BISG Announce "Start With XML Project"

BISG is pleased to announce its sponsorship and support of an exciting and important new venture, the StartwithXML project.

This project, co-presented by O'Reilly Media and The Idea Logical Company, is an industry-wide, multipart initiative to present and disseminate the information that publishers need in order to move forward with a StartwithXML workflow. Mike Shatzkin of The Idea Logical Company was a featured speaker at the recent BISG Annual Meeting, where he discussed the project and the importance of XML to the publishing world (click here to see his presentation).

Survey Now Open

The first part of the project involves a survey of current publishing and production processes. BISG urges its publisher members to participate in this survey; the information gathered from the industry is vital to the success of the program. click here to connect to the survey.

Sign Up for the January Event

A one-day forum is scheduled for January 13, 2009, at the McGraw-Hill Auditorium in New York. Through panels and presentations, you'll spend the morning understanding the “Why” of XML, and the afternoon learning about “How” to move forward. CLICK HERE for more information and registration details. BISG members will be eligible for a $100 discount off the full-day event, and $50 off for the half-day session; contact the BISG office (info@bisg.org) for discount codes.

Additional Features

The project will also include a detailed research report and an online community. The research report will include information, case studies, best practices, technology and vendor profiles, and interviews with industry experts discussing the factors that make a StartWithXML workflow both useful and tricky. The supporting online community will feature a blog, an open comments section for the report outline, and a discussion forum.

We invite all BISG members to participate in StartwithXML, starting with the survey!

StartwithXML is sponsored by

Code Mantra Klopotek Publishing Dimensions Rosetta Solutions, Inc.

Investing in the Long Tail

At the BISG annual meeting on Friday Anita Elberse presented finding from her research into the effects and impacts of the long tail of revenue opportunities that were extolled by Chris Anderson. In summary, she has found (empirically) that there is no evidence for some of the major tenets of his book. Her presentation was enlightening and here is a link to the article she published in the Harvard Business Review:

Should You Invest in the Long Tail?
It was a compelling idea: In the digitized world, there’s more money to be made in niche offerings than in blockbusters. The data tell a different story.

Elberse is Associate Professor of Business Administration at HBS.

Updated: Here is a link to the presentation given at the BISG meeting. Link

The Future of Media

Media Post held a roundtable to discuss the future of media. Some quotes:

Jane Friedman: I spent my career as a book publisher, and do I believe that there will be hardcover and paperback books forever? Yes, I do, because I think that the library's something that identifies the individual. All of us have gone into friends' homes and, very often, the first thing we look at is what's on the bookshelf.We are seeing in the book industry mainly what is just another form of reading, which is reading on the screen. And what that will do is make the kinds of books that are being published ones that can be read on the screen, and be read in book form, and put onto the library shelf. That's where the distinctions will come in.

Bonnie Fuller: Will we all be reading on a device?

Friedman: I believe so, because we all have generations behind us who do everything on a device and find nothing uncomfortable about a device. And I think that when we in the book industry face the fact that this shift is going to happen automatically, everything will change in the book-publishing world.

Everything comes back to the beginning. I want you, David, to recommend omething to me. I don't necessarily want your product manager to represent that he or she thinks that that product is what I want. If you know me, you can tell me what it is that I want. I think that's what's happening here. It's interesting to kind of stand back a little bit, because my form of media, meaning book publishing, is very different than a lot of what we're talking about here. You read an author's book. You like that author's book. You go to the author's backlist, where you look for his or her next book. Again, that's part of community and the new brand. And I think today the consumer is smarter, and great. I mean, there are too many books out there. There are too many videos out there. There are too many toothpaste products out there. The consumer wants to make his or her choice. My goal would be to influence those consumers from a marketing standpoint and give them what they want, when they want it and how they want it.

Brian Napack: The textbook is an appalling way to deliver information. It's extremely time-intensive to develop. It's extremely expensive to produce, extremely
expensive to warehouse, extremely expensive to load to the marketplace. The students don't like it. The professors don't like it. It's bad access of information. You never have it where you want it. You have a bunch of students in K to 12 and in college who have right shoulders that are lower than their left shoulders. Everybody hates it. We hate it because we sell it. It goes into the marketplace and it comes into the used marketplace. So every time we sell a textbook once, it gets sold three or four more times, and I don't make any money on it. So, I'm looking forward to a digital transition. But in this case - and this is why I'm dwelling on education - education is migrating in a very elegant fashion, a methodical and elegant fashion not just toward new and additional products, but toward products which are better for all parties involved, with the exception of the used-book industry. So what we're moving from is from a content metaphor, where the content is king, to online where you have, yes, the content, but more important, you have tools, you have community, you bring students together with teachers, students together with each other.

The whole article is very interesting.

MediaWeek (Vol 1, No 37):

CEO of Indigo Books in Canada Heather Reisman answers some questions for Canadian Business. It was less interesting for me until I got to this:

Indigo has a policy created on Day 1. To the best of our knowledge, we will not sell child pornography or material with detailed instructions on how to build weapons of mass destruction. And we will not sell any material that has as its sole intent the incitement of society toward the annihilation of any group. We will sell anything else. Electronic books will have less of an impact on publishing than digital media had on music distribution. People will always want to have traditional libraries. I can’t imagine not being surrounded by my books.

I would say that gives them a lot of latitude! Bonnier is has bought Templar a children's publisher in the UK. The Bookseller The 'F-Bomb' and Batman. (I gots to get my hands on one of these copies). LATimes.

DC Comics has pulled back tens of thousands of copies of "All-Star Batman and Robin" No. 10 due to a printing error that put two R-rated words into word balloons in the story. Which words? Well, one begins with "F" and the other begins with "C" -- and, yes, it's that C word. The issue was written by Frank Miller who didn't even know about the dustup until we called him. "This is the first I've heard of it. I have no idea how this awful thing happened. It's just one of those terrible and glorious things that happen from time to time in publishing."

An interesting article by Bob Guccione Jnr. (yes that one) on the future of media in MediaPost:

Secondly, there is the wisdom of the market, which has been gradually forgotten in the intoxicating Second Coming of New Media. People are presumed to be a guaranteed audience, no matter how many times the cell of an idea divides into multiple copies. But people are not chickens in a yard that you can throw a handful of grain at and watch them scurry around pecking at the dirt to find it all. People try most things that are new for a while and then gravitate to what really matters to them, especially when overwhelmed. They will choose what they want and won't turn up in as many actual places as they do on business plans. The amount of choice will tremendously raise the bar of quality and performance for competing media. Once again, a golden opportunity for experienced brands.

Reed continues to do all it can to off load the magazines with financing. Guardian American Booksellers Association is doing something that may actually benefit their members. They have organized a POD program with Applewood Press. Future Perfect if:Book has a long post on Publishing in a Networked Era.

The emergence of the web turned this vision of the book of the future as a solid, albeit multimedia object completely upside down and inside out. Multimedia is engaging, especially in a format that encourages reflection, but locating discourse inside of a dynamic network promises even more profound changes Reading and writing have always been social activities, but that fact tends to be obscured by the medium of print. We grew up with images of the solitary reader curled up in a chair or under a tree and the writer alone in his garret. The most important thing my colleagues and I have learned during our experiments with networked books over the past few years is that as discourse moves off the page onto the network, the social aspects are revealed in sometimes startling clarity. These exchanges move from background to foreground, a transition that has dramatic implications.

This guy advocates stealing. Is that true for the Boston Globe?

I was heartened to learn that college kids are wielding the same Internet piracy tools they used to bring down the recording industry to download textbooks. Although the textbook oligopolists are fighting back mightily - the Association of American Publishers uses Covington & Burling, a take-no-prisoners law firm in Washington, D.C., to hunt down malefactors - there are at least two sites still around offering books: Textbook Torrents tends to be shut down, and moves around the Web, but the last time I checked, thepiratebay.org was offering such books as - well, you'll see.

Database Bookselling

Mick Sussman (NYTimes) pens an interesting essay on the application of book databases to retailing and the particular impact on second hand and antiquarian bookselling.

Indeed, the state of the art in used-book selling these days seems to be less about connoisseurship than about database management. With the help of software tools, so-called megalisters stock millions of books and sell tens of thousands a week through Amazon, AbeBooks and other online marketplaces. Some sellers don’t even own their wares. They just copy other sellers’ lists and then buy the books as necessary, pocketing the markup (though none acknowledge the practice, since it is banned on most commercial sites). To small sellers like Joe Orlando of Fenwick Street Used Books and Music in Leonardtown, Md., megalisters treat books as “simply a widget that they can make a few bucks on.” The megalisters — a name originally intended as a term of abuse but now accepted by the accused — don’t quite disagree. “What we’re trying to do is provide cheap books for everybody,” said G. Seth Beal, the president and chief operating officer of Thrift Books, which lists three million books and has 180 employees. Beal says he personally loves handling and collecting old volumes, but his business model is based on achieving economies of scale through automation.

An interesting essay which ends on a positive note suggesting there is still a role for old fashioned book intelligence (even if it may be aided by blogging and list-serves) and that 'if you know what you are doing' as a seller you will win out against the megalisters.

Johnny Temple and Akashic Books

I first learned about Akashic books by picking up a copy of their DC Noir anthology many years ago and only then because it was edited by George Pelecanos one of my favorite authors. Since then they have released several more in the series but I also started reading some of their crime novels set in Cuba. I've read several and had a few more sitting on the 'to be read' shelf These books are thoroughly enjoyable: Tango for A Torturer , Outcast.

Johnny Temple set up Akashic Books and here he is speaking to the Gothamist.

This is the intro:

Yesterday we sent some questions about the festival over to Johnny Temple, who chairs the fiction programming. Though many know him as the bassist for Girls gainst Boys, Temple has roots in the D.C. post-hardcore scene and, as comes with the territory, a passion for all things independent. His Akashic Books publishing house is dedicated to nurturing urban fiction and political non-fiction that mainstream publishers ignore. Their motto? "Reverse-gentrification of the literary world." So it's no wonder Ian MacKaye and Thurston Moore will also be holding forth in downtown Brooklyn Sunday.

We Should be Insulted.

John McCain insulted everyone Democrat and Republican in chosing Gov Palin as his VP choice. I wonder if in flying a mission over Viet Nam he would have chosen a deck hand as navigator?