MediaWeek (Vol 3, No 8): Larsson Trilogy (or More), Learning, Reader's Digest, BGov.

If you want to see the first movie versions of those very popular Stieg Larsson books you will need to look hard because they don't have a US distributor this despite the fact that they have collected all kinds of critical support in Europe. The last (or is there a fourth?) title has been available in the UK for months but will not be out in the US for many more so while waiting amuse yourself with a profile of the actress who plays Lisbeth Salander and contemplate George Clonney for Mikael Blomkvist: Could it happen? - Times Online

It is Salander, the unlikeliest of literary heroines, with whom Rapace has become inextricably entwined. As the character’s screen embodiment, she has starred in all three film adaptations of the books, the third of which has just opened in Scandinavia. Belatedly, the first one, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, is about to launch in the UK; the other two follow later in the year. It has been worth the wait. The story of the wealthy Vanger family and the unresolved disappearance of the patriarch’s niece in 1966 is far from a trashy screen translation. A superior thriller, it has been nominated for gongs across Europe, not least for its female lead. There is a touch of Salander about Rapace in real life. “I am not senti­mental,” she shrugs. “The prizes, I give them to my manager.” At one point during filming, she even threatened to quit after a blazing row with the director, Niels Arden Oplev. “In every creative circus, it’s good to have some fights,” she offers. “In Sweden, in most film productions, everybody’s friends and everybody’s afraid of conflict.”

Switching gears a bit - The Chronicle of Higher Ed looks at how scholars are looking into how the brain deals with multi-tasking particularly in respect to learning and memory: (Chronicle)

That illusion of competence is one of the things that worry scholars who study attention, cognition, and the classroom. Students' minds have been wandering since the dawn of education. But until recently—so the worry goes—students at least knew when they had checked out. A student today who moves his attention rapid-fire from text-messaging to the lecture to Facebook to note-taking and back again may walk away from the class feeling buzzed and alert, with a sense that he has absorbed much more of the lesson than he actually has. " Heavy multitaskers are often extremely confident in their abilities," says Clifford I. Nass, a professor of psychology at Stanford University. "But there's evidence that those people are actually worse at multitasking than most people." Indeed, last summer Nass and two colleagues published a study that found that self-described multitaskers performed much worse on cognitive and memory tasks that involved distraction than did people who said they preferred to focus on single tasks. Nass says he was surprised at the result: He had expected the multitaskers to perform better on at least some elements of the test. But no. The study was yet another piece of evidence for the unwisdom of multitasking.

The problems of Reader's Digest UK and its imminent collapse may bewilder some but many long time readers will miss the title if it disappears. Here is Alexander McCall Smith's portrayal: Reader's Digest: a teacher, and a friend (Telegraph)

And that was the problem: the Reader's Digest was unashamedly middlebrow. It had no intellectual pretensions: it sought to entertain and, yes, educate its readers. This was at a time when everything was going the other way. It was no longer fashionable to claim an educational role in the mass media – everything had to be entertainment, everything had to be slick and, if possible, sensational. The Reader's Digest clung stubbornly to the notion that mass reading could be part of the process of educating the public about the world. It published popular science; it published factual articles about economics and business, about history and endeavour. This all continued at a time when radio and television were turning away from any serious educational objectives. The Reader's Digest stuck to its mission. It was a magazine for autodidacts.

The NYTimes is to implement sometype of pay wall later this year but some research conducted with smaller newspapers may mean the NYTimes will be forced to reverese its decision quickly thereafter. From Viewsflow, Early newspaper paywall results suggest that the New York Times' plan is doomed (Viewsflow) Fancy yourself a writer, then perhaps you should follow some of these simple rules: Ten rules for writing fiction (Guardian)

From Roddy Doyle, Number One: Do not place a photograph of your ­favourite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide.

News a few weeks ago that Bloomberg is to build a legal reference product to compete with West and LexisNexis is now followed by confirmation that the company also intends to build a government data reference business. (Acquisitions anyone?) Washington Technology

Mark Amtower first reported the rumor earlier today on his Amtower B2G blog. Bloomberg officials confirmed the acquisition when contacted by Washington Technology, but would comment on the value of the deal or expand on Bloomberg’s strategy in the government space. However, rumors have swirled in recent months about Bloomberg wanting to create a Bloomberg Government business to be named Bgov. The enterprise will compete with the likes of Congressional Quarterly, but with a focus on how government actions impact publicly traded companies.

United had a chance to go top this weekend and blew it.

Why don't Libraries Have Publishing Programs? - Repost

Originally posted 4/9/2007

My introduction to Charles Bukowski occurred via the display cases inside the Boston University library lobby, and I was drawn to them because I happened to be working in the library's special collections department at the time. The special collections department at BU is quite renowned and was established by Dr. Howard Gotlieb who recently died. (Gotlieb actually wrote one of my recommendations for business school). My job was less intellectual than hired muscle since the library was becoming so overwhelmed with boxed submissions they needed someone to unload the stuff and place the materials in uniform boxes on shelves. I didn't have too much time to peruse the material in some of these boxes but I do recall a wealth of material from Herbert Swope and Fletcher Knebel, who's boxes were filled with photos of JFK and his family while they were all in the White House.

Some of the material deposited wasn't quite so moving or important (at least to my eyes) and in many cases it was clear that entire desk draws had been upended into a box and sent off to BU. These boxes often included things like gum, blank paper, pens, pennies, paper clips and other detritus which had minimal residual value to scholars. BU did have several archivists responsible for cataloging the vast amount of stuff that was deposited. They seemed to work fairly methodically (slowly) to identify the important material and provide tables of content for scholars. Increasingly, the material in formal special collections libraries like BU and in local libraries is being digitized and there is little doubt that this will accelerate. Books constitute some of this material and are included in scanning projects but the bulk of material in these collections would be non-book format material such as documents, letters, posters, art work, banners, etc.

Displaying this material is regarded as an important activity at libraries. After all, they have expended the effort to collect and catalog the material and they want people to know they have it. Hence the display cases at BU and in the lobbies of many other libraries. On a sales call to a small public library in Redlands CA a number of years ago, our meeting was held in the special collections room which contained their collection of local southern Californian historical material. Much of this material probably doesn't exist anywhere else and sadly patrons had to ask for permission to enter the room. With the glacial progression towards digitization of this material it does mean that patrons will eventually have more access to this material online but it will take some time.

Digitization will enable more opportunities for the library to benefit commercially from this material and I am curious why more libraries are not recognising these opportunities. Two of these include the electronic version of the traditional display case and traditional publishing. Both of these require the touch of the archivist/curator to prioritize, explain and make relevant the chosen material. Not everything in a collection will be important or interesting enough for the average patron and the editing function remains important to ensure that the interest of the patron is held through the presentation. The electronic version of the display cases are computer terminals and/or online access that enable some self-directed exploration of the material and these are showing up in some libraries. In an electronic collection, this material should be available to other institutions that want to access it where the material could add to or enhance material they may be also be featuring. The network aspects of intermingling collections and expertise is nascent in the library world but could become a very exciting area of study. Increasingly, much like museums, libraries will be able to develop programs and special events that feature their special collections content not only at a reasonable cost but also as a revenue generator.

Traditional publishing can also support and enhance the display and exploitation of library special collections. Many of us are familiar with the Museum shop experience which can be irritating because it often appears overly commercial; however, the reason these shops exist is basic economics. The products sold are a material support to the institutions. In the case of virtually all museums the institutions retain extensive publishing programs for everything from books and exhibition catalogs, to greeting cards, post cards and posters. Digitization will allow even small libraries to leverage their content in revenue producing ways. Ideally, the most savvy library administrators are going to realize that the opportunity for revenue could actually pay for the the digitization. After I graduated from BU, I became the book buyer at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and that experience showed me the intense focus on leveraging their collection in all commercial aspects is critical to retail revenues, special events and shows and donor participation. Obviously, the correlation with your typical local library and the MFA is tenuous but the lessons are there to be learned in how to build new and recurring revenue streams that can be channelled back into the library.

Once in digital (leverageable) format it is no slam dunk that your typical librarian is going to be able to produce a printed book but today there are more readily available options for print production. All of the 'photo book' providers such as Blurb.com, picaboo.com etc. offer templates and functionality that could provide that basis for a publishing program. At least something they could test without too much downside. The downside of these providers is that the retail price point for these products would probably be too high to create much demand. On the other hand, the self-publishing programs offered by lulu.com, exlibris and iUniverse may be the answer especially as they become more sophisticated about format and color. Even now, quality from these vendors is high enough that patrons would pay for the books. As any Museum publisher will tell you, the popularity of their in-house titles published to support both specific events and to show case their collection would amaze in the number of annual units sold. I am convinced that there is a business opportunity or consulting practice here for someone to help libraries build publishing programs or digital collections that will enhance their revenue base.

Not every library is going to have a collection worthy of digitization, but those that do will increasingly see revenue opportunities from catalogs or a publishing program. Who knows perhaps BU will get around to publishing their Charles Bukowski collection.

MediaWeek (Vol 3, No 7): Amis, Plagiarism, Demand Media, "Botulism"

Martin Amis muses about the fourth estate (Guardian):

About 90% of the coverage has passed me by, but some new tendencies are clear enough. What's different, this time round, is that the writer, or this writer, gets blamed for all the slanders he incites in the press. Some quite serious commentators (DJ Taylor, for one) have said that I'm controversial-on-purpose whenever I have a book coming out. Haven't they noticed that the papers pick up on my remarks whether I have a book coming out or not? And how can you be ­controversial- on-purpose without ceasing to care what you say? The Telegraph, on its front page, offers the following: "Martin Amis: 'Women have too much power for their own good'." This is the equivalent of "Rowan Williams: 'Christianity is a vulgar fraud'." I suppose the Telegraph was trying to make me sound "provocative". Well, they messed that up too. I don't sound ­provocative. I sound like a much-feared pub bore in Hove. And yet experienced journalists will look me in the eye and solemnly ask, "Why do you do it?" They are not asking me why I say things in public (which is an increasingly pertinent question). They are asking me why I deliberately stir up the newspapers. How can they have such a slender understanding of their own trade? Getting taken up (and recklessly distorted) in the newspapers is not something I do. It's something the news- ­ papers do. The only person in England who can manipulate the fourth estate is, appropriately, Katie Price. But there I go again. No, the vow of silence looks more and more attractive. That would be a story too, but it would only be a story once. Wouldn't it?

Is plagiarism the new black? Interview with a young successful author/artist who admits to 'mixing' rather than steeling content from others. She even gets and endorsement from one of the 'victims' (NYTimes):

For the obviously gifted Ms. Hegemann, who already had a play (written and staged) and a movie (written, directed and released in theaters) to her credit, it was an early ascension to the ranks of artistic stardom. That is, until a blogger last week uncovered material in the novel taken from the less-well-known novel “Strobo,” by an author writing under the nom de plume Airen. In one case, an entire page was lifted with few changes. As other unattributed sources came to light, outsize praise quickly turned to a torrent of outrage, reminiscent of the uproar in 2006 over a Harvard sophomore, Kaavya Viswanathan, who was caught plagiarizing numerous passages in her much praised debut novel. But Ms. Hegemann’s story took a very different turn. On Thursday, Ms. Hegemann’s book was announced as one of the finalists for the $20,000 prize of the Leipzig Book Fair in the fiction category. And a member of the jury said Thursday that the panel had been aware of the plagiarism charges before they made their final selection.

NY Times reporter Bill Carter, who wrote the book on the 'Late Night Wars' is set to pen an up-t0-date book on the recent Conan-Leno fracas (Gawker):

Carter said he isn't taking a Team Conan or Team Jay stance now—or in the book. "I obviously have to reach out to all sides," he said. "For the longest time, I personally tried to watch as many episodes of all the shows as I could to get sense of each show, and what each guy does. I don't just pick one and stick with that guy." Although the book will touch on many of the TV industry's struggles, Carter said he is focusing on the recent late-night infighting. "It's fun to have something to write about again," he said. Carter's 1992 The Late Shift: Letterman, Leno, and the Network Battle for the Night had exclusive details about one of televisions most infamous power struggles: the original battle between NBC, CBS, Jay Leno and David Letterman for Johnny Carson's seat on the Tonight Show. The Late Shift revealed secret NBC documents; Johnny Carson's role in Letterman's decision to join CBS; and ridiculous scenes like Jay Leno hiding in a closet to spy on a secret NBC staff meeting. It was later turned into an 1996 HBO movie.

Libraries seeking to migrate to eBooks and send print volumes to deep storage find it's not so easy: InsideHigherEd (And, yes that is the worst web site design ever).

But campus resistance to digital creep might not boil down to simple antiquarianism. Notwithstanding Apple’s new iPad, the e-reader market may be as unprepared to be embraced by academe as academe is to embrace e-books. “Although some e-book standards such as ePub are beginning to emerge, there is still significant flux and divergence from those standards,” Henry and Spiro write. “Standards are important in enabling consumers to read content from multiple publishers on their devices, to move content around to multiple devices, and to preserve books for the long-term.” Though e-books are poised to gain a firm foothold in higher education within the decade, the authors predict, academics and e-reader vendors aren't yet on the same page. This is largely due to the fact that e-readers have not managed to replicate certain aspects of the traditional book-reader's user experience: “You can do a lot with a print book: photocopy or scan as many pages as you like, scrawl in the margins, highlight passages, bookmark pages, skip around, read it in the bathtub, give it to someone else, make art out of it, etc.,” the Rice researchers note. “Due to constraints imposed by some [Digital Rights Management] regimes, readers of e-books may find that they only can print a limited number of pages, have to navigate awkwardly through the book, cannot take notes or bookmark pages, and cannot give the book to someone else.” While they enjoy the searchability of electronic documents and databases, academics still prefer holding a book in their hands to read it. These advantages come at a price, though. Print volumes are, after all, voluminous — a property that implies a series of relatively pricey preservation costs. According to Courant and Nielsen, these work out to an average of $4.26 per book, per year when you take into account, maintenance, cleaning, electricity for temperature control, staffing, and circulation, as well as the considerable funds that go into building and renovating centrally located, open-stack facilities to house the volumes

Profile of Demand Media and their 'factory' approach to content creation (Guardian):

And it is changing, indeed. It is not only that 7,000 freelance editors, writers and video producers as well as 650 copy editors work for the company. Demand Media produces more than 4,500 items of content a day, and it uses algorithms to produce that content most effectively. Previously, news organizations published content based on what their editors thought readers were interested in. Now, the internet gives publishers access to hundreds of millions of people's search queries. That is where Demand Media's algorithms come in. "Our search algorithm delivers keywords like 'pruning roses', 'naming babies', or 'hiking'," says Rosenblatt. "We take these keywords and turn them into article titles, and use that to influence what we are going to create." But Demand Media is taking it further. After learning about web users' interests, Demand Media calculates if an article is commercially relevant. The company calculates the advertising demand by using another database, and looks if there isn't too much competition for its content because the topic has been widely reported online. If the outcome is correct, it assigns a freelancer to produce content.

French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy extensively cites a fake philosopher in his new book (NYTimes):

For the debut of his latest weighty title, “On War in Philosophy,” the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy made the glossy spreads of French magazines with his trademark panache: crisp, unbuttoned white Charvet shirts, golden tan and a windswept silvery mane of hair. But this glamorous literary campaign was suddenly marred by an absolute philosophical truth: Mr. Lévy backed up the book’s theories by citing the thought of a fake philosopher. In fact, the sham philosopher has never been a secret, and even has his own Wikipedia entry .... In his newest book, Mr. Lévy attacked the 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant as a madman, and in support cited the Paraguayan lectures of Jean-Baptiste Botul to his 20th-century followers. In fact Mr. Botul is the longtime creature of Frédéric Pagès, a journalist with the satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaîné. “We’ve had a big laugh, obviously,” Mr. Pagès said of Mr. Lévy. “This one was an error that was really simple that the media immediately understood.” Mr. Pagès has never made a secret of his fictional philosopher, who has a fan club that meets monthly in salons throughout Paris. Mr. Botul’s school of thought is called Botulism, his followers are botuliennes and they debate such weighty theories as the metaphysics of flab. As they describe it, Mr. Botul’s astonishing ideas ranged from phenomenology to cheese, sausages, women’s breasts and the transport of valises during the 1930s.

Hamstrung by computer issues over the past week or so that accounts for the tardiness.

All about the T Shirt

I had some fun with my latest blurb book. It is quite silly but I got to the point where I had to throw out some of my collection and thus decided to commit them to print posterity.

It's all about...

By Michael Cairns

Book Preview

Tracking the Reader

Instinct and intuition are the stuff of the editor when it comes to deciding which books and which articles will resonate with a reader. As the circuitry of the web forges deeper into our daily lives the data 'exhaust' trails of our activity begin to offer real clues as to what interests us and what engages our attention. Often - and I will bet with increasingly frequency - the material that generates attention from readers is not what the editors expected.

I've long believed that content databases sold into the academic library and to the scholarly world could build a robust market catering to the average consumer. There's an in-bred bias against the level of interest and the intelligence of the average Joe in 'scholarly' material. This perspective seems to preclude many of the purveyors of journals and full text databases making their database content available to consumers. Increasingly this will change and better tools to aid consumers will be important in this expansion: Gale, for example, has begun to disaggregate some of their database content to make it available for consumers. I think this is an intelligent move in that they are leaving it to the end-user to decide whether the content is too advanced for them (and typically it will not be).

In the NYTimes, John Tierney takes a look some research that was under-taken by the University of Pennsylvania examining which types of NYT articles are most distributed via email:

The results are surprising — well, to me, anyway. I would have hypothesized that there are two basic strategies for making the most-e-mailed list. One, which I’ve happily employed, is to write anything about sex. The other, which I’m still working on, is to write an article headlined: “How Your Pet’s Diet Threatens Your Marriage, and Why It’s Bush’s Fault.”

But it turns out that readers have more exalted tastes, according to the Penn researchers, Jonah Berger and Katherine A. Milkman. People preferred e-mailing articles with positive rather than negative themes, and they liked to send long articles on intellectually challenging topics.

There is some discussion delving further into motivation and the article continues near the end with this:

The motivation for mailing these awe-inspiring articles is not as immediately obvious as with other kinds of articles, Dr. Berger said. Sharing recipes or financial tips or medical advice makes sense according to classic economic utility theory: I give you something of practical value in the hope that you’ll someday return the favor. There can also be self-interested reasons for sharing surprising articles: I get to show off how well informed I am by sending news that will shock you.

But why send someone an exposition on quantum mechanics? In some cases, it, too, could be a way of showing off, particularly if you accompanied the article with a note like, “Perhaps this will amuse, although of course it’s a superficial treatment. Why can’t they use Schrödinger’s full equation?”

All told, data begins to lead the way in the formation of content that readers will react to whether by reading it or sharing it within their social circle. More importantly, the data begins to document the wide interests of users and their faculty with material that in the past editors may have regarded as of little interest to their readers or deemed the material 'too advanced' for the average Joe. Happily, some of these walls are falling as data reflecting real experience shows the way.

MediaWeek (Vol 3, No 5): Google Wave, Reed Elsevier, Lexis/West, Elsevier,

Google Wave could be part of Google's plan to enter the educational market: eSchool News

Raymond Schroeder, director of the University of Illinois’s Center for Online Learning, Research, and Service, said an instant replay of students’ waves answers “the age-old question posed to faculty members: How do you know that everyone contributed to the project?”

“With playback, you can view the wave in time-lapse, blip by blip—even those that are deleted. You can see who contributed what at what time to the wave,” said Schroeder, adding that free access to Wave could be a fiscal godsend for IT officials whose budgets have dwindled over the past two years. “Free is very good,” he said. Schroeder became one of the country’s first campus IT officials to use Google Wave last month when he connected Illinois’s Internet in American Life course with a class from Ireland’s Institute of Technology at Sligo, participating in a wave that focused in the internet’s role in energy sustainability.

Setting Reed Elsevier to rights may mean break up (Times):

Sales remain weak and margins are heading south. Reed urgently needs to catch up on the investment it should have made in its information tools years ago. LexisNexis, its database for lawyers, is losing market share in the giant US legal market to Westlaw, owned by Thomson Reuters. Only Elsevier, its science and healthcare arm, is still growing. Thomas Singlehurst at Citigroup thinks the group as a whole will not return to topline growth until the end of the year.

Reed shares rallied 13% in December but have trailed the wider market by 26% in the past year. Trading at 13 times this year’s forecast earnings flatters its weak earnings profile. What is Erik Engstrom, Smith’s replacement, to do? In these cases, the kitchen sink is the favoured option. Engstrom is not ready with a revival plan yet, so painting a bleak picture of the trading environment and writing off lots of good will should do the trick. The nettle he has to grasp is closing down the remnants of business publisher RBI, where trading is in freefall, and selling off its exhibitions arm. It could raise £1.2 billion and it is essential to pay down its £4 billion debt pile.

With a lack of ideas coming from Reed, analysts are coming up with their own. Claudio Aspesi at Bernstein thinks a complete break-up becomes an option if LexisNexis cannot fight back against Westlaw. That plan has plenty of merit. Selling databases to lawyers and journals to academics has as much in common as the meat trays and cigarette filters that were demerged from each other when Reed chairman Anthony Habgood ran packaging combine Bunzl.

More of the revamped Lexis and West legal database products (Law Tech News):

Online legal research is not an easy activity. An entire industry has grown up around interpreting research needs and finding information for lawyers and their clients. Researchers have to remember where information resides, e.g., which database, and extract relevant documents in a compressed amount of time using Boolean or natural language search strategies, prayers, and perhaps a Ouija board.

Last year, Google Scholar and Public.Resource.Org made legal information more available and easier to search. This year at LegalTech New York, LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters aim to change the way users interface legal research tasks. And these changes, at once, appear to make legal research easier and more effective.

LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters are putting their best assets forward with Lexis for Microsoft Office and WestlawNext, respectively, to bring value to the legal information stored in their repositories and make search easier and more effective for legal professionals. LexisNexis draws on its experience in enabling content-related workflows and the IP in LSA to put legal research in Microsoft Office and SharePoint Server. Thomson Reuters incorporates its work product in digests, headnotes, indices, and more into WestSearch.

ImageSpan teams with Arvato Finance to create a global clearinghouse for digital content (MarinIJ)

ImageSpan connected with Arvato, a Dublin, Ireland-based subsidiary of media giant Bertelsmann, to streamline its LicenseStream service, which wraps a photo with tracking information that allows its owner to identify who is using it on the Web. Arvato operates Payment Lounge, a payment system that takes the money from a licensee and then distributes the proper share of the revenues to the different parties that created or distributed it. "By joining LicenseStream with Arvato Finance's PaymentLounge services we are creating a new category of infrastructure that addresses a monetization gap - an automated content clearinghouse - and generates revenues for content producers and owners in several significant ways," said Iain Scholnick, ImageSpan's chief executive officer.

The company launched LicenseStream in 2008 and it has inked deals with a number of large digital content owners, including the Chicago Tribune newspaper and McEvoy Group, publisher of media properties such as Spin magazine and Chronicle Books. ImageSpan tracks how many times a photo is viewed and thereby can figure out how much money the news site would have to pay the owner of the content.

From the @twitter:

Amazon Said to Buy Touch Start-Up (NYTimes)

Pearson buys Medley to aid FT's move to digital (EveningStandard) Adds more 'premium services' for FT subscribers.

Hachette tells US court: revised Settlement worse than first: (Bookseller)

ScrollMotion tapped by publishers to develop textbook apps for iPad (AppleInsider)

CQPress/Sage launches custom textbook publishing operation for professors. (CQPress) (LibreDigital platform).

Elsevier announce Pageburst (Elsevier)

Munich: February 6th 1958 - Repost

Originally posted on 2/6/08.

Today is the 50th anniversary of the air crash that killed eight members of the Manchester United football team among 23 who died when a plane they were on crashed on take-off. It was the aircraft’s third attempt to gain altitude but the snow and ice that had accumulated on the plane and slush at the end of the runway ensured it never achieved the lift necessary for take-off. The plane clipped a fence at the end of the runway and split open on impact. The team members who died were Roger Byrne, Billy Whelan, Tommy Taylor, Duncan Edwards, Mark Jones, Eddie Colman, Geoff Bent and David Pegg. It is hard to underestimate the impact the tragedy had on Manchester and England at the time. All were members of a youthful team dubbed the Busby Babes so named after the team's manager. Many of the dead not only played team football but had already been named to the full England team despite their youth. There was a wider context in that the crash occurred only 13 years after the end of WW2 and this team somehow represented a new generation free from the expectation of deprivation and war. In contrast to the US, the nation was only just starting to come out of the war years and rationing had only just ended.

Duncan Edwards, ‘the young colossus’ was the soul of the team. At 21, he survived the actual crash but died from his injuries 15 days later. Perhaps the intervening years have added to his mystique but even in his day he was considered a special footballer. Bobby Charlton who survived the crash and went on to a phenomenal club and international career has said he was "his hero and a beautiful, beautiful footballer and he has never seen one better." Bobby played with George Best and against Pele, Eusebio, Beckenbauer among other great players of the 1960s and 1970s. Family legend has it that some of the team were billeted in a rooming house my grandfather owned near the ground and that my father had a kick-around with Duncan and the other team members from time to time.

Manchester United is a world club just like the Yankees but bigger. The Munich disaster punctuates any discussion about the team - even today, whether the fan is in Japan, China or England. It is one of those club facts that a new fan - or in my case a young fan becoming more aware - is confronted with. At the ground, despite all its changes in the years since, still has a clock set to the time and date of the crash. No one visiting the ground can fail to see it.

No one knows what the Busby Babes team could have accomplished. This team, with an average age about 22, had already won the league title twice and the night of the crash they went into the semi-final of the European Cup for the second straight year. Sir Matt Busby, who almost died in the crash, went on to rebuild the team around the nucleus of the remaining players. It took another ten years until the team led by Bobby Charlton and another Busby wunderkind named George Best conquered Europe. Today, and this weekend there will be commemorations about this event for ‘the young players with the world at their feet – suddenly no more,” lest we not forget them.

Manchester United
BBC
Football Focus

Beyond the Book: Does Piracy Improve Book Sales?

At the Digital Book World conference last week, founder and principal of Magellan Media Brian O’Leary discussed research his firm has conducted that shows that eBook sales are boosted by pirated copies of eBooks. Brian discussed these findings with Chris Kenneally, host of Copyright Clearance Center’s Beyond the Book (http://bit.ly/d2w2TY).

Brian explains that the publishing industry has always given away content in order to sell content by citing examples like book readings, signings, etc. For more details, you can see the transcript of the interview here: http://www.beyondthebookcast.com/wp-images/OLearyDBWTranscript.pdf

MediaWeek (Vol 3, No 4): Elsevier, Gale/Questia, Legal Improvements,

Elsevier Launches Next-Generation Digital Learning Platform (Elsevier Press Release):

Accessible offline or online through Elsevier's market-leading Evolve portal, Pageburst is Elsevier's new platform for accessing a much wider array of features and functionality for its digital textbooks. Pageburst is easy for faculty and students to access and use and is delivered through the device most college students already have - a computer.

Elsevier's community of health education experts designed Pageburst to enhance the way health professions students think, learn, and study. For example, students will be able to create personalized study guides and instantly link content within the text to expert definitions and descriptions in dictionaries and other Elsevier reference works. They will also be able to view a video or animation within the context of applicable textbook content to help clarify complex concepts. Additionally, students can increase retention and easily learn terms that look alike, sound alike or are hard to pronounce by clicking a button to hear the correct pronunciation and meaning.

Fully integrated collaboration tools within Pageburst will help students gain and share knowledge through personal learning networks that connect students, instructors, and user groups directly from within the content. Both students and instructors can embed notes and links directly into textbook content. Additional features include interactive quizzes and activities that can be submitted to an instructor's virtual grade book.

Pageburst is web-based, so it can be accessed anytime, on any device with a supported web browser. Students can also download their content to their desktop or laptop computers to study offline. Unlike other e-Book platforms, Pageburst is at one time: (1) interactive, (2) with book content available both on-and-offline that (3) will be available to the student over the course of their lives after a single purchase. Students can also download an iTunes application that syncs highlighted material along with accompanying notes with their iPhone or iPod Touch, enabling quick, anytime access to the information they need most.

Student to Save Money by Using Pageburst vs. Print Textbooks

Unlike the average undergraduate student seeking deeply discounted content for one semester, health professions students are more likely to retain their textbooks for future classes and to reference in professional practice. Still, Pageburst users will save up to 20 percent off the print price on each title, plus benefit from the suite of electronic enhancements. The nation's approximate 1.2 million nursing and health professions students often purchase several books per semester, and on average more than half of those books are Elsevier titles. With the digital textbooks on Pageburst, that means students can not only save substantial dollars, but also benefit by cross-referencing multiple books on one integrated platform. Titles purchased on Pageburst do not expire; they can be downloaded to a user's hard drive and accessed indefinitely.

More than 550 of Elsevier's most-used book titles are available on the platform, including Potter's Fundamentals of Nursing, Chabner's Language of Medicine, and Lewis's Medical Surgical Nursing.

At Digital Book World this week Verso presented interesting market research on 'avid readers' and the market for eBook readers: (Verso Presentation) Long inside view of the new Westlaw, Lexis & Bloomberg Platforms (ABA Journal):

Both companies claim to be creating a legal research experience that will mimic the ease of use their customers have come to expect from the leading Internet search engine, Google. The updated services come not a moment too soon, since the Mountain View, Calif.-based search engine has just gotten into the legal research business. In November, the company announced that its Scholar search engine now contains more than 80 years of U.S. case law from federal and state courts, as well as U.S. Supreme Court decisions dating back to 1791—all of it free. Like a handful of smaller legal research companies that mostly serve solo practitioners and smaller law firms, Google built its service by aggregating the case law made available on the Internet by courts nationwide in recent years. Those companies have been slowly but surely nipping at the heels of West and LexisNexis at the low end of the market, where customers are most price-sensitive. With Google joining them, that price pressure is likely only to grow.

... Peter Warwick, chief executive of Thomson Reuters’ legal unit, allows that “the demand for legal services is less, so that helps to drive what goes on in legal research. Clearly we are impacted by that as a whole, which is to say that there isn’t the same underlying rate of growth in our business as there was a year ago.” Warwick’s eye is on the prize of increasing market share. To accomplish that goal, he says, his company must make sure it is offering a product that lawyers want. “There’s less growth in the market than we’ve seen for a number of years,” Warwick says, “but the need for the type of products and services that we have has never been stronger.” ... At the biggest law firms, the companies may be testing the limits of how much information beyond pure legal research content is too much. Fried Frank’s Rine may have already reached her limit. “It’s a challenge. You have to make such an investment in these products. And they keep adding more and more content, often duplicating what’s included in other services we already subscribe to. But we don’t necessarily need all that content, and we can’t continue paying different vendors for the same information,” she says.

The excellent book by Denis Lehane, Shutter Island gets the graphic novel treatment (Paste) and is also an upcoming movie directed by Martin Scorsese. From the @twitter this week: Some controversy in library land this week with Ebsco having gained exclusive access to some magazine content. How much seems debatable and following 'open-letters' from other vendors Ebsco defends itself (ResourceShelf)

EBSCO has many agreements with many publishers, and is very open about the fact that our databases include dramatically more unique content than other aggregators. We think publishers choose to work with EBSCO because we listen to their concerns and attempt to find solutions that work for the publisher and for libraries. Publishers appreciate that we respect the value of their content and do not sublicense their content to free websites that compete with libraries and each publisher’s core business. ... While Gale is correct that ongoing full text for Forbes will be available via some EBSCOhost full-text databases and not Gale’s; their depiction of the way this happened is not accurate. In fact, Forbes told us that they received multiple bids from library market aggregators and simply decided to go with EBSCO.

Elisabeth Murdoch: ‘Borderline Piracy May Be Our Best Outlet’ PaidContent

“Fans remain the best salesmen of our content, even if that behavior is on the borderline of piracy. Danger of the new world is that we must concede that we’ll lose some control,” Murdoch, who owns TV producer Shine, said in a speech to the NATPE TV conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday. That must take us to “the borderline of piracy”, she said, according to Broadcasting & Cable.

The head of the Interactive Ad Bureau Randall Rothenberg delivers an 'iRant' against the iPad. (MediaPost)

In the iPad's case, Rothenberg takes issue specifically with its lack of support for Adobe Flash, a core element of much online display advertising. Ad executives interviewed Wednesday also cited the iPad's lack of Flash as a drawback but welcomed the device's larger screen size as a plus for mobile marketing. But the iPad still is not as bad as Amazon's Kindle, "more akin to a company town, with everything from access to product offerings to pricing tightly managed." Increasingly, "degree of openness" will be the key differentiator among all the walled gardens springing up around the Web, he argues. Netflix streaming is fairly close, Boxee is more open. But overall, fragmentation is growing.

In an interesting move, Gale has acquired Questia: (Press Release)

Gale, part of Cengage Learning, has acquired the assets of Questia Media, Inc., a leading provider of information and educational resources to students through its questia.com and questiaschool.com products. Questia provides a premium subscription-based online information service that gives users access to more than 76,000 books from 300+ publishers and millions of articles from journals, magazines and newspapers. “Questia has developed excellent products for learners and educators, with quality content and unique technologies created specifically for college students, professors and high school students,” said Patrick C. Sommers, president, Gale. “The business has a solid subscription base and is developing unique applications to extend its reach to users around the world. “Questia will further broaden Gale’s extensive content base, by adding information from tens of thousands of scholarly books selected from leading publishers to support learning in high school and college. In addition, it will enhance Gale’s offerings with new research and productivity tools, lesson plans and professional development for the classroom,” said Sommers. “But perhaps most importantly, Questia will expand our depth and reach to users who begin their search for information on the Web,” said Sommers. “A major focus at Gale is reaching users wherever they do their research and connecting them with high-quality content and the resources of their library. We see considerable synergy with Gale’s HighBeam, Encyclopedia.com and AccessMyLibrary services, as well as our library products, and we look forward to the expansion of content and services that will result from this combination of resources.”

New Moon Over Big Smoke

A Digital Concierge - Repost

Friday again which means I repost something from the archive and since I mentioned this in my panel at dbw I thought it reasonable to repost. It was originally from May 21, 2009.

Authors, writers, illustrators, photographers, etc all need to produce content for publishers but doing so in a world increasingly dominated by technology becomes a challenge. The more technology is interwoven into the creation and leverage of content, the more it becomes clear that pro-actively managing the intersection between content creator and technology represents an imperative for publishers. Publishers want their contributors to focus on content creation not the help desk. As functional responsibilities change within publishing houses, we will begin to see the morphing of the roles of editorial, marketing and promotions assistants into something akin to a ‘digital concierge’

Functional responsibilities are changing within a publishing house not least because the publishing process becomes less linear. It will no-longer be typical that a book ‘commissioned’ or ‘acquired’ sits proudly at the front end of a long sequential set of steps that ultimately lands the book on a shelf somewhere. In the new model, a book may be the last item produced after what may look from today’s perspective like a meandering route to publication. Truth is, there may not be ‘a model’ as publishers become more attuned to how consumers want to interact with content and as they experiment. Finding and engaging with an audience becomes both fractured and expansive and options to interact can seem at odds: facebook versus Myspace or twitter versus friendfeed, and a publisher is unlikely to want their ‘investment’ (i.e. The Author) to be distracted by those considerations. Not only will publishers build these relationships on their authors’ behalf, they will see doing so as an additional content creation opportunity. The ‘traditional book’ may reside at the center of additional supporting material from on-line chat to Powerpoint webinars to audio and video interviews. Of course, the book may also be a secondary rather than primary outcome of one of these publisher/author social communities.

Social networking is a catch-all phrase that can describe many things, but typically we use it to explain the concept of reaching customers via the web; whether the consumer takes specific action – commenting or emailing – thereby involving them with the content, or the creator (author and publisher) pushes interaction using tools like facebook, twitter and myspace. This can all be overwhelming to an author and, left to their own devices, they are likely to be unsuccessful; hence, the concept of a digital concierge.

The job of digital concierge grows in significance as more and more material is introduced to the market via the web. As mentioned above, the web community around an author almost becomes their studio where new material is introduced, discussed and ‘published’. The author will require a digital concierge who will marry and blend the appropriate technology tools so they are not a distraction to the content producer and they compliment the experience of the consumer. There is much to ponder here as trade book content moves to the web and the role of the publisher changes. While the job description for the digital concierge may not be written yet, I see this position as potentially critical to the successful migration from a trade print world to one dominated by social communities.

Pirates as Product Development

There were numerous fine presentations at the Digital Book World this week - notably the panel discussion featuring Larry Kirshbaum, Michael Cader, Evan Schnittman and Ken Brooks - which I think added a lot to our understanding of where we are in the eBook evolution.

Not to dismiss any other discussion, I thought the simple, clean direct - almost matter-of-fact - presentation by Liza Daly that described the typical consumer experience in finding, downloading and reading an eBook was one of the highlights. If that presentation didn't leave publishers thinking about the eBook versions of their titles then there's no hope.

During the course of her presentation and almost as an aside, she noted that there are many pirated eBook versions of books that are actually significantly better designed and presented than the legit version. Hence the title of this post; rather than shutting the Pirate down why not adopt the pirated version and use it instead as the legit version? Hey, why not hire the pirate?

I know, I know...

Just Like Magic: The Harry Potter Economy

I've such a backlog that I am still on The Economist Christmas Special. Here is a selection from an article on the The Harry Potter economy (Economist):

In fact the Harry Potter books were the iceberg. As each book appeared it drew new readers to the series and expanded sales of earlier books in a snowball effect. Thanks largely to the boy wizard, Bloomsbury’s turnover, which had gradually increased from £11m in 1995 to £14m in 1997, took off. In 1999 it stood at £21m. Two years later it was £61m. By the middle of this decade, with Bloomsbury’s revenues above £100m, rival publishers were griping that there was no point bidding against the firm for a children’s title. So far the books, which are published in America by Scholastic, have sold more than 400m copies worldwide. Not all were read by the young. Central to the books’ success was a repackaging, with a darker cover, for adults embarrassed about being seen reading a children’s book.

Mr Newton says he became “fearful and respectful” of the windfall. A sudden hit can destabilise any company, but the danger is acute in the swaggering media industry. Bloomsbury banked a lot of the money, and has taken advantage of the slump in asset prices to pick up specialist and scholarly publishers. It now owns Arden, most famous for its series of Shakespeare texts, the legal publisher, Tottel, and the cricketer’s bible, Wisden. Having learned to handle magic, Bloomsbury is thus returning to its Muggle (non-wizard) roots. The ideal, Mr Newton says, is to balance the risks—and large potential profits—of the trade fiction business with the dependability and high margins of specialist publishing.
.....
Fans get up to much more. As the books and films took off, the hunger for Harry Potter news and content quickly became so much greater than Warner Bros or the increasingly press-shy Ms Rowling were able to supply that alternative sources began to spring up. The emerging internet fuelled their growth. The most obvious of them are fan websites like MuggleNet and The Leaky Cauldron, which mix official announcements with rumours. But the most intriguing is the strange world of fan fiction. Ms Rowling’s “worst nightmare” was that her hero would end up on fast-food containers Re-telling the Harry Potter story is a popular pastime. One website dedicated to it, Fiction Alley, added 14 book chapters in November 2009 alone, together with many shorter works. Would-be Rowlings push the Harry Potter story in new directions by focusing on different characters or writing about years not covered in the books. Many plunge into the characters’ romantic lives—perhaps the weakest point of “the canon”, as the original series of books is reverentially known. These amateur stories, which are often subjected to rigorous criticism from other fans, are for the most part competent. The students in them often talk the way teenagers actually talk. “I can’t just be an arse to him for no reason,” splutters Harry at one point in the third book in the “Lily’s Charm” series, by a writer called ObsidianEmbrace. That carries a convincing whiff of the playground.

Remodel at Victoria & Albert Museum

Over Christmas Mrs. PND and I ran into the V&A to get out of the sleet and cold and we were greeted by the fantastic remodel to some of the antiquities galleries. This weekend the NYTimes had a short travel article about the Museum but they only had one photo. Problem solved courtesy of yours truly and flickr.



Flickr Link

FiledBy Launches 50 New Category Websites

From their press release:

FiledBy’s innovative category sites now provide a vertical view of authors and their work and further organize the activity of authors into the categories in which they publish. The new websites aggregate activity taking place on individual FiledBy author sites according to relevant categories and display the activity as authors and their collaborators customize their online presence with photographs, biographies, videos, podcasts, documents and links to other locations like blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and custom author websites. Authors and contributors can locate their work, register with FiledBy, claim a pre-assembled website that already includes all of an author’s work and build an effective online marketing platform with easy to use tools. And now that the aggregation of author-related activity is arranged by subject category, FiledBy becomes an even more compelling place for an author to bring and share audiences.

“We launched FiledBy nine months ago based on the vision that discoverability of books and authors has changed forever due to the impact of the Internet and search,” said Peter Clifton, co-founder and CEO of FiledBy. “We wanted to provide tools that authors and their creative partners could use to easily collect and present authoritative information about themselves and focus on their overall social marketing efforts. To accomplish this, we had to first organize a vast amount of information around the people who create books, rather than simply display the books themselves. Now that information is also available through our category websites.”

Peter is one of my panelists at this weeks Digital Book World conference. If you haven't registered you have until noon to do so and use my discount code.

MediaWeek (Vol 3, No 3): Holmes, Death Booths, War of The Worlds, Education

In the NY Times this morning they come out against extending copyright terms and use Sherlock Holmes as an example (NYTimes):

Sherlock Holmes is a vivid example of what happens when copyright is repeatedly extended. In 1976, an extension of the term of copyright for intellectual property gave Conan Doyle’s daughter an opportunity to recapture the right to her father’s legacy in America, which would otherwise have entered the public domain. The term has since been extended further, and there is every prospect of more battles to keep extending it. The reason might simply be called “The Adventures of the Cash Cow.” The various claimants to the Conan Doyle estate argue that they are protecting the Holmes legacy. But you have to look no further than the local movie theater, where the new “Sherlock Holmes” is playing, to realize that the real goal is protecting a lucrative franchise. The movie is a lot of fun, but Holmes himself — the master of the cerebral has been turned into a brawling action hero — could not be more irreverently served if he were already in the public domain.

(He could be a vampire...) Also in the NYTimes an article on the industry that is James Patterson (NYTimes):

ACCORDING TO FORBES magazine, Patterson earned Hachette about $500 million over the last two years. Hachette disputes the accuracy of these numbers but wouldn’t provide me with different ones. Regardless, it seems safe to assume that Patterson, who puts out more best sellers in any given year than many publishing houses, is responsible for a meaningful portion of the company’s annual revenues. “I like to say that Jim is the rock on which we build this company,” David Young told me in his office one recent morning. Like movie studios, publishing houses have long built their businesses on top of blockbusters. But never in the history of publishing has the blockbuster been so big. Thirty years ago, the industry defined a “hit” novel as a book that sold a couple of hundred thousand copies in hardcover. Today a book isn’t considered a blockbuster unless it sells at least one million copies. The story of the blockbuster’s explosion is, paradoxically, bound up with that of publishing’s recent troubles. They each began with the wave of consolidation that swept through the industry in the 1980s. Unsatisfied with publishing’s small margins, the new conglomerates that now owned the various publishing houses pressed for bigger best sellers and larger profits. Mass-market fiction had historically been a paperback business, but publishers now put more energy and resources into selling these same books as hardcovers, with their vastly more favorable profit margins. At the same time, large stores like Barnes & Noble and Borders were elbowing out independent booksellers. Their growing dominance of the market gave them the leverage to demand wholesale discounts and charge hefty sums for favorable store placement, forcing publishers to sell still more books. Big-box stores like Costco accelerated the trend by stocking large quantities of books by a small group of authors and offering steep discounts on them. Under pressure from both their parent companies and booksellers, publishers became less and less willing to gamble on undiscovered talent and more inclined to hoard their resources for their most bankable authors. The effect was self-fulfilling. The few books that publishers invested heavily in sold; most of the rest didn’t. And the blockbuster became even bigger.

And again in the Times, Motoko Rich realizes that bookclubs aren't for everyone (NYTimes):

There is a different class of reader, though. They feel that their relationship with a book, its characters and the author is too intimate to share. “The pursuit of reading,” Virginia Woolf wrote, “is carried on by private people.” Ms. Stead remembers having had especially intense feelings about books when she was young. “For me, as a kid, a book was a very private world,” she said. “I didn’t like talking about books with other people very much because it almost felt like I didn’t want other people to be in that world with me.” Particularly with the books we adore most, a certain reader wants to preserve the experience for reflection, or even claim the book as hers and hers alone. Lois Lowry, an author of books for children and a two-time winner of the Newbery for “Number the Stars” and “The Giver,” said she recently read that Katherine Paterson, also a two-time Newbery winner and now the national ambassador for young people’s literature, had named “The Yearling,” by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, as the most influential book of her childhood. “I felt a twinge of ‘no fair, that’s mine!’ ” Ms. Lowry said. “I hastily backed off from that feeling because I know and love Katherine, and it’s O.K. that we share the same book.”

Martin Amis in what could be the most extraordinary link you will ever find on this blog is calling for euthanasia booths - "death booths" in common parlance I expect. (Telegraph):

Martin Amis, the novelist, has compared Britain's fast-growing population of elderly people to "an invasion of terrible immigrants", as he called for ‘death booths’ to be placed on street corners so they can kill themselves. ... He did not think it would be "too hard" to have some sort of test that established a person's capacity to decide their own fate, he said.

Larger point may be valid...not sure about the tactics. Penguin has asked authors to select their favorite classic from their list and thus, Will Self on War of The Worlds (Times):

For a modern reader the initial impact of the story is lessened by a sense of scientific anachronism. Unlike Wells, we can’t give any significance to the Italian astronomer Schiaparelli’s observation of canali on the Martian surface (famously mistranslated as “canals”, though he meant “channels”). Certainly, we know — or think we know — that Mars cannot support sentient life. In fact, if there is any life on Mars, it’s more likely to be the kind of microscopic bacteria that in Wells’s book eventually eliminate the invading Martians, despite the vast technological superiority of their teetering tripods, their death rays, their poison gases and their form of biological warfare — the invasive “red weed”. Yet such is the genius of Wells’s storytelling that it doesn’t take much suspension of disbelief before you do begin finding The War of the Worlds horribly credible. Wells knew how to ground the fantastic in the mundane — and what can be more mundane than the late-Victorian Surrey commuter belt? His descriptive skill lay in juxtaposing death rays with dahlias, and milk churns with the aliens’ giant spaceships. As the Martians proceed to lay waste to London and its environs, Wells seems to take a positive glee in this privet-lined Armageddon, a glee never more to the fore than in the book’s two great set pieces.

From The Twitter last week (@personanondata) TeleRead references a on last weeks Google Book Search settlement workshop, by Paul Biba (Teleread) A report on how Online Learning Is Revolutionizing K-12 Education and Benefiting Students (HeritageFoundation):

Virtual or online learning is revolutionizing American education. It has the potential to dramatically expand the educational opportunities of American students, largely overcoming the geographic and demographic restrictions. Virtual learning also has the potential to improve the quality of instruction, while increasing productivity and lowering costs, ultimately reducing the burden on taxpayers. Local, state, and federal policymakers should reform education policies and funding to facilitate online learning, particularly by allowing funding to follow the students to their learning institutions of choice.

Felix Salmon: The Economics of the NYT Paywall (SeekingAlpha):

The way that it seems the NYT paywall is going to work, visitors to nytimes.com will have a free allowance of n articles per month. To read the n+1th article, they will have to pay a subscription fee F. After that, they can read as many articles as they like for the rest of the month. If a visitor to nytimes.com normally reads N articles per month, then the key number in their mind will be N-n. If reading that number of articles is worth more to them than F, they’ll pay the fee. If on the other hand N-n is small, or perceived value-per-article is small, then they won’t pay. Specifically, if the average value to the reader of any given article is v, then they’ll pay the fee when v(N-n)>F.

Two presentations: The ALA Top Tech Trends Panel Focuses on End Users and Ebooks (Library Journal) Social Media, Libraries, and Web 2.0: How American Libraries are Using New Tools for Public Relations and to Attract new Users - Second Survey November 2009 (SlideShare)

Who Wants to Pay for “Content”? - REPOST

Repost Friday and this time from March 9, 2009 a repost that is still somewhat topical given the NYTimes announcement that they would implement a reader toll.

Suggestions newspapers charge for content ignores deeper questions about their value proposition, the fourth estate and democracy.

Reports that the owners of Newsday plan to charge users of their web site for access have been received with equal parts hilarity and incredulity, but this is only one of many public displays of desperation on the part of newspaper owners over the past two or three months. Almost simultaneous with the deluge of bankruptcy filings and threats of closure that have run through Philadelphia, Miami, Chicago, San Francisco, Sacramento and Seattle since Christmas, newspaper owners have been openly discussing the idea of charging for online access. As most readers and users (aka customers) of online news sources know, that approach is not going to work because there is simply no value proposition presented by 99% of the incumbent newspaper businesses.

At a base level, newspapers failed to understand how their customers’ needs had changed over the past twenty years. Instead, newspaper owners chose to focus on maintaining their margins and offering dividends at historically high levels, rather than in reinvesting in the future. Like many businesses, they made a simple but tragic mistake: They thought it would go on forever. Many large publishing companies were content to pat themselves on the back for attaining economies of scale across their trans-national companies which made newspapers in Salem, Oregon and Newport News, look and read virtually the same. In these mid-market locations, while consolidation had made many cities one-newspaper towns, the genesis of what has become one of the biggest dangers to survival of the newspaper industry has emerged. Community reporting, with the diligence and aggression that supported the development and growth of newspapers all the way back to late 17th century England, has been on the wain for years. Sadly, local journalism, as we traditionally know it, is disappearing and, with it, a measure of democracy - particularly as it relates to local, county and state government.

Last week, I was discussing this topic with an acquaintance who lives in a fairly affluent part of Central New Jersey. He noted that, in a wide swath covering eight to ten townships and a number of counties, he wasn’t aware of more than one journalist assigned to that market from the larger state-wide newspapers. In Hoboken (regional HQ for PND), where mayoral and city council budget incompetence has seen our property taxes increase 50% in the past six months, there is rarely any local media coverage nor any attendance at city business meetings by traditional media. And forget investigative reporting - even in a state where you could throw a rock in any direction and hit a shady politician. The lack of journalistic attention means that one of the mainstays of democracy (the fourth estate) is eroded and this is seen starkly in Hoboken, where private citizens are forced (on their own initiative) to file freedom of information requests to gain access to basic public interest materials such as meeting minutes and financial statements.

Recently, a number of New York and New Jersey newspapers announced they would be beginning a content-sharing network that might enable each to focus more on their local news reporting. However, MediaDaily believes cost-cutting is the focus:

The latest iteration of the new content-sharing model brings together The Record of Hackensack, New Jersey, The Star-Ledger of Newark, the Times Union of Albany, the Buffalo News, and New York Daily News, which apparently organized the consortium. According to the papers, the Northeast Consortium "will enhance each publication's coverage in the region by exchanging articles, photographs and graphics." But the club would probably be better described as a cost-cutting measure, given the dire circumstances of many of America's daily newspapers.

Few of the newspapers we currently recognize will survive in the US. It is just a fact, but the irony is that significant news and community markets exist. New entrants will address this market and, in numerous cases, they are already making in-roads to address particular market segments. This brings me back to the notion of charging for “content” which many newspaper companies are debating. Newsday might succeed but only if they are able to establish community, service(s) and context around the reporting they do. The reporting will need to be far deeper and almost, by definition, becomes unique: Both in terms of its relevance to the user and the fact of its collection (after all, no one else is doing it). That’s a tall order for an organization only thinking about slapping a fee on product that looks increasingly generic. In their case (and others are thinking the same thing), asking readers to pay for “content” will fail.

About three years ago, a curious guy set up a website named Hoboken411. He started going to all the council meetings and actually reporting, visiting and reviewing local restaurants, keeping up with local happenings, generally mouthing off and adding photos. The web site, now a virtual town square, appears to be providing Perry a decent wage but its popularity is really evidenced by the number of comments each article receives. Almost every post (of substance) garners 50 comments and often many more. The ‘discussions’ are often vitriolic and opinionated, but every local politician and concerned citizen of Hoboken now visits the site to understand what’s going on. Make no mistake - this is an ‘unprofessional’ site (all due respect) by old media’s definition, but Hoboken411 is a precursor of the emerging local journalism of the near-term future.

Traditional newspaper media companies are still consumed by “the machine”. Obstacles as intransigent as union rules preclude a journalist from carrying a video camera and recording equipment and delivering multi-media presented on the newspaper’s website. Perry and those like him have no such restrictions. Whereas actual newspapers could logically be considered a ‘platform’ for the delivery of content, these old-line publishers have no online equivalent. Real success in local reporting would require an ability to templatize and automate the presentation of their news no matter how local the segment. This would allow the newspaper publishers to extend technologies including mapping, photo uploads, comments, polls, groups/community and other services similar to those offered by companies such as yelp.com and craigslist. (In fact, it is hard to understand why there is no local/community news on either of those sites).

A few years ago, I predicted that the NYTimes would open their platform for other newspapers to use. In doing so, I saw the NYTimes had the potential to build a revenue stream as a service provider, as well as providing the company with a wider pool of potential product-development ideas. My thought was not that the Times license this technology to other large city newspapers but, rather, they do so to medium- and small-sized news organizations. Application of this technology would enable these local news organizations to focus on gathering hyper-local content and building community, while giving the NYTimes a much wider profile. And, obviously, the Times would benefit from important stories that surfaced up to their level from its wide variety of content partners. Last month, at an invitation-only open house for web developers, one of the attendees addressed this very issue and it seems the Times maybe thinking along these lines. How this idea develops will be interesting to watch. Regardless, the Times is something of a different beast even among large-city newspapers. In the US, the WSJ may be the only other paper that could do something similar.

In February, the Times launched two ‘hyper-local’ websites which could represent their first step in developing a more local approach and it remains to be seen how successful this will be. We know ‘viral’ is impossible to bottle and it is very likely that, when local journalism returns in some organized and coordinated way to the local communities of central New Jersey, its origins are more likely to be anarchic; however, if these ‘journalists’ (like Perry) have access to powerful tools and platforms such as those the NYTimes could offer them, we will see a revitalization of this significant cornerstone of democracy.

Digital Book World Conference Preview

Next week, the two-day Digital Book World conference gets underway in New York City at a moment when – for better or for worse – the digital tide may become a tsunami for the book publishing world. Ahead of the first-time conference, Chris Kenneally spoke with Conference Chair and industry pundit Mike Shatzkin of the Idea Logical Company and his DBW colleague Guy LeCharles Gonzalez for a special preview.

Here is the link to the interview.

News Reader's Promiscuity

An early December article in The Economist looked at some research into the habits of newspaper readers particularly noting the impact on readership should content be paid (Link):

The survey also contained devastating news for those publishers hoping to co-ordinate attempts to charge. When Guardian readers were asked whether they would pay £2 a month to read their favourite paper online, 26% said yes. But if all newspapers charged? The proportion prepared to pay for the Guardian might have been expected to rise. Instead it fell to 16%. This seems odd, until one considers readers’ promiscuity. Faced with having to spend rather a lot to keep snacking from a wide variety of news sources, they protested. The questions are hypothetical, and people may react differently when and if pay walls actually go up. But this will hardly encourage newspaper owners.

BISG Consumer Study

BISG announces the first of three studies that look at consumer attitudes to e-Book reading (BISG):

The first of three, all to be released in 2010, the initial Consumer Attitudes Toward E-Book Reading survey also found that the majority of print book buyers rank "affordability" as the #1 reason they would choose to purchase an e-book rather than a print book of the same title. Of less consequence when it came to their purchase decisions was the extent to which an e-book was searchable or environmentally friendly.

Additional findings include:

• Roughly 1/5 of survey respondents said they've stopped purchasing print books within the past 12 months in favor of acquiring the e-book editions.
• Most survey respondents said they prefer to share e-books across devices.
  
• Only 28% said they would "definitely" purchase an e-book with Digital Rights Management (DRM); men were more likely than women to say they would not buy an e-book with DRM.
• Survey respondents indicated a clear preference for e-reader devices used as of November 2009, with computers coming in first (47%), followed by the Kindle (32%), and other e-reader devices at roughly 10% apiece.
• Although certainly growing, 81% of survey respondents say they currently purchase an e-book only "rarely" or "occasionally."

MediaWeek (Vol 3, No 2): Scientific Publishing, Textbooks: Renting and E, 1930s Culture and Nordic Mysteries.

Michael Clark writing for Scholarly Kitchen wonders why Scientific Publishing hasn't been disrupted already (Link):

Given these 3 deeply entrenched cultural functions, I do not think that scientific publishing will be disrupted anytime in the foreseeable future. That being said, I do think that new technologies are opening the door for entirely new products and services built on top of—and adjacent to—the existing scientific publishing system:

• Semantic technologies are powering new professional applications (e.g. ChemSpider) that more efficiently deliver information to scientists. They are also beginning to power more effective search tools (such as Wolfram Alpha) meaning researchers will spend less time looking for the information they need.
• Mobile technologies are enabling the ability to access information anywhere. Combined with GPS systems and cameras, Web enabled mobile devices have the potential to transform our interaction with the world. As I have described recently in the Scholarly Kitchen, layering data on real-world objects is an enormous opportunity for scientists and the disseminators of scientific information. The merger of the Web and the physical world could very well turn out to be the next decade’s most significant contribution to scientific communication.
• Open data standards being developed now will allow for greater interoperability between data sets, leading to new data-driven scientific tools and applications. Moreoever, open data standards will lead to the ability to ask entirely new questions. As Tim Berners-Lee’s pointed out in his impassioned talk at TED last year, search engines with popularity-weighted algorithms (e.g. Google, Bing) are most helpful when one is asking a question that many other people have already asked. Interoperable, linked data will allow for the interrogation of scientific information in entirely new ways.

California has set a deadline for college texts to be available in electronic form (Link):

While it seems increasingly likely that e-books will one day become the standard in education, California has passed a law to virtually guarantee it -- and to set a deadline. A new state law, effective January 1, 2020, will require that all textbooks used in public and private postsecondary institutions be made available in electronic form "to the extent practicable" either "in whole or in part." Senate Bill 48 states that "the electronic version of any textbook shall contain the same content as the printed version and may be copy-protected." Senator Elaine Alquist, who wrote the bill, was unavailable for comment. Her legislative aid, James Schwab, who was involved with writing the bill, said that helping students save money was the primary motive. For instance, even today, one textbook with a list price of $173.33 is available electronically for $95.33.

Cengage is expanding their previously announced textbook rental scheme (Link):

At CengageBrain.com students can now rent textbooks for up to 70% off the suggested retail price, and purchase print textbooks, eTextbooks, individual eChapters and audio books. The Web site also includes Cengage Learning's broad range of homework and study tools, features a selection of free content and offers discounts for purchasing multiple products. Currently, 1,200 Cengage Learning titles are available for rent -- including popular titles such as Essentials of Psychology, 5th Edition (Douglas Bernstein); American Government: The Essentials, 12th Edition (James Q. Wilson); and Principles of Economics, 5th Edition (N. Gregory Mankiw) -- with approximately 1,500 more titles to be added in July 2010. The rental process with CengageBrain.com is simple and convenient for customers. Students who choose the rental option will have immediate access to the first chapter in eBook format and will also have a choice of shipping options. Once the rental term is complete, students can either choose to print a pre-paid return label from CengageBrain.com and ship the textbook back, or purchase the title.

Inside HigherEd looks at all the different textbook rental programs, but leaves us with this (Link):

Strangely enough, the rental companies don’t see their rental services as being a long-term solution, either — at least, not in their present incarnations. The transition to electronic textbooks might not happen overnight; in a 2008 Student PIRGs survey, only 33 percent of students said they were comfortable reading off a screen, and 60 percent said they would buy a low-cost printed textbook rather than using an electronic one for free. CourseSmart, one of the leading e-textbook vendors, does not always charge less than it would cost students to rent, Allen says. “Students overwhelmingly prefer print still,” she says. “And digital textbooks are not where students are at now; they want to be able to print — they want to be able to make their notes on paper.” Still, just as Netflix has begun making more and more of its inventory available for users to stream instantly on their personal computers rather than sending away for the discs, a number of companies acknowledge that sometime in the not-so-distant future they probably will be renting access to digital e-textbooks instead of hard copies, and have been quietly preparing for such a shift.

A review of Dancing in the Dark by Morris Dickstein - Culture and the Great Depression "the most effervescent popular culture of the twentieth century" TimesOnline

The commonest explanation for this apparent contradiction is that poverty and anxiety intensified the need for escapism. It is not a bad explanation, either, as far as it goes. But Dickstein is determined to dig deeper. He begins with crime or crime-and-punishment films (the gangster classics; I Am a Fugitive from the Chain Gang), and has no trouble in presenting them as social parables, which articulated public fantasies and frustrations. Moving on to the screwball comedies which were one of Hollywood's glories in the 1930s, he argues that they were appropriate romances for a conflict-ridden post-1929 world – tough-talking, hard-boiled and disenchanted (though not, it need hardly be said, to the point of spoiling the fun). His prime exhibit, however, is popular music – and here a positive connection with the Depression might seem harder to prove. Dickstein offers three different lines of approach. First, he cites a number of songs where references to the Depression were deliberate and unmistakable: the most spectacular example is Busby Berkeley’s lavish number “Remember My Forgotten Man” (an unemployed First World War veteran), from the film Gold Diggers of 1933. Such songs certainly deserve their place in the historical record, but there were not many of them. Second, he detects a new spirit of community and solidarity in the songs of the period. It may be so, but such a generalization needs to be backed up by more evidence than we are given. Finally, he points to the plangency of many 1930s songs, and suggests that it had “a larger cultural resonance”.

The headline is from the WSJ but someone pointed out that the use of "Nordic" is incorrect: The Strange Case of the Nordic Detectives (Link)

Stieg Larsson's hugely popular Millennium Trilogy (beginning with "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo") is the most visible example of the global mania for Scandinavian crime fiction. Running a close second is Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander series, nine novels that, combined, have sold upward of 25 million copies world-wide and spawned a British television series (starring Kenneth Branagh), as well as several Swedish films. That's a pretty impressive impact for a paunchy, diabetic, middle-age police detective in a provincial Swedish city, a man hobbled by self-doubt, pessimism and an untameable yen for junk food. In the U.S., Mr. Mankell has a new publisher that is printing five times as many copies of his next book, "The Man From Beijing," as his previous title. Even before Mr. Mankell, the Swedish husband-and-wife team of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö produced 10 very successful novels in the '60s and '70s about a laconic, ulcer-ridden Stockholm police detective named Martin Beck; the best-known is "The Laughing Policeman," made into a 1973 American film starring Walter Matthau.

Thomas Nelson keeps track of the top US trade publishers (Link) - Why no Houghton Mifflin? Pearson may sell their majority interest in financial data arm IDC. The company confirmed they are reviewing strategic alternatives for their 61% stake in Interactive Data Corporation. Is this the prelude to further anticipated investment in Education? (Guardian) The Economist looks at e-Readers (from December - Economist):

Now for a reality check: in the history of ingenious display technologies, only a handful have ever made it into mass production. So although there are many promising new technologies for next-generation e-readers, the technology arguably best positioned to take over from E Ink, at least in the near future, is a variant of LCD. Engineers have repeatedly shown that they can improve LCD technology when the market demands it. Such displays have wider viewing angles than they did just a few years ago. Fast motion, like a tennis serve, is no longer jerky. And large LCD panels have become much thinner and far more power-efficient. There is already one LCD-based e-reader on the market. Fujitsu’s FLEPia uses a so-called cholesteric LCD, which produces an image from reflected light. The crystals are bistable, which means that they can remain in either a reflective or non-reflective state without any power. Cholesteric LCDs do not require a backlight and lack many of the layers of a traditional LCD, which should make them easier to build. But the manufacturing process and materials differ enough to make cholesteric displays more expensive than standard LCDs—hence the FLEPia’s high price (about $1,000). Moreover, despite having a colour display, the FLEPia takes two seconds to switch from one image to another, so video is out of the question, and even reading books can be painfully slow.

Robert McCrum: Is it really doomsday for books? Not while English casts its spell. (Guardian):

The essentials are clear enough: English, in its contemporary Anglo-American guise, has been a lingua franca since roughly the end of the second world war. Throughout the cold war, Anglo-American culture and values became as much a part of global consciousness as the combustion engine. There was hardly a transaction in the contemporary world that was innocent of English, in some form. However, until the turn of the millennium, its scope was limited by its troubled association with British imperialism and the pax Americana. But now, for the first time, English language and culture are rapidly becoming decoupled from their contentious past and disassociated from postcolonial trauma. At the same time, thanks to Microsoft, Vodafone, Orange and Apple, this rejuvenated lingua franca has acquired the capacity to zoom through space and time at unprecedented speeds, reaching unprecedented new audiences. An evolving technology is changing the rules of the game faster than the match itself can be played.

Tosh!

Predictions 2010: The Powerpoint Version

Close readers will recall my predictions for 2010 and here I have created a convenient Powerpoint version.

Predictions 2010

View more presentations from Michael Cairns.