Georgia On My Mind: Fair Use, Digital Availability & Reasonable Pricing

In April 2008, three publishers Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press and Sage, filed suit against Georgia State University (GSU) for copyright infringement.  The Publishers charged that university officials had facilitated and encouraged the posting of the publishers' works on university websites and, consequently, made this copyright material available for students without compensation to the publisher.  While only three publishers were part of the suit, the case has been closely watched by both sides in the case: The three publishers being generally representative of all academic and scholarly publishers and GSU as representative of educational institutions particularly academic libraries.  Suing your customers is a very unsavory practice and generally both frowned on and generally only taken as a last resort.  The publishers felt that this case represented a slippery slope in the expansion of the application "fair use" within academia that could fully undermine their own business models and was thus worth fighting despite the potential for negative fall-out.

The case as adjudicated is victory for GSU although there may be some significant caveats which will become be even more important as the publishing business accelerates towards more electronic availability and delivery.  Firstly, however this is how Judge Evans summed up the case (Copy at InfoDocket):

Of the 99 alleged infringements that Plaintiffs maintained at the start of trial, only 75 were submitted for post-trial findings of fact and conclusions of law. This Order concludes that the unlicensed use of five excerpts (of four different books) infringed Plaintiffs’ copyrights. The question now is whether Georgia State's 2009 Copyright Policy caused those infringements. The Court finds that it did, in that the policy did not limit copying in those instances to decidedly small excerpts as required by this Order. Nor did it proscribe the use of multiple chapters from the same book.  Also, the fair use policy did not provide sufficient guidance in determining the “actual or potential effect on the market or the value of the copyrighted work,” a task which would likely be futile for prospective determinations (in advance of litigation). The only practical way to deal with factor four in advance likely is to assume that it strongly favors the plaintiff-publisher (if licensed digital excerpts are available). The Court does believe that Defendants, in adopting the 2009 policy, tried to comply with the Copyright Act. The truth is that fair use principles are notoriously difficult to apply. Nonetheless, in the final analysis Defendants' intent is not relevant to a determination whether infringements occurred.

The publishers only proved five of the 99 infringements and will be very disappointed by this result.  Further, their financial claims may be marginalized later by the Judge; in which case, they are not likely to gain any significant financial 'reward' for these five infringements.  (Who would pay in any case is also a question since the Judge affirmed sovereign immunity but that's above my pay grade).

In her explanation, Judge Evans did present some important qualifications in her interpretation (based on the Campbell case which defined four criteria) of the fair use determination.

The most interesting interpretations to me were the following (pages 87-89): Firstly, on the amount of content that could be used under fair use, the Judge stated the following:

Where a book is not divided into chapters or contains fewer than ten chapters, unpaid copying of no more than 10% of the pages in the book is permissible under factor three. The pages are counted as previously set forth in this Order. In practical effect, this will allow copying of about one chapter or its equivalent. Where a book contains ten or more chapters, the unpaid copying of up to but no more than one chapter (or its equivalent) will be permissible under fair use factor three.

That suggests to me that publishers will be encouraged to disaggregate their content into chunks so that each chapter stands independently.  Hard to do in print, this is entirely possible electronically (as part of the publishers digital strategy).  Which brings me to the second item of interest in the case:

Unpaid use of a decidedly small excerpt (as defined under factor three) in itself will not cause harm to the potential market for the copyrighted book. That is because a decidedly small excerpt does not substitute for the book. However, where permissions are readily available from CCC or the publisher for a copy of a small excerpt of a copyrighted book, at a reasonable price, and in a convenient format (in this case, permissions for digital excerpts), and permissions are not paid, factor four weighs heavily in Plaintiffs' favor. Factor four weighs in Defendants' favor when such permissions are not readily available.

Judge Evans has plainly stated that if a publisher's chapter is readily and easily available and the permission is set at a "reasonable price" then the law comes down on the publisher's side.  She notes specifically, Copyright Clearance Center which can deliver a permissions fee to the user (faculty, librarian, etc.) via Rightslink and, although CCC does not hold the actual content, publishers will be motivated to create digital repositories at a disaggregated level.

Anything connected with content and digital continues to move apace and who knows what the practical impact of this ruling will be as more and more content is digitally available and traditional frameworks around which content is organized begin to erode. The traditional monograph and textbook construct will dissipate and this ruling might seem to give that transition impetus.

CCC has been trying to move institutions towards campus wide licenses and this business model has proceeded fittingly over the past three or four years.  I suspect this program will become much more interesting to many more administrators given this ruling.  In Canada, Access Copyright has attempted to unilaterally apply the all-in-model for schools there but has faced tough opposition over the pricing structure.  Some schools have been asked to pay several multiples of the amounts they were paying under the old pay-as-you-go model.  As the kinks are worked out, Access Canada is likely to sign up most of the schools in Canada to this program. The UK has had the universal license program from many years.

There's no doubt the application of fair use will continue to generate friction between content owners and (in this case) educators and librarians but then technology continues to advance as well making all of this content both accessible and trackable.  Publishers might be able to live with 10% fair use if they can track and monitor the users but to do that they will probably have to universally participate in agencies like CCC and Access Copyright. 

Shining Star of Hong Kong Harbor

This image from September 1969 as the family was in the process of heading from Bangkok to new digs in Auckland, New Zealand.

No trip to Hong Kong even now should be complete without at least one trip over the harbor on one of the famous Star ferries.  Still ridiculously cheap, it's the only way to take in the city skyline and all the hustle and bustle on the water.  I am fairly certain that housing has spread mostly up and over that ridge in the background.





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


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.

Blog Feed Reset

Apparently, my feedburner RSS feed went wonky about a month ago and since I don't use the feed I didn't notice.  I wondered why a few people mentioned I had been lazy over the past few weeks.  Now I know.  So, if you are paying attention to this post you will probably also see a month's worth of 'new' blog posts.

Here are the posts in summary:

MediaWeek (V4, N19): HuffPo's Aggregation Model, Espresso Books, FT on the state of Publishing +More

Kabul Chevelle 1973

Corporate Data Strategy and The Chief Data Officer

Some Soft Nooky

MediaWeek (V4, N18): Cloud Education, Navigating LBF, NYPL Rennovations, Pottermore + More

PND Mascot Charlie

MediaWeek (V4, N17): Academic Publishing, Canadian Copyright, Linked Data + More

MediaWeek (V4,N16): Texas Custom, Apps For Education, William Boyd, Official Chinese Authors, + More

Hong Kong Harbor September 1968

Going Digital Doesn't Mean Lower Prices

MediaWeek (V4, N15): NYPublic remodels, Creative Thought, Gunter Grass, Pew eReader Study + More

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MediaWeek (Vol 5, No 19): HuffPo's Aggregation Model, Espresso Books, FT on the state of Publishing +More

From the Columbia Journalism Review a long review of how Huff Po came to define the news aggregation 'business' (CJR)

Before its purchase by AOL in February 2011, HuffPost was not a property that had produced much in the way of revenue; it had posted a profit only in the year before the sale—the amount has never been disclosed—on a modest $30 million in revenue. Aside from scoops from its estimable Washington bureau, it did little in the way of breaking stories, the industry’s traditional pathway to recognition.
Huffington Post, which had mastered search-engine optimization and was quick to understand and pounce on the rise of social media, had been at once widely followed but not nearly so widely cited. But that is likely to change now that it can boast of a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting—the rebuttal to every critic who dismissed HuffPost as an abasement to all that was journalistically sacred.
Arianna Huffington liked to boast that the site that bore her name had remained true to its origins. The homepage’s “splash” headline still reflected a left-of-center perspective; it had thousands of bloggers, famous and not, none of them paid; and while there was ever more original content, especially on the politics and business pages, the site was populated overwhelmingly with content that had originated elsewhere, much of it from the wires (in fairness, an approach long practiced by many of the nation’s newspapers). But Huffington Post had evolved into something more than the Web’s beast of traffic, blogging, and aggregation. These days, Arianna Huffington has a regular seat at the politics roundtable, which speaks not only to her own facility on TV but also to the prominence her organization enjoys.
Power can be felt, even if it defies measurement. By the winter of 2012, Huffington Post could lay claim to a widely shared perception of its growing influence—the word Huffington prefers to power, which, she says, sounds “too loaded.” For better or, in the eyes of its critics, worse, Huffington Post had assumed the position of a media institution of consequence.

Taking a look at the Espresso Book Machine at Powells (Mercury)

When I was at Powell's, before I went up to look at The Machine, I spent a few minutes talking myself down from buying a Poe Ballantine novel published by local house Hawthorne Books. I almost bought the book half because I want to read it, and half because it was pretty—Hawthorne puts out lovely books with distinctive covers and classy French flaps (when a soft-cover book folds in on the sides like a dust jacket). It's often suggested that with the increasing popularity of ebooks, publishers should/will move toward the McSweeney's model of publishing, which emphasizes "book-as-object." The Book Machine is a step in the opposite direction, back to book-as-collection-of-paper-that-has-words-on-it.
Mercury Film Editor Erik Henriksen—a regular Kindle user—expressed extreme bafflement at the existence of such a machine. I'd use it, though: Despite owning and liking a Kindle, I still have a stubborn preference for reading in print, and all other things being equal (price, convenience, availability) would always take a print book over a digital one. Plus, being able to create physical copies of hard-to-find/out-of-print titles is pretty amazing in its own right.

Warren Adler op ed in (you guessed it) the HufPo on The Coming Battle of eReaders (HuffPo):

There are thousands of categories that e-books support, running the gamut from instruction to politics and every thing in between and beyond. Works of the imagination, meaning fiction, cover numerous genres aimed to specific reader requirements. The so-called mainstream novel, the work I have labored to define, is the toughest category to monetize, especially in today's environment, which tempts creative writers to replicate and attracts the self-published.
The mainstream novel is also challenging to the author, who must be branded as a serious contributor in order to attain enough status to attract interest and sales where outlets for recognition and discoverability are shrinking.
While it was easy to make a prediction about the future of e-books it is no simple matter to predict the fate of the serious novelist in the ever-accelerating rough and tumble world of e-books. I suspect that most authors in this category will have to shoulder the task of relying on themselves to publicize, advertise, promote, and project his or her authorial name and titles, whether his or her books are published by a traditional publisher or via self-publishing. Authors of this material will either have to learn how to promote their own works or risk the ultimate curse of artistic endeavor... obscurity and dismissal.

I wasn't sure whether to pull this reference to the FT on the current landscape in publishing or not.  eBooks are big, Technology is a driver, publishers being sued, etc, etc.  You be the judge (FT):

As deep-pocketed tech companies tout ebooks to sell Windows 8 devices or Kindle Fires, iPads or gadgets running Google’s Android software, reading habits will change further, with profound consequences for retailers, publishers, authors and consumers.
The pace of change is already dramatic. According to PwC, the consultancy, US consumer ebook sales will grow 42 per cent to $2.5bn this year, or 11 per cent of the American consumer books market. But this may understate the growth. The Association of American Publishers said on Friday that ebooks accounted for 31 per cent of all adult trade sales in February, up from 27 per cent in the same period a year ago, with their share of the children’s and young adult market jumping from 10 per cent to 16 per cent in a year.
In Europe, ebook sales will grow 113 per cent, PwC estimates, but will end the year as less than 2 per cent of the market. In Asia, ebooks will be more than 6 per cent of the market by December, it predicts.
However, this comes at a heavy cost to print. Adult hardback sales fell 17.5 per cent last year, according to the Association of American Publishers. In the UK, The Publishers Association said this week that consumer ebook sales leapt 366 per cent in 2011 to 6 per cent of the total, but print declines left the total market down 2 per cent.

Joking about textbook prices (Link)

From my Twitter feed this week

The Man Who Revitalized 'Doctor Who' And 'Sherlock' http://n.pr/KsTaYF

BISG’s Making Information Pay Conference:Beyond “Business-as-Usual”;The Age of Big Data,by Lorraine Shanley /PubTrends http://bit.ly/IHI6sK

A universal digital library is within reach http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-samuelson-google-books-and-copyright-20120501,0,2442760.story

Kabul Chevelle 1973

Somewhere downtown Kabul on our visit there in 1973.  I am not actually sure of the year but it was around this time.  Not sure who the two guys in the first car are but they look like US Government types.  I don't believe they were connected with us at all.  Notice the traffic cop on the far right.  There is something written on the top of the building left of center but I can't make it out.  That would probably identify the location.

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


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.

Corporate Data Strategy and The Chief Data Officer

There were several discussion points around data at today's BISG Making Information Pay session and I was reminded of a series of posts I published last September about the importance of having a data strategy. Here are is the first of those posts with links at the bottom for the other three articles in the series.

Corporate Data Strategy and The Chief Data Officer

Are you managing your data as a corporate asset? Is data – customer, product, user/transaction – even acknowledged by senior management? Responsibility for data within an organization reflects its importance; so, who manages your data?

Few companies recognize the tangible value of the data their organizations produce and generate. Some data, such as product meta-data, are seen as problematic necessities that generally support the sale of the company’s products; but management of much of the other data (such as information generated as a customer passes through the operations of the business) is often ad-hoc and creates only operational headaches rather than usable business intelligence. Yet, a few data aware companies are starting to understand the value of the data generated by their companies and are creating specific business strategies to manage their internal data.

Establishing an environment in which a corporate data strategy can flourish is not an inconsequential task. It requires strong, active senior-level sponsorship, a financial commitment and adoption of change-management principles to rethink how business operations manage and control internal data. Without CEO-level support, a uniform data-strategy program will never take off because inertia, internal politics and/or self-interest will conspire to undermine any effort. Which raises a question: “Why adopt a corporate data strategy program?”

In simple terms, more effectively managing proprietary data can help a company grow revenue, reduce expenses and improve operational activities (such as customer support.) In years past, company data may have been meaningless in so far that businesses did not or could not collect business information in an organized or coordinated manner. Corporate data warehouses, data stores and similar infrastructure improvements are now commonplace and, coupled with access to much more transaction information (from web traffic to consumer purchase data), these technological improvements have created environments where data benefits become tangible. In data-aware businesses, employees know where to look for the right data, are able to source and search it effectively and are often compensated for effectively managing it.  

Recognizing the potential value in data represents a critical first-step in establishing a data strategy and an increasing number of companies are building on this to create a corporate data strategy function.

Businesses embarking on a data-asset program will only do so successfully if the CEO assigns responsibility and accountability to a Corporate Data Officer. This position is a new management role and not additive to an existing manager’s responsibilities (such as the head of marketing or information technology). In order to be successful, this position carries with it the responsibility for organizing, aggregating and managing the organization’s corporate data to better effect communications with supply chain partners, customers and internal data users.

Impediments to implementing a corporate data strategy might include internal politics, inertia and a lack of commitment, all of which must be overcome by unequivocal support from the CEO. Business fundamentals should drive the initiative so that its expected benefits are captured explicitly. Those metrics might include revenue goals, expense savings, return on investment and other, narrower measures. In addition, operating procedures that define data policies and responsibilities should be established early in the project so that corporate ‘behavior’ can be articulated without the chance for mis- and/or self-interpretation.

Formulating a three-year strategic plan in support of this initiative should be considered a basic requirement that will establish clear objectives and goals. In addition, managing expectations for what is likely to be a complex initiative will be vital. Planning and then delivering will enable the program to build on iterative successes. Included in this plan will be a cohesive communication program to ensure the organization is routinely made aware of objectives, timing and achievements.

In general terms, there are likely to be four significant elements to this plan: (1) the identification and description of the existing data sources within an organization; (2) the development of data models supporting both individual businesses and the corporate entity; (3) the sourcing of technology and tools needed to enact the program to best effect; and then, finally, (4) a progressive plan to consolidate data and responsibility into a single entity. Around this effort would also be the implementation of policies and procedures to govern how each stakeholder in the process interacts with others.

While this effort may appear to have more relevance for very large companies, all companies should be able to generate value from the data their businesses produce. At larger companies the problems will be more complex and challenging but, in smaller companies, the opportunities may be more immediate and the implementation challenges more manageable. Importantly, as more of our business relationships assume a data component, data becomes integral to the way business itself is conducted. Big or small, establishing a data strategy with CEO-level sponsorship should become an important element of corporate strategy.

The following are the other articles in the series:

2: Setting the Data Strategy Agenda

3: Corporate Data Program: Where to Start?

4: Strategically Managing Data for Long Term Benefit

Some Soft Nooky

I don’t get the strategy: Sure, I understand that Barnes & Noble wanted to extract the considerable hidden value from their digital (Nook) operations and were seeking a way to do that but, what is the Microsoft play here and should publishers’ be more worried than excited? 

The Nook business is growing at 30+% while physical store sales grew around 2% - which wouldn’t seem so bad if not for the fact that Borders shut for business, and it has long been reported that B&N wanted to carve out the digital business.  Along comes Microsoft and, in a somewhat opaque deal, we now have a “New Co” business worth almost $2bill and in which Microsoft will invest $300+ million.  That amount seems relatively small to a company with the resources of Microsoft and yet this deal is being lauded as Microsoft’s big play into the content business.  Competing with iTunes (mentioned by Forester) seems a big ask given Amazon’s head start although some suggest the Nook is a good example of how to come from nowhere to compete with a bigger player (Kindle).

The nature of the cooperation between B&N/Nook and Microsoft will be borne out over the coming years.  Some investors in “New CO” might be hoping Microsoft stays in Seattle and away from the Nook business since Microsoft’s experience in media content hasn’t been so stellar.  Examples such as their digitization efforts launched to chase Google might have been technically superior but the effort never seemed to get out of second gear.   Each successive time they were lapped by Google their commitment waned until they finally pulled the plug.  Zune was a similar experience: Some people loved the iPod-like device but a thirteen year old girl once summed up the Zune by saying ‘everyone knows when you have to advertise something it’s no good’.

Looking further back, a greater danger to publishers might exist in the example of Encarta, the encyclopedia Microsoft bundled with millions of PCs and in the process effectively destroyed the traditional encyclopedia business.  The traditional publishing business in its’ transition from print to electronic distribution has already witnessed significant price deflation and Microsoft in an effort to sell more hardware (X-Box) and software licenses is likely to jump on the price deflation bandwagon established by Amazon. 

Will Microsoft show impunity to traditional models as they did in the Encarta years?  Perhaps, but their objectives might be simpler: Gaining an anchor tenant to support their mobile strategy.  To me, books are long since a killer application (when was the last time you heard that phrase) moreover, I just don’t see how the relationship with Microsoft benefits Barnes & Noble/Nook other than giving the company a huge valuation on a business that was buried under the vestiges of the physical store model.  I guess you have to start somewhere but will Microsoft and their $300mm influence the trajectory that Nook would have achieved anyway?  I just don’t see it.

MediaWeek (Vol 5, No 18): Cloud Education, Navigating LBF, NYPL Rennovations, Pottermore + More

Is the cloud the future to revolutionizing education?  Gordon Freedman in the Chronicle proposes some interesting ideas (Chron):

The problem with many academic systems is that they are "dumb" to who their users are, what they are doing, and what other systems they are using. This is largely because colleges have different buyers for different functions—learning management, student-information systems, digital-content management, campus analytics, and e-mail systems.
While there are single sign-on systems to get to all of these systems with one log-on, that does not make them "smart." A smart system integrates all of these functions to do two things: serve the end user (students, faculty, administrators) and interpret the data to improve performance.
At the moment there is no clear path to smart systems in higher education. The big data and identity engines of Silicon Valley are not idling, however. They are starting to accelerate, with the higher-education market squarely in their sights. While private equity is rearranging many of the traditional education-technology and content players, mostly on the East Coast, a new breed of venture-backed education start-ups are taking what their founders learned at Google, Facebook, Zynga, and Twitter and focusing on education.

How goes the London Book Fair?  Mark Medley from Canada's National Post follows Canadian publisher House of Anansi Press around the fair (NatPo):

There isn’t much trembling at the fair, at least on the surface. The London Book Fair makes you forget about the paper-thin profit margins, closing bookstores, and falling advances. Walking through Earls Court’s cavernous main hall, one is transported to an alternate-universe where the popularity of books is at an all-time high. It is a circus atmosphere: a man on stilts distributes leaflets; pirates welcome visitors to the L. Ron Hubbard display; a half-naked man hands out copies of 50 Shades of Grey. While there are plenty of smaller displays, the larger publishing houses have all built lavish shrines to the printed page. Wiley’s booth is equipped with 23 individual meeting desks and looks more like a stock market trading floor than a book fair display; Hachette’s multi-tiered mansion rises two storeys in the air, like a middle finger, and Little, Brown, part of the Hachette empire, flaunts an oversized photo of J.K. Rowling, as if to remind other publishers that they, and not you, are publishing her upcoming novel.
“We keep it in the basement, I guess, and wheel it out for every London Book Fair,” says Stuart Williams, an editor at The Bodley Head, an imprint of Random House UK, when I ask where the booths come from.
Over in Earls Court Two, which opened in 1991, adding 17,000 square metres of floor space, the Chinese contingent dominates the centre of the mammoth hall. Nearby is the sleek and minimalist Digital Zone, where attendees wait for the day they take over the main space. Dozens of individual countries are present, from Romania to Saudi Arabia to Turkey, next year’s market focus. The Sultanate of Oman is housed in a castle. There are also booksellers, textbook and university publishers, business books, children’s publishers, travel guides, accessories for e-readers. There are even booths advertising other book fairs, such as the Sharjah International Book Fair, which takes place in the U.A.E.

The debate over the New York public library's house cleaning continues (IHE):

Efforts to spin the news are to be expected. Much more of a problem with the proposed changes is the lack of transparency. The actual Central Library Plan itself had not been made public last year, when The Nation published Scott Sherman’s long report on the proposed changes. Four months later, it still isn’t. Nor are officials responsive to serious questions. When the New York writer Caleb Crain was invited to join an advisory panel concerning the Central Library Plan, he assumed it meant the administration would be forthcoming about details. At least he cleared up that misunderstanding pretty quickly. “I don't think anyone should expect this advisory panel to have much investigative authority or capacity,” Crain wrote on his blog two weeks ago. “I've pressed as hard as is consonant with civility, and I'm afraid I don't have much to show for it publicly. I've been given private answers to some of my questions, but I worry that unless the answers are offered to the public, there's no way to recruit outsiders to help fact-check them, and no way to hold the library accountable later for promises implicit in its reassurances.”

 The Economist on Pottermore and the power of Rowling.  I continue to believe Pottermore is a storefront and platform for a lot more than the Potter franchise. (Econ):

“With great power comes great responsibility,” is a lesson learned by Harry Potter, Frodo Baggins and Peter Parker. High expectations are the price of Pottermore’s guaranteed success. Ms Rowling knows full well that she, like The Boy Who Lived, does not abide by ordinary rules. Already she has changed the e-book retailing model. By retaining her own e-book rights, and then forcing Amazon and others to sell them via Pottermore, as well as offering vastly extended access to libraries and schools, she is evening the playing field. Fans responded by buying $1.5m in e-books in the first three days, particularly the seven-book set. The sales are fundamental, Mr Redmayne says, to financing the free Pottermore platform, which can be accessed in a variety of languages.
Whether Ms Rowling and her team can bring this same disruptive innovation to the Pottermore world itself, and sustain the momentum of the original series remains to be seen. How fast, and how creatively, the site builds out will determine the answer. An entire world of linking interactivity between the digital books and the online universe of Pottermore is possible. The medium is in its infancy. One thing is certain: if there’s anyone who can turn an e-reader into a device that “apparates” from the everyday into the truly magical, it will be Harry Potter.

Thinking about NetFlix and their changed business model that generated so much aggro (S&B):

In October 2011, one of the great backflips in the annals of business strategy took place. Netflix Inc., the most prominent video rental service company in the world, had begun to charge separately for its DVD-by-mail service and its streaming service in July, which in effect had increased prices by 60 percent for customers who used both services. Then, in September, Netflix had gone further, announcing it would split those services into two separate businesses, renaming the DVD-by-mail operation Qwikster. Consumer protests, conducted largely over the Internet, forced the retraction in October; Netflix announced it would revert to providing a combined service under one brand. By November, the company’s market cap had dropped by 70 percent and more than 800,000 subscribers had fled. The online mea culpa that CEO Reed Hastings wrote to customers only added fuel to the flames. In January 2012, a group of investors sued the company for loss of profits. Clearly, a bit of the company’s luster as a Silicon Valley darling has been lost, and Reed Hastings’s reputation as a strategically adept CEO has been damaged.

From the twitter this week (PND):

Flipboard is ‘head-on competitor’ on Economist’s road to all-digital Paidcontent

Apple's iBooks Author: the iTunes of self-publishing apps? Arstechnica

The digital world has invigorated publishing, not doomed it Guardian 

If Harvard Can’t Afford Academic Journal Subscriptions, Maybe It’s Time for an Open Access Model Time

Pearson says first-half profits will dip - FT

Fight heats up between John Wiley and patent lawyers over journals Paidcontent

U of M opens up to open source textbooks MINN Public Radio

PND Mascot Charlie

Some of you will recall meeting Charlie when I took him to the office.  On that day, I had an almost all day meeting and I put him in my office by himself.  He wasn't having it and barked constantly until my assistant took him and put him under her desk.  He should have had three more years but then, there are few guarantees in life.  This from Mrs PND:

Charlie

May 13, 2000 – April 26, 2012

A beautiful dog inside and out, Charlie had a brave heart, an old soul

and an iron will. He exceeded the life expectancy for dogs with

Transitional Cell Carcinoma by almost two years with a cheerful outlook,

a fighting spirit and a patient acceptance of being poked, prodded

and medicated. A peaceful, playful and loving companion to us, Charlie

was a tolerant friend to puppies and small children

and an enemy of squirrels, skateboards and big mean dogs

till the very end.

MediaWeek (Vol 5, No 17): Academic Publishing, Canadian Copyright, Linked Data + More

I was in London all week where I had a terrific London Book Fair and met many new publishers and partners which accounts for the lack of posts this week - even missed my weekly photo image.

Academic and Scientific publishing is still hitting the main stream news with little or no real counter pr campaign mounted by the publishers in question.  Elsevier is taking the brunt of the attention as in this article from the Observer on Sunday:

The most astonishing thing about this is not so much that it goes on, but that people have put up with it for so long. Talk to university librarians about extortionist journal subscriptions and mostly all you will get is a pained shrug. The librarians know it's a racket, but they feel powerless to act because if they refused to pay the monopoly rents then their academics – who, after all, are under the cosh of publish-or-perish mandates – would react furiously (and vituperatively). 

And as you might imagine there are many comments.

In an opinion piece the Economist also weighs in:

There are some hopeful signs. The British government plans to mandate open access to state-funded research. The Wellcome Trust, a medical charity that pumps more than £600m ($950m) a year into research, already requires open access within six months of publication, but the compliance rate is only 55%. The charity says it will “get tough” on scientists who publish in journals that restrict access, for example by withholding future grants, and is also launching its own open-access journal. In America, a recent attempt (backed by journal publishers) to strike down the existing requirement that research funded by the National Institutes of Health should be made available to all online has failed. That is good news, but the same requirement should now be extended to all federally funded research.

A little hysteria in the run up to London Book Fair from the Guardian:

It's not only new names commanding attention at this year's London Book Fair, a three-day event attended by over 24,000 publishing professionals from around the world, where rights in the hottest new books are bought and sold. Literary novelist William Boyd's take on the James Bond legend, announced last week, has already been sold to publishers in Germany and France, while agent Deborah Rogers has been signing deals left, right and centre for McEwan's latest. Set in 1972, Sweet Tooth is the story of Serena Frome, the daughter of an Anglican bishop, as she enters the intelligence service and falls for a promising young writer while on a mission. Out in the UK this summer, Rogers has already sold it to 14 other countries and promises this is "just the beginning". "It's only just come in and it's moving very quickly," she said. "A new Ian is always a very exciting moment."

There's been a copyright wrangle in Canada for the past 12 months or so which keeps percolating nicely (Canada.com):

The deal between the Association of Universities and Colleges Canada and Access Copyright, which collects money for copyright holders from such institutions as schools, libraries and businesses for the right to photocopy and distribute copyrighted works.
Under terms of a deal announced earlier this week, students could pay more than $25 per semester to access copyrighted materials. That's up from less than $4 a semester in 2010.
Under the former agreement, students were charged 10 cents per page for printed readings and similar works.

Nature have launched a linked data platform to aid searching over their 450,000 journal articles (Folio):

Essentially, this linked data platform connects publication dates and other features within manuscripts like institutions, journal titles, volumes, issues and authors. That creates what Wilde refers to as triples.
“A triple is an object, an assertion and a destination,” he says. “A subject, a predicate and an object are the official way of describing it. Many believe linked data itself is the next generation of the Internet and semantic Web—being able to understand and create links between information that may not necessarily be directly linked. For example you can say an article is written by me and via linked data you can find out what else I’ve done—you’re starting to create connections of information by how they relate to each other.”

In the Economist I found this interesting in how behavioral economics are being used in public policy

All this experimentation is yielding insights into which nudges give the biggest shove. One question is whether nudges can be designed to harness existing social norms. In Copenhagen Pelle Guldborg Hansen, founder of the Danish Nudging Network, a non-profit organisation, tested two potential “social nudges” in partnership with the local government, both using symbols to try to influence choices. In one trial, green arrows pointing to stairs were put next to railway-station escalators, in the hope of encouraging people to take the healthier option. This had almost no effect. The other experiment had a series of green footprints leading to rubbish bins. These signs reduced littering by 46% during a controlled experiment in which wrapped sweets were handed out. “There are no social norms about taking the stairs but there are about littering,” says Mr Hansen.

John Wiley is working with Blackboard to make the Wiley content available to Blackboard users as an integrated option (Press Release):

The field trial involves students, faculty and campus administrators across 42 courses at two and four-year higher education institutions in the U.S. and Canada. More than 50 instructors and 2,900 students have been providing ongoing feedback on their experience with the integration that significantly enhances the use of Wiley’s content within the Blackboard Learn™ platform.  Instructors have expressed great satisfaction with the integration, which lets them easily add digital content to their courses in Blackboard Learn and synchronize grades and other data from Wiley’s research-based, online teaching-and-learning-environment, WileyPLUS.  “I can set up my Blackboard class and integrate WileyPLUS assignment links with Blackboard tools, like discussion boards,” said Julie Porterfield, an Anatomy and Physiology instructor at Tulsa Community College. “Students can easily tell in what order they need to complete certain tasks and assignments. I have been using WileyPLUS for four years and so far, this semester is even more successful in terms of student use and tracking data.”

From Twitter:

Supreme Court to rule on “grey market” goods in books case PaidContent

Not a good weekend in sports (and I was there to make it worse) MEM.

MediaWeek (Vol 5, No 16): Texas Custom, Apps For Education, William Boyd, Official Chinese Authors, + More

Tarrant county (Texas) attempts to save students money on textbooks runs into faculty resistance (IHEd):

The push for cheaper textbooks isn’t new, and the spat in Tarrant County frames larger debates about the use of open-source texts and the best way to increase student learning while controlling costs. Some community colleges have saved money by working with publishers to create custom books for widespread adoption. Some textbook writers have started making their materials free on the Web, and a recent Rice University effort expanded that medium. Tarrant County administrators hope that using a common textbook in every class will help push costs down, which will allow more students to buy the books and in turn perform better in the classroom.
But some professors aren’t convinced. The faculty resolution expressed agreement with the goal of reducing textbook costs, but questioned whether this was the best way to do it. We "ask that the 'common course textbook' plan be suspended and that the college faculty be allowed to develop meaningful, realistic strategies for reducing student textbook costs to be implemented by the fall semester of 2014," the resolution reads.

Efforts to open up education information might create an App culture which has educators and technologists keenly interested (Chronicle):

In the case of the MyData button being promoted by the Education Department, it's not clear how many different types of information will be made available, although the data will exist in machine-readable, open formats. Participants will be required to specify how the exported data are formatted. Because participants are not required to export data in an identical format, a department official explains, developers may have to do more work upfront, but the information will get into students' hands more quickly.
At least one company, Fidelis Education, has committed itself to use the data students can download from the Veterans Administration's blue button.
As an enterprise that helps veterans pursue higher education and training for civilian careers, Fidelis plans to use the blue button's military-service data in the admissions process to verify that applicants are who they claim to be. Gunnar Counselman, a co-founder and chief executive of the company, says having access to an even more robust set of data about alumni satisfaction and employment could provide students with a personalized way to pick colleges that goes beyond rankings.
He's not convinced that such data will be available anytime soon. But the emergence of start-ups has had a "Hawthorne effect" on universities, he says—they're more open as a result of being observed so intently by outsiders.

 Profile of William Boyd who has been tasked with giving James Bond some new assignments (Independent):

They're still reviewed, however, in the serious, literary-fiction pages of the national press. Although Restless was a "Richard and Judy" selection in 2007, it won the high-profile Costa Award. Literary editors and judges refuse to relinquish their view of Boyd as a superior literary being, a writer of subtlety, poignancy and psychological nuance, as his earlier novels revealed him to be. He is, they admit, a 21st-century avatar of Graham Greene, who blithely interspersed "serious" works (The End of the Affair, A Burnt-Out Case) with action-thriller "entertainments" such as Brighton Rock and Our Man in Havana. The reading public couldn't care tuppence about such matters. They buy Boyd's books in hundreds of thousands because they know him to be the most reliably page-turning of modern English novelists, full of old-fashioned storytelling virtues, of place evocation, pace, drama and sex.
Of the generation nominated "Best of Young British Writers" by Granta in 1983 – the generation of Amis, Barnes, McEwan, Rushdie, Rose Tremain, Pat Barker, A N Wilson, Adam Mars-Jones et al – Boyd's probably the author for whom ordinary readers feel the most fondness. The Queen is known to be a fan, though possibly more because of his Commonwealth background and blue-eyed charm than his prose style. He lives in a handsome Chelsea townhouse, with his wife Susan, editor-at-large at the American Harper's Bazaar magazine (he married her at 23 – they've been married for 37 years, and have no children) and in a converted farmhouse in Bergerac, where he owns a vineyard, Chateau Pecachard. For a chap who turned 60 in March, it seems an enviable life.

China is the focus at London Bookfair which predictably has raised some commentary about how some authors where chosen over others (Independent):

Did the BC have any alternative? Almost certainly not. But, via its literature director, it has chosen to tell us, chillingly, that "There was no disagreement with the Chinese government about the final list of... writers who regularly appear on well-respected lists of the best novelists and poets in China." Indeed. But so do many other Chinese writers - who live not only in exile but also at home, where they may have a vexing relationship with the cultural authorities. That's not to mention the dozens brutally silenced in the courts. At Amnesty International, the Tiananmen Square veteran Shao Jiang has greeted the run-up to the Book Fair with an invaluable day-by-day log of imprisoned Chinese writers: learn their stories at amnesty.org.uk/ blogs/countdown-china.
The non-state Chinese Independent PEN Centre comments, with grave courtesy: "We cannot but ask: to understand Chinese literature, should the British people rely on... recommendations by the Chinese government alone?" The Centre has objected to the British Council's collaboration with the GAPP, saying that if it "wishes to promote an authentic cultural exchange in a free and civilised way, please do not disregard the independent writers whose works are dedicated to shaping Chinese civil society".

Juicy gripping true crime story reviewed in the Observer:

In 1877, Harriet Staunton's husband and three others were accused of starving her to death and lurid newspaper reports of the Penge murder trial held the nation's rapt attention. A bestselling novel about the affair – written in 1934 and now republished – proves as gripping today .

Creating, writing editing and producing a magazine as performance art (Observer):

The idea to create twenty-four began selfishly: I wanted to make a magazine. For me, print magazines are a fascinating medium, combining content, design, a crafted physical object and the opportunity to curate an ongoing conversation around a single idea. Twenty-four is simultaneously a print magazine, an online experience and a creative challenge. The goal is simple: a small team of creative professionals conceptualise, design, write and photograph a print magazine in 24 hours and document everything via Flickr, Tumblr, YouTube, Storify and Kickstarter, making the process part of the product. Time-restricted projects have been done for comics, art shows, albums and other magazines before; it seems we increasingly invest in experiences over products and we want more transparency from the artists we love. This is why twenty-four was designed with documentation in mind; revealing our process live meant that we were not only producing a magazine for print but also creating a sort of online improv show.

From Twitter this week:

Amazon Massively Inflates Its Streaming Library Size http://bit.ly/IaQ0XW

(In case you missed it) BBC News - US sues Apple and publishers over e-book prices http://bbc.in/Hxfe8R

ALA Releases State of American Libraries 2012 Report. http://ow.ly/ab3NB