The Baked Beans Are Off

When I joined Macmillan, Inc in 1989 the company was rounding out the decade nicely having gone from losing over $1mm per week and a share price less than $2 in 1980 to one sold to Robert Maxwell for 19x earnings and $92 per share. Application of economies of scale helped build Macmillan to a $2billion publishing conglomerate where each newly acquired publishing company was just ‘more beans for the baked bean company’ which was how senior executives referred to their “factory acquisition” process. In fact, some of the executives, notably CEO Bill Reilly, had come from industrial manufacturing and had a deep understanding of how to effectively apply scale economies to operations.

All the largest publishing companies were following a similar ‘baked bean’ approach as the industry consolidated: Publishing lists were separated from their original companies and progressively (sometimes immediately) overhead expenses were eliminated as the acquired company was absorbed. At one point, I was tasked with following up on the ROI for a slew of companies acquired over a two year period. This proved difficult because their operations had been so effectively integrated into the parent company that constructing a post-acquisition income statement proved virtually impossible.

Fast forward 20 years and the scale economic model is falling apart for trade publishing. So effective at applying scale to accounting, manufacturing, management, production and other overhead, it is ironic that in the internet world everyone now has access to similar scale benefits. Publishing companies now realize they have achieved scale advantages in the wrong functions. Scale advantage in editorial, marketing, promotion, and content management is almost non-existent to the degree that will ensure competitive advantage, yet these are the functions important to future success. (As an isolated example, I would argue that authonomy.com by Harpercollins represents an attempt to build scale into the editorial process).

We all know seismic change – prevalent everywhere - has to come to the cost structures of publishing companies. Squeezed by downward pricing and potential revenue share models that provide more to authors and contributors, publishers will wonder where the money is going to come from. The scale model that built companies like Macmillan, Inc. is irreparably dead to anyone thinking about the future of publishing. The only way out – and it’s not an easy suggestion – is to recognize that those functions that used to provide scale benefits are no longer doing so and need to be carved out. Some of this has happened in manufacturing where companies like Donnelly and Williams Lea have taken over the manufacturing and production function for companies: Those departments no longer exist at the publisher. Decisions to outsource non-value added functions such as accounting, distribution and fulfillment and information technology must be made as the publisher contemplates their future. Once unencumbered, the real test will be whether publishers can re-work their structures so that they build scale economies in those functions that do provide value: Content acquisition, editorial, marketing & promotion and content licensing and brand building.

There is little evidence that this is happening or that the realization has set in. Instead of seeing a publishing company improve their performance over ten years as Macmillan did in the 1980s, we are likely to see many examples of the exact opposite over the next ten. Will companies rise to the challenge or are they so wedded to the old ‘baked bean’ model that they expect it to go on forever? Clearly, it won’t.

MediaWeek (Vol 3, No 28): Students study habits, The future of our Bookshelves, Trends in researchers and libraries.

The Atlantic looks at reports that college students don't study as much as they used to. These are eight possible reasons which they expand upon (Atlantic):

• Study Leaders Cite Professor Apathy
• Modern Technology Not to Blame
• Grades Becoming Less Important Than Activities
• Increase in 'Temporary, Adjunct' Faculty
• Advent of Pass-Fail Classes, Fewer Language Requirements
• Studying Methods Became More Efficient
• Rise in Publishing Requirements Means Professors Assign Less Work
• More Working Part-Time as Scholarships Decline
• Students Less Comfortable With Long-Form Reading

Nathan Schneider writing in Open Letters Monthly: On the decline of print which while delayed now seems inevitable (OLM)

The decline of actual, physical book-publishing has been taking longer than it was supposed to. Way back in 1992 Robert Coover announced in The New York Times that printed books were as “dead as God.” His doomsday was premature. But the digital offerings of Amazon and Google, along with their ever-better delivery devices, promise that finally the end may be nigh. Crotchety complaints about screen-reading aside, it should be obvious to anyone who cares about information that in many respects digital text is a superior technology to the printed page. On Google Books, I just searched “the printed page” (without the quotation marks) across “some seven million volumes of books,” instantly returning results in 76,000 of them. And that is not mere statistical flourish; for the several years since I lost my borrowing privileges from research libraries and have had to leave my source texts behind, I’ve come to rely on Google and Amazon searchable previews. My old dream of a possessionless library, unencumbered and mobile, seems possible again. The very meaning of the word “book” has become something more powerful, dynamic, and accessible than ever before. Every good reactionary knows well that there arises, in the process of using these wonders, the opportunity for laziness. Days, weeks, and years of archival labor are replaced by a keystroke and, with it, much of the discipline, erudition, and tenacity that the old ways required. But there’s no time to be nostalgic and grumpy. Living well with technology has always been a matter of beating it and abusing it. No one cared much about the electric guitar until somebody turned it up too loud. Now our job is to figure out how to be cleverer than the search engine; when certain ways of finding information become easy, the knowledge really worth having becomes what those methods don’t turn up, what the crawlers somehow managed to miss. As the Temple of Knowledge comes to look ever more like the Googleplex, public libraries are downsizing their reference desks, presuming that for every query an internet search will suffice. ... So far, for all the wonders they offer, the digital alternatives to a bookshelf fail to serve its basic purposes. The space of memory and thinking must not be an essentially controlled, homogenous one. Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s iPad are noxious ruses that must be creatively resisted—not simply because they are electronic but because they propose to commandeer our bookshelves. I will defend the spirit of mine tooth and nail.

David Brookes in the NYTimes also wonders at the efficacy of books versus the internet (NYT):

A citizen of the Internet has a very different experience. The Internet smashes hierarchy and is not marked by deference. Maybe it would be different if it had been invented in Victorian England, but Internet culture is set in contemporary America. Internet culture is egalitarian. The young are more accomplished than the old. The new media is supposedly savvier than the old media. The dominant activity is free-wheeling, disrespectful, antiauthority disputation. These different cultures foster different types of learning. The great essayist Joseph Epstein once distinguished between being well informed, being hip and being cultivated. The Internet helps you become well informed — knowledgeable about current events, the latest controversies and important trends. The Internet also helps you become hip — to learn about what’s going on, as Epstein writes, “in those lively waters outside the boring mainstream.” But the literary world is still better at helping you become cultivated, mastering significant things of lasting import. To learn these sorts of things, you have to defer to greater minds than your own. You have to take the time to immerse yourself in a great writer’s world. You have to respect the authority of the teacher. Right now, the literary world is better at encouraging this kind of identity. The Internet culture may produce better conversationalists, but the literary culture still produces better students.

American Research Libraries blog notes the amicus filing in the Costco vs Omega watch case (ARL):

And that is why this case is important for libraries. In its amicus brief, LCA notes that “[b]y restricting the application of Section 109(a) to copies manufactured in the United States, the Ninth Circuit’s decision threatens the ability of libraries to continue to lend materials in their collections.” There are millions of volumes in library collections that were manufactured abroad. A more precise estimate than “millions” can probably never be known, though, because there is no reliable way of knowing where books in library collections were actually manufactured. So, if the Supreme Court agreed with the Ninth Circuit, and libraries determined that they could not find an alternative to the traditional first sale doctrine rationale for circulating foreign-manufactured works, they would face an impossible task in determining which of their books could not circulate under the new rule.

Also related a brief filed in the case of Pearson vs Textbook Discounters (JDSupra) Fastcompany makes up for lost time (10yrs) in extrapolating the changes in academic libraries to bookstores (Fastco):

The change in publication habits for periodicals, and plain ol' text books too, has been so severe that a new library building, commissioned in 2005 and due to open next month, actually has 85% less shelf capacity than the previous edifice. That's a massive reduction in storage volume, and a pure reflection of the fact that bytes don't weigh anything. It's also the next logical progression in the modernization of library systems. Remember card catalogs? They were once a staple of any visit to a library, and their often hand-typed and hand-annotated reference cards were vital for finding the right book in a collection. But the card index was a perfect contender for digital replacement, even in an era when computers were mainly text-based. First they came for my card catalog ... then they came for my books ...

In a Podcast from OCLC and JISC, Lynn Silipigni Connaway asks, "what does the digital information seeker look like". (JISC):

New research from JISC suggests that the way people look for information in libraries and online is changing. JISC recently commissioned a report2 from the OCLC to bring together a number of different studies in the area. Senior research scientist Dr Lynn Silipigni Connaway at OCLC Research in the US talks to Nicola Yeeles about how researchers ‘bounce’ and ‘whirl’ and what that means for the library of the future.

Also OCLC has a number of podcast available for free via iTunes. From ACRL: 2010 top ten trends in academic libraries (ACRL):

The ACRL Research, Planning and Review Committee, a component of the Research Coordinating Committee, is responsible for creating and updating a continuous and dynamic environmental scan for the association that encompasses trends in academic librarianship, higher education, and the broader environment. As a part of this effort, the committee develops a list of the top ten trends that are affecting academic libraries now and in the near future. This list was compiled based on an extensive review of current literature.

From the twitter this week: Tom Sutcliffe -Throw the book at clichéd blurbs - Independent. Over the top blurbing. If the new Tom Jones album is that bad, I must hear it. Telegraph Marketing a stinker. Do good buildings make for better educated children? Observer Huge for me, but I was lucky. Seabury Hall PwC Technology Forecast 2010 Issue 3:Tapping into the power of Big Data: PWC Tech Report Nerd alert - interesting. Can Bloomberg Law Compete With Westlaw and LexisNexis? - LawBlog WSJ The textbook system is broken: high costs, poor information for students, bad books: Chronicle In sports, Iniesta was the mvp of the tournament for me and well done Spain.

Cengage Learning Announces Streamlined Operating Structure

From their press release

Cengage Learning Announces Streamlined Operating Structure to Allow Greater Synergy, Focused Technology Investments and Increased Innovation Across Company

Incorporates Library/Reference, Academic/Professional and International Business Units to Provide Research and Learning Solutions Unmatched In Industry
STAMFORD, Conn., July 7

/PRNewswire/ -- Cengage Learning, a leading global provider of innovative teaching, learning and research solutions, today announced that the company will consolidate its business units into one streamlined operating group, a new structure that will allow for greater synergies, more focused technology investments and increased innovation both domestically and internationally. The move brings together the company's Academic and Professional Group (APG), including such well-known brands as South-Western, Delmar, Wadsworth and Brooks/Cole, with the market leading library/reference group, Gale, and the company's international operations. The transition will begin immediately, and is expected to be completed in September 2010.
"This is an exciting change for Cengage Learning and our customers, making it possible for us to provide a range of research and learning solutions that is unprecedented in our industry," said Ron Dunn, President and CEO of Cengage Learning. "Unlike any of our competitors, we can leverage the combined resources of Gale and APG to bridge the gap between the library and the classroom, developing innovative new solutions that combine Gale's unparalleled expertise in creating, organizing and distributing content with APG's deep understanding of pedagogy, teaching and learning styles, and assessment. This combination will allow Cengage Learning to better serve customers worldwide -- in classrooms, libraries, and anywhere else people engage in research and learning. It represents an alliance of abilities completely unique in our industry -- a blend of content, technology, and expertise -- drawn from more than half a century serving both classrooms and libraries."
As a result of the restructuring, Patrick C. Sommers, President of Gale will retire at the end of July, and Ron Mobed, President of the Academic and Professional Group will be leaving the company. Dunn's new Executive Committee will include: Adrian Butler, Executive Vice President, Human Resources; Ken Carson, General Counsel; Dean Durbin, Chief Financial Officer; Rich Foley, Executive Vice President, Sales and Marketing; Manuel Guzman, Executive Vice President, Learning and Research Solutions; and William Rieders, Executive Vice President, New Media.
About Cengage Learning
Cengage Learning is a leading provider of innovative teaching, learning and research solutions for the academic, professional and library markets worldwide. The company's products and services are designed to foster academic excellence and professional development, increase student engagement and improve learning outcomes. Cengage Learning's brands include Heinle, Gale, Wadsworth, Delmar, Brooks/Cole and South-Western, among others. For more information on Cengage

Lufufe Kwetshube Was Terrified By Reading

This arrived from the Cape Town Book Fair people unsolicited:


Cape Town Book Fair literacy campaign set to change lives.

By Joanne Smetherham

Lufufe Kwetshube was paralysed by shyness and his terror of reading in his first year at Observatory Junior School, Cape Town. He would answer questions in monosyllables and dared not look adults in the eye.

“We thought he would be one of the small minority whom we wouldn’t be able to help,” said Maurita Weissenberg, founder of the Shine Literacy Programme at the school.

Lufefe entered the literacy programme in his second year, after he failed the first set of national benchmark tests on literacy – as did a staggering three-quarters of his classmates, who all took part in the programme. To Weissenberg’s surprise and delight, Lufefe was a transformed child after 18 months.

Within months, he was able look adults in the eye and answer them with confidence. Best of all, he was asking to read books. And instead of avoiding the imaginary games using plastic animals, he would eagerly ask: “Can I please play that one?” Then he would come up to hold up a giraffe or a zebra, telling his tutor all about it.

“He’s happy, and he’s enjoying learning. I’m so proud,” said Lufefe’s grandmother Princess Lutshebe, who is bringing him up because his mother died. “Help with literacy was all he needed to change this child’s life and allow him to take control of his future,” said Weissenberg. “And it didn’t even take that much.”

Lufefe is one of large numbers of South African children who do not receive the help with literacy that they need, in their school lessons. A study by the UCT Children’s Institute last year found that two-thirds of junior school learners nationally were functionally illiterate and innumerate. It is against this background that the Cape Town Book Fair (CTBF) together with Literacy Campaign (LitCam) of the Frankfurt Book Fair – a part-owner of the Cape Town Book Fair - as well as community organisations is launching a far-reaching literacy campaign.

This will see reading and learning (RaL) rooms set up in the poorest areas of Cape Town, and will also include a writing competition and a conference on literacy. “Literacy allows people to reach their full potential as human beings, and enables us to take part in society, especially in our globalised world,” says CTBF Director Claudia Kaiser. “Our vision is to give people easy access to books, in their own neighbourhoods, because people can’t always get to libraries”, adds Karin Ploetz, director of LitCam.

There will be a variety of books and learning tools in the RaL rooms, where special literacy programmes and workshops will take place. The project leaders will work in co-operation with the librarians at the new Khayelitsha library. The campaign organisers will also hire teachers to work in the RaL rooms.

The first three reading rooms in Cape Town - two in Khayelitsha and one in Mfuleni - will be finished by July 29. This is also the date of the launch of the RaL-room project. Five more RaL rooms will be finished by October.

The proposal for the RaL-rooms has been integrated into a broader community action plan, said Michael Krause, team leader of Violence Prevention Through Urban Upgrading (VPUU), one of the community organisations working with CTBF on the literacy project. “The reading rooms are what the community wants,” he said. “The project will start small, but the model could be widely replicated. It’s a great partnership.”

The first RaL-room will be in a building in the Western Forecourt of the Khayelitsha train station, where volunteers, some of whom have poor literacy skills, work for a local neighbourhood watch. The second RaL-room will be a container near a crèche in Monwabisi Park. A VPUU secretary will work there, issuing books to the crèche teachers for the children. The third will be at the Women for Peace centre in Mfuleni, catering for families. The aim is to set up further RaL rooms in Pretoria.

The learning tools in the RaL rooms will be Discovery Boxes, provided by Siemens, which contain materials for children to conduct 22 science experiments. Poet, performer and writer Diane Ferrus will be among those running writing workshops for children at the RaL rooms, and acclaimed poet and writer Antjie Krog will be among the authors who will give readings.
A writing competition called “Football moments – short stories from the townships” will be announced at the launch of the RaL-rooms. In addition, the CTBF is also organising a conference at which organisations working on literacy will be able to share their experiences and network. This will take place on Saturday July 31 at the Cape Town International Convention Centre, during the CTBF.

LitCam is an international literacy and basic education campaign launched four years ago by the Frankfurt Book Fair and its partners. One of its projects, Football Meets Culture, aims to help some of Germany’s four million illiterate children. The children taking part in the programme experience the fun of football along with remedial education, and discovery that learning can be fun, the programme organisers have said.

In his literacy lessons with Shine at Observatory Junior School little Lufefe, too, made this discovery. His tutor, Leigh-Anne Nathan, remembers a day three months into the programme, when he came in as shyly as always. However, when he lifted his head to greet her, he grinned, showing off a big set of false teeth. Leigh-Anne burst out laughing, just as Lufefe had wanted, and realised they had made a breakthrough. Lufefe was enjoying himself.

The Cape Town Book Fair runs from 30 July to 2 August. This year for the first time the first day of the fair will be a trade day, with the fair opening to the public on 31 July. For more information on the CTBF visit www.capetownbookfair.com and join our Facebook page to take part in competitions, write a story that will be read at the Fair and much more.

MediaWeek (Vol 3, No 27): Economist Issue, Newspapers, Pixar, Copyright, Internet Retailing, Price or Scale

A backlog of Economist issues has resulted in the following "Economist Issue" of my weekly review. An obituary of author Martin Gardner who died on May 22nd (Economist)

Yet he was far more than a synthesiser. Indeed, all his non-fiction—he also wrote novels, short stories and poetry—was rigorously analytical. And though he was shy, usually shunning his fans’ two-yearly “Gatherings for Gardner”, he was not afraid to speak his mind. Any beliefs he thought pseudoscientific, such as homeopathy, Scientology, creationism, anthroposophy, spoon-bending, astrology and flying saucers, he would dismiss with cool efficiency. Other ideas, such as Ronald Reagan’s beloved Laffer curve, were derided in spoof articles: Mr Gardner had a sense of humour, and used it to effect. But he was not malicious. Though he enjoyed hoaxes, he would sometimes turn them on himself, once writing, under a pseudonym, a withering review of one of his own works in the New York Review of Books. Did he spread himself too thin? It is hard not to think that anyone who writes more books (70-plus) than many people have read, as well as numberless articles and essays, must be at the controls of a sausage machine, yet the sausages were usually good. The harder question is where it all came from, to which the only answer is himself—and reading.

The strange survival of ink - speaking of newspapers from June 12 (Economist):

That emphasis on giving readers what they want to read, as opposed to what lofty notions of civic responsibility suggest they ought to read, is part of a global trend. Newspapers are becoming more distinctive and customer-focused. Rather than trying to bring the world to as many readers as possible, they are carving out niches. Proprietors and editors are trying to identify distinctive strengths and investing what money they have in those areas. In America many newspapers have plumped for local news and sport, leaving everything else to bigger outfits or to wire services like The Associated Press. Several of them now refuse to deliver papers to readers far from the urban core. Such readers are expensive to reach and less alluring to advertisers. Papers are also courting small local businesses with technology that allows them to design their own ads cheaply. In short, metropolitan newspapers are turning into city newspapers. That may help them in the long term. Jim Chisholm, a newspaper analyst, points out that small local papers have fared better than larger regional ones in many countries, including America.

An interesting article about Pixar and planning for the future (Economist):

Pixar’s approach to creativity is striking for two reasons. The first is that the company puts people before projects. Most Hollywood studios start by hunting down promising ideas and then hire creative teams to turn them into films. The projects dictate whom they hire. Pixar starts by bringing in creative people and then encourages them to generate ideas. One of its most successful recruits has been Brad Bird, who has presided over two Oscar-winning feature films, “The Incredibles” (in which he also provided a character’s voice) and “Ratatouille”. The second is that the company devotes a lot of effort to getting people to work together. In most companies, people collaborate on specific projects, but pay little attention to what’s going on elsewhere in the business. Pixar, however, tries to foster a sense of collective responsibility among its 1,200 staff. Employees show unfinished work to one another in daily meetings, so get used to giving and receiving constructive criticism. And a small “brain trust” of top executives reviews films in the works.

A look at the Apps market: Apps and Downs (Economist):

As this is all part of the ongoing “platform war” between different mobile operating systems, the numbers should be taken with several grains of salt. The more the numbers are puffed up, not least with some double-counting, the more users and developers the respective app stores hope to attract. Ilja Laurs, GetJar’s chief executive, admits that his tally includes different versions of the same software—because this is industry practice. What is more, many apps are the mobile equivalent of marketing: they are given away to tout other wares. On June 15th Apple even released an app that lets users order the latest version of its own iPhone. Others apps are labours of love that have been put out free by passionate developers. Nevertheless, research firms are trying to measure the market with tried and tested methods, sensing there are lucrative reports and consulting services to sell. In a recent study Juniper Research put last year’s revenues from mobile apps at nearly $10 billion and estimated that it will more than treble by 2015. Yet such figures are educated guesses at best, argues an analyst with a rival market-research firm which has refrained from making predictions of its own because of the paucity of data.

Can booksellers learn anything from Uniqlo? (Economist):

Fast Retailing also has a distinctive business model. Zara and H&M bring the latest fashions to the masses quickly, ordering new lines many times a year. Fast Retailing, by contrast, sells only around 1,000 items, far fewer than its rivals, and keeps them on the shelves longer. “We don’t want to chase after ‘fast-fashion’ trends,” explains Mr Yanai. This lets Fast Retailing strike lower-priced, higher-volume deals with suppliers (most products cost $10-20) and makes managing inventory a much simpler and cheaper affair. Uniqlo makes up for the narrowness of its offering by selling the same item in many colours: socks come in 50 hues at its flagship store in Tokyo. Such basics, the firm believes, have the added benefit of appealing to a wider audience than the preppy Americana sold by Gap or the faddish wares of Inditex and H&M.

Owning the news: Copyrighting facts as well as words (Economist):

FACTS, ruled America’s Supreme Court in 1918 in the “hot news doctrine”, cannot be copyrighted. But a news agency can retain exclusive use of its product so long as it has a commercial value. Now newspapers, fed up with stories being “scraped” by other websites, want that ruling made into law. The idea is floated in a discussion document published by the Federal Trade Commission, which is holding hearings on the news industry’s future. Media organisations would have the exclusive right, for a predetermined period, to publish their material online. The draft also considers curtailing fair use, the legal principle that allows search engines to reproduce headlines and links, so long as the use is selective and transformative (as with a list of search results). Jeff Jarvis, who teaches journalism students to become entrepreneurs at New York’s City University, says this sounds like an attempt to protect newspapers more than journalism.

The click and the dead: E-commerce favours large companies but only because that is what people want (Economist):

Everywhere people bemoan the replacement of the local and the quaint by outposts of big, homogeneous chains. But how true is the notion that the internet in particular has hastened the demise of some retailers, and that those it hurt were overwhelmingly small? A new study* on this subject by four economists at the University of Chicago looks at three industries—bookshops, travel agencies and new-car dealerships—for answers. They find much truth in the conventional wisdom, but also some solace for those who believe small is beautiful. .... The study finds evidence for this, too. Among booksellers, all the smaller categories withered in the internet age—save one. The lone exception was the very smallest, shops with between one and four employees. These appeared to have weathered the storm unscathed: in Harvard Square itself, Curious George, a children’s bookshop run by the same people who owned WordsWorth, flourishes to this day. The internet allows customers to see businesses’ true colours. The adjustment that follows may be wrenching. But the net effect is one that conforms to what consumers want, whether they admit it to themselves or not.

Media's two tribes: Scale or pricing? (Economist):

Paywalls are rising across the media landscape as many firms conclude that revenue from online advertising alone is not enough to make ends meet. The Tallahassee Democrat, a newspaper owned by Gannett, starts charging from July 1st. Hulu, a free video website that was launched in America in 2008, said this week that it would begin selling subscriptions. Yet there is a strong drift in the opposite direction, too. For every outfit that is trying to build a premium subscription service, another is becoming more convinced of the virtues of giving away free content. Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper, for example, is something of an anti-Times. Its website, which is heavy on pictures and celebrity news, has grown rapidly in the past two years, both at home and abroad. It had 42m unique monthly visitors in May, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations—more than any other British newspaper website. Martin Clarke, who runs the Mail’s website, reckons people simply will not pay for general news on the web, and is happy to maximise viewers and advertising. The model of giving away content is not broken, he says: “It’s only broken if you are not big enough.” This is not merely a difference of opinion over whether to charge for online content. It is a divide between a strategy based on “up-selling” people to premium subscriptions, and a strategy based on scale and market-share. More fundamentally, it reflects different views about the extent to which consumers can be steered towards the most profitable products.

From the twitter this week: China E-Book Firm Challenges PDF InformationWeek Just what we need. My US orphan estimate cited in Euro Orphans Report But spelled blog name incorrectly. My report. Digital Magazines Don’t Encourage Socializing - NYT Tech Trends: Ereaders, Mobile Devices, and Cloud Computing Library Journal David Rothman on the iPad Stimulus Plan The Atlantic

High Noon on The High Street - Repost

Originally published May 4, 2007: News this week that the prior owner of Borders UK sees the imminent collapse of UK high street booksellers reminded me of this post.


Michael Holdsworth wrote the following article for The Bookseller Daily at London Bookfair two weeks ago and I asked him if I could republish it here. He kindly acceded. Until earlier this year, Michael was Managing Director (EMEA) at Cambridge University Press, responsible for about 70% of Cambridge’s global publishing and 50% of its sales. He now works with businesses on digital aspects of the industry. He is chairman of BIC, and of EDItEUR’s ONIX International Steering Committee.

The Bookseller London Book Fair Daily – Wednesday 18 April 2007

High Noon on The High Street

It isn’t directly the internet or eBooks which are the big threats for high street booksellers. They may just run out of books to sell, says Michael Holdsworth.

Much has been written about the difficulties facing the traditional bookseller – ‘unfair’ competition from the supermarkets, infinite range at Amazon, secondhand at AbeBooks, internecine discount wars, decreasing footfall, and pumped-up property leases.

The market for books isn’t growing as it should. Consumer research suggests that we have the wrong kind of young people, who reject the notion of reading books for recreation and leisure. Or even of using books for information and study. Today’s under-thirties – who ought by right to be tomorrow’s hardcore bookbuyers – live out their lives on the playing-card screens of mobile phones, preferring to interact online with the lean-forward social networks of Myspace, Flickr and Facebook. Inveterate multi-taskers, they listen to their iPods and text their friends, while watching television with laptops, not books, on their knees. For many students, information which is not online simply doesn’t exist, to the dismay of their so-last-century professors. The library is ignored, since the chances are that the book will be out on loan, deliberately mis-shelved, or will have had this week’s chapter razored out; and the bookshop shunned, where the right course books are perceived to be too expensive or rarely available. Time-rich and money-poor, they surf their always-on broadband to find roughly what they need – and preferably free (that is, ripped-off or public domain).

And if that future cultural environment wasn’t looking bad enough for bricks-and-mortar booksellers, rumblings are heard that the eBook may now be tottering out of the last chance saloon, available on mobiles and Blackberrys, or to a Sony Reader (with its magic suddenly-screen-readable paperlike ‘e-Ink’ technology) or to some other top-secret handheld iPod-like contraption, as the technorati scuttlebutt would have one believe, from Amazon, from Google, from Apple or from Sir James Dyson (pick your rumour).

But the most damaging factors powering this one-way ratchet of doom and gloom may be none of the above – directly. The critical disruption that will change the shape of book retail forever will be that booksellers will cease to be the channel for the distribution of information and non-fiction (even when it is in book form). And without that, they simply won’t have enough stuff to sell. And they certainly won’t be selling what they still can sell from stores of over 10,000 square feet as they do on Britain’s high streets today.

For most of us, the Internet is our first port of call for reference and information. We go straight to Google, we Ask Jeeves, we scour Wikipedia. What we get may not be validated content, and may not always be 100 per cent correct, but, hey, it’s free. Will today’s students – tomorrow’s shoppers – buy reference and information titles at all, let alone from bookshops? Will anyone buy maps or atlases? Watch the people on the tube, clutching their MultiMap print-outs.

What’s more we are only on the brink of some new Internet models which will change the way we all think about reading online and paid content on the web. Google and Amazon now have the largest eBook libraries on the planet. And if the Internet rumour-mill is to be believed, it’s only a matter of time before we see these collections monetised, with the full collusion of the publishers, of course. And we know that Microsoft Windows Live, which launched its public domain book search offering last year, and Yahoo, are watching and waiting in the wings.

As the physical ‘Blockbuster’ model of video rental through video stores collapses, giving way to anytime mail-order and high-bandwidth movie downloads, information book consumers will for the first time discover online subscription and rental. Why buy the book when all you want is to turn the pages for a day, or research the topic for a week? Why buy the whole thing when you only need a chapter; why buy a guide to France when all you need is Chartres Cathedral?

Amazon’s Upgrade – the first consumer eBook-and-print book bundle – isn’t yet being offered outside the USA. This path-breaking new service allows buyers of the print book to pay an additional 10 or 20 per cent on top of the print price for immediate and perpetual online-only access to the full searchable text. Publishers may think that Amazon is selling this additional access too cheaply, but there is no doubt that it is already proving a most attractive proposition. Not only does it fulfil the 1970s Martini dream of having the books you own available to you "any time, any place, anywhere . . .", it also offers customers the gratification of using the book (and remember, this is mainly about ‘extractive’ reading, not the immersive long-form narrative of fiction or biography) immediately the credit card has gone through, without having to wait for the postman.

Amazon Upgrade may prove a pivotal tipping-point for two reasons. First, because Upgrade (and other services such as Google’s Book Search) will for the first time start to encourage and facilitate really-easy online reading of book content by ordinary people, not academics, students or geeks. Amazon and Google have the reach and access to democratise this new habit in a way that specialist eBooks never will, with their often rebarbative DRM and user experiences. Some people may actually prefer this new way.

Second, we can anticipate that bundled online access for non-fiction and information titles will become the norm. It will become a sine-qua-non of this sort of publishing, exactly as online access has long been for scholarly journals, and as additional blended elements are increasingly de rigueur for school and university textbooks. Just as cars now come with radios, and hotel rooms come with TVs, it will quite simply be what bookbuyers will come to expect. That they can get into their home book collection from anywhere, whether it’s a recipe for must-have pineapple upside-down-cake while on holiday in the gite; or settling a holiday argument from The Guinness Book of Records. Pervasive GPRS on mobiles and public-access wi-fi will simply accelerate this trend. And this won’t just be an Amazon thing. There will be other aggregators, digital distributors and of course publishers providing these services. But not, easily, traditional booksellers…

So take away that non-fiction and information stock-in-trade – professional books, computer manuals, encyclopaedias, dictionaries, travel guides, DIY guides, atlases, maps, annuals, wine and cook books, almanacs, yearbooks. What kind of damage will that do to high street retail? Will only the most niche, the most specialised, the most responsive, the most remarkable – and the smallest – booksellers survive, in the most affluent cities? Such relict survivors will need to add a lot of value in service, ambience and expensive coffee as they hand-sell books as objects, as gifts, as things of beauty, as coffee-table items. Speakers at Google’s Unbound conference in New York in January introduced us to the scary concept of the non-fiction print book as ‘souvenir’ – as a permanent and tactile reminder of an information experience you’ve already had. You’ve enjoyed its immediacy and its primary utility online; now own the physical book as memento, as curio. But the owning bit is optional.

Is High Street book retail holed below the waterline? Or will the BA's new initiatives (at Godalming etc.) bring results in time for our booksellers to reinvent themselves? They probably don’t have long.

This article is covered by a creative commons licence.

Michael can be reached via email at the hard to forget michael@michaelholdsworth.com

Springer introduces new open access journals

In 2008, Springer acquired open access publisher BioMed Central amid worries the publisher would curtail the open access model despite claims at the time that they viewed open access as a viable business model and expected to expand the operation. This week, the company announced an expansion of the open access model to all disciplines under the trade name SpringerOpen.

From their press release:

SpringerOpen (www.springeropen.com) will cover all disciplines within the science, technology and medicine (STM) fields and will be offered in cooperation with BioMed Central. The entire content of SpringerOpen journals – including research articles, reviews, and editorials – are fully and immediately open access, and are accessible to anyone with an internet connection. No subscription is needed.

“We are seeing an increasing interest from our authors and from funders in all areas for open access publishing options and have responded to a need in the current market,” said Wim van der Stelt, EVP Business Development, Springer. “We are happy to serve our authors and editorial boards with the publishing options they want and are also pleased to supply universities, research institutions and our other patrons with the ability to use this content online freely and conveniently.”

SpringerOpen journals are e-only journals. Springer is committed to delivering high-quality articles and ensuring rapid publication as with its traditional journals, from online submission systems and in-depth peer review to an efficient, author-friendly production process. The final articles are not only published in a timely manner on Springer’s online information platform SpringerLink, but are also distributed to archives such as PubMed Central and to institutional repositories as requested.

SpringerOpen journals are published under the Creative Commons Attribution license, which facilitates the open distribution of copyrighted work. According to this license, Springer will not reserve any exclusive commercial rights. The journals ask the authors to pay an article-processing charge, in accordance with market standards.

BioMed Central, acquired in 2008 by Springer, will provide its expertise and technology to help establish the SpringerOpen portfolio. SpringerOpen journals will publish in emerging and interdisciplinary fields and will complement both the established Springer journal portfolios and BioMed Central’s growing list of over 200 life science and biomedicine journal titles. Furthermore, in order to reduce the financial burden faced by individual authors, Springer and BioMed Central are collaborating to extend BioMed Central’s Open Access Membership scheme, offered to institutions, societies, groups, funders and corporations, to include the SpringerOpen titles. More than 300 institutional open access membership arrangements are currently in place.

Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com) is a leading global scientific publisher, delivering quality content through innovative information products and services. The company is also a trusted provider of local-language professional publications in Europe, especially in Germany and the Netherlands. In the science, technology and medicine (STM) sector, the group publishes around 2,000 journals and more than 6,500 new books a year, as well as the largest STM eBook Collection worldwide. Springer has operations in about 20 countries in Europe, the USA, and Asia, and more than 5,000 employees.

BioMed Central (www.biomedcentral.com) has been part of Springer Science+Business Media since 2008. Founded in 1999, the STM publisher has pioneered the open access publishing model. All peer-reviewed research articles published by BioMed Central are made immediately and freely accessible online, and are licensed to allow redistribution and reuse. BioMed Central is the largest open access publisher in the world.

MediaWeek (Vol 3, No 26): OCLC, AAUP Conference, Intellectual Property Enforcement, Harold Robbins, Book Bloggers

OCLC announced that a revised record use policy will be going into effect on August 1st (LJ):

After more than a year and a half of proposals, withdrawals, and revisions, OCLC's final updated policy governing the usage of WorldCat records is set to go into effect on August 1. The document, an update to the currently prevailing "Guidelines for Use and Transfer of OCLC Derived Records" (from 1987), is written in the form of an agreement on "Rights and Responsibilities" governing both OCLC Cooperative members and the steward organization itself. This commitment-driven approach is a departure from OCLC's previous attempts, criticized for being opaque and for featuring severe legalistic language. The current iteration has been repeatedly described as "a code of good practice," and stresses cooperative member libraries' vested interest in maintaining WorldCat as a viable and self-sustaining resource for catalog records and other services.

A wrap up of the AAUP conference in Salt Lake City (Chronicle):

The program was praised by many attendees in part because it focused on digital how-to: how to make and market e-books, and how to work with libraries that want everything in electronic form. It's far too early to say that most or even many university presses have made the transition from a print-based world to an electronic one. But most have now recognized that they have to figure out what that transition will look like for their particular presses if they want to keep publishing.

Concluding:

Beyond the practical questions, there was a philosophical slant to the conference, too. The publishers wondered and worried about the future of the long-form argument—e.g., the scholarly monograph. How will it survive in an era of quick Internet searches and piecemeal reading? Nicholas G. Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, wasn't in Salt Lake City, but his argument that the Internet is killing off "deep reading" came up several times.

At a freewheeling session on "information hyperabundance," the audience wrestled with how society ought to deal with the flood of data coming at us. Michael J. Jensen, director of strategic Web communications for National Academies Press, talked about how publishers and the rest of us are up against "a whole industry of distraction engines" that wants us to surf the Web, play video games, and generally do anything but read a book.

A drink writer is a bad writer (Independent):

"The idea that drugs and alcohol give artists unique insights and powerful experiences is an illusion," he said. "When you try and capture the experiences [triggered by drugs or alcohol] they are often nonsense. These drugs often wipe your memory, so it's hard to remember how you were in that state of mind."

LA Times notes that the Obama administration is beefing up the policing of piracy and counterfeiting of goods and e-books are mentioned (LAT):

Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator Victoria Espinel said her office would review current efforts to curb intellectual property infringement of U.S. goods abroad, especially in China. China also is the source of many counterfeit goods. A U.S. Customs and Border Protection report published last year said 79% of seized fake goods came from China.

The enforcement strategy outlined in a 61-page report released Tuesday contains over 30 recommendations, which includes establishing an interagency committee dedicated to curbing fake drugs and medical products. It also calls for agencies to encourage foreign law enforcement to go after rogue websites and "increase the number of criminal enforcement actions" against intellectual property violators.

"There's not an industry that hasn't been affected," said Dr. Mark Esper, executive vice president of the Global Intellectual Property Center at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, who lauded the enforcement strategy. "The next victim out there is probably going to be the e-books and the publishing industry. "

Also in the LAT, book bloggers are inheriting the world of book reviews (LAT):

Blogs like Riley's, because of the genres they focus on, have caught the eye of publishers, who are eager to have a new opportunity to reach readers. "Women's fiction that maybe wouldn't be covered by traditional book sections is being blogged about, talked about," says Jennifer Hart, vice president and associate publisher at HarperCollins for its paperback imprints. "There are books blogs for every niche of publishing — from literary and commercial fiction to young adult, to sci-fi, to cookbooks. This offers publishers an incredible opportunity — we can reach the audience for all of our books, no matter the genre."

Some of this diversity was reflected in the Book Blogger Convention's attendees. Joan Pantsios, a public defender from Chicago just getting started with book blogging, has a fondness for literature. Carrie Brownell, whose Christianity is important to her blogging, is a stay-at-home mom from Oregon. Monica Shroeder, a 23-year-old military service member, devours books with incredible speed — especially those with vampires. Yet despite their different backgrounds, world views and tastes in books, these women — most book bloggers are women — were all incredibly friendly, eager to connect.

Almost complete collection of Faukner's works goes up for auction at Christie's (AP):

The auction could be the last chance to acquire such a large collection of the Nobel Prize-winning author's work, said Louis Daniel Brodsky, a poet and Faulkner scholar, who lives in St. Louis.Brodsky, who donated his own private collection to the Center for Faulkner Studies at Southeast Missouri State University, said he once owned the extremely rare copy of Faulkner's first novel, "Soldier's Pay," in a dust jacket that's part of the lot up for auction."There are five of those known," he said.Also included in the collection are signed copies of "The Wild Palms" and "Absalom, Absalom!" In keeping with common auction house practice, Christie's didn't identify the owner, but said he was an American.A few items offer a glimpse into the personal side of the author, whose stream of consciousness writings explored the complicated social system of the South.Ironically, Faulkner likely would have cringed to know his personal items are to be part of a public bidding war, Griffith said.

The lot eventually went for $833K. Not too bad - pays for a few air conditioners.

News that Author House will bring Harold Robbins back into print reminded me of Basil Fawlty and the Waldorf salad episode of Faulty Towers. This is Basil's review of Robbin's work:

"aimless thrills, ... the most awful American ... tripe, a sort of pornographic muzak." Of course, when he (Basil) learns the Hamiltons (guests) like Robbins, Basil pretends to have been referring to another author named "Harold Robinson." Harold Robbins was an American romance novelist whose peak of popularity lasted from the 1950s through the 1970s. His lurid, melodramatic writings were dismissed by critics as trashy pulp but were international bestsellers.

Here from the press release:

AuthorHouse, a leading self-publishing imprint of Author Solutions, Inc. (ASI), announced Thursday that is re-releasing 12 classic novels from America's top-selling fiction author of all-time, Harold Robbins.

Robbins' widow Jann said she chose AuthorHouse because it provided her the opportunity to make the books available over a wide range of digital platforms, like the Kindle, the nook and through Kobo. Additionally, the books will be re-released in paperback and hardcover formats.

"I'm an avid reader of eBooks and Harold would have loved the idea of making his books available digitally," said Jann Robbins. "His books spoke to all people, and by increasing the ways we can reach readers [through digital formats], I believe we're carrying on his legacy."

Galley editions of the first three titles: Where Love Has Gone; The Lonely Lady; and Goodbye, Janette will be debuted at the 2010 American Library Association (ALA) Annual Conference Friday through Sunday at the Washington Convention Center in Washington DC.

In addition, AuthorHouse will re-release nine more titles in the coming months. The release dates for hardcover copies and digital versions of the books will be announced in July, but pre-orders will be taken at the conference. "Harold Robbins is an American icon, selling more than 750 million books, in 32 languages, to readers worldwide. He paved the way for mainstream authors like Danielle Steele and Jackie Collins. We are pleased to bring his writing into the new digital age," said Kevin Weiss, ASI president and chief executive officer. The other nine titles being made available through AuthorHouse include: The Adventurers; Never Love a Stranger; Descent from Xanadu; Memories of Another Day; The Pirate; The Inheritors; Spellbinder; Dreams Die First; and The Dream Merchants.

From the @twitter this week:

Guardian: Conrad Black given fresh hope of early release after US supreme court ruling The http://bit.ly/9hImnD
TeleRead: Ray Kurzweil’s ‘Blio’ e-reader: Is it really all that? http://bit.ly/dgwClg
Guardian: 'Operation Thunderdome' takes US paper digital. http://bit.ly/c75mnE http://bit.ly/9fgvDu Digital first print last. Revolutionary
MediaPost Viacom's Copyright Infringement Lawsuit Against YouTube Dismissed: In a sweeping victory for Google, a federal... http://bit.ly/bRBAtR

BBC News: Spy novelist Alan Furst takes readers back in time http://bit.ly/bpagJF - Just saw this. He is a great writer. (Video)
Nothing to report in Sport this week.

Amazon As Producer - Repost

Originally posted May 14, 2009

Amazon sells a lot of books but like any retailer they want to sell more. Reliance on publishers to produce the right books, or support the books in the right way, is so old school, and Amazon has determined that in some cases they can do a better job than a traditional publisher. From their press release:

AmazonEncore is a new program whereby Amazon uses information such as customer reviews on Amazon websites to identify exceptional, overlooked books and authors that show potential for greater sales. Amazon then partners with the authors to re-introduce their books to readers through marketing support and distribution into multiple channels and formats, such as the Amazon Books Store, Amazon Kindle Store, Audible.com, and national and independent bookstores via third-party wholesalers. This summer "Legacy" will be revised by the author and re-issued as an AmazonEncore edition in print on Amazon websites around the world, in physical bookstores, as a digital download from the Kindle Store in less than 60 seconds, and via spoken-word audio download on Audible.com.

It was really only a matter of time before Amazon entered the acquisitions segment of the publishing value chain and they follow Barnes & Noble and Borders in this respect, but the danger (or opportunity) in the Amazon case is more acute given their market power. Amazon is likely to go about this program in a far more aggressive manner than the other retailers, and the strategy looks like another element of their 'platform' play. Soon it may be the case where traditional book content - once 'generic' in terms of its' availability in all retail outlets - becomes somehow proprietary on the Kindle, in audio and perhaps in print. Amazon has such retail selling power that any publisher selected into the Encore program would have few qualms agreeing to an 'exclusive' sales arrangement. 'Exclusive' since few non-Amazon retailers would be likely to carry the title.

The self-publishing market has long seemed to me to be one of the best things that has happened to the acquisitions editor. The market represents a test bed of potential new authors and book projects. While the number of winners is always going to be small, the work of sifting through this material, which historically would have been done by reading the stacks of manuscript submissions, now takes place in the minor leagues of publishing. Here, there is a ready market of readers and reviewers who en mass can do the job of many AE's; but, Amazon is spoiling all the fun. With their superior data analysis capability, Amazon will be able to select these sleeper hits far in advance of any publisher and this Encore program will conspire to erode a publishers ability to source new books.

On the other hand, publishers will continue to publish authors who have not gone the self-publishing route and will not initially be available to Amazon. Many of these titles don't sell well even though they are good titles. Amazon are telling publishers that they are prepared to step in and help out if they determine that with a little more coaxing the title could indeed find an audience. The question will be on what terms this arrangement will be based.

Amazon as producer is a subtle but important change in the operations of the largest retailer. I often mull what would happen to some of the largest publishers if they lost their top two or three authors to Google or Amazon. It may be that the Amazon Encore program sets the stage for a much larger program by Amazon to establish their own publishing and media production operation - their content supply - that feeds their retail presence. There may be further ramifications from this seemingly innocuous press release.

SS United States - August 1968

USS United States, August 1968

A weekly image from my archive.

The way the trim line arcs down from prow to stern, the funnels swept backwards as though pushed back by the wind, indeed the SS United States was a stylish ship. The liner held the trans-Atlantic record for many years and in this image you can easily imagine its sleek contour slicing through the sea. On the ships stern gold lettering proudly proclaims the ship's name and home port. Pretenders would have caught this parting message – “Sure, we're the United States and we're from New York!”

My parents were probably on a Circle Line tour in August 1968 and the liner was docked and preparing for a return to Europe. The ship’s owner was already in financial difficulty: My parents flew over on a 707 and jet travel killed the luxury liner. The United States was effectively taken out of service a year later.

Looking at the NY skyline almost 40 yrs later, the skyline is still familiar despite the significant changes. On the right of this image is the Sheraton Motor Lodge West Side, which opened in 1962 and boasted a roof top pool and “off street parking”. Rooms in 1968 went for $21. The Sheraton is now the Chinese consulate having first become run down as a Travelodge (I think) and then renovated by imported Chinese workers. Just to the left of the Sheraton and to the right of the first water tower you can just see the New Yorker hotel sign which is still a night time beacon on the skyline. There's an unobstructed view of the Empire State Building and to the far left is the Pan Am building with the Chrysler building in front.

The 2010 panorama has changed considerably but I don’t think my parents, on a 1968 Circle Line tour, would have thought their child would be able to view the Empire State Building out of his living room window forty years later.

Entire 1968 Set

The Curator and the Docent

Walking around a vast museum can be interesting and, sometimes serendipitous, but often it is an incomplete experience. Items are organized in specific groups yet not always in a manner that encourages exploration of the most important items. Presented with a gallery full of amphorae, it can be difficult to recognize the single important item while on your own and without a guide. Surfing the web for information and knowledge can offer a similar experience: Access and proximity is no guarantee you will happen on relevance. 

Museums and libraries are good proxies for the concept of “curation,” which we’re hearing a lot about at the moment. Private equity (for one) has found its next buzz word and funding vultures are lacing their presentations with references to ‘curation’ in an effort to gain financial support for their new business ideas. But curation is an old concept: Television networks, newspapers, magazines, journals and other media have all practiced a form of content curation for hundreds of years. We’ve just recently latched onto the idea of curation as though it were something new. 

The need for curation in the old media world wasn’t as obvious as in the internet world because, on the web, ‘everything carries the same weight’ and the average user has difficulty discerning good content from bad. Indeed, as content on the web exploded over the past fifteen years, users accepted the “good enough” concept – free content was plentiful – and were content to ‘satisfice’ either knowingly or obliviously. User behavior and expectations are changing and investors are now chasing businesses that profess to actively curate content and communities of interest. In recent years content curation has emerged out of the wild, wild, west of ‘mere’ content. Sites such as The Huffington Post, Red State and Politico all represent new attempts to build audiences around curated content. While they appear to be successful, at the same time there are other sites (such as Associated Content and Demand Media) contributing to the morass of filler content that can plague the web users’ experience. 

The buzz word ‘curation’ does carry with it some logic: As the sheer amount of information and content grows, consumers seek help parsing the good from the bad. And that’s where curation comes in. The amount of content available to consumers – much of it free of charge, but scattered across thousands of websites – is growing exponentially every day. At the same time, consumers are increasingly doing independent research and attempting on their own to source important information to support their increasingly complicated lives. Questions or information relating to healthcare, finances, education and leisure activities represent a small sample of the range of topics on which consumers look for accuracy and relevance, yet encounter an immense sea of specious or outdated content. 

In many ways, the web - in its entirety - is the new dictionary, directory or reference encyclopedia, but users with specific interests are increasingly beginning to understand they need to spend as much time validating what they find as they do consuming their research. In the old days, it was as simple as pulling the volume off the shelf and, while the web offers a depth and accuracy of content that far outstrips any from the old days, finding content of similar veracity can be a challenge. 

For the past two years, I was working on a project with Louis Borders at Mywire.com in an attempt to build a curated news and information service we called Week’sBest. For a variety of reasons we put the project on hold in February, but the concept was simple: Identify experts that can curate content on a range of specific topics and build a community of interested subscribers around the content. Our model was to find expert ‘content producers’ who retain unique knowledge and understanding of a specific topic and would filter content from across the web specific to their topic of expertise. Mywire.com built a unique editorial tool to make this process almost routine by pre-selecting topic-specific content from both brand name sources and from across the web. Our experts - the content producers – logged on each day and selected from this pre-sorted list only those items they considered the best content. 

Consumers interested in each of these topics subscribe to a free weekly email digest of the material selected. Our revenue model was based on turning a subset of our free email subscribers into paid subscribers who would gain access to high-quality content – such as content from Oxford University Press. While we were unable to execute as we expected, we did gain validation of our concept from both the publishing and the private equity community. 

Publishers, who we were chasing to be our ‘content experts’ liked that there was a low cost of entry for their participation and liked the editorial platform we had invested in. The equity community liked the ‘curation’ model, the people involved in the project and the investment that Mywire had made in the platform. However, we suffered the ‘prove it’ syndrome. Both publishers and equity partners wanted to see the model work before they committed and we ran out of time and resources. Mywire.com continues to invest in other curation type models. I remain convinced that applying technology to the selection of useful, valid and appropriate content is only part of the solution. 

At Mywire, we used a text mining tool as part of the editorial process and on simple news items – which are increasingly generic – placing content items into subject/topic groupings was relatively easy. The process isn’t perfect and requires frequent ‘fine tuning’ but while the tools are improving, human intervention is still required. Earlier this month we learned that even Google was applying some human filtering to their news site. There is a real debate whether consumers will pay for real expertise and knowledge: I believe they will, just as they paid for specialist magazines, journals, cable channels and similar media in the analog centuries. 

The atomization of content has complicated matters in that it has taken the proverbial covers off the print limitation of the traditional magazine. While a reader or subscriber will buy into the expertise of ‘Glamour’ or ‘Men’s Health,’ they now expect all important and relevant content and not just the content prepared by the magazine’s writers. After all, there is a low hurdle in the user’s ability to search for content on their own and it is silly to ignore this ability. Acting as a ‘content producer,’ the editors of ‘Glamour’ should be able to provide their paying subscribers with a collective representation of all content that’s important and relevant to their readers even if the content is produced by Glamour’s competitors. This is an important service and doesn’t limit the ability of Glamour to produce their own content; rather, it enhances it because they are able to view in detail the interests of their subscribers and produce applicable content to match. 

In the above example, generic news is never going to be the basis for paid subscriptions. For example, the news that suntan lotion causes skin cancer is a hyped news story. In the Glamour example, this news story would always remain in the free section of their site; however, available to subscribers would be a curated selection of in-depth content including reference material, added to over time, with commentary and discussion from their ‘expert’ editors and advisors about the real issue of sun protection products. 

With a brand such as Glamour, the number of expert curated topics made available to subscribers could easily exceed fifty and over time would be likely to grow. Strongly associated with this approach would be the development of communities around each topic, leading in turn to additional business opportunities such as ad programs, events and special publishing programs. The interest of consumers across a wide variety of subjects and topics continues unabated and the internet has only facilitated that interest, although our expectations have been reduced or marginalized due to undifferentiated content. 

The consumer is increasingly smarter about the content they consume and they also continue to impress with their ability to seek out and absorb what, in the analog world, was considered too “advanced” for their understanding. There was always an arbitrary wall between “professional or academic” content and consumer content: Increasingly, consumers are making it clear that they want to make the decision themselves whether particular content is or is not too advanced for their comprehension or enjoyment. 

Recently, as I wandered around a museum with overwhelming breadth and depth of content, I was lucky to be guided in my travels by a professional. When she introduced herself to me, she used the term ‘docent’ to describe her function. A docent is a ‘knowledgeable guide’ and the function seems to me to perfectly complement the process of curation. In an online world, where more and more content appears to “carry the same weight,” we will look to and pay for the combination of curator and docent – sometimes the same person or entity – who can organize and manage a range of content and also engage with the user so they gain insight and meaning from the material. 

At Mywire.com, we intentionally approached branded media companies because they were recognized as experts in their segments. These are the companies which should be able to build revenue models around the curation of content to offer subscribers a materially different experience than simply performing a Google search query delivering up generic news and semi-relevant content.

MediaWeek (Vol 3, No 25): Joyce, Embedded Librarians, Cloud Computing Survey

You may have heard of the iPad & Ulysses controversy - here from the Observer:

Ulysses has what the racing fraternity call "form" in this regard. In 1926, for example, four years after its publication, the Cambridge English don FR Leavis decided that he wanted to quote from the book – which was then banned in Britain – in his lectures. He therefore wrote to the Home Office seeking permission to import a copy. For his temerity, he was then summoned by the university's vice-chancellor, who handed him a note from the director of public prosecutions revealing that the Cambridge police had been monitoring Leavis's lectures, and concluding with a recommendation that he "should be suitably and firmly dealt with". The publishers of Ulysses "Seen" are no doubt feeling relaxed and contented, on the grounds that if you can get round Apple's editorial control-freakery then you can get around anything. There is, however, one further possibly fly in their ointment. His name is Stephen Joyce. He is the grandson of the great man and since the 1980s has been in sole control of his grandfather's literary estate. More importantly, his desire to control the uses of his literary property makes Steve Jobs look like St Francis of Assisi.

Robert McCrumb on a busman's holiday in the Northeast (Observer):

In Washington I went to one of America's great bookstores – Politics and Prose on Connecticut Avenue – a beacon of traditional bookselling, run for the past 25 years by Barbara Meade and Carla Cohen. To the dismay of the locals, they have just announced their retirement and the business is for sale. But it's age (both women are in their 70s) not recession or competition from Barnes and Noble that's driving this decision. Meade told me that their book sales are actually up 30% in 2010.The US and Canada remain an enthusiastic and sophisticated book market. Unlike in Britain, there are hardly any festivals, but book clubs and reading groups make up the deficit, and everyone is a consumer, if not always a reader. A Martian would have to conclude that the thing called "the printed word" was enjoying a bonanza.

Embedded Librarians? (Inside HigherEd):

The model Roderer and her staff are pursuing is distributed not only in the sense that every researcher’s computer can access the library’s website and its vaults of electronic journal articles and e-books, but in that library personnel are embedded in various departments to work with researchers on their own turf. These staffers are no longer called librarians; they are “informationists.” (Roderer did not invent the term, but she prefers it to “librarian,” which she says evokes envoys from a faraway building rather than information experts whose skills are applicable anywhere.) Medical students, clinicians, and professors are loath to trek across campus to the library’s physical plant now that the majority of its collections are available in electronic format through its website, Roderer says. However, that does not mean the library’s staff is no longer of use to researchers, she says — nor does it mean the staff’s interactions with researchers need to be limited to e-mail and text-messaging.

Pew Research on the Future of Cloud Computing (Pew):

The highly engaged, diverse set of respondents to an online, opt-in survey included 895 technology stakeholders and critics. The study was fielded by the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project and Elon University's Imagining the Internet Center. Some 71% agreed with the statement: " By 2020, most people won't do their work with software running on a general-purpose PC. Instead, they will work in Internet-based applications such as Google Docs, and in applications run from smartphones. Aspiring application developers will develop for smartphone vendors and companies that provide Internet-based applications, because most innovative work will be done in that domain, instead of designing applications that run on a PC operating system." Some 27% agreed with the opposite statement, which posited: "By 2020, most people will still do their work with software running on a general-purpose PC. Internet-based applications like Google Docs and applications run from smartphones will have some functionality, but the most innovative and important applications will run on (and spring from) a PC operating system. Aspiring application designers will write mostly for PCs." Most of those surveyed noted that cloud computing will continue to expand and come to dominate information transactions because it offers many advantages, allowing users to have easy, instant, and individualized access to tools and information they need wherever they are, locatable from any networked device. Some experts noted that people in technology-rich environments will have access to sophisticated-yet-affordable local networks that allow them to "have the cloud in their homes."

From the twitter: A good series of notes from John Mark Ockerbloom On bibliographic data and cataloging: #rmti A Failure to Communicate http://shar.es/mysOJ In lawsuit against Georgia St over e-reserves, scholarly publishing faces a defining moment Reader's Digest Moves to Mend http://bit.ly/9ZizvU Less ambition, fewer staff but looking to rebound. And in sports, England beat Australia and the rest is not worth mentioning. Lakers beat Celtics - always good.

Metadata Everywhere

An interesting article in OCLC's NextSpace publication about the increasing importance of meta data. Music to bibliographers and catalogers' ears. (OCLC):

“Metadata has become a stand-in for place.”

So says Richard Amelung, Associate Director at the Saint Louis University Law Library. When asked to expand on that idea he explains, “Law is almost entirely jurisdictional. You need to know where a decision occurred or a law was changed to understand if it has any relevance to your subject.

“In the old days, you would walk the stacks in the law library and look at the sections for U.S. law, international law, various state law publications, etc. Online? Without metadata, you may have no idea where something is from. Good cataloging isn’t just a ‘nice-to-have’ for legal reference online. It’s a requirement.”

Richard’s point is one example of a trend that is being felt across all aspects of information services, both on and off the Web: the increasing importance and ubiquity of metadata. In a world where more and more people, systems, places and even objects are digitally connected, the ability to differentiate “signal from noise” is fast becoming a core competency for many businesses and institutions.

Librarians—and catalogers more specifically—are deeply familiar with the role good metadata creation plays in any information system. As part of this revolution, industries are increasing the value they place on talents and the ways in which librarians work, extending the ever-growing sphere of interested players.

Whether we are tracing connections on LinkedIn, getting recommendations from Netflix, trying to find the right medical specialist in a particular city or monitoring a shipment online, metadata has become the structure on which we’re building information services. And no one has more experience with those structures than catalogers.

Concluding:

“It is clear that metadata is ubiquitous,” Jane continues. “Education, the arts, science, industry, government and the many humanistic, scientific and social pursuits that comprise our world have rallied to develop, implement and adhere to some form of metadata practice.

“What is important is that librarians are the experts in developing information standards, and we have the most sophisticated skills and experience in knowledge representation.”

Those skills are being put to good use not only in the library, but in nearly every discipline and societal sector coming into contact with information.

Bibliographers Shall Inherit...Data Monopolies - Repost

I recently heard Fred Wilson speak and it reminded me of this post from February 5th, 2007:


Fred Wilson is a founder of Union Square Ventures a private equity firm located in NYC. He was also part of Flatiron Partners until he left to start Union Square. He was the key note speaker at Monday’s SIIA Previews meeting and spoke about Content; specifically that content "wants to be free."

He ended the session with a potentially more interesting theme which related to tagging and content descriptions. In answer to a question about the potential power of social nets and the attendant tagging possibilities he suggested that we shouldn’t have to tag information at all; that is, content should be adequately described for us. The questioner stated that ‘publishers are good’ at describing their content. Wilson disagreed, confirming (to me) that publishers are definitely not good at tagging or classifying their content. His comments confirm for me a belief that intermediaries that insert descriptors, subject classifications and other metadata to improve relevance and discovery will play an increasingly important role. Personally, I do not think the battle has yet been joined that will determine one provider of standardized meta-data within specific product or content categories. (Some players have clear positioning, take for example Snap-On tools purchase of Proquest’s Business Solutions unit which opens many intriguing opportunities – if you like car parts).

You may think that books are effectively categorized by Amazon.com and therefore Amazon is the standard. This is untrue: In fact there are several bibliographic book databases and none of them are compatible across the industry. Additionally, while Amazon allows great access to their data, they are not a good cataloguer of bibliographic information. Their effort is enough to serve their purposes. As a seeker of books and book (e)content, I will want to be able to search on a variety of data elements (publisher, format, subject, author) and find what I am looking regardless of the tool I am using. In my view a single source of quality bibliographic information distributed at the element level will solve this problem. Suppliers of content are beginning to understand that it is the description of the content (metadata) that is as important as the content itself.

It is really quite simple: A database provider needs to spend time standardizing their deep bibliographic content, distribute it to anyone who wants it and then figure out how they can make money doing that. Historically, a vendor had to create their own product catalog because either one didn’t exist or they preferred to build it themselves. Look at office products or mattresses. It is nearly impossible to compare items across vendors. Books and other media products are slightly easier but the legacy of multiple databases continues to reduce efficiency. Management of a product database/catalog should never be a competitive advantage unless it is your business.

Fred Wilson stated that if information wants to be free then where is the value in information? Unsurprisingly it is in attention. To quote, "there is a scarcity of attention and narrowing users’ data ‘experience’ to mitigate irrelevance is the future." Furthermore the ‘leverage points’ in the attention driven information model are Discovery, Navigation, Trust – ratings around content (page rank is good example), Governance, Values and Metadata – data about the data. The likes of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have the first couple of these items well in hand but they will all increasingly need good meta-data that describes the content they are serving up. This is where aggregators/intermediaries step in whether it be tools, tv programs and movies, advertising or books.

He has provided a link on his web site to the presentation from this meeting.

Photo: Tehran August 1972

PND on the tarmac, Tehran 1972

This will be a weekly series of photos from my archive and I hope you enjoy the selection.


This photo is a good point of embarkation for my series:

Pan Am Clipper Pacific Trader (N744PA) is parked on the tarmac at Mehrabad International Airport in Tehran. That's me in the foreground clutching my Air New Zealand carry on. My father, grand father and I were traveling back to New Zealand after I had spent the summer in the UK and my father had attended a Columbia summer business program.

The 747 jumbo was still relatively new and in those years the upstairs section was designed to be a lounge and dining room. Dad worked for the hotels division of Pan Am and we regularly traveled first class which included the upstairs section. In our experience there was never anyone up there, but there was this wonderful u shaped couch which stretched around the back of the cabin. If you were quick and lucky and the flight attendants allowed, it was possible to grab a section and lie prone from Hong Kong to Karachi. As long as you were strapped in they never woke you.

The 747 was too large for many airports at that time and so passengers tended to be bussed to the terminal. As the plane came to a stop in Tehran a contingent of armed troops came and encircled the plane with each soldier 10 or so yards apart. There they stood facing outward, guarding the aircraft until we departed. To this day I'm not too sure they were ever equipped to protect us.

I never kept track of the planes I traveled on but I was able to identify this 747 from the photo. Curiously, it was loaned by Pan Am to Iran Air about 2 years later. I like the two well dressed travelers at the bottom of the stairs - a sight not often seen now a days.

Photo: Flickr

BISG Revising Sales Reporting: Take a Survey

From BISG:

SHORT SURVEY ON DATA MODEL FOR COLLECTING BOOK INDUSTRY STATISTICS

Dear Book Industry Colleagues,

This is an exciting time!

As mentioned in the notice attached, for years AAP and BISG have developed data separately on the size of the market for books—in the aggregate and by market sector. We have used different models and produced different results. Now, we’re working together to develop a new data model to track book industry statistics and to dramatically improve our capacity to estimate the size of market sectors and the industry as a whole.

AAP and BISG have retained Management Practice, Inc. (MPI) to develop a prototype data model. A committee of representatives of AAP and BISG members is overseeing the process.

Now, you're invited to join us!

We expect participants from every sector of the book business will find that the improved accuracy and timeliness of data will lead to better business decisions and more effective public advocacy. We welcome your involvement in the process.

Over the next couple months, AAP, BISG and MPI will be contacting our members through interviews and surveys to determine the usefulness and accuracy of the new data model as it develops. The following brief survey stands at the beginning of this process. Please take the time to let us know what you think about the direction we're going by submitting your response no later than Friday, June 25, 2010 at 5:00 p.m. Eastern.

We look forward to working with you on this extremely important industry initiative.

LIVE SURVEY LINK: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/P98PS2N

SURVEY DEADLINE: FRIDAY, JUNE 25, 2010 @ 5:00 p.m. EASTERN