Open Text Book Revolution

Wired Magazine takes a look at start-up Flat World Knowledge that is looking to revolutionize the College textbook business:

The idea behind open textbooks began with people frustrated with the industry, Frank says. The movement then led to non-profit aggregation platforms like Connexions at Rice University and the Global Text Project at the University of Georgia. But he believes they are one of the first to turn this into a commercial venture. "On the surface they're (traditional publishers) doing OK, but underneath the surface there are lots of problems," says Frank. "The internet has caused so much disruption in the distribution that there are so many used books and international books and pirated copies out there that after about two years, publishers have to bring out new editions in order to capture revenue again."
Frank says the firm is also in the process of releasing a version for Amazon's Kindle, but is working out several technical hurdles before finalizing anything. Amazon is thought to be toying with the idea of a Kindle marketed to the college crowd, and wired.com readers have been somewhat vocal about the need for textbook support in the device. Official launch is not until next January, when the company plans to offer eight textbooks, each written for Flat World by scholars who have also produced texts for some of the major publishing companies. It will test its
business model over the next semester in a private beta with more than 20 U.S. universities.

MediaWeek (Vol 1, No 35):

The E-Book comes to England and Timesonline is there to mark the occasion:

Electronic books have had a lot of false dawns. People have had the ability to download books to their computers, phones and other handheld devices for years but so far, in the West at least, few have chosen to do so. This week Waterstone’s will be hoping to usher in a new chapter in reading when it helps to bring the Sony Reader to the UK. The Reader is smaller than a hardback, can store up to 160 e-books, comes with a screen that is more restful to read than a computer’s and a battery good for 6,800 continuous page turns — enough power to read War and Peace five times.

German publisher Bauer is a little known lesser version of Bertelsmann (Guardian):

Given the size of the company - in 2007 it was projected to turn over €1.79bn - it is surprising just how little leaks out of Bauer; publicly available information could fit on a side of A4. In fact, one morning after the takeover, Emap employees found a company biography of exactly that size on their desks: Bauer is a family-run company that owns 238 magazines in 15 countries and is now the largest consumer magazine publisher in the UK. It has TV and radio interests internationally too, with 12 million listeners in the UK following the Emap acquisition - and Magic in particular is now performing well at breakfast time with Neil Fox. They have been told little else since.

Apollo enters the bidding for Reed Magazines (Reuters). And they have apparently allowed the bidders to re-submit their order of magnitude estimates of purchase price. Certain bidders said this was needed because not enough information was available. Bids all fell but no indication that this had anything to do with current business performance. (Guardian)

The re-bids, not officially a second round, were allowed because bidders felt they were not provided enough information on the business in the first round, the sources said. After being presented with more information, the newer bids came in "slightly lower" than those in the first round, one of the sources said. All bids were non-binding. Yet more information on the unit is expected to be provided to bidders in the next few days, and a final round of offers will likely be due in early October, one source said. Reed put the unit on the block in February to reduce exposure to cyclical advertising markets.

If I had less important things to do I would have commented on how everyone is falling over themselves to anticipate Kindle revenue or where they will strike next. (Almost) Thankfully no new Kindle this year. NYTimes:

Talk of a new version of the Kindle e-book reader, aimed at college students, has been echoing around the blogosphere and has even reached your dutifully vacationing Bits correspondent. I asked Craig Berman, Amazon’s chief spokesman, for comment on a possible Kindle 2.0, and Thursday he responded

Why would a student who carries their whole life around on their Mac want to augment that with the (un)iconic Kindle? Jobs must be laughing his head off. More from ArsTechnica before Amazon announced there would not be a new Kindle.

It's this "new" version of the Kindle that will appeal to students the most, assuming Amazon decides to go ahead and pursue that market. There are other changes that have to happen with not only the Kindle but the e-book market in order for a "textbook" Kindle to be a hit with students, however. Continued price drops for e-books will help, as they'll be more attractive to students who currently resell their used textbooks at the end of each semester. A large inventory of textbooks will also help (there's no use in getting a Kindle for textbooks if you can only get one or two books on it), and the addition of student-friendly features (such as the ability to make annotations) would round out the list of things that would make such a thing appealing to students. Oh, and a low price would help too.

I don't get why a) this needs to be a 'special' version and b) why this is an opportunity given the lack of formatted content and c) I guess trade isn't actually driving millions in unit sales? For the educational publishers however a bonus, since they will have watched from the sidelines as trade publishers have performed muppet like as they annouced sucessive Kindle initiatives. Lastly this from Frank Rich in the NYTimes:

We [Journos], too, are made anxious and fearful by hard economic times and the prospect of wrenching change. YouTube, the medium that has transformed our culture and politics, didn’t exist four years ago. Four years from now, it’s entirely possible that some, even many, of the newspapers and magazines covering this campaign won’t exist in their current form, if they exist at all. The Big Three network evening newscasts, and network news divisions as we now know them, may also be extinct by then. It is a telling sign that CBS News didn’t invest in the usual sky box for its anchor, Katie Couric, in Denver. It is equally telling that CNN consistently beat ABC and CBS in last week’s Nielsen ratings, and NBC as well by week’s end. But now that media are being transformed at a speed comparable to the ever-doubling power of microchips, cable’s ascendancy could also be as short-lived as, say, the reign of AOL. Andrew Rasiej, the founder of Personal Democracy Forum, which monitors the intersection of politics and technology, points out that when networks judge their success by who got the biggest share of the television audience, “they are still counting horses while the world has moved on to counting locomotives.” The Web, in its infinite iterations, is eroding all 20th-century media.

Bloomsbury Reports

Commenting on his company's results and prospects Bloomsbury CEO, Nigel Newton, said:

“We have had a good first half performance, particularly, in the UK Adult and Specialist Divisions. As well as continuing to enjoy notable success from long-running bestselling titles such as The Kite Runner, we are also well positioned with strong publishing lists for the second half and beyond. We are now seeing the benefits of our focused strategy, which is positioning us well for the rest of the financial year and the longer term.”

Other points from the press release:

• Profit before investment income increased 6.1% to £3.5m (2007, £3.3m)
• Investment income increased to £1.9m (2007, £0.6m)
• Earnings per share increased 41.2% to 4.97 pence (2007, 3.52 pence)
• Interim dividend up 7.1% to 0.75p per share (2007, 0.70p)
• Strong list for second half including Alice Schroeder’s biography of Warren Buffet; The Snowball; Just Me by Sheila Hancock; The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer; and, on December 4, JK Rowling’s The Tales of Beedle The Bard
• Net cash balances increased by 13.0% to £53.8m (31 December 2007, £47.6m)
• Well positioned for further organic and acquisition-related growth
• Strongest ever first six months sales performance from the UK Adult trade division

Newton in further comments noted that:

The programme of digitising our entire English language catalogue has been completed. This will enable us to increase significantly the range of electronic products we can offer both to individual buyers and to resellers serving the library and institutional markets, where we have already made encouraging sales of e-book collections. Digitisation also enables us to make our titles more easily available as print on demand (“POD”), a particularly appropriate model for specialist publishing where a wide range of titles are sold in small numbers consistently over a long period of time. In addition to digitising the in-print backlist, we are engaged in an active process of digitising out of print titles in order to offer them POD and in a variety of electronic formats.

Bloomsbury intends to expand the academic part of its Specialist Publishing Division and a number of acquisitions under consideration. We have appointed Jonathan Glasspool as Managing Director of Bloomsbury Academic. The recent growth of the Methuen Drama list, many titles of which sell to higher education students and lecturers, illustrates how well Bloomsbury can reach the academic and higher education markets.

Our sharing of copyrights across the Atlantic and other initiatives have resulted in a considerable year-on-year improvement in the results of Bloomsbury USA, with sales growth of 10% and a 60% reduction in operating losses.

Lagardere Reports

Corporate owner of Hachette UK and Grand Central Publishing reported their first half results yesterday. Here are some relevant parts from their press release:

Lagardère Publishing– Net sales for the first half of 2008 were €908m, an increase of 1.3% on a reported basis and 4.5% on a like-for-like basis. The business achieved a respectable performance in the United States, the United Kingdom and Spain, but there was a further decline in Literature in France. Part-works were affected by a drop in French and Italian sales, partly offset by good performances in the United Kingdom and Japan.

EBIT before associates [amortization of goodwill] of €71m, unchanged from the 2007 first-half figure, with an improved operating performance canceled out by negative currency effects. Good contributions from the United Kingdom (other than in educational books) and from Education in Spain offset a decline in profits from General Literature in France and Part-works. The contribution from the United States rose by over 10%, driven by an excellent performance in Fiction/Non-Fiction.

OCLC's Copyright Registry

Earlier this summer at an industry conference OCLC 'announced' that they would begin work on a Registry of Copyright for published works. I had some involvement in this project last year and I am glad to see that they are formally announcing the launch of the registry. The ways and hows are covered by fellow traveller Peter Brantley:

I had a long talk with Bill Carney yesterday at OCLC; Bill is the "owner" of this product. Although OCLC is concerned about the sustainability of this service, I stressed the need for an open and free api that would permit use of the contents of the registry by any (machine) comer, providing at least essential information -- perhaps OCLC could offer payment tiers with fuller, more complete data, for example including rights-holder provided notes.Bill was definitely supportive of such an api, and is actively soliciting feedback from others about the registry's desired functionality. An api (of any sort) does not yet exist, but OCLC has discussed its need, and is giving it at least a modest priority (lagging, I believe, behind constructing the necessary authorization infrastructure for user-submitted write updates). If you wish to provide feedback to OCLC, it can be left at the OCLC CER website.

Read the whole post. (Unsure why I neglected to mention this before).

Michael's Gotta Gun

Was anyone else more than slightly taken aback to find out that Simon & Schuster Editor in Chief Michael Korda has an assault rifle? Buried in this silly promo NYT's piece on his upcoming book, author Peter Manson lets us all know we better call ahead before we show up at Michael's house:

Mr. Manso called the weapon “a literary affectation” that he bought legally, before a change in gun laws made it illegal to possess, after seeing one owned by Michael Korda, the longtime Simon & Schuster editor in chief, who edited Mr. Manso’s Brando biography. “Listen, Michael Korda had one, Hunter Thompson had one, I thought it would be cool,” Mr. Manso said.

I have to get me one of those "literary affectations." I could do some target shooting out the window of PND towers. This morning there may be several S&S employees thinking twice about that request for a raise.

The other thing amusing about this article (and it was pointless other than to let us know he is in the process of uncovering the dark under belly of corruption in Provincetown and writing a book about it) was that Manso has lived there on and off for 60 years and suddenly the 'corruption' is a surprise. He should come to Hoboken. There's enough here for several books.

On The (Internet) Radio Tonight

I have been invited to speak on web radio about the publishing industry and Personanondata - in 15mins! There is a call in feature so if you are inclined follow the instructions below:

The Interview starts at 8:30 EST (8/27). Call in to talk to me on the show by dialing 646-200-4071. The show is aired LIVE at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/Circle-Of-Seven and an active chat session is online. After the show is aired, it is available for download at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/Circle-Of-Seven. Take a look at http://www.cospradio.com/ to learn more about COSP Radio.

Borders 2Q Loss Improves

On their call this morning Border's management sounded far more confident and at-ease in contrast to previous calls over the past several quarters. In the current economic environment and given the rebuilding effort going on at Borders their results were encouraging. From the press release:

Borders reported results for the second quarter, ended Aug. 2, 2008 and reported a second quarter loss from continuing operations of $11.3 million or $0.19 per share, representing an improvement over the same period last year when Borders Group recorded a loss of $18.1 million or $0.31 per share.

Borders Group achieved second quarter consolidated sales from continuing operations of $749.2 million, a decrease of 6.9% over 2007. As stated, the second quarter loss from continuing operations improved to $11.3 million or $0.19 per share compared to $18.1 million or $0.31 per share a year ago. The improvement was due primarily to expense reductions, lower interest expense and a tax benefit. Excluding non-operating adjustments, the second quarter loss from continuing operations improved to $10.5 million or $0.18 per share from $12.1 million or $0.21 per share a year ago.

CEO George Jones indicated that the Borders rewards program now has 28mm members. It has been very successful and email programs have great 'open-rates' and integrating with Internet site is generating great customer response. They are becoming more sophisticated in how they use the data associated with how their rewards customers buy - they are not just sending e-mail blasts. Since July when the Internet store "really got going" they have generated $7mm in revenue. Jones also said that they are in process of implementing interactive kiosks in the stores and that these will integrate with internet site.

CFO Wilheim noted that they are "sitting in a very comfortable position" from a cash and debt perspective. Jones stated that they have significantly improved the financial position of the company with respect to both debt (balance sheet) and expense reduction. They feel very proud of what they have done and confident that at least their commitments over the next 6-12mths will not pose a problem to the operations of the company. The company has really attacked their operating expenses and also successfully reduced inventory carry by 14%. The inventory reduction was done by eliminating titles that sold 1 copy per year per store.

The results were released yesterday after the close and their share price was up 13% in after hours trading.

Amazon.com Buys Shelfari - Updated

Via Paid Content. Hot on the heels of their acquisition of ABE books, Amazon has purchased the rest of Shelfari. Amazon had invested in the company some two years ago and had hoped it would come to rival librarything in popularity. Interestingly, librarything now also counts Amazon as an investor in it thanks to the investment ABE made in librarything 3-4 years ago. It is likely that librarything owner Tim Spalding will negotiate with Amazon to buy back the share they now own (and I would assume there was a 'change of control' provision in his original deal with ABE). It will be interesting to see who he jumps into bed with next - if anyone.



Personanondata Bookstore

Universal Mccann Review of Social Networking Trends

Universal Mccann International Social Media Research Wave 3

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: socialmedia research)

MediaWeek (Vol 1, No 34):

TimeOut wants BBC out of Publishing (TOLine):

Tony Elliott, the owner of Time Out, the entertainment listings magazine, called for a break-up and sale of the BBC’s commercial division yesterday as he accused the corporation of overreaching itself with the £75 million acquisition of the Lonely Planet travel guides. The magazine proprietor said that Time Out, publisher of its own travel guides, could not compete with the BBC’s promotional muscle - and that the BBC should not publish books and magazines.

The TimesOnline profiles City Lights in San Francisco:

It was established in 1953 by poet and ‘beatnik’ Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter D. Martin to provide a progressive, all-paperback alternative to books available at the time. It’s where the Beat Generation laid their hats and where publishing and selling Allen Ginsberg’s Howl got Ferlinghetti and bookseller, Shigeyoshi Murao, arrested in 1957 on obscenity charges. Their victory in court guaranteed the sale of other previously banned books – including D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. (Three years later British readers achieved similar rights after the failed prosecution of Penguin for publishing Lady Chatterley’s Lover.)

Enid Blyton rocks and is the subject of a preview in TOL:

With its sense of adventure and advice on derring-do for juniors, The Dangerous Book for Boys was the sort of “how to” manual that could have been dreamt up by Enid Blyton, the creator of the Famous Five, the Secret Seven and a host of other dearly loved children’s characters. Now the inevitable has happened. Booksellers are eagerly awaiting the launch on September 4 of the Famous Five’s Adventure Survival Guide, a similar tome but with the bonus of a brand-new mystery starring the ginger-beer-loving youngsters.

For my librarian friends a comparison of JCR and Scopus Impact Factors: LINK

Impact factors for journals listed under the subject categories "ecology" and "environmental sciences" in the Journal Citation Reports database were calculated using citation data from the Scopus database. The journals were then ranked by their Scopus impact factor and compared to the ranked lists of the same journals derived from Journal Citations Reports. Although several titles varied significantly in impact factor and rank, the Journal Citation Reports and Scopus lists had a high degree of statistical similarity.

Common Sense contractual terms from Random House via BoingBoing:

Random House is asking some of its authors of young adult books to sign contracts with "morality clauses" that allow the publisher to take back your advance and cancel your book if you're caught doing anything that "damages your reputation as a person suitable to work with or be associated with children, and consequently the market for or value of the work is seriously diminished."

BusinessWeek ad topic pages NYT. NYTimes has been doing this for years. (NYT via Blogrunner). ExLibris was sold by one fund to another. PR Slow week....

Publishers Worry About Amazon

Mike Shatzkin and I were intereviewed for an article published by SNL/Kagan about Amazon.com's relationship with publishers in light of the Hachette UK situation, Booksurge and the Kindle.

Excerpt:

Mike Shatzkin, founder and CEO of the publishing advisory firm The Idea Logical Co., said in a June 26 interview with SNL Kagan that Amazon is likely not getting those titles from publishers for under $9.99 and is probably taking a loss on those books. But Shatzkin added that situation could change if Amazon succeeds in establishing the Kindle as the dominant e-book platform. "If the Kindle reaches a critical mass, Amazon will have the ability to tell publishers that if they want their books available on the Kindle, they will have to sell them to Amazon for $6 or less," Shatzkin said. "That's going to be pretty rough." One reason it is so hard for publishers to meet Amazon's demand for increasingly lower prices, Cairns said, is because they must continue to offer their authors competitive advances and royalty packages to ensure they get the best titles. "Particularly for the brandname authors, publishers have to pay a very high price for that content," Cairns said. "It would be difficult for publishers to go back to their authors and say 'Give me a better price for your books.'" As a result, when Amazon asks for steeper discounts on titles, publishers are left trying to maintain their margins in other ways — such as by putting their marketing and distribution expenses. "And in this day and age, many of the larger publishers have already sweated out as much expense out of those cost areas as they possibly can, so there's not very much room left at all for them to do that," Cairns said. "It's very tight."