MediaWeek (Vol 4, No 26): Books In Print, Journal Publishing, Joyce, Education and Technology, Area 51 and more.

Sam Andersen in the NY Times is stopped cold by an actual book (NYT):

The book was the The World Almanac and Book of Facts, an iconic yellow slab of lists and stats and graphs that has been, for the last century or so, holy scripture to the culture’s various ministers of information: journalists, writers of elementary-school reports, know-it-all uncles, “Jeopardy!” contestants. It promises to deliver, at the speed of print, all the world’s most important facts: the state bird of Oklahoma (the scissor-tailed flycatcher); the year Euripides was born (484 B.C.); the phone number for Gamblers Anonymous (213-386-8789); the major industries of Guyana (bauxite, sugar, rice milling, timber, textiles, gold mining). It is, in other words, basically the analog Internet — the Ghost of Search Engines Past.

Over the last decade, the almanac has been superseded, thoroughly, on just about every front. I’d assumed it had died, years ago, in the mass extinction that brought down (or mortally wounded) all of its informational cousins: the encyclopedia, the phone book, the printed dictionary, the classified ad, the paper road map and even the bookstore itself.

In this day and age, with the almost limitless ability to publish additional and related material, some journal publishers continue to cling to antiquated and out of touch editorial polices (NYT):

In March, for instance, Daryl Bem, a psychologist at Cornell University, shocked his colleagues by publishing a paper in a leading scientific journal, The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, in which he presented the results of experiments showing, he claimed, that people’s minds could be influenced by events in the future, as if they were clairvoyant. Three teams of scientists promptly tried to replicate his results. All three teams failed. All three teams wrote up their results and submitted them to The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. And all three teams were rejected — but not because their results were flawed. As the journal’s editor, Eliot Smith, explained to The Psychologist, a British publication, the journal has a longstanding policy of not publishing replication studies. “This policy is not new and is not unique to this journal,” he said.

As a result, the original study stands.

From Intelligent Life, Frank Delaney is trying to decipher James Joyce (IL):

Delaney—an Irish broadcaster and author based in New York—admits that as a young man he found "Ulysses" unreadable. But as the centenary of Joyce’s birth approached in 1982, he felt increasingly embarrassed by his failure to get through it. "I began to read it aloud, and it started to make sense—because it’s not a novel, it’s a prose poem." He went on to write a bestselling book about Joyce’s Dublin, after which Joyce became "a resident guest in my mind". He has now read "Ulysses" six times.

With his rich Irish intonation and palpable enthusiasm, he makes an ideal guide. The book, he declares, is one of the pleasures of life: "a vast, entertaining, funny, absorbing, exciting, complex, immensely enjoyable novel. A book to get lost in." It is also a book to listen to: "Joyce was a singer—he had a beautiful tenor voice—so he understood writing for the ear. In 'Ulysses' you can hear how he slips from one thought to another, which is fascinating."

From Inside Higher Ed a look at why educational publishers and small EdTech companies need each other (IHE):

In the next 2 years we will see an acceleration of investments and purchases in the edtech startup and edtech small company (revenues <=$20 million a year) space by the likes of Pearson, McGraw-Hill, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and Cengage.

Unsubstantiated dross: Why do publishers keep publishing this stuff. A review of Area 51 and I saw did see the interview on John Stewart and he seemed genuinely taken with the book (or maybe he's crazy) New Statesman:

But I speak too soon. It was all going so well, right up until page 370, when we are told that that the aircraft which is supposed to have crashed in Roswell was - get this! - a Nazi flying saucer sent over by the Soviets to create a mass panic of alien invasion. But, wait! There's more. The pilots were in fact "biologically and/or surgically reengineered children" produced on the orders of Joseph Stalin by none other than - ta dah! - Joseph Mengele.

Ms Jacobsen is adamant that the source for her tall story is completely reliable. "This," she told CBS News, "is information that came to me from the source, who I absolutely believe (and) stand by. I've spoken with him since the book has been published...and what he said was that the child-sized aviators had been the byproduct of this horrific human experimentation program by Stalin, in collaboration with the doctor from Auschwitz, Dr. Joseph Mengele."

In the Observer Robert McCrum thinks there's no reason print and e can't happily coexist (Observer):

The brilliant simplicity of the book should be the equal of the latest technology. Reading a book on a screen is like enjoying wine intravenously. The book remains an aesthetic as well as a literary experience. Owning printed books may soon become synonymous with collecting them.

Richard Charkin, director of Bloomsbury, sees digitisation as an opportunity. "The publisher chooses the book and turns it into something better, publicises it, markets it, and collects the money. What happens in a digital world is identical to that. I am more optimistic about the future than I can express."

Malcolm Gladwell, bestselling author of The Tipping Point, is possibly a bellwether. What's his next project? Gladwell is working with his publisher to produce his oeuvre in a high-priced box set. "There's a market for Porsche and BMW or Toyota and Fiat," he says, "but not much in between. So it's Prada or H&M, ebooks or hardbacks. The book is alive and well, just a tad more exclusive. Perhaps it's the next big thing."

A Federal Judge takes issue with the proposed settlement of a case brought against West Publishing and Kaplan over test prep materials for the LSAT and calls the coupon idea "laughable". (Law):

A federal judge refused to sign off on a second settlement in the BAR/BRI antitrust litigation after objectors raised concerns that Kaplan Inc.'s portion of the deal involved coupons.

The deal would have settled claims by class members alleging that Kaplan and West Publishing Corp. conspired to monopolize the market for bar review courses. West Publishing owns BAR/BRI and Kaplan sells preparatory courses for the Law School Admission Test. Under the settlement, West would have paid $5.29 million in cash and Kaplan would have provided coupons worth $150 each toward the purchase of future course materials.

Darwin's notes and marginalia go on line and will be available to scholars to understand how (or if) he came up with the Origin of the Species (Daily Mail - not a paper I normally read mind you).

Darwin had 1,480 books in his library, of which 730 contain a wealth of scrawled notes, providing clues to his thoughts as he wrote On The Origin Of Species. For example, his friend Charles Lyell wrote in his famous Principles Of Geology that there were definite limits to the variation of species.Darwin wrote alongside this: 'If this were true adios theory.' Academics hope the digitisation project will allow everyone to retrace how Darwin used reading to advance science. Anne Jarvis, librarian at Cambridge University, where most of the collection is held, said: 'The Darwin collections are among the most important and popular held within Cambridge University library. 'While there has been much focus on his manuscripts and correspondence, his library hasn't always received the attention it deserves - for it is as he engaged with the ideas and theories of others that his own thinking evolved.'

EBSCO Publishing and Elsevier Reach Agreement to Provide Full-Text Searching of All SciVerse ScienceDirect Journals & eBooks for EBSCO Discovery Service™ Customers (PRWeb):

Full text from SciVerse ScienceDirect is being added to EBSCO Discovery Service™ (EDS) thanks to a new agreement from Elsevier and EBSCO Publishing (EBSCO). ScienceDirect, part of the SciVerse suite of search and discovery products provided by Elsevier, is a leading full-text scientific database with journal articles and book chapters from more than 2,000 peer-reviewed journals and 20,000 books and major reference works. ScienceDirect currently includes more than 10.5 million articles and chapters with nearly 500,000 added every year. Elsevier joins a growing list of publishers and other content partners that are taking part in EDS to bring more visibility to their content. Partners include the world’s largest scholarly journal & book publishers including Elsevier, Wiley Blackwell, Springer Science & Business Media, Taylor & Francis Informa, Sage Publications, and thousands of others. Partners also include content providers, such as LexisNexis, Thomson Reuters (Web of Science), JSTOR, ARTstor, Credo Reference, Oxford University Press, World Book, ABC-CLIO, and many others.

From the twitter this week: Baker & Taylor and Barnes & Noble Partner to Build Library Access PRNewswire Apax’s Cengage Buying National Geographic’s School Publisher - BusinessWeek Amazon reprints Ed McBain: MediaBistro Random House relaunches Loveswept: MediaBistro What Big Media Can Learn From the New York Public Library - The Atlantic In sports: Babe Didrikson Zaharias’s Legacy Fades (NYT)

The Gap Between Ka Moa o Pele and Halali'i: Haleakala Crater

The Gap Between Ka Moa o Pele and Halali'i: Haleakala Crater

Another weekly image from the family archive. Click on it to make it larger.

It is almost impossible to describe the sheer extent of the Haleakala Crater that tops off the Hawaiian island of Maui. This image is taken virtually in the center of the crater on one of the hiking trails that course through the moon-like landscape. The trail is described in one of the Park's handouts: Ka Moa o Pele Trail branches from the foot of the Sliding Sands Trail to join the Halemauu Trail across the crater. It is a scenic route between silverswords on Ka Moa o Pele, a red cinder cone. Flowering plants can usually be seen from June to September. Pa Puaa o Pele, Pele's Pig Pen, is the rim of a spatter cone, now buried, in the low pass between Halalii and Ka Moa o Pele.

Close readers will know I lived on Maui for a while but this is taken on a subsequent vacation in 1991. Having said that the image could easily have been shot in 1891. (I’ve just had over 1,000 image of Hawaii scanned so there may be more to come). One of my other images in this series was taken at dawn from the observatory which is at an elevation of 10,000 feet. After hiking down into the crater to this point you will have descended over 2,000 feet. On this day we hiked into the crater from the observatory, then across the crater floor and up the ‘switch-back’ trail to Crater Rim road. At the point the trail meets up with the road the altitude is still about 1,000 feet below the summit and almost six miles from where you probably parked your rental. On this particular hike, we stupidly hiked the road back but on future visits we’ve done what most normal people do and thumb a ride back to the top. A long day but an incredible experience and recommended for any able bodied and hiker.

Map of the crater

Meeting Wenger of Union Square Ventures: Welcome to the Net Natives

Addressing the Hoboken Tech Meetup group Monday night, Albert Wenger of Union Square Ventures (USV) provided the 150 attendees with a treatise on what works and why on the internet. Union Square Ventures only invests in companies that operate on the internet and,while that premise sounds simple, he told us that he and his colleagues at USV spend a lot of time thinking about what is different about the internet and what works and doesn’t. His comments to the group were interspersed with specific cases and he called on the example of the newspaper industry initially to expand on his first point by reflecting on the example of Craigslist and a company named AdOne. He noted, that while many investors made some money from AdOne, the company ultimately disappeared because it merely transferred an old legacy model to the web. Not so, in the case of Craigslist, which is a company that ‘broke the model’ and (as we know) provided a marketplace and network based on free provision of content (classifieds).

As Wenger stated, “Craig Newmark didn’t necessarily know what the impact of his business would be, but what he did know was that what he was doing was not dependent on anyone or any other business. He didn’t need to ask permission and he didn’t need to license information, he could just do it. Maybe by luck he backed into the ‘native model of the internet,’ which is largely exemplified by free services.” This ‘native model’ concept became a theme of Wenger’s comments for the rest of the presentation, and he stressed that USV tries to council entrepreneurs to make sure that their proposed business model represents (as he says) “what the internet wants to do.” Sometimes this isn't obvious as in the case of job listing sites like Monster.com and Hotjobs.com

As a subset of the classified market, both these companies made their investors rich and continue to be real businesses in that they have considerable revenues and profits. USV is an investor in Indeed.com, which is also a job listing service but ‘net native’ in contrast. Wenger expanded by suggesting that the problem is no longer getting your job listed (where the listee pays for the listing), now the problem is having the job found. Indeed.com provides aggregated lists of jobs available but, in a similar manner to Google, the company also matches jobs with key words and provides a better service to users in the process. This is how people use the internet: In a vertical search environment, key words can be bought to draw attention to position listing. This model, Wenger suggests, is much closer to a ‘net native business model’ which ‘doesn’t fight the web’ and where users are not asked to pay for something they can easily get for free elsewhere.

The partners at USV try to get entrepreneurs to think about how their business models ‘allow them to swim with the internet’ and build businesses that enable them to charge for services that add value, rather than charge for features as an auto dealer might by adding or deleting new car features to compute a price. Market leadership becomes a function of which company can build the best network. He also suggested that LinkedIN doesn’t have a great feature set, but has built such a dominant network that they will be very difficult to displace in the near future. The interconnectedness of all the participants on LinkedIN is the glue, and therefore, the value that holds the site together.

Sites like LinkedIN have developed business models that leverage the benefits of being part of the network and, thus, set a price for something that will have immediate and/or obvious value for the user. This is where – especially in the business-to-business segment - USV sees real opportunities. Coincidentally, at the meeting, several of the companies that presented (Sonar SquidJob BeanSprout) earlier in the evening are building their revenue models around the development of coherent, organized networks and not attempting to charge for access or services that are free elsewhere.

The catch phrase ‘net native business model’ is a great way to capture the concepts around some of the most successful internet start-ups: Think Twitter and 4Square, both of which are USV companies. Thinking in the terms Wenger suggests provides a framework for close examination of any new business idea and might save some good ideas from failure or lead to radically different approaches to a business idea.

In the question period, Albert was asked why it has been so hard to find networks in education and government and his response was both observant and depressing at the same time. He said,

“Selling to existing institutions is difficult because institutions generally select from companies that are good at selling. Because it is the administrators that are making the decisions based on processes and procedures. Companies which have great products or services, which would be appealing more to teachers and students, don’t have access. That’s how you end up with companies like Blackboard, which is a large, publicly traded company, very embedded but an awful product. But we are encouraged in that we are seeing some companies with innovation catering to products and service and these are getting adopted. Putting products into the market that are free and one we have invested in is Edmodo a network-based product that allows students and teachers in k-12 to work together”.

My impression of the Blackboard comment had more to do with what was possible in a net native world than a simple of-the-cuff denunciation of the Blackboard platform. With respect to government, he sees the same ‘broken procurement’ process based more on the process and mechanics of selling rather than on the benefits of particular products.

Naturally, I found these last comments very interesting based on my bias and experience in publishing and I would hasten to guess that government and education have been areas that USV have or continue to look at for opportunities. What would the completely disruptive “net native business model’ look like for education? Any ideas out there?

Amplified Version of Kerouac's On The Road

Penguin releases "amplified iPad version" of Kerouac's On The Road (Apple Store) and the title is covered by the NY Times Paper Cuts blog:

The “amplified edition” of “On the Road,” released today by Penguin Classics, certainly comes tricked out with more fancy bells and whistles than a BMW M5. It includes the full text of the novel, of course, with expandable marginal notes giving historical and biographical background. An interactive map traces Kerouac’s three real-life cross-country road trips, with links to relevant passages from the novel. There are never-before-seen photos, rare audio clips of Kerouac reading from an early draft, previously unreleased documents from his publisher’s archive, and a slide show of international covers showing how the book has been marketed from Argentina to Ukraine to China.

...

The app’s collection of documents from the archives of Viking, which published the original hardcover, gives insight into the intense corporate efforts to market this most freewheeling of American novels — which surely holds lessons for those selling souped-up e-books today. Here, you find an exchange of letters between Kerouac and his editor, Malcolm Cowley, about how to deal with obscenity issues, as well as a facsimile of a previously unreleased internal memorandum saying the book had great fascination and sales potential despite not being “a great or even a likeable book.” (That last part was penciled out.) There’s also Kerouac’s own sketch for an “appealing commercial cover,” showing all the cities visited in the novel cheek by jowl along a single straight road, under the heading “A Modern Prose Novel by John Kerouac.”

British Library Signs with Google to Digitize 250,000 Books

At a press conference in London this morning Dame Lynne Brindley, the chief executive of The British Library announced a strategic partnership with Google which will lead to the digitization and indexing of 250,000 out of copy right titles in the collection.

The titles will span the period 1700-1870 and thus will include many well known titles but it is likely the unique materials which will be made available digitally will be most interesting. As with similar deals with other "Google Libraries", the deal is not a financial one and Google will cover all the costs of the digitization and provide a copy to the BL and keep one for itself.

More from their press release:

This project will digitise a huge range of printed books, pamphlets and periodicals dated 1700 to 1870, the period that saw the French and Industrial Revolutions, The Battle of Trafalgar and the Crimean War, the invention of rail travel and of the telegraph, the beginning of UK income tax, and the end of slavery. It will include material in a variety of major European languages, and will focus on books that are not yet freely available in digital form online.

The first works to be digitised will range from feminist pamphlets about Queen Marie-Antoinette (1791), to the invention of the first combustion engine-driven submarine (1858), and an account of a stuffed Hippopotamus owned by the Prince of Orange (1775).

Once digitised, these unique items will be available for full text search, download and reading through Google Books, as well as being searchable through the Library’s website and stored in perpetuity within the Library’s digital archive.

Researchers, students and other users of the Library will be able to view historical items from anywhere in the world as well as copy, share and manipulate text for non-commercial purposes.

Dame Lynne Brindley, Chief Executive of the British Library said: “In the nineteenth century it was an ambition of our predecessors to give everybody access to as much of the world’s information as possible, to ensure that knowledge was not restricted to those who could afford private libraries. The way of doing it then was to buy books from the entire world and to make them available in Reading Rooms.”

Arrowing in on Orphans: A Beyond the Book Interview

CCC's Beyond the Book takes a look at ARROW - Accessible Registries of Rights Information and Orphan Works which is an initiative to help libraries with the identification of rights status and rightsholders in digital library programs. ARROW is indirectly is a tool for the identification of so-called “orphan works.” From the website announcement:

ARROW’s coordinator is Piero Attanasio, Head of International Projects, the Italian Publishers Association (AIE). He explained to CCC’s Chris Kenneally how the project meets one objective while approaching a solution for another. “ARROW was considered since the beginning to save the parents, not to identify the orphans,” he said. “That means to reconnect the works to the parents, that are the authors and the publishers.”

The dilemma of orphan works haunts rightsholders and users worldwide, particularly at this moment of mass digitization by libraries and others. “Whether the motivation was pure preservation of materials that were going to decline in quality over a period of time, or whether the motivation was simply to make wider and wider access over a network environment,” Michael Healy, Executive Director, The Book Rights Registry, noted, “you immediately encounter the constraints of the existing legislative and legal regimes. And those two things are not working in harmony anywhere right now.”

The audio interview is located here.

MediaWeek (Vol 4, No 24): Georgia Copyright Case, Blackboard, HW Wilson, David Mamet's PR Campaign + More

What's at Stake in the Georgia State Copyright Case (The Chronicle)

A closely watched trial in federal court in Atlanta, Cambridge University Press et al. v. Patton et al., is pitting faculty, libraries, and publishers against one another in a case that could clarify the nature of copyright and define the meaning of fair use in the digital age. Under copyright law, the doctrine of fair use allows some reproduction of copyrighted material, with a classroom exemption permitting an unspecified amount to be reproduced for educational purposes. At issue before the court is the practice of putting class readings on electronic reserve (and, by extension, on faculty Web sites). Cambridge, Oxford University Press, and SAGE Publications, with support from the Association of American Publishers and the Copyright Clearance Center, are suing four administrators at Georgia State University. But the publishers more broadly allege that the university (which, under "state sovereign immunity," cannot be prosecuted in federal court) has enabled its staff and students to claim what amounts to a blanket exemption to copyright law through an overly lenient definition of the classroom exemption. The plaintiffs are asking for an injunction to stop university personnel from making material available on e-reserve without paying licensing fees. A decision is expected in several weeks.

What follows are several different points of view of the case - all very interesting. Kenneth Green corrects and amplifies some comments he made on the announcement that Blackboard is in play (IHE):

First, no matter how you may feel about Blackboard – and lots of individuals both on- and off-campus have (very) strong opinions for or against the company, its leadership, and its products – Michael Chasen, Matthew Pittinsky and others who founded the company and the folks who work at Blackboard today do deserve their props. Blackboard survived the dot.com/dot.edu era and has grown dramatically over the past decade; last year’s sales totaled some $447 million. That’s not a random number; the revenues are not from random sales. Campus clients and others are buying lots of "stuff" – various technology applications and support services – from Blackboard

Admittedly, the company’s LMS franchise, which currently accounts for about half of total revenue, confronts significant challenges. New competitors seem to emerge about every five years, witness Desire2Learn, Moodle and Sakai in the middle of the last decade and, more recently, Epsilen and Instructure. Some 800 current Blackboard LMS clients confront "up or out" decisions about migrating from "sunsetting" Blackboard LMS applications (various versions of the WebCT and Angel LMS platforms) by 2013. Blackboard will win some of those "up or outs" and it will also lose some; but the company’s LMS platform will remain a presence on many campuses in the years ahead.

Changes are slowly becoming apparent in the sales of eBooks into the education market (IHE):

Also significant is which books they are buying. At Johns Hopkins, more than 70 percent of the e-books sold since last July have been “backlist” titles — books that had been out for more than a year. At the University of Kentucky, 87 percent were backlist. At the University of North Carolina, 90 percent. That means that the presses’ recent success in moving e-books has not come as a result of any kind of concerted marketing effort to get customers to spring for the electronic versions. Rather, it has happened despite a lack of such efforts.

An appreciation of H.W. Wilson upon the announcement that the company has been acquired by EBSCO (Am Libraries) The David Mamet show continues as he attempts to garner as much PR for his new book as possible by exclaiming as controversial statements as possible. Here the Guardian reports on a discussion in Chicago with the play write (Guardian):

Leading US playwright David Mamet has launched an attack on the British literary establishment over what he claims are inherently antisemitic attitudes.Many contemporary British authors who write in the liberal tradition, Mamet said, produce plays, books and essays that are full of anti-Jewish "filth".

And he closes with this:

Mamet's new book praises Sarah Palin's political approach and calls the decision to build an Islamic centre in the vicinity of Ground Zero, the former site of the World Trade Centre, "a cultural obscenity".

Reflecting on some recent literary controversy Alex Clark in the Observer:

In all this, everybody has a point – perhaps even Naipaul, because what are writers without the occasional unhinged outburst? But the tenor and content of the debate have become frighteningly basic and automatically adversarial; stand in the middle scratching your head and you risk being accused of colluding with the wrong side. Rarely, though, does the conversation lead in the direction of the page; rarely do the books we are actually talking about get much of a look-in. It seems beyond banal to point out that literature is a broad enough church to accommodate writing by both genders, all races and religions, every class background.

A whole section in the Observer about the History of Rock Music (Observer)

In The Altantic, Jared Keller takes a look at the Internet Archive:

The Internet Archive, a non-profit digital library with the Wikipedian mission of "universal access to all knowledge," has offered free storage and access to digitized music, movies, websites and nearly three million public domain books since 1996. In May, the Archive turned its focus offline, towards the preservation of physical reading materials. The aptly-named Physical Archive to the Internet Archive, a prototype facility devoted to the long-term preservation of physical records, launched last Sunday in Richmond, California. Materials are stored in 40-foot shipping containers, modified for secure and individually controllable environments of 50 or 60 degrees Fahrenheit and 30 percent relative humidity and designed to keep out undesirable pests.

And that's a photo of the inside of the British Library BTW.

From the twitter this week:

Faulty Towers: The Crisis in Higher Education: The Nation

After 20 Years, Is The Website About to Become Extinct? - NYTimes

The 51 Borders stores that may close. WAPO

San Francisco Overhead 1973

San Francisco Overhead 1973

Another weekly image from the family archive.

Not on this trip myself but it was only four more years until I visited San Francisco for the first time. This batch of images are completely mixed up because there are no dates on the slides. All the slides in this batch are duplicates and may have been taken by someone else. There are about four or five images of SF from the air as the aircraft circles the city and lands but this is probably the most spectacular one. Certainly a very nice day.

Join me on Flickr.

Media M&A Reports

Investment advisory firm Jordan Edmiston reported their Q1 2011 review of M&A activity a few weeks ago (JEGI):

M&A transaction value for the media, information, marketing services and technology sectors reached $12 billion in Q1 2011, representing a 16% increase over Q1 2010. The first quarter of 2010 had seen an 83% surge in deal volume and a nearly seven time increase in transaction value over Q1 2009 levels. So, 16% growth in Q1 2011, off a large prior year base, reflects a healthy continuing M&A environment.

The interactive and technology markets accounted for an even greater share of activity, with the B2B and B2C Online Media & Technology, Marketing & Interactive Services, and Mobile Media & Technology sectors accounting for 75% of total deals in Q1 2011 vs. 70% in Q1 2010. The average deal size for these sectors rose as well, from $28 million in Q1 2010 to $47 million in Q1 2011.

Looking at the Top 10 Deals:
The interactive markets accounted for 7 of the 10 largest deals of the quarter, including the only multibillion dollar deal announced – eBay’s acquisition of GSI Commerce for $2.4 billion.

The other six announced interactive deals in the top 10 included:

• Walgreen acquired Drugstore.com, an online retailer of health and beauty products, for $409 million;
  
• Tencent of China acquired RiotGames, a developer of premium online games, for $400 million;
  
• Salesforce.com acquired Radian6, a social media monitoring company, for $326 million;
  
• AOL acquired Huffington Post, an online news and opinion web site, for $315 million;
  
• GSI Commerce acquired Fanatics, a network of sports e‐commerce sites, for $277 million; and
  
• Nordstrom acquired HauteLook, a private, limited‐time e‐commerce site, for $270 million.

Interestingly, two of the largest transactions of the quarter took place in the consumer publishing market, which has been a relatively quiet sector over the past few years:

• Hearst Corporation’s acquisition of Lagardère’s magazine portfolio for $651 million; and,
• Apax Partners’ acquisition of Yellow Media’s Trader Corp., a producer of consumer shopper publications, for $745 million.

The remaining deal in the top 10 for Q1 2011 took place in the fast‐growing healthcare market:

• inVentive Health, owned by private equity firms Thomas H. Lee and Liberty Lane Partners, acquired i3, a pharmaceutical services company, for $400 million.

Additionally, Marlin & Associates also circulated their deals overview for June 2011 which takes a wider view of activity and has some nicer graphs if you like that sort of thing (Marlin).

Thomson Reuters to Divest Health Business

Thomson Reuters announced their intention to divest their $450mm healthcare business yesterday. The business provides data, analytics and performance benchmarking solutions and services to companies, government agencies and healthcare professionals. From their press release:

With leading assets and solutions such as MarketScan, Advantage Suite, Micromedex, CareDiscovery and ActionOI, coupled with expert services and analysis, the Healthcare business provides its customers with solutions to identify savings, improve outcomes, fight fraud and abuse and more efficiently manage their healthcare operations.

The Healthcare business in 2010 had revenues of approximately $450 million and an operating margin comparable to the company’s consolidated margin of 19.3%. Following adjustment for this divestiture by removing Healthcare’s results from ongoing businesses, no material impact is expected to the company’s previously announced 2011 outlook. The company expects the divestiture to close before the end of the year.

This divestiture will result in a realignment of the company’s existing Intellectual Property and Science businesses into a single operating unit of the Professional division. Both are global and support scientific research, discovery and innovation. Details related to the realignment can be found in the “Investor Relations” section of the Thomson Reuters website. Thomson Reuters will provide restated historical financial information on its website, which reflects this realignment and which excludes results from the Healthcare business, early in July and its second quarter reported results will reflect these changes.

Potential acquirers are likely to include private equity backed companies but operating companies interested in the business will include IMS Health, Wolters Kluwer, Reed Elsevier and others. With an operating margin close to 20% and revenues of $450 mm the acquisition is likely to be expensive.

Sunshine on the Amazon

I have a confession: I don't own an eReader. This isn't because I don't like the idea but I've still got lots of non-read paper books to get through. I do read significantly on my iPhone and it is only a matter of time before I succumb. While I have the Kindle and Nook apps on my phone I've not felt compelled to use them. Mrs PND on the other hand has been devouring Kindle books on the iPad since Christmas and here again a confession: I purchased my first Kindle book on her iPad last weekend. Why, because the deals were just too good.

With publishers' participation, Amazon launched their Kindle sunshine deals promotion with 650 deeply discounted eBooks and if you look through the Kindle best seller list and you will see how many of the current top Kindle titles are selling for $.99, $1.99 and $2.99.

What this price promotion will tell publishers will be interesting to see. To me the current list of book titles is reminiscent of the deep back catalog music CD's that have been priced for years at $4-9. It took music publishers a long time to get to discounting pricing but once they did it became a profitable way to reissue many older titles.

Obviously pricing strategy to trade publishers could be thought of as an oxymoron and at the least pricing for eBooks has been fraught with friction between the publishers and retailers. This discounting program will give both retailers and publishers more data points from which to really develop their pricing policies. Book pricing is so often an additive exercise versus one derived from real market data. Unfortunately, what this research might reveal is that pricing in the $2.99 range represents the highest point of the demand bell curve.

As a few commentators have been saying for a long time (myself included), how are publishers going to manage their cost structures when optimal pricing for eBooks is in the $2.99 range. Interestingly, print pricing in the $34.95 range probably never represented the top of the demand bell curve either, but in the eBook world maybe we are starting to see real actionable data for the first time. Whether trade publishers are prepared for world where pricing is much lower (but perhaps demand is much higher) is a different story. In music of course, that industry did not appear to use market data effectively and have continued to hang on to first release pricing of $12 or so. Importantly, the music publishers never considered piracy a component of demand whether book publishers will or not is to be determined.

Here some interesting charting from Laura Hazard Owen at PaidContent:

MediaWeek (Vol 4, No 23): Romance or Not, Grief in The Killing, The Value of College, Nordic Crimewave + More

From Salon reacting to a report on Utah's KSL.com that romance novels can he highly addictive and threaten marriages (Salon):

Now, a disclaimer first: These generalities are always problematic, because far more men and women represent unique variations on these stereotypes than perfectly adhere to the sexual mold. It's also true that romance novels do not all include sex, whereas porn does by definition. As Sarah Wendell wrote on her website, Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, "Anyone who picks up [romance novelist] Georgette Heyer looking for Jenna Jameson is going to be woefully and comically disappointed." A much more direct comparison can be made between smut and the hot-and-heavy action of X-rated fan fiction, but romance novels represent a larger, more mainstream audience. That's why researchers Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam used the two genres -- as well as billions of Internet search terms -- as a way to plumb the depths of the male and female sexual psyches in their book "A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World's Largest Experiment Reveals About Human Desire," and it's a gold mine for a discussion like this one.

Slate looks at how grief is a center piece of the AMC serial The Killing (Slate):

And so The Killing, AMC's moody police procedural about the murder of teenager Rosie Larsen, had its work cut out for it when it decided to tie its murder-investigation plot to a closely observed portrait of the grief of Larsen's parents, Stan and Mitch. Grief is not an easy sell to the American public in the best of circumstances. To portray it authentically is to risk alienating viewers. In addition to being an internal experience that's hard to dramatize, grief can make the bereaved seem prickly and standoffish, difficult to sympathize with. After a warm critical reception, The Killing has indeed stumbled lately, with The New Yorker's Nancy Franklin and Salon's Matt Zoller Seitz pointing out the show's many flaws—the way our relationship to main characters like the mayoral candidate and the detectives fails to deepen and the sketchy politics of the recent terrorist bait-and-switch subplot. To judge by the increasingly impatient responses from fellow viewers I've talked with, the Larsens' plight has started to grate as well. Ironically, though, it is probably the show's most original feature. If frustration with the detective story is due to The Killing's all-too-risible plot twists, frustration with the Larsens is tied up with the show's more-nuanced-than-usual portrait of grief.

In The Atlantic, Debating the Value of College in America by Louis Menand (The Atlantic)

Society needs a mechanism for sorting out its more intelligent members from its less intelligent ones, just as a track team needs a mechanism (such as a stopwatch) for sorting out the faster athletes from the slower ones. Society wants to identify intelligent people early on so that it can funnel them into careers that maximize their talents. It wants to get the most out of its human resources. College is a process that is sufficiently multifaceted and fine-grained to do this. College is, essentially, a four-year intelligence test. Students have to demonstrate intellectual ability over time and across a range of subjects. If they’re sloppy or inflexible or obnoxious—no matter how smart they might be in the I.Q. sense—those negatives will get picked up in their grades. As an added service, college also sorts people according to aptitude. It separates the math types from the poetry types. At the end of the process, graduates get a score, the G.P.A., that professional schools and employers can trust as a measure of intellectual capacity and productive potential. It’s important, therefore, that everyone is taking more or less the same test.

New York magazine takes an almost retrospective look at Scandinavian crime fiction (New York):

Stieg Larsson didn’t just write three blockbuster novels and create an iconic feminist sleuth named Lisbeth Salander. The author, who died at age 50 in 2004, introduced the world to Scandinavian crime fiction, a massive iceberg of a genre, decades old, of which Americans have seen only the tip. That’s already changing. In the next year or so, we may well see Zac Efron in a movie based on Jens Lapidus’s Easy Money, an adaptation of a best seller by Danish newcomer Jussi Adler-Olsen produced by Lars von Trier’s company, and Norwegian star author Jo Nesbø approaching Larsson-level fame (if Knopf head Sonny Mehta has anything to say about it). Over the past year, Mehta has been “busy turning Scandinavians down,” feeling that “I was inhabiting some kind of dark Nordic night.” But he plans to market Nesbø’s The Snowman to the heavens; 150,000 copies hit stores beginning May 10. Even academics are catching the fever: On May 20, a symposium on “Stieg Larsson and Scandinavian Crime Fiction” will convene deep in the heart of Chandler country, at UCLA. For those in search of a summer project, a guide to navigating this publishing phenomenon.

Finally, there's a lot of material from the Hay Festival on sponsors The Telegraph's web site but here is a list of best quotes (Telegraph):

Event 141 Eric Hobsbawm with Tristram Hunt “Eric’s books are on sale in the bookshop, because, as any Marxist will tell you, materialism matters.” Event 150 David Sedaris “One in three Americans weigh as much as the other two.”

From the Twitter this week: Learning to Read on Zero Dollars a Day - NYTimes Girls, pick your bedtime reading with care Guardian Amazon May Soon Need to Collect Sales Tax - Businessweek EBSCO Publishing and The H.W. Wilson Company Make Joint Announcement of Merger Agreement PND WorldCat Local adds access to more databases, collections and publishers OCLC Google and publishers weigh their options after lawyers are given more time by Judge Denny Chin GoogleNews And in sports, Lance Armstrong's lawyers have requested an on air apology from 60mins for the segment last week with Tyler Hamilton in which he accuses Armstrong of doping. As The Atlantic puts is: Do they think we're stupid? (The Atlantic)

EBSCO Publishing and The H.W. Wilson Company Make Joint Announcement of Merger Agreement

In a significant deal announced late Wednesday, EBSCO and HW Wilson have agreed a merger agreement that will combine the operations of EBSCO Publishing and HW Wilson. Many have tried to unravel the complicated ownership structure of the Wilson company over the years but it was inevitable that a company would eventually succeed. Wilson has many valuable content assets however it would an understatement to say they've not been as aggressive as EBSCO has been in developing online and mobile applications. No doubt EBSCO sees significant opportunities in leveraging the Wilson content in many new and interesting ways. No word on terms or what this will mean for the employees located in the time capsule in the Bronx.

Here is the EBSCO/Wilson press release:

EBSCO Publishing (EBSCO) and The H.W. Wilson Company (Wilson) have merged in what is being viewed by the companies as an ideal match. This combination of organizations will allow the strengths of each to benefit existing and forthcoming products & services.

With 180 combined years of experience serving libraries, EBSCO and Wilson have traveled similar paths, but have maintained unique advantages and abilities. Libraries using products from either company will benefit as improvements are made to the respective resources. Wilson database products are known for their quality indexing. The Wilson subject thesaurus and Wilson “names” authority file are largely considered the best of their kind, and the WilsonWeb platform systematically leverages this valuable indexing within its searching to provide high quality, relevant results to end users. The Wilson controlled vocabularies will be integrated into EBSCO’s controlled vocabularies, resulting in improved subject indexing for EBSCO databases. The EBSCOhost® platform will be enhanced to take advantage of this indexing in its search and relevancy ranking algorithms.

According to Tim Collins, President of EBSCO Publishing, this acquisition leads directly to heightening the value and quality of EBSCO and Wilson resources. “Upholding the integrity of the Wilson indexing is essential, and extending these attributes to EBSCOhost resources is a critical part of this venture. When it comes to thesauri (subjects and names), and how these are leveraged, Wilson has long been an industry leader. We look forward to bringing this value and approach to all applicable EBSCOhost databases and are excited about the benefits this will bring to EBSCOhost users. We are also pleased to be able to add the Wilson databases into the EBSCO Discovery Service search experience”

Harry Regan, President & CEO for Wilson, commented, “EBSCO and H.W. Wilson have been engaged as business partners for a number of years and are now officially operating as one. The result will be a broader and deeper range of products and services for the library reference community with significantly added value. Both companies have had separate, distinctive histories, but have always shared a common commitment for the highest order of customer satisfaction.”

BISG: Downloads of Course Content On the Rise

According to new research from BISG on student attitudes to content in Higher Education, illicit textbook acquisition behavior among college students is on the rise. From their press release:

Since students were first surveyed during the fall 2010 semester, illegal photocopying of content doubled (from 20% to 40%) and instances of e-textbook content download went up 70%. Freshmen and sophomores reported the greatest increase in these activities, suggesting that students are learning to be more aggressive in finding lower cost alternatives to high priced core textbooks. In addition, while financial investment by students is one predictor of illicit behaviors, the study also revealed that personal interest in a course is a strong driver in student textbook buying behavior.

Student Attitudes Toward Content in Higher Education focuses on college student perceptions related to educational content and presentation media in the higher education marketplace. It is powered by Bowker's PubTrack™ Consumer data, the publishing industry’s premier resource for understanding book consumer buying behavior. Volume One of Student Attitudes Toward Content in Higher Education is sponsored by Champion Sponsor Xplana and Additional Sponsors Baker & Taylor, Budgetext, CourseSmart, Follett Higher Education, Kno and Pearson.

“College students are an exceptionally dynamic demographic,” said Angela Bole, BISG’s Deputy Executive Director. “Plotting their behavior is complicated by rapid technology transformation as well as rising educational costs, among other things. BISG’s ongoing survey of student attitudes goes a long way toward helping the publishing industry make sense of this changing market place by providing hard data on the impact of habits and preferences.”

Additional findings from the survey include:

· International editions are gaining popularity. The number of students reporting the purchase of international editions increased by 68.2% from fall to spring.

· E-textbooks have a long way to go. Of the 20% of students who said they purchased an e-textbook, 24% said they were not satisfied with the experience (compared to only 7% who were not satisfied with the core print textbook).

· Textbook rentals might be losing momentum. 7.4% of college students said they rented their textbook, down slightly from the previous survey. This could indicate that the rental trend has peaked.

· Student and professor engagement drives satisfaction with textbook management systems. Tools such as MyLabs and WileyPlus were considered “high value” by only 38% of the general population of students surveyed. However, higher percentages of students saw value in the individual components of these tools, such as online quizzing and diagnostic self tests, indicating a possible brand perception issue. Further, students said they are more likely to be satisfied with these tools when they are used in a course they are interested in or if their professor integrates them into the course appropriately. When both of these things happen, student satisfaction rates are very high.

The survey can be found here