Tokyo Skyline 1972

I've never been to Tokyo.  I've not had an interest.  It's never been in my plans.  

In an odd way this is a mesmerizing view of a damp Tokyo skyline taken from high up the Keio Plaza Intercontinental.  The damp surfaces add a lot of depth to the image and the mist confines the view so it feels almost intimate.  It's a shame we have as much of the roof and air conditioning unit in the foreground but if it were tighter then we would miss all the intricate pedestrian walkways in the bottom left.

This is a full page spread in my blurb book and works really well.

A Funny Thing Happened on the way to History

It is hard not to find the humor in this announcement from the American Historical Association which in a recent policy statement suggests that universities seek up to a six year embargo on publishing digital dissertations.  Windowing hasn't proven effective in trade publishing and it is just as less likely to work here.  The nub of their argument is that digital content can be so widely distributed in contrast to those pesky paper dissertations or UMI versions, that academics risk harming their opportunities for tenure if they can't get their work published.  There is some logic to the policy in that the society wants to protect scholarship by providing a financial incentive for both the author and publisher but for all practical purposes this is wrong headed.  Having a dissertation widely available in advance of a proposed book, it is argued, would torpedo a potential book deal.

The policy runs counter to the growing calls for more open access which often comes from researchers and academics but not publishers.   It would seem that rather than think of a potential solution that looks forward taking full advantage of current media culture and technology the AHA has chosen the historical approach.  In the process, they have attempted to, at a very late date, turn back the clock on scholarly publishing.

That would then lead me to conclude that any young researcher and/or PhD student would view the association as not one which they would want to actively participate in.  Ever.  And that's history for you.

In their announcement they cut straight to the chase:

The American Historical Association strongly encourages graduate programs and university libraries to adopt a policy that allows the embargoing of completed history PhD dissertations in digital form for as many as six years. Because many universities no longer keep hard copies of dissertations deposited in their libraries, more and more institutions are requiring that all successfully defended dissertations be posted online, so that they are free and accessible to anyone who wants to read them. At the same time, however, an increasing number of university presses are reluctant to offer a publishing contract to newly minted PhDs whose dissertations have been freely available via online sources. Presumably, online readers will become familiar with an author’s particular argument, methodology, and archival sources, and will feel no need to buy the book once it is available. As a result, students who must post their dissertations online immediately after they receive their degree can find themselves at a serious disadvantage in their effort to get their first book published; it is not unusual for an early-career historian to spend five or six years revising a dissertation and preparing the manuscript for submission to a press for consideration. During that period, the scholar typically builds on the raw material presented in the dissertation, refines the argument, and improves the presentation itself. Thus, although there is so close a relationship between the dissertation and the book that presses often consider them competitors, the book is the measure of scholarly competence used by tenure committees.

MediaWeek (Vol 6, No 29): MOOCs again, Dr. Who, Fiction in Business, 1970s NYC, Flipping the class.

The Economist on MOOC's

The industry has similar network economics to Amazon, eBay and Google, says Ms Koller, in that “content producers go to where most consumers are, and consumers go to where the most content is.” Simon Nelson, the chief executive of FutureLearn, disagrees. “Anyone who thinks the rules of engagement have already been written by the existing players is massively underestimating the potential of the technology,” he says.
Certainly, there is plenty of experimentation with business models taking place. The MOOCs themselves may be free, but those behind them think there will be plenty of revenue opportunities. Coursera has started charging to provide certificates for those who complete its courses and want proof, perhaps for a future employer. It is also starting to license course materials to universities that want to beef up their existing offering. However, it has abandoned for now attempts to help firms recruit employees from among Coursera’s students, because catering to the different needs of each employer was “not a scalable model”, says Ms Koller.

That big MOOC initiative announced by San Jose State six months ago is on-hold (IHeD)

San Jose State Provost Ellen Junn said disappointing student performance will prompt the university to stop offering online classes with Udacity this fall as part of a "short breather."  Junn wants to spend the fall going over the results and talking with faculty members about the university’s online experimentation, which extends beyond the Udacity partnership and has proved somewhat controversial. She said the plan is to start working with Udacity again in spring 2014.  “I think the commitment is to look at the data carefully and make adjustments,” Junn said in a telephone interview Wednesday.  Preliminary findings from the spring semester suggest students in the online Udacity courses, which were developed jointly with San Jose State faculty, do not fare as well as students who attended normal classes -- though Junn cautioned against reading too much into the comparison, given the significant differences in the student populations.

The Daleks and Dr. Who make a show at Comic-Com (Guardian)

The big news outside the Comic-Con panel was confirmation that the Daleks are coming back for the 50th anniversary. Said Moffat: "The Doctor once said that you can judge a man by the quality of his enemies, so it's fitting that for this very special episode, he should be facing the greatest enemies of all." (A biscuit for anyone who got that reference to Remembrance of the Daleks.) But from the publicity stills we've already seen, the Daleks in question are the ones from the Russell T Davies era.

Photos of 1970s NYC (Atlantic)

And so closes Maxwells in Hoboken (New York)

“Maxwell’s felt like a Portkey in Harry Potter,” says ex–Hoboken resident Chris Stamey, one of the many musicians  mourning the great venue’s passing. In the pantheon of important New York City rock clubs—Max’s Kansas City, CBGB, the Bottom Line—Maxwell’s ranks as high as any, even though its legal address is New Jersey. Hoboken was still known mostly as Frank Sinatra’s birthplace when Steve Fallon began booking unknown bands in his tiny, plain bar 35 years ago. On July 31, after countless nights of weird music from acts that went on to fame (Nirvana, R.E.M.) or didn’t (the New Marines drew only one paying customer), the first couple of bands to perform at Maxwell’s—the Bongos and a—will play a final show, and the club will close.

Flipping the class room for ancient Rome (Chronicle)

For me it all started last August, when I naïvely assumed that the students would be delighted to listen to short lectures at their own pace and away from an uncomfortable and noisy auditorium.  The problem, I soon discovered, was that nobody told the students they were supposed to hate lectures. They were genuinely disoriented when I didn't spend class time lecturing. Only about 25 percent of them watched the prerecorded lectures before class. As a result, class discussion of content became an exercise in futility. Their comments at the end of the semester made it clear that about two-thirds of them preferred a typical lecture class.  I'm pretty sure my students would have been no more interested in watching a Superprofessor lecture on Ancient Rome than they were in watching me—it wasn't me or my style (as they clearly said in the surveys); it was the extra work required of them.

Assigning fiction reading in business school (HBR)

My view of what makes literature so valuable in the classroom is that it helps students really get inside individuals who are making decisions. It helps them see things as these people in the stories actually see them. And that's because the inner life of the characters is imagined and described, in many cases, by brilliant writers whose sense of how people really think and how they really work have been tested by time over decades or even centuries.  We have students, as you know, from a wide variety of backgrounds. And many of them take this course because they've got their own sort of personal interests and concerns-- things they're really trying to think through. And what they often really learn is not sort of what the author put in there, but they learn what other students see and understand and are troubled by or like in these stories.  So it's a very complex form of learning, but it's very different from the old instructional model. In many ways, it's like the case method approach to learning.

Jefferson Memorial

From this morning.  We hold these truths, etc, etc.

MediaWeek (Vol 6, No 28): Turow and Authors, Library Incinerator, Open Access, Apple Decision, Responsive FT, Linguistic Rowling + More

Gene Schwartz writing in Book Business magazine about Scott Turow's advocacy for the lowly author (Book Business):

Copyright protection has now become a two edged sword. Not requiring registration, ownership is vested from the moment of the first scribble. Large corporate copyright holders who can afford policing these provisions, are now benefiting a few authors at the expense of the many, by constraining the ability of journeymen and aspiring creators to excerpt and cite from other works without going through daunting procedural barriers, at the risk otherwise of what could be draconian punitive penalties (the threat of up to $150,000 in statutory damages) and outsized processing and permissions costs.

So, Turow’s main point has traction with me, that our institutions work against the author’s interests: legal decisions such as the first sale doctrine applied by the Supreme Court to the recent Wiley case – albeit confirming what has been going on for over fifty years; regulatory interventions such as that of the Justice department upsetting a settlement supervised by the courts, and agreed to by the Authors Guild, major publishers and Google.

Turow also made a point that with Amazon’s patent for the resale of e-Books, non-drm protected works would need very few original sales in order to create an unlimited copyable inventory for the resale market. This forecast may seem a bit extreme, but I think it suggests is that Scott Turow’s lament is not without foundation. Unless the industry and the legal system is prepared to re-visit how creators can extract a legally and technologically enforced portion of the economic value of their intellectual output, very little economic value will remain after first publication.

That big train crash in Canada destroyed a library (Metro)

The fatal train disaster that obliterated much of Lac-Megantic also destroyed the local library, including irreplaceable items outlining the history of the town and the surrounding area. Nothing is left of the building — which bordered the railway tracks — except ash. Including books, some 60,000 items are gone. The library was next door to the Musi-Cafe, where dozens of patrons and employees died after the July 6 tragedy. The archives were personal — more than two dozen families had donated various documents, items and heirlooms since the library opened in 1991. Diane Roy, chairwoman of the library’s board of directors, said the archives included letters penned by her uncle dating back to the Second World War. Other items included some of the oldest photos in existence of Lac-Megantic as well as the negatives. Also gone forever are a few hundred works of art — reproductions, originals and some that were being housed on loan.

Michael Clark writing in Scholarly Kitchen on the Apple court decision (ScholarKitchen):

What this means is that anyone wishing to enter the ebook distribution space will face an ebook pricing war against an entrenched competitor that is willing to sell at a loss, propped up by a seemingly limitless supply of cash from investors who do not seem to care about margins so long as market share is growing.

The result is likely to be an ebook market (at least in trade publishing – professional and scholarly publishing is a different matter) with little innovation – why would anyone bother? Not only must a new entrant invest in new technology, negotiate complex, multi-national rights agreements with publishers, and market their new product to consumers, they must then slog it out in a price war. And while a very few entrants such as Kobo are trying, one of the few companies with the cash hoard to withstand Amazon is Apple (Google is another and Microsoft, reported to be flirting with the idea of purchasing Barnes & Noble’s Nook business, is a third), though a price war goes against their DNA and it is not clear that ebooks are important enough to them to be worth the cost.

In case anyone thinks that this is overstating the bleakness of the situation, I direct you to the recent departure of Barnes & Noble’s CEO, William Lynch, a former Palm executive who was brought into the company to grow their reader business, in what Reuters called “an acknowledgement that its digital division Nook has failed to compete successfully in the e-reader and tablet markets“. Furthermore, after reporting that Nook sales dropped 34% last quarter, the company announced it was pulling the plug on its hardware division.

Interesting business case review of the Financial Times responsive design approach (SmashingMag):

In order to stay competitive, a digital product needs to evolve, and as developers, we need to be prepared for this. When the request for a redesign landed at the Financial Times, we already had a fast, popular, feature-rich application, but it wasn’t built for change. At the time, we were able to implement small changes to features, but implementing anything big became a slow process and often introduced a lot of unrelated regressions.

Our application was drastically reworked to make the new requirements possible, and this took a lot of time. Having made this investment, we hope the new application not only meets (and even exceeds) the standard of the first product, but gives us a platform on which we can develop faster and more flexibly in the future.

Why Open Access makes no sense (Guardian):

There can be no such thing as free access to academic research. Academic research is not something to which free access is possible. Academic research is a process – a process which universities teach (at a fee). Like it or not, the primary beneficiary of research funding is the researcher, who has managed to deepen their understanding by working on a particular dataset. The publications that result from the research project are only trivially a result of the research funding, they come out of a whole history of human interactions that are not for sale. Not even in a slave society.

For those who wish to have access, there is an admission cost: they must invest in the education prerequisite to enable them to understand the language used. Current publication practices work to ensure that the entry threshold for understanding my language is as low as possible. Open access will raise that entry threshold. Much more will be downloaded; much less will be understood.

Nerd Alert: Heard on the Radio The linguistics professor who unmasked Rowling (BBC):

Prof Peter Millican of Hertford College, University of Oxford, helped unmask JK Rowling as debut crime writer Robert Galbraith. An expert in computer linguistics, the professor developed software to analyse and compare texts. He analysed The Cuckoo's Calling against Rowling's other novels, The Casual Vacancy and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. He spoke to BBC News about how he arrived at his conclusions. "I was given some text by The Sunday Times - I had two known texts by JK Rowling, two by Ruth Rendell, two by PD James and two by Val McDermid. "What I did was clean up the texts, put them into my software and do a battery of tests to see what similarities there were.

From twitter:
Amazon shares hit another record on strong sales data Reuters
Blackboard Announces New MOOC Platform,By Jeffrey R. Young /The Chronicle Chronicle
Vital Source Launches E-Textbook Building Block for Blackboard Learn Platform PRWeb
Copyright actually keeps many books off the market, study says Fortune

Bali Wood Carving Craftsman 1971

These guys could whip up a nice piece of wood carving in less than a day and here, he's finishing up something that's been sitting in PND Abbey for forty years now.   It's days may be numbered as the PND aristocracy is forced to downsize due to events entirely within their control and it could get tossed in the skip.

Justice Department declares emphatic victory in price fixing case against Apple eBookstore

In a decision which will undoubtedly be appealed but which opens the possibility of hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties and restitution, Apple was found guilty of conspiring with publishers to raise eBook prices.  Personnally, I thought Apple had a good case but Judge Denise Cote noted that Apple facilitated the conspiracy, took advantage of the publishers paranoia regarding Amazon and also leveraged the impending launch of the iPad that caused higher pricing for eBook consumers.

For the Department of Justice - them of the spider-web of telephone conversations - this was an opportunity for a victory lap and some degree of hyperbole (DoJ)

“This result is a victory for millions of consumers who choose to read books electronically.  After carefully weighing the evidence, the court agreed with the Justice Department and 33 state attorneys general that executives at the highest levels of Apple orchestrated a conspiracy with five major publishers – Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin and Simon & Schuster – to raise e-book prices.  Through today’s court decision and previous settlements with five major publishers, consumers are again benefitting from retail price competition and paying less for their e-books.

 

“As the department’s litigation team established at trial, Apple executives hoped to ensure that its e-book business would be free from retail price competition, causing consumers throughout the country to pay higher prices for many e-books.  The evidence showed that the prices of the conspiring publishers’ e-books increased by an average of 18 percent as a result of the collusive effort led by Apple.

  “Companies cannot ignore the antitrust laws when they believe it is in their economic self-interest to do so. This decision by the court is a critical step in undoing the harm caused by Apple’s illegal actions. 

“I am proud of the outstanding work done by the trial team.  The Antitrust Division will continue to vigorously protect competition and enforce the antitrust laws in this important business, and in other industries that affect the everyday lives of consumers.”

Other reports:

Reuters
Telegraph
WSJ - No comment from Amazon.

MediaWeek (Vol 6, No 27): Childrens Books, Kodak Moment, Education Technology, Cengage Pricing +More

The Atlantic magazine goes along to the New York Public library to review an exhibit there on Children's books (Atlantic):

The exhibit also reveals that the books that matter to children are not always the same as the ones adults think should matter. Marcus cites Edward Stratemeyer, the turn-of-the-century author and entrepreneur who launched The Bobbsey Twins, The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and other commercial favorites. An adulatory 1934 profile in Fortune magazine said that children's book publishing had been a sleepy backwater until Stratemeyer proved it could be big business, "and he did so by publishing book after book that the critics of the day thought mediocre but that children loved," Marcus says. Likewise, The Poky Little Puppy, which is on view, was one of the original 1942 Little Golden Books that the librarians of the day thought were not artistic enough to be worthy of children—but that kids loved anyway.

The genre has come a long way over four centuries. "Early children's books tended to be solemn and purposeful," Marcus says. "They were created to teach a moral lesson of some kind and they spoke to the child from on high. This approach worked well enough for groups with a fundamentalist view of life—the Puritans for instance—and with certain basic lessons that needed to be communicated as early as possible. But other kinds of books for children began to appear by the mid-1700s. Under the influence of John Locke and his observations about how children learn and grow, this new kind of children's book showed a greater awareness of children's interests and capabilities."

Another look at the fall of Kodak from Kenny Suleimanagich reporting in Medium:

Analysts have pointed to a number of factors in Kodak’s fall, from general mismanagement to poor financial decisions. Its divestiture of Eastman Chemical stripped billions in cash flow that might have propped it up as it struggled to make the transition to digital. Others point to antitrust suits that hampered the company for decades and opened the door to rivals. Some of those, notably Fuji, were able to manage the analog-to-digital conversion successfully.

To the people in the trenches, like DeMoulin, the failure always comes back to the same key error: Kodak, they say, suffered from a fundamental breakdown between, on one side the engineers and tinkerers — many of whom saw the digital future clearly and fought to bring it forth — and on the other the top management, whose interest remained fixed on molecules and the miracle of near-monopoly profits.

DeMoulin told me about watching a team in 1980 demonstrate a scanner-printer that converted film images to digital. “That’s when I thought: This digital thing is going to happen,” he recalls. His place at the helm of the professional-imaging division allowed him to autonomously invest in developing a digital still camera, and he says he pursued that vision, despite lukewarm support from the company.

The Economist takes a look at how technology is disrupting education (Economist):

The main reason for optimism, though, is the evidence coming in from classrooms. Adoption of education technology in America’s state-funded schools was given a boost by a requirement to measure pupil performance in the No Child Left Behind Act, signed by George W. Bush. Online learning was first picked up in some surprising places, including rural Idaho, where schools were looking for ways to expand the limited curriculums they were able to offer. Barack Obama’s Race to the Top initiative gave a further shove, making billions of dollars available to states willing to innovate. At the beginning of June his administration announced a plan to give 99% of America’s students access to high-speed internet within five years.

Those schools that have pressed on have done rather well. Rocketship, a chain of seven charter schools in San Jose, California, blends traditional teaching with at least an hour a day of individualised online instruction in mathematics, literacy and comprehension. Its low-income pupils outperform those living in the wealthiest districts in the state. Over on the east coast Mark Edwards, superintendent of the Mooresville graded school district in North Carolina, introduced personalised learning on laptops for all pupils aged ten and over in 2009. His district is now one of the state’s leading performers, despite being close to the bottom in funding per pupil. Between 2009 and 2012 the share of its pupils considered proficient in maths, science and reading rose from 73% to 88%.

The Chronicle of Higher Education covers the Cengage bankruptcy but in the comments was this from "Fyzprof" on textbook pricing (Chron):

See the article by Peter Roll, "Introductory Physics Textbooks", Physics Today, Jan. 1968, p. 63. The article lists 50 texts, ranging in price from $5.50 to $14.75 in 1968. This translates to roughly $36 - $100 in 2013 dollars, according to an online calculator that uses the Consumer Price Index. Since this is the high end of the "trade book" range, I would consider it reasonable for textbooks.

In the 1960's, science and math books tended to be more expensive than texts in other fields due to the complex manual typesetting of equations and diagrams. Everything is electronic today, so I don't know why the prices are still so high. A Cengage text for a one-semester advanced course (3rd ed.) that I thought was expensive at $16.50 in the 1970's now retails for $347.95 (7th ed.). Yes, three hundred(!) and fifty bucks. The publisher's rental fee for the fall 2013 semester is $120. A Wiley text that cost $13.50 in 1968 (1st ed.) now costs $247.99 (10th ed.) for the regular version and $257.99 for the extended version. The electronic version is $89 and requires that the student download and install proprietary software. The electronic version may or may not stay active throughout the entire multi-semester course sequence. It is frustrating to have proper texts available, but not be able to use them.

The publisher and bookstore reps are always extremely helpful and have been very good to me through the years. I appreciate that very much. Unfortunately, the astronomical prices effectively sabotage my courses. I recently had a class revolt on the first day of the term because of a $180 paperback for the one-semester course. I used that book for over ten years, but I can't use it any more. Its current list price is $271.95, and even the previous edition, used, is well north of $150. Students generally prefer paper books, which are easier to use and sell. Many electronic versions are non-transferable and expire within a year. Students who might otherwise keep their books for future reference cannot do so. They find it necessary to sell their books from one semester in order to raise the money for next semester's books. To save money, students order their books online. The term is half over by the time the books arrive. In the meantime, the students fall behind and make excuses for not completing their assignments. Even if students don't revolt openly, the resentment is there and that makes it difficult to establish a good rapport with the class. This whole textbook situation just doesn't make for a good learning experience.

From twitter this week:
'Publishing has gone mad': literary world rocked by moves at HarperCollins and Penguin Standard
The Guardian Literary clock - add a quote Guardian
Newsstand in Brooklyn subway station becomes pop-up shop for books and zines PW
Russell Brand: what I made of Morning Joe and Question Time Guardian

And in sports, how great was Andy Murray? (Guardian)

Cengage Declares Bankruptcy as Expected

Cengage has submitted a per-arranged bankruptcy filing which will wipe $4Billion in debt off its balance sheet and in the process enable them to "better position the company for long term growth" according to their press release.  The wipe-out leaves the company with approximately $1.8Billion in debt but it will be the crippling debt payments, loan requirements and covenants that will do most to free up the company to do what the private equity investors said they would do in the first place which is to push the company into producing more digital and on-line products.

The company has been aggressively re-populating its' executive suite and under Michael Hansen who joined as CEO from Elsevier last year, the company now has an almost entirely new executive management team.  It would be expected that this new team will have more flexibility in developing new products and expanding their Cengage MindTap (which still sounds like a medical procedure) products.  When the original Apax led private equity deal was done, there were promises made that Cengage would begin to haul back the advantages that Pearson and McGrawHill had built up in their respective investments in digital learning; however, reality bites, and the debt coupled with a fast slow down in the education market conspired against them.  It is likely that insiders at the company knew this day was inevitable at least two or three years ago as the market slowed and their cash flow became less buoyant.  That's only to imply that the market did not grow sufficiently to match their projections and allow them space to grow the business.

Perhaps this is finally the end of stupid publisher ticks with debt.

Here is the Cengage press release and the text is below:

Stamford, CT – July 2, 2013 – Cengage Learning, Inc., a leading educational content, software and services company for the academic, professional and library markets worldwide, announced today an agreement with certain of its lenders to restructure its balance sheet and significantly reduce its approximately $5.8 billion of outstanding debt to better position the Company for long‐term growth and profitability. In order to implement the financial restructuring, Cengage Learning and all of its domestic wholly‐owned subsidiaries have filed voluntary petitions for reorganization under Chapter 11 of the Bankruptcy Code in the Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of New York.

In conjunction with the Chapter 11 filing, Cengage Learning entered into a restructuring support agreement with an ad hoc committee of first lien lenders who hold approximately $2 billion of the Company’s first lien debt. In this agreement, the lenders committed to support a restructuring transaction that will eliminate more than $4 billion in debt from Cengage Learning’s balance sheet and position the Company to implement management’s strategic business plan.

Cengage Learning maintains substantial cash balances and expects to generate positive cash flow, and therefore does not need nor intend to obtain debtor‐in‐possession (DIP) financing. In addition, the Company has reached an agreement with its secured lenders that permits it to continue to use cash flow from operations to continue to fund the business and meet obligations in the normal course during the restructuring process.

Michael Hansen, Chief Executive Officer of Cengage Learning, said, “The decisive actions we are taking today will reduce our debt and improve our capital structure to support our long‐term business strategy of transitioning from traditional print models to digital educational and research materials. Cengage Learning began an operational transformation six months ago under the leadership of our new senior management team, which is executing bold plans to enhance our customer relationships and introduce innovative digital and print products and solutions to meet our customers’ evolving needs.

“A more appropriately‐sized capital structure, along with our established product lines, leading market positions and strong customer relationships, will position us well to accelerate our growth and take advantage of business opportunities in the education and research space. We are grateful for the support of our key financial stakeholders for our business plan and restructuring. We will continue normal business operations, with no expected disruptions to our relationships with our employees, customers, business partners, or vendors. Our customers can be confident that they will continue to receive the same high quality content, products and industry leading services and support they are accustomed to without interruption,” concluded Mr. Hansen.

Cengage Learning plans to make timely payment to vendors for goods and services provided to the Company during its restructuring in the normal course of business. It is anticipated that employees will continue to receive their usual pay and health and welfare benefits.

Cengage Learning has filed customary “First Day Motions” with the Bankruptcy Court, which, if granted, will help ensure a smooth transition to Chapter 11 without business disruption and will minimize impact on its employees, customers, authors, content providers, business partners, vendors and suppliers. The motions are expected to be addressed promptly by the Court. Cengage Learning plans to make timely payment to vendors for goods and services provided to the Company during its restructuring in the normal course of business. The Company fully anticipates that employees will continue to receive their usual pay and health and welfare benefits and is confident that the Court will approve its request to do so.

Fair Use Google?

Judge Denny Chin doesn't move so fast. His current colleagues on the second circuit, of which one is considered a fair use scholar, may have forced him to push the Google Books case a long a little quicker than he has in the past.

As you may have heard by now, the second circuit has determined that it was premature of Judge Chin (now a colleague) to confirm class status to the case The Author's Guild had brought against Google as a result of their book scanning program. This is clearly Google's victory for several reasons. Firstly, they will get to argue the fair use case which - aside from settling - is what they've always wanted to do and where they expect an outright win. Second, the Author's Guild now has far less expectation for a large pay out but probably crippling legal expenses should they continue.

Copy of the Second Circuit decision

Putting aside the merits of Google’s claim that plaintiffs are not representative of the certified class
—  an argument which, in our view, may carry some force — we believe that the resolution of Google’s fair use defense in the first instance will necessarily inform and perhaps moot our analysis of many class certification issues, including those regarding the commonality of plaintiffs’ injuries, the typicality of their claims, and the predominance of common questions of law or fact, (denying plaintiffs’ request for class certification “because of the fact-specific inquiries the court would have to
evaluate to address [defendants’] affirmative defenses [including fair use of trademarks]”); 

....
Moreover, we are persuaded that holding the issue of class certification in abeyance until Google’s fair use defense has been resolved will not prejudice the interests of either party during the projected proceedings before the District Court following remand. Accordingly, we vacate the District Court’s order of June 11, 2012 certifying plaintiffs’ proposed class, and we remand the cause to the District Court, for consideration of the fair use issues

Michael Boni, the lead lawyer for The Authors Guild was quoted by Reuters as saying they are going to litigate fair use and 'that is the shooting match'.  Good luck with that.

In March 2011, Judge Chin dismissed a proposed settlement between publishers, authors and Google which was valued at $125mm saying it raised (or didn't address) some important copyright issues and questions.

So, this decision bounces the adjudication back to the district court so they can address the fair use issue and Judge Chin who currently sits on the second circuit but held on to this case when he moved up.  Will he continue to hold on to the case or will be finally decide to hand it over?

MediaWeek (Vol 6, No 26) Digg Reader, Quantified Self, Chicago Public Maker Fair, Music Data Miners + More

Developing the Digg Reader replacement for Google Reader (Wired)

McLaughlin saw a blog post in the Fall of 2012 speculating that Google Reader, choked of resources, was shutting down. He sent a teasing note to a friend at Google offering to “take it off their hands.” To his surprise, he got a serious reply. Google, his friend replied, had concluded that it couldn’t sell the name, user data, or code base (which would only run on their servers) and so there was nothing to actually buy.

The following February, McLaughlin, now full-time at Digg, bumped into this same pal at a TED conference. The friend warned him to act fast if he really did want to develop a Reader. “He said ‘I’m not telling you anything, but we’re not going to keep this thing around forever and maybe you want to have something ready by the end of the year.”

But instead of year’s end Google announced plans to shutter Google Reader on July 1. That same night, Digg put up a blog post announcing that it was going to build a replacement. The Internet went crazy.

The idea of Digg building a Reader replacement just resonated. The revamped Digg.com was already popular, especially in news and developer circles. It had a reputation for scrumptious headlines and kickers, courtesy of editorial director David Weiner, a HuffPo alum. Its tech team, led by CTO Michael Young had already shown serious backend chops, which meant people didn’t doubt its ability to pull off building a reader. The same minimalist sensibility that design director Justin Van Slembrouck had given the front page of Digg would translate well to the new project, and, hell: Its GM Jake Levine might even be able to figure out a way to monetize it in ways Google never had.

I like the idea of selling my 'quantified self' rather than allow just about anyone to come and take it. There will be a market in personal information. You watch. (Wired)

The much-publicized Scanadu Scout, which is slated to ship in the first quarter of 2014, is the result of his last two years of work. The puck-like device is a sleek vital-signs recorder – tracking everything from blood pressure, body temperature and heart rhythm via myriad sensors. The gizmo then beams your vital signs to an app loaded on your phone or tablet, where it’s yours to keep forever. De Brouwer designed the Scanadu Scout to be a DIY doctor’s office, minus the frustration, endless waiting, and lack of empowerment that’s often associated with the health care system.

Wired sat down with De Brouwer in our offices in San Francisco to discuss what it’s been like to delve into the health care space and how the Quantified Self movement will change medicine forever.

Chicago Public library is going all innovative (Press Release)

The Chicago Public Library is opening the CPL Innovation Lab at the Harold Washington Library Center. Already used by a variety of industries from retail to banking to universities, innovation labs offer organizations a place to test new ideas for services, programs and products. The third floor space at the Chicago Public Library will allow CPL to quickly experiment with new ideas and approaches in order to be more customer focused and able to adapt to the community’s changing needs.

The first innovation experiment in the space is the Maker Lab, part of the growing movement of hands-on, collaborative learning environments in which people come together to share knowledge and resources to design, create and build items. CPL is the first large urban library to experiment with a maker space. Made possible with a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to the Chicago Public Library Foundation, the Maker Lab will be open to the public from July 8 through December 31, 2013. While a number of maker spaces exist in Chicago, this will be the first free maker space open to the public.

Created in partnership with the Museum of Science and Industry, the Library’s Maker Lab offers the public an introduction to technology and equipment which are enabling new forms of personal manufacturing and business opportunities. After the six month run, the Library will evaluate the project to determine the fit with the Library’s mission and the ability to bring the project, or elements of it, to a wider audience in the neighborhood branches.

The Lab will offer access to a variety of software such as Trimble Sketchup, Inkscape, Meshlab, Makercam and equipment including three 3D Printers, two laser cutters, as well as a milling machine and vinyl cutter.

In addition to Open Lab hours during which patrons can work with staff members to master new software and create personal projects, a variety of programs and workshops will be offered throughout the seven day schedule of the Maker Lab. Family workshops will be offered every Sunday afternoon to foster invention, creation and exploration of STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Math), the focus of this year’s Summer Learning Challenge.

Cengage continue 'constructive discussions' about their financial future (press release):

Cengage Learning continues to be in constructive discussions with its key financial stakeholders about a comprehensive financial restructuring that would strengthen the Company’s balance sheet and position Cengage for longterm growth and success. Although Cengage Learning has substantial cash balances and continues to generate positive cash flow, it has elected to take advantage of grace periods and not make certain debt payments as these discussions continue. Our goal is to undertake a financial restructuring that will put Cengage Learning on a stronger financial footing and allow us to support our strategic growth plans and ongoing digital transformation.

Musicians do data mining (Economist)

It helps that Ms Keating performs alone, which cuts down costs. She has no band, no manager, and no entourage on the payroll. Instead she tends to tour with her son, her husband and a nanny; sometimes there is someone to sell merchandise. But much of her success can be attributed to her skills as a data miner (alongside her cello-playing). By digging through the analytics on her various social networks, she determines where her fans are and what songs they like. A music-sharing site like SoundCloud allows Ms Keating to see which countries yield the most clicks. SoundCloud also lets users leave comments on songs, so musicians can determine fan preferences and perhaps alter their set lists accordingly.

From the twitter;
Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life – review Guardian
Does Jane Austen deserve a place on our £10 notes? Guardian Mr Darcy - man with a fortune
Jennifer Lopez sparks controversy with show for Turkmenistan president Guardian  Jenny from the dictatorship
Russell Brand: what I made of Morning Joe and Question Time Guardian
Barnes & Noble Throws in Towel on Tablets. NYT 

Kabul Market 1973

I've noted before the PND family visited Afghanistan and Pakistan in the mid-1970s and this image is from Kabul.  My recollections are very hazy about this trip and most of my memories had been forgotten until I found these slides in the family archive.  Along this road were many small stores and shops many of which were selling carpets.  I recall that the merchants would place new carpets on the sidewalks to wear them in and they then washed and draped them over the wall to dry them.  I've always thought that odd but then I am sure they know what they were doing.  I hope the same is true of that guy on the roof.

Amazon's Fan Fiction Play

From the Hardy Boys to Mad Men, fan fiction may have been the growth market within the publishing industry that no one knows about.  Fans are by nature the most ardent supporters of character narratives whether they be text or image based and some fairly large online communities have developed around specific shows, characters and franchises.  Over the years, traditional print publishers have dabbled in the market and video and television have accommodated fan fiction into some of their offerings but today's announcement from Amazon is a new twist (I think).

Amazon has now launch their fan fiction site in the Kindle store.  Amazon doesn't own any content but they've circumvented this issue by establishing licensing agreements with content owners so that fans can publish their fiction within an established "world".  It is a really interesting model and given the extent of the Amazon reach one could assume revenue from these fan "worlds" may generate impressive 'found cash'.

More from the Amazon press release:

Kindle Worlds is a new publishing model that allows any writer to publish authorized stories inspired by popular Worlds and make them available for readers to purchase in the Kindle Store, and earn up to a 35% royalty while doing so. Kindle Worlds stories will typically be priced between $0.99 and $3.99 and will be exclusive to Kindle. To learn more and get started writing, visit kindleworlds.amazon.com.
Here’s what authors and licensors are saying about Kindle Worlds:

• “It’s actually a gift to be able to take someone else’s creation and see whether you can take it in a new direction. Watch every show; read every comic book. Honor the canon and honor the fans. There is a reason these stories have become so popular. And don’t feel restricted by the universe that has already been created. It reminds me a bit of writing a haiku or a sonnet. There are rules that must be followed, but within those rules, you can go anywhere. Your imagination is the only limit.” —Carolyn Nash, writer in Archer & Armstrong
• “I believe Kindle Worlds has the potential to increase writership in much the same way the introduction of the Kindle expanded readership. I am thrilled for the Silo Saga to be a part of this program. It’s a natural fit because for the past year, talented authors have been exploring Silos of their own creation, and I look forward to reading more and to crafting some Worlds stories of my own.” —Hugh Howey, World Licensor for the Silo Saga
• “I was intrigued by the opportunity to create something that absolutely had to fall inside a canon that someone else came up with. In one way, it was very freeing to do so. Because the universe itself exists, with all the richness of an already established background and history, I could get right into the meat of the story without having to explain everything to the readers. I did try to make it understandable and enjoyable to a newcomer to the world, however. But there’s a lot I worked to add that will hopefully tickle the fancy of the fans.” —L.J. McDonald, writer in The Vampire Diaries
• “It was great fun to play ‘What if?’ and come up with scenarios that had ties to things that have happened on Vampire Diaries but which took things in a different direction or introduced new characters that could fit into the world of Mystic Falls. There’s probably not a writer fangirl alive who hasn’t fantasized about being able to write at least one episode of her favorite show, and I’m no different. While these stories aren’t show episodes, it’s still pretty darn cool to be able to write them with the idea of fellow fans reading them.” —Trish Milburn, writer in The Vampire Diaries

The Kindle Worlds Store is now open with over 50 commissioned stories including:

• “Pretty Little Liars: Stained” by Barbra Annino
• “The Vampire Diaries: The Arrival” by Lauren Barnholdt & Aaron Gorvine
• “Shadowman: Salvation Sally” by Tom King
• “The Foreworld Saga: The Qian” by Aric Davis
• “X-O Manowar: Noughts and Crosses” by Stuart Moore

I expect publishers and other content producers will pay close attention to this experiment.  Licensing has always been a part of many new title, tv or movie marketing and promotion campaigns and I could see this opportunity becoming very important within product development at many content companies.

Collaboration: McGrawHill and the IET in Publishing Partnership

Interesting bit of news came my way this week when I read that McGraw-Hill Professional had entered into a publishing partnership with The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET).  No doubt you'll have heard of McGraw-Hill but the IET is a member organization with more than 150,000 members located in over 120 countries.  According to the terms of the agreement, the two companies will partner to create engineering content for professionals and students covering every aspect of electrical and electronic engineering.   Content created in this partnership will be available on McGraw-Hill's AccessEngineering platform although there is no word whether the content will also be available on the IET content platform.  From their press release:

"We are very pleased to partner with The IET. This new agreement fits perfectly with our publishing strategy, which is designed to foster technological innovation. It is the next step in growing McGraw-Hill Professional's more than 100 year relationship with the international engineering community," said Steve Chapman, Publisher of Science & Technology at McGraw-Hill Professional.

Daniel Smith, IET's Head of Academic Publishing, said: "We are always looking for opportunities to extend our reach into the engineering community and are delighted to be partnering with McGraw-Hill Professional to develop new content to complement our ongoing publishing program in this area. Developing quality engineering content which accelerates both research and innovation is a major pillar of the IET's knowledge strategy, helping to bring essential engineering intelligence to a wider audience."

As the press release makes clear, this deal looks like a brand extension deal for the IET where McGraw-Hill will be overseeing the publishing services for all the print and electronic titles and will benefit from the strong brand affiliation that IET carries with engineering professionals.  Naturally, IET will benefit from the broader exposure that working with MGH Professional will bring them particularly into the traditional global retail channels that perhaps IET may not have ready access to.  Making IET branded content available on a wider basis looks like a smart play for this organization.

MediaWeek (Vol 6, No 25): A great presentation, What does social mean for Journalism? + More

Chris Anderson the curator of the TED talks writes about killer presentations (HBR):

We all know that humans are wired to listen to stories, and metaphors abound for the narrative structures that work best to engage people. When I think about compelling presentations, I think about taking an audience on a journey. A successful talk is a little miracle—people see the world differently afterward.
If you frame the talk as a journey, the biggest decisions are figuring out where to start and where to end. To find the right place to start, consider what people in the audience already know about your subject—and how much they care about it. If you assume they have more knowledge or interest than they do, or if you start using jargon or get too technical, you’ll lose them. The most engaging speakers do a superb job of very quickly introducing the topic, explaining why they care so deeply about it, and convincing the audience members that they should, too.

From the Columbia Journalism Review: Streams of Consciousness:  Millennials expect a steady diet of quick-hit, social-media-mediated bits and bytes. What does that mean for journalism?

However, studies show that several emerging shifts—from print and broadcast television to digital news, from computers to mobile devices, and from homepage browsing to social-media filtration—are all widespread among millennials.
How does it change the value of journalism to strip away the context that a credible publication provides? A reader who comes through a social-media side door is given no sense of a story’s relative importance. A blog post on the latest fad diet that would never have made it onto the front page, or even into print at all, can go viral and attract far more readers than the latest news from Syria. Readers who no longer page through a newspaper or sit through the evening news are bound to miss some information they might not click on but could benefit from knowing nonetheless.
To get a sense of these evolving patterns of news consumption, and their implications, I interviewed some two dozen young journalists (mostly editors of new digital publications), as well as social-media directors, digital-media executives, academics, and researchers.
I found four overlapping, and mutually reinforcing, trends:

• Proliferation of news sources, formats, and new technologies for media consumption
• Participation by consumers in the dissemination and creation of news, through social-media sharing, commenting, blogging, and the posting online of photos, audio, and video
• Personalization of one’s streams of news via email, mobile apps, and social media
• Source promiscuity Rather than having strong relationships with a handful of media brands, young people graze among a vast array of news outlets.

Both of the above are long so I will leave it at that for this week.

From twitter this week:
News: Katie Price Is To Release Her Fifth Autobiography Independent”. Four more to go?
Apple sells 800k TV shows and 350k movies a day. That's nuts. Techcrunch
Profiting from a market at the price of zero Brian's Blog
Is Anyone In Charge At Nook Media? MikeCane

Chicken Slaughter Hong Kong 1972

Looks a little like an impressionist painting but clearly due to low light.  This guy is carrying in a load of live chickens tied by their ankles into the central Hong Kong market.  Friday night chicken and chips is a standard in the PND household (all international locations by the way) but we prefer to pick up our chicken at the super market.  PND moms once told me that during the war they raised chickens in their back yard and she remembers the abrupt endings.  She will have been too young to have been the executioner however. 

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.