wrongfully deprived, falsely accused, shamelessly persecuted, innocently convicted and grotesquely punished, it does n’t take much to figure out what happens to the vulnerable and the powerless: they land, finally, in the 8:45am courtroom parade that takes place all over “America the Free” — the country that “wins” 90% of cases and imprisons more people than any other in the world.

GB Gold Overflow

Just an unbelievable performance by the Great Britain team over the weekend. Four gold medals on both Saturday and Sunday has pushed us up to the heady heights of third on the medal table. We're running just ahead of Michael Phelps. And it's not over yet.

How good a Games has this been for Team GB? Well, a gold today will make this our most successful since 1920. The 11 collected so far matches our total in Sydney in 2000. We are well on course to make this our second best Olympics ever. BBC

Best of British: 1908 (London): 55 golds

1900 (Paris): 14 golds

1920 (Antwerp): 14 golds

2000 (Sydney): 11 golds

Random Searches

A curious search string delivered someone to my site today:

"if you have a felony conviction can you travel to the UK"

The answer to that cannot be found on this blog. Nor can I offer any guidance.

Personanondata Bookstore

People ask me whether there are any good books written on the publishing industry and of course there are. There are also many research reports that to varying degrees profile the industry and segments of the industry. With the aid of Booksinprint - I found the exercise of narrowing down my 'publishing books' selection intolerable on Amazon.com - I have built a small bookstore containing books about the publishing industry. The Amazon bookstore application building is brain numbingly easy to implement and I don't see why anyone wouldn't have a store on their own site.

You will notice I have placed the block on the upper right of my blog page. Here is the link.

The downside for me is that many of my readers are RSS subscribers so won't be seeing the Bookstore block. My attempt to add some xml script to the RSS feed has thus far been farcical but as a history major I should get points for trying. I shall not give up. As an Amazon 'associate' I get a small commission which will help pay for food for the company mascot.

Feel free to recommend some titles but please make use of the store especially if you are in need of some expensive research publications.

Is Jerome Corsi on Drugs?

Jerome Corsi says you can't trust a drug user when they say they've given up drugs. Using an argument childishly similar to 'he who smelt it delt it', Corsi and his publisher are refusing to acknowledge that Senator Barack Obama has repeatedly stated he gave up his use of drugs - other than cigarettes - long ago. Noted this drug use was never more than casual and certainly no more than the average college student is exposed to, even those from Harvard - like Jerome. Certainly, the current President has lied about a lot but has anyone suggested he has lied about giving up blow? Or Drinking? Maybe we should ask Jerome.

Jerome Corsi has no intention of correcting the errors in his book The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality. This is despite the fact he views his effort as investigative rather than prosecutorial (why either would require a lesser degree of accuracy is beyond me). Simon & Schuster the silent publisher is only likely to be interested in the revenue which is why they signed up Mary Matalin to become a 'publisher' in the first place. Fiction or non-fiction what's the difference anymore? The book hasn't been fact corrected. It may not even have been read by Matalin who commented (NYT) that the book “was not designed to be, and does not set out to be, a political book,” calling it, rather, “a piece of scholarship, and a good one at that.” What is she doing at S&S if not political books? And given the level of scholarship and the errors cited by numerous sources perhaps this book should be excerpted in the National Enquirer.

Corsi's name is emblazoned on the cover of this book with the attendant "Phd" in a visual attempt to imply scholarship. The central points made in this book are no more accurate than those in the CIA ghost written memo noted in Suskind's book The Shadow War which came out earlier this month. Interesting that the two books are published by the same publisher. There has been no discussion about inaccuracies in the latter and indeed Suskind stands on solid ground for his diligence in reporting the facts what with all the actual interview recordings. Not so Corsi who says “The goal is to defeat Obama,” Mr. Corsi said in a telephone interview. “I don’t want Obama to be in office.” Obviously, at S&S the standards vary widely depending on the purpose. On the one hand you might have factual grounds for impeachment on the other simple political mud raking.

Court Reverses Steinbeck Copyright Ruling

The son of famed author John Steinbeck who won control over some of his father's works has had the decision reversed by the US Court of Appeals (2nd Circuit Court). In mid 2006, a judge in California ruled that the rights to Steinbeck's novels should revert to the family. LATimes. (A review from a legal perspective). From the AP:

The ruling by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will leave the rights in the hands of Penguin Group Inc. and the heirs of John Steinbeck's widow, Elaine. Author John Steinbeck died in 1968; his wife in 2003. The appeals court said a lower court judge misapplied copyright law in awarding the rights in 2006 to the son, Thomas Steinbeck, and granddaughter Blake Smyle. Both already receive a portion of the proceeds of sales. The case was returned to the lower court with instructions to leave the rights with various individuals and organizations, including the publisher Penguin and Elaine Steinbeck's heirs. The heirs include her sister, four children and grandchildren.

No word on any further action that may be contemplated by either side.