400,000 Titles Published!

Rachel Donadio in The NYTimes book review section has an essay on the expansion of publishing. As she points out, if reading is generally going down hill this isn't stopping people from adopting self-publishing as a hobby. "Publishing" a book is like putting your photo collection on flickr now-a-days. It is so easy and the hurdles so low that anyone with a half baked idea is doing it. Not that there's anything wrong with that; I happen to believe that the creativity, the experiences and the expression evident in many of these books will become a reference point for our age. Just as letters between family members shone light on a family's history, future generations will browse the published output of family members. I want my parents to do this.

On the other hand, my view may be too prosaic; since many of these self-publishers still think their titles will become the next best seller. As mentioned in the article, the potential for iUniverse.com titles to be on display at B&N garners considerable attention and revenues from their legions of authors. So, there is some delusion but the self-publishing market is estimated to be worth over $1.3billion (although, regretably I can't recall the citation for this number) and deserves significant attention from all segments of the publishing community. As I have suggested before, one of the major publishing houses is going to get into this segment in a big way (Xlibris aside).

As for the number of titles published annually, the absolute number is meaningless without explanation as it grows by 35% from 2006-2007. In order to draw any analysis from this number of published titles the number would have to be broken down considerably. Impressive as the number is it is noted for effect only.

Reed Business to be Broken Up

PaidContent cites inside knowledge that the RBI sale will be broken into bite size pieces.

We have also learned that Reed Elsevier has changed its mind on how to sell it. Initially it did not want to sell off various pieces separately, but now at least the U.S. part, RBI-US, will be sold off separately, and multiple parties are aligning their arrows for when the process starts.

In my opinion, in the US we will see a group of PE partners join to buy the entire US segment and then carve this up subsequently into smaller chunks. The RBI media titles represent one such chunk which I have mentioned before.

The "Bankrupting Costs of Textbooks"

That is the conclusion of an editorial in this mornings NYTimes. The newspaper also notes a bill pending in Congress that would require publishers to sell "unbundled versions of textbooks minus the pricey add-ons." The editorial is short but makes some significant and spurious leaps in logic. As one example, Educators must,

embrace new methods of textbook development and distribution if they want to rein in runaway costs. That means using digital textbooks, which can often be presented online free of charge or in hard copies for as little as one-fifth the cost of traditional books. The digital books can also be easily customized and updated.

In conclusion, the newspaper suggests that institutions should take advantage of these new developments citing a tiny publisher offering textbooks for free and 'research' that suggests free geography material produces the same results as purchased materials.

Noting there is 'no reason' a textbook costs $140 is like saying there is no reason gas is $4/gallon. Higher education is like buying a car. You don't expect to get the gas for free and you shouldn't expect to get educational material for free. Legitimately, a student should expect to be treated fairly in respect to the materials they are asked to purchase for their course work but this is a complicated issue and to suggest 'publishers are calling the tune' is inaccurate and misleading.

Wolters Kluwer, Thomson Acquire Accounting Firms

Earlier this month, two of the big players in information publishing purchased accounting firms. Nonsensical? Not really, when you consider that both companies are in the business of offering a suite of products and services to their customers that encompass not only what we may traditionally think of as publishing products but also services and solutions that leverage or embed the information and expand the relationship with the customer. (I touched on this at a recent industry conference).

In the case of Wolters Kluwer, they have taken over the UK offices of Melbourne, Australia based accounting software firm MYOB (Mind Your Own Business). WK reportedly paid £35.5m earlier this month for MYOB. From AccountingWeb:

The MYOB Accountants Division product range includes PerTax and Viztopia accounts production and practice management programs acquired from MYOB's fellow Australian software Solution 6 in 2004. MYOB also produces the Singleview
knowledge management portal, plus corporation tax, trust and insolvency practice programs.

CCH's ProSystem portfolio includes many similar applications. In an email to customers CCH UK managing director Martin Casimir said the long term plan was to migrate all the solutions to a single range of best of breed products. "Please rest assured that this will be done in a considered and carefully controlled manner," he wrote.

CCH is WK existing software division.

Competitor Thomson has purchased tax software company Digita within the same time frame but after considerably wooing of the Digita founders. Thomson's UK and European market share is far smaller than their US position and they see Digita as enabling a rapid development of that market. As core markets mature, similar companies will be looking to the international market for growth performance. Additionally, in the case of both companies, the acquisitions will enable the companies to further expand the range of business solutions and services that they offer to their key markets.

Thomson will place Digita with Sweet & Maxwell.

Fictional Non Fictionists

Colson Whitehead had me. As I read this in New York magazine, I thought how could they have missed this story. But by the third paragraph, it struck me. This guy is lying!

Nevertheless a thoroughly entertaining satire - somewhat lost on some of the readers as noted in the comments - but then these are exactly the target audience so no matter. Here's a sample:

Average. That’s one thing Margaret most definitely is not. I broach this subject with her friend Misha Defonseca, author of Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years, which describes how she hid out in the forests of Europe to escape the Nazis and was taken in by a gang of wolves. Whenever Misha makes it out to the States for a visit, she and Margaret go shopping for Levi’s, which are difficult to come by in her native country. She resells them to aspiring hipsters in her village at a dreadful markup.

I visit her tiny cottage, a few kilometers outside a large Eastern European city. Misha is a little Cabbage Patch doll of a woman, with an energy beyond her years. It’s not hard to see her nestled in with the other cubs, fighting bravely for the teat of the she-bitch. I ask her if it’s harder to be adopted by black people or wolves. She chuckles at my question and sips her tea. “We tease each other, Margaret and I. She says, ‘At least we had cable and White Castle—you had to forage for nuts and berries.’ But the wolves, I tell her, the wolves have”—and here she turns her eyes to the ceiling—“they have La Vida Lobo. The Wolf Life!” It is a brief audience, and she soon dismisses me to return to work on the prequel of her memoir, about her time on the run from the Armenian genocide, when she was taken in by ferrets.

Ah, ferrets...

Net Galley Announce Digital Galley Early Adopters.

Earlier this year, NetGalley announced an important partnership with Publisher's Weekly as their first major step to implementing their digital workflow tool NetGalley. NetGalley is a tool that may transform the current paper based Galley workflow into a truly digital based process that will become both make the distribution and management of Galleys more efficient and effective. The product will be launched commercially at BookExpo, but they announce today that St.Martins, SourceBooks, Hachette Book Group and Bloomsbury US will be the first publishers to implement the tool.

From their press release:

"We are delighted to be here at the beginning of this terrific program," said Matt Baldacci, VP, director of marketing and publishing operations at St. Martin's Press. "NetGalley will make our interaction with Publishers Weekly more efficient, and has the potential to show cost, resource, and environmental efficiencies. These benefits are good for PW, the publishers that will join the full roll-out, and the industry in general.

During the pilot period, publishers will submit their title information—and optionally digital galleys—electronically to PW. In return, PW will provide visibility on review acceptance and status through NetGalley.com. Pilot publishers will also have the opportunity to invite other reviewers, media, and bloggers to join their community and view their “NetGalleys” online.

Ted Treanor, CEO of Rosetta Solutions, commented, “The response from publishers to support this initiative has been extraordinarily positive. NetGalley selected this group for their diversity of size and publishing type, and their willingness to innovate. We’re counting on these partners to help us continue to refine NetGalley.com.”

Earlier this year, I interviewed Mike Forney from RosettaSolutions.

Dilbert Mashups

It is here. Your opportunity to match wits and funny bone with office humor superstar Scott Adams. Publisher's pay attention, because here is a perfect example of a content owner embracing their audience and letting them interact in a meaningful way with their product. I have noted that travel publishers, cookbook publishers and some others are experimenting with this idea and I hope we will see more of it. Register with Dilbert.com and have some fun with it.

That is my submission at the top of the screen shot.