Panel Discussion - Lost and Found: A Practical Look at Orphan Works

On Tuesday, October 20th, from 6-8pm, the Art Law Committee and the Copyright and Literary Property Law Committees of the New York City Bar Association, in conjunction with Columbia Law School’s Kernochan Center for Law, Media and the Arts, will present Lost and Found: A Practical Look at Orphan Works. Please join us in the Association Meeting Hall at 42 W. 44th Street for a discussion of the latest proposals for use of orphan works, and particularly, orphan images.

Speakers:
Brendan M. Connell, Jr., Director and Counsel for Administration, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation
Frederic Haber, Vice President and General Counsel, Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.
Eugene H. Mopsik, Executive Director, American Society of Media Photographers
Maria Pallante, Associate Register for Policy & International Affairs, U.S. Copyright Office
Charles Wright, Vice President and Associate General Counsel, Legal and Business Affairs, A&E Television Networks

Moderator: June M. Besek, Executive Director, Kernochan Center for Law, Media and the Arts, Columbia Law School

The program is free and open to all. Please register at HERE

BISG Webcast: ONIX 3.0 & Metadata for E-Books

In April 2009, EDItEUR announced the release of a major new version of the ONIX for Books standard: ONIX 3.0. This release of ONIX is the first since 2001 that is not backwards-compatible with its predecessors and, more importantly, provides a means for improved handling of digital products.

During this FREE 60-minute BISG Webcast, David Martin from EDItEUR's ONIX Support Team and Brian Green, Executive Director of the International ISBN Agency, will focus on how ONIX 3.0 provides new support for digital publishing, along with requirements for identifying ebooks in our industry's complex new supply chain. Along the way they will answer four key questions about ONIX 3.0:

• How does ONIX 3.0 provide new support for digital publishing?What are the requirements for the standard identification of ebooks in the complex new supply chain?
• What are other important benefits of ONIX 3.0?
• How should publishers and other ONIX users respond to the new release?

Wednesday, October 07, 2009

11:00 AM to 12:00 PM


BISGispleasedtopresentthisFREE60-minuteWebcastinpartnershipwiththeInternationalDigitalPublishingForum.
Registertoday!

Do Books Cost too Much

Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords thinks so (HuffPo):

Most books are too expensive. Compared to lower cost alternative media sources, books are becoming niche consumables like caviar. The high cost of books jeopardizes not only the future of books, but the future of the book publishing industry. Unless authors, publishers and booksellers cooperate to bring down the cost of books, book publishing faces a painful decline, much as we're now witnessing with newspaper and magazine publishing. Here in the U.S., most consumers already think twice before shelling out $7.50, $15.00 or $30.00 for a good read. If a book at the current prices represents a big purchase for citizens of the world's most affluent economy, imagine the cost burden for the vast majority of the world's literate people.

For some reason books seem hold a special spot when it comes to pricing theory – you don’t seem to hear too many people telling Mercedes they should lower their car prices to a $1,000. It is very easy to suggest that books cost too much but there’s little evidence that demand is elastic. I’m all for lower prices but there are only so many readers – to expand the readership requires publishing content they want not lowering the prices on the same stuff that is churned out by today’s publishing companies. If we want to increase demand it is the product that should be addressed not simply the pricing. If a $4.00 book is still as crappy as a $35 book the reader is still not coming back; building reader loyalty through the delivery of products they embrace and aren’t disappointed by is what will support growth. Pricing is an element but it is not at all the panacea.

ARL report on the current use of E-Books in Libraries

ARL has produced a report that examines e-Book use in libraries. Access to the full report is paid however the toc and executive summary are available for free. Here is a sample (ARL):

Libraries are changing. The publishing industry is changing. Patrons are changing and expecting more and different things from their libraries. “The Global Reading Room: Libraries in the Digital Age” states “the role of libraries is becoming more important and more far-reaching than ever” and “though their mission remains unchanged, libraries are rethinking their collections, services, spaces, and opportunities for pooling resources.” The line between collection development and acquisitions is blurring. Librarians are communicating with patrons through instant messaging and twittering. Some libraries provide print-ondemand machines. Budgets are decreasing with the current economic crisis and libraries are looking at ways to maximize their collection development funds. And while the Library of Congress reports that their Copyright Office currently defines print as the “best edition format,” this is being revisited.

Libraries are facing both internal and external factors in developing and maintaining e-book collections. With change, however, comes denial and pockets of resistance. Librarians and library staff can lobby for new policies and procedures and increase communication among departments. Library administrators can leverage internal change by encouraging new workflows and can significantly impact the building of a new business model with publishers and aggregators to manage external factors. The last comment of the survey sums up the overall conclusion of this SPEC Kit: Well, good luck with all of this. It seems libraries are all over place with e-books and some are very aggressively trying to acquire while others appear to be sticking their heads in the sand and pretending it doesn’t exist. Libraries, librarians, and publishers should all be working harder in this place to help shape the model and the future of all of this. Honestly it makes my skin crawl when libraries suggest that e-books should be purchased and/or operate like print models. If we are just trying to recreate the print model here, then I’m not sure I understand the point. The reality is that nothing in academic libraries is going to be what it used to be, and so many libraries are clinging to that without realizing that the war has already been lost.

Boston Publishers Benefit from Google Partner Program

From an article in the Boston Globe last week about the Google Books program (not the settlement) several interesting quotes from the experiences of Houghton Mifflin and MIT Press:

Langevin said that Galbraith’s “The Great Crash 1929’’ generated “zero’’ views for July and August 2008. In September 2008, as the collapse of Lehman Brothers caused the US economy to start teetering, book views rose to 628. By October, the views rocketed to 22,897, as Internet users started searching for words and concepts that were well represented in the book, although the number of views did subside later.

Langevin said that sales of Galbraith’s book also spiked during the peak months.

MIT Press’s Manaktala said she noticed that views of the publisher’s books increased dramatically after universal search was implemented. “What surprises me is that pretty much every one of our 2,600 books on Google gets viewed every week,’’ she said.

....

“It’s really a great deal,’’ said Manaktala. “We could never afford to create all this exposure ourselves.’’

MediaWeek (Vol 2, No 40): Curating, Larsson, BooksEtc, Disney, Magazines

Interesting article in Sunday's NYTimes about curating content in the retail sense. Some relevance to book retailing and publishing although not specifically noted in the article (NYTimes):

The word “curate,” lofty and once rarely spoken outside exhibition corridors or British parishes, has become a fashionable code word among the aesthetically minded, who seem to paste it onto any activity that involves culling and selecting. In more print-centric times, the term of art was “edit” — as in a boutique edits its dress collections carefully. But now, among designers, disc jockeys, club promoters, bloggers and thrift-store owners, curate is code for “I have a discerning eye and great taste.”
Or more to the point, “I belong.”
For many who adopt the term, or bestow it on others, “it’s an innocent form of self-inflation,” said John H. McWhorter, a linguist and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. “You’re implying that there is some similarity between what you do and what someone with an advanced degree who works at a museum does.”
Indeed, these days, serving as a guest curator of a design blog, craft fair or department store is an honor. Last month, Scott Schuman, creator of The Sartorialist, a photo blog about street fashion, was invited to curate a pop-up shop at Barneys New York.

The Girl Who kicked the Hornets' Nest by Stieg Larsson is the final book in Stieg Larsson's posthumously published Millennium trilogy and seals his status as a master storyteller, says Nick Cohen of the Observer. Of course not available in the US until next year. (Observer):

I cannot think of another modern writer who so successfully turns his politics away from a preachy manifesto and into a dynamic narrative device. Larsson's hatred of injustice will drive readers across the world through a three-volume novel and leave them regretting reaching the final page; and regretting, even more, the early death of a master storyteller just as he was entering his prime.

In the UK Borders has announced that it will retire the BooksEtc and Borders Express brands (Independent):

Borders UK has confirmed it plans to remove the Books Etc and Borders Express brands from the high street. The bookseller – which in July completed a management buyout backed by the retail restructuring specialist Hilco – is trying to sell its remaining seven Books Etc shops and two smaller format Borders Express stores.

Books Etc has been a financial millstone around the neck of Borders UK for a number of years. The retailer's spokesman said: "I can confirm that our future strategy is single-brand." Earlier this month, Borders UK said it would close its Books Etc outlet in Staines, Surrey. The company, which has 36 core Borders stores, came close to collapse in July under its previous owner Risk Capital Partners, the private equity vehicle of Luke Johnson, the Channel 4 chairman.

Was Frankenstein too good to have been written by a woman? (HuffPo):

The debate has continued right up until the present day, most recently through the publication of John Lauritsen's The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein (Pagan Press, 2007). The logic of the doubters has not shifted noticeably for 200 years: Frankenstein is too good to have been written by a young woman, therefore it must have been written by a man.
Percy Shelley was indisputably present at the birth of the creature, who was born in the Swiss countryside during the unseasonably rainy summer of 1816. Mary and Percy Shelley were part of a group that included Lord Byron, Claire Clairmont, and John Polidori, Byron's personal physician. To beguile the hours, the group took to reading German ghost stories and decided to try and write their own. Mary was stuck for inspiration for several days when finally one night her dreams yielded up the image of a depraved scientist bringing to life a ghastly simulacrum of a man.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/victoria-rosner/co-creating-a-monster_b_301089.html

Disney launch a subscription based web site for children (NYTimes):

DisneyDigitalBooks.com, which is aimed at children ages 3 to 12, is organized by reading level. In the “look and listen” section for beginning readers, the books will be read aloud by voice actors to accompanying music (with each word highlighted on the screen as it is spoken). Another area is dedicated to children who read on their own. Find an unfamiliar word? Click on it and a voice says it aloud. Chapter books for teenagers and trivia features round out the service.
“For parents, this isn’t going to replace snuggle time with a storybook,” said Yves Saada, vice president of digital media. “We think you can have different reading formats co-existing together.”
Publishers, of course, have been experimenting with e-books for the children’s market for years. About 1,000 children’s titles are now available digitally from HarperCollins. Scholastic has BookFlix, a subscription service for schools and libraries that pairs a video storybook with a nonfiction e-book on a related topic. “Curious George” is available on the iPhone.

There may be a new service provider in the magazine space that would aggregate magazine content for readers using electronic devices such as the Kindle, Blackberry, and iTouch. (ATD):

The idea: The new company, which will operate independently from the publishers that invest in it, will create a digital storefront where consumers can purchase and manage their subscriptions, which can be delivered to any device. The pitch: Control a direct relationship with consumers while gaining leverage with heavyweights like Apple (AAPL) and Amazon (AMZN).
Industry executives briefed on Squires’s plan say it has been well received by Time Inc.’s peers and that several major publishers, including Hearst and Condé Nast, are expected to sign on for the JV, which isn’t scheduled to debut until 2010. No comment from Hearst, Condé Nast or Time Inc., a unit of Time Warner (TWX).

Newsweek looks at the 'controversy' over holding back big books from the eBook store and gets to the nub of the issue (NewsW):

Why isn't Amazon.com livid about this? After all, this technology firm is providing the beleaguered publishing industry a more efficient way to reach readers, and it's being stiffed on some big sellers. It may be that Amazon is losing money on many sales it makes of Kindle-ready books. With the Kindle, Amazon has inverted the old business model of giving away the shaver and selling the blades. Amazon is using the blades (cheap books, in this case) as a loss leader to induce people to pay up for the shaver (the $299 Kindle). As I understand it, Amazon pays the same wholesale price for Kindle books as it does for real books—generally 50 percent of the list price. For a typical hardback that retails for $26—say, E.L. Doctorow's Homer & Langley—Amazon pays $13 and then sells it for $9.99 on the Kindle, taking a $3 loss on each sale. (The longer-term strategy, publishers fear, is that once the Kindle gains significant market share, Amazon will negotiate lower wholesale prices for digital versions.) In the short term, though, this means that Amazon is likely to lose more money on more expensive books sold on the Kindle. It would have to pay $17.50 per "copy" of the digital version of True Compass, and $14.50 per copy for Going Rogue, but would sell them for significantly less. It may seem perverse, but once Amazon has sold a Kindle to a customer, it doesn't have all that much incentive to sell expensive books to the Kindle owner—unless it's willing to boost the prices of electronic books significantly.

The Kindle goes to Princeton to mixed reviews. However, in the comments students unload on the whiners (DailyP):

But though they acknowledged some benefits of the new technology, many students and faculty in the three courses said they found the Kindles disappointing and difficult to use.
“I hate to sound like a Luddite, but this technology is a poor excuse of an academic tool,” said Aaron Horvath ’10, a student in Civil Society and Public Policy. “It’s clunky, slow and a real pain to operate.”
Horvath said that using the Kindle has required completely changing the way he completes his coursework.
“Much of my learning comes from a physical interaction with the text: bookmarks, highlights, page-tearing, sticky notes and other marks representing the importance of certain passages — not to mention margin notes, where most of my paper ideas come from and interaction with the material occurs,” he explained. “All these things have been lost, and if not lost they’re too slow to keep up with my thinking, and the ‘features’ have been rendered useless.”

Recent Google Book Settlement Links

For GBS junkies, a few recent pieces of note (Thanks for the links Mary):

Peter Brantley has a piece appearing this evening on Huffington Post: "GBS: Right Goal, Wrong Solution"

"The DOJ has raised the alarm, and now it is time for Congress to assume its rightful place in this debate - convening interested voices and arbitrating on behalf of public good. Standard Oil's price fixing conspiracy with the railroads inspired Congress to pass the Sherman Act because they recognized that control over critical transportation and fueling infrastructure could be wielded to impact virtually every aspect of American life. In the modern day, the Internet is the railroad and search technology the coal that powers our cultural, commercial, academic and social existence. Allowing a powerful cartel of commercial actors to possess control over these fundamental elements of networked information promises to create a modern day Standard Oil."

Law professor Timothy Wu takes a very different tack in Slate, "Save the Google Book Deal."

"A delivery system for books that few people want is not a business one builds for financial reasons. Over history, such projects are usually built not by the market but by mad emperors. No bean counter would have approved the Library of Alexandria or the Taj Mahal....

"If you want to put Google in its place, the book project is the wrong way to do so. It is Google's monopoly on Internet search that is valuable and potentially dangerous, not a quixotic project to provide access to unpopular books. So hold on to that sense of wariness, but understand that in this case, it's misplaced. To punish Google by killing Book Search would be like punishing Andrew Carnegie by blowing up Carnegie Hall."

Alexis Madrigal, a researcher and writer, comes to the project's defense, based on his experiences researching a book, in Wired, "A Writer's Plea: Figure Out How to Preserve Google Books"

"So, as we sort out the various privacy, competitiveness and profit issues, let’s not just assume the status quo was the best of all possible information-distribution worlds. It wasn’t — and we know that because Google Books showed us how the system could be better."

And, finally, from the ARL, a summary of the court filings, in a handy set of tables, drawn from the Public Index. If you've been following the filings, there's not much here to learn. But if you haven't been following them, you might find the (somewhat crude) summation of filings of interest or otherwise useful. Interesting, for instance, that the foreign filings by class members outnumber the domestic ones by more than 3 to 1.

"Who is Filing and What are they Saying?" By Brandon Butler.

24hr Book Project from CompletelyNovel

UK Book social networking company CompletelyNovel is experimenting with a '24hr book' concept over the coming weekend. Here is the information from their web site:

In collaboration with if:book, The Society of Young Publishers and CompletelyNovel.com, Spread the Word has commissioned The 24 Hour Book, a groundbreaking project to challenge a group of writers to write a new story about London in just 24 hours. Who’s writing what, when? The book will be written by a group of experienced writers working together using all kinds of online collaborative tools around the clock.

The lead writer for The 24 Hour Book will be Kate Pullinger and writers participating will include Sarah Butler, Aoife Mannix, Dean Atta, Cath Drake, Ben Payne, Chris Meade, Toni Le Busque, Saradha Soobrayen and Shamim Azad. The final book will be published under a Creative Commons license and available to buy on CompletelyNovel.com.

The 24hr book will be based around a group of city centre allotments and the story will explore ideas of shared and private space and the real and imaginary barriers between a range of different city characters. Join us online from 10am on Saturday 3 October The writing will be going on throughout Saturday, and then on Sunday 4 October, a group of volunteer editors and publishers will move in to make the story ready for publication. You’ll be able to see that happening live too! As well as making the book available to read online, CompletelyNovel will link directly to Print-on-Demand printers to enable hard copies of the 24hr book to be available for its launch at 6pm on Monday 5 October at St Barnabas House in Soho.

Click here to find more details of the launch event and register for a ticket.

MediaWeek (Vol 2, No 38): Carver, Google Scholar, Espresso Books, Reader's Digest, BusinessWeek

Per usual most of the following were on the twitter (@personanondata). Long feature article on Raymond Carver and long time editor Gordon Lish in the Observer.

The pair had worked together for years – Lish, a dashing, influential literary figure once known as Captain Fiction, had published Carver's first stories in Esquire magazine. (They had met in Palo Alto, when Carver was, as his wife later put it, a "practising alcoholic" working at a textbook publisher's.) Lish later became an editor at Knopf and championed many other writers whose styles were unlike Carver's – Don DeLillo, for instance, and Richard Ford. He went on to give writing workshops at which he managed, by all accounts, to be gnomic, crushing and inspiring in relatively equal measure. Lish's own fiction – he wrote stories and novels – is compact, antic and self-reflexive, with titles such as Wouldn't A Title Just Make It Worse?.

Carver was about as far from this world – both in content and style – as it was possible to be. His characters worked in diners and motels; they had amputated limbs and their families had left them, with or without furniture; their working lives, their cropped, half-understood thoughts had not been seen in fiction. Lish had edited Carver's first collection, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? and together they had composed a taut new voice full of left-field desire and hopeless dread. As Carver put it in the letter of 8 July: "You've given me some degree of immortality already."

Ex-Reed Elsevier CEO Sir Crispin Davis now favorite to become ITV Chairman (Guardian):

"The committee has therefore concluded that it would not be in the best interests of the company to appoint Mr Ball as ITV's chief executive," it added.

ITV insiders maintain that Ball expressed an unwillingness to work with the committee's leading candidate to replace Grade, the former Reed Elsevier boss Sir Crispin Davis, and expressed doubts about another potential candidate, the former Channel 4 chairman and founder of BMI, Sir Michael Bishop. After meeting Ball, Crosby is understood to have got the impression that Ball wanted a mere figurehead as chairman.

"The board was close to appointing Ball and told him about some of the chairman candidates and he told them he did not like any of them," said a source involved in the talks. "The board just felt like it could no longer go on dealing with this man."

Harsh. PD James is interviewed by The Telegraph:

She has a crack at explaining the genre’s appeal in Talking about Detective Fiction, an idiosyncratic and entertaining primer written at the suggestion of the Bodleian Library, which is publishing the book and to which James is donating hardback royalties. It is not a comprehensive history – she does not read much contemporary crime fiction apart from books by Ian Rankin and her old friend Ruth Rendell – but an imaginative response to some of her favourite authors.

The 89-year-old Lady James is trying to recall what first drew the teenage Phyllis, along with millions of other readers in the Thirties, to the so-called Golden Age detective stories.

“Those books suggested we live in a moral, comprehensible universe, at a time when there was a great deal of disruption and violence at home and abroad, and of course the ever-present risk of war. And we live in times of unrest now, so perhaps we may soon enter another Golden Age.”

Peter Jacso writing in Library Journal takes a long critical look at Google Scholar (LJ):

Google’s algorithms create phantom authors for millions of papers. They derive false names from options listed on the search menu, such as P Login (for Please Login).

Very often, the real authors are relegated to ghost authors deprived of their authorship along with publication and citation counts. In the scholarly world, this is critical, as the mantra “publish or perish” is changing to “publish, get cited or perish.”

Compounding the problem, the inflated publication and citation counts produced by GS will embarrass those who take the reported numbers at face value, as they discover that many of the publications, randomly scattered in the detailed result lists, are just variant formats of the same paper, and the citations are mismatched.

While GS developers have fixed some of the most egregious problems that I reported in several reviews, columns and conference/workshop presentations since 2004—such as the 910,000 papers attributed to an author named “Password”—other large-scale nonsense remains and new absurdities are produced every day.

On-Demand Books' Espresso Machine continues its glacier like expansion with the addition of the Harvard Bookstore (UWire):

The Espresso Book Machine—produced by New York-based firm On Demand Books—has been rolled out to a select few stores to date, but the one at Harvard Book Store will be the first with access to the 2 million public-domain texts digitized by Google, which also announced a deal with On Demand last Thursday.

After the unveiling on Sept. 29, Harvard Book Store customers will be able to order a printed copy of Google’s titles or On Demand’s 1.6 million works—all in public domain because they were copy-righted before 1923.

Store Marketing Manager Heather Gain said owner Jeffrey Mayersohn ’73 bought the machine in pursuit of a broader vision for the store—which he took over from long-time owner Frank Kramer last October.

“He would like to provide customers with every book ever written,” Gain said.

The Espresso Book Machine will be able to print a 300-page paperback book in four minutes, according to Gain, who added that printed books will be competitively priced and indistinguishable from those sitting on the shelves.

Customers will be able to request a book to be printed online or in the store, after which they can either pick it up in-store within minutes or have the book delivered by bicycle either the same or next day. Books can also be shipped to domestic or overseas locations.

See also The NYTimes. JISC (UK) has undertaken a market study of the impact of eBooks in higher education and their initial reports indicates some startling and unintuitive results (JISC):

The current estimate of revenue generated from publishers selling textbooks direct to students in the UK is £200 million. Publishers are therefore extremely cautious about making e-textbooks available, free at the point of use, through the university library, in case it cannibalises print sales. During the course of the project, the impact on the sales of the print equivalents of the 36 e- books licensed and made freely available to all UK higher education intuitions has been monitored. The data we have suggests that the availability of the e-versions has no impact on the print sales and that, certainly at the moment, e-textbooks are a back up to the print and will co-exist. JISC Collections is encouraging publishers to think of e-textbooks not as a threat, but as a new and different market.

Readers Digest announced it is consolidating its international web presence onto one digital platform (RD):

The Reader's Digest Association is launching a major new global initiative to bring its flagship iconic brand into the international digital arena, it was announced today by Eva Dillon, President, Reader's Digest Community. The company is rolling out a new Global Web Platform in over 40 international markets including China to debut live this week. The launch is a key part of a wider digital monetization strategy that will see Reader's Digest leverage its branded content on a variety of platforms.

Dillon said, "As one of the world's largest producers of original content, Reader's Digest continues its transformation in creating a global brand experience online. This new platform allows each of our international markets to focus on driving digital revenue via advertising sales and e-commerce, and creates a compelling online experience for new and existing customers."

Content re-packaging is a key component of the new Global Web Platform and the company is looking to leverage its existing material, as well as developing Web-exclusive content going forward.

Pressure builds on the commercial activities of the BBC particularly with respect to the company's purchase of Lonely Planet (Bookseller):

A report published on Wednesday (23rd September) by the Commons' Culture, Media and Sport Committee branded BBC Worldwide's purchase of Lonely Planet "the most egregious example" of the company's expansion beyond its existing remit. The committee added that if the Trust had been "a more responsible oversight body" more thought would have been given to the impact of the purchase on the sector as a whole.

The acquisition was originally resisted by rival publishers, who called for a review by the Office of Fair Trading at the time. Time Out guides m.d. Peter Fiennes said that this report had really "upped the ante". He added: "It's really significant that they have singled out the Lonely Planet acquisition. Before it was just one of a number of things . . . they've said it's quite clearly wrong." Fiennes said that there is now "so much more pressure" on the Trust to do something about the acquisition.

Adam Hodgkin makes some suggestions for Bloomberg in their thoughts over the acquisition of BusinessWeek and he concludes, (EE):

Many of these recommendations amount to saying "Make Business Week more like The Economist". One can be sure that The Economist does feature in a competitive analysis of what has gone wrong with BW, but The Economist also has not yet figured out how to deliver a solid audience of digital subscribers. BW will have some advantages in getting this right first. This sale is a break with the past. So much has not been working out well for BW in its digital initiatives that it is time that some sacred cows were sacrificed and some simple steps taken. Building digital subscriptions is the obvious path that needs to be developed.

Great to see Little Dorrit do so well at the Emmys (Guardian):

Little Dorrit, starring Matthew Macfadyen and Sir Tom Courtenay, was named best mini-series and won a brace of awards for writing, directing, art direction and costumes, chalking up more prizes than any other programme. But many of the most prestigious Emmys went to familiar US favourites. The sitcom 30 Rock, starring Alec Baldwin as an egotistical television executive, was named top comedy for the third consecutive year while Mad Men, a critically acclaimed depiction of politically incorrect 1960s advertising executives, won best drama for the second year in a row.

Document Cloud: Back-up in the Cloud

In a twist on the idea of massive data sets - the idea that the data supporting research is as valuable as the conclusions and should be made available as part of research findings - a new start-up is taking the idea to news gathering. DocumentCloud already has the participation of numerous large media companies that will enable these companies to 'deposit' the back-ground material and primary research supporting their investigative and news gathering. Funded initially by grants, DocumentCloud expects to create a revenue model over the next two years as they expand. From their website:

DocumentCloud will be software, a Web site, and a set of open standards that will make original source documents easy to find, share, read and collaborate on, anywhere on the Web. Users will be able to search for documents by date, topic, person, location, etc. and will be able to do "document dives," collaboratively examining large sets of documents. Organizations will be able to do all this while keeping the documents--and readers--on their own sites. Think of it as a card catalog for primary source documents.

Enabling access to this material will, the company says, make it easier for researchers, journalists or bloggers to do research, investigate and report on a wide range of material. And you may be saying to yourself 'I can do this at Scribd, so what's different?' The answer is you can deposit your documents in Scribd and other similar sites and list your documents with DocumentCloud; however, DocumentCloud will be scrupulous in allowing submissions to their listings. From their site:

How will you guarantee authenticity? How will you fight copyright infringement? How will you keep the collection free from spam and inappropriate material?

It will be of the utmost importance to us that the collection remain of the highest integrity, so we're planning to limit the right to list documents, at least initially, to individuals and organizations involved in original reporting. Contributors will agree to a set of guidelines, and will have to vouch for the authenticity of the documents they upload.

More information on their website.

Seth Godin: Rethinking the Publishing Industry

The following was written by Eugene Schwartz who sat next to me at yesterday's meet-up and took better notes than I.

Publishers need to develop their own “tribal” networks to reach readers to whom they will be selling books in the new marketing environment. It is a concept that applies to authors, agents and anyone in the business who wants efficiently to create a market for their work. The old way of waiting for the publisher to promote the work is becoming ineffectual.

This was Seth Godin’s message at a Brown Bag lunch sponsored by the Digital Publishing Group (founded by Susan Danziger of Daily Lit) and held at the Random House building in New York. Godin is author of ten best-selling books including Permission Marketing and Purple Cow. He is the founder of the interest community “lens” builder Squidoo.com, and former vice president of direct marketing at Yahoo.

Preaching revolution in the master’s den so to speak, Godin advised the more than 150 largely mainstream publishing house staffers that if they want to advance into the future and their employers didn’t see the light, they should put in the sweat labor in their off hours to demonstrate to their employers the efficacy of building social network followings centered around themes and/or authors. And if this didn’t do the trick, there would be something to be said for leaving and finding – or starting – another venture that understood where the future lies.

Publishers need to recognize that many of the production, marketing and distribution skill sets which authors relied on them for in the past are easily available to the authors themselves as well as to startup publishers by other means. The publisher’s value proposition needs to be reinvented in that light. Godin made the comparison to the music industry, “Music hasn’t gone away, but the old music industry has.”

According to Godin there is a five year window of opportunity for the industry to reshape itself to the new realities: readers can find advance information about any book on line before they buy it, and they will respond to free previews – or even free whole books – by buying more printed works or eBooks. It is in the next five years, he believes, that tribal franchises will be defined and won.

You build this tribe and the right to promote new books to them by gaining their permission through the prior interest you have generated by generous access to content and experiences that draw them to your site and your mailing list.

“If you have people’s attention, you can make money,” Godin declared. You start promoting your new book well before it is written by using the internet through blogging, hosting content-driven sites, and social networking to accumulate a tribal following. When to start promoting? “Five years ahead of time,” he suggested, underscoring the point.

The major error being made by established publishers (and agents and authors I would add) using conventional business models, Godin says, is to see new technology and the internet as a way to make old business models work better instead of as an opportunity to destroy (no sentimentality here) and reinvent the old. Strong medicine, imho – but true. Hard to conceive of at a meeting on the 44th floor of the Random House building – although we can take comfort that at least the building will survive in its present form.

-- Eugene G. Schwartz

Gene Schwartz is currently launching a new web service for authors named WorthyShorts.

SharedBook Announces Several New Initiatives

Many readers will know I have been a fan of the SharedBook model for several years now and enjoy keeping track of their new initiatives. Here is a recent update on several new announcements from the company:

Today, Congressman John Culberson http://culberson.house.gov (R-Texas) placed a link on his site that allows his constituents to read and comment on the House Healthcare Bill, using SharedBook’s annotation platform. In the Congressman’s words, “this new website will give you, my constituents in the Seventh District, a choice in the health care debate. You now have an opportunity to read and comment on the bill. I look forward to reading your comments and restoring public trust in the government by raising the level of openness, order and discourse.” We applaud the Congressman for taking Transparency to a new level by allowing his constituents to give him feedback on healthcare reform in a very granular and detailed way.

Meanwhile, Google has informally announced on its blog that they now have an affiliation with SharedBook’s Blog2Print product, to enable users of the Blogger platform to easily translate their blog into a physical book or PDF download. Since Blog2Print was introduced in July of ‘07 ago, tens of thousands of bloggers have created a permanent record of their posts and photos. See http://buzz.blogger.com/2009/09/turn-your-blog-into-book-with.html.

On September 14th, Hachette, through its Twelve Books imprint, with authors Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, launched three chapters of their best seller “NurtureShock” into the SharedBook annotation platform, to allow readers to discuss their controversial findings on child rearing. The New York Times and others covered this experiment in social media as applied to published works and we are excited to watch the discussion progress. (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/07/business/media/07book.html?_r=1)

And Woman’s Day is using SharedBook’s Smart Button to allow consumers of their web content to create their own cookbooks <http://www.womansday.com/shared_book.html> from Woman’s Day recipes. With a couple of clicks, users can compile a cookbook of their choice, add more personal content to it if they so desire, and save it to their hard drive or create a hard or soft bound copy.

Finally, we’ve added another 50 titles from assorted publishers to www.Inscribe-it.com and are looking forward to the Holiday season, when we are told that some major magazines and media outlets will choose these personalized books as a featured Holiday gift item. A home page redesign will be launched to usher in the 4th quarter.

More posts on SharedBook.