PND Technology: Hashable

My weekly (kind of) recap of some of the interesting technology I've heard about at the tech meet-ups I've been going to (NYTech)

Making introductions can often be difficult even when the compatibility or mutual interest is so obvious. Along comes Hashable which is making connecting and establishing introductions easier and less painful.

The Hashable tool can be used to make introductions via Twitter or email and you can track the introductions you have initiated and those that your social group is building. You see who they are connecting with and potentially follow their lead in providing introductions. Hashable has an integrated address book so searching for people to connect with each other is simple and there is a gaming aspect to the site that enables you to see who 'ranks' highest (via a leaderboard) in introducing the most connections.

Here is the video from the recent NYTech Meetup and here are some more details from their website:

What do I use it for?
For starters, you can use it to track introductions you make and people you meet with. And you can discover new people by following your friends and seeing who they're connecting with. Your profile page shows your latest activity. You can also check out our leaderboard to see who the top movers and shakers are in our community at large.

How do I use Hashable via Hashable.com?

There is a simple tool on your hashable.com homepage that helps you make introductions. You can use the tool to make an introduction through twitter or email. Using our integrated address book, you'll be able to easily search your twitter or email contacts and find people you'd like to connect.

How do I use Hashable via Twitter?

With the #intro hashtag, Hashable makes Twitter intros not only socially acceptable but socially awesome. Send a tweet that includes the names of the people you'd like to introduce, the '#intro' hashtag, and our Twitter name @hashable. Then, we'll immediately send a follow-up tweet to the people you're introducing with a link to an icebreaker page. This page gets your friends started by showing them each others' information (photo, job title etc.) as well as their mutual connections on Twitter. We also give your friends an easy way to respond with the 'connect through twitter' button at the top of the page.

How do I use Hashable via Email?
If you want to keep making introductions through your email client, you can still get many of the benefits of using Hashable. From your email client, just cc 'post@hashable.com' to make your introduction public or cc 'dontpost@hashable.com' to make your introduction private. Private intros will not be posted to the public stream, but they still get archived and you still get points.

As Mike Yavonditte, CEO of the company notes in the demo that networking isn't always fun but it is a necessary thing. Hashable is making introductions easy and fun. Check it out in beta.

Not so benighted music business: There's money to be made.

The economist reviews how musicians are making money in a media segment that has been derided as an internet loser. Here are several clips:

Yet the music business is surprisingly healthy, and becoming more so. Will Page of PRS for Music, which collects royalties on behalf of writers and publishers, has added up the entire British music business. He reckons it turned over £3.9 billion ($6.1 billion) in 2009, 5% more than in 2008. It was the second consecutive year of growth. Much of the money bypassed the record companies. But even they managed to pull in £1.1 billion last year, up 2% from 2008. A surprising number of things are making money for artists and music firms, and others show great promise. The music business is not dying. But it is changing profoundly.

The longest, loudest boom is in live music. Between 1999 and 2009 concert-ticket sales in America tripled in value, from $1.5 billion to $4.6 billion (see chart 1). Ticket sales wobbled in America during the summer of 2010, but that was partly because some big-selling acts took a break. One of the most reliable earners, Bono, U2’s singer, was put out of action when he injured his back in May. Next year many of the big acts will be on the road again, and a bumper year is expected.
....
On television, music is either supported by advertising or bundled invisibly into the cost of pay-TV subscriptions. That model is spreading from the box to the web. Free music-streaming services like We7 and Spotify have proliferated in Europe: the latter claims 10m users. America has Vevo, a music-video website linked to YouTube and owned in part by Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment. Because Vevo’s content is consistently professional, it draws advertisers. Rio Caraeff, who runs the outfit, says companies pay $25-30 to reach 1,000 viewers. That is more than television networks tend to get, although Vevo reaches fewer people and runs many fewer ads (just 15 seconds every six-and-a-half minutes).
...
Some music executives fret that the stadium-filling acts will not be replaced. It is true that the starmaking machines run by the record companies are creaking. But this does not mean there will be no more popular acts. Musicians will build fan bases in other ways—through social networks, by recording music for TV or simply by trekking from gig to gig (which is how bands became famous for much of the 20th century). Some will rise with a speed that would have shocked their predecessors—witness Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber, a 16-year-old singer who was almost unknown a year ago. Those who doubt their staying power may wish to consider that adults have long believed the music their teenage children listen to will not endure as long as the tunes they grew up with.

MediaWeek (Vol 3, No 43): Larsson, Type & Fonts, Taylor Bradford

Just when you thought you had read all the Stieg Larsson stories comes word he was a revolutionary(Telegraph):

In it, Mr Holmberg describes how Larsson trained a group of women who were part of a Marxist liberation group fighting for Eritrea’s independence from Ethiopia. He writes: “1977 was a dramatic year. Stieg spent part of it in Eritrea, where he had contacts in the Marxist EPLF liberation movement and helped to train a company of women guerrillas in the use of grenade launchers. “But he also contracted a kidney inflammation and was forced to leave the country.”

Curiously no one seems to explain who trained the trainer which could be far more interesting. The Observer has a very long excerpt from True to Type, How we fell in love with our letters (Observer):

The etiquette of type informs our daily lives. Say you are designing a jacket for a new edition of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. The book is out of copyright and so has cost you nothing, the beautiful jacket illustration of a secret garden has been done by a friend, and now all you have to do is find a suitable typeface for the title and author, and then the text inside. For the jacket type, conventional wisdom would be to choose something like Didot, which first appeared at around the time Austen was writing and looks very classy with its extreme range of fine and stronger lines, especially in italics. This font will fit right in, and will sell books to people who like classic editions. But if you wanted to reach a different market, the sort who might read Kate Atkinson or Sebastian Faulks, you may opt for something less fusty, perhaps Ambroise Light, which, like Didot, has a stylish French pedigree. For the text of the book, you might consider a digital update of Bembo – perhaps Bembo Book? Originally cut from metal in the 1490s, this classic roman typeface retains a consistent readability. And it fits the overriding principle that typefaces should mostly pass unrecognised in daily life; that they should inform but not alarm. A font on a book jacket should merely pull you in; once it has created the desired atmosphere it does well to slink away, like the host at a party. There are exceptions, of course, and a brilliant one is John Gray's bestseller, Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, in which the designer Andrew Newman chose Arquitectura for the male lines and Centaur for the female ones. Arquitectura looks manly because it is tall, solid, slightly space-age, rooted and implacable. Centaur, despite its bullish name, looks like it has been written by hand, has thin and thick strokes, and is charming and elegant (obviously this is gross sexua l stereotyping, but Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus is pop-psychology).

Novelist Taylor Bradford is named Yorkshire person of the year (BBC - Link to video plays immediately) And from the twitter this week:

NYTimes.com: Streetscapes - Rare Books About New York - Rare Books About New York - NYT See Frankfurt presentation - Carla Stoffle: almost no new print book acquisitions in one year from now at U Arizona #ARLCNI10

Sheila Bounford's (of NBN) presentation from TOC Frankfurt: Technology, Change & Customers Blogpost Tony Blair In Line For Bad Sex Award (Telegraph - with suitable grim photo) Edward Nawotka Discusses Digital Publishing: The Book Futurists - EbookNews And in sport, it seems we have some serious issues with our star player (Guardian)

Parallel Universe: Will Libraries and Publishers Learn to Share?

Following is my presentation (10/5/10) at the 32nd Supply Chain Interests meeting at the Frankfurt Book fair. Below is the full text of my speech but on slideshare you can view each slide with the corresponding text.

Parallel Universe: Will Libraries and Publishers Learn to Share? from Michael Cairns

MediaWeek (Vol 3, No 42b): Midnight's Children, Harold McGraw on Technology, 50 Best Bookstores

The Independent is reporting that after years of working on a script Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children is to become a movie (Independent):

The novelist has been working for two years with the director Deepa Mehta on a script of a film version of the book that originally made his reputation. This week, the Harold Greenberg Fund, set up by the Canadian media firm Astral in honour of one of Canada's leading film directors, announced it was giving an award for "polishing and packaging" the script. Deepa Mehta, an Indian-born Canadian who has known Rushdie for many years, is best known for her trilogy Fire, Earth and Water, which she directed between 1996 and 2005. She and her husband, David Hamilton, run up the film company Hamilton Mehta, in Toronto. He will produce the film, which she will direct. The book's protagonist, Saleem, is born in Bombay at midnight on 15 August 1947, the moment when India became independent, who discovers that all Indian children born in that first hour have magical powers. The novel won the Booker Prize in 1981, then 12 years later was named the "Booker of Bookers". In 2008, in a contest to mark Booker's 40th anniversary of the prize, was again singled out as the best novel ever to win the prize.

Harold McGraw III and Philip Ruppel of McGraw Hill opine about the impact of technology on reading in (the) USA Today:

Today, it is not uncommon to hear predictions that the names of the great publishing houses will soon fall from the covers of books to the footnotes of self-published history tomes. Casual observers could be forgiven for thinking this way based on headlines on the e-reading revolution. First, Amazon announced that its e-book sales topped its hardcover sales for the first time. Then, in August, the Washington Post Co. sold iconic Newsweek amid questions about the future of weekly magazines. And just recently, this newspaper launched a " major organizational restructuring" as part of a continued shift from newsprint toward more digital platforms. While this tide of headlines speaks to the sea change sweeping the publishing world, the industry itself is anything but washed out. In fact, many parts of the industry are thriving in the digital age. Nowhere is this clearer than in the success of the e-book. The Association of American Publishers recently reported that e-book sales for the first half of the year were up more than 200%. Far from being the end of the publishing industry, this number is a sign of a new beginning. Why is there such a gap between the perception of a dying industry and the reality of a rapidly adapting one? It begins with five common myths about publishing:

Traveling England? What better guide than the 50 best bookshops Independent A deep write up and review of the conference eBooks: Libraries at the Tipping Point from Librarian in Black (Link) From the twitter: @Personanondata The Independent: What do you do with 8 million books? Build a shelf 153 miles long Independent Bodleian's offsite storage Elsevier Introduces Article-Based Publishing to Increase Publication Speed PR MediaPost: Wave of New Data On E-Reader Owners MediaPost Frankfurt Book Fair - Digital heads discuss the e-book market and the challenges that face us all PaidContent Picture Books Languish as Parents Push ‘Big-Kid Books’ - NYT See comment number 1.

MediaWeek (Vol 3, 42a): Frankfurt 2010 from the Show Dailies

There were dueling show dailies at the FBF this year and between the three of them they may have been able to pull together a decent single issue each day. Both The Bookseller and Publishing Perspectives had pdf versions of their show dailies and their content isn't yet (or maybe never) separately available on their sites. Publishers Weekly/ BookBrunch also had a show daily but I had no luck finding the show daily content I was looking for on their websites. If it was there it was buried. (As an aside, I was bemused that PW had a lead story on day two about the $100mm HMH fund for learning that I mentioned a month ago). (And I do realize the images look like they were taken out a prison window). Day One The Bookseller Daily- Day 1

Tour de Force (Pg 21) Events have helped the music industry cope with digitization. But, Anna Coatman asks, can author tours ever become a viable revenue stream for books? Going Native (Pg 23) The generation that has grown up with digital represents a challenge for academic publishers. E(uro) Files (Pg 8) Price maintainance, some EU laws and high VAT rates mean digital still hasn't caught fire in some European markets. Publishing Perspectives: Money For Nothing, And Your Pics For Free - Gwyn Headley on how Ebooks are finally embracing color images, but how much should you pay for them? (Pg 11) Day Two: The Bookseller Day 2 New Model Army (Pg 13) Perhaps today's biggest publishing challenge is how to repurpose and monetise digital content. Publishing Perspectives Day 2: Hunting for E-books Around the Globe: American bookseller Barnes & Noble’s Patricia Arancibia is in search of the best the world has to offer. (Pg 15) Day Three: The Bookseller Day 3 Up to 3mm searches per day for pirated eBooks. (Pg 4) Publishing Perspectives Day 3: Why Publishers Need Agile Content (Pg 10) Clearing the Air about Copyright: Users need education, rights-holders need to get paid. (Pg 11) The American Gentleman: At first publisher Roger Straus was reticent to come to Germany for a book fair, but once he did, the legendary publisher made friends, struck deals, and left a lasting legacy. (Pg 12) Scheherazade in the App Store: Can Digital Free Arabic Publishers. (Pg 15) The Future of Rights: Digital publishing raises countless rights issues, but work towards a universal international framework for clearances is beginning. (Pg 16) Moscow at Night: Is there such a thing as Russian noir and could it be the next big thing? (Pg 19) All in all Publishing Perspectives seemed to have a more expansive and interesting selection of stories than either The Bookseller or Publisher's Weekly. (IMHO of course). Here are all PW's Frankfurt posts.

Slums in Hong Kong: 1969

Slums of Hong Kong 1969

A weekly image from my archive. Click on the image to make it larger.

MediaWeek (Vol 3, No 41): Springer, Reading, Personal Librarians

Book business magazine profiles Springer's success in migrating to e-Journals (BBM):

Journals were early adopters in transitioning to digital, and since have become almost ubiquitously available in electronic formats. By 2009, there were about 25,400 active scholarly peer-reviewed journals, and more than 96 percent were available electronically. When Springer began offering e-books, the decision was made to follow the journal model. Libraries and patrons had become accustomed to this model, and a chapter in a scientific, technical or medical (STM) book often is viewed much like a journal article. Also, search engines have fundamentally changed the way that research is conducted and made print books largely obsolete for this purpose. Researchers now expect to be able to quickly sift through vast quantities of information at their fingertips. Because of this, Springer e-books and e-journals are searchable on a common platform, providing access to much more high-relevance information than was previously available. Where e-books are readily available, researchers are increasingly accepting and utilizing them. While Springer saw overall digital downloads increase 33 percent in 2008, e-book chapter downloads rose 70 percent and e-book usage more than doubled between 2007 and 2009.

You are what you read is the suggestion from Boston Globe reporter Natalie Southwick (BG):

Of course, the definition of “interesting’’ is hardly universal. The folks who might want to discuss the “merits’’ of “Atlas Shrugged’’ could be fascinating from a sociological standpoint, but that’s not something I want with my morning coffee. Or ever. But people attracted by the crustacean waving from the cover of “Consider the Lobster,’’ by the late, great David Foster Wallace? That’s the kind of interesting that interests me. But, as Stein points out, navigating the subtleties of commuter-lit culture is as much about context as familiar names: “The trick is to choose books that have cult followings, and so create a sense of secret fellowship — but that large numbers of your fellow-riders have actually read,’’ he advises. He recommends various authors and books for individual New York subway lines — according to his picks (Roberto Bolaño’s amazing “2666,’’ and my current T tome, Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow’’ ), I’m a G train girl.While Boston has fewer subway lines, Stein’s point still applies here. Would Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, “Freedom,’’ appeal as much to the college-age crowd on the Green Line as it might to the professional riders of the Red, or would you have more success opening Charlaine Harris’s latest Sookie Stackhouse novel as you head down Comm. Ave.? Perhaps Michael Pollan’s “Food Rules’’ would be appropriate for the South End-bound foodies of the Silver Line, Jon Krakauer’s “Where Men Win Glory’’ for Orange Line commuters, or a Dennis Lehane novel for the Revere Beach-goers of the Blue. As for the Commuter Rail — shouldn’t you be checking your BlackBerry?

A look at university libraries that are taking the personal approach to students (IHE):

The obligations are not nearly the same as those between academic advisers and advisees; in fact, students are not required to meet with their personal librarian, or even acknowledge them. The important thing for the library is that students know the library has not just books but also familiar-looking people who know their names and want to help them. The idea is that getting that name might make students more likely to schedule a sit-down meeting to learn how to use the library's various interfaces, collections, and specialists. Sit-downs, or even e-mail correspondence, are much more effective than group orientations, says Patricia Tully, the university librarian at Wesleyan. If personal librarian programs are a trend, the trend is a recent one. Barbara Rockenbach, director of undergraduate and library research at Yale, frames the movement toward “personalization” as a foil to technological forces that have made the library seem more impersonal. With many libraries canceling subscriptions to printed journals, shuttling underused books off to remote storage, and making more of their resources available on the Web, students might increasingly view the library as a database they can use from a solitary dorm room rather than an actual place populated by helpful humans.

The pulping of Franzen's book got a huge amount of press this weekend in the UK. Even my mother asked me if I had heard about it. (Independent) Review of all many touched by Twilight (Independent):

In an effort to strike a blow for anonymous catalogue models everywhere, Hickey told the New York Post that she is now hoping to audition for a walk-on role in the forthcoming fourth instalment in the Twilight film series. "If I could get a little background part, it would be fantastic... even if they only wanted my hands in it."Her success at exploiting such a tenuous connection with Meyer's first novel goes at least some way towards illustrating the huge commercial power of the Twilight franchise. The first three films in the series were made on budgets of $37, $50 and $68 million respectively, but generated a combined $800m at the box office for the previously-small Los Angeles firm behind them, Summit Entertainment.The vampire-themed romance novels have meanwhile overcome their sniffy critical reception to be translated into 37 languages, selling over 100 million copies, and turning Meyer, a 36-year-old Mormon who lives in a remote corner of Arizona, into a global publishing phenomenon with an annual income which has been estimated by Forbes magazine at over $50m.

From the twitter: Stephen J. Cannell, Prolific TV Writer, Dies at 69 - http://nyti.ms/9wrMGm Publishing Houses of Today, Yesterday and Tomorrow: Gene Schwartz' latest blog http://bit.ly/ayNTgi Kara Swisher BoomTown AllThingsDExclusive: Chegg Raises $75 Million in Additional Funding from Asian Firm http://bit.ly/brhJ8F

Repost: Frankfurt Presentation: Publishing in a Digital Age

Repost Friday and this post originally appeared on October 20th, 2008. Since I am addressing this same meeting on Tuesday I thought I would re-visit the last presentation.


This week I presented at the 30th International Supply Chain Specialists Meeting at the Frankfurt Bookfair. The presentation is available on Slideshare

Frankfurt Bookfair Supply Chain Meeting: Publishing in a Digital Age from Michael Cairns

If you click on the notes tab below the slideviewer you will be able to read my verbal comments attributed to each page. Without these comments the presentation is likely to be next to meaningless. (For some reason, you will need to click back from page two to page one to see the notes for page one - looks like a small bug to me).

Also, the presentation was videotaped (here). My video is the second one. The A/V guy starts in on page three for some reason.

It is about a 24 minute presentation. Some seemed to enjoy it and a number of people came up to me at the end although, I wondered why no one asked me who 'Kenneth' was. The other presentations that day were interesting and I will note the link to the editeur site when they are all up.

Ala Moana Beach Park & Diamond Head Honolulu 1975

Ala Moana Beach Park and Diamond Head 1975

A weekly image from my archive. Click on the image to make it larger.

Another beautiful day in paradise and while the skyline has changed considerably Honolulu is still a great town. Just left of center in this photo is the Illikai hotel with its revolving restaurant on top. About five years ago, the hotel had a major renovation and added time shares. One of my ex-colleagues from Bowker owns one. In the distance is Diamond Head (never any diamonds) around which I have run many times although I only lived in Honolulu briefly in the summer 1982. The Honolulu marathon goes around the edges of that going out and coming back. Makes it rather challenging.

PND Technology: Jibe

My weekly (kind of) recap of some of the interesting technology I've heard about at the tech meet-ups I've been going to (NYTech)

JIBE is a site that combines your social network with your job search. The site includes listings from companies (which are paid) allows you in the application process to include specific recommendations from your social network in support of your application. For example, if you are applying to a position at Conde Nast (launch partner) and you have a facebook or linkedin connection at that company you can ask for and attach a specific recommendation or endorsement to travel with your application for the position.

The company has also developed some intelligent software that decodes information from your network on linkedin and facebook so that you can organize your contacts by business and/or business segment. In effect, JIBE creates a set of profiles of your profiles but applicable to work and job seeking.

Check out the video:

Watch live streaming video from nytechmeetup at livestream.com

Parallel Universe: Change in Libraries For Publishers

As I mentioned last week I am speaking at the Supply Chain meeting at the Frankfurt bookfair next week. Here is the second part of my draft presentation. (Part one from last week).

The academic library has been forced to re-evaluate their activities for a variety of reasons. If we reference the changes made generally to accommodate a migration from paper to electronic materials, then the impact on monographs is really an anticipated progression of their change programs.

One important change initiative I would characterize as one of “efficiency”. As the thinking goes: “Are we as librarians delivering the appropriate services in the most efficient manner?” Whereas detailed cost analysis have always been possible, economic realities now enable solutions that previously may have been unrealistic for practical or political reasons. The life time costs of maintaining a monograph collection were always known to be expensive but limited alternatives to the open stack paradigm made real analysis irrelevant. With the rapid escalation in digitization programs and a collective approach to resource sharing, libraries now have viable options with respect to down sizing their monograph collections. This now defined expense coupled with the very real costs of real estate and development projects for new buildings has many university administrators salivating over all that “under-utilized” space.

Research conducted by Paul Courant and Mathew Nelson (The Idea of Order) explicitly documents the costs of maintaining a print monograph collection. The opportunity for publishers may rely on turning this analysis of the ‘life time cost’ of holding book into a sales opportunity for eBooks. The authors also calculate that a typical academic library could be spending about $1mm just to maintain their legacy print collection. In an environment where monograph usage is declining this large annual expense begins to look like an onerous and misguided use of funds. What response will publishers get if you ask libraries to – in effect – add to this annual expense by buying more print?

As I noted earlier, the case for a wholesale reevaluation of the idea of books in the library has gained credibility. As strange as it is to say, the physical book collection may not be needed. It may be both economical and efficient to remove them. Constance Malpas from OCLC goes a bit further when she comments that “books have already left the building” – with over 70mm volumes having been removed from local collections and placed in off-site storage. Some important universities have determined that they can operate with little or no diminution of service while reducing their on-site collections. (30% of Columbia’s, 40% of Berkeley’s, 50% of UCLC’s and more than 50% of Harvard’s).

Simply moving books off site, doesn’t represent a total solution. As the authors Courant and Nelson note, electronic storage in addition to or combination with physical collections is most optimal because access to an electronic version of a book aids in selection of the title. If a user is able to look at the toc or index or search the electronic version in advance of requesting the physical book then they are more likely to request from off site storage the books they really need. Large digitization programs such as Hathi Trust and others are beginning to support this type of “mixed platform” hybrid.

The Hathi Trust is one of several digital repositories. At Hathi, their mass-digitized collection is sufficient to replace at least 30% of most academic print book collections. Hathi grows daily and there are other repositories adding titles in a similar manner. All have a different collection profile and different partnerships but at some point these repositories will collaborate and weave together their collections so that the overlap or replacement potential across academic library collections will near 100%.

So what are we seeing here? Initially, I spoke about the cost savings from more efficient use of physical space and transitioned into discussion about shared repositories of content. These activities are closely related and will be progressively augmented and expanded with further network level services. In short, more sophistication will ensue concerning access, applications and services focused on monograph content that historically was disbursed in the extreme volume by volume and library by library.

Strategically, what might these initiatives mean for publishers? Libraries are not saying categorically they don’t want print but they are aggressively placing print content offsite. In some instances new books purchased are going straight to off site storage. In accessing these assets, the library also wants a digital copy that they can place in the catalog for search and discovery. The shared approach to collection management while currently reflective primarily of their retrospective print collections will become the paradigm for future purchases – both print and eBooks. Going forward publishers will be expected to accommodate this. While representing a challenge for both libraries and publishers there may be opportunities in working toward a new business model. Recall, that the combination of the ILL statistics and the Hathi stats on title overlap suggests – strongly – that supply and demand is significantly out of balance. Addressing this is just one opportunity.

This discussion would not be complete without also bringing in the migration to eBooks and eContent. It may be in the transition to an eBook environment where publishers and libraries will clash and it would be a significant mistake for book publishers to assume libraries are ignorant of the issues and complexities of eBook and eContent business models.

In fact, libraries may have a more experienced view of the eContent business models than do many book publishers. Libraries participated in the migration of information databases, print serials and journals to online databases and most importantly facilitated the radical improvements in the provision of serials content. Some see similar and perhaps greater opportunities as monograph make this transition.

But publishers see eBooks in libraries as problematic. There may be more acceptance of eBooks in the academic setting but thus far much less so in the public library segment. A recent report published by Chief Officers of State Library Agencies (COSLA) suggested that libraries seek to organize a national buying pool to source and negotiate eBook deals. We’ll see how far they get with that.

(Part three to come).

MediaWeek (Vol 3, No 40): Japanese Scanners, French Retailers, Library Vending & Stacks

In Japan scanning for 'personal' use is a service business (Yomiuri Shibum):

A growing business in which companies are digitizing books into e-books for individual customers is drawing the ire of publishers, who say the practice violates the Copyright Law. The companies remove the spines of books and scan the pages one by one for transfer to e-readers, a practice called "jisui," which literally means "cooking one's own meals." Although it is legal for individuals to digitize their books for their own use, some publishing companies maintain it is a violation of the Copyright Law for companies to do so on behalf of individuals. But the companies that provide the service argue they are not digitizing books for commercial use. The Japan Book Publishers Association says individuals can create e-books by digitizing their own books because "reproduction of books for private use" is allowed under the Copyright Law. There are more than 10 companies that take orders for digitizing books, which is labor-intensive and time-consuming. The companies charge from several tens of yen to several hundreds of yen per book. After digitizing a book, the companies return the data to customers on a DVD or via the Internet. Customers then transfer the data to an e-reader. A company in the Tohoku region that started digitizing books in July received orders for 10,000 books in August, and the number is likely to reach 15,000 in September, it said. "[The operation of this business] might be in a gray zone in terms of copyright violation," the company said. "But we think there's no problem regarding copyrights as we just do this on behalf of individuals." An official of the Japan Book Publishers Association said the association plans to take decisive measures, such as issuing a warning against such businesses. "Any reproduction other than copying books for private use is illegal," the official said.

France looks to protect its small book retailers from eBook sales (WSJ):

In France a 1981 law prohibits the sale of books for less than 5% below the cover price, a move to protect independent booksellers from the narrow profit margins that big chains could absorb if they discounted books heavily. But e-books, not covered by the 1981 law because it refers to "printed volumes," typically sell for 25% less than printed works. Now France is considering how best to stop big Internet retailers, such as Amazon.com Inc. and Apple Inc., from hurting smaller bookstores and publishers with heavily discounted offers on e-books. Sen. Jacques Legendre this month proposed a law that would allow publishers to set the retail price of e-books. View Full Image Reuters Lawmaker Hervé Gaymard In France, a publisher typically offers bookstores a profit margin of between 30% and 40% depending on, say, the size of a bookstore and its sales record. If, for example, a publisher lists a retail price of $10 for a book, it is sold to the bookstore at $6 to $7.

Library vending machine (FL Today)

Library staff members keep the machine stocked with a revolving collection of new-release DVDs and books, about 125 items, both for adults and children. Books are hardback and paperback.All library patrons, no matter where they live in Brevard County, can use the machine.It cost $16,000 and was made possible by a donation from Friends of the Central Brevard Library and Reference Center.

The Augusta Chronicle notes some data from the OCLC report How Libraries Stack Up:

DVD rentals have become one of the fastest-growing collections among libraries nationally, with lending outpacing the Redbox-style kiosks and Netflix subscriptions. A survey from the Online Computer Library Center, a national library cooperative nonprofit organization, found that public branches lend 2.1 million DVDs a day, trumping 2 million DVDs rented by Netflix and 1.4 million by Redbox. The daily averages were provided by company representatives for the OCLC's How Libraries Stack Up report, which highlights libraries' roles in communities. "It's part of (our) mission to educate as well as entertain," said Sherryl Jones, an East Central Georgia Library System community service librarian. "Once someone finds something they like, they're in here often. It's especially busy on Thursday and Friday." Last month the system, which includes Richmond and Columbia counties, circulated 23,000 DVDs. The number is expected to increase as the Augusta Library settles into its new location.

Certainly one of my all time favorite authors Barbara Taylor Bradford is profiled in The Independent:

It is classic BTB: glamorous people in glamorous places doing glamorous things; but beneath the surface hide grubby secrets that threaten to bring their whole world crashing down. Annette is, says her creator, "still a strong woman and independent, but stuck in a terrible situation". The situation is that, at 18, she married the rich Marius Remmington, 20 years her senior and a would-be Svengali to her Trilby. "He tries to control her, but because she is a Barbara Taylor Bradford woman, she's fought and resisted this total control," she adds with the pride of a mother describing a daughter. Annette is the latest in a long line of feisty heroines, beginning with Emma Harte in A Woman of Substance, who combine the looks of an Angelina Jolie and the business acumen of a Deborah Meaden. Taylor Bradford loves these women and their stories, referencing them like family throughout the time we have together. As strong women are her forte, I wonder how she feels about the domestic drudges who inhabit much contemporary women's fiction these days? " I'm not interested," she says dismissing them like flies with a flick of her hand. "I know people say I write about women who are rich, but that is not really true. I write about women who become successful."

From the twitter this week (@personanondata) Borders Group Cancels New York Superstore Plans in Quest to End Losses Bloomberg The human pillars of a blockbuster INdependent About Ken Follett. A Claim of Pro-Islam Bias in Textbooks in Texas NYT Ingram rethinks the distribution model Ingram

Re-post: Massive Data Sets

Originally posted June 24th, 2008

Large publishers like Elsevier, Macmillan and Kluwer spent the past 20-30 years or so consolidating journal publishing under their umbrellas and building virtually unassailable positions in numerous vertical publishing segments. The open access movement has had only minimal impact on the prospects for these businesses and there is little indication even market forces will reduce their commanding positions. Much of the consolidation has occurred but occasionally, some large concentration of journals comes on the market however, it is unlikely that a new publisher would be able to build a significant position in any meaningful segment because all the important titles already belong to one of the major players.

Journals publish the outcome of the intellectual activity of the article authors. In some cases, access is provided to the data that serves to back up the investigation but invariably this data remains in the dark. Some publishers have experimented with allowing journal readers to play with the data but this does not appear to be a developing trend. Data's day may come however. Several months ago (via Brantley) I read of yet another initiative at Google.

Sources at Google have disclosed that the humble domain, http://research.google.com/, will soon provide a home for terabytes of open-source scientific datasets. The storage will be free to scientists and access to the data will be free for all. The project, known as Palimpsest and first previewed to the scientific community at the Science Foo camp at the Googleplex last August, missed its original launch date this week, but will debut soon.

The article on their web site is brief and my immediate thoughts had little to do with the gist of this story. My immediate thought was that here could develop the next land grab for publishers and perhaps other parties interested in gaining access to the raw data supporting all types of research. As publishers develop platforms supporting their publishing and (n0w) service offers will they see maintaining these data sets as integral to that policy? I believe so, and I suspect in agreements with authors, institutions and associations that own these journals the publishers like Elsevier will also require the 'deposit' of the raw data supporting each article. In return, the offerings on the publisher's 'platform' would enable analysis, synthesis and data storage all of benefit to their authors. But the story may be more comprehensive than simply rounding out their existing titles with more data.

The current power publishers in the journal segment may find themselves competing with new players including Google in thier efforts to gain access to data sets that may have been historically supplemental or even not considered relevant to research. In addition, sources of massive data sets are growing with the introduction of every new consumer product and exponential web traffic growth. In the NYTimes today is an article about a number of new companies that are analyzing massive amounts of data to produce market reports and business analysis. From the article:

Just this month, the journal Nature published a paper that looked at cellphone data from 100,000 people in an unnamed European country over six months and found that most follow very predictable routines. Knowing those routines means that you can set probabilities for them, and track how they change. It’s hard to make sense of such data, but Sense Networks, a software analytics company in New York, earlier this month released Macrosense, a tool that aims to do just that. Macrosense applies complex statistical algorithms to sift through the growing heaps of data about location and to make predictions or recommendations on various questions — where a company should put its next store, for example. Gregory Skibiski, 34, the chief executive and a co-founder of Sense, says the company has been testing its software with a major retailer, a major financial services firm and a large hedge fund.

As noted in the article, the data (growing rapidly to massive status) has been hard to manipulate but this issue is diminishing rapidly. As it diminishes we will see more and more companies, groups and even individuals note the value of their data and begin to negotiate the access to this data. All of the large information publishers will see themselves playing a significant role in this market as they gather data sets around market segments just as they did with journals. If they don't do this they could undercut the value of their journal collections if they are forced to separate the result/analysis from the data. Signing agreements for access to these data sets (cell phone data in the example above) will enable Journal publishers to concentrate research even further by making access to this information a pre-condition to publication in the respective journal. Either way, the providers of these data sets are likely to be looking at a new and significant revenue source.

USS Whipple (FF-1062): Hong Kong 1972

USS Whipple (FF-1062) Hong Kong 1972

A weekly image from my archive. Click on the image to make it larger.
From June 1972 the USS Whipple and the USS Lexington in Hong Kong harbor. It was pretty easy to identify these ships but in doing so what was also interesting was that on Wikipedia there is a deep description of the Whipple's activities during this period (less so the Lexington CV-16 which at the time was a training ship):

After a brief period planeguarding on "Dixie" and "Yankee" stations for Hancock, Whipple received a needed upkeep at Danang from 3 to 10 May while Piedmont (AD-17) replaced the escort's 5-inch (127 mm) gun. She then returned to "Yankee" Station where she once more operated with Hancock, conducting escort and plane-guarding operations through June. Following availability at Subic Bay and a visit to Hong Kong, Whipple returned to the line and provided gunfire support in the vicinity of Point "Claudia" for the Republic of Vietnam's 1st and 3d Divisions. From 17 to 25 June, she fired harassment and interdiction missions at night and made runs during daylight hours in which she was aided by OV-1 Mohawks which pinpointed enemy bunker complexes, rocket sites, and supply routes.

Paul McCartney in the Cloud.

Paul McCartney once wrote about having his head in the clouds but reality is stranger than fiction and his management company just announced a deal with Hewlett Packard that calls for HP to build a private cloud that will digitize and deliver his expansive library of content and memorabilia.

From the press release:

McCartney has one of the most comprehensive libraries of any artist, much of which has never been viewed before. His library includes images, artwork, paintings, film and videos, as well as masters of some of the most popular songs ever written. Additionally, during his successful career, he has accumulated iconic imagery, including the cover artwork for the multimillion selling No. 1 album, "Band on the Run."

Under the agreement, HP will work closely with MPL to digitize the material and design and build a state-of-the-art content management system. McCartney's library will then be delivered through a private cloud environment. Portions of the library will be made available to fans so they can have a personal and unparalleled glimpse into McCartney's work.

"I've always been interested in creative ideas and new ways of reaching people, so this is a really exciting initiative for me," said McCartney. "I hope it will allow people who might be interested to access parts of our archives they might otherwise not be able to. I'm looking forward to working with HP on this project."

The agreement marks the first time that HP has collaborated with an artist in this way. In addition to changing how fans and artists will interact, the digitization of McCartney's library will help preserve the history of one of the world's most loved artists for future generations.

"Paul McCartney has always been a trendsetter in the music industry and HP has been at the forefront of technology innovation," said Tom Hogan, executive vice president, Sales, Marketing and Strategy, Enterprise Business, HP. "We are proud that he turned to HP as a trusted partner to help him preserve his legacy and set a new vision for the industry."

Could this be a trend?

Parallel Universe

I am speaking in two weeks at the annual supply chain meeting at the Frankfurt bookfair. The following is a draft of the first part of my presentation.

There’s a lot going on in the library world of books, serials and eContent. Just like every business connected to the publishing industry today, libraries are experiencing change and dealing with complexity to an extent that most publishers neither understand nor appreciate. As the relationship between book publishers and libraries changes – and it is - both sides would be well advised to understand more about the circumstances and experiences of the other.

We always associate books with libraries yet, books have not been the pillars that support the library mission for many decades. Based on some of the data I will share with you, some might even argue that books are not a success story in the library environment. Perhaps an odd observation but actual data and experience suggests that as a group they are expensive to manage, under-utilized, hard to navigate and of declining importance to scholarship. There is also the element of ‘lost opportunity’ in that decisions to purchase specific books are rarely optimized with demand and so books that will have supported a need or demand are not purchased and books that were purchased more often than not sit on shelves rarely used.

I believe our collective challenge will be to not replicate the limited publisher/library model of decades past but to build a better model. We need to think differently about the monograph.

Despite remaining critically important to many communities, the public library in the US is under constant threat. If not from actual dwindling revenue sources which have universally caused layoffs, closings and reduced services, then from the passive aggressive stance of publishers who propose not to make electronic versions of their books available to library patrons.

This bleak outlook obscures the fact that academic libraries and some larger public libraries are embarked on a radical redesign and reevaluation of their activities which will impact all libraries in the short term. Many of these changes are almost completely hidden to publishers. That is not to say that the same couldn't be said of the library community about the circumstances and strategic questions facing book publishing companies as they make their transition from print to electronic.

Regrettably, at a critical juncture in the transformation of the relationship between publishing and libraries neither side seems to know or appreciate enough about the circumstances of other. This should be troubling to all those – like me - who believe libraries and publishers should share a desire to expand knowledge and community around books.

I see an unavoidable situation developing where sharp disagreement over the provision of eContent will fracture the historically uneasy alliance between book publishers and libraries as more content migrates to electronic form and consumers make electronic delivery their format of choice.

My comments take the library perspective and I would like to examine three areas. Firstly, an overview of where libraries are today. Secondly, a look at some of the most important strategic library initiatives under way and thirdly, some thoughts on the way forward for libraries and publishers.

The primary focus of this presentation will be on the academic library environment; however, let me make some brief notes about the situation with public libraries in the US. I do this because I will include public libraries in my concluding comments. The purpose and mission of public versus academic libraries are similar but the execution of their goals is often quite different.

Many of us are familiar with the steady stream of headlines regarding closures and layoffs. In the US and in some cases Europe, public libraries are facing the immediate threat of reduced funding as well as the more strategic question about their role in the fabric of their community. Hard economic times are the precise reason why public library use in the US is trending up.

Academic libraries are not immune to macro economic changes either; although seem to have more flexibility to devise new methods of dealing with some of the economic challenges they face.

For example, can you envision an academic library remodeling its space that results in the permanent removal of all its books? That sounds absurd – even crazy - yet during a recent renovation Ohio State removed all their books from the library and placed them in off site storage. Service for students and faculty was impacted only minimally and once the space was remodeled not all the books returned. Books in the Ohio State library now look more like display items than accessible resources. NYU removed 30% of their collection during a similar renovation. A library at the University of Texas recently gained a lot of attention as a new library without any “books”.

There are more and more examples and what it strongly suggests is that academic library’s physical monograph collections may be more likely to be found today in a warehouse than on a library shelf.

More to follow from my presentation next week.