Breaking up the Monolith – The Modular Future of Scholarly Publishing

This post was also on the Publishing Technology blog yesterday.  Join them

Scholarly and academic publishing has always been a linear business, even though the activities and mission of these businesses (and associations) has often been quite diverse. As traditional publishers, they may have published journals, textbooks and monographs yet, as the internet imposed itself on their businesses many of them became more adventurous and added archives, electronic versions of new content and even commissioning dedicated online content.

Many scholarly and academic publishers today have highly varied revenue streams, but remain heavily siloed businesses. The fact that their journal, book publishing and online businesses grew up at different times in different ways means the content these publishers generated is stored and distributed across different platforms and databases and is subject to different processes and business models.

As a business operating in this type of environment, they are likely to be held back in several ways:-

1. The operations of the business are not optimized and reduce efficiency and flexibility which are critical elements in an internet dependent publishing environment.
2. It can make it very difficult for users and customers to locate the content they need in the format they want when they want it.
3. It makes the task of adding new streams of content that could be sources of additional revenue (eg conference proceedings, statistics, images and videos) a matter of adding a new platform – thus increasing the complexity of the business yet again

As significant challenge scholarly publishers face over the coming years lies in dis-aggregating content to enable their staff and their customers to search across the totality of the content and materials they produce. Many scholarly publishers still expect their users to search by content-type rather than subject, so if a user was looking for content related to ‘contract law’, for example, she would need to run searches across the publisher’s books database, then journals and so on. Not only is this a frustrating situation for users – especially for a generation of digital natives who are used to everything being indexed by Google – but it also represents a potential lost revenue opportunity for scholarly publishers. It is true that different content types need to maintain their differences, but by compartmentalizing that content to the point that users can’t find what they need, then, publishers are limiting their revenue potential.

Interpreting the interests your customers have in the varieties of content and materials that you produce is also benefited by providing complete and easy access to your content. Where content is hard to located and find it follows that interpreting what the user is interested in is also negatively impacted. Either users simply give up looking or consolidating user traffic across various silos is impossible for the publisher both of which reduce your understanding of what material is most likely to appeal to your user community. Reducing the guess work in determining upcoming titles and articles for example would naturally improve your profit and /or better support your mission.

So how are we to overcome the constraints of these formats, while retaining the integrity of unique assets? We explored this topic at SSP recently in the panel discussion I moderated, Rethinking and Remixing Content. The answer lies in format-independent technology that breaks down content into the most basic fragments that can be searched, browsed, repackaged and sold in any number of ways. Instead of thinking of digital publishing as putting monolithic content on the web, these technologies break down the monoliths of books/textbooks/journals into digital components – eg chapters, summaries, tests, supplemental material – that can be more easily searched.

Treating these ‘monoliths’ almost as part-works will involve a shift in emphasis for scholarly publishers, but will also multiply their opportunities to make sales. The latest platforms are built around data stories and flexible ecommerce solutions that make it much easier for content to be bundled, cross-sold and recommended via ‘users who read this also read’ suggestions. The flexible architecture offered by such platforms can even enable publishers to create professional networks to showcase relevant content from across their list, or subject specific landing pages. These custom landing pages need to be flexible and can be built around a critical mass of content across a single discipline drawing from journal articles, book chapters, reports and ancillary materials—or even type of user such as students, practitioners, or nationality. These pages wouldn’t just have search and usability benefits either: they can increase opportunities for content discovery, help nurture reader communities and ultimately benefit sales.

Drawing other functions into these platforms, such as enabling comment features or the ability to share or recommend content via social media could also help scholarly publishers solve the knotty problem of assessing the impact that their content has in ‘the real world’.

A number of scholarly publishers have already begun publishing in this more granular, searchable way, establishing models of best practice for the industry.

Brill

Brill is one example of an academic publisher that is driving greater value from its institutional subscribers by rolling out a Print on Demand (POD) model for content. This service, which is integrated with Lightning Source and will launch soon will be offered as a benefit to institutional subscribers. It will permit subscribing universities’ students to purchase a POD version of the book at a lower rate than the normal print version. Brill is the first site to offer Patron Driven Acquisition (PDA) as a business model for libraries. It have been running PDA as a pilot for about a year and are now rolling it out more widely.

ICE

The Institute of Civil Engineers (ICE) was among the first professional and society publishers to catalogue its content in such a way as to make the various articles, chapters, books, conference proceedings that it offers subscribers searchable via a single database.

The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET)

Another example of a forward-thinking professional publisher, The Institute of Engineering Technology (IET) has rolled out a new online publishing system for its content which ranges across journal, article, ebook, chapter and conference proceedings categories. As part of this process it has introduced a four level taxonomy for its content which enables users to narrow down their searches more effectively, and to run a single search across all content categories.

Challenges to the University Press

From the Chicago Tribune:

Publishers had barely caught their breath at the loss of those two sizable revenue streams when the e-book tsunami hit. By 2008, large publishers had made major investments toward digital conversion.

Many new titles now appear in print and e-book formats, but smaller presses still struggle to go digital, a move demanded by the market. Apart from the University of Chicago Press, where digital sales are expected to yield 16 percent in revenue this year, all other presses remain well below 10 percent, with Harvard at 6 percent.

Morris Philipson, the esteemed director of the University of Chicago Press from 1967 to 2000, coined a classic characterization of university publishing. Philipson, who died in 2011, once said, "If I were in this business as a business, I wouldn't be in this business."

It's love of books, not profit maximization, that motivates university publishers and editors. "The caliber of the books we publish gives me the greatest satisfaction," says Harvard's Sisler. "It's all about the books. We don't publish ephemera."

Given the challenges, directors have succeeded in keeping bankruptcy at bay. Collectively, presses even managed to post a 10 percent sales growth over the past decade, Armato said.

Shifting conditions have forced directors to be more nimble and innovative. Peter Berkery, the association's new executive director who formerly was with Oxford University Press, describes today's directors as "130 scrappy entrepreneurs."

The University of Chicago Press, the nation's largest academic press, runs in the black, a rare distinction owing to profitable journals and a distribution division for other publishers. Garrett Kiely, press director, says its 400 yearly titles and 50 journals generate $40 million in revenue.

Across the industry, academic presses have crafted a host of new strategies to meet the changing landscape of books. To replace lost monograph and journal sales, presses now rely on more paperbound and e-book offerings, an increased emphasis on reprinting all or some of their backlist (Harvard's backlist accounts for two-thirds of its sales) and doubling or tripling prices on more specialized, hardbound editions.

MediaWeek (Vol 6, No 24): Professor copyright, Springer Digital, Chorus, Journalistic Women?

Bucking for a fight, the head of the AAU Professors wants to protect professorial copyright on campus (CHEd):

The group's effort to mount a strong defense of professorial copyright, however, is new. In explaining his concern, Mr. Nelson said colleges previously often sought to assert control over patents but generally left faculty members' ownership of their courses and other writings alone.

With the emergence of MOOCs, however, colleges have begun asserting ownership of the courses their faculty members develop, raising the question of what is keeping such institutions from claiming ownership of other scholarly products covered by copyright, such as books.

"There is no need for the university to own the online course you create," Mr. Nelson said, because a contract giving a college the right to use the course should suffice. In claiming ownership of a course, Mr. Nelson said, a higher-education institution asserts the right to update or revise the course as it sees fit, threatening the academic freedom of the course's creator.

Springer is offering entire collections of eBooks to small and medium sized unversities (Digital Shift):

In response to growing demand for ebook content, Springer has begun offering colleges and small universities complete collections of its ebook titles by copyright year. Pricing is based on the size of the institution, and the ebooks are sold DRM-free, under a perpetual-license model that allows unlimited simultaneous use, representatives from the publisher told LJ.

A recent white paper, which Springer researched in conjunction with librarians from Wellesley College and Boston University, reported a very high rate of ebook usage among faculty and undergraduates at small colleges. At Wellesley, 71 percent of students and faculty said that they used ebooks in 2011. That total included non-academic and leisure reading, but more than half of these ebook users also said that they had downloaded ebooks from the Wellesley College Library collection. By comparison, the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project released a more comprehensive survey of all U.S. adults in April 2012, which indicated that only about 21 percent of U.S. adults had read an ebook in 2011.

If you were paying attention this shouldn't surprise you. Academic authors say the Authors Guild doesn't speak for them (LJ):

The brief distinguished their interest from that of the Guild’s members and pointed out that they are not only different, but diametrically opposed. “A ‘win’ for the Authors Guild would be a ‘loss’ for academic authors,” the brief stated bluntly. Academic authors, it argued, benefit from the Trust, “both because it makes our books more accessible to the public than ever before and because we use HathiTrust in conducting our own research.”

The authors also pointed out that their works “are likely more typical of those in the HathiTrust corpus than works of the Authors Guild and its members,” since much of the Trust’s holdings came from three partners’ participation in the Google Books project, and of those scans, 93 percent were nonfiction and 78 percent of the nonfiction was aimed at a scholarly audience.

The authors therefore asked the court to limit the Guild’s standing to the copyrights it actually holds (about 116, the brief estimates) rather than allowing its broad theory of associational standing to cover the trust’s 7.3 million potentially in-copyright books.

They also noted that in the related Google Books case, a District Court judge ruled that the Guild had inadequately represented the interests of academic authors. (In February 2012, more than 80 academics objected to class certification in that case, in a brief written by Professor Pamela Samuelson of the University of California, Berkeley, who also worked on this one.)

Will a CHORUS of publishers satisfy the White House desire for open access?(Science)

A group of scientific publishers today announced a plan for allowing the public to read taxpayer-funded research papers for free by linking to journals' own websites. The publishers say that this will eliminate the need for federal agencies to archive the papers themselves to comply with a new government directive. Details are sketchy, however, and it's not yet clear whether the plan will accomplish everything that the government wants from agencies.

The plan is a response to a February memo from White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) Director John Holdren that asks federal science agencies to come up with a plan by 22 August for making peer-reviewed papers that they fund freely available within 12 months. The memo would essentially extend a National Institutes of Health (NIH) policy that requires its grantees to submit copies of their papers to NIH's full-text PubMed Central (PMC) archive for posting after a delay of up to a year to protect journal subscriptions. Many publishers dislike PMC, however, because they say it is duplicative, infringes on copyright, and diverts readers from their own journal websites. So they have proposed an alternative that would offer a way to let the public see full-text articles without creating more PubMed Centrals.

Can Women's magazine's do serious journalism? (New Republic)

Not a single women’s magazine has been nominated for profile writing in more than a decade, while GQ and Esquire have received multiple nominations. (Men’s Journal even got one). What’s more, women’s magazines have received zero ASME nominations for reporting in the past 30 years and zero ASME nominations for fiction in the past 20 years. (This is not because women’s magazines weren’t publishing pieces that qualified in those categories; they were—more on that in a minute). And though Elle and Vogue both have excellent literary and film criticism, neither has received a nomination in the “essays and criticism” category in the past decade.1 (Neither have any other women’s magazines, by the way. You have to go back to 1999, when the now-defunct Mirabella got one.) While Elle got a nod for columns and commentary in 2013, no other women’s magazine had been nominated in the past decade in that category.

When I asked ASME chief executive Sid Holt about the disproportion, he said, via email, “Literary journalism is not central to women's magazines' editorial mission—which is one reason these magazines are rarely nominated in these categories.” He also adds that no one questions the editorial strength of women’s magazines, pointing out that Glamour was magazine of the year in 2010. He says that he can’t comment on the judges’ decisions, but that there’s no discrepancy among the judges. “There are far more judges from women's magazines than from any other magazine category,” Holt says. “Women's-magazine editors are assigned to every literary journalism judging group.”

Wailea Maui 1978

At SSP this week I met with someone who told me that they were missing their annual Hawaii holiday in Wailea this year because of circumstances beyond their control.  Here's what it looked like just after we arrived there in 1977.  These images were taken several months apart from our living room window.  The large white building was at the time a Westin Hotel and had been the first hotel in Wailea (1975).  No chain could ever make it profitable.  It had a disco but no dancers.

The land in the foreground was Kiave (Kee ah Vey) scrub land but by 1980 it was covered with condos.  The beach didn't fare much better; In 1980 we were hit with a hurricane and a lot of the sand was washed away for years thereafter.

Society of Scholarly Publishers Panel: Remixing Content

There are four or five sessions devoted to remixing and reusing content here at the SSP conference which speaks to how much publishers are starting to really think about how they produce content that can be used in a multitude of ways.  I am hosting a Panel and here are my opening comments and the slide deck.

Rethinking and Remixing Content: Society of Scholarly Publishers Panel 2013 from Michael Cairns

Chart 2: This session will explore ways to rethink and remix content in numerous ways that can be searched, browsed, repackaged and sold to achieve the publisher’s strategic objectives.  In this session today we will try to cover fragmenting, bundling, collections, cross selling, flexible e-commerce, academic adoptions, community networks, SEO and the ability to provide the right content when, where and how users want it.  That’s ambitious and if you don’t think a then end of the panel discussion we’ve covered it then please ask about it during the q&a.

Chart 3: On our panel today are Brian Erwin from Slicebooks, Alan Noren from O’Reilly Media and Catherine Flack from Cambridge University Press.  I will introduce each speaker as they present their section in a few minutes.  What I thought I would do was provide an introduction of this topic and then have each panelist provide a brief 10-15 minute presentation which we will then follow up with questions at the end.

First my introduction, I am Chief Operating Officer for the Online division of Publishing Technology which is a publishing applications and software provider based in Oxford, UK.  We are a sponsor of this conference and we have a stand in the exhibit hall so please come by and say hello.   I only accepted by position a month ago and this panel was suggested by my predecessor Louise Russell, but don’t let that worry you because I’ve been working with publishers on their content strategy for most of my career both as a consultant and as an operations executive.  Since 2006 I’ve consulted with publishers such as Wolters Kluwer and start-up businesses such as CourseLoad which are looking to re-invent part or all of their businesses with respect to how they create, manage and distribute content.   Prior to 2006, I ran RR Bowker which is primarily a bibliographic database company; but then, metadata is just another form of ‘content’.

Before Bowker, I was with PriceWaterhouseCoopers as a consultant in their Entertainment, Media and Communication practice.  Back in the mid-nineties we frequently made presentations to prospective and existing clients about ‘non-format specific publishing’ meaning we could help them create content process that were not dependent on the output format of that content.  Of course in those days the primarily output was print but the fact is that even today most publishers are not much further along in creating flexible, modular, componentized – call it what you will – content than they were in the mid-nineties.  Our charts during those presentations looked great but in reality they were almost irrelevant given the capabilities of the audiences we were addressing. 

Chart 4: Over the past three or four years I’ve worked with a wide spectrum of publishers in the scholarly and academic market who are only now beginning to recognize that they need to make fundamental changes in the manner in which they manage their content workflows. 

In one initiative over 18mths, I created a very large library of publisher content from academic journal and book publishers which eventually comprised approximately 200 publishers and 7million items of content.  In that effort I worked with many of you in this room and maybe this is your chance to put a face to a name.

Chart 5: In the process of this exercise it was clear to me that many publishers were not thinking about their content processes in a strategic way.  Not only are publishers still oriented to the ‘document’ but they find it very difficult to get their constituencies – author, editor, production managers, owners, etc. to allocate time, money and effort to implement real change in how their businesses operate.

Chart 6: All companies producing content should develop a content strategy.  Your business may have a set of big picture strategic objectives but what I am recommending is a programmatic, strategic re-think about how you manage your content creation process.  If you were to stop thinking about the ‘format’ or ‘document’ and more about the content item; then what would this mean for your business?  Which processes and relationships would need to change?  What technology might you need, etc. etc?  Are you able to establish some strategic targets around the answers to these questions and define some tactical objectives for reaching your objectives?

So you should be asking, how might you approach this effort?  The process may begin with an evaluation of your content: how is it created and who does that work.  What happens internally with the content once it is submitted by authors?  Externally, how does the market want to use and work with your content?   In my example in building the content library, many of the book publishers I worked with did not have chapter level content.  No abstracts, key words or metadata for their chapters.  In some cases the chapters had no titles merely sequential numbers.  This is not the way to present content to support flexible use by customers and I don’t think any of those publishers would disagree with me.  At the AAUP meeting last year, I heard from many publishers that their permissions revenues were rising year on year and I see this as a reflection of the faculty and researcher’s need to be able to find, use and even pay for just the right part of your content.  If you are not facilitating that you are missing out.

Chart 7: In the academic market there are numerous start-up businesses that want to enable content delivery at the base unit level: journal articles via Deep Dyve, book chapters and business case content via Gingotree, Symtext or full textbook content via CourseLoad.  These companies struggle with your content to make it usable for their clients whether they are researchers, academics, students or consumers.  It shouldn’t be that way but even more importantly you – as the publisher - should be able to offer this level of content flexibility directly to your customers.

These struggles with content may all come to a head in the mobile space.  As consumers rush to mobile devices for their content consumption it will be impossible for a content producer to supply content across all these devices unless they can COPE. 

Chart 8: What is COPE:  Create Once Publish Everywhere and increasingly we are seeing publishing adopt this principle.  It’s another way of saying ‘non-format specific content’ which is where we were in 1997 at PriceWaterhouse.

Chart 9: At Publishing Technology we are at the center of this effort with our pub2web solution which is a built from the ground up content management solution supporting all manner of business models, distribution services and content administration tools.  Our publisher clients are traditional academic publishers, associations and government agencies around the world and if you come by our stand we can tell you more about what we are doing.

Chart 10: In summary, you as a publisher need to begin to think of your content as a strategic asset of the business and as such you should devise a strategic plan for that aspect of your business.  Managed appropriately assets should return capital invested and the content you invest in should be no different. 

Chart 11:  When you get back to the office next week think about the following:

• What do we need to do with our content creation process (and our author relationships) to make the content less dependent on an output format?
• Chunking content while maintaining a web of interrelationships across the content.
•  Can we actively involve authors in the process: Maybe give them an office!
• How can we establish templates that support flexible content: Book>Chapter>Image>Diagram; Description>Abstract>Key words> Concepts>Author bios;
• Who is doing this well?  Can we deconstruct their activity and build our own way?
• What do our customers want: Content everywhere – so how do we deliver it?

Chart 12: I hope that my comments form a good introduction to this topic and let me know hand it over to the panel for our discussion.

Questions:

1.      How do publishers merge content separated by legacy systems?

2.      How can increased smaller offerings boost discoverability and find new markets?

3.      How to monetize backlists and granular content?

4.      How can publishers compete with free web models and go on the offensive again?

5.       How will it impact academic adoptions?

6.       How can this content organically find new markets?

7.       How can this tool keep backlist alive at no/low cost and with no accompanying inventory costs?

8.       How can this greatly increased amount of online content grow your company’s Search Engine Optimization and allow your company to compete with inferior content available on the Internet?

US versus Apple, Inc. et al. The eBook Pricing Case

Here is that 81 page opening salvo from the government that they hope proves a conspiracy.

MediaWeek (Vol 6, No 22): Bloomberg Chat, Coursea Expands, Literary Criticism, Bridget Jones +More

Bloomberg terminals benefit from Chat solution making them hard to give up (FT):

In a world where many market infrastructure operators provide a cheap, often free messaging tool, Bloomberg reigns supreme. Each day, its 315,000 subscribers exchange 200m messages and have 15m to 20m chats. Rivals have tried for years to break its dominance in messaging, with little success.

Financial groups with security and compliance concerns about Facebook or Twitter like Instant Bloomberg for its security, including biometric identification, and the fact messages are archived and auditable. Users like functions allowing them to share complex data sets, integrate with Yahoo or AOL chat services, or simply see whether someone has received a message. Others have to have it simply because their customers use it.

However its customers are facing intense pressure to cut costs and comply with a raft of tougher banking legislations. The fallout from how Bloomberg’s reporters monitored data used in the terminals has created a chink in the armour some customers are hoping to exploit.

Long article in Inside Higher Education about the annoucement that Coursera will expand to support a much broader base of schools. Here's what they may help SUNY with (IHEd):

The State University of New York, whose 64 campuses make it one of the largest systems in the world, is in the midst of an ambitious effort to enroll 100,000 new students over the next several years. as part of its Open SUNY effort. It plans to use Coursera to help reach that goal, said SUNY Chancellor Nancy Zimpher. "This is not a random act of subscription," she said. "This is an intentional relationship with a provider fitted within our SUNY portfolio of online degree programs." Those efforts include plans to reduce the time students are enrolled by offering credit for certain MOOCs. SUNY's associate provost, Carey Hatch, said the system also plans to offer incentives to campuses to develop and consume online courses that meet general education requirements. Some courses could be “guided MOOCs” where a SUNY instructor helps SUNY students work their way through a course that was created by another institution.
“We hope to reach more students with the existing faculty that we have,” Hatch said. The partnerships announced this week also represent a break from Coursera’s plans to work only with elite institutions. Koller said she realized that state systems educate about 70 percent of the students in the country. So, Koller said, her desire to improve education in the United States needs to involve state systems.

In an age of eBooks collecting print editions to make money (BBC):

So if you have a small budget, where should you start?
"The most important thing in books is to get the first of anything," says Adam Douglas, senior specialist in literature at Peter Harrington.
"That's what collectors are interested in. They want the first printing, the first publication, the first impression of any given book."
Potential investors should also look for the best possible copy they can find.
"You can always tell when you're looking at a collection if somebody has always gone for the slightly poorer copy because it was a little bit cheaper," says Tim Bryars, of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association.
"In the long term, buying the best will pay off."
Much like the advice on building art collections, book experts recommend investors avoid buying for the sake of buying.
"It's very difficult to start looking at it in a speculative way and say, 'I'm going to start collecting in that area because I think it's going to increase in value," says Mr Douglas.
"The only way you're going to get excitement and enjoyment out of it is to follow your passion."

Clive James suggests in the NYTimes that it is almost impossible to write a negative book review in contrast to the UK (NYT)

America does polite literary criticism well enough. And how: there is a new Lionel Trilling on every campus. But America can’t do the bitchery of British book reviewing and literary commentary. In Britain, the realm of book reviewing is still known as Grub Street though the actual Grub Street vanished long ago. But its occasionally vicious spirit lives on; one of the marks of Grub Street is that the spleen gets a voice. Ripping somebody’s reputation is recognized blood sport. Shredding a new book is a kind of fox hunting that is still legal today. Such critical violence is far less frequent in America. Any even remotely derogatory article in an American journal is called “negative,” and hardly any American publication wants to be negative.

In her centenary year, Philip Hensher celebrates the uniquely English comedies of novelist Barbara Pym (Telegraph):

Barbara Pym’s unique and unmistakable comedies of English life had an uncertain status during her lifetime, but since her death in 1980 her reputation has grown steadily. They occupy a very specific corner of existence, and her concerns remain much the same from book to book. Though her tone darkens as her work goes on, and her manner diverts from the flippant and artificial comedy of manners to a more natural, disillusioned, uncertain world of provisional unhappiness, her interests remain fairly constant. There is the world of the church and its dowdy social life; there are anthropologists and other intellectuals; there are some selfish men, aware of their power over others, whether homosexual or straight; there is English literature and its dreams of romance; and there are single women dining alone, their minds running on the possibility of happiness.
It is a small world, but acutely observed. Its opportunities are circumscribed, but genuine; and the reader puts her books down smiling, wondering in what ways he has allowed his life to be circumscribed, without meaning it.

Bridget Jones: The third date (Observer)

Would Bridget still be counting calories and units in her 40s? (In theory, she should be at least 50. In the novel, she is likely to be quite a bit younger.) And does that make her out of step with her contemporaries? Her fans' reactions were mixed on Mumsnet: "Will be Zimmer fighting and creaking bones during the sex scenes"; "Bridget should be left in the 1990s"; "The first book captured a particular time for a particular group of women … the second book/film was just terrible"; "I would like some trash like this … bring it on."

In 2007, Bridget Jones's Diary was named as one of the 10 novels that best defined the 20th century. But does Bridget Jones still speak for a generation, especially when her multimillionaire creator mostly lives in LA? In the London Evening Standard, Melanie McDonagh argued yes, she does: "Someone to represent the fag end of the babyboomers is no bad thing."

Fielding's publisher at Jonathan Cape, Dan Franklin, said: "As a comic writer, Helen is without equal. Over 15 years ago, she gave a voice to a generation of young women with the original Bridget book. Now they've grown up and she's doing it again, this time with all the joys and complications of social media."

From Twitter this week:
CourseSmart Partners with Metrodigi to Create Interactive eTextbooks PR Newswire

Timur Vermes’ Hitler novel: Can the Führer be funny? BBC
Google to bring net access to Africa using blimps, masts and satellites Guardian 
Lynda La Plante, screenwriter and novelist – portrait of the artist Guardian 
Clash city rockers – Mick Jones and Paul Simonon recall the glory days Guardian  

Lake Taupo, North Island 1973

We used to go here during holiday breaks in the early 70s when the PND family lived there.  Lake Taupo is almost in the center of the north island of New Zealand and the area is still volcanic.  A little north of here is Rotorua which I remember as smelling like bad eggs.  The white peak in the back ground of this photo is Mt Ruapehu which is over 9,000 feet.  Geologists think that Lake Taupo may be a crater of a massive volcano that exploded eons ago.  We had fun there.

MediaWeek (Vol 6, No 22) BookExpo Week

What a story - a surprise at every page!  You'll laugh and cry - sometimes at the same time!
A panel on ethics in book reviewing.  Was it ever thus?  (Time Magazine)

It was a topic that, because of one obvious reason, provoked lots of spirited debate, As of now, book reviewers have no set of guiding principles. Sure, publications and individual writers have vague ideas about what’s okay, but the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) has not adopted a set of ethical guidelines. Yet. After conducting a survey of members of the industry—the data from which will be available in the fall—and holding events like the BEA panel, the NBCC will issue its ethical best practices.
In the mean time, there’s lots to debate.
“It’s kind of the wild west these days,” said moderator Marcela Valdes, who serves on the NBCC board of directors. As print book reviews are trimmed and amateur, online review sites prosper, the lack of clarity about what’s acceptable for a legit book review has become clearer than ever.

Boris Kachka on Sad Literary Women (Vulture)

“You didn’t think that All Joy and No Fun was going to be the comic relief of this panel, did you?” asked the panel’s final presenter, Ecco Press editorial director Lee Boudreaux, introducing the relatively upbeat survey of American parenthood by New York’s own contributing editor Jennifer Senior (based on her 2010 cover story). Boudreaux noted that, title notwithstanding, there's lots of complex discussion about the nature of happiness, and two chapters on the ineffable joy of parenting. “So I’m saying what everybody else is saying,” Boudreaux beamed. “My book is not depressing.”

An article Jeff could have written five years ago - (may be he did). Excepting the Facebook reference (WSJ)

BookExpo is also a crucial social venue for people in the book industry, and a focal point for discussion of industry issues. This year there will be panel sessions on such topics as "Facebook FB +5.27% 2.0: Advanced Strategies for Book Sales," plus author events, including one Saturday called "Creating the Ultimate Book Club Experience" that will feature Elizabeth Gilbert and Wally Lamb.
Some have reason for optimism. Publisher net revenue for fiction and nonfiction titles grew 7% to $15 billion in 2012 compared with 2011, according to BookStats, a recent study by two book-industry groups.
However, publisher net revenue from bricks-and-mortar bookstores declined 7% to $7.5 billion in 2012, according to the same study. E-book sales are growing, and in 2012 represented 20% of publisher revenue

3M continues to shake up the library market for eBooks and announced their new Publisher Portal at BookExpo (Businesswire):

3M Cloud Library will debut its new online publisher portal at Book Expo America 2013 (BEA) to be held May 30 - June 1 at the Javits Center in New York City. BEA attendees will be among the first to experience the portal, which allows publishers to receive daily data updates on their eBook content sales.

The project is an outcome of a variety of successful pilot programs 3M Cloud Library has coordinated with several key publishers and libraries that have expressed the need for a more immediate picture into the library eBook market. Publishers will now be granted immediate access to the online portal when they work with 3M Cloud Library. Publishers will only be able to view data on their eBook content - no private or personal data will be shared.
"We know publishers can find great value in the metrics generated through libraries," said Matt Tempelis, global business manager, 3M Cloud Library. "Sharing data with publishing partners not only strengthens relationships, but it also shows the importance of selling eBooks to the library market."
Attendees are encouraged to visit 3M Cloud Library at booth DZ2163 for a demonstration of the online publisher portal. For more information about the 3M Cloud Library eLending system, visit 3M.com/Cloud.

Malcolm Galdwell was mean to the New York Public library.  Surely with funding obliterated for libraries across the country there are better targets. (NY Observer)

Every time I turn around, there’s some new extravagant renovation going on in the main building. Why? In my mind, the New York Public Library should be focused on keeping small libraries open, on its branches all over the city,” Mr. Gladwell reportedly said at a BookExpo America in New York forum. He then let lose the ultimate dis, adding that “luxury condos would look wonderful there. Go back into the business of reaching people who do not have access to books. And that is not on the corner of 42nd and Fifth.”

PW reports on an up beat show:

Megan Sullivan, from Boston’s Harvard Bookstore, said she thought many publishers “have a bigger presence than last year” and that the booths were, overall, bigger. Though some still miss the old weekend schedule—Dave Mallman of Wisconsin’s Books & Co. said he misses the ability to meet with publishers during the week and then attend the show on Saturday and Sunday—it was not an overwhelming complaint.

The weekend, this year, brought more questions about Consumer Day, which is entering its second year. Booksellers, as well as those working at the houses, said they were eager to see how many consumers would actually show up on Saturday, and what kind of consumers they would be. Questions about who the mysterious “Power Readers” are persisted; some wondered aloud if more would-be authors would come to the show on Saturday, eager to pitch ideas to publishers as opposed to pick up books to read.

The Baked Beans Are Off - Ideas on What Scale Means (And reference to Simon & Schuster/Penguin Random House)

One of the themes at BookExpo 2013 is about scale in publishing and how this concept has and is changing within our industry.  I was reminded of this post from July 2010 on that topic:


When I joined Macmillan, Inc in 1989 the company was rounding out the decade nicely having gone from losing over $1mm per week and a share price less than $2 in 1980 to one sold to Robert Maxwell for 19x earnings and $92 per share. Application of economies of scale helped build Macmillan to a $2billion publishing conglomerate where each newly acquired publishing company was just ‘more beans for the baked bean company’ which was how senior executives referred to their “factory acquisition” process. In fact, some of the executives, notably CEO Bill Reilly, had come from industrial manufacturing and had a deep understanding of how to effectively apply scale economies to operations.

All the largest publishing companies were following a similar ‘baked bean’ approach as the industry consolidated: Publishing lists were separated from their original companies and progressively (sometimes immediately) overhead expenses were eliminated as the acquired company was absorbed. At one point, I was tasked with following up on the ROI for a slew of companies acquired over a two year period. This proved difficult because their operations had been so effectively integrated into the parent company that constructing a post-acquisition income statement proved virtually impossible.

Fast forward 20 years and the scale economic model is falling apart for trade publishing. So effective at applying scale to accounting, manufacturing, management, production and other overhead, it is ironic that in the internet world everyone now has access to similar scale benefits. Publishing companies now realize they have achieved scale advantages in the wrong functions. Scale advantage in editorial, marketing, promotion, and content management is almost non-existent to the degree that will ensure competitive advantage, yet these are the functions important to future success. (As an isolated example, I would argue that authonomy.com by Harpercollins represents an attempt to build scale into the editorial process).

We all know seismic change – prevalent everywhere - has to come to the cost structures of publishing companies. Squeezed by downward pricing and potential revenue share models that provide more to authors and contributors, publishers will wonder where the money is going to come from. The scale model that built companies like Macmillan, Inc. is irreparably dead to anyone thinking about the future of publishing. The only way out – and it’s not an easy suggestion – is to recognize that those functions that used to provide scale benefits are no longer doing so and need to be carved out. Some of this has happened in manufacturing where companies like Donnelly and Williams Lea have taken over the manufacturing and production function for companies: Those departments no longer exist at the publisher. Decisions to outsource non-value added functions such as accounting, distribution and fulfillment and information technology must be made as the publisher contemplates their future. Once unencumbered, the real test will be whether publishers can re-work their structures so that they build scale economies in those functions that do provide value: Content acquisition, editorial, marketing & promotion and content licensing and brand building.

There is little evidence that this is happening or that the realization has set in. Instead of seeing a publishing company improve their performance over ten years as Macmillan did in the 1980s, we are likely to see many examples of the exact opposite over the next ten. Will companies rise to the challenge or are they so wedded to the old ‘baked bean’ model that they expect it to go on forever? Clearly, it won’t.

Pearson Reorganizes their Business Operations: Will Ethridge to Leave

Pearson announced a significant change in the way their business is organized and perhaps the most interesting aspect of this reorganization is that the FT Group will be subsumed into their new "Professional"
business unit together with English Language learning and their electronic testing business.  The conclusion could be this is a catch-all for units the new executive management no longer has confidence in.  That speculation could be counter minded given the level of acquisitions and investment the company has recently made in language learning and testing.  Time will tell but it is hard to understand the inclusion of the FT in that collection.

As the following press release notes the changes will be implemented in 2014 so much can change between then and now.

From their press release:

Pearson, the world’s leading learning company, is today announcing a new organization structure and the appointment of a new leadership team. The changes are designed to accelerate Pearson’s push into digital learning, education services and emerging markets, which the company views as significant growth opportunities.

Under the new structure, Pearson will organize around three global lines of business – School, Higher Education and Professional – and three geographic market categories – North America, Growth and Core.

The leaders of these businesses will be:

• School - Doug Kubach
• Higher Education - Tim Bozik
• Professional - John Ridding
• North America - Don Kilburn
• Growth markets - Tamara Minick-Scokalo
• Core markets - Rod Bristow

Global lines of business will have primary responsibility for strategy and product development, while geographies have primary responsibility for customer relationships, sales, marketing and product delivery.

In addition, Genevieve Shore, currently Pearson chief information officer, will take on a new role as chief product and marketing officer.
The changes will take effect on 1 January 2014 and, to provide investors with greater insight into business trends and performance, Pearson intends to report its sales and profits by both lines of business and geography from 2014.
As a result of the new organization structure, Will Ethridge (currently chief executive of Pearson North America) will step down from his role and from the Pearson plc Board on 31 December 2013. He will continue to work for Pearson in an advisory capacity.
Glen Moreno, chairman, said: “North American Education has been a powerhouse for Pearson for many years and Will has been at the heart of its success. He has developed a strong team of executives and ensured they are ready to take on these new responsibilities. We thank him for his significant contribution to Pearson as a leader and board director.”

Ingram VitalSource and Blackboard announce Platform and Content Deal

Last year Blackboard announced several high profile content deals with publishers however this deal with Ingram Vitalsource could be more significant if it encourages faculty to really engage with content creation and aggregation on the Blackboard site.   Question is: Is this an exclusive deal for Ingram?

Ingram and Blackboard announced an integration of the Ingram Vital Source platform onto the Blackboard learning management system. From their press release:

Blackboard Inc. and Vital Source Technologies, Inc., an Ingram Content Group company, have launched pilot programs with a number of colleges and universities to test-drive an integrated offering that makes the VitalSource Bookshelf® platform and its hundreds of thousands of e-Textbooks available directly within Blackboard Learn™, the company's flagship learning management system (LMS).

Indiana University—Fort Wayne, University of Alaska Anchorage, and Fayetteville Technical Community College are among the institutions participating in the field trial. With the integration instructors can preview and select e-textbooks, content and learning objects from the VitalSource Bookshelf platform that students can then access through a single sign-on.

Participants in the field trial will provide ongoing feedback to the companies about their experience to strengthen the offering. Participating instructors have expressed satisfaction with the ability to annotate e-textbooks, link to content from anywhere within a course or assignment and assess how students are progressing through content. Students have been enthusiastic about using e-textbooks on mobile devices through native iOS® and Android™ applications, including deep linking that makes pages and features such as notes, highlights and annotations look the same on e-textbooks as they do in printed textbooks.

"My students read more because with this technology, you can assign the reading, and they'll know that I'm checking closely on whether they've read it or not," said Minnie Wagner, business and healthcare management program chair at Minnesota School of Business-Lakeville. "So it has helped students to be more proactive and make sure that they're prepared for the class."

The integrated solution, expected to be available this summer, would offer two purchase models. Institutions that include textbooks as part of tuition could place e-textbooks directly into Blackboard Learn courses for immediate student access. Alternatively, a student-purchase option would give instructors the opportunity to make e-textbooks available for students to purchase or rent from within their Blackboard Learn course environment.

MediaWeek (Vol 6, No 21) Online College?, Society Publishing, Georgia Tech Online, Copyright Revision + More

Nathan Heller in The New Yorker: Is College moving Online?

When people refer to “higher education” in this country, they are talking about two systems. One is élite. It’s made up of selective schools that people can apply to—schools like Harvard, and also like U.C. Santa Cruz, Northeastern, Penn State, and Kenyon. All these institutions turn most applicants away, and all pursue a common, if vague, notion of what universities are meant to strive for. When colleges appear in movies, they are verdant, tree-draped quadrangles set amid Georgian or Gothic (or Georgian-Gothic) buildings. When brochures from these schools arrive in the mail, they often look the same. Chances are, you’ll find a Byronic young man reading “Cartesian Meditations” on a bench beneath an elm tree, or perhaps his romantic cousin, the New England boy of fall, a tousle-haired chap with a knapsack slung back on one shoulder. He is walking with a lovely, earnest young woman who apparently likes scarves, and probably Shelley. They are smiling. Everyone is smiling. The professors, who are wearing friendly, Rick Moranis-style glasses, smile, though they’re hard at work at a large table with an eager student, sharing a splayed book and gesturing as if weighing two big, wholesome orbs of fruit. Universities are special places, we believe: gardens where chosen people escape their normal lives to cultivate the Life of the Mind.

But that is not the kind of higher education most Americans know. The vast majority of people who get education beyond high school do so at community colleges and other regional and nonselective schools. Most who apply are accepted. The teachers there, not all of whom have doctorates or get research support, may seem restless and harried. Students may, too. Some attend school part time, juggling their academic work with family or full-time jobs, and so the dropout rate, and time-to-degree, runs higher than at élite institutions. Many campuses are funded on fumes, or are on thin ice with accreditation boards; there are few quadrangles involved. The coursework often prepares students for specific professions or required skills. If you want to be trained as a medical assistant, there is a track for that. If you want to learn to operate an infrared spectrometer, there is a course to show you how. This is the populist arm of higher education. It accounts for about eighty per cent of colleges in the United States.

In Scholarly Kitchen Joe Esposito identifies the Inexorable Path of the Professional Society Publisher:

What makes this path inexorable has to do with the structure of the marketplace today. For almost all journals publishers, libraries constitute their single largest source of revenue. Therefore, a publisher must get access to the library budget to thrive or even survive. But increasingly the largest commercial publishers have set up as gatekeepers to those library budgets, a situation that has intensified as more and more purchasing power has moved to the library consortia. When a society publisher decides to move up to stage 6 — that is, by making an arrangement with a large commercial publisher — it can be seen as selling out, but a strategic assessment of the marketplace may see that as buying in.

Georgia Tech announce massive Online/distance learning project (Inside HigherEd)

The Georgia Institute of Technology plans to offer a $7,000 online master’s degree to 10,000 new students over the next three years without hiring much more than a handful of new instructors.

Georgia Tech will work with AT&T and Udacity, the 15-month-old Silicon Valley-based company, to offer a new online master’s degree in computer science to students across the world at a sixth of the price of its current degree. The deal, announced Tuesday, is portrayed as a revolutionary attempt by a respected university, an education technology startup and a major corporate employer to drive down costs and expand higher education capacity.

Georgia Tech expects to hire only eight or so new instructors even as it takes its master's program from 300 students to as many as 10,000 within three years, said Zvi Galil, the dean of computing at Georgia Tech.

The university will rely instead on Udacity staffers, known as “mentors,” to field most questions from students who enroll in the new program. But company and university officials said the new degrees would be entirely comparable to the existing master’s degree in computer science from Georgia Tech, which costs about $40,000 a year for non-Georgia residents.

Some bullet points and not particularly cohesive from the Goldman Sachs business book of the year award (FT):

Victoria Barnsley, chief executive of HarperCollins UK, probably speaks for many publishing executives when she highlights “single platform domination” as “the risk”. “I don’t think it was good for the record industry nor will it be good for publishing,” she says. The conundrum for publishers is what to do about it.

The House Judiciary Committee began hearings on changing copyright law. Don't hold your breath (CJR):

This contentiousness stems from the fact that copyright law, itself, is something other, or more than, dull. As it stands now, it’s intricate, confusing, and — most of the experts who testified yesterday more or less agreed — due for an update. But not quite everyone. “I think the notion in many circles that copyright law has become totally dysfunctional and counter productive is not the way the situation is,” said Jon Baumgarten, who once served as the general counsel to the copyright office.

This is what passed for consensus in this debate. The CPP’s final report, for instance, noted that “various members of the group maintain reservations and even objections to some proposals described as recommendations in this Report.” And so, they wrote, “we do not intend affirmative statements or the use of phrases, such as ‘we recommend’ or ‘we believe,’ to suggest that the group as a whole was uniformly in support of each particular view stated.”

From twitter this week:

Fresh questions for Amazon over pittance it pays in tax Guardian

Flagstaff Arizona 1992

At a sales conference in January 1992 I got to see some of the scenery around Sedona and Flagstaff Arizona.  I've always wanted to go back there.  It's some amazing landscapes.

Skip Prichard Named to Succeed Jay Jordan at OCLC

From their press release:

Mr. Prichard has led multi-national organizations that serve libraries across the full spectrum of library services and content needs. Most recently, he was President and CEO of Ingram Content Group Inc., which provides a broad range of physical and digital services to the book industry. Prior to his service at Ingram, he was President and CEO of ProQuest Information and Learning, a respected global publisher and information provider serving library, education, government and corporate markets with offices around the world.
Mr. Prichard will succeed Jay Jordan, who will retire June 30 after 15 years as OCLC President and CEO. Mr. Prichard will serve as OCLC President-elect, effective June 3, and will officially become President and CEO on July 1.
"Skip Prichard is a proven leader with an outstanding record of accomplishment," said Sandy Yee, Chair, OCLC Board of Trustees, and Dean, Wayne State University Libraries and School of Library and Information Science. "He has guided leading library services organizations through eras of significant change, from print to electronic and from local to global. His experience and commitment to libraries will help us continue our work to move library services and cooperation forward—in the cloud, on mobile devices and through the collaborative work of libraries and partners around the world."
"OCLC has a long tradition of strong leadership and vision, and I consider myself fortunate to have the opportunity to lead the cooperative into what promises to be an exciting and challenging future," said Mr. Prichard. "OCLC and member libraries are using the newest technologies available to move library services to the cloud where they continue to collaboratively build resources and infrastructure to share. I look forward to working with the talented OCLC staff and membership to ensure that we build on that momentum, and provide the resources necessary for libraries and librarians around the world to meet and exceed the increasing expectations of their users."