Update on Harpercollins' Authonomy.com

A few weeks ago I had a post on the new authors site being launched by Harpercollins UK. Victoria Barnsley the HC UK CEO was on BBC Radio 4 talking about it. Here is the link. Her piece is about half way through the program. Meet the Author is also profiled.

Blog post

Go for the Dew(ey)

The BBC goes looking to see if Dewey is still relevant in today's (UK) libraries and along the way they discuss some of the history of Mr. Dewey and his evident psychological 'issues'. These issues may have materially impacted the development of the system. So I guess, we should be happy that Prozac wasn't available. One other note: No mention of OCLC.

This audio article appeared on BBC Radio 4. Link. It is about 20mins and if you are a Dewey know-it-all you are not going to get much out of this.

John Burdett: The Bangkok Underworld

I have read all the books John Burdett has written about Bangkok and also heard him speak about his most recent book when he was on his recent author tour. The books are evocative of the real Bangkok which you will immediately recognise if you have ever visited the city. I have been back several times since 1997 but as a child I also lived there for about a year. Burdett is profiled in The Times this morning with an article and a slide show:

Mr. Burdett delivers this grab bag through his narrator, Sonchai Jitpleecheep, a cop whose mother was a prostitute and whose father was an American soldier during the Vietnam War. Sonchai is a cultural interpreter par excellence, a cross between Descartes and a Thai palm reader who has flashbacks of travels to Europe with his mother and her various client-lovers. “I still feel very Thai, despite my straw-colored hair and sharp nose,” Sonchai says in “Bangkok 8.”

The narrator’s frequent reflections on Buddhism complete the cultural mélange. Mr. Burdett himself meditates one or two hours a day. It’s hard to imagine how the broad and nuanced canvas Mr. Burdett paints in his books could be conveyed on the big screen. But Millennium Films, which recently produced “John Rambo,” the fourth movie in the “Rambo” series, in Thailand, has optioned “Bangkok 8” and is serious about making the film, Mr. Burdett said.

Video Link

German Bookselling

The Times has an article on the German bookselling market which maybe under threat because of legislation proposed in Switzerland to abolish fixed price policies on German language titles. Germany has an extraordinarily efficient system of distributing books and in many cases orders to wholesalers are delivered first thing the next day to all types of retailers. In some cases, the dispatchers have keys to the bookstore and boxes are sitting inside the front door when staff arrive. According to both publishers and retailers interviewed in this article, the net price agreement supports the diversity of publishing and of the size and location of all types of bookstores.

The fixed-price system is not unique to Germany. France had it, gave it up and reinstituted it after finding that discounting hurt small booksellers. But in the German-speaking book world, the system has long been a source of special pride until Switzerland jumped ship this spring. Despite vigorous lobbying from German and Swiss publishers and independent booksellers, the Swiss government sustained a ruling by the Swiss Competition Commission to overturn the fixed-price law and allow discounting there.

Here is the rest of the article.

Amazon Reports

The highlights from the Amazon.com earnings call were pretty impressive and here are highlights from the press release:

• Worldwide revenue grew 41% to $3.26 billion, or 38% excluding the $75 million favorable impact from foreign exchange.
• Q3 2007 revenue benefited by approximately 290 basis points of year-over-year growth from Harry Potter VII sales, plus attachments.
• Media revenue increased to $2.09 billion, up 36%, or 32% excluding FX
  In the North America segment, revenue grew 42% to $1.79 billion. This is the highest growth rate in seven years.
• US segment Media revenue grew 38% to $1.08 billion.
• GAAP net income was $80 million or $0.19 per diluted share, compared with $19 million and $0.05 per diluted share
• The Company sold 2.5 million copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows worldwide, making it Amazon's largest new product release.
• The Company launched a public beta of Amazon MP3, a digital music store with Earth's biggest selection of a la carte DRM-free MP3 music downloads. Amazon MP3 has over two million songs from more than 180,000 artists represented by over 20,000 major and independent labels.

I found the reports on the growth of their services business to be most profound. The company annouced a development fund for companies or individuals that could build commercial applications using the Amazon web services. Amazon will fund expansion and further development of the best of these applications. Without staring a gift horse, etc. the only limitation is that they application has to work with Amazon services. On the back of this they appear to have really spured the growth of people and companies tinkering with webservices. (I might even have a go). A lot of this growth may be people checking in to look around but regardless the growth in registrations in shocking.

• Over 290,000 developers have registered to use Amazon Web Services (AWS), up 25,000 from the prior quarter.
• AWS also launched a limited beta version of the Amazon Flexible Payments Service (FPS). Amazon FPS is the first payments service designed from the ground up specifically for developers, and provides unprecedented flexibility in the movement of money through a set of web services APIs.
• AWS recently introduced several new compute instance types for the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, which provide up to eight times more memory, CPU, and storage, enabling developers to support an even broader set of applications. Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) continues to be rapidly adopted by developers, and objects in storage have doubled to more than ten billion during the last six months. In addition, we have instituted a Service Level Agreement for Amazon S3 that guarantees operational performance levels.
• On the earnings call, Bezos had this to say about webservices:

Obviously if you're building web scale applications, in many cases you have to be able to charge people for things. The Flexible Payment Service is the first payment service specifically designed from the ground up for developers, and it has a lot of features that make it very flexible and easy to use for developers to incorporate payments into their own applications.So that set of services that we're offering to developers is growing very, very rapidly and has gotten an unusual amount of traction. We are very, very gratified to see this early uptake in the development community. It's happening at the very small scale with small software developers; one-person and two-person shops. It's also happening at the middle scale with venture capital-funded startups; and then at the large scale, with enterprise customers all the way from the small up to the big. So it's a very exciting and new product offering. These infrastructure services are things that we needed to build for ourselves in order to run the web scale application called Amazon. While we were in the process of building these things, we decided to build them in an external way so we could charge for them and turn them into a new profit center.

Looking forward to the full year the company stated:

• For Q4 we expect net sales of between $5.1 billion and $5.45 billion, or growth of between 28% and 37%. This guidance anticipates greater than 300 basis points of positive impact from foreign exchange.

Lastly in response to questions on the earnings call were the following:

• A question on Gross Margin: :In terms of gross margins, yes, Harry Potter is having an effect. It was slightly less than a contribution profit breakeven event for us. You should assume that's a lower gross margin than our average, so it is bringing it down."
• A question regarding the legal challenge to 1-Click. Bezos: "In terms of 1-Click, we have a longstanding practice of not talking about such matters outside of our public filings. You should refer to our public filings."
• A question on the Borders web store collaboration that is ending: Bezos "Re Borders: I don't really have any comments on any specific contracts."

Five Questions with Rosetta Solutions

netGalley is attempting to solve an intractable issue for publishers: How to ensure that your review copies get into the hands of the right reviewers, at the right time and at the lowest possible cost. In addition, tracking these reviews becomes an increasing problem as reviews publishing rapidly expands beyond traditional newspaper and trade magazines. netGalley is an innovative technology services company located in Seattle and staffed with people committed to improving the way publishing operates. For publishers, netGalley helps publicity and editorial and marketing staff reach a wider range of review publications and media and provides up-to-date status of reviews. For reviewers, netGalley helps to manage the inflow of titles and internally manage the review process. There is no cost for individual reviewers to register for the service.

I asked Michael Forney, President of Rosetta Solutions which is the corporate owner of netGalley my five questions.

1. Who is Rosetta Solutions and where does netGalley fit in the organization?
   
   Rosetta Solutions, Inc. (Rosetta) is a publishing technology company full of people who love books. All of Rosetta's products and services have been designed and built with extensive collaboration from publishers and media organizations. Our goal is to streamline and automate publishing workflows to help grow the industry. We do that by providing tools and services for both print and digital editions, including production, conversion and distribution.
   
   Rosetta’s netGalley™ is an online service that helps publishers better connect with their book reviewer and media communities through electronic distribution and tracking of ARCs, galleys and press materials. Through netGalley, publishers can simplify existing processes with premier review and media contacts and broaden their reach to online reviewers, bloggers and specialty publications, all while significantly diminishing the cost of printed review copies and press materials.
   
   
2. How did the netGalley product evolve?
   
   At netGalley, we are fascinated by how the internet continues to help connect smaller and more specialized groups of people who benefit from shared information. Books have long been sold through word-of-mouth, with traditional reviews being the most influential recommendation tool. What we wanted to accomplish with netGalley was to bring to bear the networking power and digitization of the internet on the book review process. We keep asking, “How can we make the existing process more efficient and less expensive? How can we mine the process for more information that will enable better decision-making? And last, how can we help connect the exponential number of new media outlets with new galleys at THE lowest possible cost?” We are grateful to have had the input and counsel of the some of the biggest and most successful publishers and media groups to help us shape the functionality of netGalley. Good listeners make good leaders.
   
   
3. You describe yourselves as a services company in this context what are the solutions that netGalley can provide? Is netGalley a discrete product or tool or do you see it as part of a platform or suite of products?
   
   When we first began with netGalley we saw the immediate benefits of better connecting review organizations with publishers to streamline the back-and-forth communication that characterizes this process. What we then began to see by talking to publishers is how netGalley can equally be applied to the larger publicity process by providing media with a central location to access a broad range of ancillary material about a title. We began to see how netGalley can benefit a range of constituents, directly (in the publishing house or media organizations) or indirectly (for example providing better information and services to authors). So, absolutely, we see netGalley as a platform providing a continuum of services.
   
   
4. You are currently working with a number of publishers on the netGalley launch. What have been some of the issues you have faced as you have designed and built this product?
   
   Probably the biggest challenge for us has been straddling the current reliance on printed materials with the gradual evolution toward digital media. We recognize that publishers and media will continue to rely primarily on printed galleys for some time. At the same time we can be evangelists for digital content, particularly by making it easy and secure to distribute within a given professional community. To be clear, netGalley does not require the distribution of digital galleys and facilitates the distribution of physical galleys. Yet many publishers have indicated that they can use digital galleys to supplement their physical galleys, especially to the online media and blogger communities.
   
   Have you faced particular issues in convincing publishers of the ROI involved in implementing at productivity tool like netGalley?
   
   The publishers and media organizations we have talked with all agree that there is a great deal of opaqueness in the current communication media and review processes. There is equally a sense that it is difficult to understand the true costs of reviews or media coverage. When you pair that difficulty with the explosiveness of new sites covering and reviewing books…it seems reasonable to want to automate and capture more information in this area.
   
   The distribution of marketing materials and the breadth of potential reviewers are growing rapidly. None too recently, a publisher had a fairly static list of people they needed to send ARC’s to have you heard from publishers that this is becoming an unmanageable task unless fundamental changes are made?
   
   We haven’t met a publisher yet who has noted the diminishing importance of The New York Times in selling books. We haven’t met one who says that their list of daily tasks is shrinking. The traditional media outlets will continue to have enormous impact on the books purchased by the reading public. The publicists’ day will get fuller and fuller.
   I think the challenge for publishers is partially in verifying the influence of potential new media sources. We see a lot of heads nod when we talk about automating and consolidating communications online, about bringing together potential reviewers/media who might find you as much as you find them, about cutting down the number of manual tasks particularly around formats and files.
   
   What kinds of improvements would you anticipate in a typical installation of the netGalley product?
   
   First I would ask, improvements for whom? Review organizations for example are going to see enormous benefits in terms of improving their internal workflow and minimizing redistribution costs to off site reviewers. Media organizations will see improvements in time efficiencies and task management. Publishers can anticipate lower direct costs of producing and distributing physical galleys, replacement of manual processes, and a broadening of the publicity universe at lower cost.
   
   
5. What is next for netGalley. Do you have a sense what your next development phase will be?
   
   On the netGalley side, we have a development plan that extends through the next two years and includes new functionality in the existing application as well as services to new segments such as the library and educator markets. Our research indicates that many of the benefits of netGalley to review and media communities can be transferred to other book communities.
   
   From the Rosetta perspective, we have a number of new products and services in development all surrounding the automation of publishing workflows and the consolidation of information derived from these processes. Watch this space for more!

Scanned! Libraries See the Folly in Proprietary Programs

The Open Content Alliance was established as a non-profit, non-proprietary program to aid libraries in developing their own book scanning efforts. It was partially a reaction to the far more renowned Google book program but some could argue it was a logical extension of the work of the Internet Archive program that the OCA founder Brewster Kahle also established. There are fundamental differences between the OCA approach and other digitization programs: Firstly, the library pays OCA for the scan, secondly, the content is limited to out of copyright material and thirdly, the library has no restriction on what is done with the scan.

This morning the NYTimes examines the developing resistance to commercial digitization programs such as Google and Microsoft and uses as an example the decision by a consortium of Massachusetts libraries not to go commercial.

But the resistance from some libraries, like the Boston Public Library and the Smithsonian Institution, suggests that many in the academic and nonprofit world are intent on pursuing a vision of the Web as a global repository of knowledge that is free of business interests or restrictions. Even though Google’s program could make millions of books available to hundreds of millions of Internet users for the first time, some libraries and researchers worry that if any one company comes to dominate the digital conversion of these works, it could exploit that dominance for commercial gain.

But Google continues to add libraries to their digitization program with regularity and why this continues is not really discussed here. Within the library community the disquiet regarding the Google program has been growing all year and the discussion as been as much about the restrictions as it has about the quality of the scans themselves. Less has been said about public trust and this aspect is not directly addressed in the Times article either.

As repositories of our collective knowledge and most often as beneficiaries of our tax revenues or public donations, libraries have an obligation to ensure that the general public has ready access to the content collected on our behalf. Perhaps this is a controversial point and perhaps this thought it not directly applicable in an academic context (unless it is a public institution) but the President of the Boston Public Library obliquely references this point when he says in the article:

"We understand the commercial value of what Google is doing, but we want to be able to distribute materials in a way where everyone benefits from it,” said Bernard A. Margolis, president of the Boston Public Library, which has in its collection roughly 3,700 volumes from the personal library of John Adams.

So what of the libraries in the Google program? Some are having second thoughts, some are entirely happy and some have made it work to their advantage. Generally, speaking it appears that everyone believes that all library content will eventually be freely accessible. If that means that works will have to be scanned again for those works that have restrictions placed on them by the original scanner then so be it. Since this second effort is likely to take some time, this content may be available in digitized form at a network level in advance as more and more libraries take advantage of 'open' programs like OCA.

I was intrigued by the last sentence of the article:

On Wednesday the Internet Archive announced, together with the Boston Public Library and the library of the Marine Biological Laboratory and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, that it would start scanning out-of-print but in-copyright works to be distributed through a digital inter library loan system.

"digital interlibrary loan system" sounds very interesting.