Looking at Kindle Pricing: Shift of Kindle Bestsellers Towards Price Extremes

Dan Lubart of Iobyte Solutions has been working with several publishers on the mechanics of eBook marketing and selling. He's begun to promote his work on his website and his analysis of Kindle pricing is throwing up some interesting data. Here is a recent post (Blogsite):

This chart shows the number of titles on the Kindle Bestsellers list that fall within each of four selected price bands each day. The shift of the market towards premium titles (over $10) and super-discount titles (under $3) is significant of late. Even since the disruption of March 1st when Random House went agency and repriced a number of bestsellers from $9.99 to $12.99, the trend has continued. Our working hypothesis is that as the increasing number of books in the super-discount band become available, that segment of the buying market will continue to congregate there. What follows is that the remainder of buyers as a segment are less price-sensitive than the entire market was, resulting in stronger support for premium priced eBooks as opposed to value priced eBooks (under $10).

* Totals may be less than 100 on certain days due to exclusion of games and other non-book titles.

Today there are 35 super-discount titles (below $3) and 40 premium titles (above $10). Three months ago (1/8/11) those numbers were 26 and 19 respectively. Part of this shift is explained by the Random House change on 3/1, but the trend has been strong since then. Both of the middle bands have lost 6 titles each since 3/2.

Iobyte's eBook MarketView tool enables publisher, authors, agents and other interested parties to study the dynamics of the eBook retail marketplace in various ways. For more information, please email us at info@iobyte.com

MediaWeek (Vol 4, No 17): Morrissey, King James, Big Content, Sneering at Genres, Hitch, + More

Morrissey sees his autobiography as an instant "classic" so does Penguin have an advantage (Independent):

"I'd like it to go to Penguin, but only if they published it as a Classic," Morrissey told Radio 4's Front Row. "I can't see why not – a contemporary Penguin Classic. When you consider what really hits print these days and when you look at the autobiographies and how they are sold, most of it is appalling. It's a publishing event, not a literary event." Penguin, whose Classic imprint was launched in 1946 to provide the best books for the affordable price of sixpence, said Morrissey's wishes could be accommodated. A spokeswoman told The Independent: "There is a natural fit between Morrissey's sensibility, his artistic achievements and Penguin Classics. A book could be published as a Penguin Classic because it is a classic in the making. It's something we would like to discuss with Morrissey." There is no minimum time limit before a book can be considered a Penguin Classic, but the list embraces people or works that have "caused scandal and political change, broken down barriers, social and sexual". A provocative figure who challenged rock stereotypes through his celibacy, Morrissey would fit the Penguin Classics lineage, which includes memoirs by Quentin Crisp, Andy Warhol and William Burroughs.

So that settles it then.

The King James Bible is now 400 years old and David Starkey in The Mail on Sunday suggests England can trace her empire back to its publication (Mail):

Called into being by a king, it has carried ideas of truth and freedom and justice and human dignity to the furthest corners of the globe. Its cadences can be heard in the speeches of Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King and President Obama. It is the spice in the new English of the Indian Subcontinent. And yet, extraordinarily, this supreme achievement was the work of a committee – or so we have always been told. Closer examination reveals a very different story, which overturns our notions of the chronology of this great book and reintroduces an unjustly neglected name to our pantheon of great writers, William Tyndale. James VI of Scotland succeeded the childless Queen Elizabeth I as James I of England in 1603. There were high hopes for him, and none higher than James’s for himself. He had been king of Scots since he was in his cradle. He was learned; a polished, published author and a patient, canny politician. Above all – and in sharp contrast to the ageing Elizabeth, who had frozen into a sort of querulous immobility – he had vision and ambition. James I had set himself three main tasks. He wanted to end the long, debilitating war between England and Spain. He was determined to bring about a political union between his two separate kingdoms of Scotland and England. And he even dreamt of reuniting the Christian church, which had been riven by the Reformation into warring factions, as Catholics fought Protestants and Protestants fought each other. All three conflicts, James resolved, would be settled by his deft mediation as the universal Rex Pacificus – ‘the peacemaker king’.

And on the other hand, a journal issue dedicated to discussing evolution, creation and intelligent design generates some controversy (Inside HigherEd):

But the anger wasn’t provoked by any of the articles in the guest-edited issue, which wrestled with questions including “Are creationists rational?” (answer: yes, in one sense) and “Can’t philosophers tell the difference between science and religion?” The outrage sprang from two paragraphs published in the front of the print edition: a note from the journal’s three regular editors-in-chief, apologizing for the content that followed.

In the Harvard Business Review, Big Content is Strangling American Innovation (HBR):

Many in the high technology industry have known this for a long time. Despite making their living relying on it, the Big Content players do not understand technology, and never have. Rather than see it as an opportunity to reach new audiences, technology has always been a threat to them. Example after example abounds of this attitude; whether it was the VCR which was "to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone" as famed movie industry lobbyist Jack Valenti put it at a congressional hearing, or MP3 technology, which they tried to sue out of existence. In fact, it's possible to go back as far as the gramophone and see the content industries rail against new technology. The reason why? Every shift in technology is difficult for them. Just as they work out how to make money using one technology, it changes. The sensible thing for them to do would be to learn how to deal with the change. Instead, their approach to every generation of technology is either to attempt to stymie it so badly that nobody wants it, or to stop it altogether through their influence with lawmakers in Washington DC.

BBC denies sneering at genre fiction (Guardian):

The programming, which included The Books We Really Read: a Culture Show Special and New Novelists: 12 of the Best, used a "sneering derogatory tone" to address commercial fiction, focusing instead on literary fiction, the letter read." The vast majority of novels that are read in this country fall far outside of the contemporary fiction genre – they very much include the three genres of science fiction, fantasy and horror, which has produced everything from classics by HG Wells, Bram Stoker, Roald Dahl, Mary Shelley, George Orwell and JRR Tolkien, to modern bestsellers by such authors as Iain M Banks, Sir Terry Pratchett and JK Rowling – these three genres being totally excluded from the BBC's World Book Night coverage," the authors complained. " The BBC World Book Nights self-indulgent coverage gave the general public the misleading impression that novels are only for an elite, and that unless you're reading Dostoevsky, preferably in the original Russian, you're wasting your time on trash." But the BBC said today that it was "absolutely committed to celebrating books in all their forms", including science fiction, pointing to Mark Gatiss's adaptation of HG Wells's Man on the Moon, which ran last October on BBC4, and to three-time Arthur C Clarke award winner China Miéville's appearance on The Review Show.

Martin Amis on Christopher Hitchens (Observer):

As a result, Christopher is one of the most terrifying rhetoricians that the world has yet seen. Lenin used to boast that his objective, in debate, was not rebuttal and then refutation: it was the "destruction" of his interlocutor. This isn't Christopher's policy – but it is his practice. Towards the very end of the last century, all the greatest chessplayers, including Garry Kasparov, began to succumb to a computer (named Deep Blue); I had the opportunity to ask two grandmasters to describe the Deep Blue experience, and they both said: "It's like a wall coming at you." In argument, Christopher is that wall. The prototype of Deep Blue was known as Deep Thought. And there's a case for calling Christopher Deep Speech. With his vast array of geohistorical references and precedents, he is almost Google-like; but Google (with, say, its 10 million "results" in 0.7 seconds) is something of an idiot savant, and Christopher's search engine is much more finely tuned. In debate, no matter what the motion, I would back him against Cicero, against Demosthenes. Whereas mere Earthlings get by with a mess of expletives, subordinate clauses, and finely turned tautologies, Christopher talks not only in complete sentences but also in complete paragraphs. Similarly, he is an utter stranger to what Diderot called l'esprit de l'escalier: the spirit of the staircase. This phrase is sometimes translated as "staircase wit" – far too limitingly, in my view, because l'esprit de l'escalier describes an entire stratum of one's intellectual and emotional being. The door to the debating hall, or to the contentious drinks party, or indeed to the little flat containing the focus of amatory desire, has just been firmly closed; and now the belated eureka shapes itself on your lips. These lost chances, these unexercised potencies of persuasion, can haunt you for a lifetime – particularly, of course, when the staircase was the one that might have led to the bedroom.

Ingrate Paul Brodeur wants his stuff back from the NY Public Library (NYTimes):

In a series of letters and phone calls to Mr. Brodeur over the summer, they explained that, as they did with every donation, they had carefully weeded out what would be useful to generations of researchers (original letters and rare primary documents) and excluded less-meaningful artifacts (photocopied news stories and multiple drafts of New Yorker writings). In the process, an original donation of about 320 boxes had been whittled to 53. On a recent afternoon, Ms. Thornton, who oversees collections and exhibits, showed off the results of that winnowing, displaying a detailed catalog and a sampling of documents on a long table outside the library’s Rose Main Reading Room. The Brodeur collection appeared carefully labeled by subject and date. There were folders containing fan mail from readers (one called an article he had written for The New Yorker “extremely provocative and well-researched”). There were copies of letters from Mr. Brodeur to his colleagues at the magazine (including an angry missive to Seymour Hersh, who had backtracked on an endorsement of a much-debated Brodeur book about the dangers of electrical power lines in 1997. Mr. Brodeur called him “craven” and “lame.”). And there was an unfinished draft of a novel, titled “Coral Sea,” about an investigative journalist who stumbles on an important secret. Ms. Thornton said that before last year, Mr. Brodeur’s papers had been largely undigested. The documents, she said, “had no catalog record, no archival finding aid, no collection guide.” She added: “The collection was not usable.”

From the twitter: Reclaiming LS Lowry | Richard Cork Guardian PND: Blackboard in Play PND Who will buy this $Billion education business? PND: 60mins Expose of Mortenson - And He Responds. PND Peter Osnos: Good Book Reviews Are No Longer Enough - The Atlantic Chris Whittle's plan to make a world-class private school - Fortune

Week in Photos: April 4th, 2011

Week in Photos: April 4th, 2011, a set on Flickr.

A different approach this week but a return to normal next week.

Arab Spring: An interview with Mona Eltahawy

From CCC's Beyond the Book:

As popular uprisings have spread across the Middle East and North Africa, media pundits have credited Twitter and Facebook. But one Egyptian-born journalist based in New York says the acclaim for social media is misplaced, even though she admits to a Twitter addiction herself.

“It was a revolution of courage, rather than a revolution of Twitter or Facebook,” says Mona Eltahawy. “Social media connected real-life activists with online activists, and with ordinary Egyptians whose only exposure to politics came through Facebook and through tweets that they read. And through that connection, [Twitter] brought people out on the ground. But it was a tool. It was a weapon.”

An acclaimed freelance journalist, Mona Eltahawy is also a lecturer and researcher on the growing importance of social media in the Arab world. She spoke with CCC’s Chris Kenneally at the We Media NYC conference about her work and her insights on the Arab Spring.

Interview

Blackboard in Play

Leading educational platform company Blackboard, that virtually invented the learning management system (LMS), has said it will consider placing itself up for sale. According to various reports the company has received multiple unsolicited offers for the company and thus has decided to retain investment council to determine their best course of action.

Shares soared as much as 35% on Tuesday based on the company's announcement and analysts began speculating which companies might bid for the educational services company. Immediately mentioned were publishers Pearson and McGraw Hill although these companies might find it difficult to continue a 'non-biased' version of the Blackboard platform as owners (at least in the minds of educators). Google was also mentioned as a potential buyer - possibly more likely given the company's recent comments about their future m/a plans. According to Feltl & Co analyst Scott Berg, "An acquirer can pay as high as 16-17 times the EBITDA ... I think somewhere between $50 and $57 (per share)" for Blackboard.

Share prices exceeded $50 which values the company at well over $1.3billion and Blackboard has retained Barclays Capital to advise them on their options.

Reuters

Speakers Announced for Making Information Pay: Constructing the 21st Century Publishing Enterprise

BISG will hold its eighth annual Making Information Pay conference (www.bisg.org/mip) on Thursday, May 5, 2011, at the McGraw-Hill Auditorium in New York City.

The conference will feature keynote speaker Kenneth Michaels, EVP & COO, Hachette Book Group, joined by a lineup of industry leaders sharing new ways to think about, create and deliver products that successfully connect with today’s consumer. Confirmed speakers and session topics include:

Kenneth Michaels, EVP & COO, Hachette Book Group “Publishers as 21st Century Content Providers”

Bill Kasdorf, Vice President, Apex Content Solutions “Toward Agility & Efficiency: Best Practices for ‘Future-Proofing’ New Content”

Andrew Savikas, CEO, Safari Books Online and VP, Digital Initiatives, O’Reilly Media “Flexible & Multi-Channel Content: Real-World Examples from O’Reilly Media”

Madi Solomon, Director of Content Standards, Pearson “Smart Content: The Importance of Semantics in Publishing”

Brett Sandusky, Director of Product Innovation, Kaplan Publishing “Building a Smarter Wrapper: Utilizing the Data Locked Inside Digital Content to Increase ‘E-’ and ‘P-’ Book Discoverability”

Heather Reid, Director of Data Systems and Services, Copyright Clearance Center “The State of Current Rights Management Systems: Initial Findings from BISG & CCC’s Joint Survey of Publishers and Vendors”

David Marlin, President and Co-Founder, MetaComet Systems “Content in the Wild: What Happens When Rights Management Goes Wrong”

Mike Shatzkin, Founder & CEO, The Idea Logical Company “The Key to Future Profits: More Transactions, Fewer Dollars”

Tara Catogge, Senior Vice President of Inbound Supply Chain, Levy Home Entertainment “Attention Shoppers: Building Opportunity Based on Customer Behavior Data”

REGISTER

For more information about Making Information Pay 2011 visit MIP

60mins Expose of Mortenson - And He Responds.

By now you will have heard and read of the 60mins piece that exposed yet another literary faker. Greg Mortenson, who wrote (the now apparently fictional) Three Cups of Tea, has actively participated in the education and emancipation of students and young girls in Afghanistan and Pakistan; however, according to CBS all his good work is based on a fiction. Even worse, there's the suspicion that in intermingling his business and charity works, it is the charity work which is getting short shrift. If you haven't seen the 60mins piece the link is here.

Meanwhile Mortenson has responded in an exclusive interview in Outside magazine and here are a few samples:

What happens then is, when you re-create the scenes, you have my recollections, the different memories of those involved, you have his writing, and sometimes things come out different. In order to be convenient, there were some omissions. If we included everything I did from 1993 to 2003 it would take three books to write it. So there were some omissions and compressions, and ... I don’t know, what that’s called?

Literary license?
Yeah. So, rather than me going two or three times to one place, he would synthesize it into one trip. I would squawk about it and be told that it would all work out.

This was my first book. I’m an introverted guy, running ragged for months on end, and in those days I was overseas all the time, and also trying to raise money. My regret—what I wish I would have done—is that I should have taken off several months and really focused on the book. But I was trying to raise a family, be gone most of the year, and work 16- to 20-hour days without stopping.

...

60 Minutes focused on financial matters, relating to the blurry lines between CAI, which is a tax-exempt nonprofit, and you, an individual who sells books and collects lecture fees at events promoted by CAI advertising. I’ve also heard from sources who have criticized the fact that you often use a charter jet when you fly around to engagements. What do you say to all that?

If you go to the Web sites for Stones Into Schools or Three Cups of Tea, I have most of my public events listed for the last five or six years. Last year I went to 140 cities, something like that, and I also traveled overseas plus trying to be home whenever I can.

When I do events, it doesn’t just mean a lecture. I go early in the morning, often talk to local schools, and then maybe I do a luncheon at a library, in the afternoon I go to a college. I’m often doing five lectures a day, plus tea with some little old ladies at the library. Then there’s some kind of dinner or reception, the lecture, a book signing, and those go on for two or three hours sometimes.

Mostly what the charters involved was having a plane and then getting on that plane at midnight or one in the morning, flying to the next city, crashing on the plane, getting on the ground, and then hitting the road again.

Donors could really care less, I guess, but I was spending more and more time away from my family, and it was really having a huge impact on my wife and kids. Using charter flights, which I only started doing in 2009, allowed me to pack in many more cities. I get about 2,400 speaking requests a year. About 400 of the ones last year were offering to pay money. So I mix them. And, since January, I have totally paid for all my own travel.

There's a lot more in the article.

New Jersey Library Association Critical of Google Privacy Issues

Via the LawLibrary Blog, NJ is leading the way in comments critical of Google's policy regarding privacy and reader confidentiality. Here is the text of the draft letter:

The New Jersey Library Association submits this comment on the proposed consent order, In the Matter of Google Inc., File No. 1023136, between the FTC and Google. The consent order comes as a result of the complaint filed by the Electronic Privacy Information Center ("EPIC") regarding the privacy breach to Gmail users caused by Google Buzz.

The FTC complaint alleges that Google employed unfair and deceptive practices when it launched the Google Buzz social networking service.

The NJLA strongly supports the FTC settlement agreement, which applies to all Google products and services, including Gmail and Google Buzz. It bans Google from misrepresenting its privacy policies in the future, requires independent privacy audits every two-years for the next 20 years, and requires that Google institute a comprehensive privacy program to safeguard its users’ data and personal information.

NJLA’s interest in the settlement pertains to the rights of individuals to read anonymously. Reader privacy is an important component of intellectual freedom. In our experience, readers who visit websites and use Google have a reasonable expectation of privacy. That is to say, they believe they are anonymous. They are entitled to hold this belief, and should not be deceived by unfair practices that track their Internet use.

As part of the Comprehensive Privacy Program, the FTC should require Google to:

- Limit data retention to the minimum time necessary

- Establish user privacy provisions for Google Books

- Treat IP addresses as personally identifiable: they should be protected, not routinely collected

- Routinely encrypt all cloud-based services (Gmail, Docs, etc.)

- Not disclose user data to law enforcement without a warrant

- Allow users to use Google services anonymously

- Stop behavioral profiling of Internet users

- Limit Google's use of a web site's Analytics data

- Not require Google Accounts for Android phones

- Not track Android users without explicit permission

- Be transparent as to what data it collects on users

- Allow users to control the information Google collects on them

- Encrypt all Gmail to Gmail emails and chats using open standards like pgp

- Refrain from offering facial recognition services

The same requirements should apply to Google’s competitors as well.

Thank you for the opportunity to comment on the Google Buzz settlement.

From LawLibraryBlog

MediaWeek (Vol 4, No 16): Alberto Vitale, Arab Market eBooks, B2B Magazines.

Former Random House CEO Alberto Vitale was interviewed Stephen J. Kobrin, publisher and executive director of Wharton Digital Press, and Knowledge@Wharton and he had this to say about protection publishers for publishers:

Knowledge@Wharton: If we think just about the English-speaking market, globally, will territorial rights survive? Is there any reason you can't publish a book in English, in New York, and have it downloaded from, say, Amazon servers onto Kindles all over the world?
Vitale: For as long as there is a copyright issue, it's going to be a problem. Things become illegitimate when you put obstacles to legitimate things. I agree with you that anybody in the world should be able to download a book from the publisher, or from Amazon, or from whoever it is. But, you have to also protect the publishers in England, in Canada, in Australia, in New Zealand, [and] in South Africa. It's going to be something rather arduous, but it's going to have to be done. If the publishers don't do it, those books will find a way, anyhow ... through not-so-official ways and that would be a problem.
Knowledge@Wharton: Can I push that one step further? Why is there a reason to protect the publisher in Australia or New Zealand, or Tashkent?
Vitale: Excuse me? How is the publisher going to live? On thin air?
Knowledge@Wharton: No, I understand, but...
Vitale: End of the story.
Knowledge@Wharton: But the question is, in a digital world, where books can be sold globally, is there a role for national publishers, when people are going to be publishing books globally?
Vitale: There is a role. These national publishers are also publishing books, even in digital format. Those books can be distributed by Amazon in New York or in London. That publisher has to be protected.
Knowledge@Wharton: In the e-book world, is there a reason that the publisher -- if they're not publishing paper, but just electronic books -- shouldn't have global rights to the book, and be able to market it globally? In those instances, is there a reason to protect publishers in other countries?
Vitale: In that situation, obviously not. But that's utopia. Paper books are going to be with us for as far as I can see. But the digital book will change guise many, many times, because of what the technology allows you to do. Amazon [in January began] publishing $2.99 or $1.99 books ... or the Amazon [Kindle] Singles [short works of between 10,000 and 30,000 words]. That's a major development. Whatever anybody innovates, it will be taken a step further by the establishment.

The National newspapers looks at the availability of Arabic language eReader software and the presumed lack of interest in catering to the worlds' fifth largest language group (National):

Last year, the global e-book market grew by more than 200 per cent, according to Futuresource Consulting, a research company. But no one has yet calculated the full extent of the vast global market for e-books.

At the moment, Arabic is the fifth-largest spoken language in the world. With internet penetration spreading across the region, there is a growing demand for e-books in the Arab market that stretches well beyond the Middle East.

"E-publishing in Arabic is not confined to a specific geographic region - because there are Arabic readers in South America, Asia and Europe," says Emad Aldoghaither, the president of the electronic publishing software company Semanoor, based in Saudi Arabia.

"Arabic speakers outside the Middle East often have greater access to credit cards and internet access than those in the region," he says. "The growth potential for e-books within the Middle East is very high as the younger generation prefer electronic to printed media."

Semanoor is trying to tap into that market after developing the software needed to support electronic versions of Arabic books. The new version of its SBoook services is currently awaiting approval as an application to run on Apple's iPad tablet computers.

The company supports e-books covering the Saudi curriculum and university publications in addition to more general titles. But at the moment Semanoor offers only about 10,000 Arabic-language e-books.

"There are different platforms, such as Sony e-readers and Android tablets. But the best platform for Arabic-language e-books is the iPad," says Mr Aldoghaither. "Android is also good but does not have the same penetration in terms of users numbers. Our software does not merely deliver a PDF as the existing technology already out there does. It actually supports the text itself and allows right-to-left reading."

The Spectator has the briefest of summaries of the London Bookfair including this quote from one of the seminars (Spectator):

First, most publishers and agents agree that the e-book will soon outstrip the paperback. This, insiders claim, is an opportunity. Speaking at an event on Tuesday, Corrine Turner of Ian Fleming Publications argued that the e-book was more flexible than the strict format of the paperback, which means that publishers can reach a more diverse range of customers. Production costs are also significantly less, so an ever greater number of books can be published to exploit niche markets across the globe. The upshot is that the days of vanity publishing are numbered – trust a convocation of publishers to arrive at that conclusion.

The market may be depressed (March 2011 saw the worst performance since 2005), but some of the big-wigs are in bullish mood. MDs and CEOs are pitching everything on securing the rights for English language books, as the rise of the internet and digital editions makes publishing an increasingly globalised industry. Speaking at a seminar called ‘The Book is Dead: Long live the global book’, Bloomsbury’s group sales and marketing director Evan Schnittman argued that protecting ‘territoriality’ was essential if publishers were to compete: ‘

Selling the English-language rights to different territories opens up the opportunity for competition. The internet will undermine all the protections we put up. The most important thing to do as a business is to make a decision as to how to manage territoriality.’

I don't buy that argument at all.

Mediashift looks at how B2B magazines are redefining themselves:

Today's successful B2B magazines have redefined themselves as multi-platform brands that provide a variety of information and services to their audiences and advertisers.

"We wouldn't be here if we continued to say we wanted to be a traditional print magazine," said Rich Reiff, CEO of Advantage Business Media, which produces a variety of technology-oriented B2B magazines and web media.

Publishers are now applying their B2B magazine brands to a variety of products that serve their already existing audiences in new ways. Some are developing webinars, sponsoring trade shows, and creating online databases of information related to their topics, in addition to the now-commonplace websites, social media outreach, and digital editions. For example, Reiff's company is creating a "self-service digital directory" that will list industry-specific companies and the products or services they provide.

The role of actual print B2B magazines has shifted as well. Most of the news that these magazines once offered can now quickly be found online, so their publishers have had to focus on other kinds of content and find ways to play upon the unique strengths of print.

"We have to be very careful that what content we provide in the print property will stand the test of time and also be very valuable. It has to go in depth on something that's going on in the industry," said Reiff.

Research suggests what we might already know: That we're not very good at researching (Jacob):

During our user testing in Asia-Pacific last month, I watched users conduct more than 100 searches for a broad range of tasks. Only once did I see a user change strategy.

Given the rarity of strategy shifts, we'd need much more data to precisely estimate how often they happen. In this round of user research, our goal was to update the Fundamental Guidelines for Web Usability seminar, so we focused on website design, not on search engine statistics.

Still, the rough estimate from our available data is obvious: users change search strategy only 1% of the time; 99% of the time they plod along a single unwavering path. Whether the true number is 2% or 0.5%, the big-picture conclusion is the same: users have extraordinarily inadequate research skills when it comes to solving problems on the Web.

In our study, for example, an interior decorator indiscriminately entered queries into any text box that caught her eye, with no understanding of which search system she was using or whether it was searching the entire Web or only the site she was on.

This example offers a striking case of confused mental models. It also highlights a big problem with search today: it doesn't facilitate any conceptual knowledge because it relies on quick in–out dips into websites.

Online revenues grow even for television (Mediapost):

Major growth of U.S. online television has pushed the business to $1.6 billion in all revenue in 2010.
The online revenue rise -- a strong 34.2% gain over 2009 -- came from both advertising and consumer fee revenues, according to IHS Screen Digest. One highlight of this growth was in advertising sales, which climbed 64.7% to reach $719 million in 2010, up from $436.8 million in 2009. Other surveys note that all U.S. digital video advertising was over the $1 billion mark for 2010.
...
"The relatively modest growth in the streaming video area reveals a still tentative approach toward the Internet from some big media companies, which are reluctant to jeopardize their lucrative cable carriage deals by aggressively pursuing online opportunities," stated Dan Cryan, senior analyst and head of broadband media at IHS.

And in Sports PaidContent notes how important mobile access was for the Cricket WorldCup:

ESPN (NYSE: DIS) says the mobile version of its ESPNcricinfo site accounted for 45 percent (45 million) of all the brand’s page views during the April 2 final, in which India beat Sri Lanka. That’s the highest share of any of the digital media through which ESPN covered the sport, and doesn’t even include the app versions of ESPNcricinfo.

It’s significant that mobile use outweighed desktop use. ESPN claims ESPNcricinfo’s mobile site took 63.6 percent of the global mobile audience in its industry segment - far outweighing the 36.1 percent share ESPNcricinfo claims it took in the desktop web market.

That effect came from Indians, who supplied the largest slice of mobile traffic to ESPNcricinfo (377.3 million page views through the tournament). There are around 700 million mobile phones in use in India - nearly the entire population of 1.15 billion. Many of the handsets are unsophisticated, but broadcasters nevertheless supply subscription audio content. In neighbouring Pakistan, BBC Urdu offered five, two-minute World Cup audio reports every hour for on-demand listening by dial-up during the competition.

From the Twitter:

Eight Things You Didn't Know You Could Do With Your Kindle: TechNews

Authors Sign eBooks Electronically NYTimes

Eye Shadow: London

Eye Shadow. London Eye, April 2011

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

As the sun set on a stunning day in London last Friday I took this shot of the London Eye as its' shadow passed across the front of the Shell Building.

Join me on Flickr

MediaWeek (Vol 4, No 15); Borders, Indigo,

Short this week due to travel: Borders' management are under fire for the seemingly unjustified executive bonus plan they put in place (Reuters)

In a filing on Thursday, the U.S. Trustee's Office said the plan to pay 17 executives, 25 "director-level" employees and additional "key" employees over $8 million in bonuses was "really a disguised retention plan for insiders, which also provides for discriminatory bonuses for non-insiders".The Trustee's Office, which is the Justice Department agency charged with overseeing the administration of bankruptcy cases, said Borders failed to show that the proposed payments complied with the bankruptcy code."Seeking the approval of the bonus motion at this early juncture, prior to the debtors finalizing their business and operational plans is not a sound exercise of the debtors' business judgment," said Tracy Hope Davis, the U.S. Trustee, in the filing.

Locked in a bathroom (Telegraph):

I have long observed that the success of a social occasion depends upon at least one individual sacrificing their dignity for the merriment of others: witness the guest who found herself locked in the loo at a book launch I went to on Monday night. Attempts to break down the door left the young aesthetes winded, and eventually our stumped hostess called in the fire brigade. This took the drama to new and enthralling levels, and drinks consumption trebled.Soon afterwards, the prisoner was freed and the firemen chivalrously allowed her to flee down the stairs before she could be identified. I was glad the poor woman was spared her blushes, but longed to tell her she was in excellent company. Margaret Thatcher, as Leader of the Opposition, had to be "released from bondage" when her bathroom door stuck fast in a Detroit hotel. In the days after John Smith's death, when Gordon Brown and Tony Blair were haggling over the leadership, Blair received a text message during one peculiarly long hiatus: "Tony. It's Gordon. I'm locked in the toilet." Blair couldn't resist writing: "You're staying there until you agree."

Heather Reisman profiled as the best book retailer (The Star):

Reisman, billing herself early on as a merchant of "culture" and not just books, successfully diversfied her product mix to include upscale giftware and stationery, going beyond music and DVDs that even Canadian Tire now sells in "dump bins" in its corriders.

I thought at that time, in the early 2000s, that Reisman, 61, risked junking up her stores with the non-book inventory, muddying the image of Indigo/Chapters. I was wrong. While too much of the early non-book merchandise was shoddy or too cute, Reisman steadily narrowed and refined the non-book demo. That has since been a big driver of sales, up 11% over the past four years in a flat market for traditional booksellers. Indigo also launched and is the largest owner in Kobo, an e-reader intended to guard and ideally grow Indigo's bookselling franchise. Kobo is pitted against rivals including Kindle, iBooks and Google Inc.'s nascent Editions e-book store. An online bookstore as well as an e-reader, Kobo comes pre-installed in a number of smartphone and tablet devices. It's unique in operating on the EPUB open standard devised by the global book trade. Which means Kobo works on all manner of devices, while Amazon's Kindle has been selective in developing apps for favored device makers.

The great debate: Will Publishers' exist was a bit of a bust but here's a short write up (The Bookseller):

Franklin said that while digital meant self-publishing was easy, it did not mean authors could replicate all of a publisher's work. "If you self-publish on the internet, you might as well not bother, you will be silent," he said. "Free is far too much to pay for the overwhelming majority of books self-published‚ you can't even give them away." Both Charkin and Franklin pointed to the health of the fair as evidence that publishing was still vital. Franklin added that so long as publishers provided a service that connected readers to authors, they would remain in business. "The job of publishers is to persuade readers that they should part with money to read an author's work," he said. However, both admitted that publishing had to change. Charkin said it had to begin marketing 24/7, and improve its speed of production. Franklin also conceded that publishing was not in a "healthy state" and warned: "Some publishers will go bankrupt this year."

Diversification at ThomsonReuters?

A good overview of ThomsonReuters and an interview with CEO Tom Glocer in the Gulf News:

The Thomson Reuters' focus on serving professional markets means that its prospects are more linked to the level of professionalization in a given country or market, than its GDP. "If there are more scientists, wealth managers, doctors, lawyers, then the demand for our content and software is correspondingly higher," said Glocer.

"In the more rapidly developing parts of the world you are seeing quite a steep curve of rapid professionalization. People are building legal systems. Think of all the new universities."

"So even if it has less than many countries in Asia in absolute terms, the GCC is significant in terms of rate of growth. In the Middle East our financial information services are still the fastest growing: in double-digits before the recession, and moving back towards double-digits now," he said.

"We have a very global view that our services are intended to go everywhere, but our legal services have to be more tied to the laws and languages of an area. So we have invested in that as a special regional or country service."

"We have just acquired the rights to the leading electronic collection of legal information in Saudi, Rashamoun."

Siam Intercontinental 1970

Siam Intercontinental 1970, originally uploaded by Personanondata - Michael Cairns.

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

A much younger PND family lived in the white building on the left on the second floor at the far end between 1968 and 1969. The tower block was constructed and completed around 1967 whereas the main hotel - with the red tile roof - was opened in 1960. For many years the Interconti was the hot spot in town and, with the Oriental, the only top class hotel in Bangkok.

The stately building on the upper left was the current Kings' mothers' residence.

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OCLC's WorldCat Local Building Content Resources

OCLC recently announced how much their efforts to include access to publishers content has developed. Here from their press release:

An expanding collection of authoritative content from leading academic publishers is now accessible through WorldCat Local, the OCLC discovery service that offers users integrated access to electronic, digital and physical library materials.

WorldCat Local provides access to more than 750 million items, including books, journals and databases from international publishers; the digital collections of groups like HathiTrust, OAIster and Google Books; open access materials; as well as the collective resources of libraries worldwide through WorldCat.

OCLC continues to negotiate access to critical library content on behalf of the cooperative to ensure access to libraries’ most popular resources. To view a full list of the nearly 1,200 databases and collections available through WorldCat Local, visit the website.

Databases recently added to the WorldCat Local central index include:

• American Psychological Association: PsycARTICLES, PsycBOOKS, PsycCRITIQUES
• Alternative Press Center: Alternative Press Index, Alternative Press Index Archive

Content providers that will soon add databases to the WorldCat Local central index include:

• Accessible Archives
• Oxford University Press
• Taylor & Francis
• CABI
• OECD
• Sabinet
• Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)

Databases now available in WorldCat Local through remote access:

• Gale: Contemporary Authors, ¡Informe!, Making of Modern Law, Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center
• EBSCO: ATLA Religion Database ™ with ATLASerials ™ , PsycEXTRA, PsycINFO
• H. W. Wilson: Book Review Digest Retrospective: 1905-1982, Essay & General Literature Index Retrospective

WorldCat Local now offers vendor record sets from:

• ProQuest: ProQuest U. S. Executive Branch Documents, 1910-1932
• ProQuest: Gerritsen Collection of Women’s History, 1543-1945 (six collections in varying formats)
• Cassidy Cataloguing: Lexis I – E-treatises

The WorldCat Local search experience also grows richer with the ongoing addition of article-level metadata to WorldCat.org. When this metadata is added to WorldCat.org, it is automatically made part of WorldCat Local. Article-level metadata for the following resources have been added recently to WorldCat.org:

• ISIS Current Bibliography of the History of Science
• Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine

For more information, visit the WorldCat Local website.

The Global Library Information Site from OCLC

Via the OCLC cooperative website an announcement about the launch of their global library information website.

Our library often gets requests for combined statistics of this second kind that don't take into account the fact that there is no one, single global repository of library data. In order to help provide that kind of comparative information, we've created the Global Library Statistics page for the use of the entire library community. The service was originally a joint project of OCLC Research and the OCLC Library, and Research has contributed to its development.

Just choose a region and then a country from the drop-down menus or click on the map arrows to narrow your search. Then click on the tabs at the top of the table below the map for information about a specific category.

The page has information about (as much as possible) the total global library universe. It includes data for the total number of libraries, librarians, volumes, expenditures, and users for every country and territory in the world broken down into the major library types: academic, public, school, special and national. These figures do not represent OCLC membership, although the information is broken down into three regions that represent those used by the OCLC Global and Regional Councils: the Americas (North and South America), EMEA (Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and India), and Asia Pacific (Asia, Australia and Oceania). The statistics also include available data for languages used, and the number of library schools, publishers, and museums.

The staff of the OCLC Library extracted data from respected third-party sources, both electronic and print, that in their judgment are the most current and accurate sources to which they have access. For many countries, data were either unavailable (indicated in the charts as NA) or sporadic. Also, for a lot of the world, the data were not as current as we would have liked. We felt, though, that a fairly recent figure was better than none at all.

Report: Ithaka S+R Library Survey 2010 - Insights from Library Directors

From the executive summary of the most recent Ithaka S+R report on library strategies from the perspective of library directors. There are also a series of webinars scheduled to review the report beginning this Wednesday.

On strategy and leadership:

Most respondents do not think their libraries have conducted sufficient strategic planning to meet user needs for services and optimally manage collections. Thirty-five percent of respondents agreed with this statement, “My library has a well-developed strategy to meet changing user needs and research habits.” Slightly less than half said they have all the information they need to make informed decisions about when to deaccession print journals to which they have access digitally.

Library directors envision a high-level strategic prioritization of their research and teaching support and facilitation functions (expected to be important to more than 90% of respondents in five years) in conjunction with a shift away, in some cases, from collections acquisitions and preservation functions (expected to shrink so they are important to 80% or less of respondents in five years).

There are a number of important divergences between high-level strategies on the one hand and budget priorities on the other, suggesting that library directors are in some cases not able to fully execute the strategic direction they have in mind for their libraries.

On service offerings:

Library directors at all types of institutions see supporting teaching and learning as one of their primary missions: 94% of respondents said that they see teaching information literacy skills to undergraduates as a very important role for their libraries. They would also like to work more closely with faculty members on supporting classroom instruction. However, a notably smaller share of faculty members values the library for its teachingsupport role, raising questions about how the library best works within an institutional context to pursue this role.

Library directors believe that it is strategically important that their libraries be seen by users as the principal starting point in the discovery process. While they recognize that faculty members and students increasingly rely on resources outside the library for discovery of information and content, they would like to invest more in discovery tools to aid users.

On collections:

The library‟s role as a buyer of materials remains of primary importance, both in terms of how library directors prioritize their spending and how faculty members view the library. Electronic journals are a significant budget priority for many, and respondents envision a continued gradual rise in the amount that they spend on digital materials and commensurate reduction in expenditures for print materials. They expect in five years to essentially complete the transition to electronic format for journals acquisitions and at that point spend nearly half their books budget on electronic books.

Most libraries have become comfortable with deaccessioning or moving offsite their print journal collections after they have reliable digital access to copies of these materials: 91% have already done so or are planning to do so in the future. This is not the case for books, at least not yet. However, a significant portion of respondents would be willing to consider deaccessioning or moving offsite their print books collections if the proper preservation and access infrastructure is put in place.

Hat tip @lorcanD

MediaWeek (Vol 4, No 14): Long Distance Learning, OpenSource Textbooks, CCC, Harpercollins

Forbes takes a look at the rapidly expanding long distance learning market in India (Forbes):

The $260 million (market cap) Everonn uses a satellite network, with two-way video and audio. It reaches 1,800 colleges and 7,800 schools across 24 of India's 28 states. It offers everything from digitized school lessons to entrance exam prep for aspiring engineers and has training for job-seekers, too. "Never in my wildest imagination did I ever think I would be doing what I am doing today," says 49-year-old Kishore, who along with his family owns nearly 19% of the company. "When I started out I would have been happy if I'd reached 50 schools in south India."
Everonn debuted on FORBES ASIA's Best Under A Billion list in 2010. Revenues for the first three quarters of this fiscal year, through December, rose to $65 million--from $40 million the previous year. Profits touched $9.2 million--up from $6.1 million last year.

Edutopia opines about open source textbooks:

The Argument for Open-Source Curricular Materials:
The week this announcement was made, Edutopia had an article on the use of open source curricular materials – a growing trend being driven, in part, by the extraordinary cost of commercial textbooks. The argument for open curriculum has many elements in common with the argument for the increased use of open-source software. The most obvious feature of free open source (FOS) materials is the lack of cost for the materials themselves – most open-source content is free of cost in digital form. Historically there has been a tradeoff: low-cost (or free) comes at the expense of quality. (In other words, "There is no free lunch.") But FOS is different. Indeed, I've long argued that FOS software has the advantage of being free of cost, while, at the same time, providing greater value to the users.

This Lunch Is Not Only Free, It's Really Good:
The pairing of high quality with reduced cost seems counter-intuitive at first glance, but makes sense once you look into the open source community more deeply. Many of the developers and maintainers of open source materials are people who use these materials themselves, and thus have a strong interest in keeping the quality as high as possible. Historically this has been true since the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary – arguably the definitive dictionary of the English language whose entries were (and are) submitted by language fanatics, making it one of the largest and earliest open-source documents.

Washington Post on Orphans:

This may well be a practical solution, but the issue should not be Google’s to decide. As the lawfully elected representatives of rights holders and readers, Congress is best positioned to determine how copyright should apply in this case. An essential piece of any such solution is a body, similar to the recording industry’s ASCAP, that would be able to search for rights holders, disperse funds and oversee collective licensing of copyrighted works. This is an accepted strategy for exactly such situations, where an opt-in approach would be prohibitively onerous.

And Tracey Armstrong CEO of CCC comments on the above that this entity already exists (WAPO):

In fact, such an organization has been in existence for more than 30 years: the Copyright Clearance Center.

Mercury News on Orphan legislation:

However, Google might choose to a drop its court efforts altogether and take its cause to the legislative branch, one that would benefit the public interest.

This new strategy would be to have Congress pass legislation that would primarily make orphan works available to the public. Congress has considered similar legislation before, once in 2006. At that time, the U.S. Copyright Office advocated that after a thorough search failed to uncover the rightsholder, orphan books should be made available to the public. The legislation stalled because Congressional policy makers wanted to see how the Google Books case would play out in the courts.

Now that the outcome is known, Congress can act. Legislation would not only allow Google and commercialized enterprises from digitizing works, but libraries and universities too.

Allowing these organizations to scan out-of-print books and make millions of printed works readily available to the public will usher in an era of digital enlightenment.

Cory Doctrow in the Guardian on loaning eBooks:

Now, in point of fact, many ordinary trade books circulate far more than 26 times before they're ready for the discard pile. If a group of untrained school kids working as part-time pages can keep a copy of the Toronto Star in readable shape for 30 days' worth of several-times-per-day usage, then it's certainly the case that the skilled gluepot ninjas working behind the counter at your local library can easily keep a book patched up and running around the course for a lot more than 26 circuits.

Indeed, the HarperCollins editions of my own books are superb and robust examples of the bookbinder's art (take note!), and judging from the comments of outraged librarians, it's common for HarperCollins printed volumes to stay in circulation for a very long time indeed.But this is the wrong thing to argue about. Whether a HarperCollins book has the circulatory vigour to cope with 26 checkouts or 200, it's bizarre to argue that this finite durability is a feature that we should carefully import into new media. It would be like assuming the contractual obligation to attack the microfilm with nail-scissors every time someone looked up an old article, to simulate the damage that might have been done by our careless patrons to the newsprint that had once borne it.

From the twitter:

Reuters Special Report: Nic Callaway the publisher of the Madonna "Sex" book now building book Apps Reuters

Gallimard: 100 years in publishing Guardian

Astor Place

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

A walk around the lower east side late last year ended at Astor Place where I took this image of old and new.

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Serials Solutions and HathiTrust Indexing

Serials Solutions announce full indexing of HathiTrust content. From their press release:

Serials Solutions and HathiTrust today announced an agreement to enable full-text search of the entire HathiTrust collection of digitized scholarly books from the Summon™ web-scale discovery service. Researchers and faculty at institutions with the Summon™ service will be able to use the library’s own website to search the full text of its print books and serials, and discover materials relevant to their research topics. This collaboration makes the full text of much of the library’s physical collection as easily searchable as its electronic content.

“The HathiTrust collection today includes a significant, and growing, percentage of all the books contained within research libraries,” said John Wilkin, executive director of HathiTrust and associate university librarian at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. “We believe the library community needs strong platforms that make the discovery of quality content in libraries’ collections as easy and compelling as commercial web alternatives. In making the HathiTrust searchable from the Summon discovery service, we are enabling users to easily and efficiently search the full text of the entire HathiTrust collection concurrent with their exploration of a library’s other collections. We see this significant step forward in discoverability aiding HathiTrust in ensuring the accessibility and long-term preservation of this vast record of cultural heritage and collected knowledge.”

Soon researchers at any library with the Summon™ service will effectively search the full text of more than 8.4 million total volumes in the HathiTrust collection, including more than 4.6 million book titles and over 200,000 serials titles— nearly three billion pages. Once users locate the information they need using the Summon™ search box, they can access public domain materials directly from the HathiTrust, as well as be directed to the digital and physical content in the collections of their respective libraries.

Copyright's Beyond the Book looks at what's next for the Google Book Settlement

From their press release:

On March 22, Judge Chin issued his long awaited opinion in the Google Book Search settlement proceedings, rejecting the Amended Settlement Agreement (ASA) proposed by the Authors Guild, AAP and Google.

In his 48-page opinion, Judge Chin discussed the various objections before the court, including concerns regarding copyright, international law, antitrust, privacy and the class action/procedural aspects of the case – ultimately concluding that the ASA is not “fair, adequate and reasonable” as required for court approval of a settlement.

Judge Chin did, however, leave the door open for the parties to renegotiate and resubmit the settlement, urging them to consider adopting an “opt-in” rather than “opt-out” model which would ameliorate many of the concerns raised in the objections.

Through lively discussion, copyright expert Lois Wasoff and Copyright Clearance Center’s Christopher Kenneally will analyze this highly-anticipated decision, what it means for those affected by the proposed settlement and what is likely to happen next.

Unraveling the Rejection - The Google Book Settlement
Wednesday, March 30th at 12:00pm EST.
Click here to register for this complimentary hour-long online seminar