Digital Book World Conference: January 26/7th

Tickets for the Digital Book World conference are going like hot cakes and there are rumors the organizing group may have to close registration early so get your tickets now. No one wants to be the one left out at the next publishing cocktail party when you can't join the conversation about sessions like the following:

Getting Comfortable in Niches
The shift from horizontal paths to audiences to vertical ones is a hard concept for people who have grown up in book publishing to accept. This panel features publishers from niches as diverse as Mind Body Spirit, Sustainable Living, and Science Fiction, who have made the shift and will talk about how to build a sustained relationship with a vertical audience.

Speakers: Rebecca Smart, President & Managing Director of Osprey Publishing Brent Lewis, Harlequin Reid Tracy, President & CEO, Hay House Margo Baldwin, Co-Founder, President & Publisher Chelsea Green Publishing. Time: Tuesday January 26th 1.00pm


Teaching Authors to Fish: Empowering Authors to Market Themselves
One thing is sure about the new digital age: publishers know that that author marketing is among their most important tools. All sorts of efforts are being made by publishers to make authors more effective as their own advocates. A collection of publishers and an outside service provider that gives authors free web tools will discuss how publishers can make authors their most effective marketing allies

Speakers: Peter Clifton: Founder, President & CEO, Filedby Matt Schwartz: Director of Digital Strategy & Business Development, Random House Cecelia Tan: Founder, Circlet Press Christina Katz: Author Time: Wednesday January 27th 1.00pm

(I'm moderating both).

Use my courtesy discount code (DBWadvisor) to get $200 off the fee.

See you there.

Publishing Futurist: REPOST

Continuing my effort at regurgitation, here is a post from 1/8/2007 where I think about changes in education.

During an interview a few weeks ago, I was asked if I were to look at one segment of the publishing industry 10 years from now what would be my most radical forecast? It is a hard question because the rate of change in publishing is so rapid and all segments of the industry will see significant change in different ways over the next decade. Technology is fundamental and what often makes predictions like this difficult is to anticipate how technology can open new applications which are not immediately apparent on first exposure. For example, cameras on cell phones - have become widely used because they addressed a need in an unanticipated way.

Many people, myself included, thought that a camera on a cell phone was a worthless extravagance but because we never had access to this technology we couldn't understand where or under what circumstances it would be used. Now taken for granted, I take pictures with my phone all the time and soon I will be reading barcodes with it enabling me to access to product information as I browse through a store.

In publishing, social networking, wikis and blogs etc. will become the primary publishing platform for educational publishing. Currently, the environment is anarchic and it is hard to see how the formula heavy education market could leverage this technology to produce a better product. I think it is inevitable.

My answer to the question posed to me was that I envisioned an environment where there were no set textbooks, content or a curriculum for particular courses. Courses would have learning objectives both general and specific and the students would be required to obtain and/or demonstrate their understanding of the core material against these objectives. The student could obtain this knowledge and understanding via any means they wanted. In addition to demonstrating a mastery of the course objectives they would also have to justify the reference material and methodology they used to obtain their knowledge.

My comments are not unique and in a recent CNET interview, John Seely Brown (former chief scientist at PARC) suggested that,

"rather than treat pedagogy as the transfer of knowledge from teachers who are experts to students who are receptacles, educators should consider more hands-on and informal types of learning. These models are closer to an apprenticeship, a further-reaching, more multilayered approach than traditional formal education."

He also discussed a number of current examples of collaborative/social learning including a site at Brown University that brings together experts on Boccaccio.

Educational content will still be vitally important in any futurist vision of learning and education but it will not be delivered or published in forms we are currently familiar with. In my view, it is the current publishing paradigm that is slowing the development of online/ elearning methods. Publishers publish traditional book products and most of what they do is dictated by the format of a print product which does not travel well in the online world. The tasks publishers support for scoping, editing, veracity, testing, etc. will gain in importance as some other (non-value add) functions are eliminated.

Teaching methods will also change as educators spend more time and effort on critical thinking, research techniques and collaboration/mediation. Flexible teaching methodologies will allow students to learn more effectively. For example, for a student that learns by doing perhaps simulations will feature more with this student versus the student that learns by reading.

Who knows if my idea is relevant but without a doubt change comes rapidly to the manner in which children are being taught. As this gathers steam the children themselves could have more influence on the methodology and the supporting material than the traditional school, academic, publisher triumvirate.

Agatha Christie

A visit to Hatchards on Piccadilly is always an expensive one. A narrow crowded space with creaky floor boards and a wide curved set of front windows it looks right out of central casting as the quintessential representation of what an old victorian bookstore might have been like. A complete nonsense of course but Hatchard's remains one of the few constant destinations in our infrequent trips to London. The store has a very well curated collection of books and their buyers go deep into categories despite the small location.

Had it not been for Hatchards I wouldn't have seen the collection of Agatha Christie titles that began to trickle out from Harpercollins in 2008 (I think). These 'new' hardcover titles recreate the original published covers and trim size and are now a wonderful 38 volume set. There are more to come I think but he lies a frustration. As far as I can tell the no one is offering to sell the entire set: A consumer has to buy them individually - gambling somewhat that they have them all. Now really, with an author that maybe the world's most popular wouldn't it make some sense to market to this expansive audience a bit more aggressively. These titles are even hard to find on the HC web site. Here would be some examples:

• a complete boxed set
• a mail order version - a new title delivered by mail each quarter from the publisher
• individually boxed titles (sold as a set or separately)
• inscribed editions that allow you to gift the books with an inscription

These are books that are read and re-read and there is no question that some one who buys one of these titles couldn't be induced - without too much difficulty - to buy all of them. Interestingly, I intended to write this post last year after I visited Hatchard's but this year I was again reminded of the continued frustration at not being able by buy all of the titles in one go and the obvious lack of creativity on behalf of the publisher.

Hughenden Manor

UK09087, originally uploaded by Personanondata - Michael Cairns.

The UK is in the grip of a winter storm unlike any they have had for a long time. In December we visited Hughenden Manor the home of Queen Victoria's Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. As you will note, there was already a lot of snow about even before Christmas and it made for a very pretty scene. Hughenden Manor is in High Wycombe just off the M40 and north of the M25. If you've driven to Oxford you will have passed this house.

Click on the image or click here for the rest of the set.

MediaWeek (Vol 2, No 53): Television, Amazon, Libraries, And a book about running.

Wasn't sure if I was going to do one of these this weekend but what the hey. Next week we start back at week one. I will be posting my 2010 predictions on Tuesday and I hope you find them interesting. The Independent gives us a heads up on some of the TV adaptations that may be coming our way. (As I mentioned last week a second series of Cranford is on its way here in January). Independent:

Book publishers have fallen on hard times but a new crop of festive television adaptations is luring in new readers and boosting sales. .... "A TV adaptation can be the best free advertising a book can get," said a spokeswoman for Waterstone's, which saw sales of John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps treble in the week after a festive screening in 2008. "Frequent Jane Austen adaptations garner remarkable sales and reintroduce new generations of readers to her books. Where the effect is most obvious, though, is with relatively obscure classics and with contemporary novels."

Sales of Elizabeth Gaskell's "lost classic" Cranford soared by more than 500 per cent at Waterstone's in the four weeks during and after its BBC airing in 2007, compared with the four weeks before the serialisation. The bookseller expects another, albeit less dramatic, sales rise after the bonnet drama's recent return.

Reuters suggests that Amazon's 'coyness' with respect to full disclosure of eBook and Kindle sales could come back to bite them if they begin to see a softening in the numbers. Currently, all good news but what if things backtrack and what will that do to their share price. I wonder if Bezos cares. (Reuters):

But investor patience with the lack of details has begun to wear thin, particularly as Amazon shares hit an all-time high in early December on expectations it will be one of the biggest winners in overall sales growth this holiday season.

That benefit of the doubt could be further tested in 2010 as more e-readers enter the market and challenge the Kindle.

"As long as Amazon continues to have the right margins and the right profit numbers at the end of every quarter, they can probably get away with that," said James McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research.

But if the Kindle's streak goes cold and Amazon continues to keep investors in the dark, they could turn on the stock.

"You may suffer a 10 to 15 to 20 percent correction because the uncertainty factor would be so high," McQuivey said. "It ensures that if there is bad news, people imagine the worst."

John Naughton at the Observer picks up the same theme on Sunday:

But the combination of the two "facts" has further ratcheted up speculation that 2010 will be the Year of the Kindle and the end is nigh for the printed codex.

If you detect a whiff of what philosophers call "technological determinism" in this, you're in good company. I have on my shelves a (printed) copy of The Myth of the Paperless Office by Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper, a wonderful antidote to the irrational exuberance of Kindlemania. The authors conducted an ethnographic study of how people actually use paper in order to reach an understanding of which of those uses might conceivably be eliminated by electronics, and which might not. It should be required reading for anyone showing the early symptoms of Kindlemania.

Do you think you've got the autobiographic goods? If so, your life story could become a bestseller in a competition to be run by the BBC and the Daily Mail:

As many as 15 true life stories will feature in a new five-part TV series called My Story, to be broadcast on primetime BBC1 next year. And every week, after each programme, one person's story will be published, with an advance of £20,000 from a leading publisher.

There's going to be some stiff competition if Petty Officer Parton is anything to go by. More from the Observer that suggests UK readers may be talking about India's Abraham Vergese's stunning story of Siamese twins in Ethiopia which will be getting a boost from a TV tie-in (Observer):

A novelist, even a well-reviewed one, may sell just a couple of thousand books. It is no way to make a living, unless of course you catch the attention of Britain's biggest literary star-maker, the television producer Amanda Ross.

Novels that find favour with Ross can be expected to achieve much, much more. The film The Lovely Bones, to be released at the end of this month, is based on the novel of the same name by Alice Sebold which shot up the bestsellers list after it was featured on the programme Ross devised, Channel 4's Richard & Judy. Cecilia Aherne's PS I Love You followed the same route to the cinema, while Victoria Hislop's The Island was plucked from relative obscurity by the show's regular book review slot.

The Guardian Blogs that playlists could do for books what they have done for music sites like Spotify (Guardian):

But perhaps there is more to the notion of the playlist than first meets the eye. Not long ago, I was mucking about on Spotify when a thought occurred me. The online music library's extensive catalogue impresses for obvious reasons, but what genuinely recommends the service is the public playlist facility, allowing individual users to curate and publish groupings of songs based on whatever criteria take their fancy. It's a fascinating way to discover music, to expand one's tastes, and the only limitation is the imagination of the curator. And I wondered: why not a similar facility for books?

Librarians in Aberdeen - and now online - are learning to combat information overload (Press & Journal)

This enormous mass of information (often conflicting) requires organising and managing in order to make some sense of it, and to enable others to make best use of it. These skills of information organisation go to the heart of what it means to be an information professional: a role found in a huge variety of different types of organisation.

It is a dynamic and challenging career path to follow, but one which is very rewarding. The department of information management at Aberdeen Business School at The Robert Gordon University delivers full-time and online master’s degrees in information management and information and library studies accredited by the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP).

Recently, the department has also developed a new and innovative course, the Access Foundation (Graduate Certificate) Information Studies (GCIS), to provide flexible access routes into its master’s degrees. The GCIS course is delivered entirely online over a period of nine months. It provides a new access route for students with experience of information work, but without the necessary educational qualifications for entry to postgraduate courses.

Several librarians take issue with how library's role in the Google Book Settlement has been characterised by Harvard's Robert Darnton (NYRB):

In his recent article criticizing the Google settlement ["Google and the New Digital Future," NYR, December 17, 2009], Robert Darnton fails to acknowledge the significant role that libraries have had in the creation of Google Book Search as well as the concrete steps they are taking to address the sorts of concerns he raises. Libraries are using Google-digitized volumes to create the "truly public library" that he seeks, and these same libraries are taking responsibility for the preservation of Google-digitized volumes. ... Libraries are much further ahead in the game than Darnton would have readers believe. Although there are disappointments for Google partner libraries in the settlement agreement, libraries have worked to secure important privileges, including significant influence over the commercial pricing of Google's Book Search product. The settlement also sanctions important uses of digital volumes, including those that are in copyright. These include providing access to content to users with print disabilities and using libraries' digitized volumes in large-scale computational research. Opening the enormous body of Google-scanned content to new user populations and methods of inquiry will have a transformative effect on our ability to produce and analyze knowledge about our society, our heritage, and the world. We invite Harvard to join us in this endeavor!

UK Libraries are in a mess and all kinds of suggestions are being offered. "Why shouldn't libraries sell books," asks minister Margaret Hodge raises prospect of libraries expanding role beyond lending books in major reconsideration of policy (Guardian)

A report on 2008 library statistics: The Academic Libraries: 2008 First Look summarizes services, staff, collections, and expenditures of academic libraries in 2- and 4-year, degree-granting post-secondary institutions in the 50 states and the District of Columbia (link). Tim Spalding from LibraryThing on a boon doggle to Christchurch, New Zealand in this video on social cataloging (Vimeo). A book about running (Observer)

Even though running is the world's most popular hobby, the running bookshelf is curiously empty. Of the few books on the subject in print, nearly all fall into one of two categories: either how-to tips or personal accounts of one man's perseverance against pain. Both share one weird feature: as celebrations of running they make running seem pretty awful. It comes across like performing home surgery – it'll hurt, require expensive equipment and leave scars. ... Gotaas combs the world for true running tales, and comes up with some beauties. Who knew that naked running was the vogue in 18th-century England, with men and women racing separately and thousands of spectators lining the race course? Or that in ancient Egypt, Ramses II legitimised his hold on the throne by performing a long-distance run every few years, a ritual he performed until he was over 90?

I ran a lot in 2009 and had some good race times. That's not a bad collection for the end of the year.

The year's top 10 PND articles

The top ten articles read this year (no surprise on the first one).

ISBN is Dead
Border's Store Closings
Digital Concierge
Five Questions with Bondi Digital
580,388 Orphans Give or Take
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Loose Credit Rating
Predictions 2009: Death and Resurrection
Anderson News Folds Tent
Presuming No Book
Harcourt Houghton Mifflin in Anti-Trust

Works Progress for Scanning

Carl Malamud blogging on the Radar O'Reilly blog speaks eloquently about the need for a coordinated approach to digitizing the nations print content and one that doesn't "lien on the public domain, preventing the public from accessing these vital materials." He concludes (O'Reilly):

If the government invested a mere $100 million of our stimulus package (we've already spent over $72.6 billion), that means 2 billion pages of paper or microfiche would get scanned. For $500 million, we're talking a huge chunk of our national backlog being digitized, a task that would result in an enduring digitial public work for our modern era, something that would prove immense use to future generations, and would also save the government tremendous amounts of money in storage costs and other facilities expenses.

What would it take to get the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, the Government Printing Office, the National Archives and Records Administration, and the National Technical Information Service all singing off the same page and working together? There is a tremendous opportunity for White House leadership here, bringing the parties together and creating a compelling case on why we should launch and fund a 5-year $500 million effort to create a National Scan Center. Both the CIO and the CTO in the Executive Office of the President have talked about the tremendous "moral authority and convening power" of the White House, and I believe that this issue is of sufficient importance that it would be worthwhile to pursue.