How Students Use of Information in the Digital Age

New report from the University of Washington using a grant from the Macarthur Foundation on how college students evaluate and use information in the digital age. The summary of the findings are as follows:

All in all, the findings suggest students in both large universities and small colleges use a risk averse strategy based on efficiency and predictability in order to manage and control the information available to them on campuses. Still, most students struggle with the same frustrating open-endedness when trying to find information and conduct research for college courses and to a far lesser extent, for solving an information problem in their personal lives.

Major findings are as follows:
1. Students in the sample took little at face value and reported they were frequent
evaluators of information culled from the Web and to a lesser extent, the campus library.

More often than anything else, respondents considered whether information was up-to date and current when evaluating Web content (77%) and library materials (67%) for course work.

2. Evaluating information was often a collaborative process—almost two-thirds of the
respondents (61%) reportedly turned to friends and/or family members when they
needed help and advice with sorting through and evaluating information for personal use. Nearly half of the students in the sample (49%) frequently asked instructors for assistance with assessing the quality of sources for course work—far fewer
asked librarians (11%) for assistance.

3. The majority of the sample used routines for completing one research assignment to the next, including writing a thesis statement (58%), adding personal perspective to papers (55%), and developing a working outline (51%). Many techniques were
learned in high school and ported to college, according to students we interviewed.

4. Despite their reputation of being avid computer users who are fluent with new
technologies, few students in our sample had used a growing number of Web 2.0
applications within the past six months for collaborating on course research assignments and/or managing research tasks.

5. For over three-fourths (84%) of the students surveyed, the most difficult step of the course-related research process was getting started. Defining a topic (66%), narrowing it down (62%), and filtering through irrelevant results (61%) frequently hampered students in the sample, too. Follow-up interviews suggest students lacked the research acumen for framing an inquiry in the digital age where information abounds and intellectual discovery was paradoxically overwhelming for them.

6. Comparatively, students reported having far fewer problems finding information for personal use, though sorting through results for solving an information problem in their daily lives hamstrung more than a third of the students in the sample (41%).

7. Unsurprisingly, what mattered most to students while they were working on course related research assignments was passing the course (99%), finishing the assignment (97%), and getting a good grade (97%). Yet, three-quarters of the sample also reported they considered carrying out comprehensive research of a topic (78%) and learning something new (78%) of importance to them, too.

Our analysis shows robust relationships and similarities among variables from our sample of students at 25 educational institutions in the U.S. However, these findings should not be viewed as comprehensive, but as another part of our ongoing research.
While additional research is warranted in order to confirm whether or not our conclusions may be generalized to the nationwide college and university population, the size of our sample and consistent patterns of responses do lend credibility to our findings.

In the following pages, we present detailed findings from our analysis in three parts:

Part One: A comparative analysis of how students find information and prioritize their use of information sources, based on survey data from last year (2009) and this yearʼs survey (2010).

Part Two: Findings about how students evaluate information they find on the Web and through the library for course work and personal use. In addition, findings about how students use routine techniques for completing for course-related research assignments, including their use of Web 2.0 applications.

Part Three: Findings about the difficulties, challenges, and obstacles students frequently encounter during the entire research process—from start to finish—for course work and for personal use.

Over America: Mt Hood

Mt Hood, 1973

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

In the family archive there is a batch of 100 duplicate images. Dupes are rarely marked with a month and year as processed images normally are so for this particular batch of images I have no idea what the date was. I am guessing 1973 but there are few if any markers in the set to make a definite declaration. There are many from the air photos and most of these are unidentifiable as is this image on the left. I am guessing Mt Hood. It is from the Pacific North West since there are some images of Seattle Tacoma airport in the set. Again, as is the case with numerous archive photos that I had no hand in, less than 10 years later I ended up going to school in this area. If you can identify these images let me know.

Join me on Flickr

MediaWeek (Vol 3, No 46): Hay-on-Wye, Commercial Libraries, Bush Critics, Random House Film & Words.

The Telegraph will partner with the Hay-on-Wye book festival for the next three years (Telegraph):

Over the next three years, in these pages and throughout the Telegraph, you’ll be able to enjoy writers and thinkers of this calibre, and experience some of what the organisers of Hay have put on for those who have visited since it began. When I suggest to Florence that he is immune to the old parlour game about fantasy dinner guests because he’s had his fantasy several times over, he replies: “Yes, except it’s not dinner, it’s a picnic.” The green fields of Hay are “great levellers”, he says. The Hay organisers operate in the belief that a child who lives on the border between Herefordshire and Powys is entitled to the same world-class entertainment as a child who lives in Hampstead and attends Westminster School. And locals are now, he says, blasé to the point of comedy about celebrity. Twenty years ago, one writer Florence had invited to Hay turned him down, on the grounds that his project was implausible – literature in Britain, the author replied, was simply not good enough to sustain a 10-day festival. Now Hay welcomes not just hundreds of thousands of people over 10 days in May, but hundreds of thousands more across the globe, trading in intellectual dynamism and productive mischief. Hay’s expansion internationally is both an important part of its future and entirely in keeping with its founding concerns. It’s a way, Florence says, of “finding out about the world through its writers”. The guiding spirit of the festivals has always been, he adds, “scepticism, inquiry, going beyond what you’re told. Think again. Look twice.” Nothing, we feel, could better match the perceptiveness and curiosity of Telegraph readers.

The Chronicle Review has a thought provoking article on the commercialization of libraries (Chron):

Libraries have already drifted too far down the commercial path: Research and educational values must be restored to their primacy of place. "Good enough" and one-stop shopping are no substitutes for systematic research. Technology cannot replace human expertise. The business world has many valuable tools and resources to offer, but libraries must insist that scholarly requirements take precedence over commercial interests. The need to realign library values is especially urgent in the realm of monographs. Electronic publishing of academic monographs is still at an early stage, but it is growing fast. As it is developing, e-monographic publishing is following the path of e-journals and will, therefore, reproduce many of the same problems—spiraling prices, homogeneous collections, greater numbers of low-quality monographs. Libraries will provide access to titles owned by the publishers, who will offer them up in preset packages accompanied by complex licensing agreements that constrain their use. (Existing e-book licenses, for example, generally prohibit interlibrary loans.)

And what about the Bush book from several UK perspectives (Independent):

Tony Blair: 'Some of our allies wavered. Tony Blair never did'Seven years after the invasion of Iraq, George Bush and Tony Blair remained joined at the hip. Sorry is the hardest word for both of them. The former US president seems to have studied the former prime minister's appearance before the Chilcot Inquiry on Iraq in January. A headline flashed danger signals in Mr Blair's mind as he was asked whether he had any regrets. He did not want the headline to be "Blair apologises for war" or "Blair finally says sorry." So he said merely that he took responsibility for his actions. Mr Bush has been through the same thought process. "I mean, apologising would basically say the decision was a wrong decision," Mr Bush told NBC. "And I don't believe it was the wrong decision." Unlike his soulmate, Mr Bush does not do emotion. In his own memoirs, Mr Blair pleads for understanding from his critics, saying: "Do they really suppose I don't care, don't feel, don't regret with every fibre of my being the loss of those who died?" In contrast, Mr Bush says: "It doesn't matter how people perceive me in England. It just doesn't matter any more. And frankly, at times, it didn't matter then." Mr Blair was ready to ignore political opinion. Mr Bush offered Mr Blair a last-minute opt-out from the Iraq invasion when he realised it could bring his closest foreign ally down, saying he wanted regime change in Baghdad, not London.Revealingly, Mr Blair replied: "I'm in. If it costs the Government, fine." That unquestioning loyalty might have surprised some observers at the time. But Mr Bush already felt he had a sense of his British ally's character. It was a judgement he had come to on Mr Blair's first visit to the US president's Crawford ranch in 2001."There was no stiffness about Tony and Cherie," he writes. "After dinner, we decided to watch a movie. When they agreed on Meet the Parents, a comedy starring Robert De Niro and Ben Stiller, Laura and I knew the Bushes and Blairs would get along."Andrew Grice, Political Editor

Random House have launched a web site dedicated to movies and television made from their books (Word & Film) From the twitter this week (@personanondata) Elsevier Releases Image Search; New SciVerse ScienceDirect Feature Enables Researchers to Quickly Find Visual content. Press Release The Australian: Local publishers invited to Apple's iBookstore. Telegraph: Pearson to double number of language schools in China. paidContent: Why Publishers Are Tracking The Costco v. Omega Supreme Court Case MediaPost: NY Appeals Court Reinstates Amazon Sales Tax Suit 11/09/2010

Repost: The Beatles Bookstore and Reference Collections

Originally posted on January 19, 2010.


I may have the best collection of Beatles books for sale on Amazon. How? I recently read The Beatles, The Biography by Bob Spitz and in the back of the book were eight pages of bibliographic references. As I looked through these it occurred to me that all the work 'behind the book' is essentially hidden to the reader; more importantly this 'extra' content represents un-monetized revenue to the publisher. As more non-fiction titles are available on the web and as publishers attempt to build direct relationships with readers it would seem obvious that adding the 'raw' content that went into the creation of the work - all of which represents real, tangible material and research - could be made available to the consumer as a package of content. Let the consumer decide if they want to read only the finished book or delve into the primary research material.

At BookExpo last year, a publisher from a major house lamented a friend who had spent 10 years writing some social history book and dammed if they didn't have a right to sell the book for $35. It struck me the reader doesn't really care it took ten years of the authors life; it's always about value proposition, and because consumers are barraged with free content the $35 often doesn't appear reasonable. On the other hand, if the reader had access to a 'reference' collection of material that was effectively curated by the author and expansive beyond the traditional book suddenly the value proposition of that social history begins to justify a price differential between the basic book (at $9.95 for sake of argument) and a companion web based reference collection at $35.

Getting back to The Beatles and my bookstore. I took all the citations and added them to my Amazon bookstore and there they reside as a dedicated Beatles bookstore. (I haven't sold much). This really isn't close to representing the true potential value that a web based reference collection of The Beatles could represent, yet Spitz did the work: He took the notes, watched the videos, interviewed the people, read the books, etc. etc. This material is index-able, with a little bit of foresight the writing/editing process could support more efficient collection of the bibliographic material and collectively the material could be monetized. As a 'reference collection' the book then becomes a living thing, because as new material about the Beatles is written or material is written about The Beatles, The Biography by reviewers and readers, all additional material can be added to the 'reference collection' thus keeping the book relevant. Accordingly, developing additional (web) content around a book in this manner starts to challenge the idea of front and back list.

If the publisher doesn't want to invest the time and effort in developing their content in this manner then I am sure third parties would be interested in licensing the rights to take the authors primary material, marry it with the finished product and create a web reference collection as I described. Last year I read a biography of Sir Charles Wren, the architect of post-Great Fire London. I know London fairly well, but I had a devil of a time locating and visualizing all the buildings discussed in the book: Just think of all the city plans, architectural diagrams and 3d models that this book could support. An end product maybe not for everyone but enough that the 'premium' $35 price looks viable.

Yankee Book and Ebook library launch combined print and eBook acquisition work flow.

From their press release:

YBP Library Services, a Baker & Taylor company, and Ebook Library (EBL) announce the launch of the first comprehensive demand-driven workflow for print and e-book acquisition. The two companies will combine the book-in-hand descriptions and preferences from YBP's approval process with EBL's flexible real-time On Demand acquisition service, offering a robust just-in-time approach to delivering e-books and print books.

"Demand-driven acquisitions are a new way of helping our library customers to better serve their patrons," said Mark Kendall, Senior Vice President of Sales for YBP. "This partnership with EBL is a groundbreaking effort to add value."

EBL is a division of Ebooks Corporation Limited, an Australian public company with additional distribution channels that include ebooks.com (www.ebooks.com), the leading dedicated ebook retail site, and Ebook Services for publishers (http://www.ebookscorp.com/publishers.html). EBL's multi-user and demand-driven access models have been widely adopted by libraries around the world. EBL's ever-expanding catalogue currently offers over 150,000 titles from over more than 400 international publishers in a vast range of academic and professional subject areas.

This new service will enable libraries to use YBP's approval profiling methodologies to automatically designate new books as DDA (demand-driven acquisition), rather than receive the titles as an automatic book or as a slip. Titles designated as DDA will automatically be made available for patron-driven selection in EBL's On Demand platform. The initial launch of the DDA-Approval workflow will be available for e-books and then will be extended to incorporate print books from select publishers. The service will gradually incorporate an increasing percentage of the books YBP handles on approval.

"We are very pleased to enhance our On Demand service with YBP's outstanding approval plan tools and to add print books alongside e-books to our platform," said Kari Paulson, President of EBL. "EBL has been working for many years to provide innovative demand-driven acquisition services, and we believe the work we are doing with YBP is a step toward delivering the next generation of tools for providing a streamlined, end-to-end service for our libraries."

Books about Presidents

These USA Today snapshots were the best and most effective marketing and PR we did at Bowker when I was there. We got more mileage out of these than anything else we did. At the time it was Andrew Grabois who did the stats and this time it is Roy Crego.

MediaWeek Report (Vol 3, No 45a): Recent Publishers' Financial Headlines- Peason, Hachette, Simon & Schuster

The past few weeks have seen a resurgence of sorts in the fortunes of some of publishing's biggest players. Here is a summary: Pearson noted that their markets were 'subdued' however they continued to produce market gains their competitors probably envy (Press Release):

Demand in some of our markets remained subdued in the third quarter, and the macroeconomic outlook is still uncertain. Even so, Pearson increased sales by 7% and adjusted operating profit 15% in the first nine months of 2010*. All parts of the company continued to perform strongly, with sales growth of 5% in Penguin, 7% in education and 11% at the Financial Times Group. ...

In North America, this strategy enabled us to gain share and grow faster than our market, with sales growth of 5% in the first nine months. Our Higher Education business grew strongly once again. Its market remains healthy (industry sales up 10% in the first eight months, according to the Association of American Publishers) and our leadership in digital learning continues to produce market share gains. More than 3.5m students have enrolled in an online course provided by eCollege in the first nine months, an increase of almost 39% over last year. More than 6.5m college students have registered for our subject-specific digital learning tools (MyLabs), an increase of almost 34%. Our Assessment and Information business remained resilient as we won or renewed a number of contracts including a teacher certification contract in Pennsylvania and student data systems in Utah. The breadth of our School Curriculum business and its strength in digital is enabling us to grow despite weakness in state and local funding and uncertainty around the impact of new Common Core standards. We are planning on the basis that school funding remains under pressure in 2011 and that the total new adoption opportunity will be lower than in 2010. We are accelerating the transformation of our School business, investing to broaden the range of products and services we offer to schools to help them boost student performance and institutional efficiency. Sales in International Education are up 8% after nine months. We are benefiting from strong demand in developing markets and for assessment services, English Language learning in China and digital, while developed markets and school publishing are generally soft. In the first nine months, MyLab registrations outside North America were up almost 40% on the same period last year to more than 460,000. ....

At Penguin, sales are up 5%. Physical retail markets are tough, but are offset for Penguin by strong publishing and rapid growth in eBook sales (which have increased threefold). Penguin continues to lead the industry in innovation in digital publishing, with 16,500 eBook titles now available and a number of children’s apps for bestselling brands. The Fry Chronicles by Stephen Fry became a bestseller in five formats (hardback, ebook, enhanced ebook, app and audio), a publishing first. The fourth quarter is an important selling season in consumer publishing and Penguin has a strong line-up of bestselling authors including Tom Clancy, Patricia Cornwell, Barbra Streisand and Nora Roberts in the US; and Michael McIntyre and Jamie Oliver in the UK.

Hachette (Grand Central Books) reported declines attributed to reduced sales of the Stephanie Meyer 'saga' (Press Release):

As expected, the erosion in sales of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight saga (Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse and Breaking Dawn) had a marked impact on revenue trends not only in the United States, but also in France and the United Kingdom. In France, the postponement of deliveries of secondary school textbooks from the third quarter to the fourth quarter (due to the late announcement of new curriculums) also had a temporarily negative effect. And in Spain, the Education market was more challenging than last year.

After a like-for-like revenue fall of just 4.5% in the first half of 2010, there was a more marked fall (of 6.8%) in the nine months to end September; this was largely due to the sharp decline in the Stephenie Meyer phenomenon and the non-recurrence of the sale of the international rights to the saga, booked in the first half of 2010.

However, revenues for the first nine months of 2010 are slightly ahead of those for the comparable period of 2008, demonstrating the remarkable resilience of the Lagardère group. Numerous literary successes - James Patterson and Nicholas Sparks in the United States, David Nicholls and Sarah Waters in the United Kingdom, and Jacques Attali and Erik Orsenna in France - are testimony to the dynamism of our publishing houses.

Sales of e-books remain strong, accounting for some 9% of revenues in the United States in the first nine months of 2010.

Simon & Schuster (Part of CBS)

For the three months ended September 30, 2010, Publishing revenues decreased 6% to $217.7 million from $230.4 million for the same prior-year period reflecting lower book sales in the adult group from the soft retail market, partially offset by growth in sales of digital content. Best-selling titles in the third quarter of 2010 included The Power by Rhonda Byrne and Obama's Wars by Bob Woodward. For the three months ended September 30, 2010, Publishing operating income increased 11% to $29.4 million from $26.6 million and OIBDA increased 10% to $31.1 million from $28.4 million for the same prior-year period reflecting the impact of cost containment measures, lower royalty expenses and lower production costs from a change in the mix of titles. Nine Months Ended September 30, 2010 and 2009: For the nine months ended September 30, 2010, Publishing revenues decreased 3% to $559.1 million from $573.5 million for the same prior-year period reflecting the soft retail market, partially offset by growth in digital sales of Publishing content. For the nine months ended September 30, 2010, Publishing operating income increased 47% to $44.9 million from $30.6 million and OIBDA increased 36% to $49.9 million from $36.6 million for the same prior-year period reflecting the impact of cost reduction measures and lower production expenses from a change in the mix of titles, partially offset by higher royalty expenses. Restructuring charges of $1.8 million incurred during the nine months ended September 30, 2010 reflect severance costs associated with the elimination of positions.

NewsCorp is done separating out the Harpercollins unit from their other publishing assets. (SeekingAlpha)

McGraw-Hill Education and Professional publishing reported as follows (Press Release):

Education: Revenue for this segment increased by 5.5% to $1.1 billion in the third quarter compared to the same period last year. Including a $3.8 million pre-tax gain on the divestiture of a secondary school business in Australia, the operating profit for the third quarter grew by 19.9% to $357.5 million. Cost controls contributed to the increase in the segment's operating margin to 33.9%, the best third-quarter performance for McGraw-Hill Education since 2007. Foreign exchange rates had an immaterial impact on revenue and operating profit in the third quarter. Revenue for the McGraw-Hill School Education Group increased by 6.7% to $534.7 million in the third quarter versus the same period last year. Revenue for the McGraw-Hill Higher Education, Professional and International Group grew by 4.3% to $520.0 million in the third quarter, compared to the same period last year. A strong performance in the state new adoption market was the major factor in McGraw-Hill School Education Group's third quarter results. The McGraw-Hill School Education Group is on track to capture approximately 30% of the estimated $825 million to $875 million state new adoption market in 2010. In 2009, the state new adoption market was about $500 million. ... In professional publishing, online sales of books and digital products produced solid growth in the third quarter. Double-digit e-book sales were a bright spot in the sluggish retail book market, which continues to be buffeted by difficult economic conditions. More than 5,000 McGraw-Hill professional titles are now available to customers as e-books.

Harlequin a division of TorStar is often beset by forex changes (PR)

Book Publishing operating profit was $23.0 million in the third quarter of 2010, up $0.1 million from $22.9 million in the third quarter of 2009, as $1.4 million of underlying growth offset a negative $1.3 million from the impact of foreign exchange. Year to date, Book Publishing operating profit was $66.1 million, up $3.0 million from $63.1 million last year as $6.2 million of underlying growth more than offset a negative $3.2 million from the impact of foreign exchange. In both the quarter and the year to date, operating results were up in the North America Direct-To-Consumer and Overseas divisions and down in the North America Retail division.

Earlier this month Wolters Kluwer reiterated their full year guidance (PR)

In the third quarter, growth in online and software solutions continued in all divisions. With improving retention rates across the business, subscription revenues, which represent 72% of total revenues, showed improvement over the prior year, especially for electronic revenues. This growth helped to offset the impact of print publishing declines and the continued pressure on advertising and pharma promotional product lines. Book performance improved in the third quarter driven by strong results in legal education and health book product lines. The Health & Pharma Solutions division performed well, with strong growth noted at Clinical Solutions, Ovid, and books. Within Tax & Accounting, new sales and retention rates for software solutions grew at a solid rate which helped offset pressure on print-based publishing. Financial & Compliance Services saw double-digit growth in its audit risk and compliance product lines and cyclical revenues associated with mortgage lending improved in the third quarter. In the Legal & Regulatory division, transactional revenues at Corporate Legal Services continued to grow, reflecting the steady economic recovery underway in the U.S. While online and software products grew globally within Legal & Regulatory, macro economic conditions continue to put pressure on publishing and cyclical product lines such as training, consulting and advertising, particularly within Europe, offsetting the positive trends for electronic revenues.

MediaWeek (Vol 3, No 45): Attention and Information, British Museum Manuscripts, Irish Shorts, Audio Books, Renting Textbooks, Cooks Source

I don't normally quote blogs on these weekly round-ups (for no real reason) but I came across this post by The Aporetic questioning whether we are really suffering from over abundance of information versus what our ancestors faced:

Rus­tic sim­plic­ity, except that the farmer in charge has labor man­age­ment problems–who are these work­ers, how is he com­pen­sat­ing them? He has to man­age the horses–how is their health? Do they need feed­ing and water­ing? He’s got to get the har­vested wheat stored prop­erly: he’s check­ing the weather all the time–just imag­ine how much infor­ma­tion is involved, in an age before reli­able fore­casts, in guess­ing the weather! He’s scan­ning the crop itself, to see how much he lost to insects or dis­ease. He’s got a good idea of crop prices in Chicago and whether they’re trend­ing up or down. The scene was information-dense, and if you click on the image, you can see how the orig­i­nal title frames the scene. The mod­ern farmer climbs into the air con­di­tioned cab of a com­bine har­vester, and turns on the radio. The radio fills the atten­tion spaces left by, say, read­ing the weather signs or man­ag­ing the work­ers or the animals. ... But the argu­ment about atten­tion here is that atten­tion is a constant–it just directs itself, when freed, to whatever’s avail­able. The arrival of online archives gives us “sur­plus atten­tion.” What do we do with our­selves now that the time required for basic research has been (in many cases) so dras­ti­cally reduced?

I visited the Ritblat Gallery at the British Library in October which contains a wide variety of original manuscripts and other material on permanent display. It is well worth the trip and in this article Andrew Motion, chairman of the Booker Committee takes us on a tour (IL):

The gallery is easy to take for granted. Compared with the visual arts, the thrill and beauty of manuscripts are not widely celebrated, but this single mid-sized room, with its black walls, lowered lights and atmosphere of something approaching reverence, is one of the world’s great treasure-troves. It is a place of delight as well as learning, and of astonishment as well as understanding. Whenever I have a group of students, I insist that they come here: it’s an Eng Lit version of the geography field trip. Some parts of the collection are on permanent display—the material relating to Lewis Carroll and the “Alice” books, and the manuscripts of several songs by the Beatles. These songs are as good a place to start as any, as they abolish any idea that displays of this sort are somehow dusty, or of narrow academic interest. The Beatles’ music and words continue to live in the world as few other kinds of writing have ever managed to do. Yet their composition, judging by the evidence here, depended on a similar blend of luck and labour. Paul McCartney’s “Michelle” turns out to be based on a tune he first tried to get down when he was at school, “in an attempt”, the label says, “to write a French-sounding song at the time when the bohemian Parisian Left Bank was a fashionable influence on art students”. Several years later John Lennon suggested that if Paul wanted it to sound French, he’d better use some French words—hence “ma belle” and so on. It was hardly Proust, but it did the trick, and the song was included on “Rubber Soul”. It became the only Beatles track to be named Song of the Year at the Grammys.

Anne Enright in The Guardian looks at the Irish short story and tries to fathom why they are so good at it (Guardian):

Perhaps Irish writers, like Irish actors, rely more than is usual on personality in that balance of technique and the self that is the secret of style. The trick might be in its suppression, indeed, an effort that must fail, over time. John Banville, Edna O'Brien, McGahern, Tóibín – these writers become more distinctive as people, even as their sentences become more distinctively their own. It is a jealous kind of delight to find on the page some inimicable thing, a particular passion, and if the writer is dead, it is delightful and sad to meet a sensibility that will not pass this way again. The shock of recognition runs through this anthology. As much as possible I have tried to choose those stories in which a writer is most himself. A writer has many selves, of course, and an editor has many and mixed criteria – some of them urgent, as I have described, and some more easy. The selection is from writers who were born in the 20th century (cheating a little for Elizabeth Bowen, who was born in 1899); I wanted to put together a book that was varied and good to read, with a strong eye to the contemporary.

Audio books are on the upswing in the UK as reported by the Independent:

According to the most recent sales figures from the Publishers Association, downloads of audio books grew by 72 per cent between 2008 and 2009. Sales of talking books on CD, cassette and DVD also grew to an annual £22.4m, according to the sales monitoring company Nielsen BookScan. It all began very differently. Exactly 75 years ago today, audio books were first produced as a public service for soldiers blinded in the First World War. The Talking Books Service, an audio library run by the Royal National Institute of Blind People, was launched in 1935, when Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was recorded on to LPs and distributed to users, along with a large record player. Modern technology – particularly MP3 players – and a growing roster of high-profile narrators, have given the format a dramatic boost.

From the WaPo: Textbook rental programs offer no relief to rising textbook prices (WaPo):

In the end, students will decide how they get their textbooks - and they have an ever-expanding galaxy of choices. They can buy them new, shrink-wrapped at campus stores. They can search online for discounted used copies at numerous websites like Amazon.com or Bigwords.com. They can download them to their computers or rent them - from their campus bookstore, from online websites and even the publishers themselves. Two of the largest bookstore operators, Barnes & Noble and Follett Higher Education Group, have spent millions to build their own Internet rental portals in the face of competition from websites, stocking up on inventory and developing tracking software. Yet for all of the innovation from digital media and the Internet, prices are still set by publishers, who market directly to faculty. Faculty, in turn, decide titles for study, often without considering cover prices. That means students are still paying hundreds of dollars each semester.

For entertainment value alone the controversy over Cooks Source lifting a blogger's article was enough to keep your attention and to get an idea cast your eye over their facebook page to see how the internets are taking to it. Far afield the Sydney Morning Herald takes a bash at explaining it (SMH):

That's what Cooks Source was relying on. The New England-based bottom feeder lifted Gaudio's piece, gave it a few tweaks, and reprinted it as new copy without attribution. Exactly the same sin of plagiarism for which Helen Darville/Demidenko was finally run out of publishing about 10 years ago. When Gaudio discovered the theft –for that's what it was, not inadvertent borrowing, or sub editing error, her work was stolen– she contacted the editor of Cooks Source, Judith Griggs, asking for a correction and an apology. As a show of good faith, just to prove she wasn't some sort of egomaniac greed head, she asked the magazine to make a $130 donation to the Columbia School of Journalism rather than to pay her. Some of you will already be aware of what happened next. Griggs sent a frankly amazing e-mail, full of legal errors, claiming the Internet to be entirely public domain, a place where copyright did not apply, and told the freelancer she should be happy the magazine didn't lift the entire article before putting somebodyelse's name on it. In a deliciously droll passage which was either completely clueless, or shaded with cartoon villainy, the Cooks Source editor informed Gaudio that this was standard practice online and happens "clearly more than you are aware of".

From the twitter (@personanondata) this week:

British Library hints at videogame archiving plan Independent Grand Theft Cataloging..

JSTOR and Serials Solutions Partner to Enhance Discoverability of Resources Nov. 4, 2010 PRNewswire

Online Learning Is Growing on Campus - NYTimes Bricks and Mortar a thing of the past?

Times's paywall figures don't add up to a new business model Guardian

And in sports, Jenson Button is welcomed to Sao Paulo (Independent)

Repost: There are Libraries and there are Libraries

Originally posted on October 10, 2006

We get loads of magazines here at PND Central mainly because my bequeathed is an interior designer and needs them for 'research'. I always find myself looking at these pictures of living rooms and focusing on the bookshelves pictured to identify the books these people have purchased. There is actually a spread in the current (November) House and Garden (US) showing the libraries of selected rich people which is great food for my curiosity. Rather than an opportunity to discuss how these books add to the quality of life of these people or indeed what part the collection of books plays in their lives the spread is about clothes and jewelry. Fits entirely with a magazine that is supposed to represent 'design for the well lived life'.

The pictures of the libraries themselves are naturally attractive and they do represent a spectrum. One library is over 3,000 books (but only a small portion are shown) and another seems suspiciously lacking in said critical element. Perhaps in this case the appellation 'library' is simply affectation. In addition to this spread there are also a few pages with some library furniture including a gorgeous book stand and library ladder. I wish I could link to the pages.

I would love to have a designated library with enough room for our current collection and expansion space. My wife has a large collection of large format design and garden books and has run out of space such that the titles now pile under her desk. This is not a way to treat these wonderful items. We have plans to own a house where we can designate a true library - free of TV and with some of the types of furniture House and Garden might advertise.

Mrs PND and I have different philosophies on organizing the books as well. I like to group my authors and use some rudimentary dewey decimal system but she on the otherhand has no organization. She has her side and I have mine. We share a check book but not the book shelves. (Since I was a child I always retained my own collection and did not mix my books with my family either). In the next several years we both plan to become more methodical about how and what we collect while we still retaining the joy of reading.

Looking at the titles that people have in their collections - via my close views of house magazines and books - does give me some insight into who the people might be. I think the most curious pictures are those that cover vast houses of immense expense and lavish wall art but few books. Often what books these people have are one notable best seller per year for the past ten years as though this was all they could manage. Table tops are often covered with art books which look like they were placed by the photographer. A dead give-away is when the same books are in different shots. Thankfully, rarely do you see books with the dust covers removed: "tell the client to toss all the dust jackets," was the advice my wife was once given by her mentor. That just horrifies me.

Fishing off Hoboken: 1992

Fishing off Hoboken: 1992

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

Technically off limits this small pier below Stevens University was a frequent location for fishermen before the waterfront was opened up to the public. Ordinarily the better view from this perspective is directly forward where lower Manhattan spreads out down the river rather than this view looking downward. I've a lot of the former images as well but on this particular day this perspective was more interesting.

Join me on Flickr

Fake Reviews: Does Amazon have a sense of Humor?

Take a look at how numerous Amazon reviewers have taken the time to write reviews for a book that is either a test page (why Amazon would be doing that at this stage is questionable) or the metadata is someone's idea of a sick bibliographic joke. Since the record appears on other booksellers web pages it may be the latter. Anyway the reviews are funny and in case the page is removed here are images:

NetGalley Announce Hachette Digital Galley Program

One of my favorite new technology companies Net Galley has announced a new client agreement with Hachette to deliver their digital galleys. Here is the press release:

Hachette Book Group announced today that they will use NetGalley to distribute digital galleys and digital press kits (including video, audio, tour schedules, author Q&As, and photos) to reviewers, bloggers, media, booksellers, librarians, and educators.

Using NetGalley, HBG will be able to share secure, text-searchable, full-color digital galleys, which the reader can download onto a variety of devices, including Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, Sony Reader, Kobo Reader, and the user’s desktop.

Distributing galleys and marketing material through NetGalley is a faster, more efficient, and environmentally conscious method of sharing content. HBG looks to expand its reach into the reviewer and blogger community, delivering digital galleys to their own extensive contact lists, as well as NetGalley’s network of readers who are both hungry for books and embracing the technology—and ease and speed of delivery – that this new platform offers.

NetGalley’s membership currently numbers 12,000 “professional readers.” Readers can register and use the site for free at www.netgalley.com. HBG’s launch catalog on NetGalley includes new titles from Brad Meltzer, Lawrence Block, Carlos Ruiz Zafón, Darren Shan, Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child, Don Winslow, Michael Koryta, Tom Holt and Nic Sheff.

The catalog will expand in the coming months but the current title list is here.

More on NetGalley

When is a standard not standard practice?

Forty years ago something remarkable happened in the UK publishing world. The Standard Book Number (SBN) was defined on the basis that it was better to cooperate across the supply chain than not. That booksellers, wholesalers, publishers and associated agencies all came together in agreement on something so mundane and wonky seems anachronistic, yet these UK visionaries established one of the most successful standards implementations in any industry.

The primary business driver of this effort was explained in the original paper written by Professor F.G. Foster, specifying the requirements of the SBN:

“By a Standard Number for a book title is meant a number which is made known to, and may be used by, all concerned with order processing operations involving that title. The number is then an identifying code for that title throughout its life, and it does not change. The Standard Number can be used, for example, by wholesalers or institutional suppliers in all their operations. Publishers will appreciate the advantages in arranging that their titles have Standard Numbers so that orders involving these titles can be processed more quickly and efficiently.

The general adoption of Standard Numbering by U.K. publishers will mean that instead of the trade having to cope with a proliferation of incompatibly numbered publishers' lists (with the possibility of the same number appearing on different lists to indicate different titles) there will be created a single register of all titles, and their Standard Numbers will be made readily available to all who require to use them.[1]”

So imperative did the UK industry believe to be the SBN implementation that they initially forsook international acceptance. In the UK, the bibliographic agency John Whitaker & Sons was given the task of administering the SBN and, in the early 1970s, the US agency R.R. Bowker was invited to join in an international implementation of the standard. Thus, the International Standard Book Number (ISBN) was born.

In the intervening 40 years, the ISBN has served us exceptionally well. Most publishing operations from book ordering to royalty processing to best-seller lists, couldn’t function today without the ISBN. The objective of managing operations efficiently across the supply chain from agents to publishers to booksellers has been achieved and, while this success is exemplary and has been achieved with a very light hand by the international agency that manages the standard, the publishing industry is now undergoing such change that even the ISBN may be straining to adapt.

As the publishing industry migrates to an electronic content, world publishers and retailers have been asking whether ISBN can accommodate the changes in process, product and placement. In the application of ISBN numbers to eBook content the international agency has formulated a policy – applied to all ISBN countries and agencies – that requires a distinct ISBN be applied to each format of an eBook made available to the trade. This policy requires that a publisher placing a pdf, mobipocket, or ePub version of a title into the supply chain must apply separate ISBNs to each ‘product’.

In the sometimes arcane world of standards discussions can sometimes get heated and this policy has generated strong opinions on both sides of the argument. Some publishers agree in practice with the International ISBN’s requirements and some publishers do not. Those who do not are typically applying their eBook ISBN to only one file (often the ePub file).

As noted, the ISBN policy is consistent with past practice that called for the application of a separate ISBN to the hard cover, large print, library edition and so on. The specific eBook requirement dates to revision to the entire ISBN standard approximately five years ago. The Book Industry Study Group (BISG) recently commissioned a study to review current practice and opinion from supply chain partners on this eBook ISBN issue and the study is expected to be completed by the middle of November. Out of the study, BISG expects to develop a policy statement that addresses the objectives of the International ISBN community while representing the realities of the US marketplace.

This article first appeared in Foreword Magazine.

As you may know I am conducting the study for BISG and I am condensing my interviews into a findings report. I've conducted over 50 interviews with more than 70 people across the supply chain and thus should have an excellent perspective on what is current practice.

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[1] F.G. Foster: http://www.informaticsdevelopmentinstitute.net/isbn.html

Edelweiss Incorporates Goodreads "Shelf Counts" in Title Buzz Tracking

Above the Treeline is pleased to announce the addition of the Goodreads shelf count to the buzz tracking tools within Edelweiss, its market-leading online publisher catalog service. In addition to the newly added Goodreads data, Edelweiss provides Twitter and blog tracking so that book professionals using Edelweiss can easily see which titles have online activity and can quickly view the relevant information. Similar to the other buzz tracking tools in Edelweiss, the Goodreads indicator will contain a link to the title page on the Goodreads site so that users can see full Goodreads information for a selected title.

Goodreads is an online community of more than 4.1 million book lovers and casual readers who are able to assign titles to personal shelves, such as "to-read", "currently-reading", "read" and other custom shelves. By integrating this aggregated information into Edelweiss, book professionals such as booksellers, sales reps, publicists, librarians, and media will be able to see which titles have the most energy and excitement from the Goodreads community, as expressed through the overall shelf count.

"Goodreads is the world's largest social network for readers and we're really excited to be providing Edelweiss users with this information to help them to gauge which new titles are generating the most excitement from readers," said Treeline CEO John Rubin. "As with our Twitter and blog tracking, we think this will become another key piece of information within Edelweiss to support marketing efforts and buying decisions."

The image below is an example of the Edelweiss title detail page with the Goodreads buzz meter. Click on the image to go to the page within Edelweiss.

MediaWeek (Vol 3, No 44): Library demands, 30 Day Novels, D.H. Lawrence, Education, Internet Archiving

The demand on libraries grows and grows (The Economist):

The weak economy is forcing libraries to redefine their role. Close to 70% of America’s public libraries now say their staff help patrons complete job applications online, and the same number offer help with résumés. “Workforce Solutions”—as the state of New Mexico calls the dole—requires a weekly check-in. For many people, long queues or long journeys means it is only practical to do this online. Lynne Fothergill, a head librarian at Erna Fergusson, says she noticed an increasing number of online check-ins in early 2009; they are now a primary function of the library’s two 15-minute computer terminals.

Nationally, the number of libraries reporting that they help patrons with e-government services has risen by almost half. As with private employers, when state and local governments save money by moving services online, they actually shift some of those costs to the point of access: for many of those most likely to need jobs and benefits, this is the local library.

Perversely, computers are often more expensive for public libraries than for individuals, and harder to buy. In Albuquerque, any city purchase over $500 requires approval by a technical review committee. A single library desktop, with all of the officially necessary licences and security and session-management programmes, costs the city a whopping $1,800.

Write a novel in a month? (Independent):

And although there are plenty of tales of great novelists spending years crafting their masterpieces – Joseph Heller took eight years to write Catch-22 – many of the literary world's most popular works were knocked out in a few weeks, such as Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol. Lindsey Grant, who helps run NaNoWriMo, said that 55 novels written under the scheme have gone on to publication. These include Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants, which spent 12 weeks in The New York Times best-sellers list in 2006. "The idea is to get the rough drafts of the novels down," Ms Grant said. "But so many people then go on to rewrite."Two years ago, Birdsong author Sebastian Faulks wrote a James Bond thriller, Devil May Care, in only six weeks – following the work pattern of Bond's creator, Ian Fleming."I enjoyed the rush," he said. "There was a way in which my own race to the finish line mirrored the chase of the plot. Novels that have been written quickly can retain a slightly torn-off, uneven quality – like life. This is certainly one of the miraculous things about Jean Brodie, where the story zooms back and forth through time. There is a careering, out-of-control feeling, which is exhilarating. The main danger is that the writer hasn't worked out his/her theme. They don't really know what the novel's about."

Behind The trail of Lady Chatterley's Lover (Independent):

Some were eager, and duly stepped into the witness box. E M Forster, for instance, wrote to Mr Rubenstein, calling the book "a literary work of importance", adding, "the law tells me that obscenity may deprave and corrupt, but as far as I know it offers no definition of depravity or corruption." With some willing to testify, there were complications. Aldous Huxley, for instance, wrote: "Lady Chatterley's Lover is an essentially wholesome book." But the long journey from his American home, and his request for $1,000 expenses meant he was kept in reserve, as were Iris Murdoch and T S Eliot. Eliot had, in the early Thirties, dismissed book and author, but now thought better of both and was prepared to appear. During the trial, he was on the defence team's substitutes' bench, and legend has it that, for several days, he sat outside the court in a taxi, the meter ticking all the while.Among prominent refuseniks were Evelyn Waugh and Robert Graves. Waugh's letter to Mr Rubenstein described the book as dull and pretentious, one whose publication would serve no private or public good. He ended with the verdict: "Lawrence had very meagre literary gifts." Graves's letter said of Lawrence: "I won't have a book of his on my shelves."

Even Field and Stream got into it:

The review read in part: "This fictional account of the day-to-day life of an English gamekeeper is still of interest to outdoor-minded readers, as it contains many passages on pheasant-raising, the apprehending of poachers, ways to control vermin, and other chores and duties of the occasional gamekeeper. "Unfortunately, one is obliged to wade through many pages of extraneous material in order to discover and savour these sidelights on the management of a Midlands shooting estate, and in this reviewer's opinion the book cannot take the place of J R Miller's Practical Gamekeeper."

How to Fix our Schools a Manifesto (WaPo):

Just as we must give teachers and schools the capability and flexibility to meet the needs of students, we must give parents a better portfolio of school choices. That starts with having the courage to replace or substantially restructure persistently low-performing schools that continuously fail our students. Closing a neighborhood school -- whether it's in Southeast D.C., Harlem, Denver or Chicago -- is a difficult decision that can be very emotional for a community. But no one ever said leadership is easy. We also must make charter schools a truly viable option. If all of our neighborhood schools were great, we wouldn't be facing this crisis. But our children need great schools now -- whether district-run public schools or public charter schools serving all students -- and we shouldn't limit the numbers of one form at the expense of the other. Excellence must be our only criteria for evaluating our schools. For the wealthiest among us, the crisis in public education may still seem like someone else's problem, because those families can afford to choose something better for their kids. But it's a problem for all of us -- until we fix our schools, we will never fix the nation's broader economic problems. Until we fix our schools, the gap between the haves and the have-nots will only grow wider and the United States will fall further behind the rest of the industrialized world in education, rendering the American dream a distant, elusive memory.

Two e-Learning companies to begin selling online remedial courses to community colleges (Inside HE):

K12 has made only a few inroads in higher education; last summer one of its subsidiaries was rebuffed by an accrediting agency when it tried to take over operations at Rochester College, a four-year liberal arts college in Michigan. (K12’s collaboration with Middlebury College to deliver language instruction as part of a summer program has been more successful.) Davis said he will be pleased this time to have, in Blackboard, a co-pilot with a huge network of existing higher-ed clients.For Blackboard — which has sold online learning platforms and other services for years, but never courses — the deal also represents a new sort of business. Both sides say K12 will do most of the heavy lifting on course design and provide the labor from its stable of 2,700 instructors, while Blackboard will focus mainly on the technology. But the two companies say they will work together on all aspects of the product. Small, the chief business officer, said Blackboard does not currently sell courses past the remedial level. “Outside of this very targeted effort, we have no plans to move into the general areas of curriculum and instruction,” he said.

The Economist looks at efforts to archive the web (The Economist):

The biggest problem, for now, is money. The British Library estimates that it costs half as much to store a digital document as it does a physical one. But there are a lot more digital ones. America’s Library of Congress enjoys a specific mandate, and budget, to save the web. The British Library is still seeking one.

So national libraries have decided to split the task. Each has taken responsibility for the digital works in its national top-level domain (web-address suffixes such as “.uk” or “.fr”). In countries with larger domains, such as Britain and America, curators cannot hope to save everything. They are concentrating on material of national interest, such as elections, news sites and citizen journalism or innovative uses of the web.

The daily death of countless websites has brought a new sense of urgency—and forced libraries to adapt culturally as well. Past practice was to tag every new document as it arrived. Now precision must be sacrificed to scale and speed. The task started before standards, goals or budgets are set. And they may yet change. Just like many websites, libraries will be stuck in what is known as “permanent beta”.

From The Twitter this week - follow me @Personanondata: Conrad Black fails in attempt to clear his name Guardian DOI To Become Backbone of New Entertainment Content Registry Press Release Amazing Kindle book sales stats from The Bookseller Cornwell: "The tyranny of the Epos [computerized book tracking] can make it very difficult for the beginner." Guardian

Repost: Just Trying to Keep My Customers Satisfied

Originally published Jan 18, 2007:


I feel like a total monkey when I walk into Starbucks; that is, since I read Breaking the Trade-Off Between Efficiency and Service by Francis X. Frei in the November 2006 edition of The Harvard Business Review. The article is about how service businesses struggle with the impact customers have on their daily operations: the fact that customers interfere with the smooth running of their operations. Who hasn’t heard someone in the service business lament "…if it wasn’t for the customers this business would work perfectly."

Service business by definition rely on customer interaction. The problem is that this interaction is often unmanaged and unmanageable by the service provider. The impact of this is often seen in inconsistent service and the not insignificant task of service providers is to be able to deliver a consistent level of service despite the level of interruption by the customer.

Frei goes on to discuss five types of customer variability;

• Arrival - you can’t always anticipate when customers will show up
• Request - sometimes they want it their way
• Capability - perhaps the customer knows a lot and sometimes they are clueless which is especially relevant if they play an active role in the process
• Effort – the customer may be more or less willing to participate in the process
• Subjective Preference – Is the customer happy with hand-holding or embarrassed by it?

In managing the variability, the manager faces a choice of accommodating the variability or attempting to reduce it. This is a trade off that could bankrupt the organization if it goes to extremes in either direction. Offer no flexibility and customers leave; offer too much and it costs too much. The actual solution is more nuanced and Frei discusses a number of options and companies which have been able to maintain expected service levels without going broke.

Which is where the Starbucks reference is relevant.

I sometimes get a ‘bar’ drink at Starbucks rather than a regular coffee. As I stand in line I find myself reciting the proper syntax so that when I get to the counter I don’t embarrass myself by getting the order wrong. (The Economist recently recited a Starbucks bar drink order in an article, got it wrong and it was corrected in a letter to the editor – which they dutifully printed). Mine is a Grande, 2% Extra Hot, Whip, Hot Chocolate. Starbucks do this by design. If you notice the Starbucks employees call out the drinks each time, and this is to teach you the customer to remember it so you can get it right next time and reduce the variability, speed up the line and not embarrass yourself.

This article was given to me in relation to some consulting work I was doing, but it is interesting reading for anyone involved in the service business who needs to ensure a consistent cost effective customer experience.

Bali 1971: Parade

Bali 1971: Parade

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

This image looks like it was a staged tourist shot but I can't tell since other frames in the set seem to indicate that my parents came upon this group by accident. Either way it's a fun photo. All the women in their extremely colorful sarongs they look great and in the other images from the set even the 'locals' are caught watching the parade

DOI To Become Backbone of New Entertainment Content Registry

I have long believed that entertainment media is begging for a uniform identifier system and collaborative database approach and a recently announced coalition may be bringing us closer to this eventuality. Led by MovieLabs, CableLabs(R), Comcast and Rovi Corporation a non-profit group has been formed that will provide a uniform approach to cataloging movies, television shows, and other commercial audio/video assets with unique identifiers (IDs).

The system is being developed as an open, standards-based effort built on the established Digital Object Identifier (DOI) system, created by the International DOI(R) Foundation and based on the widely used Handle System persistent identifier technology. In addition, it uses the open-source registry software from the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI). The DOI framework will not be unfamiliar to publishing professionals especially those in the journal business and the related (non-profit) entity CrossRef. It appears this coalition in the entertainment business will attempt to mimic the successful CrossRef application of DOI technology.

The press release was long (and I've summarized some above) but here is more:

Backed by a broad group of industry players, including Deluxe, Universal Pictures, Neustar, Paramount Pictures, Sonic Solutions, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Walt Disney Pictures, Warner Bros. Entertainment, Motion Picture Association of America, Inc., Civolution, Vobile, INA (L'institut national de l'audiovisuel), and others, the registry is set up as an industry resource to help streamline digital commerce and simplify consumer transactions. The consortium is actively looking to expand with new partners and participants internationally.

Each year, millions of new entertainment assets from many sources and distribution channels are being added to the massive amount of content available in the marketplace. With the growth of digital and other alternative distribution channels, keeping track of all of these content products, especially videos, is becoming an increasingly complex task for many businesses in the entertainment supply chain. EIDR has been developed to address a critical need for a universal ID system for all types of audio/video assets in the entertainment industry, making it easier for businesses to search, track rights and report revenue based on an assets' unique ID. The expected results are increased accuracy of information flowing to consumers, and lower cost and more efficient back-office processes.

"Most companies today are either using proprietary or disparate organic systems to catalog their entertainment assets, making the process of tracking content across multiple systems very difficult," said Steve Weinstein, president and CEO, MovieLabs. "EIDR can provide the missing communication link between businesses. We look forward to expanding EIDR membership to companies throughout the global content ecosystem, which we think is critical to the success of the effort."

Members of EIDR will have open access to the registry and/ or be able to supply their content to the registry for identification. For content distributors, access to unique IDs will help eliminate confusion between assets with same name or different cuts of the same video, helping to ensure that the right products are being distributed to the consumer. For content producers, the ability to register all of their assets will help simplify their post-production process and potentially lead to greater distribution of their products. Other companies in the supply chain can benefit from a streamlined communication process between their suppliers and distributors.

Hat tip @MJHealy

CCC Podcast: Putting the ‘Social’ in Media

Web 2.0 brought a more interactive relationship between creating and consuming content than ever seen before. That interaction is shaping our lives and changing our media in sometimes fascinating, and sometimes threatening ways.

Alexandra Samuel joins Chris Kenneally to talk about the economics and the ecology of social media. She’s the Director of the Social + Interactive Media Centre at Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver, and a blogger for Oprah.com and the Harvard Business Review. She shares research on the future form of the e-book, as well as her thoughts on culture as a community rather than a personal asset.

Listen here.

MediaWeek (Vol 3, No 43): Islamic Superheros, Shakespeare and Co, Terrorist David Hicks, eMagazines,

Now we're in for it. Islamic superheros (Guardian):

She, along with her fellow crime-fighters, a vast team of characters from around the world, including Jabbar the Powerful from Saudi Arabia and Hadya the Guide from London, collectively known as "The 99", are the world's first Islam-inspired superheroes. And this week, in what is perhaps the ultimate comic-book accolade, they will join forces with Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. DC Comics, the US publishing giant, will publish the first of six special crossover issues in which The 99 will be fighting crime alongside the Justice League of America, the fictional superhero team that includes Superman and Batman.

What's even more remarkable is that The 99 only came into being in 2007 with some remarkable firsts: the first comic book superheroes to have Muslim names and be directed at an international audience and the first to come out of the Middle East. Crossovers don't happen often and even less often with characters that are just three years old. Even The 99's creator and mastermind, a Kuwaiti-born, American-educated psychologist and entrepreneur called Naif al-Mutawa, seems to be having some trouble believing the Superman link-up.

Profile of bookstore Shakespeare and Company (Independent):

At Shakespeare & Co, there's not enough space for a stockroom, so it's a constant merry-go-round of books bought and books sold; tourists flock here to take photographs of the higgledy-piggledy interior, with books stacked from floor to ceiling. This is the place, after all, where in the Fifties the Beat poets hung out, and, more recently, where Ethan Hawke is filmed in the opening scenes of cult movie Before Sunset (and, indeed, where Meryl Streep in last year's Julia & Julia was seen to wander, in search of a cookbook). There's a wishing well in the floor that holds a plenteous supply of coins; in times gone by, it had a gas pipe which owner George Whitman was inclined to light on occasion (once, the story goes, when he was feeling particularly rakish, he accidentally set a hair-model's long tresses on fire). Upstairs, at the top of the winding staircase, there are all sorts of places for readers to loll. One room is a library, with literary donations to Whitman from Simone de Beauvoir's personal collection, and an eclectic selection of his own books – what remained, anyway, after a horrendous fire a number of years ago destroyed thousands of words. That's the room with a piano (and a fire extinguisher). When I visit, most customers aren't shy about playing it; although one man, too bashful to perform, is unable to resist sitting at the stool – he mimes playing for 10 minutes, fingers never touching the keys.

From AdAge, mixed results reported for eMagazines (Poynter):

Nat Ives writes that six months into the magazines-on-iPad experiment, sales have ranged from mixed to disappointing. Perhaps not surprisingly, tech-focused titles seem to be faring better than fashion magazines:

• Popular Science: average monthly sales of 14,034 from April through JulyWired: 105,000 sales in June; 31,000 in July; 28,000 in August; 32,000 in SeptemberMen's Health: average sales of 3,174 for April, May, June and July/August issues
• People: 10,800 downloads per weekly issue (includes print subscriber downloads)Glamour: 4,099 sales for its September issueGQ: average sales of 13,310 from April through August (includes iPhone and iPad editions)
• Vanity Fair: average monthly sales of 8,925 from June through September (includes iPhone and iPad editions)

Full AdAge Article Controversy in Australia where the government is being advised not to challenge the ability of convicted terrorist David Hicks to keep the profits from the sale of his memoir Growing Up Taliban (not the title). Random House Australia is the publisher and the title is available on the Kindle store but not in the US. (The Australian)

In 2001, Hicks was with the Taliban in Afghanistan when he was captured by US forces. He spent 5 1/2 years in Guantanamo Bay before serving the final seven months of his sentence in Adelaide.The federal government has received advice that the guilty plea made by Hicks before the military commission meant he had been convicted under a foreign law -- which triggers the proceeds-of-crime legislation. But Professor Williams said an Australian court would still need to order that Hicks be stripped of his profits, and this was likely to mean that a judge could question the legitimacy of the military commission process. The original military commissions were struck down by the US Supreme Court and were reconstituted before the plea agreement with Hicks.But Professor Williams questioned their legitimacy. "Whether or not he did it, he pled guilty to a kangaroo court and it is inescapable that the process was flawed in many ways," he said. Even if a judge accepts the legitimacy of the military commission process, the Proceeds of Crime Act means Hicks could retain his profits if the judge considers that his book has "social, cultural or education value" or is in the public interest.The doubts about the effectiveness of the Proceeds of Crime Act coincide with intense criticism of the Hicks book in the US.

And in Music: Apple - The short, strange blossoming of The Beatles' dream (Independent)

To the music business at large, an industry not best known for altruism, this was the hippie ideal gone truly mad. If Dick James, the head of Northern Songs, the company that published the Lennon and McCartney catalogue of music, had needed any encouragement in his plan to sever his links with The Beatles following the death of manager Brian Epstein a year earlier, this had to be it. Within months the songs had been sold to Lew Grade at ATV. As it turned out the cynics were quickly proved at least partly right. Staffed by many of the group's old friends from Liverpool, few of whom had any real business acumen, Apple quickly became a financial whirlpool as money was sucked away to places unknown. Perhaps the group's first venture outside music, a fashion boutique in nearby Baker Street, should have been a warning, quickly turning into a Beatle-takeaway as, in the absence of much in the way of security, customers simply helped themselves to the designs and walked out without paying. If it was an omen it wasn't spotted. As a character known as Magic Alex was given funding to build a new recording studio, which didn't work, and grotesque bills for drinks, food, taxis and flowers began to rain in, accountants were soon trying to trace an Apple-owned Mercedes that had simply vanished off the face of the earth. Within a year, with John Lennon joking he was "down to his last 10,000 [pounds]" and they'd "all be broke within six months if this carried on", American Allen Klein was introduced to sort out the mess. Another big mistake: Klein quickly dropped James Taylor's contract and lost them millions. Meanwhile the sackings began: the dream was over, as Lennon used to sing.

From the twitter (@personanondata): It has come to this: Talking meerkat is the latest in a line of animals to publish their 'memoirs Independent This will be cool: “Amazon: 14-Day Lending Coming to Kindle ‘Later This Year’” Mashable Cengage's Dunn Says Learning Enhanced by Digital Media: Video Youtube Michael Wolf (not that one) at GigaOm thinks Starbucks will be a big eBook retailer. I don't. Prize though for the most ironic title in a long while.

Repost: Publishing and Global Data Synchronization

Originally published on March 19, 2007


Over the past several months, I have commented on issues related to the publishing supply chain and the need to revamp the relationships between supply chain partners to create a more efficient business environment. Closer integration across the publishing supply chain will result in better efficiency and effectiveness leading to higher revenue and profitability. While sharing information between partners is growing in frequency, there has been only limited movement towards a more holistic approach to addressing supply chain issues.

The potential evolution of metadata requirements for the industry is also a theme I have addressed and I have suggested that base level bibliographic information has become a commodity. In recent years BISG has proactively reviewed the potential for a single “(Global) data synchronization (Network)” application for the publishing business. This GDSN application would sit as a central hub of base-level bibliographic information that would be accessible to all industry participants. Fees would be assessed to participants but would be fairly modest given the experience with similar applications in other industries. (In fact, some large publishers are already subscribers to GDSN data pools due to their business operations in non-retail markets such as big box retailing).

The management of a GDSN data pool is not an insignificant task and were BISG to sponsor the development of a publishing data pool it is logical to believe that a manager of this data-pool would be required. It is unlikely that BISG would want to manage this themselves and would be more likely to create an RFP for the application. A fully implemented GDSN solution for the publishing industry could significantly improve data flow and data accuracy across the supply chain not least because there would be one central location for read and write product details.

Having said that, there is an assumption that the internal data provided externally to the GDSN data pool would be accurate. Unfortunately I know this is not generally the case based on my experience at Bowker. Since the launch of Amazon and the subsequent adoption of ONIX, publisher data is significantly better than it was in the past but once you move away from all but the top 200-300 publishers data quality is a real problem. Businesses must continue to focus on product information and it is likely that service providers such as Netread will continue to play a large role in data supply.

The implementation of GDSN will lead to other integrated applications that will support further improvements in the supply chain. These include RFID, collaborative planning, forecasting and replenishment, vendor managed inventory and scan based trading. All of which have been implemented in other industries and in publishing would begin to mimic my suggested Intelligent Publishing Supply Network (IPSN). Among the benefits that other industries have proven is possible are,

• Increased order accuracy
• Ability to identify and correct internal data discrepancies
• Decrease retailer out-of-stocks
• Realize more timely replenishment orders
• Reduce the likelihood of retailer returns
• Establish the foundation for adopting RFID

RFID tagging could create the opportunity for significant gains in operational efficiency within the book world. The RFID tag carries only minimal data – the Electronic Product Code (EPC) - (sometimes referred to as the electronic barcode) and the tag can either be read only or read/write. Even in isolated (non-networked) applications within a book store or a distribution center the results in efficiency would be profound. Within a full RFID implementation across a supply chain, product level data is accessible from a central location (database) at any point in the supply chain providing details on what the product is and where it came from. In tandem, the location of that item is made available centrally so that tracking details can be analyzed and acted upon. Wide spread implementations will be limited until tag costs decrease and some operational issues, such as pallet level accuracy (some tags can’t be read if they are buried on a pallet), are addressed.

The future for an efficient book supply chain is playing out in other industries such as consumer products, hardware and the grocery chain. As Publisher revenues become more bifurcated across multiple distribution networks, making physical distribution more cost effective becomes critical, because less revenue will be generated from physical distribution reducing scale effects and squeezing profit margins. It remains for the industry via BISG to lead in the direction of a more efficient and effective supply chain.

Links:
Qualified Metadata
Supply Chain 1/2

Kabul International Airport 1973

Kabul International Airport, 1973

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

We spent three days in Kabul between our stops in Karachi, Peshawar and Tehran. An amazing trip but one only vaguely remembered. More images on flickr.

Keeping Yiddish alive and a rare bookshop open

From the BBC - pity you can't embed the viewer - a look at the last secular bookshop in New York which is facing closure by the end of this year.

In this first person account owner Hy Wolfe talks about his mission to keep both the bookshop and his language (Yiddish) alive.

Video is five minutes long. (And I love Moishe the baker).