MediaWeek (Vol 4, No 3): UK Libraries, Perceptions of US Libraries, Pearson Acquires, Wolters Kluwer Partner, Libraries in the Cloud

UK libraries are facing potentially dire circumstances with funding cuts from Westminster forcing local governments to make some hard and unpopular decisions about funds. Across the UK organized groups are going on mass 'lend-out's where they are encouraging patrons to check out as many books as possible. This weekend there were several articles about the situation in most of the major newspapers.

Libraries: 'Hands off our doors to learning' The Independent on Sunday has been inundated with stories about the role public libraries have played in readers' lives. Campaigns to stop councils from closing as many as half of their libraries are gathering pace, as public figures protest furiously about 'cultural vandalism'. They share their memories with Nina Lakhani

From the Telegraph:

In response to the need for cuts, Oxfordshire county council wants to axe 20 of its 43 libraries. Among them is a small stone building in Bampton, the archetypally English village that doubled as Downton for ITV. For me, the library was almost a second home, where my lifelong love of Asterix – and of reading, generally – was kindled. The thought of its closure causes quite extraordinary pain. Lord Fellowes, Downton Abbey’s writer, and a prominent defender of his own local libraries, is quick to commiserate. “In a village like that, a library has a real function,” he says. “There was someone quoted the other day as saying they’re for the white middle classes. But that’s exactly who they’re not principally for, particularly in the country.” That is a point that the villagers will be quick to make. But they won’t be alone. Across the country, more than 400 libraries are on the chopping block – and everywhere, informal coalitions are assembling to defend them. The residents of Stony Stratford, in Milton Keynes, borrowed every single one of their library’s 16,000 books to highlight how much they valued it. Is this just special pleading by the middle classes? No – because libraries are not just another public service. They are a physical embodiment of the idea that knowledge is to be cherished, both for its own sake and for its power to change lives. That was why, when they sought to improve themselves, members of the working class in the 18th and 19th centuries reached for the bookshelves. That is why Andrew Carnegie, the ultimate self-made man, devoted much of his fortune to building libraries. The design almost always included a staircase and a lantern – symbols of learning’s power to uplift the mind, and illuminate the soul.

The Telegraph tells the story behind Graham Greene's Brighton Rock (Telegraph):

Brighton Rock started out, Greene tells us, as a “simple detective story” but developed into a “discussion, too obvious and open for a novel, of the distinction between good and evil, and right and wrong and the mystery of the 'appalling strangeness of the mercy of God’”. It is set among the racecourse touts and razor-wielding gangsters of Brighton and, like Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square, Brighton Rock vividly evokes the raffish seaside town, awash with weekending Londoners who shared Greene’s own liking for pubs and beer and sausages. Rose Macaulay remembered Greene saying that “only RCs were capable of real sin because the rest of us were so invincibly ignorant”: the psychopathic Pinkie and his girlfriend are both Catholics, and although Pinkie is intent on his own damnation, he is well aware that “these atheists, they don’t know nothing”. The “real point” of the story, Greene said, was “the contrast between the ethical mind and the religious” and it set a pattern for Greene’s later “Catholic” novels.

Earlier reports suggested that Pearson were to invest in Indian education services company TutorVista (Times Of India):

British publishing major Pearson may infuse fresh capital into TutorVista, an integrated education services company, which is raising in excess of $50 million. Pearson, which holds around 17% stake in the firm, could increase its holding as it participates in the latest round of fund raising along with new private equity investors. The entrepreneur duo of K Ganesh and Meena Ganesh, who are the investors behind CustomerAsset BPO (which became ICICI Onesource) and Marketics KPO (sold to WNS), has been holding talks with PE giants GIC of Singapore and Providence, among others. The transaction is expected to be announced in the last week of January, which may also see TutorVista announcing a small acquisition in the US.

But the company decided to buy it outright (Pearson):

Pearson, the world’s leading learning company, today announces that it has agreed to increase its shareholding in TutorVista to a controlling 76% stake for a consideration of $127m. Pearson acquired a minority stake in TutorVista in June 2009 and this transaction takes Pearson’s total equity investment in the company to approximately $139m.

TutorVista was founded in 2005 by Krishnan Ganesh and is headquartered in Bangalore. The company has four main activities:

1. Technology: TutorVista supplies digital content and technology platforms to private and government schools in India, typically under long term contracts. It currently serves approximately 3,300 classrooms;
2. Online tutoring: it provides online tutoring services to approximately 10,000 students per month. It uses Voice-Over-Internet-Protocol and online whiteboards to connect instructors in India with school and college students, principally in North America, with developing opportunities across the globe;
3. Test preparation and tuition: it operates a network of 60 centres across southern India delivering English language coaching courses for university entrance exams and out-of-class tuition to K-12 school children for SAT, ACT, AP and other exams; and
4. K-12 schools: it provides a full suite of services including curriculum design, teacher training, technology solutions and school administration services to schools serving approximately 5,000 students in India.

India's government currently invests $40bn each year or three per cent of GDP in education, while Indian consumers spend more than $40bn on private educational institutions and services. Both segments of the market are growing rapidly as a result of government commitment to increase the quality of and access to learning opportunities as a means of sustaining economic growth and reducing poverty.

This acquisition further supports Pearson’s goals of building significant education companies in selected fast-growing markets and applying its learning services and technologies to support governments and institutions in making educational opportunities more accessible and more effective. TutorVista will be integrated into our education business in India and will enhance our presence in the school market in India and in tutoring across the globe in schools and higher education.

Pearson also raised their guidence for the year (Pearson):

All of Pearson’s major businesses sustained their strong trading momentum throughout 2010. We will report healthy sales growth and further margin improvement, fuelled by our consistent investment in the global learning industry, in digital services and in developing economies. As a result, we now expect to report continuing operating profits for 2010 of approximately £850m, a headline increase of approximately 20% (compared with £710m in 2009, excluding Interactive Data, which was sold in July 2010, from both years). We expect to report adjusted earnings of approximately 76p per share, an increase of approximately 16% on 65.4p in 2009, and ahead of our previous guidance of approximately 72p.

WoltersKluwer announced a joint venture with leading China drug information company Medicom (PR):

Wolters Kluwer Health today announced a joint venture with leading China drug information provider Medicom to deliver clinical decision support to doctors in China as the country prepares for significant changes to its healthcare system. The deal allows Wolters Kluwer Health to expand its market-leading Clinical Decision Support (CDS) and drug information business into the rapidly growing China market and creates a needed drug information infrastructure in China. “The clinical decision support market in China is at a critical juncture, similar to what we saw in the U.S. market many years ago,” said Arvind Subramanian, President & CEO, Wolters Kluwer Health Clinical Solutions. “Our agreement with Medicom gives Wolters Kluwer Health a strong entry point in China and creates a solid foundation for us to introduce more advanced CDS products and solutions that will give healthcare professionals in China unparalleled access to evidence-based medicine for the advancement of healthcare.” Medicom, located in the city of Chengdu in the Sichuan Province, has a strong footprint in the China healthcare market, providing drug information and services. Its products and services are highly complementary to those of Wolters Kluwer Health’s Clinical Solutions business, which offers healthcare professionals fast access to evidence-based medical information that helps clinicians effectively manage patient care on a daily basis. The combined offering creates a robust library of clinical content not previously available in China that physicians can access at the point of learning as well as at the point of care with patients.

OCLC's 2005 report on the perceptions of libraries was widely circulated at the time and the organization has revisited that report in a new release (OCLC):

Perceptions of Libraries, 2010: Context and Community is a follow-up to the 2005 Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources. The new report provides updated information and new insights into information consumers and their online information habits, preferences and perceptions. Particular attention was paid to how the current economic downturn has affected information-seeking behaviors and how those changes are reflected in the use and perception of libraries. The OCLC membership report explores:

• Technological and economic shifts since 2005
• Lifestyle changes Americans have made during the recession, including increased use of the library and other online resources
• How a negative change to employment status impacts use and perceptions of the library
• How Americans use online resources and libraries in 2010
• Perceptions of libraries and information resources based on life stage, from teens to college students, to senior Americans.

The membership report is based on U.S. data from an online survey conducted by Harris Interactive on behalf of OCLC. OCLC analyzed and summarized the results to produce Perceptions of Libraries, 2010: Context and Community, which is available for download on the OCLC Web site free of charge. Print copies of the report are available for a nominal fee to cover the cost of printing and shipping.

And those readers paying attention will recall my speech at Frankfurt last year where I discussed significant changes underway in academic libraries in how print collections are changing. Earlier this month OCLC released a report on Cloud Sourcing Research Collections (OCLC):

The objective of the project was to examine the feasibility of outsourcing management of low-use print books held in academic libraries to shared service providers, including large-scale print and digital repositories. The study assessed the opportunity for library space saving and cost avoidance through the systematic and intentional outsourcing of local management operations for digitized books to shared service providers and progressive downsizing of local print collections in favor of negotiated access to the digitized corpus and regionally consolidated print inventory.

Some of the findings from the project that are detailed in the report include:

• There is sufficient material in the mass-digitized library collection managed by the HathiTrust to duplicate a sizeable (and growing) portion of virtually any academic library in the United States, and there is adequate duplication between the shared digital repository and large-scale print storage facilities to enable a great number of academic libraries to reconsider their local print management operations.
• The combination of a relatively small number of potential shared print providers, including the US Library of Congress, was sufficient to achieve more than 70% coverage of the digitized book collection, suggesting that shared service may not require a very large network of providers.
• Substantial library space savings and cost avoidance could be achieved if academic institutions outsourced management of redundant low-use inventory to shared service providers.
• Academic library directors can have a positive and profound impact on the future of academic print collections by adopting and implementing a deliberate strategy to build and sustain regional print service centers that can reduce the total cost of library preservation and access.

From the executive summary:

It is our strong conviction, based on the above findings, that academic libraries in the United States (and elsewhere) should mobilize the resources and leadership necessary to implement a bridge strategy that will maximize the return on years of investment in library print collections while acknowledging the rapid shift toward online provisioning and consumption of information. Even, and perhaps especially, in advance of any legal outcome on the Google Book Search settlement, academic libraries have a unique opportunity to reconfigure print supply chains to ensure continued library relevance in the print supply chain. In the absence of a licensing option, online access to most of the digitized retrospective literature will be severely constrained. Demand for print versions of digitized books will continue to exist and libraries will be motivated to meet it, but they will need to do so in more cost-effective ways. In the absence of fully available online editions, full-text indexing of digitized in-copyright material provides a means of moderating and tuning demand for print versions and should facilitate the transfer of an increasing part of the print inventory to high-density warehouses. Viewed in this light, shared print storage repositories could enable a significant and positive shift in library resources toward a more distinctive and institutionally relevant service portfolio.

From the twitter (@personanondata): Amazon Changes Digital Text Platform to Kindle Direct Publishing http://bit.ly/h4pxkH Digital Publisher Vook Closes $5.25 Million Financing http://bit.ly/g22bf1 Thomson Reuters Acquires Legal Publishing Group in Argentina & Chile http://bit.ly/fLgx8T Bloomberg: Bertelsmann Leads $15mm round for College Textbook Publisher Flat World Knowledge, FT Says http://bloom.bg/goZQOH MediaPost: Ad Networks Ordered To Stop Working With Alleged eBook Piracy Site http://bit.ly/hBtVW0 Publishers get a measure of India's booming English book market - The National http://bit.ly/h3WTUH In sports Manchester United continue to under perform (if you must find something to criticize), but England get embarrassed again (although we don't really care about this slog).

Juliet on St Mark's Place

Juliet on St Mark's Place, New York June 1991

A weekly image from my archive. Click on the image to make it larger.
The frame immediately preceding this one is without the girl but she makes this photo. Taken on St Mark's Place just off 3rd Avenue in June 1991, I don't even know if this building is there anymore. I think the place was some kind of community center although I'm not sure. You can see the tracings of the original windows which seems to indicate that there may be some large rec space behind that wall.

In addition to the girl it is the purple door that originally caught my eye as I walked up the street. I can only image what the color scheme inside must have looked like if the building was blue and the rooms were purple.

Join me on Flickr

Toward Better Industry Sales Stats

The AAP and BISG announced their plans for the collection of sales data and will be using Bowker's industry leading data collection tools to power the work. In a jointly written letter and press release AAP and BISG have embarked on an effort to encourage wide participation and support for the initiative. Sales data collection in the US publishing market has long been rife with under reporting, limited participation and flawed logic. This combined effort represents an attempt to address all the failures of the old methods will also enabling some new analytics and value add.

From the press release:

Our efforts to improve the accuracy and quality of data collection rest primarily on the commitment and engagement of the entire industry. Book publishers’ data submissions are critical to the success of the final product. We hope we can count on your participation leading into the New Year. We have a target rollout date of May 2011.

The new data product, to be released annually in its first phase, will provide a comprehensive view of book publishing sales aggregated by revenue, units, categories, formats and distribution channels. For a review of the first cut of the data model please visit AAP OR BISG.

The industry’s response to the new joint venture has been overwhelmingly positive, due to the critical need for accurate industry data to assess changes in the marketplace. We expect the rate of publisher participation to increase exponentially, with data being provided by all vertical markets (trade, academic, professional). Moreover we are actively seeking the full engagement of large, mid-sized, small, and niche publishers. When final, the new data set will be delivered in print as well as by means of a data warehouse that will provide sophisticated tools for more detailed data access and customized analysis.

Finally, we are developing a new algorithm to estimate the size of the industry, which will complement actual reports from participants. This new methodology will incorporate data from non-publishing partners including other industry data collection services, associations, retailers, distributors and wholesalers.

We’re pleased to announce that the joint venture has retained the services of Bowker as the data collection provider for the new joint venture led by industry statistics veteran Kelly Gallagher, Vice President, Publisher Services. Kelly will be working closely with the BookStats Steering Committee comprised of Kenneth Michaels, Chief Operating Officer, Hachette Book Group; Dominique Raccah, CEO, Sourcebooks; Joe Gonnella, Vice President, Adult Trade Merchandising, Barnes & Noble, Inc; Scott Lubeck, Executive Director, Book Industry Study Group, and Tina Jordan, Vice President, Association of American Publishers. Kelly will also be assisted by longstanding AAP statistics provider Management Practice, Inc. for additional support.

We encourage you to contact the AAP’s Tina Jordan, BISG’s Scott Lubeck or Bowker’s Kelly Gallagher to participate in the data submission process. Tina can be reached at (212) 255-0275 or via email at tjordan@publishers.org. Scott can be reached at (646) 336-7141 or via email at scott@bisg.org; and Kelly can be reached at Kelly.gallagher@bowker.com or 908/219-0063.

BISG eBook ISBN Study Findings Released

BISG held a meeting last Thursday to review the findings from the eBook ISBN study which I conducted for the group. BISG intends to use this study as a first step in defining what the industry should do to identify eBooks and eContent for the future.

Here is a link to the summary presentation. BISG plans to distribute the full report in some form within the next few weeks.

By way of introduction, here is the executive summary from the detailed report:

All publishing supply-chain participants want clarity and consistency in applying ISBNs to eBooks and all would like the solution to be defined and agreed by the relevant parties. The ISBN agency is virtually irrelevant to participants and most interviewees – including sophisticated players – do not understand or acknowledge important aspects of the ISBN standard. These aspects include the international community of ISBN countries, the ratification by ISO of the standard and important standard definitions contained in the standard. Many interviewees referred to the ISBN policies and procedures as “recommendations” or “best practices” and without correction each of these issues encourages misinterpretation of the ISBN standard policies.

“Bad practice” is common and enabled at all levels within the supply chain. For example, retailers have the power to reject improperly applied title-level ISBNs but pragmatically create ‘work-arounds’ in order to make the products available for sale in the shortest possible time.

One major retailer has been ‘allowed’ to reject the ISBN almost entirely (although this pre-dates the issues with respect to eBooks). It is our view that many instances of these ‘bad practices’ are so embedded they will be difficult to dislodge.

Supply chain participants self-define important terms such as ‘product’ and ‘format’ and an industry thesaurus is suggested to alleviate this practice. Without a generally accepted thesaurus, participants are able to use terms as they please to support their arguments. All participants in the supply chain would benefit from better messaging and communication that addresses standards generally and the ISBN issues specifically. Interviewees – particularly medium and small players – repeatedly requested more information and education about standards (and related) issues. In particular, all participants would like an unambiguous eBook policy that is consistently and uniformly adopted.

With particular reference to the above, most of the interviewees failed to understand or recognize the ‘business case’ for applying ISBNs to the ultimate or purchased manifestation of the product.

Arguments regarding metadata control, data analysis or ‘discovery’ have failed to make any impact in convincing participants that the ISBN policy is one they should adopt. To publishers, these arguments sound ‘theoretical’ without any practical relevance.

While the definition of a ‘product’ is problematic (as noted above) there is a more pragmatic challenge faced by ISBN. Not only are publishers combining different content elements (in addition to text) into ‘books,’ they are beginning to redefine how books are created. Publishers contemplate gathering disaggregated content into collections that are ‘published’ specific to a customer’s requirements. As a consequence, some publishers openly question the need for an ISBN as their future publishing programs develop.

While the publisher > distributor > retailer supply chain has adequately accommodated eBooks, the library market faces some unique challenges. In particular, titles available from multiple vendors and in multiple pricing packages create significant challenges to vendors operating in this segment. As eBooks become more prevalent in the library community, these issues will continue to exacerbate what is an incomplete solution to eBook identification.

The quality of meta data provided by publishers was universally derided by all downstream supply partners. In particular, very few publishers are making an effort to combine print and electronic metadata in the first instance and secondly to ensure over time that the metadata attributable to print and electronic versions of the same titles remains in sync. Repeatedly, supply chain partners referred to incomplete and inconsistent eBook metadata files and data rot in electronic metadata files over time.

Metadata quality remains an important issue and, setting aside a revision of the ISBN policies and procedures, improving metadata would be the single most important and beneficial activity publishers could undertake to improve the effectiveness of the print and electronic book supply chain.

Conclusion: There is wide interpretation and varying implementations of the ISBN eBook standard; however, all participants agree a normalized approach supported by all key participants would create significant benefits and should be a goal of all parties.

Achieving that goal will require closer and more active communication among all concerned parties and potential changes in ISBN policies and procedures. Enforcement of any eventual agreed policy will require commitment from all parties; otherwise, no solution will be effective and, to that end, it would be practical to gain this commitment in advance of defining solutions.

Any activity will ultimately prove irrelevant if the larger question regarding the identification of electronic (book) content in an online-dominated supply chain (where traditional processes and procedures mutate, fracture and are replaced) is not addressed. In short, the current inconsistency in applying standards policy to the use of ISBNs will ultimately be subsumed as books lose structure, vendors proliferate and content is atomized.

This was a fun engagement and I enjoyed the full cooperation of the participants. There remains a lot more work to be done.