Booker Short List is Free

The Times Online is reporting that the MAN Booker prize short listed titles will be made available for free download. Apparently the initiative is well advanced but what I really thought interesting was this statement:

The downloads will not impact on sales, it is thought. If readers like a novel tasted on the internet, they may just be inspired to buy the actual book.

Hummm. I must be missing something because while some forward thinking people in the industry subscribe to this theory it is by no means universally held. In fact I laughed when I read it. Surely, if free downloads were a promotional vehicle there would be more (all) of them.

Also, in one sweep the publisher disparaged the sales data in Nielsen's bookscan product by suggesting that the sales units of the Booker winner documented in the Nielsen reports were only 10% of the actual total. (Me thinks they are counting in Cusslers). The writer goes on to say that winning will do wonders for sales of the title - breathlessly, "Enright’s sales may now quadruple, at least". Gosh, is that an extra 12,000 units?

Lulu Name New President

Lulu.com the self-publishing juggernaut announced the appointment of Bryce Boothby Jr. as President and COO of Lulu Enterprises. Boothby, 57, will oversee all finance, engineering, and business at Lulu.com as well as Gnack, the Lulu Enterprises company that provides support and services for open media businesses.

From the press release:

"We are very excited to have an executive of Bryce's caliber joining the company," said Lulu Founder and CEO Bob Young. "Because of our rapid growth we must prepare our company to serve millions of customers. Bryce's experience and remarkable track record of success will ensure Lulu's ability to continue to scale rapidly into the future."

Boothby appears to have no direct publishing experience other than a stint at Quebecor in the 1990's. He does have strong manufacturing, process and technology experience which should give you a sense as to where the publishing industry is headed.

Sommers Named President of Gale

Pat Sommers who until recently was President & CEO of Sirsi/Dynix has been named as the new President of Gale Reference. He replaces Gordon Macomber who announced last week that he was leaving for Wolters Kluwer Education. Sommers will report directly to Cengage CEO Ron Dunn. From the press release:

"Pat Sommers is extremely well qualified to lead Gale. He has anoutstanding record of success in managing information service businesses,and I am confident that he will provide strong leadership to help Gale growand further solidify its position as the world's premier library referenceinformation business," said Mr. Dunn. "I am delighted to welcome Pat toCengage Learning and look forward to working with him to provideoutstanding products and services for Gale's customers."

He starts Monday.

Press Release.

Pick Up and Go Book Vending

Doughty thieves made off we two new book vending machines over the weekend (as reported by the BBC). And to think we believe reading is in the decline. Who said reading isn't popular.

"The machines, worth £10,000 each, were in a trailer attached to a lorry parked at PN Computer Services on High Street, Elsenham near Bishop's Stortford. They were due to be delivered to Stansted Airport, but thieves took the trailer between Friday 14 and Monday 17 September. Essex Police said they have few leads and want information from the public."

I could have told them to avoid Bishop's Stortford; too many angry booksellers. I have always liked the idea of book vending machines and proposed the idea when I worked for Berlitz publishing as a unique way to sell our travel guides and phrase books. Idea died.

Swets Acquires MPS Scholarly Stats

The MPS resource management tool Scholarly Stats was quite innovative but in my opinion never really fit with the MPS core business. As a result I think they struggled to sell it into the library market and gain any significant market share. At a time when librarian's budgets are threatened or limited in some manner, Scholarly Stats is a tool librarian administrators can use for library usage statistics of licensed materials. From their website:

ScholarlyStats has been developed to provide information professionals with a single point of access to their vendor usage statistics. Providing faster access to consolidated data, it can help you to analyse usage of your online content more easily and more effectively. ScholarlyStats delivers consolidated reports to libraries around the globe, providing a clearer view of usage of over 70,000 journals and almost 450 databases from 46 platforms.

MPS was not a subscription agent as Swets and Ebsco are so could operate as a neutral party. With this purchase, the Scholarly Stats tool will be integrated into the Swetswise product portfolio and this will require some of the other platform providers and agents to beef up thier own tools for managing and monitoring licensed content usage.

More on the acquisition: Information Today

On a related note, the EU competition commission has cleared the acquisition of Swets by Glide Buyout Management Holding BV. This deal was previously announced in early September. Forbes

Olivieri Resigns From Wiley Blackwell

The Bookseller (UK) is reporting that Rene Olivieri who was responsible for the integration and merger of the Blackwell business into Wiley has resigned. There is no official report from the company which seems to indicate that the timing is unexpected. (Not least because senior execs in the US will still have been in bed when The Bookseller was reporting this). Having said that, it would seem that senior executive level changes were on the cards as the integration progressed and while this change may be presumptive it may also have been inevitable. Steve Smith was appointed earlier this year as head of all Wiley operations in Europe, Asia and Australia.

LibraryThing Launch Wiki Books In Print

The success of wikipedia, Librarything and other social databases has always intrigued me in terms of the models potential application to the development of a wiki-like bibliographic database. Well, it looks like Librarything has launched something that seeks to build a collective database of book catalog information. They call it Common Knowledge and describe it thus:

Common Knowledge works like a wiki. Any member can add information, and any member can edit or revert edits. All fields are global, not personal. Common Knowledge diverges from a standard wiki insofar as each field works like its own independent wiki page, with a separate edit history. Some examples:

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. I've been conservative with characters and places. (See Longitude, worked on by Chris for the opposite approach.) But I wish I had her editor! The history page for "important places" in Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, showing improvement over time.
David Weinberger. Half-filled. He mentions his agent, but I can't tree his major at Bucknell and the honors section is empty.
Hugo Award Winners. This is going to get very cool.
The global history page. Mesmerizing.

In order to get Common Knowledge off and running, Librarything are "slapping fields up there" but this effort it really intended to give Common Knowledge some initial heft. Since all fields are editable this gives significant content for users to react to and add, correct and expand which is, of course, the intention. Tim at Librarything says that this is the perfect Librarything feature and he is very excited about it. As with other similar wiki like applications, users will be able to use and build off the data (as long as they cite the source) and there is strong encouragement to do so. Tim goes on to say that they will be building API's to promote even greater use.

As a result of this initiative we are going to see a much greater blending of user generated content and structured content from the likes of Ingram, Nielsen and Baker & Taylor. The commercial database companies would be crazy not to incorporate this content into their products but they have to be careful. What Librarything is doing is compounding the notion that biblio data is a commodity. Value still exists in the logical compilation of bibliodata but how long will it be before crowd sourcing encompasses the development of logical frameworks, data standardization and taxonomies. Perhaps this is starting to happen and indeed examples such as software development (Linux) prove that groups can build logical and powerful constructs. A wiki biblio database is probably easy by comparison and I can see the day when a biblio manager will no-longer have 50 data entry staff in New Jersey but will rely on an army of free contributors with far more collective expertise. The trick will be how each of the current commercial providers are able to differentiate themselves.

Wire Loose

Wired notes the 'rumor' regarding Random House's possible inclusion in the Google Book Program. It was mentioned as an aside by Peter Olson in a panel meeting at Frankfurt. I don't believe this article is particularly accurate and commented as such. Especially this quote:

As for Random House's rumored about-face, there's certainly the distinct waft of
desperation to it; a struggling publishing company facing stagnant sales and falling revenue trying to "compromise" with a internet titan.

Wired

The Radiohead Agenda

Dear Sir,

We will not be requiring your services any longer and will not be renewing our contract. We thank you for your 10 years of often frustrating, painful but finally rewarding management expertise but as a band we have decided we need to be masters of our own creativity and financial development.

All the best for your future plans,

Radiohead.


P.S. If you would like a copy of our new release click here. It's free.

P.P.S. Our mates OASIS and Jamiroquai are joining us.

My Foreword Article

Harpercollins Launches Authonomy.com

Harpercollins UK has announced the launch of an author community site that will attempt to mimic the success that MySpace (and others) have had in the development of new music. Interestingly, the parent of both Myspace and Harpercollins is Newscorp and leveraging Myspace across the Newscorp businesses was something observers were expecting when the deal was consummated last year. No matter.

Authonomy will be expanded globally and will seek to develop the type of social networking framework that has been the hallmark of myspace, bebo, facebook and others. That type of success is hard to bottle so it remains to be seen whether Harpercollins can create the same type of social interest around writing and authorship. Users of the site will be encouraged to upload their own writings, comment on others and generally support the efforts of their fellow Authonomists.

As talent is spotted, Harpercollins will consider the works for general publication. No guarantees of course. Thus far, the launch hasn't really generated too much excitement.

Frankfurt Bookfair Blog

The bookfair has a blog and they kindly added me to their blog roll. I wish I had known in advance and I would have been more diligent in publishing material about the fair. No matter there is always next year. I think I have my old colleague Andrew Wilkins to thank for this.

Frankfurt Blog

Frankfurt Supply Chain Meeting: MVB Content Warehouse

I attended the 29th Frankfurt Supply Chain meeting this week and from a jet-lagged audience I report on a few of the presentations. The room was typically full of vendors, publishers, data suppliers, software providers and consultants. There was a disappointing number of questions and follow-on discussion with all the presentations and I am unsure of the reason for this. Perhaps most disappointing was that the promised drinks cart failed to arrive at the end of the day - not as it turns out, the responsibility of the conference organizers.


Roland Schild: The Changing Landscape of the Book World.
Schild is the director of the German publishers and booksellers organization (MVB) has took over management of their book digitization program when he joined MVB from Amazon.de. The digitization program was originally announced at Frankfurt 2005 and is based on the Macmillan Bookstore platform. In presenting their project, Schild noted that they are announcing a name change to Libreka. The launch of the site is going to be somewhat limited with "purely search" only until added features such as purchasing are added sometime in 2008. The focus of the site is on titles "with economic value" that is those titles in German Books In Print. (MVB is the publisher of German books in print). Schild noted they have three objectives in supporting both publishers and booksellers with this initiative:

1. Maximize reach to the publishers target audience with two 'aspects': Firstly in a quantitative manner in driving traffic where the publisher is less concerned with a targeted approach: A Dan Brown novel where they just want mass exposure. Secondly, a targeted approach where the book content may appeal to a narrow audience such as 'rose gardeners'. The product will enable both models
2. Beginning in the first quarter 2008, they will become an 'open sales channel for booksellers and publishers' offering new content and content models for sale.
3. They intend (must) operate in a 'copyright friendly' way and adhere to all copyright requirements.

It remains to be seen whether Schild and his team will be able to build what he described as a 'European Digital Library' especially in competition with the likes of Google and Yahoo and even some specific library programs. Nevertheless, MVB has been seeking the support of 'GYM' (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft), libraries, publishers and others to make them aware of the program and to ensure that their content is included in search results. That seems rather obvious but the biggest challenge will be to establish a relevant content warehouse will all digital content that is a real destination. Assuming digital content is searched via GYM how MVB will draw traffic to their site will be a big challenge. Of note, Springer which is a Google Library client was not mentioned as an MVB participant and if the case represents a significant hole in MVB's digital content repository.

Schild mentioned that they would like to use the ACAP content access protocol which will allow the MVB content to be indexed but will enable traffic to be referred back to the MVB site where various content access parameters are in place according to publisher preference. Their approach is similar to the Microsoft Live Book search approach.

It was interesting to hear about the production issues they faced in this project but there were two strange things: Firstly, Schild announced they were rebranding the product but didn't show us the brand and Secondly, most importantly there were no screen shots or a demo...