E-Books: The End User Experience

Springer has published a white paper on the results of a study they undertook asking librarians and users about their views on ebook adoption and benefits. In two stages, the company spoke to librarians in 2007 and followed that study up with another focused on users in 2008.

The survey uncovered some encouraging results regarding eBook adoption. Most users were aware of eBooks and had accessed them at least once. Respondents also overwhelmingly said that eBooks are useful and that they would like to incorporate eBooks into their information experience more frequently. These positive findings are supported by additional Springer usage research and studies from independent organizations that have found a surprising level of uptake for eBooks given their relative newness.

Other items of interest from the study (and covered in the document in more detail):

• Users mostly access ebooks for research and study while reading reference and textbooks
• E-book usage appears less concentrated than online journal usage
  
• Users find ebooks equally via Google and their library
• Convenience, accessibility, and enhanced functionality are the primary benefits of eBooks
• Current users expect to prefer ebooks to other reading formats over time (next five yrs).
  

The study summarizes the findings as follows:

Users are not reading eBooks cover-to-cover in the traditional sense but instead approach them as a resource for finding answers to research questions. eBooks have the potential to stimulate new forms of book content usage and will require libraries to think differently about how to accommodate the needs of users as their eBook collections grow. Viewing eBooks through the lens of traditional print book usage might cause libraries to miss important opportunities for enhancing the user research experience.

Google Book API

Google Book Search has activated an API that allows third parties to access GBS content directly on their home site. Noted in the initial implementation are several well know booksellers and also library catalogs:

This Google Preview feature is now live on retailer sites around the globe, from Books-A-Million to Blackwell Bookshop and The Book Depository in the UK, A1Books in India, Librería Norma in Colombia, Van Stockum in the Netherlands, and Livraria Cultura in Brazil. Over the coming weeks, this functionality will roll out to even more booksellers, including Borders.com, Buy.com, and Powell's Books.

Beyond these retailer partnerships, we've also worked with a wide array of sites and organizations to bring Book Search functionality to their users:

• Library catalogs. It is now possible to preview books—including a huge number of works in the public domain—right from the online catalogs of the University of California and the University of Texas, as well as through WorldCat.org, a service that lets you search across the collections of more than 10,000 local and institutional libraries worldwide.


• Publisher and author sites. The Arcadia Publishing web site has descriptions of its books about towns from Mountain View to Medford--and now, thanks to the Book Search integration, you can peek directly into these books as well. O'Reilly, Macmillan, Apress, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and Stanford University Press have incorporated preview functionality into their sites, as well.


• Social book sites, which allow users to organize and share their reviews, ratings, and favorite books. You can now import your Book Search My Library collection straight into your aNobii account, or preview books within the weRead gadget for social networks. Be sure to also try out the exciting integrations by BookJetty, GoodReads, and BookRabbit.
  

Of course, we know that even more sites will also want to work with the Book Search index in ways we can't even imagine. That's why we've made these tools an open set of APIs, which anyone can use to build applications drawing on the unique search results and preview capabilities provided by Book Search. If you'd like to try out these APIs on your website, check out our brand new developer site.

Adam Hodgkin at Exact Editions notes the importance of this announcement for publishing CEO's:

Having, or buying into, allying with, the API's which manage and accesses your content may be the key decision for media companies in the next decade. Either your CEO knows what an API is, and can find out how, in strategic terms, to negotiate Google's, Amazon's, Facebook's and Apple's, or he/she needs to be a media genius who does it by gut instinct (Rupert Murdoch is the only one of those that I can think of and he is the wrong side of 70). The heads of Random House, Conde Nast, Elsevier, Cengage, Hachette and Pearson really ought to have an intuition about the way their business can develop an API to the servers which are hosting all their content. I wonder if any of them do?

MediaWeek (Vol 1, No 38):

New York Times reports on text book sales and pricing.

“The person who pays for the book, the parent or the student, doesn’t choose it,” he said. “There is this sort of creep. It’s always O.K. to add $5.”

In protest of what he says are textbooks’ intolerably high prices — and the dumbing down of their content to appeal to the widest possible market — Professor McAfee has put his introductory economics textbook online free. He says he most likely could have earned a $100,000 advance on the book had he gone the traditional publishing route, and it would have had a list price approaching $200.

“This market is not working very well — except for the shareholders in the textbook publishers,” he said. “We have lots of knowledge, but we are not getting it out.”

VentureBeat notes the success of an IPhone book reader from Stanza:

Stanza is currently the number one ebook app for the iPhone, and chief operating officer Neelan Choksi shared some other impressive stats with me. In its first six weeks, Stanza was downloaded 200,000 times — compare that to Amazon’s Kindle, which is seen as building momentum because it sells 40,000 units per month. Okay, that’s a totally unfair comparison, since Stanza is a free app. But if you can get a free ebook reader for your iPhone, why bother paying for the Kindle, or even a more cutting-edge reader like Plastic Logic’s? (Though of course the Amazon’s and Plastic Logic’s readers offer bigger screens, which is better for long-term reading.) People are actually downloading books, too — Choksi says one of Stanza’s content providers reports 20,000 downloads per day.

Rupert Murdoch has a rethink on subs for the WSJ from the Guardian:

Rupert Murdoch yesterday claimed online subscription revenues at the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones could rise by $300m (£164m) every year for up to three years, hinting that he will raise access charges to the financial news site.

For the moment the Informa deal appears to be dead (Guardian):

In a statement the consortium - comprising Providence Equity Partners, Carlyle and Blackstone Group - said it "has decided to withdraw its proposal" following the Informa board's rejection of its offer two weeks ago. The consortium also cited "a material change of circumstances" as one of the reasons behind its decision.

John Makinson interviewed by The Times on plans to expand into emerging markets like Pakistan:

Mr Makinson, 53, believes that Penguin can generate 10 per cent of its sales from emerging markets, which amounts to £100 million a year. The operation in India grew by 25 per cent last year, boosting turnover by £15 million and should, Mr Makinson says, generate 5 per cent of revenues in five years.

That fuels a belief that Penguin's growth can be boosted, although Mr Makinson points out that the business “has hardly let the side [Pearson] down - profits have grown in double digits in 2005, 2006, 2007 and is expected to again in 2008”.

University of Michigan places an Espresso Machine in one of their libraries (PR):

U-M is the first university library to install the book-printing machine. The Espresso Book Machine, from On Demand Books of New York, produces perfect-bound, high-quality paperback books on demand. A Time Magazine "Best Invention of 2007," the Espresso Book Machine has been called "the ATM of books." It was purchased with donations to U-M libraries.

Why experience matters. NYTimes. Alison Pendergast notes the University of Ohio is offering grants to faculty to produce course content:

However, in addition to this news, a smaller piece of news that didn't grab as much attention was the University System of Ohio offering Grants to its faculty to produce course content in an effort to move away from having Ohio students purchase branded textbooks. From the Program Synopsis:

The University System of Ohio (USO) will invest $250,000 to create affordable digital content for Ohio students and bring the digital learning materials to market in Autumn of 2009. The program goals are to:

Create learning materials that are cost-free for Ohio students; usher in a new era of digitally-delivered learning materials that, properly implemented, can improve student learning, and leverage high quality authorship and pedagogy from Ohio faculty members.

(Aside, I hope the textbooks they produce get a bit better editing than this RFP...)

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is to establish an Headquarters in Dublin and hire 450 people. (It's nice in Dublin). Finfacts:

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (formerly Riverdeep) is to invest €350m in eLearning research and development with significant support from Enterprise Ireland. HMH is to establish its global eLearning research and development centre in the greater Dublin area, creating 450 "high-value" jobs over the next 5 years.

A&R Installs First Espresso Book Machine in Australian Market

Angus & Robertson Australia's largest book retailer is heading a group that will place up to 50 Espresso Book Machines in their stores over the next two years. A&R says they will initially offer 20,000 mainly Australian hard to find and out of print titles but expect that title list to exceed 100,000 over the next few years.

The EBM has been mentioned here before (particularly in its implementation in Canada) and the machine continues to roll out steadily in the US. This implementation in Australia could be transformative because of how the Australian market works. The three partners in this effort; A&R, Central Book Services and EBM may have the market power to fundamentally change the book market in Australia.

Firstly, because the market is relatively small there the market for titles written by and for the Australian market is quite small (somewhat similar to Canada); therefore, sheer economics prevent a broad based industry. Implementing an on-demand solution could lower the profit threshold considerably resulting in a more vibrant indigenous publishing program. Secondly, the Australian market is seen as an important but secondary market for US and UK publishers. As a result, decisions are not always taken with respect to the Australian market by overseas corporate offices that are in the best interests of the Australian market. For example, decisions related to price or availability. Sometimes a title is made available only via the foreign entity or Amazon.com because the local publishing division can not promise a market for the title. (Some of these issues are far less a problem than they used to be).

Thirdly, particularly in education and professional publishing the unit sales levels of many titles can be counted in the tens or hundreds. These levels are simply not high enough to stock locally. So if orders are placed with a local publisher the delivery dates could be months rather than days because the title has to be sourced from the overseas corporate parent. The sad thing is many customers (university booksellers and libraries) bypass the local publisher and buy from B&T or Amazon. From these vendors, the title can be delivered in days and yes, that's air freighted in with costs added.

Implementing EBM can start to solve some of these inefficiencies in the Australian bookseller and publisher market. In the process, revenue that had been going overseas might return to local suppliers and publishers - those owners of the local publishing rights - and the total market might become more expansive delivering a much wider inventory of products than could be conceivable today (or yesterday).

Those interested in learning more about this initiative should contact Central Book Services especially if you are interested in adding your titles to the inventory. Contact Warren Broom on 03-92107804 or wbroom @ centralbookservices.com

Sydney Morning Herald

Publishers Lunch Launch Bookstore Maps

Announced today is an ambitious and long needed new bookstore locator product from Publishers Lunch. The database product pulls together store location information from 4200 bookstores selling new titles across the US.

If you are not a subscriber to Publishers Lunch (and face it who isn't) this should provide the motivation you need. Here is more information from their press release:

We are now live at PublishersMarketplace with our latest database project, one of our most ambitious and most essential compilations yet. Charting the landscape of physical retailers that support the entire business, we have compiled and vetted data on over 4,200 stores selling new books across the country.

The database presents basic information for each store, while also cataloging hundreds of associated bookstore websites. Most dramatic of all, we have made the information visual as well, displaying it on Google-powered maps.

A variety of search options make it easy to access the data in multiple ways: You can scan by state, 33 major metropolitan areas, zip code, and store type (chain; indie; etc.), or browse a number of specialty stores (children's; mystery; etc.) Stores are color-coded to easily and quickly distinguish among the four largest chains, general indies, college bookstores and specialty stores.

And special features add utility of particular interest for "trade" use: newly opened and recently closed stores are specially tagged, and we recently added the ability for stores to contribute rich information about the kinds of special events and readings they offer and whom to contact about author bookings.

An "add/update/remove a store" link on the main Bookstore Maps page makes it easy for stores to contribute and correct data and submit information for those Events fields so that publishers can learn more about their capabilities. We also need to bolster the lists of specialty stores and are eager to hear from organizations with comprehensive, vetted data.

Right now this resource is viewable only via PublishersMarketplace, though we are working on variety of additional uses, including a free-standing version for general users. Among the special uses we would be delighted to explore with any of you are:

* Using the database as an always up-to-date and comprehensive "store finder" to run on any publisher's web site, to help support the entire ecosystem of physical and online retail

* Generating national Tour Maps for particular authors, to embed on author sites and pages

* Developing a variety of proprietary in-house versions, using our visual interface as a way of storing your own data about accounts, a way to test visual mapping of POS data, and more

(We're already looking at incorporating feeds of data about author appearances, but help/ideas are most welcome.)

Needless to say, this feature is the culmination of a tremendous amount of work by many people. We are particularly grateful for the generous assistance of Barnes & Noble, Borders Group, the American Booksellers Association, the directors of all of the regional booksellers associations, the folks at publishing houses who viewed our demos and offered feedback, and the many freelance researchers who worked with us in compiling and correcting the data. We look forward to your suggestions for improving and employing this new resource, and to community contributions to the data itself.

To check out Bookstore Maps, just go here: http://www.publishersmarketplace.com/stores
[we'll add it to the PM menu bar shortly]

To view sample events data, visit these store links and click the "Events" tab:
Northshire Bookstore, Manchester Center VT

Third Place Books, Lake Forest Park WA

The Globe Corner Bookstore, Cambridge MA

Stanford University Bookstore, Stanford CA

When Bowker was sold by Reed, we lost American Book Trade Directory and American Library Directory once the dust had settled. Had we kept them I would like to think we could have done something like this with those data base products. Assuming PL carves out this bookstore information as a separate product I don't see how other databases could compete on quality or price. Now, Bowker should do somthing similar with the Publisher's Wholesalers and Distributors database in advance of someone beating them to it.

A Cool New Reading Device

My friends at Rosetta sent me a link to a presentation by a company named Plastic Logic who demonstrate their proto type for a new e-Reader targeted at business users. Looks very cool.

Here is the video (link) and the product is slated for launch early next year.

BISG Announce "Start With XML Project"

BISG is pleased to announce its sponsorship and support of an exciting and important new venture, the StartwithXML project.

This project, co-presented by O'Reilly Media and The Idea Logical Company, is an industry-wide, multipart initiative to present and disseminate the information that publishers need in order to move forward with a StartwithXML workflow. Mike Shatzkin of The Idea Logical Company was a featured speaker at the recent BISG Annual Meeting, where he discussed the project and the importance of XML to the publishing world (click here to see his presentation).

Survey Now Open

The first part of the project involves a survey of current publishing and production processes. BISG urges its publisher members to participate in this survey; the information gathered from the industry is vital to the success of the program. click here to connect to the survey.

Sign Up for the January Event

A one-day forum is scheduled for January 13, 2009, at the McGraw-Hill Auditorium in New York. Through panels and presentations, you'll spend the morning understanding the “Why” of XML, and the afternoon learning about “How” to move forward. CLICK HERE for more information and registration details. BISG members will be eligible for a $100 discount off the full-day event, and $50 off for the half-day session; contact the BISG office (info@bisg.org) for discount codes.

Additional Features

The project will also include a detailed research report and an online community. The research report will include information, case studies, best practices, technology and vendor profiles, and interviews with industry experts discussing the factors that make a StartWithXML workflow both useful and tricky. The supporting online community will feature a blog, an open comments section for the report outline, and a discussion forum.

We invite all BISG members to participate in StartwithXML, starting with the survey!

StartwithXML is sponsored by

Code Mantra Klopotek Publishing Dimensions Rosetta Solutions, Inc.

Investing in the Long Tail

At the BISG annual meeting on Friday Anita Elberse presented finding from her research into the effects and impacts of the long tail of revenue opportunities that were extolled by Chris Anderson. In summary, she has found (empirically) that there is no evidence for some of the major tenets of his book. Her presentation was enlightening and here is a link to the article she published in the Harvard Business Review:

Should You Invest in the Long Tail?
It was a compelling idea: In the digitized world, there’s more money to be made in niche offerings than in blockbusters. The data tell a different story.

Elberse is Associate Professor of Business Administration at HBS.

Updated: Here is a link to the presentation given at the BISG meeting. Link

The Future of Media

Media Post held a roundtable to discuss the future of media. Some quotes:

Jane Friedman: I spent my career as a book publisher, and do I believe that there will be hardcover and paperback books forever? Yes, I do, because I think that the library's something that identifies the individual. All of us have gone into friends' homes and, very often, the first thing we look at is what's on the bookshelf.We are seeing in the book industry mainly what is just another form of reading, which is reading on the screen. And what that will do is make the kinds of books that are being published ones that can be read on the screen, and be read in book form, and put onto the library shelf. That's where the distinctions will come in.

Bonnie Fuller: Will we all be reading on a device?

Friedman: I believe so, because we all have generations behind us who do everything on a device and find nothing uncomfortable about a device. And I think that when we in the book industry face the fact that this shift is going to happen automatically, everything will change in the book-publishing world.

Everything comes back to the beginning. I want you, David, to recommend omething to me. I don't necessarily want your product manager to represent that he or she thinks that that product is what I want. If you know me, you can tell me what it is that I want. I think that's what's happening here. It's interesting to kind of stand back a little bit, because my form of media, meaning book publishing, is very different than a lot of what we're talking about here. You read an author's book. You like that author's book. You go to the author's backlist, where you look for his or her next book. Again, that's part of community and the new brand. And I think today the consumer is smarter, and great. I mean, there are too many books out there. There are too many videos out there. There are too many toothpaste products out there. The consumer wants to make his or her choice. My goal would be to influence those consumers from a marketing standpoint and give them what they want, when they want it and how they want it.

Brian Napack: The textbook is an appalling way to deliver information. It's extremely time-intensive to develop. It's extremely expensive to produce, extremely
expensive to warehouse, extremely expensive to load to the marketplace. The students don't like it. The professors don't like it. It's bad access of information. You never have it where you want it. You have a bunch of students in K to 12 and in college who have right shoulders that are lower than their left shoulders. Everybody hates it. We hate it because we sell it. It goes into the marketplace and it comes into the used marketplace. So every time we sell a textbook once, it gets sold three or four more times, and I don't make any money on it. So, I'm looking forward to a digital transition. But in this case - and this is why I'm dwelling on education - education is migrating in a very elegant fashion, a methodical and elegant fashion not just toward new and additional products, but toward products which are better for all parties involved, with the exception of the used-book industry. So what we're moving from is from a content metaphor, where the content is king, to online where you have, yes, the content, but more important, you have tools, you have community, you bring students together with teachers, students together with each other.

The whole article is very interesting.

MediaWeek (Vol 1, No 37):

CEO of Indigo Books in Canada Heather Reisman answers some questions for Canadian Business. It was less interesting for me until I got to this:

Indigo has a policy created on Day 1. To the best of our knowledge, we will not sell child pornography or material with detailed instructions on how to build weapons of mass destruction. And we will not sell any material that has as its sole intent the incitement of society toward the annihilation of any group. We will sell anything else. Electronic books will have less of an impact on publishing than digital media had on music distribution. People will always want to have traditional libraries. I can’t imagine not being surrounded by my books.

I would say that gives them a lot of latitude! Bonnier is has bought Templar a children's publisher in the UK. The Bookseller The 'F-Bomb' and Batman. (I gots to get my hands on one of these copies). LATimes.

DC Comics has pulled back tens of thousands of copies of "All-Star Batman and Robin" No. 10 due to a printing error that put two R-rated words into word balloons in the story. Which words? Well, one begins with "F" and the other begins with "C" -- and, yes, it's that C word. The issue was written by Frank Miller who didn't even know about the dustup until we called him. "This is the first I've heard of it. I have no idea how this awful thing happened. It's just one of those terrible and glorious things that happen from time to time in publishing."

An interesting article by Bob Guccione Jnr. (yes that one) on the future of media in MediaPost:

Secondly, there is the wisdom of the market, which has been gradually forgotten in the intoxicating Second Coming of New Media. People are presumed to be a guaranteed audience, no matter how many times the cell of an idea divides into multiple copies. But people are not chickens in a yard that you can throw a handful of grain at and watch them scurry around pecking at the dirt to find it all. People try most things that are new for a while and then gravitate to what really matters to them, especially when overwhelmed. They will choose what they want and won't turn up in as many actual places as they do on business plans. The amount of choice will tremendously raise the bar of quality and performance for competing media. Once again, a golden opportunity for experienced brands.

Reed continues to do all it can to off load the magazines with financing. Guardian American Booksellers Association is doing something that may actually benefit their members. They have organized a POD program with Applewood Press. Future Perfect if:Book has a long post on Publishing in a Networked Era.

The emergence of the web turned this vision of the book of the future as a solid, albeit multimedia object completely upside down and inside out. Multimedia is engaging, especially in a format that encourages reflection, but locating discourse inside of a dynamic network promises even more profound changes Reading and writing have always been social activities, but that fact tends to be obscured by the medium of print. We grew up with images of the solitary reader curled up in a chair or under a tree and the writer alone in his garret. The most important thing my colleagues and I have learned during our experiments with networked books over the past few years is that as discourse moves off the page onto the network, the social aspects are revealed in sometimes startling clarity. These exchanges move from background to foreground, a transition that has dramatic implications.

This guy advocates stealing. Is that true for the Boston Globe?

I was heartened to learn that college kids are wielding the same Internet piracy tools they used to bring down the recording industry to download textbooks. Although the textbook oligopolists are fighting back mightily - the Association of American Publishers uses Covington & Burling, a take-no-prisoners law firm in Washington, D.C., to hunt down malefactors - there are at least two sites still around offering books: Textbook Torrents tends to be shut down, and moves around the Web, but the last time I checked, thepiratebay.org was offering such books as - well, you'll see.

Database Bookselling

Mick Sussman (NYTimes) pens an interesting essay on the application of book databases to retailing and the particular impact on second hand and antiquarian bookselling.

Indeed, the state of the art in used-book selling these days seems to be less about connoisseurship than about database management. With the help of software tools, so-called megalisters stock millions of books and sell tens of thousands a week through Amazon, AbeBooks and other online marketplaces. Some sellers don’t even own their wares. They just copy other sellers’ lists and then buy the books as necessary, pocketing the markup (though none acknowledge the practice, since it is banned on most commercial sites). To small sellers like Joe Orlando of Fenwick Street Used Books and Music in Leonardtown, Md., megalisters treat books as “simply a widget that they can make a few bucks on.” The megalisters — a name originally intended as a term of abuse but now accepted by the accused — don’t quite disagree. “What we’re trying to do is provide cheap books for everybody,” said G. Seth Beal, the president and chief operating officer of Thrift Books, which lists three million books and has 180 employees. Beal says he personally loves handling and collecting old volumes, but his business model is based on achieving economies of scale through automation.

An interesting essay which ends on a positive note suggesting there is still a role for old fashioned book intelligence (even if it may be aided by blogging and list-serves) and that 'if you know what you are doing' as a seller you will win out against the megalisters.

Johnny Temple and Akashic Books

I first learned about Akashic books by picking up a copy of their DC Noir anthology many years ago and only then because it was edited by George Pelecanos one of my favorite authors. Since then they have released several more in the series but I also started reading some of their crime novels set in Cuba. I've read several and had a few more sitting on the 'to be read' shelf These books are thoroughly enjoyable: Tango for A Torturer , Outcast.

Johnny Temple set up Akashic Books and here he is speaking to the Gothamist.

This is the intro:

Yesterday we sent some questions about the festival over to Johnny Temple, who chairs the fiction programming. Though many know him as the bassist for Girls gainst Boys, Temple has roots in the D.C. post-hardcore scene and, as comes with the territory, a passion for all things independent. His Akashic Books publishing house is dedicated to nurturing urban fiction and political non-fiction that mainstream publishers ignore. Their motto? "Reverse-gentrification of the literary world." So it's no wonder Ian MacKaye and Thurston Moore will also be holding forth in downtown Brooklyn Sunday.