Finding An Orphan

Based on my personal experience working with small and medium sized publishers, it will be prove very difficult for anyone reaching out to the 'Orphan' group to encourage them to participate in the Google Book Settlement process.

When I joined Bowker in 1999, we were still using the post office to mail our publisher check lists to over 55,000 small and independent publishers each year. These check-lists represented our primary communication with this group of publishers most of whom published less than 10 titles each (many only one). These publishers had one chance per year to correct any errors or change any prices to make sure that year’s edition of Books In Print had the most accurate information. This should have been sufficient motivation then for any publisher who understood that Ingram, Barnes & Noble, Borders and a raft of independent booksellers relied on BIP for their title research and buying. When we reviewed this process and analyzed the results that year – forms returned and changes made – the data showed us that less than 20% of this group bothered to return the document and of these less than 50% made any kind of change. Even with a degree of financial motivation, over 40,000 small and independent publishers couldn’t be bothered.

Certainly, you could argue this had to as much to do with the paper based process as it did their disinterest; however, several years later when we had fully implemented BowkerLink the small press group of publishers remained largely anonymous. By 2005, the publisher data base had grown from 65,000 in 1999 to approximately 85,000 and we counted approximately 45,000 publishers registered on BowkerLink. BowkerLink includes both US and international publishers and registrations were naturally skewed to active and newer publishers. In the transition, we aggressively mailed to every publisher encouraging them to register and manage their title listing online. We also proactively cleaned the publisher address file using the National Change of Address (NCoA) file which we had not been using prior to 1999. I think we eventually stopped mailing paper checklists in 2004. Still, the number of small and independent publishers who chose to participate only increased marginally even as Bowker made the title management process more inclusive.

Most of the Books In Print database reflects titles published after 1970 and most observers of the Google settlement expect that the large proportion of Orphan titles are going to be found in the pre-1970 grouping. If it has been challenging to engage the small and independent publishers post 1970 then the earlier group will be significantly harder. Whether the publicity around the Google Book Settlement proves more of a motivator than the options the post 1970 group often disdained such as listing their title(s) in bibliographic databases, asserting their ownership via the copyright office and/or selling their title on Amazon.com remains to be seen. I have my doubts. If the expectation of retail glory (however misguided) at Amazon.com hasn’t galvanized anyone with an ‘Orphan’ copyright then Google probably wont either.

I hope the lack of interest changes if real money is dispensed. The Authors Guild has stated that when you are collecting money for people and looking to disperse it recipients have a tendency to show up at your door. Around 2001, the AG started collecting the money due from rights and permissions for authors. (Previously this had been handled by CCC). Not only did they become proficient at collections but their membership and disbursements increased. All good things, but their membership is still less than 10,000. Not only do they not have a lot of undistributed revenue but they also haven’t seen a mammoth rise in members.

OUP on Google Book Settlement

Via Evan Schnittman.

There is a very long piece on the Google Settlement by OUP USA President Tim Barton in the Chronicle of Higher Education today.

..What once seemed at least debatable has now become irrefutable: If it's not online, it's invisible. While increasing numbers of long-out-of-date, public-domain books are now fully and freely available to anyone with a browser, the vast majority of the scholarship published in book form over the last 80 years is today largely overlooked by students, who limit their research to what can be discovered on the Internet.

For most books published in the last 10 years or so, the picture is more heartening: University libraries provide students and scholars with access to a fair number of those works via services purchased directly from publishers and aggregators. Excerpts can often be viewed online free (but only as much as is allowed by publishers, with an eye toward generating sales). And many titles are available as e-books. Nonetheless, the vast majority of the scholarship published since 1923 (the date before which titles are in the public domain in the United States) is now effectively out of reach to the modern student.

As one of the world's most prolific scholarly publishers, Oxford views as a core expression of its mission — and the responsibility of all scholarly publishers — the reactivation of publications long sidelined by the restrictions of a print-only existence....

MediaWeek (Vol 2, No 25): Chris Anderson, Readers Digest, Google Book Search,

Some of these were on noted Twitter (@personanondata). I find I am using delicious much less. Reader's Digest sold their library business to management (link):

Gareth Stevens Inc., the publisher of library and classroom books founded in Milwaukee, is being sold by Reader's Digest Association Inc. to Gareth Stevens' chief Gary Spears and a business partner.

Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Gareth Stevens Inc., now based in Strongsville, Ohio, is being sold to Gareth Stevens Publishing LLP, a new entity led by Spears and Roger Rosen, owner and CEO of Rosen Publishing of New York City, Reader's Digest said Thursday.

Rumors that Bertelsmann may get back into music publishing (Billboard):

U.S. private equity firm KKR and several banks are said to be ready to act as co-investors for a plan by Bertelsmann and its BMG Rights Management arm to acquire the master recordings archive of EMI Music in London (described as "one of several" targets in the report), though a representative for EMI says no deal is in the works.

Pearson invests in education businesses in the UK (NYT):

Pearson is buying half of the vocational training business of Educomp Solutions, a Delhi education company that creates software and training systems for 23,000 schools. Pearson is also buying a 17.2 percent stake in TutorVista, an online tutoring company that brings together Indian tutors and American students.

Comprehensive article in support of Google Book Settlement (BigMoney):

The meme of the Google book monopoly has been gathering force over the last months, after being given a push by Robert Darnton, the head of Harvard's library system. Darnton was originally one of the most prominent backers of Google's digitization initiative. But somewhere along the line, Darnton got cold feet. In February, he wrote an essay for the New York Review of Books in which he set out the case that thanks to Google Book Search, Google will enjoy "a monopoly of a new kind, not of railroads or steel but of access to information." Since Darnton's essay appeared, the anti-Google crusade has gathered steam, fed by Google-bashing advocacy groups like Consumer Watchdog, and the hue and cry has sparked a federal antitrust inquiry.

Chris Anderson makes an ass of himself (Edrants):

As the examples below will demonstrate, Anderson’s failure to paraphrase properly is plagiarism, according to the Indiana University Bloomington Writing Tutorial Services’s very helpful website. It is simply not enough for Anderson to cite the source. An honest and ethical author cannot, in good conscience, swipe whole sentences and paragraphs, change a few words, and call it his. Plagiarism is not an either-or proposition, although we leave the readers to decide whether the cat inside the box is dead or alive.

And some more on this from the Boston Globe

But the more important debate is going to be over the ideas in the book itself, over the future of free as a business model - and over Anderson’s contention that companies that want to survive will have to either figure out how to offer their wares for free or contend with competitors that do. “Free” is a business book, but the dynamics it describes are unsettling the social and cultural landscape, as well. For many people, music is now free, along with news, movies, video games, and the software to help with everyday tasks. In ways it was not before, it’s free today to look for jobs, apartments, friends, roommates, and even romance. For the time being at least, the forces of free are upsetting not only traditional business models, but long-held assumptions about what we have to pay for, and when and how. It’s a confusing time, and Anderson’s book offers a reassuring diagnosis and set of prescriptions.

After the Storm

Lightning and heavy rain pushed through last evening but as the sun set an orange glow reflected off the skyline and also produced some weird amoeba like cloud formations.

NY Times Announces Linked Data Initiative

A cool announcement from the NY Times yesterday:

Releasing the Times thesaurus is consistent with our TimesOpen strategy. We want to facilitate access to slices of our data for those who want to include Times content in their applications. Our TimesTags API already makes available our most frequently used tags, the 27,000 that power our topics pages. But the new effort will go well beyond that. We plan to release hundreds of thousands of tags from the corpus back to 1980, and later, in a second phase, hundreds of thousands more going back to 1851.

Here is some more material on the Linked data initiative.

And my post from earlier this month on a PWC report discussing Linked Data and the semantic web: PND

Teleread: Amazon and Synergy = Kindle

On the TeleRead.org blog about a month ago Felix Torres was asked to expand, as a guest contributor, on a comment he had made on a related post. His guest post turned into one of the best explorations of the Amazon market strategy I have seen. Two years ago, I thought the implications of the Kindle were far greater than publishers anticipated but Felix pulls together all the strands to make clear both the 'danger' for publishers and the inevitability of the strategy (Link):

Here are some examples:

Once you factor in Amazon’s hidden face it is hardly surprising that they are leveraging their cloud platform capabilities into boosting Kindle with features like Whispersync and hosting notes and bookmarks; they already host Kindle bookshelf backups and email accounts and file conversion services for their users, after all. And when you consider that none of their existing ebook-business competitors has any experience in that arena (except Microsoft, who may not even be in the game anymore) this just might turn out to be the deciding factor.

....

For the near term, say three-to-five years, Amazon really has no significant challengers to the Kindle cloud they are developing. Expect new features to roll out regularly, many of them shocking, some might even seem head-scratchingly odd, but all will fit into a basic paradigm that says: “reading is more than just about books”.

....

Want to see where Kindle is going? Look to Xbox 360. Look to Zune. Look to XBOX Live. And then look again, at what doesn’t show on the surface.

XBOX 360 is, like Kindle, a “walled garden” content delivery system. DRM rules XBOX live. Unlike Sony, Microsoft doesn’t own any movie studios, yet they beat them to market by over a year with online movie rentals and TV show sales.

....

Kindle is just for reading ebooks, after all, right?

Sure, just like an Xbox is “only” for games. Except people buy Xboxes these days so they can play with/against their friends; they buy Xboxes because the people they know buy Xboxes. And there is added value in having the same console, playing the same game, and talking, interacting. Suddenly, gaming is about more than the games. Its about the (forgive the marketing-speak) “experience”.

And that is where Kindle is going. Fast.

....

There is a lot more. With respect to this last quote the Amazon strategy of owning Social Booksites like Shelfari and LibraryThing (partly) suggests they have the elements in place to build their 'experience.' As potential influencers and curators perhaps it is the Kindle upon which these investments will be leveraged.

Roy Blount Jr. Addresses the Orphanage

Authors Guild president Roy Blount Jnr. addresses his flock on the issue of the copyright Orphans 'created' (not really) by the Google Book Settlement. This is thematic of my post earlier this week. (Link).

When, you may ask, is a book consigned to the orphanage? Some people have the impression that most out-of-print books are orphans. That's not true. Most authors I know have written some books that are out of print. Me too. We are all findable. So are most of the authors I don't know. Many of us have produced books that included excerpts from other copyrighted work. The Guild did a survey a few years ago on how difficult it is for authors to clear rights to these excerpts. Of the authors that had tried, 85% reported that they had been "rarely" or "never" unable to reach the rightsholder to ask permission. I sit on the board of the Authors Registry, a non-profit organization that helps pay authors for photocopy and other uses of their books from overseas. Its success rate at finding authors of out-of-print books is upwards of 80%. If you look for authors, the odds of finding them go way up.

Desperate Publishers of Manhattan

Poor Book Depository having been cast as the next Amazon.com killer by publishers desperate for some broadening of the retailer market they face inevitable marginality. On the back of 'they've seen some success' and 'they offer free shipping anywhere in the world' it is suggested they are a legitimate player in the US market dominated by Amazon.

David Rothman at Teleread.org addresses this silliness further (Teleread):

Some wishful publishers are rejoicing that a British company called The Book Depository will go after the U.S. market and in other ways compete online against Amazon.

Alas, I’m not so optimistic. Would you believe, the little TeleBlog in recent months has drawn more traffic at times than The Book Depository has, according to Alexa. Even allowing for Alexa’s inaccuracies, it’s clear that the Book Depository is not that big a power on the Net. Perhaps eventually the store will be. But it has a long way to go as an Amazon rival—look at the chart below. In the comparison, you can’t even see the Book Depository’s line. What’s more, if the Book Depository has a Kindle equivalent, that’s news to me. Just how is the company to be a major power in a fast-growing sector like e-books?

And another bizarre aspect to this flaccid conversation is there's no mention of B&N.com.

Are the Orphans really Phantoms?

Opponents of the Google Book Search (GBS) agreement often seem to grasp hold of the emotive issues pertaining to the ‘orphan’ works problem by suggesting some grievance on a massive scale (a content ‘land-grab’) is taking place before our eyes. The GBS, while not perfect, shouldn’t be derailed by a small, potentially un-addressable segment of publishers since the counterveiling benefits are so considerable.

Firstly, the 'orphan' issue is unlikely to represent as large a number of titles - some say as many as 2mm - as suggested. Secondly, the ‘orphan’ issue is by no means a GBS-created issue and facilities available to the parents of these orphans to assert ownership appear to have been largely ignored over the years. There is also a third issue: Copyright holders who have maintained their records and appropriately managed their copyright status stand to lose substantially should the GBS agreement be quashed by the court, and all because of an emotive argument about a relatively small number of possible copyright holders who live in blissful ignorance.

On point three, any publisher that finds their titles have been scanned without their permission can do a number of things ranging from taking compensation and staying in the program, taking compensation and getting out, or doing nothing at all. The overwhelming number of titles scanned by Google appear to be those for which the rights are known, giving these publishers and copyright holders an opportunity to make their titles widely available and perhaps even make some money. This vast pool of titles will naturally benefit the wider publishing audience (whether students or consumers) and this is a social good that substantially exceeds the pitfalls inherent in the so-called orphan “land-grab”.

Importantly, the GBS agreement makes this access possible and empowers copyright holders to establish their own business arrangements. Publishers removing their title(s) from GBS only makes sense to me if they then go into the Google Publisher program instead. As part of this agreement, publishers that find their books in the GBS pool have an easy opportunity to assert their ownership and determine their rights. It is this facility – now with the breadth and market penetration of Google – that represents yet another in a series of decades-long opportunities that copyright owners have had to assert their ownership. Importantly, the GBS (BRR) registration process doesn’t cease once the agreement is approved; rather, money is set aside and the facility remains open for owners to register their titles and assert their ownership at any time in the years to come.

The copyright office, Bowker’s Books In Print, the ISBN agency, Amazon.com, Worldcat & OCLC have all provided some ability for copyright owners to ‘register’ their titles, update their information, possibly apply for an ISBN (if the title pre-dates 1970), change pricing, etc., etc. The Amazon emporium, together with the associated raft of retailers including second-hand and antiquarian stores, have represented years' worth of opportunity for a copyright owner to ‘find their title’. Worldcat – available in most libraries - has enabled copyright owners to find their titles and even request a physical copy should they want to. These facilities continue to offer copyright owners easy access to finding out about the existence and location of their potential works. Once located and correctly identified, there have been numerous ways to correct information regarding ownership. Importantly, the Google Book Settlement agreement doesn’t circumvent that opportunity in any way; rather, it enhances it.

I’ve spent some serious time analyzing this and it looks to me like the unknown number of 'orphan' titles will be low, both in absolute terms and in relationship to the total scanned book universe. Ample opportunity has been and continues to be afforded this group to assert their ownership and to make a business decision they believe to be in their best interests. What shouldn’t happen is to allow the insurmountable issues of effectively reaching this ‘orphan’ group to derail this agreement that represents a massive step forward in accessibility and knowledge.

Voyager Learning Bought by Veronis (Cambium)

Troubled educational publisher Voyager Learning has been acquired by educational investment vehicle Cambium. This represents a rather ignominious end to what was once a billion dollar information company but for management and staff perhaps they will be able to look forward to a more productive and stable future. Here is the press release:

Voyager Learning Company (PinkSheets: VLCY) , a publisher of education materials and provider of education solutions for the K-12 market, today announced the signing of a definitive merger agreement to combine its business with Cambium Learning, Inc., an education company serving the needs of at-risk and special student populations in the Pre-K through grade 12 market. In 2008, Cambium Learning had revenues of approximately $100 million and Voyager Learning Company reported $98.5 million in revenues. The combination of the companies' businesses will create a leading provider of education intervention services in the United States.

The business combination will be effected through a newly-formed company, Cambium-Voyager Holdings, Inc., which will acquire both companies and issue shares in the combined company to stockholders of each of Voyager Learning Company and Cambium Learning. Cambium-Voyager Holdings will be majority owned by VSS-Cambium Holdings III, LLC, which will be majority owned by Veronis Suhler Stevenson, a leading private equity investor in the information, education and media industries and current owner of Cambium Learning. Upon completion of the mergers, Cambium-Voyager Holdings will be a public company, and anticipates having its common stock approved for listing on the NASDAQ Global Market.

CCC Interview Michael Healy

The copyright clearence center interviewed Michael Healy who is the Executive Director - designate of the Book Rights Registry. Here is their announcement:

Exclusive Interview Sheds Light on Google Settlement

In his first public interview, Michael Healy--the man expected to become the executive director of the Book Rights Registry (BRR)--sat down with Copyright Clearance Center to discuss the potential benefits of the proposed Google Book settlement.

Healy, a former librarian, is currently the executive director of the non-profit Book Industry Study Group and has been working with the Authors Guild and Association of American Publishers on the establishment of the BRR. Development of the BRR was included as part of the proposed settlement agreement.

In his interview with CCC, Healy highlighted that book consumers have shifted their expectations about content delivery from traditional print forms to cell phones and e-book readers. He suggested publishers' future success will depend on their ability to adapt to that changing landscape.

Healy also offered this perspective on how the proposed settlement will ultimately help copyright holders:

"The Book Rights Registry introduces into the environment an unprecedented degree of control to authors, publishers and other rightsholders on how their copyrights are exploited and distributed in this new digital world."

MediaWeek (Vol 2, No 24): OCLC, British Library, Elsevier, Google

Tim Winton wins Australia's most prestigious literary award for the fourth time (TheAge):

Tim Winton was only 24 when in 1984 he first won the Miles Franklin, Australia's most significant prize for literary fiction. He and his wife, Denise, had a colicky baby and no money. "It saved my bacon; it was the cavalry coming over the hill. And that screaming baby we were racoon-eyed from is a young man with several degrees who turns 25 next month."

Last night, after becoming the first writer to win the award in his own right for a fourth time - for his latest novel, Breath - Winton launched a passionate defence of Australian writers and literary culture

On their public policy blog Google continue their defense of the Google Book Search settlement arguing that it will expand access (Link):

Have you ever gone to your local bookstore looking for a book only to be told that it’s not there? You look for it on Amazon; they don’t offer it. You go to your local library and it’s not there. But you know that it exists because you read it your freshman year in college. Or let's say you’re a second generation American interested in reading books in your parents’ native language, Greek. Try finding more than a few books in foreign languages in most town libraries or bookstores in the United States. Or you're a graduate student who has been doing research on your thesis for years. You think you've read every book there is to read on your topic, but then you type your query into Google Book Search, and you suddenly discover a new original book or monograph that you weren't even aware of before. ... The settlement won't just expand access to out-of-print books, either. Because authors and publishers will have the ability to let users preview and purchase their in-print books through Google Book Search, readers will have even more options for accessing in-print books than they have today.

Not only did Elsevier create some 'fake' journals for drug makers they also encouraged the drug maker to agree the content. (The Australian):

THE world's largest medical publisher asked the manufacturers of anti- inflammatory drug Vioxx which articles they wanted to include in a so-called medical journal on bone health. Documents tendered to a Federal Court class action reveal staff at publishing company Elsevier, which produces The Lancet, emailed pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co about its "preferred content selection" for the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine. The publisher also admits the journal is a "single sponsored publication" where most of the content is chosen by Merck with some "input from Elsevier". The plaintiff in the class action has alleged the journal was fake and it was simply a marketing exercise designed to promote Vioxx. The court has also heard Merck put the names of high-profile arthritis experts on the editorial board of the phoney journal without telling them they had done so. Since these revelations, Elsevier has expressed embarrassment over its role and admitted it failed to meet its own "high standards for disclosure".

In more Elsevier news, there are rumors that the company is looking to take on the responsibility for managing Universities content repositories: basically managing and hosting the content that academics create. This is a potentially sly approach to the 'open-access' issue (Link):

Elsevier is thought to be mooting a new idea that could undermine universities' own open-access repositories. It would see Elsevier take over the job of archiving papers and making them available more widely as PDF files.

If successful, it would represent a new tactic by publishers in their battle to secure their future against the threat posed by the open-access publishing movement.

Most UK universities operate open-access repositories, where scholars can voluntarily deposit final drafts of their pay-to-access journal publications online. Small but growing numbers are also making such depositions mandatory.

An internet posting earlier this month alerted repository managers to Elsevier's move. "Rumours are spreading that Elsevier staff are approaching UK vice-chancellors and persuading them to point to PDF copies of articles on Elsevier's web-site rather than have the articles deposited in institutional repositories," the memo, on a mailing list operated by the Joint Information Systems Committee, said.

Google Book Search announced some enhancements to their Book Search interface (Link):

Today I'm excited to announce that we're rolling out changes to Google Books that give readers and book lovers everywhere new ways to interact with the words and images contained within the books we've brought online. We've also made it easier for users to share previews of their favorite books on their blogs or websites. Here's a tour of some of the enhancements we've made to the way you search, browse, and share the books that we've digitized.

OCLC is working with print machine manufacturer Kirtas to enable the printing of books on demand having found them via Worldcat (SBWire):

Kirtas Technologies, the worldwide leader in bound-book digitization, and OCLC, a global online library service and research organization; have signed an agreement that will enable streamlined access to the ever-increasing numbers of digitized books to users of OCLC’s WorldCat and Kirtasbooks.com.

As part of the agreement, OCLC will now be able to provide its users with data indicating that a book is either available as digitized content or that it can be made available for digitization.

In addition, OCLC will provide Kirtas with bibliographic records for use on www.kirtasbooks.com, ensuring consistent and accurate descriptions of the books being offered for sale by its library content providers.

OCLC has incorporated Worldcat identies into Worldcat.org (Blog)

The British library together with JISC and Gale/Cengage announced the launch of a newspaper archive that includes over 2mm pages of news material (Link):

The service - accessed at http://newspapers.bl.uk/blcs - includes more than two million pages of newspapers from 49 national and regional titles dating from 1800.

Newspapers covered by the service include the Daily News, Manchester Times, Western Mail, Northern Echo, Glasgow Herald and Penny Illustrated.

Users can read reports of the Battle of Trafalgar in the Examiner and the gory details of the Whitechapel murders in the melodramatic Illustrated Police News. Children as young as nine smoking and drinking, music hall star Vesta Tilley in an X Factor-style contest, and the banking collapse of 1878 are also among the stories.

A search on the words 'Hoboken, New Jersey' resulted in some very interesting results.