McCartney on Letterman

Asked why he hadn't ever been on the show before, Macca said he didn't like it.

Letter also asked him if he had played on a marquee - "it's reasonably safe" he said - to which Paul said he had 'done a roof once'.

WSJ goes to School on eBooks

In the WSJ this morning they have a round-up of some of the trails and debates about placing eBook readers in schools as a replacement for paper texts. Clearly, ebook readers are not a replacement since many basic functions that paper texts allow are not available with eBooks. At this point it appears the only 'benefit' to eBooks in schools are the low weight compared to a back pack of books. As such, the Kindle and Sony reader efforts to enter this market risk deterring other more adventurous manufactures who will face student and administrator scepticsm because these early efforts are so inadequate. That's my view but here is more from the journal:

Some California school districts say they have had positive results with e-texts so far. At the Las Virgenes Unified School District in southern California, digital books have been used on PCs and in printouts in elementary-school science classes since 2007. “The greatest immediate observable result is how quickly the kids get engaged,” says Las Virgenes schools superintendent Donald Zimring. He adds, however, that there is no evidence e-texts improved reading or test scores.At colleges, trials of e-textbooks and readers have been mixed. When Northwest Missouri State ran its trial with the Sony Reader last fall, dozens of the 200 participants bailed out after about two weeks. “The students more often than not either suffered through it or went and got physical books,” says Paul Klute, the assistant to the university’s president, who oversees the e-book program. Students didn’t like that they couldn’t flip through random pages, take notes in the margins or highlight text, he says.

Penn State ran a pilot program last fall with 100 of the Sony Reader devices in honors English classes, and found similar results as Northwest Missouri State. The devices are good if you’re using them “on a beach or on an airplane,” said Mike Furlough, assistant dean for scholarly communications at Penn State University Libraries. “But not fully functional for a learning environment.”

(If you can't see this article search the title: Book Smarts? E-Texts Receive Mixed Reviews From Students and that should bring up a link that works).

Post: Big Kindle Goes to School (Shug)

MediaWeek (Vol 2, No 27): OCLC, Journals, Book Apps, Book Data, AARP

Most of these were posted to twitter this week. (@personanondata) Springer launched an image back containing over 1.5 million scientific images, tables, charts and graphs, spanning all scientific subject areas. (GEN - Press Release):

SpringerImages allows users to search fast, broadly and accurately through captions and keywords (both author-provided and user-generated). A feature unique to SpringerImages, users can also search the sentences from the full text which refer to the image. The platform provides bibliographic information for the sources, as well as one-click access to the full text, allowing users to delve deeper into the context of the image and research surrounding it.

Images obtained from SpringerImages can be used for almost all non-commercial purposes, including integration into presentations and PDF documents. The platform enables the user to store image sets and saved searches. Image sets can be exported to PDF or PowerPoint (including their bibliographic data) with one click. Copyright and license information for images for commercial use is also available.

Eoin Purcell notes his approval (Blog) Giles Slade on HuffPo offers some thoughts on the Kindle:

Feature creep harms the quality of any tool, but, most important, it obscures a manufacturer's ability to market it. The Kindle, on the other hand, is what you keep at home or take with you on vacation to relax into. It is for the book-lover who might occasionally buy a first, a signed or a special edition. It is lingerie. It is a box of chocolates or a bottle of double-malt. Especially well-timed for the recession as a luxury item that keeps on giving by allowing you to 'save' on cheaper electronic editions, it's now here to stay. Competition will drive it to adapt and compete, of course. That's only natural. Stanza, for example, has many attractive features that Kindle now needs to copy. It will.

According to the current growth curve, electronic books will dominate world-wide book sales by 2018. (This is the book industry's own prediction, and is extremely 'safe.' It does not anticipate a watershed or 'tipping point'). In any case, Kindle-Amazon and Google will continue to make good money. Traditional print media will continue to lose money as long as they stumble around wondering how to accommodate themselves to what happened yesterday.

Does corporatisation of Journals result in 'preemptive' and 'non-consultative' staffing issues? (HigherEd):

Needless to say, having respected editors removed from their positions at journals without any consultation with editorial boards is exactly the kind of move scholars fear when they consider corporate management of their journals. While some have speculated that Sage was taking sides in some kind of philosophical battleground, many have said that the problem here isn't one of philosophy or of one editor or another, but of academics not making the decisions.

In the discussion on Crooked Timber, a popular social science blog, one political scientist wrote: "Given the nature of journal publishing anymore, where firms like Sage and Elsevier think of their journals as profit engines first and charge enormous amounts for subscriptions, I’m amazed -- though perhaps I shouldn’t be -- that people immediately leaped to the conclusion that this must be a Berkeley against the world thing, or a Habermas vs. Foucault thing, or a history-of political-thought-vs.-critical-theory thing, or an administration-vs.-faculty thing, or what have you, and ignored the possibility that it’s all about the Benjamins (Franklin, not Barber)."

For those you like bibliographic data (and I know you're out there) here is yet another report on book metadata. Of the two recently published recently neither push the envelope; however, this one by Judy Luther is the better one. (Link): These are her conclusions which as you will notice are library centric:

• Use crosswalks between ONIX and MARC to facilitate the creation of CIP and to provide publishers with an XML feed of MARC data.
• Work to enhance the CIP record post publication could be shared with OCLC member libraries if database authorizations were expanded.
• Expand training on MARC records with more international vendors to ensure broad conformance to standards and to eliminate duplication of effort by libraries.
• Reviewing of OCLC records could be automated if attributes were exposed so that a manual review could be skipped if it was determined that the contributor is a trusted source.
• Explore the value to publishers of incorporating in their systems the unique data elements added by catalogers (authorized names, subjects, series, and classification numbers).
• For large data files received via FTP as part of an electronic feed, a “manifest” is needed to identify the contents to save staff the time of having to open the file to learn what is in it.
• Descriptive metadata such as the series or table of contents could be synthesized and used to support more refined search results that would also allow better navigation from the collection level, to title level, to the article or image level.
• Science publishers that are exploring tagging content at the chapter level need guidelines and expertise in-house to create and maintain good quality metadata below the product level.
• The long tail of publishers would benefit from Best Practices and simple guidance for options on how to present their data in a consistent manner.
• Economic conditions necessitate the need to simplify ingest mechanisms. A best practice could define quality control expectations.
• There is a need for Collection Identifiers that represent the packages of individual titles that libraries acquire from both publishers and vendors.
• The NISO Thought Leader Meeting on Digital Libraries & Digital Collections recommended the development of a tool that would enable publishers to self test the quality of their metadata.
• Establish best practices for exchange, frequency of updating, feedback mechanisms, and reuse— making the supply chain more multi-directional (not just from publishers to community or from vendor to library).
• Explore methods for integrating the recently published International Standard Text Code (ISTC) and the forthcoming International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI) standards into the existing workflow and promoting their adoption. The ISTC can be used to create associations among works and ISNI could provide authority control for authors.

Publisher's Weekly looks at Apple's platform support for book related applications (link):

With such a robust emerging market for smartphones, publishers are actively reimagining the very notion of the e-book, creating book-based apps that both enable mobile reading and enhance their books. Simon & Schuster, for example, has had great success with game and utility apps, made in-house and with the help of outside developers. One, called 365 Crossword, mines the company's huge back catalogue of crossword puzzle books to offer readers a puzzle for each day of the year. “We launched that in February, and it's done really nicely,” Ellie Hirshhorn, chief digital officer and executive v-p for Simon & Schuster, told PW. “Even the first day or two as we were watching closely, it wasn't just being downloaded in the United States—it was all over the world.”

Hirshhorn is quick to point out that mobile technology has enabled S&S to “marry the platform to the content.” The company also did well with a Klingon dictionary app pegged to the release of Star Trek. And, while Hirshhorn says S&S launched these apps because they hoped to learn about the market, “we are making money,” she adds.

AARP has sold to Ebsco their unique AgeLine database of bibliographic data related to medical and aging information for the 50+ market (PR):

"AgeLine is the largest database on aging, and is widely used both domestically and internationally. When AARP decided to sell AgeLine, it was essential to find a home that would continue to provide access to the geriatric community, and who would make the investment necessary to take it to the next level. Our discussions with EBSCO disclosed that they would invest further in the database and make use of the company's larger infrastructure to support it. Confirmation of these positive attributes led to the final decision."

CompletelyNovel reach the finals of ThePitch

CompletelyNovel a small start-up social book site 'out of' Nawfth Lahdn (North London) has reached the London final of a new business launch competition named ThePitch. The company founders want CompletelyNovel to become the MySpace for books and authors where authors can join a community, showcase their work, interact with readers and hopefully build a market for their work. Readers and publishers can discover new authors and print works they are interested in as well as build relationships with authors and other readers.

In addition to providing a place for authors to mingle, CompletelyNovel is also a retailer and show cases and sells books using Amazon services (I assume) which means they are also making a small percentage on each book sale.

The services for self-publishers look interesting as they offer free display of an authors work online:

It is free to publish your book into the CompletelyNovel BookStreamer and through print on demand printers. This allows you to promote and sell paperback copies of your book throughout the internet. You can easily direct buyers to your CompletelyNovel web address so they can read, review and buy copies of your work.

We will soon be offering a premium account which for a monthly fee gives you advanced printing options such as hardback and also inserts your book into the ISBN database and book catalogues around the globe such as in amazon.

CompletelyNovel's revenue model is based on offering 'premium services' to author, publishers and printers:

We provide a very valuable service to our printers, agents and publishers on our site. Just like our writer premium account, if they want to get more out of the service they can subscribe.

We also receive a small payment when adverts are clicked or when someone clicks through from our site to buy a book from a bookshop.

The company launched last year and they say they are planning to expand into the US in the next few months.

Here is a little more from their press release regarding The Pitch. It is great a publishing business got this far in an innovation competition but admittedly this would be more news worthy if they actually won it. So fingers crossed.

CompletelyNovel.com, book publishing and web start-up, has reached the London final of The Pitch 2009, a competition to identify the most promising UK small business. The company hopes to highlight the great potential for innovation within the publishing industry and also win the prize of £50,000 worth of business related goods and services, including mentoring from former Dragon’s Den panellist, Doug Richards. Their pitch will take place on Tuesday 16^th July.

Oliver Brooks, founder of CompletelyNovel.com hopes that his vision to create a MySpace for the book publishing world, enabling future hit authors to be discovered by the power of the social web, will prove a winner:

“The new technology available through the web holds so much potential for the publishing industry – we want to help authors and publishers take advantage of this.”

Oliver will be pitching in a Dragon’s Den style against five other finalists from the South East region to demonstrate that CompletelyNovel offers the best in innovation, market knowledge, customer engagement and financial viability. A number of business experts and experienced entrepreneurs will select one company for a place in the national final, judged by ex-Dragon himself, Doug Richards, and due to take place in November.

CompletelyNovel’s pitch follows hot on the heels of some very satisfying news for their website. Aspiring author Gary Hurlstone, who published his book through CompletelyNovel, was signed to a publisher last week thanks to his ability to use the reviews, ratings and sales he got on CompletelyNovel to prove his book’s market.

"CompletelyNovel was a great help in helping us decide to publish Gary Hurlstone's book. It provided us with the rare chance to gauge a real audience's reaction prior to release, giving us a headstart in the processes of marketing and preparing the book for publication."

Derek Sandhaus, Earnshaw Books

With plans to expand into the US in the next couple of months, CompletelyNovel are hoping that there will be many similar stories to come.

For more information please contact:

Anna Lewis, CompletelyNovel.com

E: anna@completelynovel.com, T: 0207 249 1850 M: 07900 811075

Shared Book Teams with Encyclopaedia Britannica and On-Demand Books

SharedBook is making the following announcement at ALA today:

Visitors to the American Library Association conference in Chicago this week will find a unique, customized book, printed on demand by an on-site Espresso Book Machine®, created to showcase the custom publishing platform of SharedBook Inc.

The new title, A Brief Look at Chicago, is published by Encyclopaedia Britannica, using content its editors selected from Encyclopaedia Britannica Online, and SharedBook’s SMART BUTTON™ technology. Output from this one-click process has been delivered for print on demand to the Espresso Book Machine® from On Demand Books. From content selection through finished book, the entire publishing process was completed in less than 30 minutes. Conference attendees can have their personal copy of this new title printed by the Espresso Book Machine® at booth #2446.

“We’re excited to have an opportunity to share this project with our friends and colleagues at ALA,” said Caroline Vanderlip, CEO of SharedBook. “While this book represents only a small portion of the potential of our platform, it is still a powerful, tangible example of the bright future for the publishing industry as it harnesses technology to create new products and open new markets. We’re delighted that our partners at EB and On Demand Books have joined us in this effort.”

Riding the Subway

Savvy sub-way riders memorize which carriage to ride in and which door to exit that will guarantee them a quick exit up the stairs or a fast transfer to another line. I was never a public transport commuter until I spent a semester abroad in London in the early 1980s. During that time, I quickly realized there was a useful trick to optimizing your journey so that you never had to trudge behind a column of people up the stairs to get out or you missed your connection because you went down the wrong passage. It seemed obvious to me that with a little bit of observation, and by anticipating the placement of the exits and passages at my next station, that I could save considerable time. In a short while, I had it down to a science and to this day when riding the Underground, Path or Subway I still move about the departing station platform in order to make sure I get in the right car and so I can leave by the right door.

When Mrs PND and I first visited London together she couldn't grasp that whenever we traveled on the Underground I was always saying 'we can't stand here we need to go to the end of the platform' or 'I have to count the carriages to make sure we get on the right one' or words similar. Invariably, there are many stations in any system that are new to me (excepting the PATH) and thus if I end up at one of these unfamiliar stations I become a commuting victim just like everyone else.

Unlike me however; Jonathan Wegener and his sister Ashley thought that maybe "there should be an app for that" and have built an iPhone application that optimizes every NYC subway ride. They have created an easy and intuitive interface that enables you, for any combination of NYC stations, to find the proximity of carriages and doors to exit stairs and transfer points. It is a pretty neat app and represents yet another reason why the monthly NYTech Meetups can be so fun.

The Wegeners actually created this information by brute force . It didn't exist until the two of them spent 10 weeks riding the subway with clip boards in hand to document each subway stop. As far as I know, they weren't stopped by NYPD in the process. The application was introduced as the 'quintessential New York app' but I can see others copying the idea pretty rapidly.

MediaWeek (Vol 2, No 26): Scientific Publishing, Elsevier, Open Library

New blog found. Three Guys One Book. In this post they discuss Bookexpo (link):

JE: In the wake of a grim BEA, as the death toll continues to mount in all ranks of the book industry, from writer to editor to indie bookseller, I thought it was high time for all four Three Guys to convene and converse over virtual beers about the state of publishing and the state of books in 2009, as writers, readers, professionals, and consumers. It's fashionable (and not unreasonable) to saddle fiscally irresponsible corporate publishers with the burden of responsibility for the current conditions of book culture. But who else might share the responsibility? I might argue that writers are just as much to blame, that the sentence is killing the novel, that the literati needs to quit cowering in dusty academic circles and engage a larger culture. What do you three guys see as the biggest threat to book culture?

A wide ranging set of presentations entitled: Going Digital, Evolutionary and Revolutionary Aspects of Digitization. From the Nobel symposium at Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. (Link) Article about the Open Library initiative (Guardian):

Not everybody thinks that way, however, including the Open Library – a project with an audacious goal that it hopes can bring the web and books closer together.

The scheme is to create a single page on the web for every book that has ever been published; an enormous, searchable catalogue of information about millions of books. It is still in beta, but already more than 23m books are in its system, drawing information from 19 major libraries and linking to the text of more than 1m out-of-copyright titles.

That is admirable work for just a handful of staff at the library, an arm of the non-profit Internet Archive (which itself has the vast objective of trying to keep a historical record of the web for future generations). But with information about books already being processed by hugely popular websites such as Google and Amazon, the question remains – why bother?

Excellent blog post on the impending changes in scientific publishing. Also look around his site for some other interesting material (Blog):

What I will do instead is draw your attention to a striking difference between today’s scientific publishing landscape, and the landscape of ten years ago. What’s new today is the flourishing of an ecosystem of startups that are experimenting with new ways of communicating research, some radically different to conventional journals. Consider Chemspider, the excellent online database of more than 20 million molecules, recently acquired by the Royal Society of Chemistry. Consider Mendeley, a platform for managing, filtering and searching scientific papers, with backing from some of the people involved in Last.fm and Skype. Or consider startups like SciVee (YouTube for scientists), the Public Library of Science, the Journal of Visualized Experiments, vibrant community sites like OpenWetWare and the Alzheimer Research Forum, and dozens more. And then there are companies like Wordpress, Friendfeed, and Wikimedia, that weren’t started with science in mind, but which are increasingly helping scientists communicate their research. This flourishing ecosystem is not too dissimilar from the sudden flourishing of online news services we saw over the period 2000 to 2005.

Elsevier is on the loosing end of a bid to keep their pricing confidential (LJ):

The episode has served as an opportunity for ARL to reiterate its position. "This case is a telling example of why we should not be signing these non-disclosure agreements," said Tom Leonard, ARL president and university librarian at the University of California, Berkeley. Elsevier, however, disagrees. Speaking about ARL's statement, Ruth said: "We think it’s in everyone’s interest to be able to keep some elements of these agreements confidential, so we have more flexibility to customize an agreement to the unique circumstances of the customer. That’s why we might ask for confidentiality or request that some information be redacted if agreements are released to the public."

Fireworks

DA Australia Acquire Languages Direct

From their press release:

DA Information Services (DA) today announced it has completed the acquisition of Languages Direct, the leading supplier of LOTE (Languages Other Than English) books and AV material to Libraries in Australasia. This acquisition will mean public, state and University libraries in Australia, New Zealand and South East Asia can now consolidate English Language and LOTE purchasing easily.

As both companies are conveniently headquartered in Melbourne, integration has already commenced to incorporate Languages Direct as a division of DA Information Services. Languages Direct will continue to have its own identity within DA.

Richard Siegersma, Executive Chairman of DA Information Services said, “DA is the most innovative library supplier in Australia for English language titles. Our innovative solutions will be applied to the LOTE product range as well. Initiatives like local Print on Demand and access to foreign language electronic books, means a broader and more comprehensive range of books will be available faster. DA’s sophisticated technology platform and scale will deliver economies of scale for libraries, through merging the purchasing and delivery of LOTE and English
language titles.”

Jacob Miceli, Managing Director of Languages Direct commented: “We are delighted to have concluded our agreement with DA Information Services. DA have impressed us with their commitment to advancing LOTE and their capacity to expand the services associated with the supply of LOTE material. This is a positive development for our customers as it will provide continuity and improved services for our customers, which we know DA can
clearly provide.” Languages Direct operations will be relocated to DA’s Mitcham premises by early July 2009. The Foreign Language Bookshop in Collins Street, Melbourne will be retained by the Miceli family

.

FiledBy Announces Pre-Pub Website Features

FiledBy announced some new enhancements this morning:

FiledBy (www.filedby.com) has added a new pre-publication website feature to its growing list of online marketing tools for authors. Writers publishing a new book now have a low cost, effective tool to pre-launch their book online.

The new feature allows both first time and published authors to quickly and inexpensively build a pre-publication web presence on FiledBy. “Bookselling experts agree that authors should start promoting a new book well before it arrives in bookselling channels to build interest, community and sales,” said Peter Clifton, FiledBy CEO and president. “FiledBy’s new website feature makes it easy for authors to get ahead of the marketing curve by setting up a comprehensive online marketing presence in advance of their book’s publication date.”

MORE

Finding An Orphan

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

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

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

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

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

OUP on Google Book Settlement

Via Evan Schnittman.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chris Anderson makes an ass of himself (Edrants):

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

And some more on this from the Boston Globe

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

After the Storm

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

NY Times Announces Linked Data Initiative

A cool announcement from the NY Times yesterday:

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

Here is some more material on the Linked data initiative.

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

Teleread: Amazon and Synergy = Kindle

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

Here are some examples:

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

....

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

....

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

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

....

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

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

And that is where Kindle is going. Fast.

....

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

Roy Blount Jr. Addresses the Orphanage

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

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

Desperate Publishers of Manhattan

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

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

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

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

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

Are the Orphans really Phantoms?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Voyager Learning Bought by Veronis (Cambium)

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

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

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