Beyond the Book Interview with Me: eBooks and ISBNs

Beyond the book interviewed me last week about the eBook ISBN study that I conducted for BISG:

Not so long ago, a book was an unmistakable object. Then someone came along and started digitizing content, and very soon, books were something else, something much more than ink on dead trees. That transformation, indeed the redefinition of books, matters enormously to readers and publishers, as well as retailers and librarians. Without a way to identify “books” as they are published, information and creativity could be orphaned.

To discuss this challenge, CCC’s Chris Kenneally recently spoke with publishing consultant Michael Cairns who had just completed a report for the Book Industry Study Group examining practices in the identification of e-books in all their vast variety. The research turned up several surprising findings, as well as revealed a tension between US publishers and their counterparts around the world.

“We’re in this transition between the sale of a physical book to one that’s a digital book, and in that transition, some aspects of the ISBN number are not being upheld as they were in the physical world,” notes Cairns, who is a highly-regarded blogger at PersonaNonData. “And when there’s a breakdown, that starts to increase the likelihood that the supply chain does not operate as efficiently as perhaps it should or could. And so that’s a real issue.”

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Makinson's Passage to India

Pearson's John Makinson gives an interview to Livemint (India) on the company's business strategy in that country where he also comments on Pearson's recent purchase of Indian education company TutorVista (LiveMint):

Pearson Plc, which recently bought a controlling stake of Indian education company TutorVista, wants to shed public perception of a publishing firm and establish itself more as an education service provider. Pearson India chairman John Makinson, who recently visited New Delhi, said in an interview that school education is now one of its key focus in the country, which can be replicated in other nations such as South Africa. He also said the Indian government’s decision to open up the education market is a welcome move for global education firms. Edited excerpts:

How much is acquiring TutorVista going to help Pearson?

Priority focus: Makinson says two key areas for the company in India are vocational education and schools.

Pradeep Gaur/Mint

For the last three years, we have been focusing in the Indian education space. The two key areas are vocational education and school education space. Two years back, we had two partnerships, one with TutorVista, which was largely an online tutoring firm, and the other with Educomp Solutions Ltd, on vocational education.

We had really not thought about the school education space. After talking to the TutorVista management, we realized they have a vision for school education. It sounded sensible to us and we thought of honing that in India. The challenge for a company like Pearson is it’s a large opportunity, which is scalable. It has to be delivered at a relatively low price. We have software, platform, we had other resources but we did not have the dedicated culture of growing schools. By combining the entrepreneurial skill of TutorVista with our global experience as a global education company, we thought we can achieve more success here.

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MediaWeek (Vol 4, No 7): Underused eBook features, UK Tuition, Mills&Boone, Coin Art

Professors are not rushing to adopt the newest eBooks features (Chronicle):

Publishers studying the effectiveness of their latest interactive e-textbooks are finding that the biggest challenge is getting professors to use the new features of the digital texts.

“On the instructor side, that’s where the inertia is,” says Jay Chakrapani, McGraw-Hill’s digital general manager for higher education. “That’s the biggest challenge that we’re all facing.”

Another publisher, John Wiley and Sons, commissioned a study in 2009 of the use of its WileyPLUS online learning tools by the University of Tennessee’s Institute for Assessment and Evaluation of nearly 500 students at 11 two-year and four-year colleges.

Instructors selected for participation all had at least two years of experience with the program, says Petra Steriti, Wiley’s manager for market research, but instructor use varied widely. “Not all instructors make students fully aware of what’s available,” she says.

Wiley plans to offer more tutorials to give professors a better understanding of the capabilities of the system, which can be used to quiz students on reading material and provide instant feedback.

Tuition rises in the UK have resulted in riots but will tuition waivers ease the pain (Inside HigherEd):

The British government ministers hope that the large tuition-fee waiver for poor students proposed by the University of Cambridge will pile pressure on the rest of the higher education sector as institutions approach D-Day for deciding charges for 2012-3. Under the plans -- revealed first by Times Higher Education -- the university would charge the maximum £9,000 fee (more than $14,400) but offer a £3,000-a-year “waiver” (more than $4,800) for students from households earning less than £25,000 a year (just over $40,000). But Cambridge has been accused of playing into the government’s hands with the proposals, which also recommend cutting aid packages by more than half – a move that would leave students with less money in their pockets and the Treasury with more. Other university vice-chancellors may carp that Cambridge has an ­unfair advantage, given that it has a relatively low intake of poor students compared with other institutions. David Willetts, the universities and science minister, is known to be watching developments at the universities of Cambridge and Oxford closely because of the ramifications that decisions at the ancient institutions with their democratic governance structures could have for fees set elsewhere.

A documentary explores writing for Mills & Boone (Telegraph):

Actually, this is why I’ve never been hooked on M&Bs myself – even at that age when teenage girls discover them and develop what is usually a temporary addiction. I’ve always found the characters unrealistic in their stereotypical attractiveness and conduct. However, lots of women – 1.3 million a month – never tire of the tanned hunks and usually sappy females (however “sassy-mouthed’’ they might be). And this is why Roger Sanderson, who has written almost 50 M&B novels under the pen-name Gill Sanderson, says he would never try to introduce a less than perfect Alpha male as the hero. “He’s got to have a good body, and there’s no way he can be fat or badly dressed,” he says in a new documentary, Guilty Pleasures, which explores the enduring phenomenon of M&B. “And I never have – and never will have – a red-headed hero.” This seems to me a bit rich coming from a balding man in his seventies. But Roger knows his audience’s predilections. This is made abundantly clear in Guilty Pleasures, which focuses on three women for whom M&Bs are an obsession; Hiroko Honmo, a demure housewife in Tokyo, Shirley Davies, a single mother from Warrington, and Shumita Didi Singh who lives in India. “Women want to read about their ideal man and for most of them, he doesn’t have red hair,” confirms Julie Moggan, the director of the documentary. In fact, their dream man is someone who looks exactly like Stephen Muzzonigro, a male model from New York, who features on countless Mills & Boon covers in passionate embraces and saucy clinches, depending on the imprint.

Simon Heffer in the Independent mourns the loss of coin art:

In the mid-1960s, it was still common to find Victorian pennies and ha’pennies in one’s change. Most were worn almost smooth, but some were not, suggesting that they had, at some point in their century-long existence, been hoarded for years or even decades before being put back into circulation. Silver coins of that age had disappeared for the simple reason that they were entirely silver: as were all threepences, sixpences, shillings, florins and half-crowns minted before 1920. The coinage mirrored the decline of the country. Impoverished after the Great War, we made our silver coins only half silver. After 1947, and the blow dealt to our prosperity by the Second World War, these coins were entirely cupro-nickel, and the silver threepenny piece was replaced by the dodecagonal brass threepenny bit. The half-silver coins lingered for decades: my father, in about 1967, had a huge sweet jar full of pre-1947 half-crowns on his desk at home. And it was one such coin that prompted my blinding revelation about the beauty of our coinage. Others may disagree, but I do not believe we ever minted a more ravishing coin than the half-crown of Edward VII, the design for which, with only the slightest modification, was used on the half-crowns of his son until 1927.

Heffernan thinks there's problems in the coffee shop (NYT):

Many indie New York City cafes now heavily restrict, or ban outright, the use of Kindles, Nooks and iPads. Evidently, too many coffee shops in town have had their ambience wrecked when itinerant word processors with laptops turn the tables into office space. Sure, that phenomenon can be depressing — whether you’re a scornful lady who lunches or the nomadic freelancer who fields glares. And full-dress computers are perhaps too much personal furniture for cafes to accommodate. But banning devices the size of books, like Kindles and iPads, is going too far, and it’s anathema to the character and history of cafes. Unwholesome things have always happened wherever people drink coffee together. They gossip and complain about powerful jerks; they read, write and scheme about their own comebacks. On the sidelines of those conversations — muttering, silently judging, chiming in — have always been loners who loiter with books and newspapers all day, ready to be recruited into conversation. This might come as hard news to would-be restaurateurs looking only to taste that sweet margin of coffee markup, but loiterers and readers must be part of the cafe equation. People who sit at bars are going to make out and brawl; people who sit in cafes are going to read and talk.

From the twitter this week:

Martin Amis claims only a 'serious brain injury' could make him write children's lit Telegraph Always one for a quote

Bertelsmann: Could Repay All Liabilities By 2014 - Document - WSJ Does this mean acquisitions are on the way?

And in sports: Rooney's goal

Repost: Death of the Big Box

With the imminent crash of Borders into bankruptcy I was reminded of this post from December 3rd, 2008.

Travel up Route 17 in northern New Jersey and you traverse the spectrum of retailing. These stores - from Ikea to K-mart - represent the shop windows on late 20th century retailing but, in contrast to their apparent ubiquity, the days of the stand-alone big box may be numbered. A number of years ago, I saw some old photos of Route 17 and was shocked to learn it used to be a four lane (two each side) parkway with a wide grass median strip bisecting its length. Today, it is a clogged eight-lane shopping aisle and is just one of similar examples across the US from Rockville Pike in MD to Beach Boulevard in Orange County, CA.

Barnes and Noble, on their call a week ago, noted that many of their leases are coming due and these will be renegotiated at lower rates. While this sounds like good news to shareholders, the current dire economic situation coupled with the Border's situation will result in a significant reduction in superstore locations. Projecting current physical retailing trends will make many current locations simply unprofitable even at significantly lower rents. We may be witnessing the demise of the suburban book superstore and suburban consumers may be indifferent. Online retailing is going to be the huge winner across all retail segments, but particularly in book retailing.

We have a perfect storm: An excess of media options reducing the time traditionally spent reading books, the economic slow down reducing all spending, the increasing acceptance and comfort of online retailing to virtually all consumers and the advent of the online superstore which encourages a cost-conscious basket approach to consumption. Increasingly all of us - not just those of us who have been checking our bank account and buying airline tickets online for years - will be buying everything online, at the best combination of pricing and free delivery, and all without dealing with the expense and hassle of traveling.

Multi-store malls will continue to live on for many years. In contrast, we will see many large, empty retailing boxes punctuating the sides of our traditional highway shopping aisles. Already this year, the big-box retailing environment is dire with a range of store liquidations and bankruptcies from Linen & Things to Circuit City. In years past, other retailers would fill these spaces with their new formats or new concepts, but those days are gone never to return. Retailing innovation - to the extent that it exists - is emerging on the web but not in physical retailing. The big losers will be the real estate owners who won't be able to find tenants (there are only so many ice rinks or roller rinks you can have in any one community).

Superstore physical book retailing, particularly its suburban version, may be a casualty. For a strong retailer like Barnes & Noble there will be plenty of time to adapt but others will fail. The current recession is going to change many things and some business segments just won't recover as consumers transfer all their shopping online. The economic crisis will push retailing over an imaginary Rubicon: More physical stores are unprofitable so they close, which reduces consumer access and pushes the consumer online. The cycle repeats itself and big-box book retailing will be no different. Ironically, big-box retailing made shopping convenient for suburbanites and retailers chased the consumer diaspora with vigor. The convenience that suburbanites sought is now the demise of the same retailers that promoted convenience. Physical can't compete with virtual. Tant pis.

But perhaps it's not all bad news. Mitigation may be driven by a population migration back into city centers which is most apparent in big cities like NYC, Washington and even Los Angeles. Couple this urban population growth with the daily office crowd and we have the re-genesis of an old phenomena: Main street shopping, which doesn't attempt to compete with the webstores abundance but serves deeper consumer needs. Retailing on a small scale operating with smaller inventories that turn rapidly, defined as 'scarcity' merchandising. The notion that if you don't buy it now it will be gone - which is the philosophy of The Gap, The Limited and some others.

Books are sold exceptionally well online but their merchandising could adapt to smaller format retailing. Urban book retailing will continue to be dominated by chains; costs will simply be prohibitive for independents to support sophisticated merchandising and supply chains that will be needed in the type of retail environment foreseen. Regardless, store size will shrink as the inventory mix skews to movie style 'openings' and 'events' designed to bring in a volume of buyers in a short time frame. A publisher once told me that if he owned a store he would only stock 40 best sellers. That concept (or a variation) will become the next phase in physical book retailing. Will it be the last hurrah?