MediaWeek (Vol 3, No 18): Granta, Aussie Librarians, Pippi Longstocking, Special Collections

In advance of the Sydney Writers festival, The Australia profiles Granta Editor (and American) John Freeman (Australian):

Gracefully chuffed to find himself in the enviable position of editing a magazine he reveres, Freeman must nevertheless be a little shell-shocked from the barrage of choose-me writing that has come his way since he became Granta's editor. He is also an anti-email campaigner, so it is doubly difficult for him not to feel as if he's drowning in the demands that ping into his inbox unceasingly. He has written an entire book about how new communication methods are turning us into the linguistic equivalent of laboratory rats, churning on endless, meaningless wheels of words. But although he admits to missing the reading time his reviewing life gave him, and finds the "editing, acquiring, stroking and supporting, the making of the thing" more tiring than he had anticipated, he is determined to succeed. Freeman began at Granta as acting editor following the precipitous departure of Alexandra Clark, who had lasted less than a year, as had the previous editor, Jason Cowley. Given this instability after the long and stable editorship of Ian Jack, Freeman says he perfectly understands why the magazine's publisher, Sigrid Rausing, hesitated in appointing him to the role. It was a risky manoeuvre: Freeman is only 35, he is American and he has not had much editing experience. The secret of his success, it seems, is an affable and practical positivism that is pervasive even in a phone conversation. Some of this he puts down to the influence of his grandmother, whose letters taught him how to listen and to give.

Again in the land downunder but this time in The Age, it seems the profession of librarian faces the same issues as it does in the US (The Age):

Like many of her peers, she is also due to retire in the next few years, and her position will be difficult to fill. A national inquiry into school libraries heard evidence last week to suggest that teacher-librarians are a dying breed. While the Rudd Government is building thousands of libraries as part of the $16 billion ''building the education revolution'', experts warn there will be no one to staff them. About 13 per cent of Victorian primary school libraries are staffed by a professional librarian, a recent survey suggested, and the figure is expected to fall as teacher-librarians retire. There are no official statistics. More than 90 per cent of teacher-librarians in Australia are believed to be over 40, compared to half of teachers generally. Many teacher-librarians also retire early because of a lack of promotional opportunities. Meanwhile, there are just four tertiary courses nationally to train them, from a peak of 15, and only about 100 graduates a year. Library associations say job security is poor, discouraging potential students. In Victoria, rationalisation during the Kennett era and dwindling budgets has meant many principals have chosen to hire extra classroom teachers instead of librarians to reduce class sizes. ''The view is that libraries are not important because students just access information online,'' Mrs Ellingworth told The Sunday Age. ''But the thing is, students have got information overload. They don't know where to start.''

The London Times suggests there is a 'real-story' behind the Stieg Larsson heroine. Turns out to be Pippi Longstocking (Times):

As a boy he read Enid Blyton and the much-loved adventures of Pippi Longstocking. His tenacious heroine Salander is a radically reworked — and tattooed — modern version of Pippi with a polymorphous sex life. He explained to a Swedish journalist shortly before his death that he had begun to wonder how Pippi, the classic Swedish children’s heroine, would behave today. What sort of an adult had she become? How would one define her — as a sociopath, a childwoman? Larsson construed that Pippi might have an alternative view of society and transmogrified her into Salander, a girl completely alienated from society. She doesn’t know anyone; she has no ability to socialise. Salander is introduced into the first story in single-minded and skilful pursuit of a paedophile — the sexual abuse of women and children is a key theme of the novel. She is a white-faced young woman of anorexic appearance with facial piercings and a wasp tattoo on her neck. The bicep of her left arm is similarly festooned and on her left shoulder blade she has a dragon tattoo. Her hair is dyed a deep black and her boss describes her as looking like she has emerged from a lengthy orgy. Despite her anorexic appearance she seems able to vacuum up massive quantities of junk food. She is 24, but with her small breasts she sometimes appears to be about 14. Erland Larsson, the author’s father, believes that although “Salander is a mixture of different people”, a possible inspiration may have been Stieg’s niece, Therese, who was very close to him. The two often used to visit each other.

Since my only library work experience was in the special collections department at Boston University, I am always interested to read about these departments. In the Chronicle of Higher Ed, a warning about guarding the hoard (Chron):

Since she hadn't offered to let me search myself, I knew she was determined to make quick work of me. After perhaps three of her very narrow searches yielded nothing unique—only secondary sources I had seen before—I realized I wouldn't find anything useful unless I had the opportunity to search on my own, trying different approaches as I discovered the scope of the collection. That was so obviously not going to happen that I finally just thanked her politely and turned to leave. I had been in her office perhaps five minutes. Realizing she had won her battle even more quickly than expected, she mumbled an apology about how it was just a bad day, what with her being short staffed and having to train a new person and all. And so the dragon succeeded in guarding the hoard. The worst part is that I honestly think she believed she was doing her job—that her behavior was justified because I was foolish enough to just "turn up" expecting to use "her" collection. Let this, then, serve as a gentle reminder to rare-book curators that your job is not to keep readers from your books but just the opposite: to facilitate readers' use of the collections. If altruism or professional integrity aren't sufficient motivators to get you to play nice, you might consider the fact that you have a job only because people want to read what's in those collections, and you will keep your job for only as long as readers feel welcome to approach you to make use of the materials.

From the twitter this week: More Publishers Trying Outsourced Journalism AdAge Fascinating implications and some interesting comments. A new set of police heroes hits the UK small screen based on book characters. Hopefully over here soon. Independent Ian McEwan sees funny side of Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize nomination Independent Funny Not. Cancel Publish - A Call For the End of Tumblr Book Deals GQ Hilarious & True. History on the web "One of the most important collections of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts " BBC News Farrar, Straus & Giroux announced Marilyn Monroe writings to be released this fall - Conn Post In Sports, Liverpool put in a lame, pathetic and typical performance to hand Chelsea the title. Man United should have done better this season.

Survey: Blueprint for Transformation

The Gilbane Group is seeking survey respondents for a study they are undertaking to identify how publishers are re-inventing themselves. From their press release:

The Gilbane Group Survey for Book Publishing Professionals: Take it Today!

The Gilbane Group Web-based survey of book publishing professionals is now active!. This survey is one of the research mechanisms for our upcoming study "A Blueprint for Book Publishing Transformation: Seven Essential Processes to Re-Invent Publishing." The study will be published in June 2010, and all participants in this survey will have full access to the full-length study posted on The Gilbane Group website.

This survey, which will take most participants between 10-to-15 minutes to complete, seeks to gain a clearer picture of ebook and related digital publishing efforts underway among the full spectrum of book publishers. Furthermore, the analyst team at The Gilbane Group seeks to identify a number of "pain points" or barriers encountered by book publishers when it comes to developing or expanding digital publishing programs, including areas such as royalties, digital format choices, and distribution problems.

BISG Conference: Making Information Pay 2010

There is a full slate of speakers lined up for next week's MIP meeting at the McGraw Hill Auditorium on May 6th.

From BISG:

BISG's Making Information Pay is a publishing industry conference for senior executives in operations, sales and marketing who are responsible for increasing sales and reducing costs. For the past six years, book industry professionals have attended Making Information Pay in order to learn the best practices driving the success of industry leaders today.

Register today to discover the technological "points of no return" currently facing our industry and identify the new technologies dictating advanced ways in which books -- both digital and physical -- are being acquired, produced, distributed, marketed and sold.

Mike Shatzkin has a full run down of the presentations here.

MediaWeek (Vol 3, No 17): Professional Publishing, Men Don't Read, Heather Reisman, Digital Texts

In the HuffPo takes some pot shots at professional publishers namely Thomson, Reed Elsevier and Bloomberg and in an 'argument' that's all over the place he concludes (HuffPo):

For this reason, their technology expertise notwithstanding, it is not a given that the professional publishing companies will dominate the media landscape. The organizational foundations of professional publishing companies are expensive to support. Their cost structures require that information also be expensive. However, Thomson Reuters, Reed Elsevier, and Bloomberg have no monopoly on the technology, and the technology to create new information and news delivery platforms is not expensive. In this respect, the professional publishers have returned to being merely ordinary companies. In the future, they will compete with new rivals without the structural advantages that have until now fueled their growth and reinforced their market position. This is good news for the American business community, and for the future development of a vital, healthy, and prosperous news and information industry in the United States.

The Financial Post (Canada) and provides a friendly venue for an interview with Heather Reisman (FP):

Q: Now that Amazon will be allowed to have its own distribution centre here, do you believe Ottawa should ease foreign ownership legislation in a way that would allow you to enter into international partnerships? A: Amazon had a full-on distribution centre here before, but it was run by Canada Post. The change is they are going to run it themselves. In my opinion, once the government [in 2002] allowed Amazon to operate 100% as a major bookseller in Canada with no Canadian ownership, they were de facto saying that they believe in this day and age that you do not have to be Canadian to own a book-retailing company [in Canada]. Q: Do you intend to take that issue up with Industry Canada? How is it that Kobo can have international partners with a substantial stake? A: I don't have any reason to take it up because I am not looking at selling the Indigo business. Our Kobo business is a global business. But I think the government realizes that you cannot put legislation on a digital business - what are you going to do? You just can't.

Jason Pinter in the HuffPo (again) discusses his frustration over reports that men don't read (HuffPo):

Why do I bring this up? Because if you've worked in publishing, you've heard the tired old maxim: Men Don't Read. Try to acquire or sell a book aimed predominantly at men, and odds are you'll be told Men Don't Read. This story is not an isolated incident, but merely a microcosm of a huge problem within the industry. If you keep telling yourself something, regardless of its validity, eventually you'll begin to believe it. So because publishers rarely publish for men and don't market towards men, somehow that equates to our entire gender having given up on the reading books. THIS MUST END. This NPR piece three years ago came to the conclusion that women read more fiction than men by a 4-1 margin. Articles like this madden me because I think they miss the big picture, or perhaps are even ignoring it purposefully. It's like discussing global warming, while completely ignoring the fact that hey, maybe we have something to do with it. In my opinion, this empty mantra has begotten a vicious cycle. I was hesitant to write this article, mainly because in no way do I want to be perceived as diminishing the talents of many, many brilliant women in publishing. That is not the aim of this piece, nor is it my opinion in any way. This is a critique of the system, not those who work within it.

The comments are quite good as well. (I see a 't-shirt': I'm A Man and I Read! Could even add some swear words in there as well).

Xplana (Missouri Book Service) released a report looking at the potential for digital textbook sales over the next five years:

While digital textbook sales currently represent a small portion of the overall textbook market – approximately 0.5% – year-over-year increases show strong and steady growth.

• CourseSmart, a joint venture of five large college textbook publishers, reported a 400% increase in sales in 2009 from the year before;¹
• MBS Direct, representing 900 client institutions and 34 academic publishers, showed increases in digital textbooks sales of more than 100% in 2009;²
• Interviews with representatives from leading textbook publishers reveal year-over-year increases between 80%-100% for the past three years, with sales growth in 2009 topping 100%;
• According to “On Campus Research Student Watch 2010,” a 16,000-student survey released by the National Association of College Stores in fall of 2009, about 42 percent of students have either purchased or at least seen an e-textbook. That’s an increase of 24 percentage points from 2007.³

These growth numbers for digital textbooks are also consistent with the increase in the general digital trade book market. The International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) reported that in 2009, e-books accounted for 3.31% of all trade book sales in the U.S. up from only 1.19% in 2008. Sales of wholesale e-books for February 2010 were $28,900,000 for February, a 339.3% increase over February 2009 ($6,600,000). Calendar Year to Date sales are up + 292.2% from 2009.⁴

From the twitter:

Alan Sillitoe dies at 82 Guardian Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner

Stones in Exile Documentary: The Stones and the true story of Exile on Main St Observer

OUP Launch the 'anti-Google' database product ArsTechnica

A Database of Riches: The Business Model Behind The Google Book Settlement

Late last year, I wrote an analysis of the possible size of the orphan work issue that was core to the initial criticism over the Google Book Settlement. That analysis was a subset of a wider analysis of the business opportunity that the Google Book Settlement represented once the database was cleared for sale.

Following is that further analysis: In this report, I have estimated the market opportunity that the Google Book database could represent and I have organized my review based on which customers are likely to purchase the product, how much and to what degree customers will purchase and I also explore how Google might go about selling and marketing the product. I have excerpted the management summary section below and the full report is available below.

Anyone interested in discussing this report in more detail is encouraged to set up a conference call or meeting with me and I can review in more detail my methodology and explore the options available to Google as they roll out this product.

Introduction:

Almost five years ago, Google embarked on the most ambitious library development project ever conceived: To create a “Noah’s Ark” of every book ever published and to start by digitizing books held by a rarefied group of five major academic libraries. The immediate response from US publishers was muted, until the implications of the project became clear: That Google proposed no boundaries to the digitization effort and initiated the scanning of books both in and out of copyright and in and out of print. Adding to publisher’s concerns, Google planned to display “snippets” (small selections) of the book’s content in search results. Despite some hurried conversations among publishers, author groups and Google, Google remained convinced that what they were doing represented a social ‘good’ and the partial display of the scanned books was legally within the boundaries of fair use.

From the publisher perspective, this was a make-or-break moment, and the implications were more acutely felt by trade publishers who saw the potential for their business models to be obliterated by easy and ready access to high-quality content via a Google search over which they would exert little or no control. Even worse was the fear that rampant piracy of content would also develop – a debated and contentious point - given the easy access to a digitized version of a work that could be e-mailed or printed at will. The publishers determined that if Google were to ‘get away with it’ without challenge, then anyone would be able to digitize publisher content and possibly replicate what has been going on in the music and motion picture industries for almost ten years. In mid-2005, prompted by a law suit filed by The Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers (AAP) led by four primary publishers filed suit against Google in an effort to halt the scanning of in-copyright materials. (The Authors Guild and AAP ultimately combined their filings).

The initial Google Book Settlement (GBS) agreement, given preliminary approval by a court in October 2008, generated a vast amount of argument both in support of the agreement and in challenges to it. A revised agreement was drafted after the Federal District Court of Southern New York and Judge Chin agreed to delay the adjudication and final arguments which were heard in late February 2010. To date, Judge Chin has not given a timetable nor an indication of when and how he will decide the case.

From the perspective of the early leading library participants, Google’s arrival and promise to digitize their purposefully conserved print collections looked like a miracle. Faced with forced declines in the dollars spent on monographs and the ever-rising expense of maintaining over 100 years of print archives, the Google digitization program provided a possible solution to many problems. All libraries believe they hold a social covenant to collect, maintain and preserve the most relevant materials of interest to their communities but maintaining that covenant becomes a challenge in an environment of increasing expenses while also enduring the challenges of migrating to an on-line world(1).

The library world is typically segmented into public and academic institutions and while these often varied ‘communities’ may differ in their philosophy towards, for example, collection development or preservation, they do share some common practices. Most importantly, all libraries are committed to resource sharing and while materials use has historically and primarily been ‘local’ to the library, every institution wants to make its collections available to virtually any patron and institution who requests them. In short, these library collections were always ‘accessible’ to all regardless of geography or copyright: First US Mail, FedEx, e-mail and then the Internet progressively made this sharing easier but, until Google arrived with their digitization program, any sharing beyond the local institution was via physical distribution(2) . In effect, it could be argued that the Google scanning program simply makes an existing practice vastly more efficient.

Even though, the approval of the Google Book Settlement (GBS) hangs in the balance under review by Judge Chin of the Federal District Court of Southern New York, an Executive Director has been named to head the Book Rights Registry (BRR) (3) and is preparing the groundwork to establish the organization (BRR) in advance of approval. This report represents an attempt to analyze the market size opportunity for Google as it seeks to exploit the Google Book Settlement.

Following are our summary findings which are discussed in more detail in the ensuing pages of this report.

Summary Findings of the Report:

• Libraries will see tremendous advantages – both immediate and over time - from the GBS, although concerns have been voiced (notably from Robert Darnton of Harvard)(4)
• Google’s annual subscription revenue for licensing to libraries could approach $260mm by year three of launch
• Over time, publishers (and content owners) will recognize the GBS service as an effective way to reach the library community and are likely to add titles to the service(5)
• Google will add services and may open the platform for other application providers to enhance and broaden the user experience
• The manner in which the GBS deals with orphan works will provide a roadmap for other communities of ‘orphans’ in photography, arts, and similar content and intellectual property

[1] It is important to acknowledge that, initially, the GBS may have been seen as a solution to libraries’ conservation and preservation needs; however, subsequently, libraries have determined that they need to develop their own preservation options in which The Hathi Trust is a clear leader.
[2] Resource sharing and improvements in the ‘logistics’ provided by OCLC (WorldCat) or via consortia such as OhioLink has made physical distribution effective and comparatively efficient.
[3] The BRR is the management body tasked with administering the GBS and representing the interests of authors and publishers once approval has been granted by the court.
[4] Robert Darnton, NY Review of Books
[5] The settlement doesn’t provide for adding content prior to 1/5/09; however, we are suggesting that, by mutual consent, additional published content may be added as an expedient method of reaching the library market.

A database of riches michael cairns from Michael Cairns

Oxford University Press and the "Anti Google"

ArsTechnica reports on the launch of a new approach to patron and consumer research by OUP that will attempt to combat 'information overload' and the prevailing issue of 'authority'. This is a potentially revolutionary approach by a highly respected information publisher to draw back under a subscription model consumers of information who are increasingly dissatisfied with 'good enough' which is endemic to google and wikipedia.

From the article:

The OBO tool is essentially a straightforward, hyperlinked collection of professionally-produced, peer-reviewed bibliographies in different subject areas—sort of a giant, interactive syllabus put together by OUP and teams of scholars in different disciplines. Users can drill down to a specific bibliographic entry, which contains some descriptive text and a list of references that link to either Google Books or to a subscribing library's own catalog entries, by either browsing or searching. Each entry is written by a scholar working in the relevant field and vetted by a peer review process. The idea is to alleviate the twin problems of Google-induced data overload, on the one hand, and Wikipedia-driven GIGO (garbage in, garbage out), on the other.

"We did about 18 months of pretty intensive research with scholars and students and librarians to explore how their research practices were changing with the proliferation of online sources," Damon Zucca, OUP’s Executive Editor, Reference, told Ars. "The one thing we heard over and over again is that people were drowning in scholarly information, and drowning in information in general. So it takes twice as much time for people to begin their research."
...
To trust OBO's content, you have to trust its selection and vetting process. To that end, OUP is making the list of contributing scholars and editors freely available. Each subject area has an Editor in Chief who's a top scholar in the field, and an editorial board of around 15 to 20 scholars. The EIC and editorial board either write the bibliographic entries themselves, or they select other scholars to do the work.

Springer Expands Author Mapper

Springer's has added more content to its innovative application AuthorMapper.com. The company is now including eBook content in addition to the original journal content. From their press release:

Springer Science+Business Media has expanded its service on the website www.AuthorMapper.com, a free analytical online tool for discerning trends, patterns and subject experts within scientific research. AuthorMapper was launched a year ago offering searchable content from all Springer and BioMed Central journals. The platform now offers eBook data as well. Currently the tool can retrieve useful information across all disciplines, from more than three million journal articles and more than 742,000 book chapters from 29,000 eBooks. Adding eBook data allows all the benefits of specific eBook analysis just as the success of the journal data has shown in the past.

The AuthorMapper tool can provide a variety of analyses, such as keyword tag clouds and "Top 5" bar charts for various important metrics, and includes an interactive world map of the results. AuthorMapper.com’s advanced search function also allows complex queries using keyword, discipline, institution, journal, publisher and author. The results can identify new and historic scientific trends through timeline graphs and bar charts of top statistics, allowing for identification of trends in the literature, discovery of wider scientific relationships, and locating other experts in a field of study.

The trend timeline graph, for example, allows authors to see whether their area of expertise is growing or has already peaked. Users that are only interested in open access content can restrict their searches accordingly, and all search results provide link-outs to content on SpringerLink.For graduates, post-docs and emerging researchers, AuthorMapper.com shows which institutions are the most prolific in specific research areas and allows for their comparison. AuthorMapper.com can even be useful for members of the general public seeking to identify experts, for example, medical specialists, working close to where they are located.