BISG BookStats - Live Webcast

BISG has announced two webinars to discuss the recent release of BookStats:

During each Webcast, representatives from the BookStats data team will provide a comprehensive look into how BookStats was developed and what trends were discovered. The presentation will include analysis of several top line data points as well as a tour through the interactive BookStats Online Data Dashboard.

Register Wed, August 31, 2011 1:00 p.m. to 2:00 p.m.

Register Wed, September 7, 2011 1:00 p.m. to 2:00 p.m. Eastern

Spanning 2008-2010, BookStats offers data and analysis of the total industry and the individual Trade, K-12 School, Higher Education, Professional and Scholarly markets. Produced jointly by the Association of American Publishers (AAP) and the Book Industry Study Group (BISG), its highlights include:

• Overall U.S. publishing revenues are growing
• Overall U.S. publishing unit sales are up as well
• Americans, young and old, are reading actively in all print and digital formats
• Education publishing holds steady and, in some segments, shows solid growth Professional and Scholarly publishing shows gains

MediaWeek (Vol 4, No 34): Content Management Systems, Student Knowledge, Textbook Rentals, Archives + More

Thinking of a content management system (or why yours doesn't work) then read this (AdAge):

BusinessWeek, however, is just one egregious example of an ugly truth: There’s no such thing as a CMS success story. At least, successes are elusive, which is a problem for anyone in media, as content management systems—the software used by writers, editors, and producers to create digital content for websites—have become as essential as oxygen.
“There’s nobody that can walk in the door for any price tag and say, ‘We have the solution,’” laments Time Inc. CIO Mitch Klaif. “If someone had a silver bullet, I don’t know if I’d have them shoot it at the sites or at me.”
Until recently, those dependent on websites—everyone from The Huffington Post to a Fortune 1,000 brand—had seen little change in the systems needed to build them, says Brian Alvey, CEO of CMS platform Crowd Fusion. “The only innovation in [the last] 15 years was blogging and blog platforms,” he adds.
Unfortunately for these companies, the onrush of social networking—part of a larger shift in which sites are moving from static Web pages to pages assembled on the fly in real time—has overwhelmed the abilities of CMS software. In Alvey’s view, most of those systems could barely handle the existing content mix they were producing, including blog posts, stories from print editions, photos, videos, and online polls. “The tools suck,” he says.

From Inside Higher Ed, "What Students Don't Know" (IHE):

The most alarming finding in the ERIAL studies was perhaps the most predictable: when it comes to finding and evaluating sources in the Internet age, students are downright lousy.
Only seven out of 30 students whom anthropologists observed at Illinois Wesleyan “conducted what a librarian might consider a reasonably well-executed search,” wrote Duke and Andrew Asher, an anthropology professor at Bucknell University, whom the Illinois consortium called in to lead the project.
Throughout the interviews, students mentioned Google 115 times -- more than twice as many times as any other database. The prevalence of Google in student research is well-documented, but the Illinois researchers found something they did not expect: students were not very good at using Google. They were basically clueless about the logic underlying how the search engine organizes and displays its results. Consequently, the students did not know how to build a search that would return good sources. (For instance, limiting a search to news articles, or querying specific databases such as Google Book Search or Google Scholar.)

The Heller Report takes a look at the business of Textbook rentals (Heller):

In the past two years, the post-secondary textbook rental market has exploded. Driven by the outcry over book prices, federal legislation, readily available pricing information on the Internet, and sophisticated web-based rental management platforms, old and new competitors are disrupting the $10 billion college textbook business. Book rental isn’t really a new phenomenon—a few college stores have been renting books since the Civil War. The National Association of College Stores (NACS) proclaimed fall 2010 as the “Year of the Rental.” Players include long-timers like Follett and Budgetext, institutional stores and fast-growing start-ups. BookRenter, started in 2008, netted $40 million from investors in a funding round this past February. Chegg, started in 2007, has raised $200+ million in venture capital and attracted senior management from Yahoo and Netflix. The same drivers are growing trade in used books, eBooks, and online instructional content. Rental is also driving new business models for sourcing and distributing educational materials that may carry the industry forward into digital. Having book inventory isn’t necessarily required—at least one high-flying firm, BookRenter, exists mainly as an online marketplace. Read on to see how this change in distribution is impacting the higher education market.

The economist suggests that the papers of literary folk don't necessarily need to be housed where they lived (Economist):

That should mean more writers can earn a pension by offloading their archives without seeking a foreign buyer. But does retaining writers’ collections really offer a broader cultural benefit? British libraries scrimp, save and appeal to lottery and charitable funds to buy collections, but cataloguing, the next stage, is also pricey, so some archives are inaccessible for years. The most important results of plundering authors’ stores are biographies, collated letters and literary criticism, which can be read anywhere. And even book-lovers may find musty papers harder to appreciate than, say, art by Titian (Italian) or van Dyck (Flemish), whose works have also been “saved” under this scheme.In any case, literary protectionism may have passed its peak. Authors increasingly use computers, rather than pens or typewriters: it is hard to say if a hard drive will conjure the same aura of fascination as a personal letter, says the British Library’s Rachel Foss. Electronic records should also be instantly replicable—all of which may rob literary archives of the magic and exclusivity that currently gives them their financial value.

Also from the Economist a look at vinyl record sales (Economist):

What is going on? Oliver Goss of Record Pressing, a San Francisco vinyl factory, says it is a mixture of convenience and beauty. Many vinyl records come with codes for downloading the album from the internet, making them more convenient than CDs. And fans like having something large and heavy to hold in their hands. Some think that half the records sold are not actually played.
Vinyl has a distinction factor, too. “It is just cooler than a download,” explains Steve Redmond, a spokesman for Britain’s annual Record Store Day. People used to buy bootleg CDs and Japanese imports containing music that none of their friends could get hold of. Now that almost every track is available free on music-streaming services like Spotify or on a pirate website, music fans need something else to boast about. That limited-edition 12-inch in translucent blue vinyl will do nicely.

Is the US Statistical Abstract now doomed (WaPo):

I am a devoted fan of the Stat Abstract. In four decades of reporting, I have grabbed it thousands of times to find a fact, tutor myself or answer a pressing question. Its figures are usually the start of a story, not the end. They suggest paths of inquiry, including the meaning and reliability of the statistics themselves (otherwise, they can mislead or tell false tales). The Stat Abstract has been a stalwart journalistic ally. With some interruptions, the government has published it since 1878.

No more. The Stat Abstract is headed for the chopping block. The 2012 edition, scheduled for publication later this year, will be the last, unless someone saves it.

From the twitter:

Vocational Schools Face Deep Cuts in Federal Funding: NYT

College One-Stop Shop: Chegg Buys Web Tutoring Service - Digits - WSJ

Librarian of Congress James Hadley Billington on leading the nation’s library - The Washington Post

McGraw-Hill retains investment bank to explore spinoff of its education division (NYT)

Cengage Full Fiscal Year Results Disappoint

Cengage Learning, the large privately held educational publisher, recently announced (PDF) disappointing full year 2011 financial results; but in their presentation, the company did endeavor to communicate how material their transition from a print centric to an electronic publishing will be for the company.

Leading with the good news, management focused on how much additional value Cengage will be able to extract from students purchasing their content once the material is available online. The company suggests that while prices for electronic content may be reduced, the penetration rate into the typical class will be significantly higher once that content is delivered electronically. For example, in a class size of 600 (over three years) the publisher may currently only sell to about 33% of students but, in the online scenario, the penetration rate could be 90%. As noted, while revenue is potentially higher, gross margin is markedly higher by about 10 percentage points (75% versus 85%) according to their example (slide 6).

Since Cengage was purchased from Thomson Reuters the company has been in a race to migrate and/or convert their content into electronic form. In this presentation management underscored some important milestones in that effort. Over 70% of their products now have an electronic component which is expected to rise to 75% by the end of fiscal 2012. Both sessions and activations are up in percentage terms but these stats are harder to place in context. The company also noted the recent acquisition of National Geographic School Publishing which now makes Cengage a leading English language provider in the US.

However, the discussion of the financial results was less positive. A weak third and fourth quarter resulted in a significant drop in top line revenue which has been attributed to timing of orders and the loss of some adoptions. Interestingly, the company also noted that the increase in textbook rental programs may also have adversely impacted their revenue. Cengage launched their own textbook rental program recently but Chegg will be the prime offender in this category.

Other areas of concern included lower gross sales in their career segment (reflecting sales made to career and vocational schools) and Research (Gale) which declined $25mm due to lower print and online sales.

In summary, the financial results were as follows:

Fourth Quarter:

($ Millions)	2011	2010	Change
Revenue	472.9 $	$ 553.4	(14.5)%
Adjusted EBITDA	$ 201.5	$ 234.0	(13.9)%
Margin	42.6%	42.3%

Full Year:

($ Millions)	2011	2010	Change
Revenue	$ 1,875.9	$ 2,017.6	(7.0)%
Adjusted EBITDA	$ 780.4	$ 840.1	(7.1)%
Margin	41.6%	41.6%
Capital Expenditures	252.5	203.0	24.4%
Unlevered Free Cash Flow	$506.7	$596.7	(15.1)%

For a full explanation of the results check the Cengage investor presentation here.

MediaWeek (Vol 4, No 33): The Chronicle of Higher Ed on the 10th Anniversary of 9/11

In advance of the 10 year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks The Chronicle of Higher Education has published a special issue that looks at a number of themes raised by the events of that day (Chronicle):

An Era in Ideas:

To mark the 10th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, The Chronicle Review asked a group of influential thinkers to reflect on some of the themes that were raised by those events and to meditate on their meaning, then and now.The result is a portrait of the culture and ideas of a decade born in trauma, but also the beginning of a new century, with all its possibilities and problems.

A sample From Memory by Lawrence Weschler:

Get a grip, I kept finding myself thinking, as the event grew ever more fetishized over the ensuing months—the gaping hole in the skyline acquiring an idol-like status, all political life (and prior common sense) seeming to get sucked into its yawning vortex. New York was not the first city that's ever faced a terrorist attack, I kept having to remind myself, nor the first city ever to have been bombed (hell, we ourselves, as Americans, had repeatedly bombed a good many of the rest of the world's cities).

Maybe it was just that we'd imagined ourselves immune from the forces impinging on other people's lives, immune from history (history previously being defined precisely as something we did to other people, not something they ever did to us); and now suddenly that old historical machinery was clanking away big time, the chains catching hold, and it didn't feel at all good.

Nor can it be said that, historically speaking, we went on to acquit ourselves with much distinction. Londoners during the Blitz had to endure this sort of thing day after day, for weeks on end, but they didn't crumple. Under Churchill's leadership, it was as if the more the Nazis threw at them, the greater their focus, the more uncanny their calm: Far from buckling, they bucked up.They retained perspective.

For when you're under murderous assault is precisely not the time to turn your entire political culture inside out. That's what the terrorists want you to do, that's what they are dying for you to do. But you're supposed to resist that temptation.

Here are links to the rest of the individual articles:

Sheldon Solomon: Death
Steven Pinker: Terrorism
Alex Gourevitch: Fear
Terry Eagleton: Evil Scott Atran: Enemies Victor Davis Hanson: Courage
Martha C. Nussbaum: Justice Todd Gitlin: Patriotism
Lawrence Weschler: Memory
Marjorie Perloff: Language
Richard Sennett: Cooperation
Barbara Frederickson: Resilience
Omid Safi: Tolerance

Ithaca McDonalds 1968

Ithaca McDonald's, August 1968

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

My father attended summer school at Cornell's Hotel Management school in 1968 and one of his professors worked for Intercontinental. Long story short he suggested they hire him and later in 1968 the family left for the first assignment in Thailand.

In my first family trip to the US (Los Angeles) in 1976, I remember distinctly the itemized number of hamburgers served on the golden arches. I wish I had a comparison photo but I am certain it was ten times this number by then.

Flickr Set

In addition to the images I've posted on Flickr and those I've periodically posted on PND, I have now produced a Big Blurb Book: From the Archive 1960 -1980 of some of the images I really thought were special.

I now have an iPad version of this book for sale ($4.99) on the Blurb site which you can find here: STORE

I have to say, even on the iPad the book looks pretty good.

Beyond the Book with Elsevier's Rafael Sidi

From his beyond the book series, Chris Kennealy interviews Rafael Sidi, Elsevier VP of Product Management for Applications Marketplace and Developer Network.

“We are letting [researchers] play with our data and build on top of our data stuff that they need to build. In the end, scientists and researchers know their problem better than us.”

Sidi cited a variety of innovative application efforts, including for SciVerse, which offers developers access to Elsevier content, and the community driven projects Apps for Science Challenge and Apps for Library Idea Challenge. (Interview)

Some clips from the transcript of the interview:

So what we are trying to do with the data, we want to give access to our data as we’ve been giving, to make that data easily remixable, reusable among the developers. And wanting that, I’ve been saying that if we let the data to be used by the scientists, by the researchers within our environment, they are going to be able to create much, much better solutions. They are going to be able to create solutions that we couldn’t have imagined.

So what we are doing is just we are going to the crowd. We are letting them play with our data and build on top of our data stuff that they need to build, because at the end, scientists and researchers, they know their problem better than us, in some cases, and what we are doing, we are giving them the tools and we are providing the services for them in this application and developer network in our framework so that they can build using our services and tools.

....

Good question. What we are trying to do right now is to reach out to the community, to the crowd. We’ve been doing different challenges. I mentioned we had a challenge at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Our first one was at New Jersey Institute of Technology. And what we are doing right now, currently we have two different challenges going on.

One, we call it Apps for Science. It’s a challenge among six countries where we are asking developers to submit applications and then we are giving them prizes. And the other challenge that we are doing among our librarians, Apps for Library. So we are asking to librarians to submit ideas. And we are going to – again, a judging committee is going to pick the ideas and then what we are planning to do, some of the ideas we are going to go to our developer network and develop, and those ideas are going to be developed by the developer network.

So, so far, we’ve seen an excellent biomedical image search application that is going to be built by the University of Madison, Wisconsin. So we are getting some ideas that we haven’t thought about it.Just recently, we launched a new app from a company called iSpeech and the app takes the text and then translates to words, so you can just hear the text. And that’s also very important for us in terms of accessibility to the content, making the content easily accessible to everyone. So I if I have an impairment, then I can listen to the text.

FT On Potential McGraw-Hill Break-Up

Reporting via mergermarket.com the FT suggests that the activist shareholders seeking to unearth greater value from their holdings in McGraw-Hill will face an up hill battle (FT).

McGraw-Hill has spent the last ten to twelve months receiving advice from a slew of media bankers, the industry bankers said. “Even if the activists have revolutionary ideas in mind, chances are it’s already been pitched to the management and considered under various scenarios,” the first of the bankers said.

And further comments on the education assets specifically:

McGraw-Hill has been receiving sales pitches for its education publishing assets, specifically its higher education textbook assets, the first and second bankers said.
These assets have drawn strong interest from financial sponsors like Blackstone and Hellman & Friedman and could fetch around USD 3.5bn in a sale, according to a lender following the situation. Both sponsors declined to comment.
Other sponsors with historical expertise in education include Bain Capital, KKR, Providence Equity Partners, and Warburg Pincus.
The approaches come as McGraw-Hill has been accused of being slow to respond to technology changes in the publishing business.
“They’re not playing in the back-office ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) areas and student information systems that Pearson (PSON:LN) or GlobalScholar are playing in and that are higher growth margins,” said a third banker.
Pearson’s education sales jumped 7% and operating profit rose 16% last year based on public filings, meanwhile McGraw-Hill’s revenue and operating income for 2Q11 decreased 5.0% and 18.3%, respectively. Pearson, the owner of the Financial Times, is the parent company for this news service.
With McGraw’s education business not growing, it makes sense to consider a split of the business from the company’s profitable Standard & Poor’s ratings service, the industry bankers said.

More from the FT here.