The Famous Move Books

During Obama’s 60mins interview on Sunday he mentioned he was reading a lot about FDR’s first administration and specifically about the first 100 days. He didn’t mention a specific title and subsequent commentators have noted the Goodwin book Team of Rivals as a candidate. When Obama mentioned the subject, I checked Amazon for a likely candidate and I thought the book could be Alter’s The Defining Moment. At that point the Amazon ranking for the hardcover was 8961. On Monday it was in the 300’s and Wednesday (today) it is 195.

The NYTimes article from yesterday summed it up perfectly: Bingo. Goodwin's and other titles are mentioned in the article.

This tracking of title performance is becoming something of a sport. It is amazing there isn’t a storefront for endorsed books since all the marketing is done for you. Anyone in the book promotion business knows how important Jon Stewart is to driving book interest but if all of those endorsements from his show and all the others could be collected in an easy to search on-line store maybe the influence would be even more pronounced and longer lived.

Reed Business CEO to Leave

Reed Elsevier announced yesterday that Gerard van de Aast will be leaving his position as CEO of RBI on December 15th. Kieth Jones will be stepping in to fill the position on a temporary basis. Spectators will understand that this situation further complicates what has been a long frustrating process for Reed in attempting to get rid of this business.

The company has announced that discussions on the sale are at an advanced stage (but that's no guarentee, etc.). Perhaps this move by van de Aast is a precursor. Maybe he is be fronting one of the buyers groups.

MediaWeek (Vol 1, No 46):

What's going on in the Indian publishing market. 15% growth per year isn't bad. (Link):

When all sectors of industries seem to be getting affected by the ongoing recession in the world markets, the Indian book publishing market is going great guns. The book publishing market in India stands at approximately Rs 7,000 crore and is growing at a rate of over 15 per cent every year.

German media firms face the crunch but the biggest ones are sufficiently diversified. (Link):

Robin Meyer-Lucht, media thinker with the Berlin Institute, sees a silver lining in these economic storms. "The financial crisis is only the catalyst for the restructuring of the industry," he said to a recent media conference. It’s true. But this dark night with rain, snow, sleet and hail will pass slowly.

No need to visit your library if you live in Shelton, CT. they deliver. (Link)

Even if you can't transport yourself to a library, you can now have access to its materials thanks to a new homebound delivery service. Town libraries will soon kick off a pilot program to work out any problems in the system before making the service available throughout Shelton. Shawn Fields, branch director at Huntington Branch Library, said the service was conceived to help the elderly and disabled who might not be able to drive or walk to the libraries themselves.

In Davis's last year you can bet they are going to do there best to have a bang up year despite the economic downturn. Here they confirm their full year outlook. Reed may be insulated because of the vast subscription revenues they now rely on. If only they could get rid of Reed Business Information. Guardian:

The company, which has a range of business-to-business magazines, websites and exhibitions in the science, medical, business and legal sectors, told investors it was well placed to defy the gloomy economic outlook.

Reed Elsevier chief executive Crispin Davis said: "The business is on track for a very successful year and we expect to deliver Reed Elsevier's strongest constant currency earnings growth in over a decade.

"Whilst the economic environment is undoubtedly challenging, our businesses are more resilient than most and we are in a strong financial position."

Reed Elsevier announced a major restructuring programme in February 2008 and the publisher said today this was "progressing well". The company aims to build up to £100m in annual savings by 2011.

Also, Reed are looking to defer the refinance plan for the loan they needed for the ChoicePoint acquisition (Telegraph):

As credit markets come under increasing pressure and with Reed Elsevier's chief executive Sir Crispin Davis set to step down in March, the group is considering pushing back refinancing the $2bn loan until March 2010. By then, new chief executive Ian Smith, the former chief executive of housebuilder Taylor Woodrow, would have had his feet under the table for a year and the hope is that credit markets would have eased.

A clause in the terms of the first $2bn of the loan, which expires in March 2009, allows Reed to extend refinancing for one year. The second half of the loan, which is $2.175bn, is set to mature in 2011.

Guardian inteviews Blurb founder Eileen Gittins (Guardian):

The idea for Blurb came in her time after Verb, when Gittins, a former Kodak executive, returned to her love of photography: she compiled a photographic essay about people in and around Silicon Valley. In 2003, she wanted to produce 40 copies as gifts. The quotes for publishing it were horrendous; not only that, but there was the huge delay in getting the printing scheduled. Which got her thinking. What if you created a company that would handle the printing using a print-on-demand model? You'd generate the book on your computer with some software, upload a file with all the relevant data, and it would be passed to the printing company, which could do a run of one, or 10, or 10,000. Later that year, Apple launched iPhoto, its photo organisation program - which also included a "design a photo book, get it printed by Kodak" element. Validated, Gittins saw a potential business.

Google's Ancient Project

In my second post about Google in a day, I note the release of Ancient Rome using the Google Earth application. Anyone with a more than a passing interest in history is fascinated by the Roman Empire and its closely related architecture. Google has created Ancient Rome at the time of Constantine (320AD) and users of the application can navigate through the streets of Rome as it was. How cool is that?

Here is a YouTube video and more information.

The company have also launched a competition for educators.

While Google's suite of geospatial tools--Earth, Maps, SketchUp, and Sky--are used daily around the world by educators hoping to bring a fresh perspective to lessons, every once in a while a new product feature comes along that we believe will knock the socks off teachers and students alike! We're proud to announce the Ancient Rome 3D Curriculum Competition in conjunction with a brand new layer in Google Earth that models the ancient city of Rome in unbelievable detail.

For the first time ever, K-12 educators in the United States will have the chance to highlight their creativity and technical know-how by combining this brand new Google Earth content with classic classroom curricula.

The Google Registry

It would be a shame if the opportunity to create a unified (and uniform) bibliographic database itemizing the copyright status of our collective published works only resulted in a copyright database. Perhaps that comment appears strange but I believe the establishment of this 'registry' under the terms of the Google/AAP/AG settlement opens up a opportunity to tie an alphabet soup of identifiers, bibliographic (and multi-media product details), full content and transaction capability together in one form.

A primary reason ISBN was implemented so successfully in the publishing industry was that the number rapidly became integral to the publishing supply chain. Newer standard numbers such as ISTC, DOI - even ISSN in the retail channel - are not widely adopted because they have not become transactional identifyers. The same will be true if/when an Interested Party Identifier is established. The development of the Google Registry (surely the first task of the Executive Director is to come up with a name) may represent the only opportunity to tie each of these ancillary identifiers to one common objective. That objective is the better identification of content - not simply 'book' content, but content we will be using and transacting in an on-line environment.

How the registry may be formed is anyone's guess, but for sake of argument I envision a pyramidal structure. The identifier segment forms the pointy top layer, bibliographic data the second layer, content the third and the 'transaction gateway' the bottom tier. Then again maybe it's a cube and I should be adding subjects, a retail/library segmentation, and transactional details like rights information. Regardless, it seems to me combining each of these segments into a registry might engender significant opportunities to improve the publishing supply chain. But more than that, the combination I suggest works better for the on-line world than the off which is the failing of the current crop of ISBN databases (including Amazon.com).

Merchandising and search would be vastly improved if we were able to search by ISTC or IP using one database that would return all renditions of a work or all works/items produced by an author. Additionally, access to the content would be immediately available providing views of the content the searcher was interested in. Of course, all the copyright details about that work would also be available. Importantly, each of the elements in this registry would be linked so if someone happened on work they could rapidly find associated versions (ISTC) or other content produced by the author or publisher (IP).

The most obvious application enabled via the 'transaction gateway' would be purchase but a 'transaction' can be many things: views, queries, checkin-out, use rights, syndication and may more. An open service architecture would enable development of third party API's that could result in all kinds of new applications but existing ones would also benefit as well. Worldcat and Copyright Clearinghouse applications are good examples where users could find the physical content in a library or attain usage rights from CCC.

Google has provided $35mm to fund this registry and the governing board including publishers, and author reps will be forming a company to carry out the objectives of this registry. I hope their vision isn't too conservative because delivery of a copyright database is too simplistic a solution given how our content businesses are developing. Visioning a comprehensive 'bibliographic' solution that marries uniform content identification with an end transaction is what our industry really needs. We don't really need another stand alone bibliographic database.

Fred Newman

The Bookseller is reporting that Fred Newman has died after a long battle with Cancer. Fred started Publishing News 30yrs ago and only recently closed the publication down to concentrate of two of his newer businesses the British Book Awards and BML.

Shared Book Grows

I have mentioned Shared Book a few times here and they continue to gain traction with major publishers. In particular, their personalized books for children. Today they announced several new agreements:

SharedBook Inc., the Custom Publishing Platform provider, announced today new affiliate agreements with First Book, a national children’s literacy organization; Tattered Cover Book Store, the renowned independent bookseller in Denver, Colorado; Capitol Book and News of Montgomery, one of the oldest independent book stores in Alabama; Kidmondo, the online baby journal and organizer, and Grandparents.com, the premier life-stage destination for a new generation of active grandparents. All will link to www.kids.sharedbook.com , the first direct-to-consumer store featuring classic children’s books that can be quickly and easily be personalized. Kids.SharedBook.com is the new online destination for personalized editions of Fancy Nancy, The Night Before Christmas, Bad Dog, Marley and more than 100 other well known classic children’s books.

Visitors to SharedBook’s affiliates are taken to a custom-branded store that maintains the look and feel of the originating site. Once arriving in the store, consumers can create a custom dedication with text and photo that appears in the front of the book and, in some cases, can also personalize the back covers. Books are then purchased and printed in hard cover and shipped free to the recipient.

"SharedBook’s first group of affiliates reflects the broad range of companies interested in affiliating with the next wave of digital publishing. We hope these personalized books will spark lots of gift-giving ideas as we head into the Holidays,” said Caroline Vanderlip, Chief Executive Officer, SharedBook Inc. “We are extremely grateful for the support of our affiliate partners, and are pleased they have joined with us to re-think how books can utilize technology to create something lasting and special.”