Champions (Again)

The nill nill draw with Arsenal gives United their 18th title and third successive league title. With one irrelevant game left in the league next week, it's on to Rome to meet Barcelona in the Champions League final. Looking forward to a repeat of our win last year. Old Trafford is the European Capital of Trophies.

MediaWeek (Vol 2, No 20): Harpercollins, NYTimes, Long Tail,

In the NY Observer this week Debbie Stier from Harpercollins and Harper Studio is asked about social and digital media (Observer):

“Change is easier for some people than for others,” she said. "You know how some people are hoarders and they don't like to throw anything out? I'm the opposite: I get this weird thrill from throwing everything out and having nothing." Ms. Stier is the head of digital marketing at HarperCollins, as well as the associate publisher of HarperStudio, the small imprint there whose stated mission since it formed last spring has been to question conventional industry wisdom concerning advances and returns, and to experiment with untested methods of promotion. Ms. Stier is among the most visible and energetic believers in the idea that publishers must stop relying on critics, journalists and talk show hosts for coverage, and instead start finding creative ways of reaching readers directly through emerging social media tools like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.

“I’ve been running down the halls screaming ‘fire’ for a couple of years now, and you know, I feel like it’s only recently that people are starting to hear me,” Ms. Stier said. “It’s hard for me because I’m up here in my own little beehive of exciting stuff, and I forget that there’s a world of people out there in the rest of the industry who don’t believe. But there are definitely pockets of people who do, and those pockets are growing more and more, faster and faster, which is good.”

There is a lot of debate about the merits of the central arguments made by Chris Andersen in The Long Tail - that is, whether there is one. A new report (summarized here) looks at P2P and appears to debunk the Long Tail concept:

A study of P2P music exchanges to be revealed this week suggests that the ailing music business is shunning a lucrative lifeline by refusing to license the activity for money. Entitled "The Long Tail of P2P", the study by Will Page of performing rights society PRS For Music and Eric Garland of P2P research outfit Big Champagne will be aired at The Great Escape music convention tomorrow. It's a follow-up to Page's study last year which helped debunk the myth of the "Long Tail".

Page examined song purchases at a large online digital retail store, which showed that out of an inventory of 13 million songs, 10 million had never been downloaded, even once. It suggested that the idea proposed by WiReD magazine editor Chris Anderson, who in 2004 urged that the future of business was digital retailers carrying larger inventories of slow-selling items was a Utopian fantasy.

Via Mr Nash, here is the link to the whole document. (Link)

The brianiacs at the NYTimes are showing off some of their toys. (Nieman)

The R&D group is obsessed with the ability to seamlessly transition among web-enabled gadgets. They’re not convinced that the future will land on a single, multipurpose contraption — like some sort of Kindle meets Chumby meets Minority Report. Instead, they predict consumers will connect to the Internet through their cars, on their televisions, over mobile networks, and in traditional browsers, while expecting those devices to interact and sync with each other.

Reports in the Guardian from the Journalism Enterprise and Experimentation unconference in sunny Birmingham looked at hyper-local success stories (Guardian):

A session in a break-out room featured James Hatts talking about the London SE1 Community website. James was quite candid about getting different levels of support for the initiative from different organisations. Their patch covers Southwark and Lambeth. Southwark Council have, it seems, for years treated them as a news outlet on an equal footing with the traditional local media. By contrast, SE1 have found it difficult at times to even get Lambeth Council to send them press releases. Similarly, Hatt said that whilst Scotland Yard were forthcoming with information about serious crime in the area, the local police forces were more cagey.

The International Coalition of Library Consortia has weighed in on the OCLC data usage guidelines (ICOLC):

The member consortia endorsing this ICOLC statement add our recommendation to others in the library community calling for OCLC to withdraw the proposed policy and start anew to formulate a record use policy. Most notably we add our support to the January 30, 2009 Final Report to the ARL Board by the Ad Hoc Task Force to Review the Proposed OCLC Policy for Use and Transfer of WorldCat Records. It includes an extended review of the policy and six recommendations. We concur with the ARL report that OCLC develop a new policy based on widespread member library participation with a clear set of goals and explanations as to how the policy will achieve these goals and how member libraries will be affected operationally and legally.

Caroline Pittis from Harpercollins uses BookBusiness magazine to argue publishers must be less reclusive in order to thrive in the social economy (BookBus):

So, how do book publishers add visible value for their authors and consumers in new ways? What needs to change, and perhaps more importantly, what needs to stay the same? As both a publishing “insider” and a frequent reader of publishing’s critics, I am often struck by how the public discussion of these questions is fundamentally different than private ones, how the focus of those inside publishing houses is different from those in the blogosphere. Beyond publishers’ walls, the tremendous value editors and their publishing colleagues provide in helping an author create a publishable work is often unknown. Yet, the vast majority of publishing time and energy go into just this activity—the core of what publishers do.

In the blogosphere, some opine about how hidebound and irrelevant publishers now are, how slow to change and resistant to risks. It makes good copy sometimes—I know I always bite on the most critical headlines first! Rare are the critics, however, who have concrete, insightful, specific suggestions of how to evolve publishing without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Black-and-white thinking and talk of violent revolution distract many from the natural evolution that is both occurring and will likely be more sustaining for the “book” economy in the long run.

Summary of Making Information Pay

Happily I don't have to do this myself because the nice people at Follow The Reader have done this for us. They note some interesting stats from Bowker's book reader panel and link to the other presentations (Post):

Who was reading in 2008

• 45% of Americans read a book
• The average age of those who read a book was 44
• 58% of readers are women
• 32% of readers are over the age of 55
• The average reader spends 5.2 hours reading per week vs. 15 hours online and 13.1 hours watching TV (In 2008, going online surpassed watching TV as a primary activity)

Who was buying books in 2008

• 50% of Americans over 13 bought a book
• The average age of the most frequent book buyers was 50 yrs old
• 57% of book buyers are female and they buy 65% of books (e.g. women buy books and they buy in volume)
• 67% of books are bought by people over 42; Gen X buy 17% of books; Gen Y buys 10%
• Of books purchased by those who earn $100K or more, mystery and detective fiction represent 16%, juvenile 13%, romance 6%, thrillers 4% and comics and graphic novels 4%
• 41% of all books are purchased by those who earn less than $35K
• The average price of a book purchased last year was $10.08
• 31% of all book purchases are impulse buys

Pelecanos Interviewed by LATimes

I have mentioned I enjoy the work of George Pelecanos, who in addition to publishing 16 books, is also a writer and producer most notably of The Wire. In this interview he discusses his new book but he also touches on community work he has undertaken in prison reform. Here is a 'snippet' (LATimes)

GP: I've been working in adult prisons and juvenile prisons for some time. The prison in the book is based on a place called Oak Hill here in D.C., which is where all the juveniles are sent if they do time. I was out there one day -- I was kind of walking around, I had full access, the boys were in class, and I went into one of the kids' cells -- it just kind of hit me. It was a 6-by-9 cell, it's basically a cot and an open commode sitting in the middle of the room, and there's a dirty piece of plexiglass on the wall that functions as a window, but it's so dirty that you can't see out of it, and very little light gets in. I just started thinking: What's it like? What's it like for a kid to go to jail, and also what's it like for his family? How does this tear them all apart?

I'd been very interested for a long time in incarceration reform. Here in Washington we have a new guy that's been at it for several years now. He's done a tremendous job of trying to change things so that these incarcerations don't just rip up families but neighborhoods and our city, because that's what happens. That's why the book is split into two parts, so you see the way the system was run before, and then these guys go back later in the book when the jail is getting ready to be torn down, and they see how much it's changed for the better.

George is on tour and will also be autographing at BookExpo.

JISC Study on Higher Education

At London Bookfair, mention was made of this report commissioned by JISC in the UK that looks at the educational market. While this is a UK study, there is little doubt most of this is relevant to a much wider audience. Here is an snippet of their conclusions: (Link)

The impetus for change will come from students themselves as the behaviours and approaches apparent now become more deeply embedded in subsequent cohorts of entrants and the most positive of them – the experimentation, networking and collaboration, for example – are encouraged and reinforced through a school system seeking, in a reformed curriculum, to place greater emphasis on such dispositions. It will also come from policy imperatives in relation to skills development, specifically development of employability skills. These are backed by employer demands and include a range of ‘soft skills’ such as networking, teamwork, collaboration and self-direction, which are among those fostered by students’ engagement with Social Web technologies.

Higher education has a key role in helping students refine, extend and articulate the diverse range of skills they have developed through their experience of Web 2.0 technologies. It not only can, but should, fulfil this role, and it should do so through a partnership with students to develop approaches to learning and teaching. This does not necessarily mean wholesale incorporation of ICT into teaching and learning. Rather it means adapting to and capitalising on evolving and intensifying behaviours that are being shaped by the experience of the newest technologies. In practice it means building on and steering the positive aspects of those behaviours such as experimentation, collaboration and teamwork, while addressing the negatives such as a casual and insufficiently critical attitude to information.

Google Print: A Numbers Game

The following post was originally published in March 2007 but I recently saw an up tick in views which prompted me to look at it again. Given the excitement over the Google Settlement I thought it would be interesting to post it once more.


The following post is written by Andrew Grabois who worked with me at Bowker and has (among other things) compiled bibliographic stats out of the Books In Print database for a number of years. His contact details are at the bottom of this article.


On February 6th, Google announced that the Princeton University library system agreed to participate in their Book Search Library Project. According to the announcement, Princeton and Google will identify one million works in the public domain for digitization. This follows the January 19th announcement that the University of Texas libraries, the fifth largest library in the U.S., also climbed on board the Library Project. Very quietly, the number of major research libraries participating in the project has more than doubled to twelve in the last two years. The seven new libraries will add millions of printed items to the tens of millions already held by the original five, and more fuel to the legal fire surrounding Google’s plan to scan library holdings and make the full texts searchable on the web.

The public discussion has been mostly one-sided, with Google supporters trying to hold the high moral ground. Their basic argument goes something like this: The universe of published works in the U.S. consists of some 32 million books. They argue that while 80 percent of these books were published after 1923, and, therefore, potentially protected by copyright, only 3 million of them are still in-print and available for sale. As a result, mountains of books have been unnecessarily consigned to obscurity.

No one has yet challenged the basic assumptions supporting this argument. Perhaps they’ve been scared off by Google’s reputation for creating clever algorithms that “organize the world’s information”. This one, though, doesn’t stand up to serious scrutiny.

The figures used by supporters of the Library Project come from a 2005 study undertaken by the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), the largest consortium of libraries in the U.S. According to the OCLC study, its 20,000 member libraries hold 31,923,000 print books; the original five research libraries participating in the Google library scanning project hold over 18 million.

OCLC did not actually count physical books. They searched their massive database of one billion library holdings and isolated 55 million catalog records describing “language-based monographs”. This was further refined (eliminating duplicates) to 32 million “unique manifestations”, not including government publications, theses and dissertations. The reality of library classification, however, is such that “monographs” often include things like pamphlets, unbound documents, reports, manuals, and ephemera that we don’t usually think of as commercially published books.

The notion that 32 million U.S. published books languish on library shelves is absurd. Just do the math. That works out to more than 80,000 new books published every year since the first English settlement in Jamestown in 1607. Historical book production figures clearly show that the 80,000-threshold was not crossed until the 1980’s, after hovering around 10,000 for fifty years between 1910 to1958. The OCLC study showed, moreover, that member libraries added a staggering 17 million items (half of all print collections) since 1980. That averages out to 680,000 new print items acquired every year for 25 years, or more than the combined national outputs of the U.S., U.K., China, and Japan in 2004.

Not only will Google have to sift through printed collections to identify books, and then determine if they are in the public domain, but they will also have to separate out those published in the U.S. (assuming that their priority is scanning U.S.-based English-language books) from the sea of books published elsewhere. The OCLC study clearly showed that most printed materials held by U.S. libraries were not published in the U.S. The study counted more than 400 languages system-wide, and more than 3 million print materials published in French and German alone in the original Google Five. English-language print materials accounted for only 52% of holdings system-wide, and 49% in the Google Five. Since more than a few works were probably published in the United Kingdom, the total number of English-language books published in the U.S. will constitute less than half of all print collections, both system-wide and in Google libraries.

So how many U.S.-published books are there in our libraries? Annual book production figures show that some 4 million books have been published in the 125 years since figures were regularly compiled in 1880. If, very conservatively, we add an additional 1.5 million books to cover the pre-1880 years, and another 1.5 million to cover books published after 1880 that might have been missed, we get a much more realistic total of 7 million.

Using the lower baseline for published books tells a very different story than the dark one (that the universe of books consists of works that are out-of-print, in the public domain, or “orphaned” in copyright limbo) told by Google and their supporters. With some 3 million U.S. books in print, the inconvenient truth here is that 40% of all books ever published in the U.S. could still be protected by copyright. That would appear to jive with the OCLC finding that 75% of print items held by U.S. libraries were published after 1945, and 50% after 1974.

If we’re going to have a debate that may end up rewriting copyright law, let’s have one based on facts, not wishful thinking.


Andrew Grabois is a consultant to the publishing industry. He has compiled U.S. book production statistics since 1999. He can be reached at the following email address: agrabois@yahoo.com

Clarification update from Andrew: My post is not intended to be a criticism of the OCLC study ("Anatomy of Aggregate Collections: The Example of Google Print for Libraries") by Brian Lavoie et al, which is a valuable and timely look at print collections held by OCLC member libraries. What I am attempting to do here is point out how friends of the Google library project have misinterpreted the paper and cherry-picked findings and conclusions out of context to support their arguments.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Lose Credit Rating

Speculation about the financial health of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt took another turn for the worst when Moody's debt rating agency removed its' rating on HHM's debt. According to the report in the Irish Times the action by Moody's will impact virtually all the company's debt and it likely to both further raise the cost of their borrowing (although they were already at Caa3 with a negative note) and increase the expectation the company will default. From the Irish Times report:

Moody’s said that it took into account “the business risk and competitive position of the company versus others within its industry; the capital structure and financial risk of the company; the projected financial and operating performance of the company over the near-to-intermediate term, and management’s track record and tolerance for risk”.

Last month, Moody’s downgraded some of HMH’s debts to Caa3 from Caa1, and put it on a negative outlook. The move meant that it classed the company’s debts as high risk.

Earlier this year, long time HMH executive and current CEO Tony Lucki retired and was replaced by Barry O'Callaghan.