Image: Dutch Haven 1970 Pennsylvania

I don't know what a shoo-fly pie is but it must have something to do with wind mills.  I believe this place is still there.

Colbert on Amazon vs Hachette

The Colbert Report
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Indecision Political Humor,The Colbert Report on Facebook

Also a follow-up video with a guest.

http://thecolbertreport.cc.com/videos/t1nxwu/amazon-vs--hachette---sherman-alexie

MediaWeek (Vol 7, No 22): Donna Tartt, Access Copyright, Getty Photos, The Great Newspaper Bubble + More

See this update on Flipboard:

I just finished The Goldfinch and it was an excellent book. (Guardian)

In The Goldfinch, Tartt has dispensed with overt literary references. Theo does carry a copy of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's Wind, Sand and Stars, a gift, on a cross-country journey, but the book is a talisman of a genuine friendship instead of a substitution for one. Rather than have her narrator deliberately emulate fictional characters, Tartt has taken a fistful of Dickens novels, ground them into a fine powder and then blown the results all over her fictional world: Dickens permeates and perfumes The Goldfinch. So does Salinger, at least in the novel's New York passages, but as a flavouring rather than outright citation. The events in The Goldfinch, from the nebulously motivated terrorist bombing of the Metropolitan Museum, in which Theo loses his adored mother, to the devices by which he ends up in secret possession of the Carel Fabritius painting that gives the novel its title, to the climactic showdown with a bunch of international gangsters – all of this is as outlandish, as frankly and unashamedly fictional, as the bacchanal in The Secret History or the scene in The Little Friend where Harriet and Hely succeed in dropping an albino king cobra from a highway overpass into the sunroof of a moving car.

A current favorite: Alan Furst is out with a new book. (NYTimes

Who’s your favorite novelist of all time?
Years ago, I developed a grand passion for the novels of Anthony Powell. I tried, at a friend’s insistence, “A Dance to the Music of Time.” Couldn’t do it. Then I tried again, still couldn’t. But then, a year later, poking aimlessly about in my library, I paged through the books and came upon the “Autumn” section, Book 3, which includes the World War II novels: “The Valley of Bones,”  “The Soldier’s Art” and “The Military Philosophers.” Now the hook set. Going back to the beginning after reading “Autumn,” it all made sense: the interwoven lives of cosmopolitan British men and women, tossed about by the times they lived through. Powell does everything a novelist can do, from flights of aesthetic passion to romance to comedy high and low. His dialogue is extraordinary; often terse, pedestrian and perfect, each character using three or four words. Anthony Powell taught me to write; he has such brilliant control of the mechanics of the novel. Somewhere in his autobiography, he remarks that a character, when asked a question by another character, need not answer it. I remember sitting there for a long time and letting the stylistic implications of this sink in.

Can anyone compete with Amazon? (PW)

Competing with Amazon, even to carve out a slice of the market, is a daunting task. The company has a number of obvious advantages: scale, resources, and a diverse product line that can let the company treat books as loss leaders. The company, as has been well documented, is also focused on driving prices as low as possible. The perception of Amazon as the cheapest place to buy books, enhanced by its combining books with high ticket items with free shipping, gives the company a tremendous advantage over both online and physical bookselling competitors, says Peter Hildick-Smith, CEO of the Codex Group.

Hildick-Smith believes that if publishers want to help ensure a diverse marketplace, they need to move back to agency pricing on e-books once the court-order restrictions expire, and to return to windowing. Hildick-Smith believes publishers should follow the film industry's successful model of releasing new content in premium format first, followed by discount formats in later releases. Hildick-Smith has been a longtime supporter of windowing as a way to "give bricks-and-mortar stores a chance to do what they do best," noting that Amazon's own bestseller publishing program has struggled without physical-world retailer support. (One possible roadblock to windowing are reports that Amazon's contract prohibits the practice.)

Newspaper ad revenue (CJR)

It’s striking how much less dependent papers were on advertising before the 1980s than they were during and afterward. The rise of advertising was largely due to the decline of newspaper competition, which has fallen steadily since the late 1970s (the number of dailies is down about 22 percent in the last 35 years).

The last paper standing in a market could charge readers the same or less while corralling much of its former competitor’s advertising. While that was fun for a while, it undermined the long-term health of the industry. Newspapers became structurally dependent on sky-high advertising rates, ones that a true market couldn’t support.

In 1990, for instance, newspapers lost more than 6 percent of their ad lineage but also raised their ad rates by more than 6 percent. The New York Times, for instance, lost 38 percent of its advertising lineage from 1987 to 1992 but continued to raise rates.

Big doings in the Canadian copyright market (Quill  & Quire)

As royalties continue to shrink, the situation is having a profound impact on the bottom line of publishers catering to both the K–12 and postsecondary sectors. OUP Canada eliminated three jobs as a result of the closure of its schools division. At Winnipeg-based scholarly press Fernwood Publishing (which focuses on the higher-education sector), Access Copyright royalties usually amount to the salary of one of its seven staffers. And at Broadview Press, Access Copyright payments total $50,000 per year. It’s clear that these royalties have a significant impact on publishers’ abilities to break even, pay their staff, and create new works.
Royalties from the schools market dried up when Access Copyright’s K–12 customers (which include provincial ministries and, in Ontario, individual school boards) walked away from their licences, a move that was prompted in part by the 2012 passing of the Copyright Modernization Act (Bill C-11). The postsecondary sector is also distancing itself from Access Copyright, with many of the country’s biggest universities opting out of collective licences. A year ago, the agency launched a lawsuit against York University to challenge its interpretation of Bill C-11’s “fair ­dealing” provision.
Some publishers have also begun to see declines in sales. “The loss of income is not limited to the loss of the Access Copyright fees,” says Broadview Press president Leslie Dema. “There are now many professors turning to coursepacks instead of anthologies for the first time – simply because the coursepacks are so much cheaper when there is no charge for copyright.”

Plus more at my flipboard magazine.

Image Boston: North Street & Paul Revere House

I had a really good dinner at Mamma Maria's this week.  In this photo from 1971 the restaurant is in the house that has the white store sign (ABRU).  Not having been here before the location was immediately recognisable to be (and hasn't changed) because of this photo.

North Street & Paul Revere House: 1971

Amazon Warehouse Robots

This is from 2011 but still impressive.



Amazon was so impressed they bought the robot: (Youtube)

Harper Acquires Harlequin - An alternative result

From Bill Maher last week.

MediaWeek (Vol 7, No 16): Clearing Libraries, Upworthy-King of Content, Uncertain Book start-ups + More

PND Weekly roundup also on flipboard:

What of the digital humanities (with a great photo of the British Library)

And such a critical, creative, and imaginative engagement between “the digital” and “the humanities” requires an expansion of the field of humanistic inquiry in ways that leverage the power of data sets, computational analyses, design-centered thinking, and the interpretation of cultural repositories that far exceed the cognitive or analytical abilities of the normative Humanist. The task requires well-informed critical methods and forms of interrogation that belong to the present age, not the sorry “posture of skepticism” that Kirsch imagines in his urge to enforce simpleminded dichotomies. Nobody is arguing that the “digital humanities” are handing over reading, writing, thinking, and creating to “the computer,” which spits out data as culturally redundant truisms. Instead, we advocate for emerging genres, methods, knowledge formations, and new publics for the humanities, which not only use but also design digital tools to, among other things, animate archives in new ways, map and visualize data at scale, test assumptions and hypotheses rooted in source material using gaming environments and virtual worlds technologies, and provide new models of access to and engagement with knowledge.

More and more libraries are clearing out the books and Slate joins the band wagon:

But there’s one wholly unsentimental reason the stacks are both vital and irreplaceable, and that brings us back to Colby’s decision to replace theirs with a gleaming shrine to the corporate bottom line. As more of the books disappear from college libraries, the people in charge of funding those libraries will be more tempted to co-opt that space for events that bring in revenue, or entice students for the wrong reasons: food courts. Gaming lounges. I expect rock-climbing walls soon. Unless administrators make a protracted effort to preserve the contemplative and studious feeling, that feeling will disappear altogether, and the whatever-brary will become just another Jamba Juice.
Right now, the most powerful weapon in the fight to keep just one space on the entire campus dedicated to the preservation, creation, and dissemination of knowledge (a.k.a. the alleged sole purpose of the university) is the book. These obsolete cloth-bound relics—the way they smell, their very omnipresence in your field of vision; the way they carry with them centuries of past perusal—are currently the university’s strongest, if not sole, signifier of a contemplative, intellectual space. With the stacks there, a library’s architect creates spaces around the books, thus cementing their omnipresence as near-animate psychological enforcers. (There’s also the small matter that you only have to buy a book once; digital resources are licensed, and their prices increase every year!)

Upworthy - The King of Content. From CJR:

These subtle tweaks, with no change to the underlying content, have powerful results: Upworthy’s repackaged videos and articles receive an average of 75,000 likes per post on Facebook, about 12 times that of any other news organization, and the site spiked to 87 million unique viewers last December. Each view is more powerful because Upworthy doesn’t just entice readers to look, it encourages them through a swath of buttons on its homepage to share. This mastery of Facebook means that Upworthy reworkings produce significantly more views than the originals, whose creators are placed in an odd position. Upworthy works as a scavenger, drawing huge traffic to its own site by repurposing other people’s material. But to the original creators Upworthy brings new eyes; often the trickle-down traffic from people clicking to the original post (from a modest link published under each Upworthy article) is far greater than the viewership the organization could cultivate on its own.

Upworthy’s founders argue they’re not scavengers, they’re salvagers—and their acts of reclamation are making the world a better place. Most viral stories are not meaningful—think BuzzFeed’s “19 Cats Who Have Absolutely Had It” oeuvre—while Upworthy traffics in important topics: climate change, Afghanistan, gender discrimination, racism. And lifting these kinds of stories can transform the internet, they claim. “At best, things online are usually either awesome or meaningful,” reads the site’s founding statement. “But everything on Upworthy.com has a little of both.”

The ability to alter content into sharable nuggets of gold could also prove a powerful boon to advertisers: Up until this point, Upworthy hasn’t sold ads, but in April they put forward a unique strategy built around native advertising. Titled “Upworthy Collaborations,” the idea is to wave a magic wand over the advertising videos of paying brands in the same way the site does for news content. The first to line up is Unilever, the third-largest global consumer goods company, and a brand currently pitching itself as socially responsible when it comes to sustainability.

Laura Hazard over at GigaOm looks at book start-ups:

Any company that comes along trying to reinvent book publishing is competing not only with traditional book publishers but also with Amazon, which is almost 20 years old but keeps finding new ways to shake things up. Print book buying continues to move online and Amazon, which is now delivering on Sundays and offering same-day delivery in a growing number of cities, has a lock on that business. Kindle, launched in 2007, is the dominant ebook reading platform and Amazon is continually rolling out improvements to the Kindle e-reader and Kindle apps — sharing, search and so on — that rival what many startups have tried to do.

More on flipboard

Blurb Acquires HP's MagCloud

Blurb and HP announced a licensing agreement today which effectively transfers existing customers of the HP MagCloud product to Blurb.   MagCloud was developed out of HP labs to provide digital on-demand publishing options for magazine publishers - particularly self-publishing magazine publishers.

Blurb will absorb all the operational components of the MagCloud product onto the Blurb publishing platform over the next three months.  Blurb is generally known for its book publishing platform therefore these magazine capabilities should broaden Blurb's appeal to more businesses and individuals which want to create different types of publishing products.  HP have long been interested in developing new applications that leverage their hardware print capabilities and invested in numerous initiatives out of their Labs product center.  Much of that activity developed several years ago around the same time as companies like Blurb were emerging to provide sophisticated printing solutions to consumers.  While HP were always looking for killer applications that encouraged investment and purchase of their equipment they we also active boosters of tools and products like the Blurb products.  As the press release from Blurb notes the two companies have been partners for many years and the absorption of MagCloud could be viewed as a continuation of that partnership.

This deal is also the death knell for HP's investment in the new technology that sought to push the market of their hardware.  Whether their Labs program ever made a significant difference is probably debatable but there were some interesting products that came out of the Labs such as MagCloud, virtual printing apps and technology that could clean-up digital files.

From the press release:

This licensing agreement is a natural one given both brands' focus on enabling creative individuals to produce quality products that reflect the power of their work – both in print and ebook form. Working together is nothing new for Blurb and HP. HP’s MagCloud, invented by HP Labs in 2008, created a network of users publishing magazines on-demand using HP Indigo commercial printing presses. Blurb's global print-on-demand network is also based on HP Indigo printing presses.

“Blurb and HP have a longstanding relationship dating back to the origin of Blurb in 2006, so the foundation exists to make this transition successful,” said Eileen Gittins, founder and CEO, Blurb. “Further to the relationship however, the magazine at this moment in time represents the perfect intersection of technology, culture, and media: Beautifully designed short-form reading, with multiple contributors, in print, and as an ebook. In this context, the magazine as a genre is very strategic for Blurb. Indie magazines are experiencing a bit of a renaissance, and we’re thrilled to welcome MagCloud customers to the Blurb fold.”

“Since the inception of MagCloud as an HP Labs innovation to its current commercial success, we’ve strived to democratize the face of magazine publishing,” said Andrew Bolwell, general manager, HP MagCloud. “As a long-time HP customer and pioneer of the self-publishing industry, Blurb is the right company to take on the MagCloud business at this point in time.”

Existing MagCloud customers will not notice any immediate changes. Current and new publications will still be available to print, sell, and distribute through MagCloud just as they are today. MagCloud customers joining Blurb’s ecosystem will gain many new benefits, including access to:

• Precision design tools – like the recently released Blurb BookWright™ – to help them design their magazines
• Offset printing options for greater cost savings
• Unprecedented global reach across 80+ countries of Blurb’s platform
• The Blurb Bookstore and third-party marketplaces

Blurb is in the middle of its most exciting year yet. From its recently announced new precision print and ebook tool called BookWright, its seamless integration with Amazon distribution, and new offset, warehousing, and fulfillment services, 2014 promises to be big.

MediaWeek (Vol 7, No 18): Metadata Harvesting, Death of the Novel, Ed Innovations Conference + more

This weeks selection on FlipBoard

A presentation on slideshare.net that describes how to take metadata from HathiTrust and Pubmed:

This presentation will describe Cornell University Library efforts to provide an "afterlife" to The Cornell Veterinarian by leveraging a number of disparate initiatives and metadata sources. While attempting to build article level linking to full-text in HathiTrust (functionality currently unavailable), limitations in the metadata captured during the scanning process were uncovered. The speaker will delineate these metadata findings and provide strategies (some scalable, others highly labor intensive) for gathering the necessary metadata for creating direct links to articles found in HathiTrust. 

Wrangling metadata from hathi trust and pubmed to provide full text linking to the cornell veterinarian from NASIG

A dispatch in Inside HigherEd from the Education Innovations Summit where impatience may be brewing:

“At a national level, there is no evidence that educational technology has reduced the cost of education yet or improved the efficacy of education,” said Brandon Busteed, executive director of Gallup Education. “And that’s just as true as it gets. Maybe there will be some day, but that’s the question: How much longer do we think it will take before we can detect movement on the national needle?”

During the summit’s first two days, speakers identified well-known issues such as the rising cost of higher education, stagnant graduation and retention rates, and stubborn levels of unemployment among recent graduates. The proffered solution, in many cases, was a renewed promise of the disruptive powers of technology -- often wrapped in a sales pitch.

“Every one of these companies has -- at least most of them -- some story of a school or a classroom or a student or whatever that they’ve made some kind of impact on, either a qualitative story or some real data on learning improvement,” Busteed said. “You would think that with hundreds of millions of dollars, maybe billions now, that’s been plowed into ed-tech investments ... and all the years and all the efforts of all these companies to really move the needle, we ought to see some national-level movement in those indicators.”

Will Self thinks the novel is dead and it's not coming back to life. (Guardian)

My canary is a perceptive songbird – he immediately ceased his own cheeping, except to chirrup: I see what you mean. The literary novel as an art work and a narrative art form central to our culture is indeed dying before our eyes. Let me refine my terms: I do not mean narrative prose fiction tout court is dying – the kidult boywizardsroman and the soft sadomasochistic porn fantasy are clearly in rude good health. And nor do I mean that serious novels will either cease to be written or read. But what is already no longer the case is the situation that obtained when I was a young man. In the early 1980s, and I would argue throughout the second half of the last century, the literary novel was perceived to be the prince of art forms, the cultural capstone and the apogee of creative endeavour. The capability words have when arranged sequentially to both mimic the free flow of human thought and investigate the physical expressions and interactions of thinking subjects; the way they may be shaped into a believable simulacrum of either the commonsensical world, or any number of invented ones; and the capability of the extended prose form itself, which, unlike any other art form, is able to enact self-analysis, to describe other aesthetic modes and even mimic them. All this led to a general acknowledgment: the novel was the true Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk.

From twitter this week:
News Corp to buy Torstar's romance publisher Harlequin Reuters Amazing this deal hadn't been done yrs ago.
With free web courses, Wharton seeks edge in traditional programs WSJ
Sad Ending to Ladies’ Home Journal’s Era AARP

MediaWeek (Vol 7, No 17): GoldenAge of Media, Resilient physical books, Open Access, Mills & Boone + More

The flipboard version of this is here: FlipBoard

In the 'golden age of media' there are many new business models (HBR)

People with money are talking about the news business, too. The venture capitalist and Web pioneer Marc Andreessen (who has investments in three digital news operations) unleashed a spirited discussion on Twitter early this year with his visions of a bright digital future for news.
At one point Andreessen offered up the “most obvious 8 business models for news now & in the future.” After listing today’s staples, (1) advertising and (2) subscriptions, he continued with (3) premium content (that is, “a paid tier on top of a free, ad-supported one”); (4) conferences and events; (5) cross-media (meaning that your news operation also generates books, movies, and the like); (6) crowd-funding; (7) micropayments, using Bitcoin; and (8) philanthropy. Nicholas Thompson, the editor of The New Yorker’s Web site and a co-founder of the digital sort-of-magazine The Atavist, chimed in with two more: (9) “while building product you’re passionate about, create software you then license widely!”—The Atavist’s approach—and (10) “fund investigative business stories + then short stocks before publishing,” a reference to the billionaire Mark Cuban’s controversial relationship with Sharesleuth.

Physical books may be looking more resilient than we had expected (NYTimes):

So it is a funny thing, about this transitional era for the book, just how filled with bound pages it has been so far. A new kind of hard-copy bibliomania has without question sprung up along the banks of digital reading. I don’t really have a friend, either heavy reader or the sort still getting through the Malcolm Gladwell she got for Christmas, who doesn’t want, have or feverishly dream of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. I am not sure that floor-to-ceiling bookshelves haven’t even become my generation’s — or at least my peer group’s — No. 1, most-desired décor scheme. Celebrities like Leelee Sobieski and Scarlett Johansson are now photographed in front of their vast spans of spines, the way woolly-browed rabbis and ponderous authors used to be. James Franco tweets shots of his bookshelves, and the landscape of 30-something lifestyle bloggers lights up like a stoner’s brain on an M.R.I.

In more paranoid moments, you might wonder if some marketing mastermind is behind any of this. In the 1930s, another era in which books produced greatly outnumbered books bought, Edward L. Bernays — the “father of spin” who more or less invented modern P.R. — was approached by a group of publishers, including Simon & Schuster and Harcourt Brace, to try to get people to buy more books, despite the tough economic times. Bernays is said to have pronounced, “Where there are bookshelves, there will be books.” He then went about getting top architects and decorators to put book shelving into the homes of their V.I.P. clients — clients encouraged to go forth and fill these shelves up, for the benefit of, among others, magazine photographers.

Certainly, you’d be hard pressed today to find a catalog from the likes of Restoration Hardware that doesn’t contain a photo with a swath of books within frame. Same with magazines like Elle Décor, the dense shelves of reading often found in unlikely places, like the dining room, the story being that you are peering into the inner sanctum of an eccentric and ebullient mind that just won’t quit. Even if it’s just canned soup and loneliness for dinner, it’s still a feast for the intellect.

The UCSF student newspaper did a series on Open Access publishing.  Here is the last installment on new business models:

Biomedical sciences journals charge the highest APCs of any science, technology and medicine (STM) discipline, with the average fee in 2010 running just over $1,000, according to an article by Drs. David J Solomon and Bo-Christer Björk published in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. According to their calculations, the biomedical field spent over $64 million in APCs for open access journals, with many journals charging between $700 and $1800.
“I’m seeing some pushback from faculty, mostly to the ‘author-pays’ model of open access,” said UCSF Library’s Director of Serials Anneliese Taylor. “Those who are opposed think that the university is pushing costs off on researchers, while at the same time their research awards are decreasing.”
But this should not be a disincentive for scientists to publish in open access journals, according to Johnson.
“The critical thing is to look at the entire cost of a research project—and the journal publication charges are a very small part of that,” he said. “Compared to the salaries that are being paid to people and the cost of supplies and the infrastructure, it’s a very small percentage of the overall cost.

 A short video from BBC news on the new Mills and Bone romance book app.

More articles on Flipboard.

Data analysis tops publishers' priority for investment in 2014 (Guardian)
We are drowning in data about readers and attention, but which metrics really matter? You won’t like the answer. (GigaOm)
Major media publisher admits it is “afraid of Google” (ARS)
New Thai press museum in Bangkok (BPost)

SlideShow: The Next e-Commerce Revolution - Frank Lampen

The Next e-Commerce Revolution from Frank Lampen

MediaWeek (Vol 7, No 15): Hilary Mantel, Easy Printing, Science Fiction, NYC Bookstores + More

Here is the flipboard version of PND

From London's Evening Standard last week a look at Hilary Mantel's writing after the stage productions of her Cromwell books:

The experience of seeing her characters brought to life in the RSC’s stage adaptations of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, about to transfer to the West End, has changed Hilary Mantel’s writing for ever, she tells Alison Roberts

The third part of the Cromwell opus, called The Mirror and the Light, is even now “unspooling” before her eyes and ears, though there’s still no date for its appearance — “I won’t commit to that because this is the big project of my career and it has to be right, not only for all those readers who are waiting for it, but for me too”.
“Things happen on stage or I might happen to have conversations with actors that spark something off that will change my thinking and change the third book.”

The Economist (Babbage) learns how easy it is to get a book printed.  (I could have told them that).

Yet this Babbage has found that not to be the case, even though he has worked with e-books for decades across many formats. Your correspondent also has printer's ink in his veins: he trained as one of the last dedicated typesetters, worked in a printing plant in his 20s, and designed and produced dozens of books in the 1980s and 1990s. But even he was unprepared for how easy it has become to print a book and how difficult it remains to produce an electronic version suitable for a range of e-readers, including the Kindle.
As the result of a Kickstarter campaign, Babbage hired designers he knew and a recommended printer, and contracted to have made 1,500 copies of a 216-page book with a clothbound hardcover and dust jacket. While the process took longer than he'd hoped and expected due to his own bandwidth limitations, once the digital files went into the printing firm's operations, there was little to do but wait as a series of specialists carried out successive tasks at the printing plant. The final result exceeded his expectations, and as the project's backers have received the tome, delighted e-mails and tweets abound.

Underrated universal appeal of Science Fiction (Atlantic):

And now, a qualitative distinction creeps in. The assumption is made that the stuff on the “general fiction” shelves is the serious stuff—after all, it includes the literary greats—while the stuff cordoned off in those corners is, by definition, light, inconsequential, or even trashy. In fact, generalizations are made about the whole of “genre fiction” as if it were all one thing. “Genre fiction,” says Wikipedia, “also known as popular fiction, is plot-driven fictional works written with the intent of fitting into a specific literary genre, in order to appeal to readers and fans already familiar with that genre.” (Notice how, in a single sentence, the word “genre” is used in both of the two different ways I’ve described.)
Don’t get me wrong: You can certainly find lightweight stuff on the science-fiction shelves, and if you think of yourself as someone who doesn’t like science fiction, you would have no difficulty at all putting your hands on books there that would confirm all your assumptions completely. But then again, the fact that you can find lightweight, formulaic stuff on the “Romantic Fiction” shelves doesn’t mean that you dismiss any novel that deals with romantic love. Anna Karenina? Sons and Lovers? The Great Gatsby? Just because it is possible to assign a book to a “genre” (in the neutral sense of the word), doesn’t mean that it is “genre fiction” (in the loaded sense).

There are some thriving New York bookstores.  Go visit.  (NY Mag)

Does Michael Wolff make stuff up?  You be the judge (CJR)

Amazon Acquires Digital Comic Book Store Comixology Techcrunch