Most conferences now encourage attendees to reach out in advance to set up meetings with exhibitors. I tend to use this option as a last resort but and I've occasionally been able to set up business meetings with a target this way. London Bookfair and BookExpo are two conferences where I used their conference networking function. Unfortunately, it is my experience this avenue is frequently ignored by the publisher, despite the fact that there is frequently a specific person identified as the recipient for your message. I'm not sure if this is due to laziness or just incompetence but either way this makes this route to contacting a target often hit or miss.
Sometimes - and this has occurred to me in other contexts - you wonder at the decision making and competence of some of the people on the front lines. Given some responses I've received from marketing and sales staff, I wonder how aware senior management are in the breadth and depth of the barriers sometimes placed in front of people who want to do business with them. Training any staff to use their common sense or go beyond the strict limits of their job description for the betterment of the company sounds like something that wouldn't be needed but that's often not my experience. This might be especially true of staff who are placed as points of contact - at a trade show or conference, etc. - where they are likely to receive a wide array of overtures. Most of these will be spurious but occasionally that's not the case. Many of these contacts will be beyond the staff's experience or specific day-to-day job responsibilities (that's the nature of a trade show), and they should be trained to validate these contacts and forward them to the right internal person. Or they could simply provide the right person to approach. Too often they are not forthcoming in either way.
At a recent conference, I noticed that a division of a publisher who I've been trying to reach for a long time was exhibiting. Since all my prior contacts had run cold I reached out to the contact person on the conference website. I validated my approach by noting we were working with a sister division of the company (and with several competitors) but to no avail. I was told that the division was not in fact exhibiting this year and the marketing assistant suggested I register on their supplier website and the right person would get back to me. I went to the supplier website and it was clear to me this site was more for plumbers and paper suppliers. Not exactly where I thought I'd get the right response.
When I went back to the marketing person to question whether registering on that site was likely to put me in touch with someone at the same level as the person we were working with in their sister division, I got the pert response from the marketing assistance 'why don't you ask her yourself?' That's a quote.
That wasn't very helpful but the story has a happy ending. My colleague, was also chasing a contract at the same company, ended up getting a meeting at the show. Interestingly, when I went by the stand the marketing person I had the above exchange with was standing right next to the person my colleague arranged to meet. Now, how do I remind that marketing person about her complete incompetence - in a nice way, and shouldn't the boss know what the front line is doing?
Wednesday, June 06, 2012
Texas Texts are Tainted
Gail Collins in the NY Review of Books on the influence of Texas and the selection of content in many educational textbooks. It's an old story but entertaining nevertheless.
The changes often seemed to be thrown out haphazardly, and to pass or fail on the basis of frequently opaque conclusions on the part of the swing members. In 2010, the board tossed out books by the late Bill Martin Jr., the author of Baby Bear, Baby Bear, What Do You See?, from a list of authors third-graders might want to study because someone mixed him up with Bill Martin, the author of Ethical Marxism.Another post from a few years back (Post)
The final product the board came up with called for a curriculum that would make sure that students studying economic issues of the late nineteenth century would not forget “the cattle industry boom” and that when they turned to social issues like labor, growth of the cities, and problems of immigrants they also take time to dwell on “the philanthropy of industrialists.” When it came to the Middle Ages, the board appeared to be down on any mention of the Crusades, an enterprise that tends to reflect badly on the Christian side of Christian–Islamic conflict. And when they got to the cold war era, the board wanted to be sure students would be able to “explain how Arab rejection of the State of Israel has led to ongoing conflict.” Later, they were supposed to study “Islamic fundamentalism and the subsequent use of terrorism by some of its adherents.” And that appeared to be pretty much all young people in Texas were going to be required to know about Arab nations and the world’s second-largest religion.
Monday, June 04, 2012
Georgia State Update from Inside Higher Ed
ISHEd reviews the latest information pertaining to the Georgia State eReserves case (ISHEd)
Strictly speaking, Cambridge v. Patton only pertains to e-reserve practices at Georgia State. However, given the ambiguity over the boundaries of educational fair use with respect to academic libraries, many observers expect that the resolution of the case will cause ripple effects in e-reserve policies across the country.
As with the last proposed settlement by the publishers, this new proposal is likely to ruffle feathers among academic librarians.
"The proposed order is clearly intended to humiliate [Georgia State] and to make fair use as difficult as possible for them," wrote Kevin Smith, scholarly communications officer at Duke University, on his blog. "It reads to me like a party who actually won very little at the trial still trying to spike the ball in the other parties’ face."
BookExpo Week: Education Sessions of Interest
Some of the many interesting sessions at the Book Expo conference here in the big smoke this week. (Full Program)
Raise Your Revenue & Increase Your Profit Margins With Direct-To-Consumer Sales
Date: Monday, June 4 9:30 am - 10:20 amLocation: 1E04Author/Participant: Don Leeper (Founder ) BookMobile
John Oakes (co-publisher) OR Books
Keith Shay (CEO) Ware-Pak
Molly Koecher (Vice President & General Manager) Cartech, Inc.
Description:
Direct To Consumer Sales (DTC) are an indispensible sales option for publishers who want to be successful. Savvy publishers can take advantage of Direct-To-Consumer Sales and look forward to an increase in earning potential and establishing social relationships with a target audience for future sales. By selling directly to the consumer, publishers earn the full retail price of their products, which translates into higher profit margins. As a publisher, each time you reach out and make a connection to your consumer directly, it builds your brand, utilizes the reaching-readers strategy, and can create a loyal audience for future titles and products. This informative and educational session will help publishers learn how to fulfill online ebook sales and the logistics of print fulfillment. Also included are the secrets to creating a successful promotional marketing campaign, building a consumer-focused website and how to take full advantage of Print on Demand (POD).
Protecting Your Titles - Building Out The Digital Rights & Permissions Marketplace!
Date: Monday, June 4 11:00 am - 11:50 amLocation: 1E04Author/Participant: Bill Manfull (Sales Director)
Michael Healy (Executive Director, Author & Publisher Relations)
Robert Kasher
Dick Stahl (Managing Director)Description:
The next digital frontier in publishing will focus on Digital Rights and Permissions! This exciting and informative session will focus on presenting a hands-on practical guide to protecting published works with the digitalization of Rights and Permissions. Publishers will learn exactly what the benefits are to having proper Digital Rights and Permissions in place for their titles. Learn how to handle legacy contract digitalizing and why making this a priority is so important in today's downloadable mobile environment. Publishers who want to successfully enter the online marketplace should be integrated into the Book Industry Study Group's controlled rights vocabulary for Onix3 metadata and this will be covered in detail during this session.
The Changing Face of E-Book Reading: Presenting Trended E-Book Consumer Data, 2009 - 2012
Date: Tuesday, June 5 9:00 am - 9:50 amLocation: 1E16Author/Participant: Len VlahosDescription:
Peel away both the hype and the cynicism and find out how consumers are actually using e-readers and consuming digital content. Presenting results from the third volume of the Book Industry Study Group's (BISG's) Consumer Attitudes Toward E-book Reading survey, Len Vlahos will provide a window into the mind of an e-book consumer. From e-reader preferences to price sensitivity, learn what end users really think today, and how this thinking has changed over the past three years.
The Current Size of U.S. Book Publishing: Exploring Shifts (2008-2011) Across Format, Category and Channel
Date: Tuesday, June 5 - 2:00 pm - 2:50 pmLocation: 1E11Author/Participant:
Dominique Raccah (CEO and Publisher) Sourcebooks
Moderator(s)
Angela Bole Speaker(s)
Kelly Gallagher (VP of Publishing Services) RR Bowker
Tina Jordan (Vice President) Association of American PublishersDescription:
In 2011, BookStats a joint venture between the Association of American Publishers and the Book Industry Study Group revolutionized the way the book industry looked at its own data. For the first time, publishers, booksellers, and other stakeholders benefited from an accurate sizing of the entire book ecosystem based on a heralded new methodology. Now, in 2012, BookStats is back, bigger and better than ever. In addition to data across three angles format, category, and channel the new edition will include a deeper dive into category analysis along with individual company benchmarking. In this session, members of the BookStats Steering Committee will reveal topline results from BookStats 2012 and discuss the importance of good data to the entire industry.
Digital Show & Tell
Date: Thursday, June 7 - 9:00 am - 12:00 pmLocation: 1E12/1E13Author/Participant:
Presenter(s): Book Industry Study GroupDescription:
At Digital Show & Tell, developed by the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) and sponsored by BookExpo America (BEA), participants will "Speed Date" up and coming projects in the e-book, e-reader, digital book and digital content space. How it works: Over the course of four hours – punctuated with coffee breaks, of course! – eighteen demonstrators will elevator pitch their innovative digital projects to a small group of participants for 5 minutes. Once time is up, the participants will rotate to a new demonstrator. When all’s said and done, participants will have "dated" eighteen exciting new digital projects and voted for their favorite! Digital Show & Tell is for anyone in the book publishing industry that wants to get up close and personal with new technologies and talk directly with the people who created and use them. Separate registration is required through the BISG website for this innovative, experiential program. Visit http://www.bisg.org/events-0-813-digital-show-tell.php for more information. There is an additional $25 fee to cover the cost of refreshments. Please note: all participants are also required to have a BEA badge to attend. BISG will ask at registration whether or not the person already has a BEA badge
Sunday, June 03, 2012
MediaWeek (Vol 5, No 23): Amazon, Achilles, Ulysses +More
In a heavily retweeted article, The Nation takes a look at The Amazon Effect. In the process, the author seems to rely a lot on what Jason Epstein had to say. (Not that there's anything wrong with that).
Jeff Bezos got what he wanted: Amazon got big fast and is getting bigger, dwarfing all rivals. To fully appreciate the fear that is sucking the oxygen out of publishers’ suites, it is important to understand what a steamroller Amazon has become. Last year it had $48 billion in revenue, more than all six of the major American publishing conglomerates combined, with a cash reserve of $5 billion. The company is valued at nearly $100 billion and employs more than 65,000 workers (all nonunion); Bezos, according to Forbes, is the thirtieth wealthiest man in America. Amazon may be identified in the public mind with books, but the reality is that book sales account for a diminishing share of its overall business; the company is no longer principally a bookseller. Amazon is now an online Walmart, and while 50 percent of its revenues are derived from music, TV shows, movies and, yes, books, another 50 percent comes from a diverse array of products and services. In the late 1990s Bezos bought IMDb.com, the authoritative movie website. In 2009 he went gunning for bigger game, spending nearly $900 million to acquire Zappos.com, a shoe retailer. He also owns Diapers.com, a baby products website. Now he seeks to colonize high-end fashion as well. “Bezos may well be the premier technologist in America,” said Wired, “a figure who casts as big a shadow as legends like Bill Gates and the late Steve Jobs.”Tales of brave Achilles: From the Observer a discussion of the continued popularity of Achilles (Observer)
Why are the classics making a comeback? According to Hughes, the classical historian and broadcaster, it is to do with emotional connection.
"You think of big epic tales and you think they're just to do with war and conflict, but Homer actually writes beautiful lines," she says. "There's one line about Athena brushing an arrow away 'like a mother brushing a fly off the face of a sleeping child'. I read that and I remembered doing that with my own child.
"So suddenly there's an immediate emotional connection, 27 centuries later, to me as a 21st-century mother. There are big philosophical connections, but also the base connection of what it is to be human.
"I do think that, post-millennium and post-9/11, people have become much less abashed about asking the big questions about why we're here. If anything can answer those, it's the wisdom of the ancients because the Greeks and Romans weren't just swanning around in the Mediterranean sunshine, they were living in tough times. You could be dead by the age of 45. You were in a time of total war."
BBC Radio 4 is planning a whole day on Joyce's Ulysses for Bloomsday June 16th (Observer):
Which makes it all the more welcome that the BBC is intending to go several better than its (admittedly useful) cheats' guide and mount an extensive celebration of the novel on this year's Bloomsday. This coming 16 June, Radio 4 will be a wall-to-wall Joycefest, kicking off at 9am and running until midnight: a new, five-and-a-half hour dramatisation of Ulysses, narrated by Stephen Rea and starring Henry Goodman, Niamh Cusack and Andrew Scott, will be punctuated by broadcasts by Mark Lawson in Dublin and discussions about the book's place in 20th-century literature.
To reassure those who might quail at some of the book's more full-blooded material, the Beeb has emphasised that its raciest parts will be concentrated after 8pm (although there has not been a cull of the explicit: as the dramatisation's producer, Jeremy Mortimer, points out: "You can't have a Molly Bloom that doesn't enjoy sex").
Potentially interesting big data application in Higher Ed gets some funding (TC):
With capital in tow, Civitas is looking to provide colleges and universities not only with smart learning tools but also the ability to create their own learning apps based on its “Learning Community’s” application programming interfaces. By doing so, Civitas is providing an alternative path for scaling tools and solutions across institutions, through supporting publisher-created apps as well as those built by startups that otherwise could never invest in the integrations with campus systems or the sales cycles necessary to establish relationships with higher ed institutions.
In turn, the startup’s participating institutions can identify trends across swaths of student learning data, including a realtime view of which students are at risk of dropping out (and why), the ability to identify specific courses and degree paths that are contributing to attrition, and, in turn, what specific resources and interventions are most successful and for what type of students.
Frank Donoghue at The Chronicle thinks about the consequences of closing University Presses (Chronicle):
University presses have been an essential component of research institutions since the founding of Johns Hopkins, venues where scholarly knowledge could be dispersed to an admittedly small but interested intellectually interested community. It is, I admit, hard to imagine major universities without presses. But one has to at least consider: Have those various intellectual communities become too splintered, specialized and small? Have the monographs that university presses produce become so costly that individual scholars can’t purchase them? And, thus, have university presses outlived their time? If they have, there are even more dire professional consequences, which I will take up next time.From the Twitter:
Ten Reasons to Avoid Doing Business With Amazon - The Nation
Tintin cover fetches record price BBC
Spanish Booksellers to Sue Amazon Over Book Prices EbookNews
Textbooks don't have to be free, but $20/month is too much. Students will rebel. Blog (HT @neilschlager)
Libraries Grapple With The Downside Of E-Books NPR
Friday, June 01, 2012
Bus Station Kabul 1971
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| Bus Station Kabul 1971 |
I think this was the central bus station for Kabul. Hard to tell but there does seem to be some commotion down front where it looks like a crowd has gather over some dispute or other.
See all the bus passengers crammed onto the bus on the right. Hope they're not going far.
Another weekly image from my archive. Click on it to make it larger.
In addition to the images I've posted on Flickr and those I've periodically posted on PND, I have now produced a Big Blurb Book: From the Archive 1960 -1980 of some of the images I really thought were special.
Thursday, May 31, 2012
MediaWeek Report (Vol 5, No 22a): Pearson Buys Global English + McGraw-Hill, Cengage, Wiley Education News
Getting to be a recurring story: Pearson buys a language learning company this time Global English located in California. Pearson paid $90 million. From the press release:
In their investor presentation Cengage also provided this update to their debt refinancing effort:
In case you missed it Harcourt's "Official Statement" on their bankruptcy (Press Release):
Founded in 1997 in California, GlobalEnglish is a leading provider of cloud-based, on-demand Business English learning, assessment and performance support software. It serves more than 450 corporate customers, including 20 per cent of the Forbes Global 2000 companies, including General Electric, HSBC, Tata Consultancy Services and Unilever. Its product suite is uniquely suited to serve the needs of global professionals with a comprehensive offering - formal Business English learning coursework, informal and social learning capabilities, performance support tools, an enterprise collaboration platform, a mobile app, assessments and a premium one-on-one coaching service. GlobalEnglish’s Business English content is also entirely focused on the application of Business English to real life business situations such as composing emails and participating in conference calls, and its efficacy is highly rated by global companies and their employees. Approximately 75 per cent of GlobalEnglish’s more than 200,000 active subscribers are in fast growing economies in Latin America and AsiaMcGraw Hill announced some executive changes in advance of their Education spin-off (Press Release):
To continue the process of building a world-class team to lead the new education company, the Corporation is appointing Patrick Milano, currently Executive Vice President and Director of the Program Management Office of the Corporation's Growth and Value Plan, to the new position of Chief Financial Officer and Chief Administrative Officer of McGraw-Hill Education. Mr. Milano, a multi-year veteran of McGraw-Hill, including in the education segment, has successfully led the separation phase of the Growth and Value Plan since last year. In this new role, he will be responsible for Finance, Manufacturing, Distribution and IT, reporting to Jack Callahan, Chief Financial Officer of The McGraw-Hill Companies, until the new Chief Executive Officer of McGraw-Hill Education is appointed. Joe Micallef, currently Senior Vice President, Finance and Operations, will work closely with Mr. Milano on standing up McGraw-Hill Education before retiring following a very successful career at the company. (More)Cengage announced their Q3 results last month (Press Release)
Revenue for the third quarter 2012 is estimated to be between $335 million and $340 million as compared to $319 million for the same period in the prior year. Excluding National Geographic School Publishing (“NGSP”), acquired on August 1, 2011, revenue for the third quarter 2012 is estimated to be between $325 million and $330 million driven by growth in the higher education market. Domestic Learning revenue, excluding NGSP, is estimated to be $205 million to $210 million, as compared to $194 million for the same period in the prior year.Here is the full 3Q report
Adjusted EBITDA for the third quarter 2012 is estimated to be between $67 million and $72 million. The prior year third quarter Adjusted EBITDA of $89.7 million did not include an accrual for incentive compensation, but did include a credit related to a reversal of an accrual for incentive compensation accrued during the first half of fiscal 2011. On a comparable basis to this year‟s third quarter, Adjusted EBITDA for the third quarter of the prior year would have been $65 million.
Excluding NGSP, Adjusted EBITDA for the third quarter 2012 is estimated to be between $70 million and $75 million. Adjusted EBITDA for NGSP is negative for the quarter primarily due to seasonality as well as one-time costs related to achieving synergies from the integration of NGSP into Cengage Learning.
In their investor presentation Cengage also provided this update to their debt refinancing effort:
We completed the previously announced amendment and extension of our Credit Agreement whereby we:Anyone interested in how the education business is doing will be disappointed in the deck.
- Extended the maturity of $1.3 billion of our existing Term Loan, net of a partial pay down, to July 2017
- Provided for new commitments to maintain the existing $300 million of revolving credit facility availability until April 2017 resulting in a total extended and non-extended revolving credit facility of up to $525 million until July 2013, $300 million thereafter. We also completed our previously announced private placement of $725 million senior secured notes due in April 2020. These notes bear interest at a coupon rate of 11.5% and were issued at par. We used a portion of the proceeds from these notes to pay down $489 million of the extended term loan.
In case you missed it Harcourt's "Official Statement" on their bankruptcy (Press Release):
Today, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt filed a “pre-packaged” comprehensive financial restructuring plan that will strengthen the Company financially so we can continue to invest in our business and ensure we are well positioned for the future. This plan, which is supported by the vast majority of our key financial stakeholders, will eliminate $3.1 billion of debt through a debt to equity transaction, and reduce our annual cash interest costs. The Company today lodged voluntary petitions for reorganization under Chapter 11 in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York. With a more appropriate capital structure to support our strategic plan and business objectives, we will have greater financial flexibility to pursue growth opportunities.John Wiley released their 3Q results earlier in the month (Press Release):
John Wiley and Sons, Inc. (NYSE: JWA and JWB), a global provider of content and workflow solutions in areas of scientific, technical, medical, and scholarly research; professional and personal development; and education today announced results for the third quarter of fiscal year 2012:
- Revenue growth of 1% including and excluding foreign exchange (or "FX")
- Revenue by segment, including FX: STMS +3%, P/T -6% and Education +2%
- Adjusted EPS grew 8% to $0.91, or 6% excluding FX. Growth was driven by top-line results, prudent expense management and lower interest expense and income taxes.
- Shared Services and Administrative Costs excluding FX, were up 3% to $91 million, driven principally by technology spending to support investments in digital products and infrastructure.
- Outlook: Reaffirming FY12 revenue guidance of low single-digit growth excluding FX and EPS guidance in a range from $3.15 to $3.20 including the effect of FX and excluding the unusual tax benefits.
- Acquisition: In February, Wiley acquired Inscape Holdings, a leading global provider of workplace learning solutions, for $85 million in cash. Inscape will be integrated into Wiley's Professional/Trade business where it will combine Wiley's extensive reservoir of valuable content and its global reach in leadership and training with Inscape's technology, distribution network, and talent expertise, including the innovative EPIC online assessment-delivery platform and an elite network of nearly 1,700 independent consultants, trainers, and coaches. Annually, Inscape generates approximately $20 million in revenue.
- Divestment: On March 7, 2012, Wiley announced that it intends to explore opportunities to sell a number of its consumer print and digital publishing assets in its Professional/Trade business as they no longer align with the company's long-term business strategy. Fiscal Year 2011 revenue associated with the assets to be sold was approximately $85 million with a direct contribution to profit, before shared-service expenses, of approximately $6 million. Assets include travel (including the well-known Frommer's brand), culinary, general interest, nautical, pets, crafts, Webster's New World, and CliffsNotes. Wiley will re-deploy resources in its Professional/Trade business to build on its global market-leading positions in business, finance, accounting, leadership, technology, architecture, psychology, education, and through the For Dummies brand.
- Share Repurchases: Wiley repurchased 520,000 shares this quarter at a cost of $23 million. The Company has 2.9 million authorized shares remaining in its program.
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
MediaWeek (Vol 5, No 22): Orlando's "History"; Preserving Digital Archives, Publisher Apps + More
Apparently some relatively standard fact checking of the 2007 book by Orlando Figes The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia which was being translated into Russian has thrown up some 'minor and major' errors. The project has been abandoned. (The Nation)
In 2004 specialists at the Memorial Society, a widely respected Russian historical and human rights organization founded in 1988 on behalf of victims and survivors of Stalin’s terror, were contracted by Figes to conduct hundreds of interviews that form the basis of The Whisperers, and are now archived at Memorial. In preparing for the Russian edition, Corpus commissioned Memorial to provide the original Russian-language versions of Figes’s quotations and to check his other English-language translations. What Memorial’s researchers found was a startling number of minor and major errors. Its publication “as is,” it was concluded, would cause a scandal in Russia. This revelation, which we learned about several months ago, did not entirely surprise us, though our subsequent discoveries were shocking. Separately, we had been following Figes’s academic and related abuses for some time. They began in 1997, with his book A People’s Tragedy, in which the Harvard historian Richard Pipes found scholarly shortcomings. In 2002 Figes’s cultural history of Russia, Natasha’s Dance, was greeted with enthusiasm by many reviewers until it encountered a careful critic in the Times Literary Supplement, Rachel Polonsky of Cambridge University. Polonsky pointed out various defects in the book, including Figes’s careless borrowing of words and ideas of other writers without adequate acknowledgment. One of those writers, the American historian Priscilla Roosevelt, wrote to us, “Figes appropriated obscure memoirs I had used in my book Life on the Russian Country Estate (Yale University Press, 1995), but changed their content and messed up the references.” Another leading scholar, T.J. Binyon, published similar criticism of Natasha’s Dance: “Factual errors and mistaken assertions strew its pages more thickly than autumnal leaves in Vallombrosa.
Some may remember Figes as the classy guy who was writing derogatory reviews on Amazon of books by his colleagues.
Who collects the 'memories of a nation' in the digital age? Dame Lynne Brindley CEO of the British Library has an opinion. (New Statesman)
It is a matter of great regret that it will never be possible to plug the gap in our understanding of UK opinion about major social and cultural issues at the very beginning of the digital age. Will academics in the future feel the same sense of loss about some of this material that we feel today about the missing works of Ancient Greece’s greatest writers and thinkers?
The UK has been in the slow lane when it comes to preserving digital material. Non-print legal deposit is now widespread internationally, including much of Europe, Canada and New Zealand. It is two years since the United States Library of Congress announced that it would be keeping copies of every Tweet. The latest version of the UK Government’s proposed regulations is less than perfect. It would exempt start-ups and micro businesses from depositing offline publications or the need to provide passwords to enable us to harvest their websites.
The head of McGraw Hill Education got some press in the past week or so for suggesting that textbooks are on borrowed time. Only a little self interest of course. (Converge)
And what they want from us is, "Help me improve my performance. You improve my performance, learning company McGraw-Hill, then we will improve your performance." So it allows us to more aggressively invest back into our learning materials, and other kinds of things as well.
For example, we're probably where IBM was in the early- to mid-90s. IBM had their mainframes and is the ubiquitous case study. Then they had to move into services or products that their customers valued more.
In the end, it's not only about investing more in materials that will improve performance, but it's investing in our capability to provide other services to colleges and institutions, like retention services or online enablement services. The move toward e-materials allows us to change our business model entirely in many ways.
More about magazine publishers but Tech Review on "Why Publisher's Don't Like Apps"
But the real problem with apps was more profound. When people read news and features on electronic media, they expect stories to possess the linky-ness of the Web, but stories in apps didn't really link. The apps were, in the jargon of information technology, "walled gardens," and although sometimes beautiful, they were small, stifling gardens. For readers, none of that beauty overcame the weirdness and frustration of reading digital media closed off from other digital media.
Without subscribers or many single-copy buyers, and with no audiences to sell to advertisers, there were no revenues to offset the incremental costs of app development. With a couple of exceptions, publishers therefore soured on apps. The most commonly cited exception is Condé Nast, which saw its digital sales increase by 268 percent last year after Apple introduced an iPad app called Newsstand that promoted the New York publisher's iPad editions. Still, even 268 percent growth may not be saying much in total numbers. Digital is a small business for Condé Nast. For instance, Wired, the most digital of Condé Nast's titles, has 33,237 digital replica subscriptions, representing just 4.1 percent of total circulation, and 7,004 digital single-copy sales, which is 0.8 percent of paid circulation, according to ABC.
Bookseller Waterstones will begin selling Amazon's Kindle e-readers. Critics think the move is mad Economist
Alain de Botton to make highbrow porn Telegraph
Friday, May 25, 2012
Auckland Harbor 1972
The date is a bit of a guess since this is one of those images that wasn't date stamped. This would have been taken from a plane as we landed in Auckland on a return leg from Australia. In the old days most children would have been given a look into the cockpit and would have met the captain but of course not only has the glamor and uniqueness of air travel dissipated but with security you are unlikely to set eyes on the flight crew at all now a days.
I distinctly remember on one of these trips back to New Zealand, not only was I allowed to visit the cockpit but they let me stay right through landing. Not bad. When I was remembering this a few months ago with PND Senior he told me once how he went up to the cockpit on an Air India jumbo and the captain was sitting all alone in the cabin with his feet up on the dash looking out the window. He was spooning his soup out of a cup and my father asked, "Who's flying the plane?" and the pilot says "Don't worry the autopilot thing is on'.
A more simple time.
Another weekly image from my archive. Click on it to make it larger.
In addition to the images I've posted on Flickr and those I've periodically posted on PND, I have now produced a Big Blurb Book: From the Archive 1960 -1980 of some of the images I really thought were special.
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
BISG's Student Attitudes to Content in Higher Ed
The BISG has released the second installment of their report on student attitudes
Now available to purchase (and at significant discounts for BISG members), Student Attitudes Toward Content in Higher Education, Volume Two, Final Survey Report explores trends and issues in the higher ed market during the 2011-2012 academic year.
This report also integrates some data from BISG’s recent study of Faculty Attitudes, offering a unique comparison between student and faculty perspectives.
Key findings include:
In addition to the PDF Survey Report, data from Student Attitudes is available as a dynamic online data set via Real-Time Reporting: a web-based tool which displays raw data – drillable, sortable, and accessible whenever you want it.
- Nearly 48 percent of students feel Integrated Learning Systems help with their studying; compare that with 45 percent for the core print textbook and just 37 percent for the e-text.
- Although relatively few students have tablet devices — just 16 percent compared with 76 percent who own laptops — many are planning to acquire them, and are looking for course content available on these devices.
- Textbook rentals are on the rise, showing an increase from 8 percent last year to 11 percent this year. Meanwhile, acquisition from Amazon.com rose from 25 to 31 percent, while on-campus bookstores fell from 52 to 46 percent.
Sunday, May 20, 2012
MediaWeek (Vol 5, No 21): Internet Commons, Mass 'Professoriat", IP Markets, New ASCAP/BMI Model + More
In The Atlantic, Bill Davidow wonders whether like the sea, the internet will be 'over fished' (The Atlantic)
Free markets are the most efficient and best mechanism for managing most economic activity. But when they operate in arenas in which they can exploit the commons, the logic of the free market dictates that they will destroy it. Virtual retailers, for instance, live off their bricks-and-mortar brethren. They encourage customers to search for clothes that fit properly in retail stores that pay property taxes and other overhead costs, and then to buy them online. In the process, they get fat off the bricks-and-mortar commons.Give all the negative public relations that Elsevier has faced recently is a very different model on the horizon? (The American Interest):
One of the areas I see being chewed up at an alarming speed is privacy -- a vital aspect of our personal commons. We spend hours filtering out junk email, updating passwords, and worrying about stolen identity.
In the physical world, laws protect our privacy, and the cost of gaining access to us is high. (It costs a lot to send physical mail.) Physical spying is expensive. But in the virtual world, we have few property rights, few laws to protect us, and spying is almost free.
But the thought does occur to one: while it is relatively easy to see how public universities might want to support academic research in the natural sciences and economics, just how much do the taxpayers want to contribute toward the production of research of questionable utility in softer fields? And if the answer is, as I suspect it will increasingly be, that the taxpayers don’t want to shell out for these costs, how many fewer professors will our university systems employ?A fascinating look at a new way to 'market' and trade intellectual property (Economist):
It is much more fun to complain about the pirates of Elsevier than it is to think about the future of the mass professoriat, but I suspect that university faculties might soon find it necessary to adjust to a new set of public priorities. Fifteen years ago journalists thought that the internet wasn’t a serious issue for their field; today many of the journalists who once scoffed at the net are now unemployed.
All of which makes this a good time to launch a new approach to trading intellectual property, says Gerard Pannekoek, the boss of IPXI, a new financial exchange that lets companies buy, sell and hedge patent rights, just like any other asset. The idea is to offer a patent or group of patents as “unit licence rights” (ULRs), which can be bought and sold like shares. A ULR grants a one-time right to use a particular technology in a single product: a new type of airbag sensor in a car, say. If a company wants to use the technology in 100,000 cars, it buys 100,000 ULRs at the market price. ULRs are also expected to be traded on secondary markets.Capturing the 'data exhaust' from satellite transmissions to reinvent the way music royalties are made (WSJ):
So in 2009 , he and business partner and composer Chris Woods launched TuneSat, a startup that uses digital technology to monitor satellite TV signals from around the world and keep track of how music is being used in theme songs, advertisements, background soundtracks and other broadcast situations. Schreer is CEO and Woods is COO of the company. The value of the new Big Data driven part of his business has the potential to eclipse revenue from the core business of composing and producing music.Stop sending free textbooks complains higher ed faculty (IHEd):
Beyond that, they say TuneSat may help disrupt the performing rights business, an industry with $2 billion in revenue in U.S. and $9 billion worldwide, by putting powerful algorithms directly in the hands of copyright owners that allow them to scour and analyze the use of their work across the entire national TV market. A web-based application allows subscribers to access TuneSat’s servers and its proprietary analytic tools, in the process allowing them to bypass traditional royalty rights organizations, if they choose.
When I arrived at my office door one morning, arms full of books and lunch and workout clothes, and found my path blocked by an unsolicited box of books, the sales rep found my breaking point. I replied with a sharply but politely worded cease-and-desist message, making as clear as possible that I would disqualify unsolicited texts from consideration for adoption in our program because of my concern.
There are probably 50 pounds of never-requested and never-to-be-used textbooks in my office. I’d prefer 50 pounds of just about anything else. Fifty pounds of in-the-shell roasted peanuts to eat in my office; 50 pounds of water balloons to rain down on the heads of students who smoke under my frequently open office window.
Wednesday, May 16, 2012
MediaWeek (Vol 5, N 20): Georgia State Opinion Round-Up
For those interested in how discussions are setting up around the Georgia State eReserves Case:
Kevin Smith at Duke (perhaps the first to write in detail about the opinion):
Chronicle of Higher Ed: What's at Stake in the Georgia Case (2011):
Kevin Smith at Duke (perhaps the first to write in detail about the opinion):
Overall there is good news for libraries in the decision issued late yesterday in the Georgia State University e-reserves copyright case. Most of the extreme positions advocated by the plaintiff publishers were rejected, and Judge Evans found copyright infringement in only five excerpts from among the 99 specific reading that had been challenged in the case.James Grimmelmann: Inside the Georgia State Opinion
That means she found fair use, or, occasionally, some other justification, in 94 instances, or 95% of the time.
But that does not make this an easy decision for libraries to deal with. Indeed, it poses a difficult challenge for everyone involved, it seems. For the Judge, it was a monumental labor that took almost a year to complete. She wrote 350 pages, working through a raft of legal arguments first and then painstakingly applying them to each of the challenged readings. And for me, with a week’s vacation pending, I am trying to make sense of this tome before I leave, which is why I am writing this at four in the morning on a Saturday (please excuse typos!).
Thus, the operational bottom line for universities is that it’s likely to be fair use to assign less than 10% of a book, to assign larger portions of a book that is not available for digital licensing, or to assign larger portions of a book that is available for digital licensing but doesn’t make significant revenues through licensing. This third prong is almost never going to be something that professors or librarians can evaluate, so in practice, I expect to see fair-use e-reserves codes that treat under 10% as presumptively okay, and amounts over 10% but less than some ill-defined maximum as presumptively okay if it has been confirmed that a license to make digital copies of excerpts from the book is not available.ARL: GSU Fair Use Decision Recap and Implications (PDF) Hat tip Brantley
The most interesting issue open in the case is the scope of any possible injunction. Given that Georgia State won on sixty-nine out of seventy-four litigated claims, while the publishers won on only five, I expect that the any injunction will need to be rather narrow. But given how amenable the court’s proposed limits are to bright-line treatment, it is likely that the publishers will push to write them in to the injunction.
My bottom line on the case is that it’s mostly a win for Georgia State and mostly a loss for the publishers. The big winner is CCC. It gains leverage against universities for coursepack and e-reserve copying with a bright-line rule, and it gains leverage against publishers who will be under much more pressure to participate in its full panoply of licenses.
In addition to the statutory factors, courts are required to consider how aIn Some Leeway, Some Limits over at Inside Higher Ed:
proposed fair use serves or disserves the purpose of copyright, which is to
encourage the creation and dissemination of creative works. The judge’s
reasoning here is perhaps the most compelling and shows that she took into
account some key facts about the academic publishing market that are often
overlooked in these discussions. Based on testimony from GSU professors, the
judge finds that academic authors and editors are motivated by professional
reputation and achievement and the advancement of knowledge, not royalty
payments, and that any diminution in royalty payments due to unlicensed
course reserves would have no effect on their motivation to produce
scholarship.8 Indeed, because the authors of such works are also the primary
users of course reserve systems, they would experience a net benefit from fair
use in that context. The court emphasizes that publishers receive so little income
from licensing excerpts as a percentage of their overall business that the slight
diminution caused by allowing unlicensed posting to course reserves would
have no cognizable effect on their will or ability to publish new works.
Unfortunately, these additional considerations do not enter into the individual
determinations. Rather, the court finds that any uses that stay within her
framework will serve the purposes of copyright, and those that stray beyond it
will disserve them.
While the legal analysis may take time, both publishers and academic librarians have reacted strongly throughout the case. Publishers argued hat their system of promoting scholarship can't lose copyright benefits. Judge Evans in her decision noted that most book (and permission) sales for student use are by large for-profit companies, not by nonprofit university presses. But the Association of American University Presses has backed the suit by Cambridge and Oxford, saying that university presses "depend upon the income due them to continue to publish the specialized scholarly books required to educate students and to advance university research."
Many librarians, meanwhile, have expressed shock that university presses would sue a university for using their works for teaching purposes. Barbara Fister, a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College and an Inside Higher Ed blogger, tweeted Friday night: "It still boggles my mind that scholarly presses are suing scholars teaching works that were written to further knowledge."
The reserve readings at the crux of the dispute are chapters, essays or portions of books that are assigned by Georgia State professors to their undergraduate and graduate students. (While the readers are frequently referred to as "supplemental," they are generally required; "supplemental" refers to readings supplementing texts that the professors tell students to buy.) E-reserves are similar to the way an earlier generation of students might have gone to the library for print materials on reserve. The decision in this case notes a number of steps taken by Georgia State (such as password protection) to prevent students from simply distributing the electronic passages to others.
Ars Technica: Fair Use is Hard
So—crushing victory for Georgia State, whose professors can now dance gleefully through the ash of their foes in publishing? Not quite. After years of litigation, the case came down to 75 particular items that the publishers argued were infringing. Five unlicensed excerpts (from four different books) did exceed the amount allowed under factor three above. These books include The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research in both its second and third editions, along with The Power Elite and the no-doubt-scintillating tome Utilization-Focused Evaluation (Third Edition).Inside Higher Ed With Some Updates
While the university had issued a 2009 guide designed to help faculty know when they needed a license for excerpts, the judge found that the policy "did not limit copying in those instances to decidedly small excerpts as required by this Order. Nor did it proscribe the use of multiple chapters from the same book."
Still, copyright and fair use can be murky, and the judge found no bad faith on the school's part, concluding: "The truth is that fair use principles are notoriously difficult to apply."
Update, 5/15: In a conference call with reporters, Rich, along with Tom Allen, the president of AAP, disputed the popular notion that the publishers had "lost" the lawsuit. Before the publishers brought the suit four years ago, Georgia State's standards for e-reserve copying were far more permissive. Only afterward, in anticipation of a court trial, did Georgia State tighten its e-reserves policies, Rich said. During the trial, Judge Evans said she would only consider the fair use merits of instances of alleged infringement that occurred during a specific period after Georgia State had overhauled its practices.My contribution: Georgia Opinion - I see opportunity
Therefore, the judge's ruling was based on legal parsing of examples "that nobody thought would be the focal point of this lawsuit when it was brought,” Rich said. “So for Georgia State to declare victory as to those kinds of works is a false trail.”
While the scorecard might not have favored the publishers, the lawsuit forced Georgia State to shore up its e-reserve practices and confirmed that publishers' copyright protections do indeed apply to e-reserves. And that, Rich said, is not small victory. The lawsuit "was never about drawing the line at this point or that point, but to address a system that basically snubbed its nose at copyright," he said. “At a very fundamental level, that issue has been affirmatively addressed."
Judge Evans has plainly stated that if a publisher's chapter is readily and easily available and the permission is set at a "reasonable price" then the law comes down on the publisher's side. She notes specifically, Copyright Clearance Center which can deliver a permissions fee to the user (faculty, librarian, etc.) via Rightslink and, although CCC does not hold the actual content, publishers will be motivated to create digital repositories at a disaggregated level.Background to the Case:
Chronicle of Higher Ed: What's at Stake in the Georgia Case (2011):
A closely watched trial in federal court in Atlanta, Cambridge University Press et al. v. Patton et al., is pitting faculty, libraries, and publishers against one another in a case that could clarify the nature of copyright and define the meaning of fair use in the digital age. Under copyright law, the doctrine of fair use allows some reproduction of copyrighted material, with a classroom exemption permitting an unspecified amount to be reproduced for educational purposes.Library Journal (2010):
At issue before the court is the practice of putting class readings on electronic reserve (and, by extension, on faculty Web sites). Cambridge, Oxford University Press, and SAGE Publications, with support from the Association of American Publishers and the Copyright Clearance Center, are suing four administrators at Georgia State University. But the publishers more broadly allege that the university (which, under "state sovereign immunity," cannot be prosecuted in federal court) has enabled its staff and students to claim what amounts to a blanket exemption to copyright law through an overly lenient definition of the classroom exemption. The plaintiffs are asking for an injunction to stop university personnel from making material available on e-reserve without paying licensing fees. A decision is expected in several weeks. The Chronicle asked experts in scholarly communications what the case may mean for the future:
According to a ruling on October 1, the closely watched Georgia State University (GSU) ereserves lawsuit will come down to whether the named defendants participated in the specific act of "contributory infringement," as two other original accusations were removed from the case.
This narrows the scope of the charges lodged by the publisher plaintiffs—Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, and SAGE Publications—and has Fair Use advocates cautiously optimistic as the case moves closer to trial.
In a blog post, library copyright watchdog and Duke Scholarly Communications Officer Kevin Smith wrote that he was "surprised at how favorable the ruling issued yesterday is to Georgia State; even though the Judge clearly expects to go to trial, there is a lot in her ruling to give hope and comfort to the academic community."
Barring a narrow settlement, the case could have a broad effect on academic library practice. If GSU's current policies are affirmed, libraries nationwide with similar digital reserves policies will be reassured if not emboldened. Should the plaintiffs prevail, however, there is likely to be a considerable chill on Fair Use deliberations as libraries reconsider the digital access they grant to copyrighted materials.
Two levels of infringement tossed out
Judge Orina Evans of Federal District Court in Atlanta ruled against all of the plaintiffs' motions for summary judgment, and granted two of the defendants' three counter-motions.
This ruling essentially holds there to be insufficient evidence to show that the named defendants (GSU's president Mark Becker, provost, associate provost for technology, and dean of libraries, Charlene Hurt) committed any acts of infringement, thus ruling out a charge of "direct infringement."
Likewise, Judge Evans similarly determined that there was no evidence of any profit directly from infringement committed by librarians under their supervision, excluding "vicarious infringement."
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