Making Information Pay 2009

BISG has announced the speaker line-up for next months Making Information Pay conference. Here is the link to the registration page. It should be another full house.

Speakers and topics include:

The first part of the conference will feature the latest data from multiple industry sources. Confirmed speakers and session topics include:

• Leigh Watson Healy, Chief Analyst, Outsell
  A Time of Great Change: Insights from Top Publishing Executives on the Future of our Business

• Mike Shatzkin, Founder & CEO , The Idea Logical Company
  The Publishing Climate 2009: Publishers Wrestling with Change

• Jim King, SVP & General Manager, BookScan US
  The Retail Perspective: What’s Up? What’s Down?

• Kelly Gallagher, General Manager, Business Intelligence, R.R. Bowker
  The Customer’s Always Right: Who Is Today’s Book Consumer?

The second half of the conference will feature leading publishers discussing their strategies for current and future success. Confirmed speakers and session topics include:

• Dominique Raccah, Publisher & CEO, Sourcebooks, Inc.
  Business Unusual: Rethinking the Publishing Enterprise in Response to Changing Times

• Marcus Leaver, President, Sterling Publishing
  The New Marketing Budget: Breaking Traditional Marketing Allocations to Build a More Effective Model

• Josh Marwell, President of Sales, HarperCollins
  The 21^st Century Catalog: A Look at HarperCollins’ Initiative to Shift from Print to Digital Catalogs

Dave Thompson, VP, Sales Analysis, Random House
Squeezing the Most Sales from Non-Book Accounts: Tactics for Working with Inexperienced Buyers in Mass Merchant and Other Non-Book Accounts

Snooth and Book Selling

I have now been to several NY Tech Meetup meetings where the audience gets to hear (in five minutes) all about five or six new tech start ups. This is a large, appreciative and young audience and I have found myself nodding surreptitiously so some other gray beard across the aisle as we both realize the average age of the audience and the presenters are less than my shoe size. That doesn't stop the excitment however, and most of these presentations are really interesting having been vetted before hand.

This week a presentation from an online wine merchant was particularly interesting. The company Snooth is based in Brooklyn and has created a front door to wine sellers around the world. On top of that they have incorporated and organized content (formal and social) that provides a user with a wide degree of latitude in search. The interface is clean and the functionality is both well designed and obviously well tested.

Wine isn't really publishing or book related but what struck me relevant about this webstore were the similarities between the bookselling environment and wine. The founders speak about a disorganized and insular business that confused vintners and consumers alike. Applies to publishing - check. Yet wine is also complex in a similar manner to books. Wine is matched to taste and occasion and so are books. Wine is produced in many locations by many vintners - read subjects, authors or publishers. Wine is dominated by large brand merchandisers - read publishers. Wine is sold by many unconnected retailers - read book selling.

Snooth has aggrated content to support a consumers' choice and also aggregated supply so that consumers can locate and order from a local supplier (and one they know has the wine in stock). Snooth collects inventory data from a global network of 11,000 merchants and they recently announced their 100,000th registered user. And true to my heart, they are building a data analytics program that will support value-added revenue opportunites.

Michael Tamblyn suggested thinking about a new paradigm for on-line bookselling and Snooth could be an example. Check it out.

Someone's Blinded

Did you hear the one about the blind person that shelled out $350 to buy a Kindle just so they could listen to a book rather than buy a braille version? Assuming they could find the book in a braille version. Deciding the approach is far more convenient for them despite the tinny voice-over, they decide to spend their book dollars on Kindle eBooks rather than Braille books and as luck would have it, they spend more on books now that they have more choice and a far more convenient option. So every one wins: the consumer, the publisher, retailer and author - right? Apparently not.

Even though it could be legitimately argued that enabling the speech to text functionality on the Kindle could actually increase revenues (reasons above), the Author's Guild has 'persuaded' Amazon (who uncharacteristically folded like a deck chair) to disable the tool. AG believes they are protecting the economic rights of their authors. Yes, this is a real and legitimate function of the AG: View their work protecting authors in the Google book scanning suit, but no sooner had the shine on that agreement begun to dull that they stepped into this mess of their own making.

This is not about the Blind but they are now the unwitting victims of this misguided action by the AG. And realistically, who could believe the AG would ever want to take on Blind people? I'm confident there are even some blind member authors of AG. (I wonder how they feel). On the other hand, it is about the AG attempting to maintain an authors right to royalties from audio versions of their books. Yet, I must be missing something. If I buy a book for the Kindle how many times am I going to also buy the audio version? Never, is the answer. Just like if I buy an audio book for my drive commute I am unlikely (never) going to also buy the print version.

Now I am sure some will say "Oh, I did do that once," and on a few occasions I have found my self in the middle of a hardcover book and not wanting to tote it on a trip have bought the paperback at the airport. But rarely; that is, effectively never.

My point is I don't see where the author is out any royalty. It is hard to believe there is any appreciable overlap in formats purchased of the same title that makes this concern of AG's even remotely valid. On the other hand, maybe more people would buy more books if they had more options available in the manner in which they consumed them. Blind people included. Everybody wins.

For the record, if you want to read this aloud to someone -even yourself - go right ahead.

Another Embargo Undone?

The Bookseller is reporting that A&C Black is very concerned that the embargo keeping the latest Wisden Cricket Almanac off the shelves until April 6th was broken. According to Nielsen Bookscan, 816 copies of the book have been sold before the embargoed date. That's a lot of copies but could this be a case of mistaken identity or bad data? Why didn't anyone notice until the numbers were reported? We shall see.

Shared Book to provide annotation publishing tool to ourenergypolicy.org

Shared Book announces a new partnership today with web company ourenergypolicy.org that empowers OEP users with the ability to add and include comments to source documents without changing the original document. Implementation of this tool allows the user to determine which comments and mark-up is most useful to them and include or attach that material to the document. The user can then decide when to publish the material rather than having to wait for the publisher's publication date.

From the press release:

SharedBook’s annotation platform allows approved experts on OurEnergyPolicy.org to contextually add initial and responsive comments to an energy document through online footnoting, while not allowing the original content to be changed, creating a digital platform for a discussion of energy policy. The platform also has a compilation and print capability, allowing books to be created from the content with any combination of the annotations, which appear in the book as footnotes.

“Integrating our revolutionary annotation technology with OurEnergyPolicy.org is an excellent showcase for the capabilities of the patented platform,” said Caroline Vanderlip, Chief Executive Officer of SharedBook. “By allowing authorized experts to contribute thoughtful comments on the specific energy policies and positions being discussed, our annotation platform allows discussion on the site to evolve in a thoughtful, controlled way. It also gives users the option of creating books, PDFs or other printed output with a specified combination of the annotations, for use in government hearings, outreach efforts, and elsewhere.”

More on SharedBook

MediaWeek (Vol 2, No 13): OCLC, Amazon, Dawson, Curation, Bookfairs

Things are really bad in newspaper land when you can't get a copy at your local library any more. On top of this they will be charging for internet access. (BBC)

"Savings of around £10,000 will be made by ending the provision of national newspapers in a handful of libraries," a spokesman said. "National newspaper websites already publish full editorial content." The council also plans to charge people £1.30 to use computers with internet access after the first 30 minutes.

Newsagent distributor Dawson has suffered another deflection (Telegraph):

Dawson Holdings, which distributes magazine and newspaper titles to newsagents, retailers and airlines, said in a trading update today that it expected Telegraph Media Group to "terminate" its deal in the autumn.

Last month Associated Newspapers, publisher of the Daily Mail, and Comag, the joint venture between Condé Naste and the National Magazine Company, announced they would not be renewing contracts with Dawson when they expire in 2010. The two deals accounted for £139m in revenue for Dawson last year.

Dawson also has a library supply business in the UK.

WorldCat (OCLC) has partnered with book/reading social networking site WeRead (Info2Day)

It is the latest organization to join the list of more than 25 OCLC World partners. With one of the largest and most popular social book discovery applications on Facebook, MySpace, bebo, Hi5, and Orkut, weRead is a natural fit to partner with OCLC to enhance the social networking and user-discovery aspects of WorldCat.

Cindy Cunningham, director of partner programs for OCLC says, "The mission of weRead-the social discovery of books-extends and further enhances the WorldCat.org goal to connect users with their local libraries. With weRead being a Lulu company and the corresponding support for self-publishing, OCLC can offer its users access to an entirely new reading experience."

Can Curation save the media industry? (SiliconAlley)

So, what are both Maheu and Schrier in agreement about? Curation. It's a word that gained a lot of traction in the past 12 months as the overarching trends of ubiquitous distribution and mass content creation have emerged as the two headed dragon that may slay media as we know it.

The old model was "one to many" (NBC -> viewers). The new model is "one to a few" (YOU -> your friends and followers). That means there is an overwhelming explosion of content being created (Twitter feeds, blog posts, Flickr photos, Facebook updates) and most of it is interesting to a very small number of people. But, mixed in with this cacophony of consumer content, there is contextually relevant material that needs to be discovered, sorted, and made "brand safe" for advertisers. Curation is the new role of media professionals.

Separating the wheat from the chaff, assigning editorial weight, and -- most importantly - giving folks who don't want to spend their lives looking for an editorial needle in a haystack a high-quality collection of content that is contextual and coherent. It's what we always expected from our media, and now they've got the tools to do it better.

Flat World Knowledge gets $8mm for open source textbook venture. (Reuters)

Flat World offers students online books for free and the option of paying for a printed copy, which typically costs less than a comparable textbook from a college store. The textbook "Principles of Microeconomics," for example, costs $30 for a black-and-white copy and $60 for one in color.

"The idea here is the cost of textbooks has gone up dramatically over the last 10 years," says Hooks Johnston, general partner at venture firm Valhalla Partners, the largest investor in the startup. Other VC investors include Greenhill SAVP and High Peaks Venture Partners.

Amazon changes their payment terms to small publishers in the UK (Times)

The online retailer is asking for an extra 2% off the list price of books from suppliers that use its Amazon Advantage system in order for them to be paid by May 15 for sales made in April.

Those that remain on standard terms, which already involve giving Amazon a 40% discount, will not have invoices from sales made in April settled until the end of June.

The new terms, which Advantage customers were informed of last week and take effect from Wednesday, have stirred industry anger.

“How dare they try this on when we are feeling the pinch more than ever?” said one small publisher. “It’s nothing more than an attempt to rip off the small fry.”

Publishers estimate that up to 20% of books sold by Amazon go through its Advantage system.

BookFairs seem to be holding their own: "No child has too many books" (AP)

Book fairs have been around for decades, although the field now is largely controlled by Scholastic. The publisher says its business has grown from around 8,000 annual fairs in the early 1980s, with sales of around $5.5 million, to around 120,000 fairs expected this year.

The field is enticing enough that Barnes & Noble, Inc., has steadily increased its own fairs by double digits over the past few years, to over 10,000 in 2008, according to the superstore chain's vice president of speciality marketing, Kim Brown.

"As the school budgets are tightened up, the parents - the PTA - are looking for different ways to fund-raise," Brown says. "Luckily, people save their discretionary income for their children."

Educators and parents welcome the money, with 25 per cent or more of the take going back to the schools, but, as with the Scholastic book clubs, they worry about what's being sold. Scholastic fairs, like the clubs, often feature books that are tied to TV shows such as "Hannah Montana" or non-book products such as pencils, markers, toy banks and electronic games.

Encarta Dies

Earlier this week Microsoft announced that they were closing the Encarta encyclopedia operation. There is a write up on this news on the NYTimes Bits blog but I thought more interesting that that post was comment by Tom Corddry who worked on the Encarta team from the beginning. His self described 'grave side toast' is as follows:

I ran the team that created Encarta, so I’m standing up to say a few awkward words at its graveside memorial service. Encarta, may it rest in peace, deserves to be remembered more for its quality than you suggest. Your sources repeat several notions that were never true of Encarta-first, that the content from Funk and Wagnall’s was “low quality” compared to Britannica, and second that the value added by Microsoft was primarily “graphics and sound.” The text from Funk and Wagnall’s was far superior to Britannica’s as a starting point for a digital encyclopedia, because it was much more nearly “structured data,” meaning that the architecture of the text was very consistent from one article to the next. This allowed us to add a lot of “contextual” value–to compute the relatedness of every article to every other article, and build what was at the time a uniquely useful set of links and navigational tools across the entire content. Britannica, by contrast, was a bloated mishmash, a consequence of its long tradition of having articles written by many different celebrity authors. (I ghost-wrote one myself, in fact). By the standards of the print encyclopedia world, Microsoft invested heavily in expanding and updating the content of Encarta right from the beginning. We consciously invested in the contextual value just described, in expanding the core content, in creating the world’s first truly global encyclopedia, and in an efficient update cycle. We had enough “multimedia” in the original product to keep the reviewers happy, but focused on the overall usefulness of the whole product much more than on the relative handful of video clips, etc. I’d argue that within its first five years, Encarta became the best encyclopedia in history: it had tremendously consistent quality and usefulness across a very broad range of topics, and added a great deal of value by the relationships it illuminated between topics. All of that has been rendered a bit quaint now, but in it’s day it was an accomplishment worthy of a graveside toast. Encarta had more than “the potential” to unsettle the print encyclopedia business–it pretty much destroyed it. Print encyclopedias were dead, thanks to Encarta, before Wikipedia existed. We expected from the beginning that Encarta would eventually be superceded by online information-seeking. As brilliant as Wikipedia is, I don’t think that Wikipedia by itself killed Encarta. I think the Web as a whole made Encarta obsolete. I hope treasured old copies of Encarta will live on for a while in remote corners of the world, where people have scattered access to computers but little or no connection to the Web–school libraries in Africa, for example. In those places, even out-of-date copies of African Encarta, the only Encyclopedia of Africa ever published, will live on, and Joe Biden will forever be newly-elected. I’ll drink to that.

—Tom Corddry

In answer to several comments in reaction to this statement he has some further comments as well.