BISG Report: Consumer Attitudes to E-Books

From BISG the annoucement of the final installment of their study into consumer attitudes towards e-Books.

Available today, the fourth and final installment in Volume Three of BISG's ongoing survey of Consumer Attitudes Toward E-Book Reading shows that e-book buyers are continuing to shift toward multi-function tablet devices and away from dedicated e-readers. Tablets have risen by about 25% over the past year as the first choice for respondents' e-reading device, while dedicated e-readers have fallen by the same amount.

In addition to the 45-page PDF Summary Report published today, data from Consumer Attitudes is available as a dynamic online data set via Real-Time Reporting: a unique web-based tool which displays raw data -- drillable, sortable, and accessible whenever you want it.

Other key findings include:

Amazon’s Kindle Fire increased over the past year from no use to be the first choice for more than 17% of e-book consumers. Other Android devices, such as Barnes & Noble’s NOOK Tablet, have also increased, from 2% in August 2011 to nearly 7% in August 2012.

Tablets designed specifically for the purchase and consumption of books excel when it comes to that activity, and underperform for all others.

Almost 60 percent of respondents who currently own a Kindle Fire report that they read e-books “very often,” compared with 50 percent of those who own an iPad.

CLICK HERE TO PURCHASE

Cengage Revenue Off 22% - Analysts Nervous

Describing a 22% revenue decrease as a "self-inflicted wound" and the result of a single customer reducing their purchases will represent a tough backdrop when Cengage management calls on their Bankers in the next few months to refinance some of their debt.  Quoted in the Financial Times, CFO Dean Durbin stated that he doesn't "think that we are moving toward a restructuring,” telling analysts on a conference call. “I believe based on the analysis of our cash flow over the next 12 months that we’re going to be able to meet all of our obligations.”  (FT).  Notice there was almost an hour and twenty minutes spent on questions which reflects the concern the financial community has with these results.

Here are the bullets from the management discussion section of their Nov 9th earnings announcement:

The following section summarizes our results of operations for the three months ended September 30, 2012 compared to the three months ended September 30, 2011:
• Revenues decreased by $153.6 million, or 22.2%, to $538.3 million. The revenue decline was primarily in the Domestic segment due to lower sales across all markets. Revenues decreased in the International segment primarily due to lower sales in the higher education market, as well as the unfavorable impact of foreign currency translation.
• Operating income decreased by $116.7 million, or 48.7%, to $122.7 million reflecting lower revenues, partially offset by lower employee-related costs.
• Adjusted EBITDA decreased by $115.7 million, or 33.2%, to $233.1 million, reflecting lower revenues, partially offset by lower employee-related costs.
• Net cash provided by operating activities decreased by $57.7 million, or 40.4%, to $85.2 million, primarily due to lower net income, partially offset by favorable working capital movements and lower debt payments in lieu of interest.
• Unlevered Free Cash Flow decreased by $88.0 million, or 32.8%, to $180.4 million, primarily due to lower net income, partially offset by favorable working capital movements.
• In July 2012, we completed a privately-negotiated exchange (the “July 2012 Debt Exchange”) whereby we exchanged $710.0 million aggregate principal amount of 10.50% Senior Unsecured Notes due 2015 (the “Senior Unsecured Notes”) for $710.0 million aggregate principal amount of newly issued 12.00% Senior Secured Second Lien Notes due 2019 (“Senior Secured Second Lien Notes”). In connection with this transaction, we purchased approximately $28.7 million aggregate principal amount of Senior Unsecured Notes at a discount to par. These transactions resulted in a net loss of $2.2 million during the three months ended September 30, 2012.
• In addition to the Senior Unsecured Notes purchased in connection with the July 2012 Debt Exchange, we purchased $73.1 million of Senior Unsecured Notes, $29.2 million of the 13.25% Senior Subordinated Discount Notes due 2015 (the “Senior Subordinated Discount Notes”) and $7.1 million of the 13.75% Senior PIK Notes due 2015 (the “Senior PIK Notes”), resulting in a net gain of $28.8 million. During the three months ended September 30, 2011, we purchased $174.1 million of the Senior Subordinated Discount Notes and $14.1 million of the Senior PIK Notes resulting in a gain of $42.2 million. See Note 5 “Debt” to our Financial Statements for further information.
• Also in July 2012, we made mandatory principal redemptions of $72.1 million pursuant to the terms of our Senior Subordinated Discount Notes and Senior PIK Notes. These payments were calculated in accordance with the applicable high yield discount obligation (“AHYDO”) regulations issued by the Internal Revenue Services of the United States (“IRS”).

In the company's PowerPoint overview of the results the company outlines their plan of action in dealing with the current situation and this section of the presentation was delivered by CEO Michael Hansen who has only been there since the summer.  Action points include, a key performance measures program tied to compensation, development of a channel management team, improved selling focus on print and digital and a longer team focus on better digital solutions.

MediaWeek (Vol 5, No 46): Library Clouds and Data, Open Ed Resources, GOP, Pearson Investigated

Campus Technology looks at Bucknel University's libary and their implementation of OCLC's cloud based library system. In addition to saving the library money and allowing them to reallocate resources the experience for users is also significantly improved (Campus Tech):

The OCLC implementation radically changes the library experience for students, researchers, and faculty. In a traditional library system, a search of the digital library catalog typically retrieves only those materials owned or licensed by the library. To explore further afield, a patron must access multiple databases, locate items of interest, and then hope that the full text is available. If the library is not a subscriber to that particular content, users must fill out an interlibrary loan form and await delivery.
With OCLC's cloud-based service, however, the research process is more streamlined and simplified: A patron can use the same interface to search the holdings at both Bucknell and WorldCAT--a Bucknell icon indicates which materials are local. In addition, books and journal articles can be searched in one
Since Bucknell's move to the cloud, the acquisition and processing of new material have also been greatly simplified. Previously, Bucknell would place orders directly with Yankee Book Peddler Library Services (YBP) and then receive files via FTP for loading into its catalog. It would then have to update WorldCAT to indicate that the school owned these items. It was a time-consuming process.

Libraries are finding that sharing data on their users can be problematic (Chronicle):

Harvard suspended the practice after privacy concerns were raised. Even though the Twitter stream randomized checkout times and did not disclose patrons' identities, the worry was that someone might somehow use other details to identify the borrowers.
The episode points to an emerging tension as libraries embrace digital services. Historically, libraries have been staunch defenders of patrons' privacy. Yet to embrace many aspects of the modern Internet, which has grown more social and personalized, libraries will need to "tap into and encourage increased flows of personal information from their patrons," says the privacy-and-social-media scholar Michael Zimmer.
Millions of people now share what they're reading through social-networking sites like Facebook, or smaller services including Goodreads and LibraryThing. They're accustomed to the personalized recommendations that Amazon provides by tracking customers' buying and browsing habits.
Libraries are following suit. They're beginning to share data to build tools for recommending and discovering books. They're lending e-books, even though Amazon monitors reading on Kindles, and they're enabling reviews and tags in the once-sacred realm of library catalogs.

Interesting summation of a session on Open Educational Content from the Educause conference last week (IHE):

It turns out that there is a lack of understanding among top academic officials about OER in general. A new study from the Babson Survey Research Group, based on 2011 data and released here on Wednesday, found that 51 percent of chief academic officers were “aware” of OER in any meaningful sense of the word.
“We then probed to see what it is they’re talking about,” said Jeffrey Seaman, the co-director of the Babson Survey Research Group, in a session convened around the study by its corporate sponsor, Pearson, which this week made its first appeal to proponents of OER by unveiling a discovery service for "open" content.
“What we find is that their answers are all over the map,” said Seaman. One of the most common definitions volunteered by the participating academic officers in an open-ended survey question was that “open” simply means “free.”
And what about “open” as it refers to intellectual property and the licensing, re-purposing, or re-mixing of someone else’s materials? “Not mentioned,” said Seaman. “Not on the mindset at all of these chief academic officers. The idea of who did it, how I can use it, what the permissions are for use, can I re-purpose it -- never appeared in any of the examples that they described.“

The Government Printing Office has released a five year plan detailing how they plan to meet the challenges of the electronic world but they've already done a lot particularly since 2009 (GCN):

GPO has been making documents and publications available online since 1994, when it created the GPO Access Web site. This was upgraded to the Federal Digital System (FDsys) portal in 2009, which included the ability to digitally sign and authenticate online documents, giving them the status of official records. This is an important element of GPO’s digital document management, Vance-Cooks said.
“Our market niche is authentication,” she said. “That is very important for customers who want the information for legal purposes and for Congress when using it to make decisions.”
Today, FDsys has 680,000 documents online with more than 13 million downloads a month. GPO is partnering with other agencies, including the Library of Congress and the Treasury Department, to make document collections available electronically through FDsys; has agreements with several e-book publishers to make documents available for popular readers; and is developing applications to make information available in formats friendly to mobile devices.

From The Economist: Do readers know they don't own e-Books?

It may come as a surprise that this sort of thing is even possible. After all, a high-street bookseller would not spontaneously remove paperbacks from a customer’s home, whatever infractions they may have committed. But, unlike with paper books, customers do not actually “own” the e-books they buy. Instead, they are licensed to the purchaser. Customers cannot resell them and there are restrictions on lending them. The transaction is more like renting access to a book than owning one outright. Plus, e-book sellers have the capability to take them back without warning.
The furious backlash against Amazon’s Orwell deletions in 2009 suggests that many customers do not realise this distinction. (Those that do are clued-up on software of dubious legality that can strip the electronic locks—called “digital rights management”, or DRM—from e-books.) Yet this lack of awareness of the legal terms-of-use is largely the fault of the e-book sellers. Their websites talk of “buying” books as if the digital transaction is exactly the same as one in a bookshop. And the explanation that customers are, in effect, merely “renting” their e-books is buried in long, jargon-filled license agreements that almost nobody reads.

Not always good news for Pearson (here at least) and the company is being investigated in the UK for possible conflict of interest between a business unit that evaluates course materials and the textbook division (FT):

Ofqual, the UK’s qualifications regulator, said on Wednesday that it was reviewing the effectiveness of the “business separation” between Pearson’s qualifications awarding organisation – Edexcel – and its textbook publishers. The purpose of the review into Pearson, the largest provider of teaching resources in the UK and the parent company of the Financial Times, is to preserve “confidence in the exam system”, Ofqual said. Responding to the announcement, Pearson said: “Pearson has robust conflict of interest processes and works with a full range publishers, not just our own imprints.” Pearson licenses third-party textbooks for Edexcel courses and also sells “Edexcel Own” branded textbooks. These latter books share the same designs and logos as Edexcel’s examination resources and documents.

Photo "Democracy Plaza": Election Night 2012

Wandered around here early on Tuesday evening before the election results came in.  Turns out democracy plaza is brought to us by Microsoft Windows 8.  It's all over now though and the right guy won.

This image carving is above the door to 30 Rock and that crown is normally in gold leaf; however I thought it looked more interesting with all the reflected red and blue lights.

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.

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

Pearson's Blue Sky Project

At lunch with a media banker several weeks ago, she had me thinking differently about the proliferation of aggregated content platforms such as Deepdyve, Credo Reference and others (particularly in medical).  In education, there's a rush for content going on and big incumbent education companies such as Blackboard and Pearson are starting to take notice. While these companies are big and retain influence they may not find it easy to establish agreements with partner publishers and content providers unless they can prove mutual benefit and trust. It could be a long process which is why my banker friend suggested there is a lot of M&A activity in this area where the decision point is on the buy versus make side of the analysis.

I was reminded of this conversation by Monday's Pearson announcement of Project Blue Sky which will allow faculty to search for and include open resource collection content into a custom Pearson textbook.

From their website:

Project Blue Sky allows instructors to search, select, and seamlessly integrate Open Educational Resources with Pearson learning materials. Using text, video, simulations, Power Point and more, instructors can create the digital course materials that are just right for their courses and their students. Pearson’s Project Blue Sky is powered by Gooru Learning, a search engine for learning materials.

Noting that there is so much open source content out there that it is impossible to ignore, the inclusion of this content became an imperative according to Don Kilburn, vice chairman of Pearson's higher ed division. To my mind this may be a slight smoke screen; after all, what took them so long?  Secondly, it seems only logical that they would be planning to add more content from more publishers to expand the universe of content available to their faculty users. Adding content beyond the Pearson materials will expand the options available to faculty, and faculty are already seeking easy access to multiple publishers content and don't want to be force-fed "off the shelf" products that diminish their ability to teach their class the way they want.  Their ability to build their own learning products is in process and inevitable and publishers and education providers like Pearson understand this.  That's what Project Blue sky is about.  Take a look at their video.

The inclusion of Gooru in this effort is also interesting since it suggests that indexing, collating, organizing and presenting open resource and publisher content is no easy get. Even Google is listed as a partner of Gooru. Either this implies the effort was too great even for a company like Pearson or they wanted to get out quickly into a market they feel they should dominate. Perhaps both issues are at play here.

Pearson and other large education publishers have direct relationships with the faculty who buy their books via their large sales forces.  What they don't want to see happen is something like the Amazon experience where a faculty member defaults all their activity to a common provider of both content and their user experience.  Imagine if a faculty member could go to one site to select and build their course content using content from every source available mimicking their current trade book experience.  Once they tried that there would be no going back which is the scenario the incumbent education publishers want to avoid - unless they are that platform that is.

MOOCs, MOOCs and more MOOCs

Short on conclusions (but then this is all quite new) the Education section of the Times this weekend gushed about those Massive Open Online Courses (NYTimes)

“This has caught all of us by surprise,” says David Stavens, who formed a company called Udacity with Sebastian Thrun and Michael Sokolsky after more than 150,000 signed up for Dr. Thrun’s “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence” last fall, starting the revolution that has higher education gasping. A year ago, he marvels, “we were three guys in Sebastian’s living room and now we have 40 employees full time.”

“I like to call this the year of disruption,” says Anant Agarwal, president of edX, “and the year is not over yet.”

MOOCs have been around for a few years as collaborative techie learning events, but this is the year everyone wants in. Elite universities are partnering with Coursera at a furious pace. It now offers courses from 33 of the biggest names in postsecondary education, including Princeton, Brown, Columbia and Duke. In September, Google unleashed a MOOC-building online tool, and Stanford unveiled Class2Go with two courses.

Nick McKeown is teaching one of them, on computer networking, with Philip Levis (the one with a shock of magenta hair in the introductory video). Dr. McKeown sums up the energy of this grand experiment when he gushes, “We’re both very excited.” Casually draped over auditorium seats, the professors also acknowledge that they are not exactly sure how this MOOC stuff works.

“We are just going to see how this goes over the next few weeks,” says Dr. McKeown.

MediaWeek (Vol 5, No 45): Flatworld Knowledge, McGraw Education, Conde Nast + More

Things were so bad last week, I actually read a paper newspaper, maybe things can get back to normal this week.

Hoboken from the storm (WaPo)

Education textbook trailblazer Flatworld Knowledge is changing their business model to paid rather than free content (IHE):

As usage of Flat World’s materials increased (the company’s latest promotional materials assert that the texts are being used in more than 4,000 classrooms at 2,000 institutions), the company became a darling of supporters of open educational resources and critics of high textbook prices. A 2010 report commissioned by the Student PIRGs, for instance, heralded open textbooks as “the path to textbook affordability.”

But that’s only true if the providers of open textbooks can make their materials available sustainably, and the shift in gears by Flat World Knowledge suggests that, for one company at least, providing free and open textbooks is not a viable business plan. While company officials hoped that they’d be able to persuade many of the consumers of the basic, free versions of its textbooks to pay for printed copies or versions enhanced with study aids and other add-ons, “we don’t convert [from free to paid] as much as we used to,” said Shelstad, the Flat World co-founder.

Economic viability is not the only reason Flat World is dumping the free model, Shelstad said. So is fairness. Some of the company’s 15 current institutional partners pay a $20-$25 licensing fee for every student whose use of the materials they subsidize, and others pay less. Raising the minimum price for use of the materials to $19.95 (the company’s tab for its Study Pass product, which includes the full online textbook, note-taking, highlighting and study aids) is fairer and still affordable for students, Shelstad said.

McGraw Hill sees lower results in advance of their Education sell-off (FT):

Several analysts had expected a decision in mid-to-late October over the future of McGraw-Hill Education, which competes in the school and higher education market with Pearson, owner of the Financial Times.

Terry McGraw, chairman and chief executive, told analysts that he would have news on the plans for the education division “in the coming weeks and hopefully sooner”.

“Critical to this decision is ensuring that we choose the option that maximises shareholder value,” he said.

Operating profit at McGraw-Hill Education fell 20 per cent, or 15 per cent when costs of the group’s restructuring programme are excluded. Most of the decline stemmed from weak US state and local spending on schools.

Revenues in McGraw’s school education group fell 16 per cent, while professional, higher education and international revenues slipped 6 per cent. About a third of the fall was because of revenues being deferred as the business moves from publishing textbooks to selling more digital subscriptions.

Also from the FT a look at Bertelsmann's Thomas Rabe (FT):

Mr Rabe thinks he is. Although low key – he wears sober dark suits and drives a Mini – he has a self-assurance that has driven some colleagues to distraction. One reason his predecessor Hartmut Ostrowski quit as chief executive late last year, according to people familiar with events, was that he “was tired of having someone by his side who always signalled he could do things better”.

How does Conde Nast see their future? (Folio):

“The post recessionary moment is really the introduction of alternative platforms that takes the pressure off of the print business, but doesn’t replace the print business,” he said. “Our print business continues to grow post-recession, but this year is a miserable year. Not because of Condé Nast or any other media company, but because of the anemic U.S. economy—nobody can escape the problems the U.S. economy imposes on us.”

Townsend said Condé Nast’s Web business has grown at half the rate expected so far this year, by about 15 percent topline growth, and print has also been trending upward despite the current fiscal climate.

“Even in this worst moment that any of us can remember with the U.S. economy, the print business continues to grow and the margins are sharper—the growth profit margins are mouth watering,” he said. However, he added, with “net margins, we try to run at 10 percent [but] we’re going to fall short of that on the print side, but we are still an expanding business. When this economy recovers, and it must for all of us, the print business is going to be on fire.”

The print business model will now be complimented by a variety of assets, said Townsend, including, digital and mobile, among others. In November, the company will also announce that it is increasing rate-bases for several of its titles due to growing digital tablet circulation, which Townsend estimated to be around 1 million, or close to 10 percent of total circulation.

A long look at how Paul Reid undertook to finish William Manchester's biography of Churchill (Times):

In 1996, The Palm Beach Post assigned Paul Reid to cover the reunion of a group of veteran Marines from World War II that included William Manchester. Although Manchester was too ill to attend, Reid got along so well with the other Marines that in 1998 they invited him to join them on a trip to Manchester’s home in Middletown. Reid and Manchester bonded over their mutual love of military history and eventually became such close friends that Manchester revealed to Reid the trouble he was having finishing his Churchill biography.

Reid regularly traveled from Florida to visit Manchester in his home, always trying to raise his new friend’s sagging spirits. During one visit, on Oct. 9, 2003, the two men sat in Manchester’s bedroom drinking — whiskey in Manchester’s case, red wine in Reid’s — snacking on popcorn and watching the Boston Red Sox try to upset the New York Yankees for the American League pennant. Reid says he noticed Elmore Leonard’s novel “Maximum Bob” on the bed. After the game, Manchester asked Reid to retrieve a large suitcase from his study. It was a big room, more than 16 feet long, with an oversize desk taking up most of one wall; Yousuf Karsh’s famous photograph of Churchill and a picture of Jacqueline and John F. Kennedy autographed for Manchester by the first lady were on display. What Reid noticed most of all, though, were the empty wastebaskets, the still-sharp, unused pencils, the uncluttered desktop. The room was more like a museum exhibit than a working office.

In Reid’s telling, he brought the suitcase to Manchester, who had another whiskey and told him to have a seat. “I’d like you to finish the book,” he said. At first, Reid thought Manchester meant he wanted him to read aloud from “Maximum Bob,” much as Manchester himself had read “Huckleberry Finn” to an ailing, elderly Mencken years before.

UAE is providing all students with iPads (NYTimes);

The plan to offer iPads across the U.A.E.’s three main higher education institutions has been in the works for one year by government decree. With the support of the government, a team of specialists visited Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, California, in April to form a partnership and agree on training services for teachers and students.

Apple then completed a feasibility study to determine that the campuses had the proper infrastructure for the project. They shipped 14,000 iPads to the country and asked faculty members for their opinions on which 20 free applications should be downloaded for student use.

Teachers were “panicky” before they realized how easy it would be to use the device, said Andrew Blackmore, curriculum supervisor at Zayed University. He added that educators were now working directly with Apple to develop their own apps and create their own reading material as e-books on iBooks Author. By reducing paper use and waste, the iPads also promote environmentally friendly values in a region where fast cars and massive shopping malls rely on low-cost energy without thinking twice.

Photos from the storm (Atlantic)

Hurricane Outage

At PND towers we've only had to worry about our power supply while many others in Hoboken have lost everything.  That accounts for the lack of posts this week.  Power at PND HQ is not expected before Monday but we've not lost anything relative to many other unlucky neighbors.  Here's what Manhattan looks like from our side of the river.

Manhattan Black Out

Penguin & Random House Merge

News on Sunday that News Corp were considering a look at Penguin suggested that the dealings could get exciting but with this morning's announcement of a merger that will combine Random House and Penguin in a new structure makes clear these discussions were already well advanced. As The Guardian notes the new business will b 53% owned by Random House and Pearson will retain a 47% interest. The management team will be lead by Random House CEO Marcus Dohle. The combined company will have sales in excess of $3billion although this is likely to be subject to some competition scrutiny over the next several months as the deal is reviewed by authorities in the US and Europe. From their press release:

Bertelsmann will nominate five directors to the Board of Penguin Random House and Pearson will nominate four. John Makinson, currently chairman and chief executive of Penguin, will be chairman of Penguin Random House and Markus Dohle, currently chief executive of Random House, will be its chief executive.

In reviewing the long-term trends and considerable change affecting the consumer publishing industry, Pearson and Bertelsmann both concluded that the publishing and commercial success of Penguin and Random House can best be sustained and enhanced through a partnership with another major international publishing house. They believe that the combined organisation will have a stronger platform and greater resources to invest in rich content, new digital publishing models and high-growth emerging markets. The organisation will generate synergies from shared resources such as warehousing, distribution, printing and central functions. Pearson and Bertelsmann intend that the combined organisation’s level of organic investment in authors and new product models will exceed the total investment of Penguin and Random House as independent publishing houses.

The two companies believe that the combination will create a highly successful new organisation, both creatively and commercially, with the breadth and investment capacity to deliver significant benefits. Readers will have access to a wider and more diverse range of frontlist and backlist content in multiple print and digital formats. Authors will gain a greater depth and breadth of service, from traditional frontlist publishing to innovative self-publishing, on a global basis. Employees of the new organisation will be part of the world’s first truly global consumer publishing company, committed to sustained editorial excellence and long-term investment in a rich diversity of content. And shareholders will benefit from participating in the consolidation of the consumer publishing industry without having to deploy additional capital.

Interestingly, with Pearson's big acquisition of EmbanetCompass (for $650mm in cash) earlier this month the company also said that they would be somewhat limited in the amount they could spend on future acquisitions given the size of the EmbanetCompass deal. The Random House deal does not appear to improve that situation and the press release specifies that neither party may sell their shareholding in the combined business for three years.

Finally, this is the big Trade House deal we've been waiting five years for. Will there be another?

Boston 1984 - The Red Hat

This image will be in the next collection and is from The Christian Science Center one very cold winter morning.  I have no idea who that is.

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.

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

In RE Books: Conference on law and the future of Books

I'll be going to this on Friday and Saturday.  It may already be full but looks interesting from New York Law School.  More details HERE:

MediaWeek (Vol 5, No 44): McGraw Hill Education, Pearson Acquires, Open Access, TIme Mag's Education + More

Brian Kibby, President of McGraw Hill Higher Education interviewed in Inside Higher Ed

Question 4: It seems to me that in your position as president of McGraw-Hill higher education you have before you the very difficult task of leading an enormous change in how your company operates. For many many years the big educational publishes have made very good money with a model of printed books and digital add-ons. You are saying that by 2015 that traditional educational publisher model will be as dead as Blockbuster video, as dead as the old record stores. How are you going to transform your corporate culture and lead your employees to embrace this change? And why should we expect that any big traditional publisher will be able to evolve to embrace this new digital world, as there are not many very good models in other industries of other legacy companies making similar transitions.

Answer 4: McGraw-Hill Education is a company with over 100 years of experience in education, so obviously it’s a place with some history. But the world and the needs of our customers have changed dramatically, as has the technology now available to help satisfy their demands. Our team has embraced this change whole heartedly. Our culture has become one where we have a passion for creative disruption, especially as it relates to what is important to our customers: improved results, retention, and the ability to become even more competitive in the marketplace.

We’re focused on technology now in a way that we’ve never been before, but we still have that deep respect for content, and I think that our employees really appreciate that.

With regard to other models/industries, I think we’ve had something of a late-mover advantage. A lot is made about how education has lagged behind other areas in adopting technology, and I won’t go into that but to say that the more gradual transition in our space gave us the chance to sit down and really figure out the best way to do digital from a business perspective. Newspapers had to make that choice back in the mid-90s, and the music industry had to face it in the early 2000s. Like everyone else, we needed to figure out how to get people to think about digital as something you pay for, and our answer to that was to make digital products that were worth paying for. I think we’ve been able to do that pretty successfully, and the market has responded well.

Pearson announced its largest acquisition in over five years on Tuesday with the purchase of EmbanetCompass, a provider of digital services such as online degrees to leading non-profit colleges and universities in the US (FT).  From Embanet's website:

EmbanetCompass is the premier provider of online learning services and technological solutions for top-tier academic institutions. We are acutely aware of the dynamics that drive higher education and utilize our experience and expertise to assess, finance, develop, recruit for, market and support online learning solutions for our academic partners.

 A new study suggests that open access publishing is larger than expected (Guardian):

They should be encouraged by Laasko and Björk's study which, fittingly, is published in an open access journal. The Finnish researchers found not only that nearly 17% of research papers worldwide are now published in open access journals, a figure that is two to three times higher than was previously supposed, but also that the exponential rise in open access publishing shows no sign of slowing down.

In the UK, since about 35% of papers are reckoned to be made available through deposition in repositories — the green route — the total percentage of open access papers (52%) looks like it has crossed the half-way mark.

Time Magazine devotes most of its current issue to education.  Here is a sample on MOOCs (TIME)

To compare my online experience with a traditional class, I dropped into a physics course at Georgetown University, the opposite of a MOOC. Georgetown admitted only 17% of applicants last fall and, with annual tuition of $42,360, charges the equivalent of about $4,200 per class.
The university’s large lecture course for introductory physics accommodates 150 to 200 students, who receive a relatively traditional classroom experience — which is to say, one not designed according to how the brain learns. The professor, who is new to the course, declined to let me visit.
But Georgetown did allow me to observe Physics 151, an introductory class for science majors, and I soon understood why. This class was impressively nontraditional. Three times a week, the professor delivered a lecture, but she paused every 15 minutes to ask a question, which her 34 students contemplated, discussed and then answered using handheld clickers that let her assess their understanding. There was a weekly lab — an important component missing from the Udacity class. The students also met once a week with a teaching assistant who gave them problems designed to trip them up and had them work in small groups to grapple with the concepts.
The class felt like a luxury car: exquisitely wrought and expensive. Fittingly, it met in a brand-new, state-of-the-art $100 million science center that included 12 teaching labs, six student lounges and a café. It was like going to a science spa.
Elite universities like Georgetown are unlikely to go away in the near future, as even Udacity’s co-founder (and Stanford alum) David Stavens concedes. “I think the top 50 schools are probably safe,” he says. “There’s a magic that goes on inside a university campus that, if you can afford to live inside that bubble, is wonderful.”

Where does that leave the rest of the country’s 4,400 degree-granting colleges? After all, only a fifth of freshmen actually live on a residential campus. Nearly half attend community colleges. Many never experience dorm life, let alone science spas. To return to reality, I visited the University of the District of Columbia (UDC) — a school that, like many other colleges, is not ranked by U.S. News & World Report.

Disruption in the news business from Nieman Report:

With history as our guide, it shouldn't be a surprise when new entrants like The Huffington Post and BuzzFeed, which began life as news aggregators, begin their march up the value network. They may have started by collecting cute pictures of cats but they are now expanding into politics, transforming from aggregators into generators of original content, and even, in the case of The Huffington Post, winning a Pulitzer Prize for its reporting.

They are classic disruptors.

Disruption theory argues that a consistent pattern repeats itself from industry to industry. New entrants to a field establish a foothold at the low end and move up the value network—eating away at the customer base of incumbents—by using a scalable advantage and typically entering the market with a lower-margin profit formula.

It happened with Japanese automakers: They started with cheap subcompacts that were widely considered a joke. Now they make Lexuses that challenge the best of what Europe can offer.

It happened in the steel industry, where minimills began as a cheap, lower-quality alternative to established integrated mills, then moved their way up, pushing aside the industry's giants.

In the news business, newcomers are doing the same thing: delivering a product that is faster and more personalized than that provided by the bigger, more established news organizations. The newcomers aren't burdened by the expensive overheads of legacy organizations that are a function of life in the old world. Instead, they've invested in only those resources critical to survival in the new world. All the while, they have created new market demand by engaging new audiences.

Falls Don't Change 1968

Niagara, New York 1968

The PND Seniors visited in 1968 when PND senior was attending Cornell for the summer.  I've never been but I am thinking of ways to put it in my schedule.

Mrs PND recently unearthed some of her family's slide collection and sure enough there's an image similar to this one from 1958.  Not that much different admittedly hence the title.

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.

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.

Teaching the Kids to Hate

The economist has a longer piece this week on educational textbooks and the manner in which they are manipulated to match various political and social objectives (read bias). Separately, in the Daily Beast today several publishing executives called on Saudi Arabia to address their appalling record on educational content. First here is the economist's take:

Other people’s textbooks have long been a source of worry. After the first world war, the League of Nations sought to make them less nationalistic. Anxieties increased, though, after the attacks on America on September 11th 2001, when some in both America and Saudi Arabia, including officials, supposed that Saudi Arabia’s curriculum of intolerance was responsible, at least in part, for the emergence of al-Qaeda’s brutal brand of jihad. Buffeted by the criticism, Saudi rulers promised reform. From King Abdullah down, Saudis have insisted repeatedly that the intolerant bits of their teaching materials have been removed. But in a stubbornly autocratic country that adheres to a puritanical Wahhabism, there is a lot of intolerance to go round.

The Institute for Gulf Affairs (IGA), a think-tank and human-rights lobby in Washington, DC, reports that much of the material that provoked fury in the West after September 2001 is still used in Saudi classrooms today. Ali al-Ahmed, director of the IGA and author of a forthcoming work on Saudi textbooks, cites such examples as “The Jews and Christians are enemies of the believers”, and “The Jews occupied Palestine with the help of the crusaders’ malevolence towards Islam… But the Muslims will not remain silent”. The Saudi education minister says the books are being revised—but that it will take another three years. Mr Ahmed says change is not happening sooner “because the state would be putting its survival at risk. The purpose of education is to ensure social obedience to the ruler.”

From the Daily Beast:

Children who are indoctrinated with such hatred are susceptible to engage in bigotry and even violence. Hate speech is the precursor to genocide. First you get to hate and then you kill. This makes peaceful coexistence difficult, if not impossible.
...
Despite repeated promises to reform Saudi textbooks, the most recent books remain full of bigotry and intolerance. We call on Saudi Arabia to immediately stop distributing and printing children’s textbooks that incite hatred of others.

While Saudi Arabia maybe one of the most intolerant and dissembling, The Economist took a much wider look and noted well that Saudi Arabia is just one of most countries that attempt to manipulate what their children learn and they conclude rather dismally:

Fortunately, the spread of digital technology makes such revisions easier—even if it does nothing to resolve disagreements over what revisions should be made. The days when textbooks were covered with the scrawl of pupils in long-ago classrooms may be coming to an end. Digital books, which can be updated cheaply and often, will probably come to replace their paper counterparts. Some school systems are already embracing this. In September California’s governor, Jerry Brown, signed a bill to create a website where students can download popular college textbooks free of charge.

As long as textbooks in one form or another are used, says Ms Lässig, and as long as they are issued or approved by the state, they will remain a political issue. But as access to other texts is enjoyed more widely, some of the dominance they now enjoy will wane.

As indeed will the power of teachers—whose prejudices may often be just as ingrained as those found in textbooks, and rather harder to pin down. Henning Hues, a researcher at the Georg Eckert Institute, has studied South African textbooks and teaching. In one class he observed, a book issued since the rise to power of the African National Congress featured a picture of Nelson Mandela with, alongside it, a question about why the country’s first black president was a hero. The teacher, a white Afrikaans-speaker a few years away from retirement, ignored the task set and described Mr Mandela as an armed guerrilla and assassin.

Do You Sincerely Want to Sell Your Publishing Business?

A re-post originally from June 29, 2010.

There are various approaches to selling a business and selling a publishing business is no different. The circumstances surrounding the decision to sell can greatly influence how smoothly the process goes; however, as with many things, the amount of preparation that goes into the process will ultimately determine whether there is a successful outcome.

As a seller, your immediate task is to eliminate questions, cynicism and doubt about your business in the minds of potential buyers. No matter how excited the potential purchaser seems to be about your company, they are going to be skeptical about key information. Their job is to (cynically) use anything negative to undercut a purchase price; your job is to be open and effectively back up any questions they will have with facts. (Bear in mind that adequately addressing these issues to their seeming satisfaction early in the process doesn't mean the purchaser won't raise them again during negotiations, so keep your story straight and simple).

If, as an owner, you always believed you would sell the business, then you should have a reasonable understanding when you would like this to happen. As a prelude to this event, you will want to focus on a number of key areas.

First, your financial statements: If Aunt Sally has been doing your taxes for the life of the company and you have never had periodic management accounts, then you are not in a position to achieve full value for your company. Treat Aunt Sally with respect but get yourself an accountant and a bookkeeper to put the numbers in order. At least a full year's audited financials and management accounts should be considered the basic financial reporting requirement when done by a qualified financial accountant. (They do not need to be full-time staff).

Second, if Aunt Sally is just one of several family members taking a salary in the company, you may want to think about their continued involvement in the run up to the sale. A buyer will want to know the actual operating cost of the business and you, as a seller, want to provide the best possible view of the business (that is, without extra expenses). Now, if the family member(s) has a legitimate and key role, then you may have other issues to address (such as their position with the company post-sale).

Third, many buyers will focus on future revenue growth. Do you have formal contracts or handshake deals? Is revenue dependent on one source? The buyer is going to second-guess your revenue projections; therefore, if there are any 'soft spots' it will undercut their confidence in the business overall. Saying so and so has always bought from us is not as valuable as being able to say 'we have a negotiated five-year deal' and we are currently in year two. If your revenue growth is rock solid - even if it is based on a small number of authors, commercial accounts or subscribers but supported in each case contractually - that will place you in a stronger position.

Fourth, your accountant will also create a balance sheet for the company and the key items concerning a buyer are those things that deal most immediately with cash. As a seller, you need details about your inventory turn, accounts receivable collections and accounts payable. Assuming you have prepared for the sale of the business more than twelve months in advance, you should have a clear picture of these items. Just because an item is listed as a company asset doesn’t mean a potential buyer is going to agree as to its value.

Other balance sheet items that require attention are fixed assets, which may include the building in which the company is located. Sometimes a seller wants to keep the building (if they own it) in which case you and your accountant will need to determine the best way to handle this. Bear in mind that the property could be the most valuable asset owned by the company. Similarly, the company may own patents and intellectual property that must be properly accounted for and (for the benefit of the acquirer) properly documented.

In summary, get your accounts audited, create a 'clean' income statement, deal proactively to get your revenue sources locked down and establish formal procedures to manage your cash flow and balance sheet items.

Obviously, the value of a business is stated in black and white in its financial statements but to the potential buyer they will be just as interested in the products you're selling and their future value as they are in your accounting policies. You must have clear ownership rights to any content or technology that represents a primary asset(s) of the company. If contracts aren't transferable, if certain rights are retained by content producers or if you 'collected' data to create your products without proper authority, these issues and others like them should be addressed and resolved before you market your company. If there is any doubt in the mind of a buyer that they will be able to carry the business forward, this will either scuttle a deal or significantly reduce your purchase price. And don't think they won't find out.

Sixth, your organization's human capital is important to the business for continuity reasons (if not for other reasons). Don't believe that you can keep the selling process a secret because even if your employees don't know everything, they will make up the rest. As a seller, you must maintain momentum and, for that, you need to maintain decent employee morale.

Bonuses and incentives can play a role, as can simple communication. Unfortunately, you can't control what the purchaser chooses to do with the business and placing restrictions on post-sale activities - even if you can get away with this - will only reduce your take. Key employees are important to the purchaser and they will want to know who these people are. The purchaser may want some guarantee that these key employees will remain with the business for some stated period after the sale and will be willing to pay the employees a bonus to stay.

As an owner, you may have provided equity to employees over the years, which would give them a piece of any sale. Often these deals can be 'casual' which is not what a buyer wants to hear. The last place a buyer wants to find him or herself is in the middle of an ownership dispute, so, no matter how painful this process may be, get those agreements formalized in advance of a sale.

Finally, as a seller you will want to practice speaking about your company so you are effective in communicating to potential buyers why acquiring your company represents good strategy. Your understanding of your market, your competitors' market positioning and market trends and opportunities all represent key components of your company's selling attributes - and reasons why a purchaser will see opportunity in acquiring your company. Work to prepare a briefing document of your company which you can use in presentations and discussions. Importantly, at industry events, seek out speaking and panel discussion opportunities where you can both present your company and your understanding of the market, as well as learn about what other similar companies are doing in your marketplace. Not everyone is comfortable with this type of communication; however, during a sales process the buyer is going to rely a lot on your perspective about the business, and the more comfortable you are, the better your views will come across. The only way to become a better and more effective communicator is through practice.

In summary, any hiccup in the process of acquiring your company could result in a buyer or buyers either getting cold feet or simply moving on to something else. There are lots of companies drawing acquisition attention and, having gained attention, you don't want to lose it and fall to the bottom of the pile. By the time you regain their interest, circumstances could have changed significantly and no longer exist to your advantage or worse - the opportunity maybe permanently lost to you.

Frankfurt: Selections from the Show Dailies

Highlights from the show Dailies:

PW Show Daily October 10th:

Interview with James Daunt of Waterstones (Page 12)

So is Daunt’s new boss happy with the way things are going? The Managing Director in whose steady hands so much rests points out that Alexander Mamut, a long-time customer of Daunt Books, lives in Moscow and isn’t here that much, but yes, he’s pleased. Was it a big decision to step back from the chain he founded and had so lovingly created to take on the nightmare that was Waterstones? He turns slightly mischievous. “Waterstones was about to disappear and I don’t think that was going to be great for the British book trade. I’m not sure how Daunt Books was going to survive in that environment. Random House doesn’t run a warehouse to supply the likes of Daunts; it’s to supply Waterstones. Where would we have been a year on from there being no Waterstones? I don’t know.” A thought bubble seems to hang over Daunt’s head. “Waterstones not being there was going to be extremely damaging to our ecosystem. A world of supermarkets and online would have been a pretty bleak one. Independents would have found it very hard to carry on. The writing was on the wall for a very long time. Somebody had to do something.”

Doug Wright on the Future of Content Delivery (Page 34):

Professional networks are increasingly being used to provide services that give real value to the community and improve engagement, alongside content delivery. Examples of this credentialed, peer-to-peer approach include the Researcher Exchange from GSE Research. It has the facility for members to comment on journal content via the open peer-review model or to ask questions of their peers ;and it enables corporations to find expert consultants, and authors to find collaborators, via a sophisticated author search whereby a user can pinpoint experts within a particular field within a particular organisation

Cory Doctorow urges publishers to support ideas such as the Humble eBook Bundle (Page 38)

Yet, one of the biggest surprises to me in curating the HumbleEbook Bundle has been some publishers’ unwillingness to experiment with just one or two DRM-free titles in a new kind of promotion that carries a proven track record of success in a related field.I understand the industry is concerned that the perceived value of an ebook is a matter of credit and psychology, and that no one among the Big Six American houses wants the “fair price” for an ebook to drop. But I also don’t think they can do much about this: there are, by orders of magnitude, more amateur and independent ebooks entering the marketplace than the Big Six produce, and many of them are at low price points. At the same time, the Humble Indie Bundles have a record of enticing people to pay more, on average, than they would pay for the unbundled items. Sure, some people pay nothing. But why not experiment? Isn’t the idea of a successful business to make as much profit as possible; not as much profit as possible from each separate customer

PW Show Daily October 11th:

Michael Bhaskar: Working Together - Digitally (Page 8)

Here’s the rub. Digital is difficult and expensive. Simply to compete with all the other digital media producers out there means constantly raising the bar. We are in a kind of functionality and design arms race, where coming out with what wowed people last week bores them the next. You have to constantly push the envelope and you have to do this in a blizzard of competition in an environment of colossal risk, where abject failure is worryingly common. You are dealing with high upfront costs, at best uncertain demand, unstable, usually low pricing necessitating a high volume of sales and much control ceded to giant technology corporations. Yes, it’s like books–only more so.

Nikko Pfund - A Billion Dollar Process (Page 10):

PW:
Speaking of OSO, you’ve now expanded it into University PressScholarship Online (UPSO), and inked deals with publishers, including major presses such as California and Chicago. What is it like to be sharing your platform with publishers who are technically competitors?
NP:
It has been far more natural and uncomplicated than we’d dared hope. It helps that t he university press world is one of mutual support and commonality of purpose. Ultimately, I think the benefits to the scholarly and the university press community–in terms of access, learning, collaborating with other mission-driven not-for-profits, and tackling some challenges together as a community–far outweigh any competitive advantages that may be derived from our platform. So I don’t fret about the competitive aspect of UPSO at all. Technology is important, but university presses have strong personalities

Making Copyright Work in a Digital Age (Page 22)

The aim of the LCC is that through interoperability, the use of existing open standards (such as the International Standard Text Identifier and the International Standard Name Identifier , and commonality in the area of rights management, to produce a cross-media framework for a standards-based communications infra-structure that will enable businesses and individuals to man-age and communicate their rights more effectively online. The idea is for an automated rights clearance system in which content from all sectors is tagged and can be identified with a single click. The system would then allow users to request permission for specific uses and access the appropriate licences.

Open Access or Open Season (Page 46)

The burning question for publishers is how this greater open access might be achieved without causing the collapse of the publishing industry. One of the options considered by the Finch committee was the mandatory across-the-board introduction of the Green Delayed Access model after a six-month embargo, regardless of the discipline served by the journal or its estimated half-life. The Publishers Association and the Association of Learned, Professional and Society Publishers together commissioned a piece of work to try to ascertain what the likely effect of this would be on academic journals subscriptions (available at www.publishingresearch.net); its headline findings are displayed in the graphs.

PW Show Daily October 12:

Prepare for the Subscription Economy (Page 28)

We talk about data a lot in publishing: “Data is the New Oil” was the mantra of the BICNew Trends Summer Seminar in London. But when print publishers talk about data, theyare talking about product data: metadata. And metadata is crucial to the supply chain. But what we have missed is that when t he rest of the world talks about data, they are talking about “big data”: personal data, customer data, usage data, transactional data etc. They are talking about using data to reach and be relevant to individuals. We need to wake up to this; and when we do we are going to wake up to an unholy mess in our back offices. We already find it difficult enough to use data well at re-seller level (not customer or use level) let alone monetizing on a use basis (unless it is via an aggregator saving us the pain of ever getting to grips with new transactional business models). And it is this that makes Zuora (used by Pearson, by the way) so fascinating to me. They have understood that the internet has changed the whole context and therefore the fundamental basis of commercial transactions.

Publishing Perspectives:

E-Books Offer Silver Lining for Australians:

And all this despite the Fifty Shades of Grey dividend: the three books in the trilogy have sold 2 million copies this year, or over 5% of all sales. Without E. L. James’ enlivening of Australian marital life, volume sales would have been down by over 15%.
Two tough years back-to-back has created casualties. Last month, one of Australia’s hitherto most dynamic trade publishers, Murdoch Books, finally gave up the fight and has been bought by the largest local publisher, Allen & Unwin, with a large number of jobs lost. Specialist R&R Publications has gone into liquidation, and Melbourne University Publishing posted a $2.1 million loss. Sales forces and lists are being trimmed, while one of Australia’s two remaining book printers, OPUS Group (which missed out on printing Fifty Shades), is also downsizing after posting large losses. Adding to the gloom, major educational bookseller Education Works has gone into liquidation following an unsuccessful brush with venture capitalism.

IPA’s Global Ranking of Publishing Markets—US, China on Top

B&N in Frankfurt: We Come in Peace

Why no B&N branding? Because their team was there representing an entirely new company, Nook Media, armed with $300 million from Microsoft and another $305 million committed over the next several years.
“Microsoft?” you say, “I thought they were dead, doomed to second-tier status by Apple.” Yes, well, as we noted last week, users of Microsoft devices are the most active buyers of book content on mobile devices, so it would make sense that they would invest in the book business (after, it must be noted, killing off their own book digitization project several years ago).

Not for Nothing - PW and Publishing Perspectives make it purposefully difficult to collect, cite and link to this content. Well done!

MediaWeek (Vol 5, No 43): McGraw Hill, Springer, Hilary Mantel, Amazon, Metadata +More

The tires are being kicked at McGraw Hill Education by a predictable group of private equity players (Cengage is backed by Apax) but the asking price looks steep (Reuters):

McGraw-Hill Companies Inc's (MHP.N) education unit is expected to draw final bids from private equity firms Bain Capital and Apollo Global Management (APO.N) as well as rival Cengage Learning Inc, in a deal that could fetch around $3 billion, several people familiar with the matter said.

Cengage, the No. 2 U.S. college textbook publisher, and the two private equity firms are working on final offers for McGraw-Hill Education, the world's second-largest education company by sales, with the bids due later in October, the people said.

McGraw-Hill, which is running the auction as an alternative to its planned spin-off of the business, wants to get more than $3 billion and could still decide against a sale if the bids fail to meet its price expectations, the people said this week.

Note - If you read my post this week about Pearson the Apollo Group owns for profit University of Phoenix making me some kind of fortune teller.

Journals publisher Springer is up for a recapitalization based on reports from Reuters:

The company has performed well and earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) have risen to around 330 million euros, bankers said, from 310 million in 2011, which was quoted on EQT's website.
Although there is no urgency for the company to do anything as its debt does not mature until between 2015 and 2017, conditions in Europe's leveraged loan market are such that it could be good time to do an opportunistic deal.
There have been a number of such deals recently as banks and private equity firms seek to make money and take advantage of stronger market conditions, after a lack of deal activity over the summer, including dividend recapitalisations by the RAC and Formula One.

Hilary Mantel interviewed in The New Statesman:

Mantel wondered if she was being too demanding. But then she thought that to adjust her style in any way would be not only a loss, but patronising (“You simply cannot run remedial classes for people on the page”). Some will be lost along the way, but she doesn’t mind. “It makes me think that some readers read a book as if it were an instruction manual, expecting to understand everything first time, but of course when you write, you put into every sentence an overflow of meaning, and you create in every sentence as many resonances and double meanings and ambiguities as you can possibly pack in there, so that people can read it again and get something new each time.”

She can sound arrogant, Mantel, assured of her abilities and candid about them in a way that seems peculiarly un-English. But even the arrogance is purposeful. It is one of her pieces of advice to young authors: cultivate confidence, have no shame in being bullish about your ideas and your abilities. She was patronised for years by male critics who deemed her work domestic and provincial (one, writing about A Place of Greater Safety – the French 800-pager – dwelt on a brief mention of wallpaper). So she makes no apologies for her self-belief.
...

After all the research, the reading, the note-taking, the indexing, the filing and refiling, it is a question of tuning in. Alison, she says, is how she would have turned out if she hadn’t had an education – not necessarily a medium, but not far off, someone whose brain hadn’t been trained, and so whose only (but consi­derable) powers were those of instinct, of sensing, of awareness. Mantel describes herself as “skinless”. She feels everything: presences, ghosts, memories. Cromwell is researched, constructed and written, but he is also channelled. Occupying his mind is pleasurable. He is cool, all-seeing, almost super-heroic in his powers to anticipate and manipulate. (Craig thinks Mantel made the mistake of falling in love with her leading man and that her version of Cromwell is psychologically implausible for a man we know tortured people.) Mantel relishes his low heart rate, the nerveless approach to life, a mental state unbogged by rumination. She says that when she began writing Wolf Hall, first entering this mind, she felt physically robust in a way she hadn’t for years.

Amazon chief Jeff Bezos was on a promo tour in the UK this week and was interviewed in The Telegraph:

He says the business quickly realised that if they wanted to make ebooks work, they needed to make hardware. Eight years later, the Kindle is into its fifth generation. The latest, film and music playing, multimedia tablet takes on Apple’s iPad and is, on pre-orders alone, the site's number one best seller.

Bezos, though, doesn’t want to take on Apple at their own game. “Proud as I am of the hardware we don’t want to build gadgets, we want to build services,” he says. “I think of it as a service and one of the key elements of the service is the quality of the hardware. But we’re not trying to make money on the hardware – the hardware is basically sold at breakeven and then we have a continuing relationship with the customer. We hope to make money on the services they buy afterwards.”

And make money they do, but Amazon is still not Apple’s size. Would Bezos like it to be? “Even though this device is only £159, in some ways it's better than a £329 iPad – way better wifi, the iPad only has mono sound and the Kindle bookstore is by far the best electronic bookstore in the world.”

Colin Robinson writing in the Guardian suggests ten ways publishing can help itself. Extra points if you can find anything either new in this list (Guardian):

This year, on the face of things, it's been business as usual at the Frankfurt book fair, with some 7,500 exhibitors setting up shop in the gleaming white Messe. But scratch beneath the surface and a tangible unease about the future of the industry is evident: book sales are stagnating, profit margins are being squeezed by higher discounts and falling prices, and the distribution of book buyers is ever more polarised between record-shattering bestsellers and an ocean of titles with tiny readerships. The mid-list, where the unknown writer or new idea can spring to prominence, is progressively being hollowed out. This is bad news not just for publishing but for the culture at large.

Three magazine publisher's experience with Apple's Newsstand (Journalism UK)

When Goldsmith delivered presentations on Newsstand at publishing conferences a year ago, he said he would be asked a common question.  "The first question from the audience would be 'aren't you cannibalising your own sales?' And that question would come from our editors as well."  "But 80 per cent of sales are overseas, 90 per cent of customers are new to the brand." And 40 per cent of all of sales are for subscriptions. "That's brilliant, because it is offsetting that sad decline in print.
It is a similar story for Conde Nast. "We are reaching a new audience, we are able to target them in new ways, we are able to market to them in new ways, it's a pretty exciting new development for us," Read said. "It means that the overall circulations of our magazines in these particular instances are growing very healthily so that we are seeing very big increases in circulation with titles such as Wired and GQ." Overseas sales vary from title to title, Read added, "A magazine like Vanity Fair will see quite a big proportion of its iPad sales coming from overseas, something like 60 to 70 per cent will be international, but that applies to print as well.

Metadata on Stage at Frankfurt reported by Publisher's Weekly:

Indeed this is the thrust of their exchange—the ever-increasing numbers of books and the faulty metadata being circulated about them—over the next half hour. The transition from print to digital has made metadata—which can mean anything from an ISBN to customer ranking on Amazon—not just simply useful, both Dawson and O’Leary emphasized, it is now critical to the ability to find and sell a book. The rise of digital publishing, and the lowering of barriers to entry for just about anyone—from professional publisher to newest self-publisher—has resulted in an explosion of metadata of all kinds. And apparently a sizeable chunk of it is either inaccurate or missing outright, compounding the problem of book discoverability. 

“When it was only the print bookstore, BISAC was a luxury,” O’Leary said, “but with all the digital products, we need accurate and granular metadata. It’s what we need to make book discovery possible.” The explosion in the amount of digital book content, “puts pressure on the metadata,” said Dawson, who pointed out that once inaccurate metadata is published online, “it’s there forever. If you’ve ever tried to correct a mistake in the metadata you know it’s a game of Whack-A-Mole.”
In fact in the olden days of print, O’Leary said, “It used to be that once you shipped the book, that was the end, the metadata was done. But with digital it never stops, there are constant updates and changes.” And as more consumers around the world go online they encounter information on all kinds of books, many of which they will want—but will be unable to buy. “Today, every book you publish is visible everywhere, even if you can’t buy it [because of territorial rights],” O’Leary said, “This encourages piracy, because if people do try to buy it, they find out they can’t.”

From Twitter this week:

From the fashion and style section of the NYTimes (??) The Education of Tony Marx head of NYPL.  (NYTimes)