Repost: Death of the Big Box

With the imminent crash of Borders into bankruptcy I was reminded of this post from December 3rd, 2008.

Travel up Route 17 in northern New Jersey and you traverse the spectrum of retailing. These stores - from Ikea to K-mart - represent the shop windows on late 20th century retailing but, in contrast to their apparent ubiquity, the days of the stand-alone big box may be numbered. A number of years ago, I saw some old photos of Route 17 and was shocked to learn it used to be a four lane (two each side) parkway with a wide grass median strip bisecting its length. Today, it is a clogged eight-lane shopping aisle and is just one of similar examples across the US from Rockville Pike in MD to Beach Boulevard in Orange County, CA.

Barnes and Noble, on their call a week ago, noted that many of their leases are coming due and these will be renegotiated at lower rates. While this sounds like good news to shareholders, the current dire economic situation coupled with the Border's situation will result in a significant reduction in superstore locations. Projecting current physical retailing trends will make many current locations simply unprofitable even at significantly lower rents. We may be witnessing the demise of the suburban book superstore and suburban consumers may be indifferent. Online retailing is going to be the huge winner across all retail segments, but particularly in book retailing.

We have a perfect storm: An excess of media options reducing the time traditionally spent reading books, the economic slow down reducing all spending, the increasing acceptance and comfort of online retailing to virtually all consumers and the advent of the online superstore which encourages a cost-conscious basket approach to consumption. Increasingly all of us - not just those of us who have been checking our bank account and buying airline tickets online for years - will be buying everything online, at the best combination of pricing and free delivery, and all without dealing with the expense and hassle of traveling.

Multi-store malls will continue to live on for many years. In contrast, we will see many large, empty retailing boxes punctuating the sides of our traditional highway shopping aisles. Already this year, the big-box retailing environment is dire with a range of store liquidations and bankruptcies from Linen & Things to Circuit City. In years past, other retailers would fill these spaces with their new formats or new concepts, but those days are gone never to return. Retailing innovation - to the extent that it exists - is emerging on the web but not in physical retailing. The big losers will be the real estate owners who won't be able to find tenants (there are only so many ice rinks or roller rinks you can have in any one community).

Superstore physical book retailing, particularly its suburban version, may be a casualty. For a strong retailer like Barnes & Noble there will be plenty of time to adapt but others will fail. The current recession is going to change many things and some business segments just won't recover as consumers transfer all their shopping online. The economic crisis will push retailing over an imaginary Rubicon: More physical stores are unprofitable so they close, which reduces consumer access and pushes the consumer online. The cycle repeats itself and big-box book retailing will be no different. Ironically, big-box retailing made shopping convenient for suburbanites and retailers chased the consumer diaspora with vigor. The convenience that suburbanites sought is now the demise of the same retailers that promoted convenience. Physical can't compete with virtual. Tant pis.

But perhaps it's not all bad news. Mitigation may be driven by a population migration back into city centers which is most apparent in big cities like NYC, Washington and even Los Angeles. Couple this urban population growth with the daily office crowd and we have the re-genesis of an old phenomena: Main street shopping, which doesn't attempt to compete with the webstores abundance but serves deeper consumer needs. Retailing on a small scale operating with smaller inventories that turn rapidly, defined as 'scarcity' merchandising. The notion that if you don't buy it now it will be gone - which is the philosophy of The Gap, The Limited and some others.

Books are sold exceptionally well online but their merchandising could adapt to smaller format retailing. Urban book retailing will continue to be dominated by chains; costs will simply be prohibitive for independents to support sophisticated merchandising and supply chains that will be needed in the type of retail environment foreseen. Regardless, store size will shrink as the inventory mix skews to movie style 'openings' and 'events' designed to bring in a volume of buyers in a short time frame. A publisher once told me that if he owned a store he would only stock 40 best sellers. That concept (or a variation) will become the next phase in physical book retailing. Will it be the last hurrah?

The Orpheum Los Angeles in Neon

The Orpheum Los Angeles in Neon

A weekly image from my archive. Click on the image to make it larger.

A few years ago when BookExpo was in Los Angeles, I had some time to walk around the downtown area and put together this collection of neon theater facades.
I like neon and in walking along Broadway in Los Angeles there is a feast of it adorning the front of the many old theatres that formed the core of LA's theater district from approximately 1910 - 1940.

LA city government has announced a $30mm restoration project for this area. It would be great if they could recreate the glamor and excitement that pervaded this area in the 20s and 30s.

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Welcome to the migration (and other lessons)

The day before we went live with our first web product at Bowker, customer service were fielding the typical customer complaints. One customer in Cleveland was missing volume two of a three-volume set and another in Jacksonville was questioning their standing order discount. These queries and many more like them were synonymous with moving physical units to customers but all that changed the day we went live.

The changes we were forced to make didn’t happen instantaneously and, while progressive, only became apparent when we reflected periodically on our progress. Over time, ‘customer service’ morphed into ‘technical support’ and became concerned with logins, sluggish search times and IP ranges. Customer service was only one example of a line function forced to reevaluate how it operated and interacted with customers. I wish I could admit that our transition was managed and handled methodically and perfectly but, like many businesses in our situation, we oscillated at times between confused and frantic.

We did reach a point where we took the unanticipated in stride and became expert at dealing with unforeseen developments. Ironically, the supposed ‘impersonal’ nature of the internet created an environment for us where we were far closer to the customer than we ever were in the print world.

Expediency can define the future

When I joined Bowker in 1999, the future of our business was seriously challenged. No need was more imperative than that for a web version of our primary database product Books In Print. Deluged with cancelled print orders, we couldn’t even engage our customers in a discussion about migration because we had no online option. Expediency ruled our web development: We had little or no time to do extensive user testing and involve our customers in any UI development; and, with limited options available to us, we chose to replicate the functionality of our CDROM product. That strategy proved highly effective (though perhaps not optimal) and we launched the product in 2000. That’s when the fun really began.

Getting a field sales force in place became a strategic imperative if we wanted to effectively sell our online products. Selling static print products is completely different from selling an online product, which can be sold effectively via telesales; however, we had an appallingly bad approach to the sales function prior to 2001. As we implemented the field sales effort, the company became a more effective sales organization, and we gained deeper insight into our market. (I’m glossing over how difficult the task of putting a new team in place was – maybe for a later post). Feedback from the sales force, coupled with a directive from me that product managers and senior staff make frequent ‘visits’ into the market with the sales force meant we became far more aware of and attuned to what our customers were looking for. Had this sales organization been in place prior to our web transition, it would have fed our initial web development effort.

Who's your buyer?

Making the assumption your buyers are the same in changing circumstances should be challenged before you waste a lot of time. In the move to field sales we also found that the buyers of online products at our institutional customers (mainly libraries) were frequently different from the typical buyers of the print titles. The money for electronic products often came out of a different budget and, increasingly, consortia (group buying at various levels) sales became a regular component of our selling process. Historically, our sales approach hadn’t been sophisticated enough to address these changing market dynamics but we addressed that issue by hiring more effective sales management, which brought a different philosophy to sales that we hadn’t had in the past.

More staff attuned to the market did lead to more insight. An important missing input to our initial development effort was the deep knowledge about how our customers were using our products. This sounds startling (and is) but what became clear to us was that many customers of the print version were using BIP as a simple look-up tool. This print ‘look up’ tool was pulled off the shelf to find an ISBN or confirm a title name and then the volume was returned to its place. When Amazon came along (and that data was never licensed to them by Bowker) retailers and librarians saw a far simpler and effective mechanism for finding this information. Suddenly we were competing with free, made worse by the fact we didn’t have an online version. (So, I guess ‘competing’ overstates our position). Had we understood their behavior at a deeper level during our development effort, it might have impacted how we designed the search and UI. That said, we were lucky enough to do very well with the initial development and the team pulled off a triumph in the launch and subsequent roll-out. While it sounds obvious, understanding how your customers use your products and what issues they face in their daily business should be considered vital to your initial planning process. Don’t take it for granted you understand this; prove it via primary research.

Renewals are about usage

In the first year of launch, our renewal rate for Booksinprint.com was in the 70% range. Feeble, and, in a market that doesn’t grow, finding new customers to take the place of the 30% subscribers we were losing became an impossibility. Admittedly, our first-year subscriber base was low; however, this was the future of the company and, unless we raised the renewal rate, the future success of BooksinPrint.com would have been in jeopardy. As any sales manager knows, selling to a current customer is a lot easier than selling to a new one. A focus on the customer experience - particularly user stats - and strong sales management enabled us to get the renewal rate up to the low-to-mid 90% range, which is an incredible improvement and a testament to the strength of the sales team we had in place at the time.

As I look back on our transition, I see three distinct stages - two of which I have described above. Firstly, the product development and market assessment phase, where we conceived the product. Secondly, the management of the implications of this transition (particularly on customer service and sales). Which leads me to the third phase of our migration process - maintenance.

Significant in our sales improvement was the sales administration support we gave sales reps in two areas: user statistics and training. When we started to analyze our renewal statistics in the early post-launch years, we saw we could predict which customers were likely to renew based on how and how much they were using the product. Sounds obvious, but we were learning as we went.

We used this data to intervene throughout the subscription term via sales and sales admin outreach and training. On-site customer training in our market wasn’t a new thing and our parent company had embarked on a similar effort several years before. Our customer training program was designed to ensure that customers understood how to use our product and what features of the product were available to them. We hired specific trainers to travel around the country giving these sessions (often in a group setting) at client sites.

Our trainers were able to generate significant customer engagement and the program proved instrumental in pushing the renewal numbers higher each year. The payback was measurable but having trainer staff face-to-face with customers also created a feedback loop for product development as we considered new enhancements to the product. Since we sold multiple products to the same institution, the trainers often delivered multiple product training sessions during each institutional visit.

Maturity shouldn't mean complacency

I often reflect on how distinct these migration phases were from development and launch through to maintenance, and how our activities changed over time to reflect those changes. For example, in the early launch days, our sales staff was focused on making sales and finding customers yet, as the cycle reached maturity and our renewals exceeded 90%, the sales activity became focused on making sure the customers were truly engaged with our product(s). New business was still important since any percentage point below 100% renewal means the organization needs to keep finding new customers to fill the gap (but the sales person’s time spent becomes weighted differently).

Migrating from a print focus to online delivery changes every part of a business and, in the discussion above, I’ve barely scratched the surface of how one organization made this tremendous turnaround over 36mths or so. In different circumstances we might have done this faster – the company was sold in the middle of this transition – but I do think the company managed exceedingly well to reestablish a future for itself that, in 1999, didn’t look so rosy. One note of caution: The maintenance phase can be dangerous because it has an ugly sister named complacency.

MediaWeek (Vol 4, No 5): Eadweard Muybridge, Open Courseware, Education Aps, Lexis, Mother Russia, Taschen

A fascinating review of Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change at the San Francisco Museum of Art (The Smart Set):

This thought struck me while walking through the recent exhibit of Muybride’s work at London’s Tate Britain. The retrospective opened amidst new austerity programs in the U.K. The right-leaning coalition government announced drastic cuts in public spending, slashing budgets for cultural institutions and universities, cutting back on social services, setting up plans to sell off forest lands that have been protected since the Magna Carta. Last spring in Washington, D.C., Muybridge’s sepia landscapes and innovative motion studies captivated patrons at the Corcoran Gallery not far from where Congress debated bank regulations and cuts in social programs. But those are political questions, and the Muybridge exhibit was about art, and the particular passions and inventions of a man who pioneered the science of photography. As the exhibition showed so well, Muybridge motion studies were about the experience of stopping time, and turning motion into mechanical reproduction. The show didn’t mention the 19th-century economic collapse. Maybe it didn’t want to remind us that industrialization and the annihilation of time and space had it collateral damage. ... Across the room from these publicity photographs, you learn that Muybridge was a murderer. The show displayed sensational news accounts and front page headlines that recount the night in October 1874 when the 44-year-old Muybridge tracked down Harry Larkyns, the alleged lover of his wife, Flora. Greeting Larkyns with the words “My name is Muybridge and I have a message for you from my wife,” Muybridge shot Larkyns in the chest. He died minutes later. What sparked Muybridge rage? Coincidentally, it was a photograph. He found one of his infant son inscribed on the back by his wife with the words “Little Harry.” This, for Muybridge, confirmed what he had suspected for some time: that Larkyns, a tall and attractive dilettante and scam artist who had become close friends with his wife, was in fact the father of his child. While a jury acquitted Muybridge, believing his defense of temporary insanity due to domestic trauma, this aspect of Muybridge’s life haunts the work throughout the show. Here was a man who embodied the very metaphors that link the camera with the gun. It is difficult not to shake the reality that all those intricate, stop-motion photographs were taken by a murderer. And then I began to notice all the destruction that surrounded me. Most acutely true in the motion studies, there was throughout the show a deep sense that what you are looking at was in the process of becoming marginal, or insignificant, or destroyed. The horse. The vast landscapes of California, Oregon, and the Alaskan coast. The way of life for the Modocs. The economic collapse.

Inside Higher Ed takes a look at free on line course ware via a new book on the subject by Taylor Walsh (IHE)

In Unlocking the Gates, Walsh profiles current online courseware projects at MIT, Yale, Carnegie Mellon, the University of California at Berkeley, and India’s National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning. She also reviews the cautionary tales of Fathom and AllLearn, the profit-seeking harbingers of the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement, and thus lays out the conundrum facing their nominally successful offspring: As pressure mounts on online courseware projects to demonstrate their value and/or become self-supporting, will the world's premier universities be able to stay above the fray of online degree programs and pay-to-play course materials? Can they afford to stay pure, righteous, and unaccountable? Inside Higher Ed recently caught up with Walsh to explore these questions and others. The interview was conducted asynchronously and online; Walsh received no money, and Inside Higher Ed received no academic credit.

From the Boston Globe a short piece on experiments by education publishers in launching apps into middle and high schools (Boston):

Although both publishers have been aggressively moving from paper textbooks to digital and networked products for years, the two iPad pilot programs indicate that they’re eager to explore whether such devices are the next phase for textbooks. For the publishers, these iPad explorations are crucial initiatives. As school districts demand more technologically sophisticated teaching materials, platforms like the iPad serve as high-profile initiatives for publishers seeking valuable educational contracts. Programs that incorporate devices like the iPad can also open the door to public and private grants that are designed to encourage innovation. Many states, like California and Virginia, are also now encouraging school districts to experiment with digital textbooks as a way to save money. Why start on the iPad, as opposed to competing tablets and electronic reading devices?“Because this is a sexy device,’’ said Bethlam Forsa, executive vice president for content development and publishing operations at Houghton Mifflin. “Students are no different than consumers. They are excited to work with something like this.’’

LexisNexis has launched a Litigation Profile Suite (PR):

As the first product in a series of releases that will be part of the LexisNexis Litigation Profile Suite, LexisNexis Expert Witness Profilesis a Web-based solution that addresses this issue by harnessing the largest and most comprehensive collection of information about expert witnesses in North America, which was developed for direct use by litigators. Built on the New Lexis® technology platform, this rich set of content combined with easy to use analytical tools, enables users to more effectively evaluate and report on experts retained by opposing counsel or ones they may want to retain themselves. Resources within LexisNexis Expert Witness Profiles include an authoritative, exclusive database of more than 1,000,000 records on 220,000-plus experts from IDEX®, acquired by LexisNexis in 2008. The collection of information available to evaluate these experts includes transcripts from previous depositions and trials, resumes and CVs, verdicts and settlements in past cases, testimony challenges, news, publications, and Lexis® Web searching. Expert Witness Profiles also provides customers with the ability to manage the information they collect about experts by helping them aggregate volumes of data into single, easy to read reports. Interactive charts and graphs allow users to identify trends and meaningful information to assist them in shaping their case strategy. Users can also quickly illustrate the how often an expert has been hired by plaintiff or defense counsel, the percentage of cases in which the expert has testified for the prevailing party, losing party or in cases where there was a settlement, and the percentage breakdown of cases by area of law in which the expert was retained.

Why do authors love Mother Russia, you ask? The Observer wondered as well:

The country's appeal to Olga Grushin, Gary Shteyngart and David Bezmozgis is easy to understand. They were all born in the Soviet Union, emigrating to North America as children. They inherited a folk memory of suffering, plus the minutely descriptive Russian language. The dying Soviet Union, in which shortages could sometimes be overcome by ruses and yarns, was a natural breeding ground for fabulists. Finally, a system that had seemed adamantine crumbled; the world broke open (Grushin's The Dream Life of Sukhanov wonderfully captures the disorientation caused by this rupture). Add the galvanising effects of immigration to that legacy and you have a propitious background for novelists. Writers born elsewhere tend to be captivated first by the grandeur and reckless honesty of the great Russian authors; some might always view the country though the prism of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov and Vasily Grossman. But modern novelists are also drawn in by the same historical electricity and convulsions that fed those giants' work. Think of James Meek's magnificent civil-war saga The People's Act of Love, which features castrates, cannibalism and stranded foreign armies: all-too-real elements of the Russian 20th century, with its camps, famines and mass murder, the whole doomed, rotten Soviet experiment. Relatively calm though the country's recent past has been, and volatile as other parts of the post-9/11 world have become, Russia's sheer eventfulness is still a pull. It is still more an empire than a state, with an empire's patchwork variety and quirks. As an old joke has it, Russia is again in a period of transition between two periods of transition. It remains a place where anything can happen, and does: shamanism in Buryatia, sectarianism in the Caucasus, and capitalism, or at least a warped Russian version of it, more or less everywhere. A great slab of unprocessed pain sits toxically at and on the country's heart.

Off the top shelf: A new finding may explain why some works of canonical poetry were so successful in the 18th century (Telegraph):

This particular collection, ‘The Works of the Earls of Rochester and Roscommon’, was so popular that it was reprinted over 20 times in the 18th century.

It is the first time the connection between the popularity of this bestselling poetic miscellany and the erotic verses in ‘The Cabinet of Love’ has been made, indicating that high art - canonical poetry - and low art were packaged together.

Speaking of which, the WSJ visits with Benedikt Taschen (WSJ):

Just like the scavengers in these Hollywood hills, Mr. Taschen is well aware of those circling and waiting for the right moment to pounce. Not many publishers can be heralded and begrudged at the same time as vigorously as he has over the past 30 years. He doesn't adhere to rules; he makes his own. Mr. Taschen, who turns 50 this month, has cornered the book market in a way that most sellers only dream of: Cult status, with massive sales. "He has built his empire solely on personal vision and taste; this is niche publishing to the extreme," says Matt Tyrnauer, a writer for Vanity Fair and the filmmaker behind "Valentino: The Last Emperor" (2008) whose interviews were included in a book on the fashion designer published by Taschen. "Benedikt makes these remarkable documents with incredible attention to quality; he is only interested in getting the most complete and extremely interesting subjects, if only for their eccentricity."

From the twitter this week: New Dashiell Hammett stories discovered in the Harry Ransom Center. Guardian Publishing and politics: The shame of 'O': LATimes S&S and the shameful deception of 'O' McGraw-Hill Education Posts Big Earnings Gain on Small Sales Increase PW Google CEO Eric Schmidt searches for book deal - Crains NewYork

Istanbul 1972: From the air

Istanbul 1972: From the air

A weekly image from my archive. Click on the image to make it larger.
In the PND family archive there are many, many 'from the air' photos and most of the locations are virtually impossible to identify. That is not the case with this image however as it looks to me to be Istanbul from about 15,000 feet. Taken in August 1972 it is a stunning photo and for those most familiar with the city (and I am not) I am sure it provides a window on the past documenting how the expansive city has changed over the past forty years.

We would have been on one of the magnificent Pan Am 747s which circled the globe. One flight traveled clockwise (PA002) and the other counterclockwise (PA001). This flight was probably London, Frankfurt, Istanbul, Tehran, Karachi, Bangkok, HongKong. We got off in HK and traveled south to Sydney and Auckland which was home at the time.

(Little known fact: Flight numbers are odd east to west and even west to east.)
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Philip Pullman Speaks for the Library

From the False Economy blog which has produced Pullman's speech about why libraries shouldn't be victims of the wider economic difficulties the UK economy is facing (Blog):

Sample:

The greedy ghost understands profit all right. But that’s all he understands. What he doesn’t understand is enterprises that don’t make a profit, because they’re not set up to do that but to do something different. He doesn’t understand libraries at all, for instance. That branch – how much money did it make last year? Why aren’t you charging higher fines? Why don’t you charge for library cards? Why don’t you charge for every catalogue search? Reserving books – you should charge a lot more for that. Those bookshelves over there – what’s on them? Philosophy? And how many people looked at them last week? Three? Empty those shelves and fill them up with celebrity memoirs.

That’s all the greedy ghost thinks libraries are for.

Now of course I’m not blaming Oxfordshire County Council for the entire collapse of social decency throughout the western world. Its powers are large, its authority is awe-inspiring, but not that awe-inspiring. The blame for our current situation goes further back and higher up even than the majestic office currently held by Mr Keith Mitchell. It even goes higher up and further back than the substantial, not to say monumental, figure of Eric Pickles. To find the true origin you’d have to go on a long journey back in time, and you might do worse than to make your first stop in Chicago, the home of the famous Chicago School of Economics, which argued for the unfettered freedom of the market and as little government as possible.

France's eBook Moment - CCC's Beyond the Book

From Beyond the Book, Chris Kenneally takes a look at what's happening to digital books in France (Interview):

At Editis, one of France’s leading publishers, Virginia Clayssen oversees digital development. In an interview with CCC’s Chris Kenneally, she accounts for why France has not yet had its ebook moment, but is about to this year. “We didn’t have in France the Kindle effect, because connected e-readers are just arriving in France. We have one now, but it’s very new.”

Sweeping broadly across the digital landscape, Clayssen also comments on why controlling e-book prices matters to French publishers; on the importance of copyright and reasons for French rejection of the pending Google Book Settlement; and on sustaining French literary life in the digital age.

Also on the Google Book Settlement:

Q. Well that raises inevitably the Google book settlement with which the French government and French publishers became actively involved. And of course it’s all still up in the air right now, sitting on the desk of Judge Chin here in New York City, and we’ll have to wait for him to tell us what he thinks.
But tell us, in summary, what the French publishing community’s reaction was to the proposed settlement.

A: French publishers rejected this settlement for several reasons. One reason is they were not happy with Google digitizing content without permission of right owners. A second reason is to think it’s maybe it’s not a very good thing to have a global library completely controlled by a private company, even if we love this company and we have nothing against Google, but in the principle. Maybe this big, big project to make out-of-print books available for the public has to be managed by public institutions and not by a private company.

There is a real risk of monopoly on orphan works, though we are very sensitive about these questions and we have now a project with French government to build a solution for to make available out-of-print French works, and it’s a big project, and we are hard working on it to do this in the next years.

MediaWeek (Vol 4, No 4): Changing Higher Ed. Book Awards, Pippi, 007, Forecasting Technology, Michael Lewis

From The Chronicle of Higher Ed, an open letter to President Obama about the way education is changing and how we need to adapt accordingly:

The new regulations that your education officials have imposed suggest that online instruction isn’t as good as the old fashioned way of learning … you know, the sleep-in-the-back-of-the-room or catch-up-on-your-e-mail or text-all-of-your-friends-about-Saturday-night-while-the-teacher-yaks-at-the-front-of-the-room kinds of classes. For example, when a student is enrolled in a classroom-based class, the Department of Education considers him to be engaged in an academically related activity by virtue of the act of walking into class. It doesn’t matter if he sleeps through the entire class. I guess learning will just happen by osmosis. However, starting on July 1st of this year, when a student is enrolled in an online course, and she performs the equivalent of walking into class by logging into the electronic classroom portal, the Department of Education will not consider this to be an academically related activity. Well, is entering the classroom an academically related activity or isn’t it? Meanwhile, a faculty member is far more likely to know the level of engagement of an online student versus a classroom-based student because in the online environment, the professor can monitor all of the activities in which a student has been engaged—all day—and not just those that took place during a regularly scheduled 50-minute period.

How are books selected for the National Book Critics Awards (Beast):

The confidential awards nomination and voting process begins at the first meeting of the new board in March. Awards committee chairs in all six categories are elected and committees of at least eight members are formed. Throughout the rest of the year, committee members nominate books on a password-protected online Writeboard, and discuss them on dedicated email listservs. The conversation ebbs and flows through the summer months. The afternoon of the September board meeting is devoted to the first discussions of the books, led by committee chairs. It’s not breaking any rules to suggest that the words one hears include these: “Formulaic.” “Doggerel.” “Brilliant.” “Thin.”

Noted before (but it's been weeks since a Larsson link) the connection with Pippi Longstocking (Millions):

Pippi’s endlessly obliging world certainly isn’t Salander’s; Pippi is a children’s book heroine, after all. But Pippi and Salander do share a fundamental character trait: a deep sense of justice and courage in the pursuit of justice—very real, if increasingly rare, human qualities. In one of Pippi’s first adventures, she stands up to five boys bullying a younger boy. She interrupts the bullies’ taunting of the little boy and brings their taunts on herself. The bullies tease Pippi about her red hair and her clown shoes, but Pippi just smiles her friendliest smile and seems not to hear their taunts. This enrages the ringleader and he shoves her. So, Pippi calmly lifts the bully up and hangs him on a high tree branch, telling him, “I don’t think you have a very nice way with the ladies.”

Intellectualizing James Bond (Atlantic):

It was time to bring 007 back in line with the rest of the world. After 20 films spanning 4 decades, it took a full reboot of the series, with 2006's Casino Royale, to make the Bond franchise relevant again. Casino Royale depicts a ruthless, unpolished 007 on his inaugural mission, under MI6 boss M's watchful (and occasionally skeptical) eye. But Casino Royale was more than just a simple reboot; it was an aggressive rejection of the series' best-known conventions. There's no banter with familiar characters like Miss Moneypenny or Q to lighten the mood. Le Chiffre, the film's primary villain, doesn't want to rule the world; he wants money, and he's willing to work with terrorists to gain it. When Bond is captured, Le Chiffre's torture method isn't a laser or a shark tank; it's beating Bond's genitals with a knotted rope. And, most significantly, despite Bond's legendary womanizing, much of the film is devoted to an honest-to-God love story (between James Bond and the enigmatic Vesper Lynd).

Regrettably falls flat: No Bond would be caught in this (Link) Explaining the future of technology is the purpose of science fiction (Slate):

What's valuable about this for societies is that science-fiction writers explore these issues in ways that working scientists simply can't. Some years ago, for a documentary for Discovery Channel Canada, I interviewed neurobiologist Joe Tsien, who had created superintelligent mice in his lab at Princeton—something he freely spoke about when the cameras were off. But as soon as we started rolling, and I asked him about the creation of smarter mice, he made a "cut" gesture. "We can talk about the mice having better memories but not about them being smarter. The public will be all over me if they think we're making animals more intelligent." But science-fiction writers do get to talk about the real meaning of research. We're not beholden to skittish funding bodies and so are free to speculate about the full range of impacts that new technologies might have—not just the upsides but the downsides, too. And we always look at the human impact rather than couching research in vague, nonthreatening terms.

About Charles Portis from The Telegraph:

After three years in Little Rock, Portis moved on to the Herald-Tribune, working for three years in New York before his spell in London. Based near the Savoy Hotel, he combined reporting with his duties as bureau chief. He was amused rather than annoyed by the constant clicks of the telephones that indicated British intelligence were tapping his calls. He also dealt with Downing Street, as he remembered: “The Prime Minister was Sir Alec Douglas-Home. He gave us – a handful of American correspondents – one or two off-the-record interviews and spoke of Lyndon Johnson as, 'your, uh, rather racy president’, referring, I suppose, to Johnson’s barnyard humour.” He quickly became disillusioned with the whole business of “management comedies”. As he says: “I wanted to try my hand at fiction, so I gave notice and went home to America.” That was in November 1964. Four years later, he had published True Grit to widespread acclaim. Roald Dahl – who rarely reviewed books – wrote in praise for the American first edition dust jacket: “True Grit is the best novel to come my way for a very long time. I was going to say it was the best novel to come my way since…Then I stopped. Since what? What book has given me greater pleasure in the last five years? Or in the last 20? I do not know. I expect some have, but I cannot recall them right now. Marvellous it is. He hasn’t put a foot wrong anywhere. What a writer!”

Michael Lewis on book tour in the UK (Observer):

Lewis says he isn't surprised that the four Republican members of the commission refused to sign off its findings. "There is a big effort by the right wing to carve a narrative out in the public mind. It runs as follows: it was government intervention that created the crisis; Bill Clinton forced the banks to lend money to black people; Barney Frank [former Democratic chairman of the House of Representatives financial services committee] turned a blind eye to what was going on at [mortgage companies] Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which then generated demand for these loans." A few people have worked on that story, because whenever I speak at lectures, somebody always jumps up to peddle this line. But if you look at the facts, Fannie and Freddie's share of the sub-prime market fell in 2005, 2006 and 2007. The crash happened because of a dramatic failure of free markets and capitalism in general. To top it all, the banks were saved by the taxpayer. In other words, banks benefit from socialism, while everyone else has to live under capitalism. The people who are paid the most live by a different set of rules to everyone else. How absurd is that?"

From the twitter this week: Borders delays payments to conserve cash Reuters The Differential Rates Of Digital Change Problem GreenLamp Go To Hellman: It's No Pocalypse at Digital Book World Blog Summit Business Media Files for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Protection Media Thomson Reuters’ Culture of Organizational Curiosity Forbes And in sports, two morons get what they deserve (BBC)

Once The Americana now Sheraton

A weekly image from my archive. Click on the image to make it larger.

The Americana, now renamed the Sheraton is where I spent the past two days attending a conference. This image is taken from Rock Center looking north west toward the Hudson river and was shot in September 1968 when the PND seniors were visiting NYC. In this roll are other images taken from the top of the Rock in all directions which collectively provide a time capsule view of the Manhattan skyline.

As you will notice the images are washed out and I am not sure is this the error of the photographer or simply time.

Once The Americana now Sheraton, New York 1968

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MediaWeek (Vol 4, No 3): UK Libraries, Perceptions of US Libraries, Pearson Acquires, Wolters Kluwer Partner, Libraries in the Cloud

UK libraries are facing potentially dire circumstances with funding cuts from Westminster forcing local governments to make some hard and unpopular decisions about funds. Across the UK organized groups are going on mass 'lend-out's where they are encouraging patrons to check out as many books as possible. This weekend there were several articles about the situation in most of the major newspapers.

Libraries: 'Hands off our doors to learning' The Independent on Sunday has been inundated with stories about the role public libraries have played in readers' lives. Campaigns to stop councils from closing as many as half of their libraries are gathering pace, as public figures protest furiously about 'cultural vandalism'. They share their memories with Nina Lakhani

From the Telegraph:

In response to the need for cuts, Oxfordshire county council wants to axe 20 of its 43 libraries. Among them is a small stone building in Bampton, the archetypally English village that doubled as Downton for ITV. For me, the library was almost a second home, where my lifelong love of Asterix – and of reading, generally – was kindled. The thought of its closure causes quite extraordinary pain. Lord Fellowes, Downton Abbey’s writer, and a prominent defender of his own local libraries, is quick to commiserate. “In a village like that, a library has a real function,” he says. “There was someone quoted the other day as saying they’re for the white middle classes. But that’s exactly who they’re not principally for, particularly in the country.” That is a point that the villagers will be quick to make. But they won’t be alone. Across the country, more than 400 libraries are on the chopping block – and everywhere, informal coalitions are assembling to defend them. The residents of Stony Stratford, in Milton Keynes, borrowed every single one of their library’s 16,000 books to highlight how much they valued it. Is this just special pleading by the middle classes? No – because libraries are not just another public service. They are a physical embodiment of the idea that knowledge is to be cherished, both for its own sake and for its power to change lives. That was why, when they sought to improve themselves, members of the working class in the 18th and 19th centuries reached for the bookshelves. That is why Andrew Carnegie, the ultimate self-made man, devoted much of his fortune to building libraries. The design almost always included a staircase and a lantern – symbols of learning’s power to uplift the mind, and illuminate the soul.

The Telegraph tells the story behind Graham Greene's Brighton Rock (Telegraph):

Brighton Rock started out, Greene tells us, as a “simple detective story” but developed into a “discussion, too obvious and open for a novel, of the distinction between good and evil, and right and wrong and the mystery of the 'appalling strangeness of the mercy of God’”. It is set among the racecourse touts and razor-wielding gangsters of Brighton and, like Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square, Brighton Rock vividly evokes the raffish seaside town, awash with weekending Londoners who shared Greene’s own liking for pubs and beer and sausages. Rose Macaulay remembered Greene saying that “only RCs were capable of real sin because the rest of us were so invincibly ignorant”: the psychopathic Pinkie and his girlfriend are both Catholics, and although Pinkie is intent on his own damnation, he is well aware that “these atheists, they don’t know nothing”. The “real point” of the story, Greene said, was “the contrast between the ethical mind and the religious” and it set a pattern for Greene’s later “Catholic” novels.

Earlier reports suggested that Pearson were to invest in Indian education services company TutorVista (Times Of India):

British publishing major Pearson may infuse fresh capital into TutorVista, an integrated education services company, which is raising in excess of $50 million. Pearson, which holds around 17% stake in the firm, could increase its holding as it participates in the latest round of fund raising along with new private equity investors. The entrepreneur duo of K Ganesh and Meena Ganesh, who are the investors behind CustomerAsset BPO (which became ICICI Onesource) and Marketics KPO (sold to WNS), has been holding talks with PE giants GIC of Singapore and Providence, among others. The transaction is expected to be announced in the last week of January, which may also see TutorVista announcing a small acquisition in the US.

But the company decided to buy it outright (Pearson):

Pearson, the world’s leading learning company, today announces that it has agreed to increase its shareholding in TutorVista to a controlling 76% stake for a consideration of $127m. Pearson acquired a minority stake in TutorVista in June 2009 and this transaction takes Pearson’s total equity investment in the company to approximately $139m.

TutorVista was founded in 2005 by Krishnan Ganesh and is headquartered in Bangalore. The company has four main activities:

1. Technology: TutorVista supplies digital content and technology platforms to private and government schools in India, typically under long term contracts. It currently serves approximately 3,300 classrooms;
2. Online tutoring: it provides online tutoring services to approximately 10,000 students per month. It uses Voice-Over-Internet-Protocol and online whiteboards to connect instructors in India with school and college students, principally in North America, with developing opportunities across the globe;
3. Test preparation and tuition: it operates a network of 60 centres across southern India delivering English language coaching courses for university entrance exams and out-of-class tuition to K-12 school children for SAT, ACT, AP and other exams; and
4. K-12 schools: it provides a full suite of services including curriculum design, teacher training, technology solutions and school administration services to schools serving approximately 5,000 students in India.

India's government currently invests $40bn each year or three per cent of GDP in education, while Indian consumers spend more than $40bn on private educational institutions and services. Both segments of the market are growing rapidly as a result of government commitment to increase the quality of and access to learning opportunities as a means of sustaining economic growth and reducing poverty.

This acquisition further supports Pearson’s goals of building significant education companies in selected fast-growing markets and applying its learning services and technologies to support governments and institutions in making educational opportunities more accessible and more effective. TutorVista will be integrated into our education business in India and will enhance our presence in the school market in India and in tutoring across the globe in schools and higher education.

Pearson also raised their guidence for the year (Pearson):

All of Pearson’s major businesses sustained their strong trading momentum throughout 2010. We will report healthy sales growth and further margin improvement, fuelled by our consistent investment in the global learning industry, in digital services and in developing economies. As a result, we now expect to report continuing operating profits for 2010 of approximately £850m, a headline increase of approximately 20% (compared with £710m in 2009, excluding Interactive Data, which was sold in July 2010, from both years). We expect to report adjusted earnings of approximately 76p per share, an increase of approximately 16% on 65.4p in 2009, and ahead of our previous guidance of approximately 72p.

WoltersKluwer announced a joint venture with leading China drug information company Medicom (PR):

Wolters Kluwer Health today announced a joint venture with leading China drug information provider Medicom to deliver clinical decision support to doctors in China as the country prepares for significant changes to its healthcare system. The deal allows Wolters Kluwer Health to expand its market-leading Clinical Decision Support (CDS) and drug information business into the rapidly growing China market and creates a needed drug information infrastructure in China. “The clinical decision support market in China is at a critical juncture, similar to what we saw in the U.S. market many years ago,” said Arvind Subramanian, President & CEO, Wolters Kluwer Health Clinical Solutions. “Our agreement with Medicom gives Wolters Kluwer Health a strong entry point in China and creates a solid foundation for us to introduce more advanced CDS products and solutions that will give healthcare professionals in China unparalleled access to evidence-based medicine for the advancement of healthcare.” Medicom, located in the city of Chengdu in the Sichuan Province, has a strong footprint in the China healthcare market, providing drug information and services. Its products and services are highly complementary to those of Wolters Kluwer Health’s Clinical Solutions business, which offers healthcare professionals fast access to evidence-based medical information that helps clinicians effectively manage patient care on a daily basis. The combined offering creates a robust library of clinical content not previously available in China that physicians can access at the point of learning as well as at the point of care with patients.

OCLC's 2005 report on the perceptions of libraries was widely circulated at the time and the organization has revisited that report in a new release (OCLC):

Perceptions of Libraries, 2010: Context and Community is a follow-up to the 2005 Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources. The new report provides updated information and new insights into information consumers and their online information habits, preferences and perceptions. Particular attention was paid to how the current economic downturn has affected information-seeking behaviors and how those changes are reflected in the use and perception of libraries. The OCLC membership report explores:

• Technological and economic shifts since 2005
• Lifestyle changes Americans have made during the recession, including increased use of the library and other online resources
• How a negative change to employment status impacts use and perceptions of the library
• How Americans use online resources and libraries in 2010
• Perceptions of libraries and information resources based on life stage, from teens to college students, to senior Americans.

The membership report is based on U.S. data from an online survey conducted by Harris Interactive on behalf of OCLC. OCLC analyzed and summarized the results to produce Perceptions of Libraries, 2010: Context and Community, which is available for download on the OCLC Web site free of charge. Print copies of the report are available for a nominal fee to cover the cost of printing and shipping.

And those readers paying attention will recall my speech at Frankfurt last year where I discussed significant changes underway in academic libraries in how print collections are changing. Earlier this month OCLC released a report on Cloud Sourcing Research Collections (OCLC):

The objective of the project was to examine the feasibility of outsourcing management of low-use print books held in academic libraries to shared service providers, including large-scale print and digital repositories. The study assessed the opportunity for library space saving and cost avoidance through the systematic and intentional outsourcing of local management operations for digitized books to shared service providers and progressive downsizing of local print collections in favor of negotiated access to the digitized corpus and regionally consolidated print inventory.

Some of the findings from the project that are detailed in the report include:

• There is sufficient material in the mass-digitized library collection managed by the HathiTrust to duplicate a sizeable (and growing) portion of virtually any academic library in the United States, and there is adequate duplication between the shared digital repository and large-scale print storage facilities to enable a great number of academic libraries to reconsider their local print management operations.
• The combination of a relatively small number of potential shared print providers, including the US Library of Congress, was sufficient to achieve more than 70% coverage of the digitized book collection, suggesting that shared service may not require a very large network of providers.
• Substantial library space savings and cost avoidance could be achieved if academic institutions outsourced management of redundant low-use inventory to shared service providers.
• Academic library directors can have a positive and profound impact on the future of academic print collections by adopting and implementing a deliberate strategy to build and sustain regional print service centers that can reduce the total cost of library preservation and access.

From the executive summary:

It is our strong conviction, based on the above findings, that academic libraries in the United States (and elsewhere) should mobilize the resources and leadership necessary to implement a bridge strategy that will maximize the return on years of investment in library print collections while acknowledging the rapid shift toward online provisioning and consumption of information. Even, and perhaps especially, in advance of any legal outcome on the Google Book Search settlement, academic libraries have a unique opportunity to reconfigure print supply chains to ensure continued library relevance in the print supply chain. In the absence of a licensing option, online access to most of the digitized retrospective literature will be severely constrained. Demand for print versions of digitized books will continue to exist and libraries will be motivated to meet it, but they will need to do so in more cost-effective ways. In the absence of fully available online editions, full-text indexing of digitized in-copyright material provides a means of moderating and tuning demand for print versions and should facilitate the transfer of an increasing part of the print inventory to high-density warehouses. Viewed in this light, shared print storage repositories could enable a significant and positive shift in library resources toward a more distinctive and institutionally relevant service portfolio.

From the twitter (@personanondata): Amazon Changes Digital Text Platform to Kindle Direct Publishing http://bit.ly/h4pxkH Digital Publisher Vook Closes $5.25 Million Financing http://bit.ly/g22bf1 Thomson Reuters Acquires Legal Publishing Group in Argentina & Chile http://bit.ly/fLgx8T Bloomberg: Bertelsmann Leads $15mm round for College Textbook Publisher Flat World Knowledge, FT Says http://bloom.bg/goZQOH MediaPost: Ad Networks Ordered To Stop Working With Alleged eBook Piracy Site http://bit.ly/hBtVW0 Publishers get a measure of India's booming English book market - The National http://bit.ly/h3WTUH In sports Manchester United continue to under perform (if you must find something to criticize), but England get embarrassed again (although we don't really care about this slog).

Juliet on St Mark's Place

Juliet on St Mark's Place, New York June 1991

A weekly image from my archive. Click on the image to make it larger.
The frame immediately preceding this one is without the girl but she makes this photo. Taken on St Mark's Place just off 3rd Avenue in June 1991, I don't even know if this building is there anymore. I think the place was some kind of community center although I'm not sure. You can see the tracings of the original windows which seems to indicate that there may be some large rec space behind that wall.

In addition to the girl it is the purple door that originally caught my eye as I walked up the street. I can only image what the color scheme inside must have looked like if the building was blue and the rooms were purple.

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Toward Better Industry Sales Stats

The AAP and BISG announced their plans for the collection of sales data and will be using Bowker's industry leading data collection tools to power the work. In a jointly written letter and press release AAP and BISG have embarked on an effort to encourage wide participation and support for the initiative. Sales data collection in the US publishing market has long been rife with under reporting, limited participation and flawed logic. This combined effort represents an attempt to address all the failures of the old methods will also enabling some new analytics and value add.

From the press release:

Our efforts to improve the accuracy and quality of data collection rest primarily on the commitment and engagement of the entire industry. Book publishers’ data submissions are critical to the success of the final product. We hope we can count on your participation leading into the New Year. We have a target rollout date of May 2011.

The new data product, to be released annually in its first phase, will provide a comprehensive view of book publishing sales aggregated by revenue, units, categories, formats and distribution channels. For a review of the first cut of the data model please visit AAP OR BISG.

The industry’s response to the new joint venture has been overwhelmingly positive, due to the critical need for accurate industry data to assess changes in the marketplace. We expect the rate of publisher participation to increase exponentially, with data being provided by all vertical markets (trade, academic, professional). Moreover we are actively seeking the full engagement of large, mid-sized, small, and niche publishers. When final, the new data set will be delivered in print as well as by means of a data warehouse that will provide sophisticated tools for more detailed data access and customized analysis.

Finally, we are developing a new algorithm to estimate the size of the industry, which will complement actual reports from participants. This new methodology will incorporate data from non-publishing partners including other industry data collection services, associations, retailers, distributors and wholesalers.

We’re pleased to announce that the joint venture has retained the services of Bowker as the data collection provider for the new joint venture led by industry statistics veteran Kelly Gallagher, Vice President, Publisher Services. Kelly will be working closely with the BookStats Steering Committee comprised of Kenneth Michaels, Chief Operating Officer, Hachette Book Group; Dominique Raccah, CEO, Sourcebooks; Joe Gonnella, Vice President, Adult Trade Merchandising, Barnes & Noble, Inc; Scott Lubeck, Executive Director, Book Industry Study Group, and Tina Jordan, Vice President, Association of American Publishers. Kelly will also be assisted by longstanding AAP statistics provider Management Practice, Inc. for additional support.

We encourage you to contact the AAP’s Tina Jordan, BISG’s Scott Lubeck or Bowker’s Kelly Gallagher to participate in the data submission process. Tina can be reached at (212) 255-0275 or via email at tjordan@publishers.org. Scott can be reached at (646) 336-7141 or via email at scott@bisg.org; and Kelly can be reached at Kelly.gallagher@bowker.com or 908/219-0063.