Future of Publishing from DK and Penguin

I was curious why visitors to PND were looking for a Penguin video - now here it is (hat tip to paidcontent):



Link

EBSCO Buys NetLibrary

Announced yesterday and summarized in an article in Library Journal, the deal to sell OCLC's NetLibrary division to EBSCO looks to be a smart move by OCLC. From the LJ article:

In a strategic shift, OCLC today announced the sale of its NetLibrary Division to EBSCO Publishing and the exit of H.W. Wilson databases from the FirstSearch service. In doing so, OCLC moves its business from hosting and reselling vendor content further along the road toward "new Web-scale services for libraries" that include integration and expansion of WorldCat Local ("the one search box that does it all"). Meanwhile EBSCO Publishing, the database aggregator, continues to expand its offerings.

"It’s a strategic repositioning from hosting and reselling content to building WorldCat out as a platform that libraries can use to manage and provide access to their entire collection," including ebooks and articles, said OCLC VP Chip Nilges in an interview with LJ. It's also "part of a broader effort to provide comprehensive coverage" of ebooks in WorldCat, said Nilges. "We have an agreement with Google Book Search to link to books in WorldCat; we have a similar agreement with Hathi Trust. We're in hot pursuit of many different providers." (Also see Nilges's account of his history with OCLC's econtent efforts.)

OCLC rebuilt NetLibrary after they collected the company out of bankruptcy and in the process they updated some key technology, re-established relationships with publishers and re-aligned their management team. However, in an increasingly competitive market for e-Books and e-Platforms, the process of expanding content and market share must have looked daunting for OCLC. There is likely to be some consolidation in this segment over time and this NetLibrary deal looks to be one of the first examples of that trend.

Eric Hellman has a good summary of why this deal was executed (Go To Hellman):

The sale of NetLibrary should be viewed primarily as a capital allocation decision by OCLC. eBooks and eReaders are not the only change happening in the library world, and NetLibrary is not the only major product at OCLC that would suck up significant capital. OCLC is making significant investments in cloud-based library management service based on WorldCat and WorldCat Local, and sensible managed businesses, even non-profit ones, allocate capital according to the potential value created.
...
The reason that a move into ebooks makes sense for EBSCO is that ebook purchases are really subscriptions. The print book production and distribution chain was built under the assumption that once the book was delivered to the customer, the transaction was done and could be forgotten. Magazine subscriptions, by contrast, are continuing relationships. Electronic magazines and journals require even more continuing support, and this is true for ebooks as well. A corporate infrastructure built to sell and support magazine subscriptions works well for supporting ebooks.

Hiatt at Count Basie Theater in Red Bank

John Hiatt rocks and in the show at The Count Basie Theater in Red Bank last week he put on a typically professional and intimate show. Backed by "The Combo" - which is actually three tried and true old hands, the group ran through many of Hiatt's standards and mixed in half an album worth of new material. The same evening the band performed on Letterman and according to John he got the call the day before: 'Say, would you guys like to come on the show tomorrow night'. Letterman seems to be a fan and has had Hiatt on the show a few times. Letterman once asked Pete Townshend about 'smashing is guitar' which is the subject of a great Hiatt tune Perfectly Good Guitar. Mr. Townshend was untypically clueless.

Oh it breaks my heart to see those stars
Smashing a perfectly good guitar
I don't know who they think they are
Smashing a perfectly good guitar

He played that one as well but no smashing guitars this time.

Here is a link to a free download of one of his new tracks.

Some photos from the evening:



Flickr Link

Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - Opens March 19th

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo opens on March 19th and is set to play in Chelsea and Lincoln Center. The Swedish movie has already grossed $100mm in worldwide distribution and should make a bit more now that it has a release schedule in the US. Here is a link to the Music Box (Film distributor) website where there is more information. Here is the movie trailer:



Also an interview with Noomi Replace who plays Lisbeth Salander in the movie (named Millennium in Sweden) AFP

Managing Born Digital Archives

NYTimes looks at the archiving challenges for librarians dealing with born digital archives and in doing so they also speak to the unique presentation opportunities that digital archives enable for scholars (NYTimes):

Some of the early files chronicle Mr. Rushdie’s self-conscious analysis of how computers affected his work. In an imaginary dialogue with himself that he composed in 1992 when he was writing “The Moor’s Last Sigh,” he wrote about choosing formatting, fonts and spacing: “I am doing this so that I can see how a whole page looks when it’s typed at this size and spacing.

“Oh, my God, suppose it looks terrible?”

“Oh, my God, yeah. And doesn’t this look wrong?”

“Where’s the paragraph indent thing?”

“I don’t know. I will look.”

“How about this? Is this good for you?”

“A lot better. How about fixing the part above?”

At the Emory exhibition, visitors can log onto a computer and see the screen that Mr. Rushdie saw, search his file folders as he did, and find out what applications he used. (Mac Stickies were a favorite.) They can call up an early draft of Mr. Rushdie’s 1999 novel, “The Ground Beneath Her Feet,” and edit a sentence or post an editorial comment.

“I know of no other place in the world that is providing access through emulation to a born-digital archive,” said Erika Farr, the director of born-digital initiatives at the Robert W. Woodruff Library at Emory. (The original draft is preserved.)

To the Emory team, simulating the author’s electronic universe is equivalent to making a reproduction of the desk, chair, fountain pen and paper that, say, Charles Dickens used, and then allowing visitors to sit and scribble notes on a copy of an early version of “Bleak House.”

“If you’re interested in primary materials, you’re interested in the context as well as the content, the authentic artifact,” Ms. Farr said. “Fifty years from now, people may be researching how the impact of word processing affected literary output,” she added, which would require seeing the original computer images.

MediaWeek (Vol 3, No 11): Food and Shakespeare.

Cookbook author Gordon Ramsay is interviewed in the Observer on his annus horribilis (Observer):

After a year of scandal in his personal life and financial woes in his business empire, Gordon Ramsay looks back with some regret – and some anger – and looks forward to his latest British restaurant opening. ... He books under the name Gordon, not Ramsay, so as not to scare the chefs, but he still finds he has to wait 15 minutes longer than other diners for each course, so eager is everyone to impress. At Hotel Le Bristol he encountered a chicken dish for two costing €260. "I'd get stabbed in this country if I charged that! Even if the chicken had its arse wiped every day by the farmer and they said its feathers were shampooed by John Frieda – I'd be shot. Even if the chicken was delivered by the Queen's driver and had this little Armani dressing gown on before it got taken to the slaughterhouse." ... I ask about the swearing. "Fuck!" he said. "When you saw those two Kitchen Nightmares condensed into one – last year when they had those 298 'fucks' – I wasn't proud of that. There has come a time when, at the age of 43, I'm getting a bit tired of the foul-mouthed bully chef. But I've never tried to get the Great British blue-rinse nation to start falling in love with me. I don't want a radical change where I have to put a woolly hat and scarf on and go round every Women's Institute and improve their Victoria sponge or show them a much better recipe for spotted dick." ... "What have I learned?" Ramsay wonders in the car. "I've learned that outside the UK I'm not going to hold the baby with the liabilities coming out of my own pocket. One reason I lost €1.3m in Paris is because the French have become fucking lazy. They want to work 32 hours a week and they call themselves uniquely talented chefs. We do that work in two days over here.

And there is more where that came from. If you visit Chicago you have to go to Rick Bayless' restaurant Topolobampo and in addition to Gordon, Rick also has cookbooks (Observer):

For six years he lived part time in Los Angeles and part time in Mexico with his wife Deanne, working on his first book, Authentic Mexican: Regional Cooking From the Heart of Mexico, written before he had opened a restaurant. "I would go into Mexico and detail everything that was available," he says of these years of research. "I would go into restaurants and list everything they were cooking, how they were cooking it. Because I was light-skinned, marketholders would view me with suspicion if I took notes." They would assume he was some kind of policeman. "So I had to memorise exactly what these ingredients were that they were selling. What they were used for."

With the book completed he was drawn back to Chicago. "I thought I was going to become a food writer but at the same time I knew I needed to do something else. Suddenly I was not driven to write about the food. I had to cook it." With the help of wealthy friends from Los Angeles he opened the Frontera Grill. I suggest to him that the restaurant was essentially his interest in anthropology expressed by another means. "I think that's exactly right." The title of his long-running television show for PBS and the book that has accompanied it, Mexico –One Plate at a Time, speaks to that sense of a man working to understand a country directly through its food.

Robert Crum picks on Americans as he discusses the question "Who really wrote Shakespeare?" (Observer):

Surely not that 'upstart crow' from Stratford? As James Shapiro's new book rehearses the loony arguments about our greatest playwright, we ask some of today's finest Shakespearean actors and directors their thoughts on the authorship question. .... Delia Bacon was a formidable advocate for her namesake. Of course no one individual could possibly have written the plays attributed to Shakespeare. He was little better than a "pet horse-boy at Blackfriars", "an old showman and hawker of plays", an out-and-out "stupid, illiterate, third-rate play actor". The catchy vehemence of her arguments eventually got debated by two riverboat pilots on the Mississippi, one of whom, Samuel Clemens, would become the most famous writer in the United States, Mark Twain. But it was not until the very end of his career that the author of Huckleberry Finn returned to Bacon's theories. At a dinner at his house in January 1909, Twain's circle decided that it was possible to find the coded signature FRANCISCO BACONO in a sequence of letters from the First Folio.

Those who are devoted to the belief that Edward de Vere is the real author of the canon have to swallow almost as much hocus pocus. Despite his inconveniently early death in 1604 – before Macbeth, King Lear, Coriolanus, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest were written and/or staged – de Vere continues to fascinate the anti-Stratfordians for whom the plays are the surrogate autobiography of a secretive literary earl. This Oxford caucus derives a good deal of its confidence from the advocacy of Sigmund Freud. Possibly more embarrassing to the father of psychoanalysis, Freud's views are based on one book, "Shakespeare" Identified by John Thomas Looney, another American.

This is bibliographic "crack" and you will get lost for a while if you succumb (Link). From the twitter (@personanondata) National Post Canada argues halfheartedly for an Open Canadian Book market. Irony: it could help Heather monetize. Completely Novel announces an author blog award program and nominations are now open for (Link) Cengage Learning Unveils Suite of Digital Solutions and Services Focused on Improving Student Engagement (Link) Man U sees the return of Beckham to Old Trafford and we end the week on top again. Sadly, Becks is out of the World Cup (BBC).

Charity Bookselling - Repost

Originally posted on December 6th, 2006:

As a result of our annual clothes cull that ends in a trip to the Salvos I found myself in the basement of said 'mission' in Jersey City looking through their shelves of donated books. We ended up buying 12 books for $20. All were in reasonably good shape and some were worth more than the amount we paid for them. Earlier this year as a fun exercise (when I found myself with a lot of time on my hands) I set up a bookstore on alibris to sell books I knew I would never read again.

As it turns out, I have sold about $300 worth of books. The store front on Alibris cost $10/mth. I ultimately put some of the books I found at the Salvos in my Alibris store and it was easy to see that if you knew what you are doing you can easily buy low and sell high. There are many people who make considerable amounts buying books at yard sales and charity locations and selling them on. That is too much work for me.

It is surprising to me that Goodwill and The Salvation Army do not consolidate their bookselling activities. I hadn't really thought about this until I received a recent copy of Rare Book Review. Setting up a store front to sell second hand books could be beyond the abilities of Goodwill or the Salvos, but with so many easy online options and even 'wholesalers' such as blue rectangle who will buy titles in bulk (if they need them), it seems strange that these charities wouldn't be considering doing more with books. The story in RBR that caught my eye was on the increasing presence of Oxfam bookstores in UK high streets. Clearly, charities in the UK have recognized the value in selling donated books and have by accident or design taken on the small traditional local second hand bookseller. Not only is the traditional bookseller under cut on price but their supplies are also dwindling because the increased presence of charity bookstores serves to take away potential inventory.

The article notes the presence of Oxfam's Marylebone store which has an annual turnover of over £400K. As the article continues:

Oxfam's bookshops are the clear market leaders in the charity sector. Their transformations from ill-sorted repositories for unloved paperbacks to serious players in the secondhand and antiquarian book market has been swift and icily efficient. Between 1998 and 2005, sales rocketed year on year by 20% giving them an annual turnover of more than £16million, and making them Europe's largest bricks-and-mortar second hand book retailer. About 50 new stores have opened in the past year.

And they are not all in big city centers, as one local vendor in little Dumfies (I have visited) noted there are no second hand retailers left but there are four charity shops.

The crux of this article is the question of tax exempt status and it is a valid one. Regrettably, the poor second hand and antiquarian retailer is not going to garner much political support but it is a fair question whether it is right that charity shops can push for profit businesses out of business. On the other hand, as is argued in the article, perhaps the bookseller needs to compete better. Oxfam may become a victim of its own success with other charity organizations moving into 'their' market. They recognize this and are becoming more sophisticated in approach and have hired some expertise to make sure any actionable items are identified and indeed auctioned at specialist auctions such as Bloomsbury and Dominic Winter.

It is interesting how this phenomenon has developed as a physical storefront and not internet based and it will be interesting to see if the US market follows suit.