Are the Orphans really Phantoms?

Opponents of the Google Book Search (GBS) agreement often seem to grasp hold of the emotive issues pertaining to the ‘orphan’ works problem by suggesting some grievance on a massive scale (a content ‘land-grab’) is taking place before our eyes. The GBS, while not perfect, shouldn’t be derailed by a small, potentially un-addressable segment of publishers since the counterveiling benefits are so considerable.

Firstly, the 'orphan' issue is unlikely to represent as large a number of titles - some say as many as 2mm - as suggested. Secondly, the ‘orphan’ issue is by no means a GBS-created issue and facilities available to the parents of these orphans to assert ownership appear to have been largely ignored over the years. There is also a third issue: Copyright holders who have maintained their records and appropriately managed their copyright status stand to lose substantially should the GBS agreement be quashed by the court, and all because of an emotive argument about a relatively small number of possible copyright holders who live in blissful ignorance.

On point three, any publisher that finds their titles have been scanned without their permission can do a number of things ranging from taking compensation and staying in the program, taking compensation and getting out, or doing nothing at all. The overwhelming number of titles scanned by Google appear to be those for which the rights are known, giving these publishers and copyright holders an opportunity to make their titles widely available and perhaps even make some money. This vast pool of titles will naturally benefit the wider publishing audience (whether students or consumers) and this is a social good that substantially exceeds the pitfalls inherent in the so-called orphan “land-grab”.

Importantly, the GBS agreement makes this access possible and empowers copyright holders to establish their own business arrangements. Publishers removing their title(s) from GBS only makes sense to me if they then go into the Google Publisher program instead. As part of this agreement, publishers that find their books in the GBS pool have an easy opportunity to assert their ownership and determine their rights. It is this facility – now with the breadth and market penetration of Google – that represents yet another in a series of decades-long opportunities that copyright owners have had to assert their ownership. Importantly, the GBS (BRR) registration process doesn’t cease once the agreement is approved; rather, money is set aside and the facility remains open for owners to register their titles and assert their ownership at any time in the years to come.

The copyright office, Bowker’s Books In Print, the ISBN agency, Amazon.com, Worldcat & OCLC have all provided some ability for copyright owners to ‘register’ their titles, update their information, possibly apply for an ISBN (if the title pre-dates 1970), change pricing, etc., etc. The Amazon emporium, together with the associated raft of retailers including second-hand and antiquarian stores, have represented years' worth of opportunity for a copyright owner to ‘find their title’. Worldcat – available in most libraries - has enabled copyright owners to find their titles and even request a physical copy should they want to. These facilities continue to offer copyright owners easy access to finding out about the existence and location of their potential works. Once located and correctly identified, there have been numerous ways to correct information regarding ownership. Importantly, the Google Book Settlement agreement doesn’t circumvent that opportunity in any way; rather, it enhances it.

I’ve spent some serious time analyzing this and it looks to me like the unknown number of 'orphan' titles will be low, both in absolute terms and in relationship to the total scanned book universe. Ample opportunity has been and continues to be afforded this group to assert their ownership and to make a business decision they believe to be in their best interests. What shouldn’t happen is to allow the insurmountable issues of effectively reaching this ‘orphan’ group to derail this agreement that represents a massive step forward in accessibility and knowledge.

Voyager Learning Bought by Veronis (Cambium)

Troubled educational publisher Voyager Learning has been acquired by educational investment vehicle Cambium. This represents a rather ignominious end to what was once a billion dollar information company but for management and staff perhaps they will be able to look forward to a more productive and stable future. Here is the press release:

Voyager Learning Company (PinkSheets: VLCY) , a publisher of education materials and provider of education solutions for the K-12 market, today announced the signing of a definitive merger agreement to combine its business with Cambium Learning, Inc., an education company serving the needs of at-risk and special student populations in the Pre-K through grade 12 market. In 2008, Cambium Learning had revenues of approximately $100 million and Voyager Learning Company reported $98.5 million in revenues. The combination of the companies' businesses will create a leading provider of education intervention services in the United States.

The business combination will be effected through a newly-formed company, Cambium-Voyager Holdings, Inc., which will acquire both companies and issue shares in the combined company to stockholders of each of Voyager Learning Company and Cambium Learning. Cambium-Voyager Holdings will be majority owned by VSS-Cambium Holdings III, LLC, which will be majority owned by Veronis Suhler Stevenson, a leading private equity investor in the information, education and media industries and current owner of Cambium Learning. Upon completion of the mergers, Cambium-Voyager Holdings will be a public company, and anticipates having its common stock approved for listing on the NASDAQ Global Market.

CCC Interview Michael Healy

The copyright clearence center interviewed Michael Healy who is the Executive Director - designate of the Book Rights Registry. Here is their announcement:

Exclusive Interview Sheds Light on Google Settlement

In his first public interview, Michael Healy--the man expected to become the executive director of the Book Rights Registry (BRR)--sat down with Copyright Clearance Center to discuss the potential benefits of the proposed Google Book settlement.

Healy, a former librarian, is currently the executive director of the non-profit Book Industry Study Group and has been working with the Authors Guild and Association of American Publishers on the establishment of the BRR. Development of the BRR was included as part of the proposed settlement agreement.

In his interview with CCC, Healy highlighted that book consumers have shifted their expectations about content delivery from traditional print forms to cell phones and e-book readers. He suggested publishers' future success will depend on their ability to adapt to that changing landscape.

Healy also offered this perspective on how the proposed settlement will ultimately help copyright holders:

"The Book Rights Registry introduces into the environment an unprecedented degree of control to authors, publishers and other rightsholders on how their copyrights are exploited and distributed in this new digital world."

MediaWeek (Vol 2, No 24): OCLC, British Library, Elsevier, Google

Tim Winton wins Australia's most prestigious literary award for the fourth time (TheAge):

Tim Winton was only 24 when in 1984 he first won the Miles Franklin, Australia's most significant prize for literary fiction. He and his wife, Denise, had a colicky baby and no money. "It saved my bacon; it was the cavalry coming over the hill. And that screaming baby we were racoon-eyed from is a young man with several degrees who turns 25 next month."

Last night, after becoming the first writer to win the award in his own right for a fourth time - for his latest novel, Breath - Winton launched a passionate defence of Australian writers and literary culture

On their public policy blog Google continue their defense of the Google Book Search settlement arguing that it will expand access (Link):

Have you ever gone to your local bookstore looking for a book only to be told that it’s not there? You look for it on Amazon; they don’t offer it. You go to your local library and it’s not there. But you know that it exists because you read it your freshman year in college. Or let's say you’re a second generation American interested in reading books in your parents’ native language, Greek. Try finding more than a few books in foreign languages in most town libraries or bookstores in the United States. Or you're a graduate student who has been doing research on your thesis for years. You think you've read every book there is to read on your topic, but then you type your query into Google Book Search, and you suddenly discover a new original book or monograph that you weren't even aware of before. ... The settlement won't just expand access to out-of-print books, either. Because authors and publishers will have the ability to let users preview and purchase their in-print books through Google Book Search, readers will have even more options for accessing in-print books than they have today.

Not only did Elsevier create some 'fake' journals for drug makers they also encouraged the drug maker to agree the content. (The Australian):

THE world's largest medical publisher asked the manufacturers of anti- inflammatory drug Vioxx which articles they wanted to include in a so-called medical journal on bone health. Documents tendered to a Federal Court class action reveal staff at publishing company Elsevier, which produces The Lancet, emailed pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co about its "preferred content selection" for the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine. The publisher also admits the journal is a "single sponsored publication" where most of the content is chosen by Merck with some "input from Elsevier". The plaintiff in the class action has alleged the journal was fake and it was simply a marketing exercise designed to promote Vioxx. The court has also heard Merck put the names of high-profile arthritis experts on the editorial board of the phoney journal without telling them they had done so. Since these revelations, Elsevier has expressed embarrassment over its role and admitted it failed to meet its own "high standards for disclosure".

In more Elsevier news, there are rumors that the company is looking to take on the responsibility for managing Universities content repositories: basically managing and hosting the content that academics create. This is a potentially sly approach to the 'open-access' issue (Link):

Elsevier is thought to be mooting a new idea that could undermine universities' own open-access repositories. It would see Elsevier take over the job of archiving papers and making them available more widely as PDF files.

If successful, it would represent a new tactic by publishers in their battle to secure their future against the threat posed by the open-access publishing movement.

Most UK universities operate open-access repositories, where scholars can voluntarily deposit final drafts of their pay-to-access journal publications online. Small but growing numbers are also making such depositions mandatory.

An internet posting earlier this month alerted repository managers to Elsevier's move. "Rumours are spreading that Elsevier staff are approaching UK vice-chancellors and persuading them to point to PDF copies of articles on Elsevier's web-site rather than have the articles deposited in institutional repositories," the memo, on a mailing list operated by the Joint Information Systems Committee, said.

Google Book Search announced some enhancements to their Book Search interface (Link):

Today I'm excited to announce that we're rolling out changes to Google Books that give readers and book lovers everywhere new ways to interact with the words and images contained within the books we've brought online. We've also made it easier for users to share previews of their favorite books on their blogs or websites. Here's a tour of some of the enhancements we've made to the way you search, browse, and share the books that we've digitized.

OCLC is working with print machine manufacturer Kirtas to enable the printing of books on demand having found them via Worldcat (SBWire):

Kirtas Technologies, the worldwide leader in bound-book digitization, and OCLC, a global online library service and research organization; have signed an agreement that will enable streamlined access to the ever-increasing numbers of digitized books to users of OCLC’s WorldCat and Kirtasbooks.com.

As part of the agreement, OCLC will now be able to provide its users with data indicating that a book is either available as digitized content or that it can be made available for digitization.

In addition, OCLC will provide Kirtas with bibliographic records for use on www.kirtasbooks.com, ensuring consistent and accurate descriptions of the books being offered for sale by its library content providers.

OCLC has incorporated Worldcat identies into Worldcat.org (Blog)

The British library together with JISC and Gale/Cengage announced the launch of a newspaper archive that includes over 2mm pages of news material (Link):

The service - accessed at http://newspapers.bl.uk/blcs - includes more than two million pages of newspapers from 49 national and regional titles dating from 1800.

Newspapers covered by the service include the Daily News, Manchester Times, Western Mail, Northern Echo, Glasgow Herald and Penny Illustrated.

Users can read reports of the Battle of Trafalgar in the Examiner and the gory details of the Whitechapel murders in the melodramatic Illustrated Police News. Children as young as nine smoking and drinking, music hall star Vesta Tilley in an X Factor-style contest, and the banking collapse of 1878 are also among the stories.

A search on the words 'Hoboken, New Jersey' resulted in some very interesting results.

Bezo's is Against it, Schonfeld Misunderstands it: Google Book Settlement

Erick Schonfeld over at Seeking Alpha notes some self-serving opinion from Jeff Bezos on the Google Book Settlement (Link):

That settlement in our opinion needs to be revisited. It doesn’t seem right that you should kind of get a prize for violating a large series of copyrights. The class action settlement law . . . you can’t believe that is the way it actually works.

But Schonfeld then goes on to make the following specious comment:

Google’s book settlement gives it a blanket right to display the text of any orphan work (unclaimed books still under copyright), and to sell digital copies of such works. Since the majority of book actually fall under this category, the settlement would in effect give Google an exclusive right to show or sell these books.

I added the bold. He knows nothing about what amount of books will or will not end up being Orphans. Just more ill-formed opinion.

UPDATE: Tim O'Reilly was at the same conference and posted some notes and here is a sample (He also got Erick's comment above): LINK

"These new businesses are very energizing. We don't 'stick to the knitting'...I wouldn't even know how to respond if someone said 'Jeff, this isn't the knitting.' But we do make business decisions in a very deliberate way: we work backwards from customer needs, and we work forwards from our business skills."

Back to the Future in Iran

As we slowly made our way toward the airport for our flight home, the car lurched forward as the front wheels fell into a particularly large hole. From the front seat, our guide turned around, rolled his eyes and said "Here, he was mayor of Tehran and now he's President but he couldn't even fix our streets." And so it was during our trip, an imperceptible admission that they - our hosts and others like them - weren't responsible for Ahmadinejad. Sure they voted but not for this guy. On the one hand the events of this week are amazing in a country ruled by fear but on the other-hand less so. The crowd - students, moderate clergy, the middle class - had been invited to participate, but they had had enough and told them so. To many of them Ahmadinejad turned out to be worst than their worst nightmare.

This was my third visit to Iran having stopped over twice before in the mid-1970s. At that time, Tehran was rapidly growing under another dictatorship. Here was a vast city in the middle of nowhere completely outside my experience yet they had skyscrapers, side walks, movie theaters, traffic, jet aircraft, incredible architecture, and a jewelry collection you couldn't believe. Even in the 1970s, the separation between us and them wasn't that great. We stayed at the newly built Intercontinental and there was a Sheraton across town. We visited the souk and we got a carpet and some other souvenirs. We visited all the important sites and we went by plane and back to Isfahan, the holy city. We even frolicked in the hotel pool where off-duty Pan Am air crews wandered around as though they were in Miami.

Over the years my memories remained positive and I was never able to marry Bush's 'axis of evil' with my experience. Wouldn't that be like invading France I thought. Iran isn't some backward country. Regardless, in advance of our trip in November 2005 I did have some trepidation as I left London. I was excited, and when we arrived we were escorted through immigration by our travel guide. We were welcomed. I've had more trouble getting into Canada. Conversations were generally guarded but when we went for our big dinner out the conversation did become looser. During the dinner, males and females interacted, some women did not wear head scarfs and the Iranians proffered an almost laisez faire attitude to their political situation. Almost admitting 'we didn't vote for him but what are we supposed to do?

As chance would have it, when I returned to Tehran in 2005 we were placed in the old Intercontinental. At the height of the 1979 revolution, the hotel was 'liberated' but in the years following the government chose to keep everything the same. While the pool is now out of commission, the Iranians seemed to be proud of their previous more westernized outlook. The hotel retained all the branding of the original Intercontinental - even down to the waste basket in my room - despite a name change. The lobby was identical to the image in my mind from the day we left back in 1974. And in the entry way to their best top floor restaurant they still had on display a famous award for excellence. Encased in glass it was so covered in dust it looked like a funnel spider. Unfortunately for me, that meal caused me to get so ill I couldn't get out of bed the next day and make the day trip to Isfahan.

There were some dark spots: walls painted with 'death to America' and the local Tehran Times English language newspaper was busy interviewing a holocaust denier. There was no interest exhibited by our travel guides to engage on these topics and we didn't press the issue either.

As we saw, life in Tehran was getting harder. Inflation was growing and we saw lines outside gas stations. The roads weren't getting fixed. Corruption was rampant yet the religious police maintained their sweeps of improperly dressed women. So, some bright spark asked them for some feedback on their political circumstance and this is what they got.

Publishing History Repeating Itself.

In the course of research, this caught my eye from the NYTimes of 1911. Just proves that people who should know better mouthing off about book related statistics have always been part of the business. That aside, this is an interesting snap shot of NY publishing in 1911.

AT a session of the International Circulation Managers' Association, held this month in Chicago, Third Assistant Postmaster General Britt made an address in which he upheld the Government's position as regards the new rate of postage on periodicals. In the course of his remarks he made the following sensational statement as to the publication of books and pamphlets in this country:

NYTimes.

And if you have the time and inclination here is another article from 1919. This article laments the rapid decline of bookstores, but blames not the automobile, movies, periodicals, pamphlets or even libraries; here, a Mr. William Arnold suggests the decline is due to the lack of cooperation between publisher and bookseller. He suggests that in the US the bookseller "may suffer ruinously through the speculative quality of many of the new books he is compelled to handle."

Was his solution consignment? It is not clear, however he does paint a very rosy picture of what the book retail and publishing business could become with greater cooperation.

NYTimes

MediaWeek (Vol 2, No 23): Book Titles, E-Books and Text Books, Orphans,

Some of these appeared on The Twitter. Robert McCrum does some thinking about book titles: (Observer)

Actually, if you're stuck for a title, Shakespeare is a good place to start: Brave New World (The Tempest); Remembrance of Things Past (The Sonnets); The Sound and the Fury (Macbeth); The Dogs of War (Julius Caesar); Cakes and Ale (Twelfth Night). Apart from quoting Donne (For Whom the Bell Tolls) or the Bible (The Power and the Glory) or TS Eliot (A Handful of Dust), you can fall back on theory. Some say a good title must contain a conflict (Crime and Punishment); others that one word is best (Atonement; Money); or that exotic confections (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) make good box office.

The truth is, as William Goldman has it, "nobody knows anything".

Seth Godin rants about Marketing textbooks.

The solution seems simple to me. Professors should be spending their time devising pages or chapterettes or even entire chapters on topics that matter to them, then publishing them for free online. (it's part of their job, remember?) When you have a class to teach, assemble 100 of the best pieces, put them in a pdf or on a kindle or a website (or even in a looseleaf notebook) and there, you're done. You just saved your intro marketing class about $15,000. Every semester. Any professor of intro marketing who is assigning a basic old-school textbook is guilty of theft or laziness.

Burning a 'gay teen book' in Wisconsin could become a legal matter (Observer):

Siems said there was clearly "a bit of theatre" in the lawsuit which followed. "They've filed a lawsuit which has little possibility of going forward legally, and they're asking for damages which include the right to burn a book. It does seem more to gain publicity than a real serious challenge." But, he said, PEN remained very concerned about the impulse behind the claim. "This is a group of people trying aggressively to rid the library of these books and that's very serious - it needs to be fought."

The claimants, he said, "have a right to continue to express their views, and this in a way is a creative attempt to express those views". But it's "also a dangerous game when you're talking about something like book burning, calling on the law to burn books. It's certainly completely un-American, and if they paused, I think they would agree."

JISC (UK) produce a report that suggests that the potential Orphan work problem in the UK could extend to 50mm items. It's not just about books.

The scale and impact of Orphan Works across the public sector confirms that the presence of Orphan Works is in essence locking up culture and other public sector content and preventing organisations from serving the public interest. Works of little and/or variable commercial value but high academic and cultural significance are languishing unused. Access to an immense amount of this material, essential for education and scholarship, is consequently badly constrained, whilst scarce public sector resources are being used up on complex and unreliable ‘due diligence’ compliance. Without any kind of UK or European Union-wide legal certainty, there will remain a major risk for all users of Orphan Works. The quantity of Orphan Works and their impact is only accelerating as content is being created and digitised without adherence to any single internationally recognised standard for capturing provenance information.

Six lessons from an e-Book project at Northwest Missouri State college: (Chronicle)

Then the university ran a pilot study with the Sony Reader, a device much like the Kindle (Sony was more responsive to the university's calls than Amazon was). University officials learned some sobering lessons about electronic books. Students who got the machines quickly asked for their printed books back because it was so awkward to navigate inside the e-books (though a newer version of the device works more gracefully).

Mr. Hubbard still dreams of lighter bookbags and lower costs, but the university is now moving more slowly — and running tests involving several different types of e-books. Publishers are clamoring to be part of the experiment.

Peter Olson examines what the Kindle really means: (BookBusiness)

The real issues are:

1. How can we enhance the reader’s overall experience—not just reading, but browsing, purchasing and library-building, and not just through print or digital media, but through a combination of both?

2. How can we create pricing options that will increase demand for books and offset the decline in book readership?

3. How can we build a new business model that is attractive to authors and sufficiently profitable for publishers and online retailers?

Asking baby boomers whether they will forego their affinity for printed books is irrelevant. The key to the future is whether e-books will be interesting enough to Generations X, Y and the millennials to capture a significant portion of their entertainment spending.

In Connecticut they take the development of Math courses into their own hands: (NYTimes)

So the district’s frustrated math teachers decided to rewrite the algebra curriculum, limiting it to about half of the 90 concepts typically covered in a high school course in hopes of developing a deeper understanding of key topics. Last year, they began replacing 1,000-plus-page math textbooks with their own custom-designed online curriculum; the lessons are typically written in Westport and then sent to a program in India, called HeyMath!, to jazz up the algorithms and problem sets with animation and sounds.

S&S and Proactive Digital

When the Bowker team launched our first online product we learned by experience, but one thing we got right was perspective. Even though nearly 100% of our revenue was in print, from that day forward we became an online database company. There was nothing we didn't consider to elevate our online product in the consciousness of our customers minds: not pricing, content, sales support or marketing. Our goal was to migrate all our customers from the print to the web product as fast as possible. Admittedly, there were many before us in the online database world who we could point to for guidance but we still managed to make mistakes. For example, we quickly understood that customer service was no longer about tracking a book shipment as it was about technical support, and selling wasn't about cold calling from New Jersey rather it became training on-site. Still, we were fast learners.

In the process of proactively migrating our customer base we aggressively increased the price of our print version while also reducing the content. We continued to add new content and new functionality to the on-line product while only moderately increasing pricing. We pulled back from third party data licenses and migrated these customers to our platform so we could maintain a direct relationship with all our customers. We placed sales reps in the field which hadn't been done for many years, and later added trainers in the field to ensure our customers were using the product to its capability.

All of these proactive tasks were established to not only support our new on-line business but also eliminate our print business. We always knew online and electronic was our future and we wanted to get there as fast as possible. Our product was better online and our relationship with the customers was more positive and engaged than it ever had been in the print environment. Most importantly, the company was able to survive and gain in strength which never would have happened had we not proactively engaged a digital strategy.

This week Simon & Schuster appears to have taken a similar proactive step in defining their own online future by placing 5,000 titles with Scribd. Many trade publishers at BookExpo seemed content in commenting on eBooks counting less than 5% of revenues (I'm being generous). In shugging off the (in)significance of the stat they also seemed to be saying 'it's not really up to us' to drive these numbers faster. And why would they want to drive eBooks when print is still so important? (This is the point where I point back to my example above).

In working with Scribd, S&S has said "we want to have some say in our digitial future" are we are not going to leave it in the hands of Amazon to dictate to us. I applaud this somewhat isolated example of a publisher taking control of their fate - however small the effort may appear to some at this stage - and look both for S&S to seek other relationships and for other publishers to join them. Which publisher will be first to eliminate a first edition print in favor of digital only?

Doing Away With Textbooks In California

California is one of the holy trinity of HS text book states and thus tremendously important to the success of any textbook program. E-texts have been gaining and programs by Cengage, Pearson and MGH have begun to make inroads into schools as legitimate supplemental (and in some cases substitutions for) printed text books. Recently in an interview in the San Jose Mercury News, Governor Schwarzenegger indicated he would like to replace printed textbooks in HS as a way to battle his budget issues. He is suggesting starting this process in August which must have some executives in the educational community running frantic. There is an undoubted significant opportunity that may both reduce expenses and provide for a better educational experience; however, given the politics of both California at large and the materials selection process don't hold your breath thinking a change like this will happen in August.

From the Guardian:

Schwarzenegger, trying to plug a budget hole of $24.3bn (£15bn), thinks he can make savings by getting rid of what he decries as expensive textbooks. The governor is serious about an idea that might make Gutenberg turn in his grave. He appeared in class yesterday to push an idea he set out in the San Jose Mercury News newspaper.

"It's nonsensical and expensive to look to traditional hard-bound books when information today is so readily available in electronic form," Schwarzenegger wrote. "Especially now, when our school districts are strapped for cash and our state budget deficit is forcing further cuts to classrooms, we must do everything we can to untie educators' hands and free up dollars so that schools can do more with fewer resources."

Schwarzenegger points out that California last year set aside $350m for school books and argues that even if teachers have to print out some of the material, it will be far cheaper than regularly buying updated textbooks.

The Governor's point of view on this matter is also warped: He believes textbooks are expensive and e-Book versions will be cheaper but neither is necessarily the case. E-Books will be better - especially true when they are integrated into a networked environment - but cheaper? Maybe but unlikely since there is the cost of the reader, (and some of these will inevitably have to be replaced every year), as well as the on-going cost of creation that publishers will want to cover on the same basis as they do now. Schwarzenegger has the objective correct: Replacing print texts with electronic versions is a good idea, but his motivation will focus the argument in the wrong place. It won't be what is best for the student but what will save California the most money, and on that basis why not just buy one text book for every three students and be done with it?

Are Characters Possible in a Fragmented World?

Interesting article in The Economist on Stan Lee the graphic artist and creator of many Marvel comic characters. The article explores how characters ended up on screen but also looks into how markets are fragmenting thus making the ability to be successful as Marvel was far more difficult. (The Economist):

But there is a hitch. Mr Lee’s most celebrated creations appeared at a time when comic books were widely read. The heroes were honed over many years by other writers and artists. As a result a great many people of diverse ages are familiar with them and will happily spend $10 to sit in a cool cinema and renew their acquaintance. Blockbuster audiences are built not of enthusiastic fans—there are never enough—but of people who are vaguely aware of a character or a story and want to see what a studio does with it.

These days it is extremely difficult to propel new characters or stories into broad public consciousness, and therefore hard to mobilise a mass audience for films based on them. Take Alan Moore, a revered writer of comic books. His works have inspired five ambitious films (the most recent is “Watchmen”), none of them hugely successful. And what goes for comic books also goes for television shows, computer games and other fodder for summer blockbusters. As audiences fragment, there is simply less mass content to throw into the Hollywood recycling machine.

About Being Semantic

PriceWaterhouseCoopers has just published one of their periodic Technical Reports where they discuss and forecast the impact of the semantic web on business operations. This report is readable - although the concepts are complex, and there are several examples that elucidate the practical implications of adopting some of the theory (BBC).

Fundamental to the development of the semantic web will be the Resource Description Framework (RDF) which builds on the experience of xml and improves on the benefits provided by relational data. Central to RDF are Universal Resource Identifiers (URI) which are 'supersets' of URLs - your garden variety web address. In a semantic context, URIs are more specific than URLs and on page 7 of the report, the authors explain how this interplay works.

There are three key themes noted in this report:

1. Establishment & Use of Ontologies and Taxonomies. Increasingly anyone in data and information management is going to understand and recognise what these terms mean. In the publishing business, far more attention is now being paid to the the way data can/should relate to other data (Ontological) as well as how data can be structured hierarchically (taxonomy). As hierarchical classification schemes, taxonomies can/are limiting - although this factor may not be apparent until an organization considers utilizing one advantage of ontologies which is that they can be linked to other ontologies.
   
   
2. The ability to link your data with data from any third party will ultimately create better business information and support both more accurate and faster decision making. The Linked Data Initiative is a standards based approach to try to make this happen. In a linked data environment data can be shared and the interrelationships between data understood within the confines of a shared understanding of a common ontology. In the report, PWC examine how establishing a new retail location using complex data from a variety of sources can be aggregated and made actionable all using a linked data framework. As the report says, linked data is about both 'supply and demand': Accessing the data you want but also allowing others to access your data as well.
   
   
3. The report also addresses SPARQL and SQL. Theres much more in the report but SPARQL supports interpretation of graphical data representing an improvement over SQL. This discussion challenges the upper reaches of my pay grade so you will have to read this yourself.
   

I would have liked to quote directly from the report but ironically the pdf is disabled for copy and paste. However the report is free and runs about 50pages and I won't spoil the ending for you.

Also of relevance are two presentations I made at the Frankfurt supply chain meeting. Digital Age and Intelligent Publishing Supply Chain.

MediaWeek (Vol 2, No 22): University Press, BookExpo, BordersUK, News Corp

If you are on Twitter you will have seen these. Apologies. Scott McLemee at Inside Higher Ed takes a look at some of the University Presses at BookExpo and their comparative investments in eBook formats:

Many people take it for granted that the economic downturn amounts to a a tipping point in e-publishing, at least for scholarly presses, and perhaps especially for them.But even the publishers moving steadily deeper into the digital terrain are doing so watchfully.

The expression "tipping point" (with its implication of "point of no return") hardly seems to apply, to judge by this year's Book Expo. A more fitting term might be the one used by Ellen Trachtenberg, a publicist for the University of Pennsylvania Press. "We're at a tension point," she told me. "We don't have any e-books, but our board of trustees is keen on doing them, so we are looking into it."

PW's BookExpo content is here. Elizabeth Eaves took a walk around BookExpo last weekend (Forbes)

Why write books? The compulsion to try to entertain, persuade or make meaning is irresistible. At the very least, the industry appears to be handling technological change more gracefully than the music business or ink-on-paper newspapers, in ways that are reassuring to an author. Publishers will automatically make new books available in a digital format, suitable for the Kindle or other e-readers--though mid-list authors may have to ask, or arm wrestle, publishers into digitizing their older books. Nobody knows whether sales in the still-tiny digital books market will cannibalize print book sales or add to them, nor whether margins on e-books will be enough to keep publishers in business. It seems wisest, though, to give the people what they want, how they want it.

Borders UK denied they are facing critical financial issues rather that they need some external help to rightsize their retail space. Nevertheless, the appointment of a financial adviser raises speculation about the company's future. The Bookseller

More from News Corp - this time newly hired Jonathan Miller - on developing a paid content model. (Hollywood Reporter)

Paid digital media services are the wave of the future for media giants, and the only question is how fast they will become reality, News Corp. chief digital officer Jonathan Miller said here Tuesday evening, adding that the conglomerate will push to develop new business models that work for the industry overall. "We will see a return to multiple revenue streams," Miller predicted after his chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch recently hinted more of his empire's digital content offers may carry a price tag in the future. "Free versus pay is one of the really big issues out there," and this is the time the industry seems ready to find answers, he said. We want to see a (business) model established.

Also on The Twitter, there was a publishing boot camp in Toronto over the weekend and here is the link An interview in The Observer magazine with crime novelist Martina Cole:

I've run down the batteries of not one but two tape recorders. My note-taking hand is aching. And when I finally arrive home, I have to spend some time sitting quietly in a darkened room. It's not unlike being kidnapped, interviewing Martina Cole, although if you've read any of her novels, you're probably thinking a claw hammer through an eye socket, or a shank in the neck and a severed artery or two, whereas in actual fact it's a constant, non-stop stream of stories, opinions, homilies, exhortations and offers of tea, coffee, wine, cake, ham salad, water, coffee. Ah go on, a little glass of wine. And when I come to transcribe it all, I manage 29 pages, or 16,000 words, or to put this into context, roughly a fifth of a novel, before I simply give up, overwhelmed. God, she can talk, Martina. It's non-stop. The stories just keep on coming. She doesn't even need to pause for breath. I begin to suspect that she might have gills. Or that she breathes through her skin like a frog. But then she's written 16 novels, all bestsellers; in fact she's far and away the bestselling British author today, translated into 28 languages, trumped in the charts only by the likes of The Da Vinci Code, so it really shouldn't be surprising that she knows how to spin a yarn, although somehow it is.

Simple Analyst

Robert MacMillan over at Reuters MediaFile observes some facile 'research' from Moody's on the future of newspapers (which he cites) and then concludes with this:

This seems to leave managers with only one way to stay in business for now. If you want your credit rating not to fall further, lay off a few hundred or thousand more employees and make sure the newspaper features a bunch of under-edited news, lame stories and mostly wire copy. Repeat process as often as possible until shareholders and bondholders have a chance to cash out. Then look for another job, maybe as a McKinsey-style efficiency consultant.

Well done. It's no wonder these rating agencies contributed to the mess we are in. I do hope no one pays for this report.

Google on Orphans

On their public policy blog, Google addresses how the Google Book Settlement will increase access to 'out of print' works and also aid to decrease the number of 'orphan' works by enabling a comprehensive process for identification of rights owners. (Google):

As “parent” rightsholders claim their books through the Book Rights Registry, we think it will become clear that most out-of-print books are not actually “orphans.” Books that were once difficult for anyone to license will become books that are very easy for everyone to license, either through the Book Rights Registry or directly from their owners. Furthermore, many books that some think are in-copyright orphans (including a large percentage from 1963 or before) are actually out-of-copyright, and Google is working to make more information available that can clarify their copyright status.

Of course, some rightsholders may still be too difficult to find. Under the settlement Google will be able to open up access to truly orphaned books, but we still think more needs to be done to allow anyone and everyone to use these works. Any company or organization that wants to open up access to this untapped resource should be able to do so. The settlement is not a panacea, since it only covers a subset of orphaned works, provides only certain uses, and is not able to extend these uses to other providers. The need for comprehensive orphan works legislation is not diminished.

Australian Territorial Copyright

The Globe and Mail has the text of a speech given by Australian novelist Richard Flanagan (Sound of One Hand Clapping) during the Sydney Writers Festival two weeks ago. In this speech he makes and impassioned call to the Australian government to abandon their review of the policy of territorial copyright retention of which Flanagan believes is essential to the continued vibrancy and health of the nations written word.

Here are several samples from this long speech:

The battle to understand this world in our own tongue that Tyndale's Bible represents, to make the universal particular, the sacred secular, and the secular in its turn sacred, is a battle that has strangely resurfaced here in Australia this year.

For it falls to us to once more to defend the right – our right and our deepest need – to our own stories in our own voice, which is also, historically and perhaps inevitably, that same battle between truth and power.

At this moment, as many of you would be aware, the Australian government is giving serious consideration to a proposal that would see the ending of territorial copyright for Australian writers.

This dullest and dreariest of phrases – territorial copyright – is the drab motley thrown over a measure which will do untold damage to Australian culture. I cannot begin to convey to you the destructive stupidity of what is being proposed, nor the intense sadness and great anger that so many Australian writers feel about this proposal.

.....

But Australian publishing over the last four decades is an extraordinary cultural achievement. In an era when national cultures suffered greatly from globalization, ours grew stronger, in no small part because of our book industry. We read Australian stories from cradle to grave, and the best of our writing is judged around the world as globally significant.

....

Writers and books that matter will become like an endangered species with no habitat left to support them. The fate of most of them in the large chain and discount mega-store culture will be that of marsupials in new outer suburbs, dicing with death on freeways, not knowing until that short moment of blinding light dazzle that this is no longer their home.

That is but a small sample.

MediaWeek (Vol 2, No 21): BookExpo, Newspapers, China,

We are lagging behind this week due to BookExpo and the resulting back log of work; nevertheless, here are some of the news stories I found interesting over the past week. Many (all) of my twitter feeders (is there such a thing) will have seen most of these. From PW describing the seminar "Stupid Publisher Tricks"(PW):

Among the more provocative proposals were one from Miller that booksellers start publishing and Madan’s request for a good clean data feed, or virtual catalog of all publishers' books, so that independent booksellers could effectively sell books online. Fifteen years after the rise of Amazon, he said, there is no such catalog, and independents have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to Ingram or Baker & Taylor for data that should be free.

Peter Preston points to some stats that suggest all is not doom and gloom in newspapers - perhaps though only where we notice (Guardian):

Cue those WAN statistics one more time and find that 81% of American online users also say they read a printed paper at least once a week. In sum, for the moment, it's not one or the other: it's both. And transition from one to the other, where it's happening, comes unpredictably and patchily from city to city and country to country. Gurus with web fish to fry sing a different tune, sure enough. Burgeoning tycoons who got their debt mountains wrong (like David Montgomery at Mecom) invoke broken old revenue models. It all seems so obvious boiled down to a ritual sentence or two in some TV script.

But too much "doom and gloom", according to O'Reilly? Absolutely: and perhaps he should look at his own Independent web figures - up 63% in a year - for some added personal cheer. But it's still a melee of hopes, dreams and disappointments out there - and, certainly, too many glib simplicities.

Paul McGuinness the manager of U2, isn't satisfied with copyright protections despite the Pirate Bay case and service providers required to do more (CNET):

I would really like them to willingly go to the movie studios and the music companies and say this is how we can collect money from the people who are listening to your stuff and watching your movies. We acknowledge that it's the fair thing to do and we have some responsibility for doing it. Let's do it together and let's make some money. I've heard the estimates that half of traffic across the Internet is technically illegal non-paid-for content. That can't go on. It's such a waste. Future generations of artists will face a vacuum where payment used to be. Artists are entitled to get paid, whatever kind of art they do, the same way technologists are entitled to get paid.

But if the technology you develop prevents artists from being remunerated then there's something wrong with it. I'd like to get a moral tone into the discussion. I think there is a big moral question for civilization. It's not good enough to say that the Internet is free to all and there should be no restrictions on its use. I had the experience last year of making a speech to a group of (Members of European Parliament) in Brussels and they were very hostile to the idea of any kind of monitoring or regulation of the Internet, which they regarded as the precursor to a form of taxation. And of course, as politicians, they were against any kind of increased taxation. But it's not taxation. It's paying for something that people are consuming.

NYTimes is becoming its own ad agency (Forbes)

In the past month, the Times has unveiled a real-time news wire feature wrapped in ads for software outfit SAP ( SAP - news - people ), as well as a Web campaign for the AMC series Mad Men, which includes a mini-archive of Times articles about the show within the ad unit. The Times' recent efforts demonstrate a realization that newspapers and magazines can't wait for Madison Avenue to create lucrative new ad models online. J.P. Morgan estimates newspaper revenues will decline 20% this year to $30 billion. Last year, the digital arms of newspapers only contributed an estimated $3 billion. Along with experimenting with new ad mechanisms, the Times has said it is considering various plans to charge users for access to NYTimes.com.

Days after BookExpo you may recognise the truth in research that suggests that Publishing and Media professionals lead all industries in binge drinking (Independent):

People working in media, publishing and entertainment sectors are the heaviest drinkers, according to the Department of Health. They consume an average of 44 units a week, almost twice the recommended maximum amount of three-to-four units a day for men, and two-to-three for women.

Plans for the Plastic Logic reader device were discussed at the All things digital conference (FOX)

A big highlight from the event is Plastic Logic’s new e-reader that is bigger and thinner than Amazon’s (AMZN) popular Kindle and targeted at business users.

This device measures 8.5 inches by 11 inches, the same as the standard letter size for the paper you load into your printer at the office.

Plastic Logic CEO Rich Archuletta told FOX Business in an interview the device will be available at the start of 2010 and that it will be able to handle all different types of content, including PDFs, Word, and Excel files. He showed a working prototype of the device displaying a cover of Fortune magazine as well as a couple of documents.

Very interesting (and generally off the radar) article about publishing mergers in China (Economist):

At a recent industry forum Liu Binjie, the director of China’s General Administration of Press and Publication, the industry regulator, said China would like to see such partnerships between studios and publishers lead to a massive consolidation, leaving half a dozen giant companies capable of spreading Chinese words internationally. Small firms not swept up in the various deals would be able to auction manuscripts. Instead of indirect censorship through publishers, there would be a government clearing house.

The result would be a better organised industry, somewhat similar to what already exists for Chinese films. Production is largely done by government studios, censorship is overt, productions have a global audience and there is strong consumer demand. However, much of that demand is met not by Chinese films but by black-market consumption of foreign films blocked from entering China legally because of tight controls.

Readers at BookExpo?

If like me you have stayed over the weekend at the Frankfurt bookfair on even one occasion you will know that the fair opens to the public. A public largely interested in reading and publishing. The startling thing about this is that on each day YOU CAN'T GET DOWN THE AISLES FOR THE PEOPLE!

I bring this up because not only do the US and UK publishers bitch and moan about having to man their booths at Frankfurt - and generally, myself included, the executives tend to evacuate early Saturday anyway - but these same publishers are not interested in opening up BookExpo to the public either. Admitting there are some logistical issues, but in the face of a BookExpo where the most common statement on the floor seemed to be 'will this be the last or second last' one, I would argue opening BookExpo to readers and customers might not be such a bad idea. Actually, I don't have to argue it because Richard Nash has done so on the PW show blog this morning:

I draw the following conclusion. The publishing business is not in trouble because there's no demand for books. It is in trouble because there are changes afoot in how best to satisfy the demand, changes to which there are suitable responses, two of which are fostering fan culture, and generating a sense of occasion, and the leaders of the largest publishing organizations are failing in their professional responsibility to implement these responses. By reducing their participation in BEA at the same time the media participation has increased by almost 50%, by refusing to open the Fair to the readers on Sunday, these CEOs have effectively thrown in the towel. They are managing the demise of the book business, pointing fingers at any generic social forces they can find, failing to see the one place the responsibility can be found, their own damn offices.

Kindle Sales: Nothing, Nada, Never

News - not too shocking - that Amazon may never release Kindle sales not only adds a new dimension to the developing problem of how the industry counts itself but there's also a possible darker side. Since the company attributes their attitude to competitive issues that to me also indicates a willingness to disemble; that is, they will continue to provide misleading and partial information regarding these sales. As a result we will continue to see a variety of interpretations of the data that is provided, both by people who should know better, and worse, by people who have no grounding in publishing dynamics. It's the last set we worry about.

Don't Forget: Blogger Signing at BookExpo; 1pm Saturday

Firebrand Technologies has organized a 'blogger signing' at their booth 4077th during BookExpo and I am participating. It sounds like a lot of fun and an opportunity to meet a lot of blog readers across a spectrum of topics. Firebrand is the owner of a great application named NetGalley which automates the process of providing review copies to reviewers. Sign-up if you are a reviewer and don't forget to come by the 4077th booth to meet all of us.

I will be at the booth at 1pm on Saturday - pen in hand.

(Bare in mind however, that I will not be signing any body parts and generally speaking a hand shake will do).

Here is a note from Firebrand:

Firebrand is thrilled to announce that 44 bloggers signed up to be at our booth (#4077) during Book Expo America. It’s clear from how quickly this idea went from concept to reality, that book bloggers need and want to create community-to-community relationships with publishers, retailers, and readers. This is an incredibly exciting time in publishing!

We invite every publisher at BEA to review this schedule and mark their calendars, so they have a chance to meet the bloggers who are helping to sell their books.

The schedule is below. We have a couple of new entries (Sarah Weinman, Ed Champion, and Austin Allen) not listed below, or if you have trouble reading the layout below, Click Here

You can also see the list here.

Publishing Under 25

It was nice to hear Eric Hippeau of Softbank say pretty much the following from my Pimp My Print post:

If I were heading a publishing house, I would hire a band of 25-30 year old editors/writers, give them a budget to acquire content and have them build a new 'publishing' operation unfettered by print runs, business models and pub dates. Their responsibility would be to create content a target market valued enough to use, to experiment in how to monetize the content and to be able to replicate the model. With guidance - not oversight - provided by the many experienced managers that exist in a typical publishing house the team won't fail. And yes, I would do this TODAY.

He actually said round them up from within your own organization and he did intersperse a 'good luck' but essentially the point was the same. Unfortunately, Eric and the moderator Chris Anderson were off the subject for most of the discussion and there was little real information about "directing investments into new media" which these two were/are uniquely qualified to address. Pity.

BookExpo: Session Picks

These are the sessions today and tomorrow that I think you would want to attend:

Thursday:

The Impact of Free (and Piracy) on Book Sales: An Update on The Piracy Project
9:30AM - 10:30AM (Thursday, May 28, 2009)
As digital content has become more available and more commonly distributed in book publishing, fears of piracy and lost sales have grown. While the debate over the impact of free content has been at times heated, the discussions are more often than not characterized by a lack of hard data. To address this data gap, O'Reilly Media began a project in 2008 to characterize the free universe, catalog and assess recent experiments, establish ways to measure the benefit or cost of free distribution and conduct some follow-on experiments of our own. Come to this session to hear an update on this ongoing study.
Presenter: Brian O'Leary - Principal, Magellan Media Consulting Partners

Stay Ahead of the Shift: What Product-Centric Publishers Can Do to Flourish in a Community-Centric Web World
11:00AM - 12:00PM (Thursday, May 28, 2009)
Publishers have necessarily been focused on short-term changes in their market environment because they've been happening fast. EBook sales are rising more quickly than anything else But Mike Shatzkin is thinking of much bigger changes than these. He looks out a couple of decades and imagines a world more different than today's than the world of 20 years ago is different from today's. He challenges the most basic assumptions we have always accepted that a book is "finished" when an author turns it in, that audiences are mostly reached through intermediaries, even that publishing is about products and paints a believable picture of a completely different media and content world which, he maintains, is coming whether publishers like it or not. so they require attention, but they don't amount to much yet in the way of sales. Individual title marketing, which worked through a bunch of "usual suspects" that hardly changed year to year, has become a game of Whack-a-mole, with new blogs and social networks popping up for every book between the time you get a manuscript and the time you print a book. And sales channels and how you reach them are shifting with new online accounts sprouting while many brick-and-mortar accounts are dying and catalogs, sales conferences, reps dedicated to bookstores, and even "publishing seasons" themselves are endangered species.
Presenter: Mike Shatzkin - Founder & CEO, Idea Logical Co, Inc

A Discussion with Softbank Capital's Eric Hippeau on where VC Dollars are Flowing and What it Means for Publishers
1:30PM - 2:30PM (Thursday, May 28, 2009)
New and radical innovation has accompanied each recession for the past four decades. And though the financial meltdown is historic in its roiling of hedge and mutual funds, there is still a substantial amount of uninvested money that will be invested soon. Couple this with the impact of new broadband and mobile media applications changing consumer behavior, and publishers are left with a future of media influence uncertainty. That is, unless you are talking with a major player who is directing investments into new media. Don't miss this discussion between Wired's Chris Anderson and Softbank Capital's Eric Hippeau as they dig into the detail of what's hot and where the VC dollars are flowing.
Host: Chris Anderson - Editor in Chief, WIRED, author, FREE
Guest: Eric Hippeau - Managing Partner, Softbank Capital

The End of the Supply Chain and the Beginning of the True Book Culture
2:30PM - 3:30PM (Thursday, May 28, 2009)
Knowing what we now know, about media and content in the digital networked age, and recognizing we may not yet know that much, let''s now ask ourselves: what might the ideal publishing company look like? Had we it to do over again, how would we build a system for connecting writers and readers? Richard Nash gave up his job in order to start to answer those questions and here offers his thoughts so far...
Panelist: Dedi Felman - (formerly) Sr. Editor, Simon & Schuster
Presenter: Richard Nash - (formerly) Publisher, Soft Skull Press

Friday:

D2T2: Digital Debut Tool Time
9:30AM - 10:30AM (Friday, May 29, 2009)
An insider’s presentation of new and soon-to-be-mainstreamed web-based entities providing innovative digital services and tools to authors, publishers and readers.
Moderator:

Mike Shatzkin - Founder & CEO, Idea Logical Co, Inc
Presenter: Peter Clifton - President & Ceo, FiledBy, Inc.
Mark Coker - founder & CEO, Smashwords, Inc.
Hugh McGuire - co-founder & President, BookOven

Do Publishers Still Hold the Keys to the Kingdom? A Panel of Authors Weigh In
2:00PM - 3:00PM (Friday, May 29, 2009)
Book publishers have been criticized for their reluctance to adopt new technologies. Yet their tepid forays into the digital media world have been due in part to flavor-of-the-day platforms that leave even the experts guessing what technology will be around tomorrow. Our panelists will discuss some of the thorniest issues facing old media today, what old media can learn from new media and what both must do to adapt and survive. NOTE This panel will be held on the Downtown Author Stage
Moderator: Steven Johnson, author of The Invention of Air, The Ghost Map, Everything Bad is Good For You, and other bestsellers
Panelist: Chris Anderson - Editor in Chief, WIRED, author, FREE
Lev Grossman, Sr. Writer & Book Critic, Time and author, The Magicians
Tom Standage, Business Editor, The Economist, and author, An Edible History of Humanity

Canon Tales: 7x20x21 - Sponsored by The New Yorker
4:30PM - 5:45PM (Friday, May 29, 2009) A unique event designed to inspire conversation, creativity, and passion for the future of publishing. It was born in the UK, where the most recent event at the London Book Fair was presented to a standing-room-only crowd.
Our panel will be the first US adaptation. Ten presenters who are at the forefront of what is exciting in publishing now will be given seven minutes each to present their stories to the crowd. Their presentations will be accompanied by a Powerpoint presentation of 20 slides, with a strict 21-second limit per slide, which forces the presenter to keep the presentation moving forward quickly. Our guidelines for what they discuss will be left wide open, in order to encourage a wide range of topics and styles of presentation throughout the panel. NOTE This panel will be held on the Downtown Author Stage.
Presenter: Debbie Stier, Harper Studio; Richard Nash, former publisher of Soft Skull; Lauren Cerand, PR rep; Jeff Yamaguchi, Digital Marketing, Random House; Mat (Some one - name cut off on program).

SharedBook Launches Platform Supporting Google Book Search Discussion

SharedBook.com has launched a site that enables stakeholders and the public at large to annotate the Google Book Settlement and other related documents. The website leverages the company's editorial platform so that users can match comments and annotations directly to the locations in the text to which the comments pertain. This technology is already in use with some of SharedBook's clients and users of the GBS application of this tool can also print the official documents together with any comments they think important. These comments can be both their own as well as those of the community. Here is an excerpt from their press release:

Until now, discussions on the Google Book Settlement have been taking place across fragmented forums. Now, for the first time, policymakers, businesspeople, scholars, journalists and others have the opportunity to come together and engage in a granular, contextual dialogue on this important topic. Our platform supports comments and responsive statements in real-time, linking them directly to the Google Book Settlement and accompanying documents through online footnoting, always preserving the original documents in their original form. As a result, the Google Book Settlement site becomes an informed and transparent analysis of key points of the settlement by its most concerned stakeholders, available to anyone on the Web.

The platform also offers a compilation and print capability, allowing books to be created from the content with any combination of annotations, which appear in the book as footnotes. We invite all interested parties to participate in this discussion, and to be a part of the debate on this very important subject.

Visit the website here.

Update:

David Rothman (Teleread) also comments on this announcement and makes a statement that I believe indicates exactly the promise of this SharedBook application:

The obvious questions: What annotation sites exist to let anyone mark up federal documents here in the States? Elsewhere? Any sites from governments themselves? And via APIs, standards and in other ways, just how can governments foster the growth of such sites? Also, what about the issue of special interest groups using the sites without identifying themselves? What place is there for anonymous comments? What to do about deliberate information? And how does the media fit in, given all the enticing linking possibilities? The issues go on and on.

Borders Looks for "Selling Culture"

Admitting that hand selling is nothing new, Border's CEO Ron Marshall spoke about returning the company to one driven by sales rather than cost containment and supply chain improvements alone. In the press release accompanying their first quarter results he expands on this point,

"We continued to strengthen the financial structure of the company by making further improvements to cash flow, debt and adjusted EBITDA," said Borders Group Chief Executive Officer Ron Marshall. "Make no mistake about it, we have much more work to do and will continue to maintain our financial discipline. At the same time, we know that we cannot save our way to prosperity. Our long-term success will come from doing a much better job of driving sales and that's where our focus is right now."

The company reported significant top line declines in comp store sales; however, the company is making significant improvements in store product mix, supply chain costs and other key areas. The company saw significant improvements in certain product line gross margins but the proactive reduction in multi-media sales (DVD, Music) hid much of the improvement. The company also appears to have improved its debt position and according to their CFO is in compliance with all debt coverage obligations.

Other key metrics from their press release:

• Adjusted EBITDA in the first quarter was $3.0 million compared to an adjusted EBITDA loss of $14.3 million a year ago.
• First quarter cash flow from operations improved by $19.5 million over last year.
• Operating SG&A expenses and inventory were reduced from the prior year by $48.1 million and $254.9 million, respectively.
• Debt at the end of the first quarter was reduced by $266.0 million to $325.9 million a 44.9% reduction over a year ago and $10.3 million or 3.1% less than the end of fiscal 2008.
• Total consolidated first quarter sales were $641.5 million, down 12.1% from the prior year.
• Comparable store sales for the first quarter declined by 13.5% and 5.5% at Borders superstores and Waldenbooks Specialty Retail stores, respectively.

On an operating basis, the company generated a first quarter loss from continuing operations of $15.9 million or $0.27 per share compared to a loss of $30.5 million or $0.51 cents per share for the same period a year ago. On a GAAP basis, the first quarter loss from continuing operations was $86.0 million or $1.44 per share compared to a loss of $30.1 million or $0.50 per share a year ago. The $1.44 per share loss includes $1.17 per share of non-operating charges that were primarily non-cash.

On a side note, it looks like someone hacked their web site, (Link) and I am sure they will get that fixed soon.

Houghton Mifflin Owner EMPG set for Refinancing

The Irish Independent is reporting advanced debt for equity discussions with loaning banks of troubled Houghton Mifflin Harcourt owner Education Media Publishing Group. The refinancing is likely to significantly reduce CEO/Chairman Barry O'Callaghan's 38pc ownership in EMPG. (Independent)

Other items of note:

• Operationally EMPG appears to be doing well with 'strong cash flow'
• Synergy and savings are pushing EBITDA close to $1bill up 20%
• The company has pulled out of the ratings service after downgrades
• Lending banks have agreed to relax some of their covenants
• Bertelsemann offered to invest $300mm in EMPG but was rejected
• The debt to equity swap will further dilute Reed Elseviers share
  

File Under WTF?

OK, so Peter Olson has been gone a while but apparently he still lives in Marion Maneker's memory: (Reuters)

Legendary Simon and Schuster CEO Dick Snyder was the figure who turned publishing companies into public corporations. And it is as corporate enterprises that the book barons lost their distinctiveness, acumen, and clout. Indeed, Peter Olson's lasting legacy was not making a business of Random House but making it a business that was too big, wasteful, and flabby to succeed.

As head of U.S. operations, he presided over the purchase of Random House from the Newhouse family and combined it with Bertelsmann's own Bantam, Doubleday, Dell operation. The resulting empire controlled 10 percent of the book market but could never outrun its own massive cost structure. It lumbered from hit to hit without making progress toward greater profits. By the time Olson left for Harvard Business School—pity the students he teaches—Random was envied by no one.

As an intro to the above the author chastises Olson for a comment (taken out of context by him) quoted in Portfolio about having a hand in being "part of a process of making something that was a gentleman's hobby into a real business."

Truth is, you could drop the three or four paragraphs in question out of his commentary and I don't think it would matter at all. If you are going to do a hatchet job on a managers' legacy, do the job don't bury it in an article about ebooks.

(Gender corrected - thanks SW.)

Art of Kindle Forecasting: What's a $100mm between friends?

As noted in paidcontent Collins Stewart analyst Sandeep Aggarwal is predicting that revenues from Kindle sales will approximate $300mm this year and generate $70mm in profit. Even more he projects $1.6bill in revenues and $400mm in profit by 2012:

Aggarwal argues that sales of the Kindle grow almost 80 percent a year from ‘09 to ‘12, and that subscriptions will also jump as a result. (Amazon gets 70 percent of subscription revenue). Some 30 percent of Kindle owners subscribed to a service on the e-reader last year, a number that Aggarwal will grow to 75 percent in 2012 as more products are offered and the device becomes more mainstream.

Who's he arguing with? Maybe this guy from Piper Jaffray who suggests 2009 revenues of $405mm going up to over $1bill by 2010. What a nice growth curve that is. eMarketer goes on to note that analyst Mark Mahaney from Citibank believes 10% of all books sold in the 1Q 2009 were Kindle books. Impressive, but nontheless unknowable unless you are looking at real Amazon sales numbers and who is doing that?

Being eMarketer they go on to quote some stats on consumer purchasing. But surely some of these stats seem to undercut the basic tenants of the stratospheric growth:

Importantly, people are increasingly willing to try e-book readers.

Piper Jaffray found that 5% of consumers surveyed were interested in buying a digital book reader, and 9% were interested in buying one after a price drop. Nineteen percent of respondents had never seen a digital book reader but wanted to check one out.

I am not sure I could take anything meaningful from that set of results. The first question is a killer. We all know eBooks and eContent and devices are important but this 'analysis' is banker talk and look where that got us.

And another thing, there aren't that many $100mm publishing companies out there: Here we are just talking about the delta between these two forecasts.

Harcourt Houghton Mifflin in Anti-Trust Suit

There is no back up to this news item at this point but updates if and when they are available; however the news gets no better for Harcourt Houghton Mifflin. The state of California is investigating the merger of Harcourt and HM in 2007. As part of that agreement Harcourt devolved some assets at the request of the Feds but this action assumes that that wasn't enough. From the Courthouse News Service:

California filed a federal antitrust complaint over the $4 billion merger of textbook publishers Houghton Mifflin and Harcourt Education Group, claiming "The merged entity now commands over 50 percent of aggregate primary and middle school textbook sales in the U.S." Combined with its competitors Pearson and McGraw, the three giants now "account for roughly 87 percent of the aggregate commerce in U.S. primary and middle school textbooks." California claims that December 2007 merger will reduce competition, raise prices and "the value of the materials and services likely will decline."

Not the news that HHM would be in the mood for. (Post: Credit Rating)

Update: In the complaint (and there is a link to it on the Courthouse web page at the bottom) on page 9 the complaint is dated May 15, 2009. This is being contested under the Clayton Act which is more stringent that the Sherman Act. (And I know that sounds like I know what it means but I really don't). Here is more on the Clayton Act. Look for references to section 7.

Pete Townshend on Pete Townshend

Long open interview in The Times with Mr Townshend where he discusses Quadrophenia and the up-coming stage version. Some samples (Link):

But the supporting structure of music theatre somehow began to show itself like a manifesting ghost in early British rock. The Beatles larked about like Arthur Askey in a panto; Ray Davies exalted the glamour of the working-class world; The Who wrote songs about growing up that with a few word changes could have been squeezed into My Fair Lady. Music theatre, and its bastard brother music hall, had created and inhabited most of the venues that early British pop bands used to play in. You simply couldn't get away from the idea that it might come back one day, and of course it has. The musicals of the late 1950s - especially those by Lionel Bart - did try to anticipate what rock soon arrived to do. But Lionel himself told me once that he was just two or three years too old to understand what had been coming - it reminds me today of my anticipation of punk in the early 1970s. I knew something needed to happen, and I knew it would be subversive, but I couldn't see how it would take shape.
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Austin Powers has done a lot of damage to the image of swinging London, parodying what had already been parodied by lazy American newsreels over the years. So in a sense my mission is to bring back some of the greyness, the bleakness of those years, and demonstrate to the cast that what happened simply had to happen, otherwise we would all have gone nuts. It wasn't an optional outing of boys playing on scooters; it was a vital rebellion.

Where the Mod movement looks shallow today is in its lack of political, social or ecological interest. But you have to understand that after the ban-the-bomb movement and the failure of anti-apartheid, and then the Cuban missile crisis, young people felt their input was pointless. Fashion, music and daily life was elevated to a form of aloof poetry and was very much a secret society.

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Have you ever been to see a rock musical based on a back-catalogue?

I live inside one. Musicals based on back-catalogues are becoming a saturated market. How can rock musicals avoid being watered-down exercises in asset-stripping?

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What's next after the internet?

Compulsory electronic body implants linked to Gordon Brown's base station.

Scribd Create Content Store

Scribd the web site for sharing documents will launch an e-commerce service that will enable any publisher to load any type of document to the service and charge for usage. Scribd will take 20% from this sale. Scribd has become the most popular document sharing site since it was started several years ago. Here is more from the NYTimes:

Scribd hopes its more open and flexible system will give it a leg up on Amazon, which has become the largest player in the burgeoning market for e-books. Amazon sets the retail price for books in its Kindle store and keeps the majority of the revenue on some titles, which has publishers worried that Amazon is amassing too much control over the nascent market. Amazon also allows those books to be read only on its Kindle devices and in Kindle software on the iPhone.

“One reason publishers are excited to work with us is that they worry that publishing channels are contracting as Amazon and Google are gaining control over the e-book space,” said Jared Friedman, chief technology officer and a founder of Scribd.

Blog Roundup: Week 20 - iPhone, DRM, Disintermediation, Platforms

Adam Hodgkin tells us why Apple has enabled the best of eBook readers: (Exact Editions)

Necessity is the mother of invention, in the case of the iPhone, as elsewhere. There is not enough room on the device to support a mouse-device or a touchpad, other than the screen. So the screen had to be touchable. But there is no doubt that the Apple engineers have crafted an extraordinarily effective solution. As more books are piled into the iPhone's eco-system, I think we will see that there is a growing realisation that the digital text of a book or a magazine should be seen as the starting point for network based interaction with it. The text itself is the starting point, within it are located the points, the referrers, codes and symbols which engender user interaction. The digital version of a text, having many explicit or implicit resources for linkage and reference becomes a hypertext in its own right and one which engages the reader in more than mere reading. Much of this interaction will be initiated by finger gestures. For sure, reading is part of the point of a digital edition, but equally, it has to be said that, pointing is fully a part of the reading of a book on the iPhone.

Evan Schnittman (Black Plastic Glasses) looks at disintermediation (Post):

While Michael’s efforts over time will lead to a cleaner and clearer understanding of who owns what, it won’t fix the inherent problem. The works in question will have competing rights holders for a variety of versions. Few will have clear electronic rights ownership, and few if none will have a single entity that controls all versions. This is the key to enabling the kind of content access that is needed for Generation On-Demand, and this is what is missing across the board. This problem is beyond enormous – it is basically one that cannot be fixed. There is no short term or mid term gain for any parties involved with IP contracts to fix this problem and you cannot fix something if the parties involved don’t see their goals as being aligned.

The result – we will become irrelevant as an industry (not just publishers, but publishing in every facet) over time and have no place in the content economy. But lets face it, this doomsday scenario has been sounded for years – who doesn’t think that book publishers will be obsolete in the future?

Michael Hyatt on how to build a "platform" as he points out most of the heavy lifting has been done for you. (Post):

By “platform” most publishers mean the ability to influence an audience that is large enough to make publishing a book less of a risk. Just a few years ago, this meant you had to have a television or radio show or write a regular magazine or newspaper column. This typically required a lot of money or important contacts.

But today, by starting a blog and making use of tools social networking tools like Twitter and Facebook, you can build a big platform with little more that the investment of your creativity and time. I’m not saying it is easy, but I am saying it is within reach. (By the way, I consider my blog to be my “homebase” and Twitter, Facebook, Plaxo, LinkedIn, etc., to be “outposts.”)

Kassia Krozser at Booksquare reacts to the Mokoto Rich (NYT) article about book digital piracy:

You’ll discover total frustration surrounding purchases. Anger over DRM. You want to hear screams and curses? Listen to the reader who can’t read the book she purchased because the Adobe Digital Editions authentication server is down. Spend some time with a reader who, due to extreme confusion, bought the wrong format of a book and has to deal with the bureaucracy of rectifying an error that shouldn’t have to happen. Piracy is and has been a fact of our lives for as long as we’ve created marketplaces. Books are as subject to thievery as any other product. Same thing, different realm. How you deal with piracy is changing, even as it stays the same (physical piracy still exists). It’s going to be an ongoing battle for the entertainment industries, but unlike your predecessors, book publishers have the chance to get so much right while the market is young.

And in reaction to the same Rich (NYT) article, Mike Shatzkin had a longer piece challenging the widely accepted negative perception of online and free content (IdealogBlog):

The other study was done by my colleague Brian O’Leary in conjunction with O’Reilly Media and Random House. The methodology was similar to what Hilton employed and was reported by O’Leary and Mac Slocum of O’Reilly at Tools of Change last February. Now they have published a Research Paper with O’Leary’s findings which is available from O’Reilly. What O’Leary found, using Random House data on ebook giveaways and O’Reilly Media data on books found on pirate sites, was that there was a correlation between free distribution and a sales lift for the books in question. But O’Leary cautions, “correlation is not causality”; the fact that sales rose after piracy and giveaway doesn’t mean sales rose because of piracy and giveaway. Both O’Leary and Hilton say more data is needed to come to any definitive conclusions.

Richard Curtis notes that 'quickies' are less prevalent in publishing than the average conference goer might assume. (E-Reads):

Though the New York Times's Andrew Adam Newman describes the process as "just a blink of a book editor’s bespectacled eye," it looks pretty glacial to a YouTube generation that knew everything it needed to know within hours of the astounding event. Sure, some of those ten months from splashdown to publication date were taken up by writing the book - something that quickie-watchers tend to overlook. Still, it plays up the immense disparity between pre- and post-digital quickies. “In the old days," says the book's editor Jonathan Galassi, "it would be ideally a year from delivery of the manuscript to publication, but now I’m hoping we can do books in four months.”

Alas, four months is about 119 days too long by 21st century standards, and so no matter what Farrar does to goose (awful pun intended) the Flight 1549 book along, a quickie will always be a slowie unless the publisher goes out with it as an original e-book. And some of us have real problems with traditional publishers releasing e-book originals. Farrar, Straus & Giroux being the quintessentially traditional publisher, it's hard to know what they're going to do if they have to publish a true quickie. But Galassi says help is on the way in the form of "measures that include editing copy electronically and streamlining design."