EBSCO's Tim Collins on eBooks, Libraries and Search "has never been more important".

Interesting interview from Scholarly Kitchen with Tim Collins.  Here's a clip:

Many libraries are starting to see that, while they may spend less on ebooks for a couple of year by using STLs, they are often left with lower annual budgets (if they spend less in one year their budget declines the next) and a much less robust ebook collection to offer their users (as they don’t own as many books). While some libraries may feel like this is okay as they can enable their patrons to search ‘all’ ebooks via Demand Driven Acquisition (DDA) models without actually buying them, we worry about this logic as it assumes that publishers will continue to make all of their content available for searching via DDA at no cost to users. We don’t see this as a valid assumption as, if DDA results in reducing ebook budgets even further, we wonder whether publishers will be able to afford to make their ebooks available under this model.

We can see why book publishers worked with these models as they wanted to support their customers. But, if these models result in budget reductions, which result in publishers not being able to fulfill their mission of publishing the world’s research so that it can be consumed, we don’t see them being sustainable.   We understand that this view may not be welcomed or shared by all libraries, but we see the logic being sound. Business models need to work for both customers and vendors in order for them to be sustainable. There was much great discussion on this subject at the recent Charleston Conference and in related articles published in Against the Grain by both publishers and librarians.

MediaWeek (Vol 9, No 1): Flipboard Magazine: Future of Bloomberg, Bezo's Post, Google Big Book Data

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Cost of Publishing University Press Monographs

Ithaka S+R recently published a study conducted during 2015 of the costs of publishing monographs within the University Press environment.  Here is a link to the study (pdf)

In summary their findings are as follows:

• Regardless of group type, the largest cost item for university presses is staff time, specifically the time related to activities of acquisitions, the area most closely tied to the character and reputation of the press. This activity is least likely to be outsourced, and considered to be closely tied to its financial success: acquisitions editors being the ones with the skill, subject expertise, and relationships needed to attract the most promising authors and topics to the press.
• The working hypothesis at the outset of the study was that larger presses would demonstrate a lower per-book cost, presuming that larger houses are able to work more efficiently due to the economic benefits of scaling. Based on the data contributed by the individual presses, the small university presses in group 1 have been able to produce monographs at a lower cost than the other groups. It is impossible to determine if this signals greater efficiency on the part of the small presses or it simply means they underinvest in their publications.
• We looked for significant determinants of cost. While press size, page count, and number of illustrations showed a relationship to cost, other factors, including whether or not the title was a “first book,” whether or not the press was at an institution that required it to pay rent, or whet
• her the press was at a public versus private institution, did not. An examination of disciplines was not conclusive, due to small sample size.

Where are all the e-Textbook Users?

A whiff of great expectations and inevitability trails behind any discussion of digital textbooks like the scent of Grey Flannel from a middle-aged man. But it’s time to clear the air of both, and face the fact that the highly anticipated digital revolution just isn’t happening.  

I’ve been as guilty as anyone, speculating about the demise of print in the classroom. But a combination of institutional resistance, vested interest and simple disinterest have ultimately conspired to position digital textbooks on the slow train to never.  In fact, in a recent survey conducted by Campus Computing on behalf of the National Association of College Stores (NACS), “never” was the answer over 24% of respondents gave when asked when content in the classroom will be primarily digital.  [Correction: The survey was sponsored by the Independent College Stores Association, not NACS - sorry]


Surveying faculty and students on the adoption of and/or readiness for academic digital content has become a competitive sport, resulting in regular reports presented by associations, trade groups and retailers.   You don’t need to look at many of these to spot the themes consistent to all:  Students prefer print, textbook cost is an issue and faculty isn’t inclined to experiment.

In spring 2015, NACS announced the findings from their Student Watch™ survey and admitted that digital course materials were growing steadily, but only at a rate of approximately 3% per year.  Hardly fuel for a revolution.  They went on to make the following statement regarding the future of educational content in the classroom:

But one thing is certain: Every institution will need to consider a multidimensional and boundary-spanning learning content strategy if the transition to digital learning content and courseware is to proceed smoothly. Failure to do so likely will fragment the student experience as decisions to adopt learning content vary from course to course and as untested courseware and digital academic services are adopted and discarded. Unmanaged, the gap between courseware’s capabilities and the faculty's use of them will frustrate students and lead to substantial underutilization of the institution’s investments.

My response to that is . . . why?  If the growth of digital is slow and its value to students and teachers questionable, why does NACS believe that doing the above has become such an imperative?

Is it a justification for the big investments made by the largest educational publishers, who have bought companies and built content creation and delivery platforms to facilitate digital delivery?   Perhaps these investments, which looked so strategic and important to the industry (myself included), were premature or even misguided.  Recent financial results for some of the largest educational publishers have been soft and maybe the slow take-up in digital, coupled with heavy up-front investment, is partly to blame.  The most important question to ask now may be “Is there a digital future for educational content at all?

There are certainly many boosters who would answer “yes”.  Several years ago, Education Secretary Arne Duncan announced that the US educational market needed to move, as quickly as possible, away from print to digital, primarily to compete with other countries already making serious advances in this area. 

“Over the next few years, textbooks should be obsolete," he declared, going on to say that students in other countries are leaving their American counterparts in the dust because of those countries’ more enlightened education policy.   Duncan noted that South Korea “has set a goal to go fully digital with its textbooks by 2015.”   But, in 2016, our government appears to have done little to support the expansion and development of the infrastructure required to support digital content delivery in colleges--particularly community colleges, across the US.   

While the number of community college faculty surveyed by the recent NACS study was small relative to that of four-year institutions, the concerns over accessibility were clear.  Most students attending community colleges can’t afford digital devices and their lifestyles – balancing academic, work and home life – make using anything other than a print textbook difficult.   These problems are pretty basic but they don’t have easy solutions – and may not until the tablet is as affordable and ubiquitous as the Slimline phone.

To my mind, there are other challenges which may be even more intractable, and these concern institutional resistance and vested interests.   Publishers, colleges and faculty, retailers and others are dis-incentivized to move away from print content to digital.  I’m not at all saying they operate unethically or outside the best interests of their constituents; however, the current print-based world does afford important benefits to many of those who participate in the business model. Consequently, the desire to press for change might be somewhat muted.

The survey conducted by Campus Computing sampled approximately 3,000 faculty members at 29 two- and four-year colleges and summarized the findings:

• The majority of faculty agreed that digital materials generally cost less money.
• Less than half believed that digital content added value to their courses.
• 55 percent said that students prefer print textbooks to digital.
• 39 percent reported they had never heard of open educational resources (OER).

While the majority of faculty members professed concern over high textbook prices, there were some inconsistencies in the responses that may not entirely bear that out.  For example, faculty members believe themselves to be the final arbiters of textbook selection and, certainly, the price of the textbook is a known variable they can take into account during the selection process.  Even more telling is the finding that very few faculty members know about, are aware of, or would select open-source content for their course material.  If selected, this courseware would be free to the student!   As summarized in Campus Computing:

Two-fifths (39 percent) of the survey participants indicated that they had never heard of OER, while just over a third (36 percent) indicated that they knew a little about OER but had not used or reviewed OER materials. A tenth (10 percent) had reviewed but decided not to use OER materials for their classes, while another tenth (11 percent) were using OER materials and 4 percent were currently using OER in their classes and also making their own course materials available as OER.

The results were similar with respect to digital content: While respondents believe it to be cheaper than traditional print textbook content, a disappointing proportion of faculty are willing to select digital content for their students.  Despite their apparent unwillingness to experiment with the selection of digital course materials, the faculty surveyed are more than willing to judge the quality of digital course materials as inferior to traditional textbooks.  It’s hard to understand how the ‘quality’ of digital content can be questioned when it’s seldom selected!

These and other contradictions may be a result of the survey methodology itself (i.e., how the questions were asked), but what is patently clear is that digital transformation of content in higher education is going to be progressive, not revolutionary as predicted.  This doesn’t make sense when you consider all of the great advantages perceived in providing digital content to students.  But obstacles remain and may be difficult to overcome--especially since they are, in a sense, “protected” by incumbent publishers, administrators and suppliers.  In the meantime, Arne Duncan’s fear that the US is losing the education race to countries at the digital vanguard becomes more and more real.

Pearson Annual Results: Revenue and profit off 2%. Profit growth expected '17, '18

From their press release:

PEARSON 2015 PRELIMINARY RESULTS (UNAUDITED)

Pearson, the world's learning company, is announcing its preliminary full year results for 2015 which builds on its 21 January trading statement.  Key headlines include:

·   2015 results in line with guidance:

o  Sales of £4,468m declined 2% in underlying terms. Good growth in Pearson VUE, Connections Education and Wall Street English in China was more than offset by declines in US Higher Education, UK Qualifications and South Africa.

o   Deferred revenues grew 8% in underlying terms.

o   Adjusted operating profit of £723m was down 2% in underlying terms due to revenue mix and an operating loss in our Growth segment partly offset by Penguin Random House.

o   Adjusted earnings per share grew 5% to 70.3p reflecting lower interest and a lower tax rate of 15.5%, due to the agreement of historical tax positions and the associated release of accrued interest on tax provisions.

o   Operating cash flow decreased 33% as a result of challenging trading, disposals and increased US higher education textbook returns partly offset by an increased dividend payment from Penguin Random House.

·   2015 statutory results: Statutory profit for the year of £823m was affected by two significant items: pre-tax gains on the disposal of the Financial Times, The Economist Group and PowerSchool of £1,214m; and an impairment of goodwill and intangibles of £849m, primarily reflecting challenging market conditions in our Growth and North American businesses.

·   Simplification and growth: As announced in January, we are taking further action to simplify our business, reduce our costs and position ourselves for growth in our major markets. We will complete the majority of these actions by mid-year and incur implementation costs of approximately £320m in 2016 and expect to generate annualised savings of approximately £350m, with approximately £250m of these savings in 2016 and a further £100m of these savings in 2017. We have already implemented a number of associated actions since the announcement of the programme in January. 

·   2018 goals: With the full benefits of our restructuring programme, the launch of new products, and stability returning to US college enrolments and the UK qualifications market by the end of 2017, we expect adjusted operating profit to be at or above £800m in 2018.

·   Sustaining the dividend: We are proposing a final dividend of 34p, level with last year, resulting in a 2% increase in the overall 2015 dividend to 52p.  Pearson plans to hold its dividend at this 2015 level while it rebuilds cover, reflecting the Board's confidence in the medium term outlook. 

·   2016 outlook: In 2016, we expect to report adjusted operating profit and adjusted earnings per share before the costs of restructuring of between £580m and £620m and between 50p and 55p, respectively, with the in-year benefits from restructuring offset by the loss of operating profit from disposals made in 2015, ongoing challenging conditions in our largest markets, the reinstatement of the employee incentive pool and other operational factors. We are excluding the one-off cost of this major restructuring to better reflect the underlying earnings potential of the business. Operating profit after restructuring charges is expected to be in the £260m to £300m range.

·   Strategy: We have world-class capabilities in educational courseware and assessment, based on a strong portfolio of products and services, powered by learning technology. Our strategy of combining these core capabilities with related services that enable our partners to scale online, reaching more people and ensuring better learning outcomes, will provide Pearson with a larger market opportunity, a sharper focus on the fastest-growing education markets and stronger financial returns.

Predictions for 2016: Education, China, Platforms and Blockchain. As I see it.

For many years now I’ve been putting my thoughts about the future of the media and publishing in writing.  Here are my thoughts on the coming year.

2016 Predictions:

Education publishing may well see a lot of turmoil during 2016.   At Houghton Mifflin, CEO Linda Zecher has continued to make changes to her organizational and executive team, while at Cengage Michael Hansen‘s team is now well bedded in.  In both cases, the companies are focused in investing in digital products and distribution, which they couldn’t do doing while their businesses were under considerable financial constraints prior to refinancing.   Where change will really be evident is at Pearson, Wiley, Scholastic and Macmillan.   Given the share slides of both Wiley and Pearson, I expect some restructuring is inevitable at both companies.   Pearson has already announced significant headcount reductions and has sold off most of its ‘non-core’ operations.  Pearson’s share price is at a ten-year low and any long-term shareholder must be wondering what happened to the ROI from the asset sales and education company purchases made during the past 10 years.   At the current price, the company must be a target for private equity.  Perhaps even Bertelsmann will take a close look at the company in collaboration with a PE company.

Similarly, at Wiley there is an argument that their educational division is not big enough to be a “real” player against the bigger companies.   That may have been fine when the business as a whole was running well; however, the business is fighting a general market slow-down and internal operational issues, all of which are reflected in their operational results.   Look for some announcement in 2016 that Wiley is looking at ‘strategic options’ for parts of its business.   It is also possible that Scholastic may consider similar options for its education business and perhaps Macmillan could look to pick up more assets to grow the scale of their education textbook business.

The expansion of China.  In years past I’ve predicted that a Chinese publisher would make a significant purchase in the US/Europe of an academic/professional publisher, but that has yet to happen.  Still, there have been small, modest investments by Chinese publishers over the past few years and the Chinese publishing industry has begun to expose itself internationally at BookExpo, LBF, etc.  I think this shows increasing confidence (which may have been lacking five years ago) and that makes expansion into western markets a probability.  In addition, there is a recognition that the domestic Chinese publishing market is significant, both in size and reputation, and this presents international expansion opportunities for Chinese publishers which were not appreciated five years ago.  This developing strength will also help propel Chinese publishers towards global expansion.

And, just this week, a Chinese consortium announced it was bidding for Opera, a web browser design company based in Norway.  While this deal is not directly in our market, it is indicative of the intention of Chinese investors to expand into the media market in a big way.  (Opera actually has a larger role in content distribution than may be obviously apparent).

Platforms purposely open will become a strategic imperative for all CTOs looking for new content management options in the coming years.  The launch of Facebook, Apple News and other large distribution networks will actually convince more content owners that their content repositories and distribution networks need to be built with open-source, non-proprietary tools, and retain open APIs so that linking and third-party application development can be encouraged and fostered.   While the entry of the larger players is important, it will not diminish the need for individual publishers (and/or aggregators) to maintain their own market presence.  What becomes more important is that the platforms on which these are built are true platforms which can be upgraded frequently, without disruption or added cost by the developer.  In addition, development and third-party app “tiers” sit on top of this base platform to enable extensions and ‘bespoke’ applications.  These latter elements can be built by the software provider, the client publisher or third-party developers.  The third-party development capability will become a marketplace for applications similar to the manner in which salesforce.com has established their developer community.   These product criteria will become critical entry points for any technology provider presenting their solution to education, academic and scholarly publishers from this point forward (if it isn’t already).

The growth of corporate communication platforms is another prediction I’ve made in years past.  It hasn’t yet become prevalent; however, I believe virtually all corporations and businesses are becoming publishers to some degree.   Accelerating this is the availability of the tools needed as well as the business imperative for companies to manage their own internal and external content in more effective ways.   I recently met an ex-colleague who has developed a content tool that enables a company to host its HR and policies and procedures manuals in a central service.  This content platform offers edit features so, not only is the content updated daily, but employees are empowered to offer input to improve procedures and safety practices, which can then be immediately rolled out to other offices.  A global retailer is now testing this tool across its business.   Similarly, communication with external constituencies can be improved significantly for many businesses by adopting many of the same practices which publishers have employed with their subscribers, like content platforms and access and control features.

Growth of licensing revenues:  CCC has been on an accelerated expansion of overseas activities which underscores the opportunities for publishers outside the US marketplace.   Most publishers are still focused on the form of their content but, increasingly form will be less and less important (the aforementioned Facebook and AppleNews sites are instructive on this point).  This will mean publishers providing flexible content and making it available to as many sources as possible will increasingly drive their revenues.   Licensing fees are becoming a very important source of revenue for publishers and if your revenues in this area haven’t increased more than 20% over the past three years you may want to re-think your policies.   Undoubtedly, licensed content will become one of a publisher’s main sources of revenue in the coming years.  This will have implications across businesses, especially for systems and accounting processes.

Application of Blockchain: And, speaking of copyright, expect to see the application of Blockchain to intellectual property rights.  As you know, Blockchain is the underlying foundation for BitCoin and, as such, its application to the protection and distribution of intellectual property will be another very interesting use.   Each step in a Blockchain transaction is protected by a tamper-proof encryption technology which supports BitCoin as a legitimate financial transaction service.   The use of Blockchain is being considered in several other applications, and media is one of them.

Blockchain can be used to facilitate the transfer of intellectual property from one owner to another.  Bitcoins are ‘tokens’ that represent money and are exchanged on the Blockchain network.  But there is no reason why a ‘token’ couldn’t represent some other specific item of value, such as a book or an article or a business case.  Once a transaction occurs, the user is supplied with a unique key for accessing the content.  If the user subsequently wants to sell or lend the item, they pass their unique key to the next person for their use.  This process eliminates the ‘residual’ copy issue which arises when someone tries to sell a second-hand e-file.

Ultimately, a network of “bitRights” ™ could represent a universal content repository or bazaar/market where rights and content could be exchanged or bought, traded and sold.  In addition, this aggregation would also generate significant user data and analytics to inform future pricing, content/topic areas, distribution models and a host of other benefits which currently get lost in the very inefficient rights and copyright clearance process we have today.   Recently, Ascribe received $2mm in seed capital to establish a Blockchain product for artwork.

Open Access for federal funded research will clear Congress in 2016.   In recent years, the Fair Access to Science & Technology Research Act (FASTR) bill has failed to pass Congress due to opposition from publishers and others.  FASTR will require any federal agency which provides more than $100million in grants (which, let’s face it, is a huge hurdle) to adopt an open-access policy.   Coupled with this will be more excitement and activity around the Obama Administration’s open data initiative.  Either way, there will be much more to happening in 2016 with open access to government information.   App developers and non-profit foundations are working together to drive better access to this type of information, and I recently saw a demo from CivicHall, which is doing just that for several cities already.

As always, I expect the coming year will be another exciting year with, I hope, the above trends occurring but almost certainly many other new and interesting things as well.

Michael Cairns has served as CEO and President of several technology and content-centric business supporting global media publishers, retailers and service provider.  He can be reached at michael.cairns@outlook.com and is interested in discussing new business opportunities for executive management and/or board and advisory positions.

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The Giant List of Publishing Predictions for 2016

Here is a listing of some interesting predictions for 2016 across the publishing and media sector:

Trade and Self-Publishing

Mark Coker from Smashwords provides a comprehensive exploration of trends for 2016 with particular focus on the Amazon subscription model and its impact on traditional publishers.  His post also includes extensive follow-up and comments: 2016 Book Publishing Industry Predictions: Myriad Opportunities amid a Slow Growth Environment

Jonathon Sturgeon as flavorwire suggests "Books by Committee, Self-Published Books by Computers" may be something we need to watch out for during 2016: From Adult Relaxation to Prole Erotica: Book Publishing Predictions for 2016

Blogsite Bookworks presents: 2016 Predictions for the Self-Publishing Industry

Digital Book World asked Tom Chalmers for his 10 Industry Predictions for 2016

Jane Friedman has 5 Industry Issues for Authors to Watch in 2016

Publisher'sWeekly: What Does 2016 Hold for Digital Publishing?

LA Times: 6 book trends for 2016: Look into the future

Academic and Scholarly Publishing

From Publishing Perspectives five predictions for open access academic publishing

From Scholarly Kitchen: Ask The Chefs: What Do You See On The Horizon For Scholarly Publishing In 2016?

General and Digital Media:

Deloitte Media: Telecommunications and Technology predictions for 2016 report

MediaPost: The Mobile Revolution Accelerates

From Talking New Media Five digital publishing predictions from Arazoo Nadir

From Publishing Executive magazine:  2016: The Year Ahead for Publishing in 12 Words

From MediaShift:  VR Heats Up, Publishers Wise Up to Fraud and 10 Predictions for Media Metrics

Techcrunch: Predictions on the future of Digital Media

What's new in publishing: Digital Publishing Predictions for 2016 

From Mequoda: 3 Subscription Website Publishing Predictions for 2016

A Gartner report Top Strategic Predictions for 2016 and Beyond:  The Future Is A Digital Thing. (but requires registration)

Millward Brown: Digital and Media Predictions 2016

equimedia: Digital media predictions for 2016

Fred Wilson: 2016 Predictions

Top Indian publishers predict digital publishing trends for 2016

Newspaper/Journalism:

Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, released a new report: Media, Journalism and Technology Predictions 2016. 

From Neiman Labs: Predictions for Journalism in 2016

At Forbes and short set of suggestions: Who Will Win The Publishing Battle In 2016? Early Predictions For What's Next

There's more than enough here to keep anyone busy well into 2016.  For my predictions from years past click on this link to list all of them.

My Year in Reading 2015

Each year the web site The Millions asks a long list of people to contribute their year of reading and I've done something of the same thing on this site over the years.  Nothing recent however as PND has been in a stasis for several years.   Each year I tend to read between 25 and 30 books which is happily well above the average: I'm always looking to support the industry.   This year I will probably reach 30 again which has as much to do with the huge amounts of travel time I've experienced over the past 30 months as it does the fun in reading itself.

Most of my reading is fiction and given I was looking for escape in my reading this year, I only read three non-fiction books during year.  One, How the Music Died, was an account of the way the old line music industry was essentially destroyed by a very small number of hackers and criminals who stole music CD's and placed the music on file sharing sites.  A fascinating aspect of the sub-culture that developed in this environment was the competition between hacker groups for the largest list of titles and the fastest access to new releases.

Several years ago I decided to add some classic titles to the list of books on my 'to be read' pile and this year I probably read more than I anticipated from Catch-22 to 1984 to Catcher in the Rye.  I keep a separate list of classics I want to read and some of these are books I read in high school or college but most are books I've never read.  1984 is a scary reminder given the extent of our current surveillance 'culture' and where it might get to.   Reading Catch-22 you don't know whether to laugh or cry.

All the books I read I am generally happy with but naturally some are always better than others.  This year I read the Ibis trilogy by Amitrav Ghosh (Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke and Flood of Fire).  These books are set in India and China during the Opium trade in the mid 1800s.  It's some of the best writing I've experienced and I hope we see a TV mini-series based on the books.

I bought The Luminaries for Mrs PND a few years ago but she hasn't cracked it so I did.  This book was excellent and at over 800 pages it may seem daunting but it reads much faster and I really enjoyed it.  The book follows the experiences of a prospector named Walter Moody in gold rush New Zealand during the 1860s who is exposed to a series of mysterious unsolved crimes.  The book won The Booker prize in 2013.

Here is my complete reading list for 2015:

A Week in the Airport - Alain de Botton:      Too close to my recent travel experiences
The Redeemers - Ace Atkins:           Good story, excellent writer
Red Harvest - Dash Hammett:      Violent and bloody
The Dain Curse - Dash Hammett:      Ditto
The Girl in the Spider's Web - David Lagercrantz:   I really enjoyed this one.
A Distant Mirror - Barbara Tuchman:    I now know a lot about the 13th century
The Devil's Star - Jo Nesbo:      Violent but good storytelling
How the Music Died - Stephan Witt:  Very good review of how disaster happened.
Flood of Fire - Amitav Ghosh:  Excellent highly recommended.
The Cartel - Don Winslow:    Excellent storytelling.
Bangkok Asset - John Burdett:    Highly enjoyable cop/crime novel set in Bangkok
Catch-22 - Joe Heller:   It's quite a catch.  One of the best.
The Law of Simplicity - John Maeda:  Kinda obvious.
Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger:    Classic
River of Smoke - Amitav Ghost:  Ditto
The Girl on the Train - Paula Hawkins:   All looney.
Children of the Revolution - Peter Robinson:   Excellent story telling.
Gallows View - Peter Robinson:  Excellent storytelling
Burmese Days - George Orwell:   Depressing colonial
1984 - George Orwell:  Scary not quite prescient
Animal Farm - George Orwell:   Keep the pigs locked up
The Lady from Zagreb - Philip Kerr:  One of my favorite characters, Bernie Gunther.
The Luminaries - Eleanor Cotton:  Excellent, highly recommended
Elmore Leonard - Freaky Deaky:  EL is the master of the genre.  Never tired of his books
Sea of Poppies - Amitav Ghost:  Modern classic
Epitaph for a Spy - Eric Ambler: Good
Prayers for Rain - Dennis Lahane: Good storytelling

I've a few more books to complete by year end and to kick off 2016 I am taking Mary Beard's SPQR which has received some good reviews on holiday with me.  I think it will be a good way to kick off another year of reading.

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The Wire Cast Reunion at the Paley Center.

One of the benefits of traveliing as much as I have in the past 18mths is I get to catch up on a lot of TV. This show is one of the best ever and close watchers will know that the scripts benefited from the likes of George Pellecanos, Denis Lehane and Richard Price. (Cameo's for all I think). Unfortunately, the Paley Center has now made this video unavailable. Maybe is has to do with Gov. O'Malley.

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MediaWeek (Vol 7, No 31): Bezo's WaPo, Publishing a Book, BitLit, James Garner + More

These articles and a lot more are all in my 'magazine' on Flipboard.

The Columbia Journalism Review takes a look at Bezo's WaPo:

At the time of the sale to Bezos, Donald Graham, Weymouth’s uncle and the chairman of The Washington Post Company, explained that he and his niece felt unsure of the direction in which to take the paper, or how to reverse years of declining revenues. He had approached Bezos as a buyer, he said, because the billionaire could offer deep pockets, a digital brain, and, between the two, a way forward.

From The Chronicle of Higher Ed: Things you should know before publishing a book.

You can probably make more money having a first-class yard sale.

WaPo report on the Hachette Amazon feud with the answer to everyone's question:

Amazon.com has finally laid out the reasons behind its months-long e-book dispute with Hachette Book Group, arguing that it is advocating for a new pricing and revenue sharing plan that will ultimately boost book sales, lower prices and benefit the entire publishing industry.

Techcrunch: Can BitLit solve the eBook/pBook gap?

This is still a pilot so there aren’t many books, but it’s a clear validation that BitLit’s concept is gaining traction in the publishing world.

Clive James in The Atlantic writes an appreciation of Jimmy Garner.  (And I've been catching up with The Rockford files over the past few weeks - always a great opening sequence).

James Garner, you can bet on it, has never told an important lie in his life. He really is like the men he plays onscreen, even unto the modest requirements symbolized by the humble trailer that serves Jim Rockford for a residence. 

 Three Economist articles that I thought were interesting:

In Estonia - a national digital id scheme might go global.

On competition: The growth in online travel agents.  Interesting because it shows how competitors can develop and grow even when there is a highly dominant competitor.

The digital degree: So demand for education will grow. Who will meet it? Universities face a new competitor in the form of massive open online courses, or MOOCs. These digitally-delivered courses, which teach students via the web or tablet apps, have big advantages over their established rivals.

From the PND Twitter feed:
Lindsay Lohan Wants Fifty Shades Of Grey's EL James To Write Her Biography - Report | EntertainmentWise http://po.st/ZqqifL  Tragic.

Building a Better Amazon by PublishersWeekly

Warner Bros. Snatches Up Movie Rights to ‘The Goldfinch’ http://flip.it/2lAIl

Amazon Partners with Warner Bros for Digital First Imprint Goodreader

Enid Blyton's Famous Five to get big screen adventure http://gu.com/p/4v98p/tw  

MediaWeek (Vol 7, No 29): Amazon, The LMS, Director's Cut, Open Access + More

Read these articles on flipboard:

From the NYTimes: Amazon, a Friendly Giant as long as it's fed.

“Everything Amazon has promised me, it has fulfilled — and more,” he said. “They ask: ‘Are you happy, Vince? We just want to see you writing books.’

Changes ahead for the humble learning management system (Inside Higher Ed)

“I think we’re in a weird place right now in the marketplace -- partly because there’s a lot of parity between the systems,” Severance said. “You can almost throw a dart at a dartboard and pick an LMS, and it won’t be that bad.”

Andrew Ladd at The Newstatesman thinks publishers should think about the director's cut.

Besides, what’s wrong with a little naked commercial ambition in the publishing industry, given everything we’re always hearing about the death of the book? There’s clearly a demand for this sort of thing.

Lots of print about the Kindle all you can eat. Almost as much fun as the race between GigaOm and PL in getting the story out.

No big-5 publisher appears to be participating yet, based on my preliminary glance through the test pages. Simon & Schuster and HarperCollins have both made their ebooks available to Scribd and Oyster, but I haven’t yet seen books from those publishers on the Kindle Unlimited page

Open access is not enough according to The Guardian.

Earlier this month, Nature Publishing Group launched Scientific Data – a broader, interdisciplinary publication dedicated to a more specific type of data paper: the data descriptor. This new category of peer-reviewed publication provides detailed descriptions of individual or combined experimental, observational and computational datasets.

At the Hong Kong bookfair people camp out to get in first and also plan to spend thousands (SCMP)

Vacilando Yip Chun-kit, 18, left his home in Sheung Shui last night and joined the queue at 4am to be among the first batch into the fair.

Photo: High school throw back.

Biggish reunion this weekend.  At one point there were five Michaels in this class.

Mary Meeker's 2014 Internet Trends Report

KPCB Internet trends 2014 from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers

MediaWeek (Vol 7, No 26) Dangerous Literature, Newspapers, Ranking Publishers, MOOC Feedback + More

More here: Personanondata - The Magazine  via @flipboard

From The Chronicle of Higher Ed, a discussion on when books were dangerous:

The American Library Association, which designates the final week of September as Banned Books Week, has no problem finding titles to fill its annual lists of books under siege. However, these are generally books that have been removed from particular libraries or schools, not the kind of total proscription imposed on Ulysses, as well as Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Tropic of Cancer, Naked Lunch, Lolita, and other works that have since become staples of literary study. Over the decades since the Woolsey decision, authors, publishers, and judges have struggled to parse the differences between "indecent" and "obscene" and determine the meaning of such terms of art as "prurient interest" and "redeeming social value." However, the upshot is that, though sexual explicitness and offensive language are the most frequently cited reasons for which books are now challenged, neither is now a legal barrier to publication or sale.

Publishers Weekly has updated their hugely useful listing of top publishers by revenues:

Although there was a fair amount of deal making among the global book publishing giants last year, those mergers and acquisitions did not have much of an impact on the top of Livres Hebdo/Publishers Weekly’s annual ranking, based on annual revenue, of the world’s largest publishers in 2013. Pearson came in first, with $9.33 billion in revenue, followed by Reed Elsevier, Thomson/Reuters, and Wolters Kluwer. All four educational and professional publishers held the same respective positions on the list in 2012.

Wired Campus blog at CHEd has a look at digital versus print from the AAUP annual meeting last week in New Orleans.

Christopher Schaberg, an associate professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans, said he appreciates well-done print books more now than before the rise of e-books. Mr. Schaberg is not averse to e-publishing; he is a co-editor of the Object Lessons book and essay series, which appears in both print and digital formats. But he pointed out that e-texts aren’t necessarily more efficient for teaching purposes; he recalled a class in which everybody had an iPad but it took much time to get all the students on the same page, so to speak.

On a global scale it has long been arguable that newspapers are dying and here is another look by The Atlantic.

This captive readership is also the bedrock of the business model. Businesses seeking to target immigrant communities often find more value in advertising in these small publications than the mainstream press.

Disruptions like Craigslist, which has bled dry classified sections of large print publications, have had limited impact on these publications. The foreign-language ethnic press is reaching an audience that isn’t necessarily online and doesn’t always understand English. Nearly a quarter of New York’s population, according to the U.S. Census data, isn’t proficient in English.

The result is that many of these publishers can still support their operations with revenue from print advertising. Castaño, for example, makes 90 percent of his money from print ads, with the majority coming from local businesses. “I’ve been profitable since the beginning,” he told me.

That’s also partly because the Queens Latino only has one full-time employee: Castaño. The rest of the work is done by freelancers, and Castaño’s wife does the layout and design.

At the Urdu Times, Rehman has outsourced most of his newspaper’s operations to a small production unit in Pakistan. “I have 18 people working for me in Lahore,” he explained. The copies are drafted there and then emailed to the basement in Queens for proofreading, as are all the page layouts. Rehman and his wife approve everything, and then forward it to the printers. His only full-time employee in New York is an advertising manager, who has his own desk at the back of the store above the basement.

Rowling may be telling the publishing industry what she thinks about the industry in her newest book as contemplated by The New Republic:

It’s also one of ego-maniacs. And the writers, or would-be writers, are the worst of the batch. When the amateur author of erotica describes her work to Strike in rehearsed phrases and sound bites, he wonders how many people “who sat alone for hours as they scribbled their stories practiced talking about their work during their coffee breaks.” (One wonders: Did—or does—Rowling do this?) Meanwhile, Quine’s agent describes him “as a bigger glutton for praise than any author I’ve ever met, and they are most of them insatiable.” Of course, this agent, a wannabe writer with a first in English from Oxford but no novels to her name, turns out to be pretty insatiable herself.

Instant gratification can be a double edge sword for academics serving online courses (The Conversation):

When your classroom is a global one, filled with well-informed online learners, they don’t cut you much slack. Hundreds of people pore over every element of your course, making well-informed and sometime acerbic comments. Academics who run Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are finding that they can’t afford any sloppy reasoning, one-sided arguments, or narrow perspectives when teaching to a massive global audience.

As academic lead at FutureLearn, a company offering free online courses from UK universities, I’ve seen that this instant feedback can be eye-opening for course designers.

On a university campus, students stick around even though the teaching may be dreadful, because they need the degree qualification. In MOOCs they leave as soon as they lose interest.

So far, much of the debate in the United States about MOOCs has focused on the dropout rate. Typically, just 7-10% of students enrolled on a course from a US MOOC provider reach the end. But that assumes completion should be the goal of online learning, and that students who drop out early are failures. Much of the early publicity around free online courses focused on them as alternatives to an expensive campus university education. It’s hardly surprising that the simplest measure of failure, student dropout, has been picked up by commentators hoping to burst the MOOC bubble.

For the music lovers, something from Salon on Led Zeppelin

Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin II, and Led Zeppelin III have recently been given deluxe reissues by Atlantic Records. Each package contains a remastered version of the original album, along with a generous helping of bonus tracks. The first boasts a live set from a concert in Paris in 1969 (which has been floating around the Internet for years) while the second two include collections of rough mixes from the sessions from Led Zeppelin II and Led Zeppelin III, respectively.

The remastering is pretty superfluous: These are, and always have been, three of the most perfect sounding rock albums ever made. The rough mixes of II and III, though, are a revelation, casting light on Jimmy Page’s immense talents as a producer and giving us the opportunity to rediscover this band as they were, four absurdly gifted young people making music together, as opposed to the rock deities they’d forever after be imagined as. You can hear Page’s pick scraping string on a demo-ish “Whole Lotta Love,” Robert Plant feeling his way through an early pass at “Ramble On,” Bonzo counting the band back in on a skeletal version of “Moby Dick,” the careful interplay of Page’s acoustic and John Paul Jones’ mandolin on a rough cut of “Gallows Pole.” Listening to the ragged life behind these recordings reminds us, on the one hand, that four guys made these records. It also reminds us, on the other, that four guys made these records. Sometimes being made human only heightens your immortality.

James Bridle in the Guardian tells us why digital art matters:

Given this, it seems crucial that it is also accessible to all; not merely engineers, scientists, politicians and policy-makers, but also artists, commentators and the general public. There has never been a greater need for critical engagement with the role technology plays in society, but there's a corresponding problem with that engagement, as severe now as it was when CP Snow diagnosed it in 1959: the lack of understanding between the sciences and the humanities.

If anything, digital technologies have rendered this problem even more acute, as the vast and smoking industrial architectures of the 20th century give way to the invisible, intangible digital architectures of the 21st. If technological literacy is going to rise, it's going to need the help of artists to enlarge its vocabulary, and the leadership and guidance of cultural institutions to frame the discussion.

Different institutions are approaching this in their own way. This summer, the Barbican unveils its take, called Digital Revolution. The Barbican has form in this area: in 2002, it staged the hugely popular Game On, a retrospective of video games which included everything from original Space Invaders arcade games to Grand Theft Auto. Digital Revolution aims to walk a similar line through the entire history of digital creativity, showcasing not only some of its signature events and works, but also the stories of their creators. According to the curator Conrad Bodman, "It's not a show that just looks at contemporary art, but film, music, video games and design, the way they relate to each other, and sometimes merge into one."

Columbia Journalism Review looks into investments in media for millenninials

This problem goes deeper than man-buns and Lena Dunham, though. This month, for example, the GroundTruth Project, which trains young reporters as international correspondents, launched a project called “Generation TBD: Despair and opportunity for millennials in an uncertain global economy.” It will deploy 21 reporting fellows in 11 countries to dig into an issue legacy media has, at times, treated like a joke—the place of millennials in the economy today.

Although GroundTruth Project isn’t explicitly targeted towards any generation, it is distinctively millennial in its desire to make a difference in the world.

“It’s such a rough time—it’s risky to care too much. We’re trying to build an environment in which caring is fine,” says Kevin Grant, the managing editor.

GroundTruth Project grew out of the international news site GlobalPost; the initial idea was to raise nonprofit funding to cover social justice issues in more depth. The project, says Grant, works “to identify these big stories that impact a lot of people, and we try to identify them before our colleagues at other organizations.” And for “Generation TBD,” the GroundTruth Project, with its team of young reporting fellows, has an in and an angle to this story that older media organizations might not

Image: Dutch Haven 1970 Pennsylvania

I don't know what a shoo-fly pie is but it must have something to do with wind mills.  I believe this place is still there.

Colbert on Amazon vs Hachette

The Colbert Report
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Indecision Political Humor,The Colbert Report on Facebook

Also a follow-up video with a guest.

http://thecolbertreport.cc.com/videos/t1nxwu/amazon-vs--hachette---sherman-alexie

MediaWeek (Vol 7, No 22): Donna Tartt, Access Copyright, Getty Photos, The Great Newspaper Bubble + More

See this update on Flipboard:

I just finished The Goldfinch and it was an excellent book. (Guardian)

In The Goldfinch, Tartt has dispensed with overt literary references. Theo does carry a copy of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's Wind, Sand and Stars, a gift, on a cross-country journey, but the book is a talisman of a genuine friendship instead of a substitution for one. Rather than have her narrator deliberately emulate fictional characters, Tartt has taken a fistful of Dickens novels, ground them into a fine powder and then blown the results all over her fictional world: Dickens permeates and perfumes The Goldfinch. So does Salinger, at least in the novel's New York passages, but as a flavouring rather than outright citation. The events in The Goldfinch, from the nebulously motivated terrorist bombing of the Metropolitan Museum, in which Theo loses his adored mother, to the devices by which he ends up in secret possession of the Carel Fabritius painting that gives the novel its title, to the climactic showdown with a bunch of international gangsters – all of this is as outlandish, as frankly and unashamedly fictional, as the bacchanal in The Secret History or the scene in The Little Friend where Harriet and Hely succeed in dropping an albino king cobra from a highway overpass into the sunroof of a moving car.

A current favorite: Alan Furst is out with a new book. (NYTimes

Who’s your favorite novelist of all time?
Years ago, I developed a grand passion for the novels of Anthony Powell. I tried, at a friend’s insistence, “A Dance to the Music of Time.” Couldn’t do it. Then I tried again, still couldn’t. But then, a year later, poking aimlessly about in my library, I paged through the books and came upon the “Autumn” section, Book 3, which includes the World War II novels: “The Valley of Bones,”  “The Soldier’s Art” and “The Military Philosophers.” Now the hook set. Going back to the beginning after reading “Autumn,” it all made sense: the interwoven lives of cosmopolitan British men and women, tossed about by the times they lived through. Powell does everything a novelist can do, from flights of aesthetic passion to romance to comedy high and low. His dialogue is extraordinary; often terse, pedestrian and perfect, each character using three or four words. Anthony Powell taught me to write; he has such brilliant control of the mechanics of the novel. Somewhere in his autobiography, he remarks that a character, when asked a question by another character, need not answer it. I remember sitting there for a long time and letting the stylistic implications of this sink in.

Can anyone compete with Amazon? (PW)

Competing with Amazon, even to carve out a slice of the market, is a daunting task. The company has a number of obvious advantages: scale, resources, and a diverse product line that can let the company treat books as loss leaders. The company, as has been well documented, is also focused on driving prices as low as possible. The perception of Amazon as the cheapest place to buy books, enhanced by its combining books with high ticket items with free shipping, gives the company a tremendous advantage over both online and physical bookselling competitors, says Peter Hildick-Smith, CEO of the Codex Group.

Hildick-Smith believes that if publishers want to help ensure a diverse marketplace, they need to move back to agency pricing on e-books once the court-order restrictions expire, and to return to windowing. Hildick-Smith believes publishers should follow the film industry's successful model of releasing new content in premium format first, followed by discount formats in later releases. Hildick-Smith has been a longtime supporter of windowing as a way to "give bricks-and-mortar stores a chance to do what they do best," noting that Amazon's own bestseller publishing program has struggled without physical-world retailer support. (One possible roadblock to windowing are reports that Amazon's contract prohibits the practice.)

Newspaper ad revenue (CJR)

It’s striking how much less dependent papers were on advertising before the 1980s than they were during and afterward. The rise of advertising was largely due to the decline of newspaper competition, which has fallen steadily since the late 1970s (the number of dailies is down about 22 percent in the last 35 years).

The last paper standing in a market could charge readers the same or less while corralling much of its former competitor’s advertising. While that was fun for a while, it undermined the long-term health of the industry. Newspapers became structurally dependent on sky-high advertising rates, ones that a true market couldn’t support.

In 1990, for instance, newspapers lost more than 6 percent of their ad lineage but also raised their ad rates by more than 6 percent. The New York Times, for instance, lost 38 percent of its advertising lineage from 1987 to 1992 but continued to raise rates.

Big doings in the Canadian copyright market (Quill  & Quire)

As royalties continue to shrink, the situation is having a profound impact on the bottom line of publishers catering to both the K–12 and postsecondary sectors. OUP Canada eliminated three jobs as a result of the closure of its schools division. At Winnipeg-based scholarly press Fernwood Publishing (which focuses on the higher-education sector), Access Copyright royalties usually amount to the salary of one of its seven staffers. And at Broadview Press, Access Copyright payments total $50,000 per year. It’s clear that these royalties have a significant impact on publishers’ abilities to break even, pay their staff, and create new works.
Royalties from the schools market dried up when Access Copyright’s K–12 customers (which include provincial ministries and, in Ontario, individual school boards) walked away from their licences, a move that was prompted in part by the 2012 passing of the Copyright Modernization Act (Bill C-11). The postsecondary sector is also distancing itself from Access Copyright, with many of the country’s biggest universities opting out of collective licences. A year ago, the agency launched a lawsuit against York University to challenge its interpretation of Bill C-11’s “fair ­dealing” provision.
Some publishers have also begun to see declines in sales. “The loss of income is not limited to the loss of the Access Copyright fees,” says Broadview Press president Leslie Dema. “There are now many professors turning to coursepacks instead of anthologies for the first time – simply because the coursepacks are so much cheaper when there is no charge for copyright.”

Plus more at my flipboard magazine.

Image Boston: North Street & Paul Revere House

I had a really good dinner at Mamma Maria's this week.  In this photo from 1971 the restaurant is in the house that has the white store sign (ABRU).  Not having been here before the location was immediately recognisable to be (and hasn't changed) because of this photo.

North Street & Paul Revere House: 1971

Amazon Warehouse Robots

This is from 2011 but still impressive.



Amazon was so impressed they bought the robot: (Youtube)

Harper Acquires Harlequin - An alternative result

From Bill Maher last week.

MediaWeek (Vol 7, No 16): Clearing Libraries, Upworthy-King of Content, Uncertain Book start-ups + More

PND Weekly roundup also on flipboard:

What of the digital humanities (with a great photo of the British Library)

And such a critical, creative, and imaginative engagement between “the digital” and “the humanities” requires an expansion of the field of humanistic inquiry in ways that leverage the power of data sets, computational analyses, design-centered thinking, and the interpretation of cultural repositories that far exceed the cognitive or analytical abilities of the normative Humanist. The task requires well-informed critical methods and forms of interrogation that belong to the present age, not the sorry “posture of skepticism” that Kirsch imagines in his urge to enforce simpleminded dichotomies. Nobody is arguing that the “digital humanities” are handing over reading, writing, thinking, and creating to “the computer,” which spits out data as culturally redundant truisms. Instead, we advocate for emerging genres, methods, knowledge formations, and new publics for the humanities, which not only use but also design digital tools to, among other things, animate archives in new ways, map and visualize data at scale, test assumptions and hypotheses rooted in source material using gaming environments and virtual worlds technologies, and provide new models of access to and engagement with knowledge.

More and more libraries are clearing out the books and Slate joins the band wagon:

But there’s one wholly unsentimental reason the stacks are both vital and irreplaceable, and that brings us back to Colby’s decision to replace theirs with a gleaming shrine to the corporate bottom line. As more of the books disappear from college libraries, the people in charge of funding those libraries will be more tempted to co-opt that space for events that bring in revenue, or entice students for the wrong reasons: food courts. Gaming lounges. I expect rock-climbing walls soon. Unless administrators make a protracted effort to preserve the contemplative and studious feeling, that feeling will disappear altogether, and the whatever-brary will become just another Jamba Juice.
Right now, the most powerful weapon in the fight to keep just one space on the entire campus dedicated to the preservation, creation, and dissemination of knowledge (a.k.a. the alleged sole purpose of the university) is the book. These obsolete cloth-bound relics—the way they smell, their very omnipresence in your field of vision; the way they carry with them centuries of past perusal—are currently the university’s strongest, if not sole, signifier of a contemplative, intellectual space. With the stacks there, a library’s architect creates spaces around the books, thus cementing their omnipresence as near-animate psychological enforcers. (There’s also the small matter that you only have to buy a book once; digital resources are licensed, and their prices increase every year!)

Upworthy - The King of Content. From CJR:

These subtle tweaks, with no change to the underlying content, have powerful results: Upworthy’s repackaged videos and articles receive an average of 75,000 likes per post on Facebook, about 12 times that of any other news organization, and the site spiked to 87 million unique viewers last December. Each view is more powerful because Upworthy doesn’t just entice readers to look, it encourages them through a swath of buttons on its homepage to share. This mastery of Facebook means that Upworthy reworkings produce significantly more views than the originals, whose creators are placed in an odd position. Upworthy works as a scavenger, drawing huge traffic to its own site by repurposing other people’s material. But to the original creators Upworthy brings new eyes; often the trickle-down traffic from people clicking to the original post (from a modest link published under each Upworthy article) is far greater than the viewership the organization could cultivate on its own.

Upworthy’s founders argue they’re not scavengers, they’re salvagers—and their acts of reclamation are making the world a better place. Most viral stories are not meaningful—think BuzzFeed’s “19 Cats Who Have Absolutely Had It” oeuvre—while Upworthy traffics in important topics: climate change, Afghanistan, gender discrimination, racism. And lifting these kinds of stories can transform the internet, they claim. “At best, things online are usually either awesome or meaningful,” reads the site’s founding statement. “But everything on Upworthy.com has a little of both.”

The ability to alter content into sharable nuggets of gold could also prove a powerful boon to advertisers: Up until this point, Upworthy hasn’t sold ads, but in April they put forward a unique strategy built around native advertising. Titled “Upworthy Collaborations,” the idea is to wave a magic wand over the advertising videos of paying brands in the same way the site does for news content. The first to line up is Unilever, the third-largest global consumer goods company, and a brand currently pitching itself as socially responsible when it comes to sustainability.

Laura Hazard over at GigaOm looks at book start-ups:

Any company that comes along trying to reinvent book publishing is competing not only with traditional book publishers but also with Amazon, which is almost 20 years old but keeps finding new ways to shake things up. Print book buying continues to move online and Amazon, which is now delivering on Sundays and offering same-day delivery in a growing number of cities, has a lock on that business. Kindle, launched in 2007, is the dominant ebook reading platform and Amazon is continually rolling out improvements to the Kindle e-reader and Kindle apps — sharing, search and so on — that rival what many startups have tried to do.

More on flipboard

Blurb Acquires HP's MagCloud

Blurb and HP announced a licensing agreement today which effectively transfers existing customers of the HP MagCloud product to Blurb.   MagCloud was developed out of HP labs to provide digital on-demand publishing options for magazine publishers - particularly self-publishing magazine publishers.

Blurb will absorb all the operational components of the MagCloud product onto the Blurb publishing platform over the next three months.  Blurb is generally known for its book publishing platform therefore these magazine capabilities should broaden Blurb's appeal to more businesses and individuals which want to create different types of publishing products.  HP have long been interested in developing new applications that leverage their hardware print capabilities and invested in numerous initiatives out of their Labs product center.  Much of that activity developed several years ago around the same time as companies like Blurb were emerging to provide sophisticated printing solutions to consumers.  While HP were always looking for killer applications that encouraged investment and purchase of their equipment they we also active boosters of tools and products like the Blurb products.  As the press release from Blurb notes the two companies have been partners for many years and the absorption of MagCloud could be viewed as a continuation of that partnership.

This deal is also the death knell for HP's investment in the new technology that sought to push the market of their hardware.  Whether their Labs program ever made a significant difference is probably debatable but there were some interesting products that came out of the Labs such as MagCloud, virtual printing apps and technology that could clean-up digital files.

From the press release:

This licensing agreement is a natural one given both brands' focus on enabling creative individuals to produce quality products that reflect the power of their work – both in print and ebook form. Working together is nothing new for Blurb and HP. HP’s MagCloud, invented by HP Labs in 2008, created a network of users publishing magazines on-demand using HP Indigo commercial printing presses. Blurb's global print-on-demand network is also based on HP Indigo printing presses.

“Blurb and HP have a longstanding relationship dating back to the origin of Blurb in 2006, so the foundation exists to make this transition successful,” said Eileen Gittins, founder and CEO, Blurb. “Further to the relationship however, the magazine at this moment in time represents the perfect intersection of technology, culture, and media: Beautifully designed short-form reading, with multiple contributors, in print, and as an ebook. In this context, the magazine as a genre is very strategic for Blurb. Indie magazines are experiencing a bit of a renaissance, and we’re thrilled to welcome MagCloud customers to the Blurb fold.”

“Since the inception of MagCloud as an HP Labs innovation to its current commercial success, we’ve strived to democratize the face of magazine publishing,” said Andrew Bolwell, general manager, HP MagCloud. “As a long-time HP customer and pioneer of the self-publishing industry, Blurb is the right company to take on the MagCloud business at this point in time.”

Existing MagCloud customers will not notice any immediate changes. Current and new publications will still be available to print, sell, and distribute through MagCloud just as they are today. MagCloud customers joining Blurb’s ecosystem will gain many new benefits, including access to:

• Precision design tools – like the recently released Blurb BookWright™ – to help them design their magazines
• Offset printing options for greater cost savings
• Unprecedented global reach across 80+ countries of Blurb’s platform
• The Blurb Bookstore and third-party marketplaces

Blurb is in the middle of its most exciting year yet. From its recently announced new precision print and ebook tool called BookWright, its seamless integration with Amazon distribution, and new offset, warehousing, and fulfillment services, 2014 promises to be big.

MediaWeek (Vol 7, No 18): Metadata Harvesting, Death of the Novel, Ed Innovations Conference + more

This weeks selection on FlipBoard

A presentation on slideshare.net that describes how to take metadata from HathiTrust and Pubmed:

This presentation will describe Cornell University Library efforts to provide an "afterlife" to The Cornell Veterinarian by leveraging a number of disparate initiatives and metadata sources. While attempting to build article level linking to full-text in HathiTrust (functionality currently unavailable), limitations in the metadata captured during the scanning process were uncovered. The speaker will delineate these metadata findings and provide strategies (some scalable, others highly labor intensive) for gathering the necessary metadata for creating direct links to articles found in HathiTrust. 

Wrangling metadata from hathi trust and pubmed to provide full text linking to the cornell veterinarian from NASIG

A dispatch in Inside HigherEd from the Education Innovations Summit where impatience may be brewing:

“At a national level, there is no evidence that educational technology has reduced the cost of education yet or improved the efficacy of education,” said Brandon Busteed, executive director of Gallup Education. “And that’s just as true as it gets. Maybe there will be some day, but that’s the question: How much longer do we think it will take before we can detect movement on the national needle?”

During the summit’s first two days, speakers identified well-known issues such as the rising cost of higher education, stagnant graduation and retention rates, and stubborn levels of unemployment among recent graduates. The proffered solution, in many cases, was a renewed promise of the disruptive powers of technology -- often wrapped in a sales pitch.

“Every one of these companies has -- at least most of them -- some story of a school or a classroom or a student or whatever that they’ve made some kind of impact on, either a qualitative story or some real data on learning improvement,” Busteed said. “You would think that with hundreds of millions of dollars, maybe billions now, that’s been plowed into ed-tech investments ... and all the years and all the efforts of all these companies to really move the needle, we ought to see some national-level movement in those indicators.”

Will Self thinks the novel is dead and it's not coming back to life. (Guardian)

My canary is a perceptive songbird – he immediately ceased his own cheeping, except to chirrup: I see what you mean. The literary novel as an art work and a narrative art form central to our culture is indeed dying before our eyes. Let me refine my terms: I do not mean narrative prose fiction tout court is dying – the kidult boywizardsroman and the soft sadomasochistic porn fantasy are clearly in rude good health. And nor do I mean that serious novels will either cease to be written or read. But what is already no longer the case is the situation that obtained when I was a young man. In the early 1980s, and I would argue throughout the second half of the last century, the literary novel was perceived to be the prince of art forms, the cultural capstone and the apogee of creative endeavour. The capability words have when arranged sequentially to both mimic the free flow of human thought and investigate the physical expressions and interactions of thinking subjects; the way they may be shaped into a believable simulacrum of either the commonsensical world, or any number of invented ones; and the capability of the extended prose form itself, which, unlike any other art form, is able to enact self-analysis, to describe other aesthetic modes and even mimic them. All this led to a general acknowledgment: the novel was the true Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk.

From twitter this week:
News Corp to buy Torstar's romance publisher Harlequin Reuters Amazing this deal hadn't been done yrs ago.
With free web courses, Wharton seeks edge in traditional programs WSJ
Sad Ending to Ladies’ Home Journal’s Era AARP