MediaWeek (Vol 2, No 38): Carver, Google Scholar, Espresso Books, Reader's Digest, BusinessWeek

Per usual most of the following were on the twitter (@personanondata). Long feature article on Raymond Carver and long time editor Gordon Lish in the Observer.

The pair had worked together for years – Lish, a dashing, influential literary figure once known as Captain Fiction, had published Carver's first stories in Esquire magazine. (They had met in Palo Alto, when Carver was, as his wife later put it, a "practising alcoholic" working at a textbook publisher's.) Lish later became an editor at Knopf and championed many other writers whose styles were unlike Carver's – Don DeLillo, for instance, and Richard Ford. He went on to give writing workshops at which he managed, by all accounts, to be gnomic, crushing and inspiring in relatively equal measure. Lish's own fiction – he wrote stories and novels – is compact, antic and self-reflexive, with titles such as Wouldn't A Title Just Make It Worse?.

Carver was about as far from this world – both in content and style – as it was possible to be. His characters worked in diners and motels; they had amputated limbs and their families had left them, with or without furniture; their working lives, their cropped, half-understood thoughts had not been seen in fiction. Lish had edited Carver's first collection, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? and together they had composed a taut new voice full of left-field desire and hopeless dread. As Carver put it in the letter of 8 July: "You've given me some degree of immortality already."

Ex-Reed Elsevier CEO Sir Crispin Davis now favorite to become ITV Chairman (Guardian):

"The committee has therefore concluded that it would not be in the best interests of the company to appoint Mr Ball as ITV's chief executive," it added.

ITV insiders maintain that Ball expressed an unwillingness to work with the committee's leading candidate to replace Grade, the former Reed Elsevier boss Sir Crispin Davis, and expressed doubts about another potential candidate, the former Channel 4 chairman and founder of BMI, Sir Michael Bishop. After meeting Ball, Crosby is understood to have got the impression that Ball wanted a mere figurehead as chairman.

"The board was close to appointing Ball and told him about some of the chairman candidates and he told them he did not like any of them," said a source involved in the talks. "The board just felt like it could no longer go on dealing with this man."

Harsh. PD James is interviewed by The Telegraph:

She has a crack at explaining the genre’s appeal in Talking about Detective Fiction, an idiosyncratic and entertaining primer written at the suggestion of the Bodleian Library, which is publishing the book and to which James is donating hardback royalties. It is not a comprehensive history – she does not read much contemporary crime fiction apart from books by Ian Rankin and her old friend Ruth Rendell – but an imaginative response to some of her favourite authors.

The 89-year-old Lady James is trying to recall what first drew the teenage Phyllis, along with millions of other readers in the Thirties, to the so-called Golden Age detective stories.

“Those books suggested we live in a moral, comprehensible universe, at a time when there was a great deal of disruption and violence at home and abroad, and of course the ever-present risk of war. And we live in times of unrest now, so perhaps we may soon enter another Golden Age.”

Peter Jacso writing in Library Journal takes a long critical look at Google Scholar (LJ):

Google’s algorithms create phantom authors for millions of papers. They derive false names from options listed on the search menu, such as P Login (for Please Login).

Very often, the real authors are relegated to ghost authors deprived of their authorship along with publication and citation counts. In the scholarly world, this is critical, as the mantra “publish or perish” is changing to “publish, get cited or perish.”

Compounding the problem, the inflated publication and citation counts produced by GS will embarrass those who take the reported numbers at face value, as they discover that many of the publications, randomly scattered in the detailed result lists, are just variant formats of the same paper, and the citations are mismatched.

While GS developers have fixed some of the most egregious problems that I reported in several reviews, columns and conference/workshop presentations since 2004—such as the 910,000 papers attributed to an author named “Password”—other large-scale nonsense remains and new absurdities are produced every day.

On-Demand Books' Espresso Machine continues its glacier like expansion with the addition of the Harvard Bookstore (UWire):

The Espresso Book Machine—produced by New York-based firm On Demand Books—has been rolled out to a select few stores to date, but the one at Harvard Book Store will be the first with access to the 2 million public-domain texts digitized by Google, which also announced a deal with On Demand last Thursday.

After the unveiling on Sept. 29, Harvard Book Store customers will be able to order a printed copy of Google’s titles or On Demand’s 1.6 million works—all in public domain because they were copy-righted before 1923.

Store Marketing Manager Heather Gain said owner Jeffrey Mayersohn ’73 bought the machine in pursuit of a broader vision for the store—which he took over from long-time owner Frank Kramer last October.

“He would like to provide customers with every book ever written,” Gain said.

The Espresso Book Machine will be able to print a 300-page paperback book in four minutes, according to Gain, who added that printed books will be competitively priced and indistinguishable from those sitting on the shelves.

Customers will be able to request a book to be printed online or in the store, after which they can either pick it up in-store within minutes or have the book delivered by bicycle either the same or next day. Books can also be shipped to domestic or overseas locations.

See also The NYTimes. JISC (UK) has undertaken a market study of the impact of eBooks in higher education and their initial reports indicates some startling and unintuitive results (JISC):

The current estimate of revenue generated from publishers selling textbooks direct to students in the UK is £200 million. Publishers are therefore extremely cautious about making e-textbooks available, free at the point of use, through the university library, in case it cannibalises print sales. During the course of the project, the impact on the sales of the print equivalents of the 36 e- books licensed and made freely available to all UK higher education intuitions has been monitored. The data we have suggests that the availability of the e-versions has no impact on the print sales and that, certainly at the moment, e-textbooks are a back up to the print and will co-exist. JISC Collections is encouraging publishers to think of e-textbooks not as a threat, but as a new and different market.

Readers Digest announced it is consolidating its international web presence onto one digital platform (RD):

The Reader's Digest Association is launching a major new global initiative to bring its flagship iconic brand into the international digital arena, it was announced today by Eva Dillon, President, Reader's Digest Community. The company is rolling out a new Global Web Platform in over 40 international markets including China to debut live this week. The launch is a key part of a wider digital monetization strategy that will see Reader's Digest leverage its branded content on a variety of platforms.

Dillon said, "As one of the world's largest producers of original content, Reader's Digest continues its transformation in creating a global brand experience online. This new platform allows each of our international markets to focus on driving digital revenue via advertising sales and e-commerce, and creates a compelling online experience for new and existing customers."

Content re-packaging is a key component of the new Global Web Platform and the company is looking to leverage its existing material, as well as developing Web-exclusive content going forward.

Pressure builds on the commercial activities of the BBC particularly with respect to the company's purchase of Lonely Planet (Bookseller):

A report published on Wednesday (23rd September) by the Commons' Culture, Media and Sport Committee branded BBC Worldwide's purchase of Lonely Planet "the most egregious example" of the company's expansion beyond its existing remit. The committee added that if the Trust had been "a more responsible oversight body" more thought would have been given to the impact of the purchase on the sector as a whole.

The acquisition was originally resisted by rival publishers, who called for a review by the Office of Fair Trading at the time. Time Out guides m.d. Peter Fiennes said that this report had really "upped the ante". He added: "It's really significant that they have singled out the Lonely Planet acquisition. Before it was just one of a number of things . . . they've said it's quite clearly wrong." Fiennes said that there is now "so much more pressure" on the Trust to do something about the acquisition.

Adam Hodgkin makes some suggestions for Bloomberg in their thoughts over the acquisition of BusinessWeek and he concludes, (EE):

Many of these recommendations amount to saying "Make Business Week more like The Economist". One can be sure that The Economist does feature in a competitive analysis of what has gone wrong with BW, but The Economist also has not yet figured out how to deliver a solid audience of digital subscribers. BW will have some advantages in getting this right first. This sale is a break with the past. So much has not been working out well for BW in its digital initiatives that it is time that some sacred cows were sacrificed and some simple steps taken. Building digital subscriptions is the obvious path that needs to be developed.

Great to see Little Dorrit do so well at the Emmys (Guardian):

Little Dorrit, starring Matthew Macfadyen and Sir Tom Courtenay, was named best mini-series and won a brace of awards for writing, directing, art direction and costumes, chalking up more prizes than any other programme. But many of the most prestigious Emmys went to familiar US favourites. The sitcom 30 Rock, starring Alec Baldwin as an egotistical television executive, was named top comedy for the third consecutive year while Mad Men, a critically acclaimed depiction of politically incorrect 1960s advertising executives, won best drama for the second year in a row.

Document Cloud: Back-up in the Cloud

In a twist on the idea of massive data sets - the idea that the data supporting research is as valuable as the conclusions and should be made available as part of research findings - a new start-up is taking the idea to news gathering. DocumentCloud already has the participation of numerous large media companies that will enable these companies to 'deposit' the back-ground material and primary research supporting their investigative and news gathering. Funded initially by grants, DocumentCloud expects to create a revenue model over the next two years as they expand. From their website:

DocumentCloud will be software, a Web site, and a set of open standards that will make original source documents easy to find, share, read and collaborate on, anywhere on the Web. Users will be able to search for documents by date, topic, person, location, etc. and will be able to do "document dives," collaboratively examining large sets of documents. Organizations will be able to do all this while keeping the documents--and readers--on their own sites. Think of it as a card catalog for primary source documents.

Enabling access to this material will, the company says, make it easier for researchers, journalists or bloggers to do research, investigate and report on a wide range of material. And you may be saying to yourself 'I can do this at Scribd, so what's different?' The answer is you can deposit your documents in Scribd and other similar sites and list your documents with DocumentCloud; however, DocumentCloud will be scrupulous in allowing submissions to their listings. From their site:

How will you guarantee authenticity? How will you fight copyright infringement? How will you keep the collection free from spam and inappropriate material?

It will be of the utmost importance to us that the collection remain of the highest integrity, so we're planning to limit the right to list documents, at least initially, to individuals and organizations involved in original reporting. Contributors will agree to a set of guidelines, and will have to vouch for the authenticity of the documents they upload.

More information on their website.

Seth Godin: Rethinking the Publishing Industry

The following was written by Eugene Schwartz who sat next to me at yesterday's meet-up and took better notes than I.

Publishers need to develop their own “tribal” networks to reach readers to whom they will be selling books in the new marketing environment. It is a concept that applies to authors, agents and anyone in the business who wants efficiently to create a market for their work. The old way of waiting for the publisher to promote the work is becoming ineffectual.

This was Seth Godin’s message at a Brown Bag lunch sponsored by the Digital Publishing Group (founded by Susan Danziger of Daily Lit) and held at the Random House building in New York. Godin is author of ten best-selling books including Permission Marketing and Purple Cow. He is the founder of the interest community “lens” builder Squidoo.com, and former vice president of direct marketing at Yahoo.

Preaching revolution in the master’s den so to speak, Godin advised the more than 150 largely mainstream publishing house staffers that if they want to advance into the future and their employers didn’t see the light, they should put in the sweat labor in their off hours to demonstrate to their employers the efficacy of building social network followings centered around themes and/or authors. And if this didn’t do the trick, there would be something to be said for leaving and finding – or starting – another venture that understood where the future lies.

Publishers need to recognize that many of the production, marketing and distribution skill sets which authors relied on them for in the past are easily available to the authors themselves as well as to startup publishers by other means. The publisher’s value proposition needs to be reinvented in that light. Godin made the comparison to the music industry, “Music hasn’t gone away, but the old music industry has.”

According to Godin there is a five year window of opportunity for the industry to reshape itself to the new realities: readers can find advance information about any book on line before they buy it, and they will respond to free previews – or even free whole books – by buying more printed works or eBooks. It is in the next five years, he believes, that tribal franchises will be defined and won.

You build this tribe and the right to promote new books to them by gaining their permission through the prior interest you have generated by generous access to content and experiences that draw them to your site and your mailing list.

“If you have people’s attention, you can make money,” Godin declared. You start promoting your new book well before it is written by using the internet through blogging, hosting content-driven sites, and social networking to accumulate a tribal following. When to start promoting? “Five years ahead of time,” he suggested, underscoring the point.

The major error being made by established publishers (and agents and authors I would add) using conventional business models, Godin says, is to see new technology and the internet as a way to make old business models work better instead of as an opportunity to destroy (no sentimentality here) and reinvent the old. Strong medicine, imho – but true. Hard to conceive of at a meeting on the 44th floor of the Random House building – although we can take comfort that at least the building will survive in its present form.

-- Eugene G. Schwartz

Gene Schwartz is currently launching a new web service for authors named WorthyShorts.

SharedBook Announces Several New Initiatives

Many readers will know I have been a fan of the SharedBook model for several years now and enjoy keeping track of their new initiatives. Here is a recent update on several new announcements from the company:

Today, Congressman John Culberson http://culberson.house.gov (R-Texas) placed a link on his site that allows his constituents to read and comment on the House Healthcare Bill, using SharedBook’s annotation platform. In the Congressman’s words, “this new website will give you, my constituents in the Seventh District, a choice in the health care debate. You now have an opportunity to read and comment on the bill. I look forward to reading your comments and restoring public trust in the government by raising the level of openness, order and discourse.” We applaud the Congressman for taking Transparency to a new level by allowing his constituents to give him feedback on healthcare reform in a very granular and detailed way.

Meanwhile, Google has informally announced on its blog that they now have an affiliation with SharedBook’s Blog2Print product, to enable users of the Blogger platform to easily translate their blog into a physical book or PDF download. Since Blog2Print was introduced in July of ‘07 ago, tens of thousands of bloggers have created a permanent record of their posts and photos. See http://buzz.blogger.com/2009/09/turn-your-blog-into-book-with.html.

On September 14th, Hachette, through its Twelve Books imprint, with authors Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, launched three chapters of their best seller “NurtureShock” into the SharedBook annotation platform, to allow readers to discuss their controversial findings on child rearing. The New York Times and others covered this experiment in social media as applied to published works and we are excited to watch the discussion progress. (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/07/business/media/07book.html?_r=1)

And Woman’s Day is using SharedBook’s Smart Button to allow consumers of their web content to create their own cookbooks <http://www.womansday.com/shared_book.html> from Woman’s Day recipes. With a couple of clicks, users can compile a cookbook of their choice, add more personal content to it if they so desire, and save it to their hard drive or create a hard or soft bound copy.

Finally, we’ve added another 50 titles from assorted publishers to www.Inscribe-it.com and are looking forward to the Holiday season, when we are told that some major magazines and media outlets will choose these personalized books as a featured Holiday gift item. A home page redesign will be launched to usher in the 4th quarter.

More posts on SharedBook.

Is all Springer Science + Business now in Play?

Bloomberg is reporting that bids for the 'up to' 49% share of Springer have been disappointing at the PE owners may be considering sale of the business or sale of a majority stake. Earlier this week bids from a short list of PE firms were noted in the press but these appear to be lower than expected. From the report (Bloomberg)

The Berlin-based publisher may draw better offers with the sale of the whole company or even majority control, the people said. Springer Science announced in April it planned to sell as much as 49 percent of the company to lower debt and fund acquisitions. Offers haven’t met the company’s targets, the people said.

The initial stake sale was intended to raise as much as 500 million euros ($740 million), Eric Merkel-Sobotta, a Springer Science spokesman, had said.

EQT Partners AB, a Swedish private-equity firm partly owned by the Wallenberg family, TPG Inc., Apax Partners LLP and a combination of Providence Equity Partners Ltd. and the Carlyle Group were among the bidders for that stake. The bidders learned Sept. 18 that EQT was the frontrunner, the people said. TPG Inc., Apax and the combination of Providence Equity and Carlyle remain in the running.

Justice Prevails: The Deal is Done.

Last Friday, the Justice department (DoJ) effectively ended the debate on the Google Book Settlement (GBS). In an exceptionally well-thought-out, rational and practical submission, the DoJ established for everyone the parameters of the argument and the terms under which the GBS should be approved by the NY court. Google, AG and AAP don't have to agree to all of the suggested changes; there are both degrees and some negotiated offsets that will give the plaintiffs some flexibility in authoring the final, revised document, but what Google, AG and AAP will do is exhale a sigh of relief, incorporate many of the suggestions noted by DoJ and, as a consequence, will expect the court to approve the revised agreement. It is unlikely Judge Chin will preside over the final decision-- there simply isn't time before he (presumably) begins the approval process for his elevation to the Appeals Court. It's possible he will approve as is but with some oversight using specific guidelines to address imposed changes, but that would be unlikely given the 'importance' of this agreement to copyright law. More likely, this case will be passed on to a second judge. As a result, it could be another six months before the final revised version is approved by the court.

Encouragingly, the DoJ was balanced in its opinion, specifically noting the wide public interest that this content database will support. It is this argument that - in part - balanced some of their important concerns. Opponents took specific heart in this statement regarding DoJ's emphatic statement that the agreement should not be approved in its present form. It is important to remember that the DoJ and Judge Chin's court represent two separate arms of government and Chin is not obliged to accept all of the DoJ's statement out of hand. The DoJ's statement is wider in scope than the law upon which Judge Chin is to adjudicate: Specifically, potential impacts on competition that may result from this agreement. But in the context of a well-balanced, nuanced and implementable statement, the judge can use the DoJ statement to 'encourage' the plaintiffs to address some expansive concerns that, in the true interpretation of his remit, would otherwise be outside his immediate concern.

It is the opposition to this agreement that is, ironically, left out in the cold. Congratulations are in order for the success of the intense opposition to the agreement (or parts of it); however, the DoJ statement has established the future parameters of the arguments against. With the DoJ imprimatur now ranking the arguments, it would seem unlikely that any new argument or variation of the old will gain support: In their way, DoJ has validated all the legitimate arguments and anything outside of those will not now have 'legitimacy'. The plaintiffs benefit also because they no longer have a moving target, nor a need to 'read the tea leaves' from the Chin court: The requirements are now specific and actionable.

All this tells me that--unless AG, AAP and Google want to grasp defeat from the jaws of victory and ignore the DoJ statement (and they have already returned to the negotiating table so this is unlikely)-- this agreement will be approved with many of the changes DoJ has specified. Justice prevails for both sides of this argument.

Conference on Google Book Settlement

NYU Law School is hosting a conference on the Google Book Settlement in two weeks. I am on a panel of publishing industry people and will be discussing my estimate of the Orphans population. Here are details (D is for Digitize):

Everything about the Google Book Search project is larger than life, from Google's audacious plan to digitize every book ever published to the gigantic class action settlement now awaiting court approval. The groundbreaking proposed settlement in the Google Book Search case is so complex that controversy has outpaced conversation and questions have outnumbered answers.

We aim to help close these gaps.

D Is For Digitize will give this complex lawsuit the sustained attention it deserves. An interdisciplinary lineup of academics and practitioners will examine the settlement through the lenses of copyright, civil procedure, antitrust, information policy, literary culture, and the publishing industry.

The conference is timed to coincide with the rescheduled fairness hearing in the Google Book Search case, which will be held on Wednesday, October 7 in New York City, just five blocks from the Law School. The next few days after the hearing (October 8th - October 10th) are to provide a forum for addressing the numerous issues that have emerged and are most relevant to society at large.

The conference schedule and speaker list have been posted, and will continue to be updated. For more information about the settlement, visit thepublicindex.org, our site to study and discuss the proposed Google Book Search settlement. There you can browse and annotate the proposed settlement, section-by-section.

Registration