Carwash: Broadway and Houston 1991

Car Wash, Broadway & Houston New York 1991

A weekly image from my archive. Click on the image to make it larger.

I've always loved this image. The color seems to pop as though it was back lit. It was a 'turn and shoot' photo and the only frame I took of the subject.

The car wash stood at the corner of Broadway and Houston and I was standing 100 yards away on Lafayette. The two workers seem to be staring right at me as though I've somehow interrupted them. Or may be they're suspicious? This business is no longer there and in its' place is an Adidas sports store. I prefer the car wash.

MediaWeek (Vol 3, No 29): Tech Spending in Education: Digital Texts, Slow Reading, Medical Games

Technology spending in education is expected to rapidly increase according to a Gartner report (Paid):

Technology spending in education is seeing a surge in 2010. According to information released by IT research firm Gartner, worldwide enterprise IT spending in education will grow 4.1 percent, or about $2.53 billion, over 2009. According to the report, "Forecast Alert: Enterprise IT Spending by Vertical Industry Market, Worldwide, 2008-2014, 1Q10 Update," worldwide enterprise IT spending across all vertical segments is forecast to increase by $96.7 billion to nearly $2.43 trillion in 2010. Education itself is the smallest of the vertical segments tracked by Gartner. In 2009, total IT spending in education was $61.46 billion. By the end of this year, will make up 2.64 percent of the overall vertical enterprise IT market worldwide, or $63.99 billion, consistent with its share of the overall picture in 2009. (Via THE)

Daytona State College is moving to all digital texts (News Journal)

After a year of meetings, a Daytona State committee on Thursday began the work of reviewing proposals to replace the college's print textbooks with all e-texts. Phillips, associate director of purchasing, announced the names of nine different publishers -- including some of the biggest names in the industry -- submitting a total of 12 different proposals in response to the college's request. Among the proposers: McGraw-Hill Cos., Pearson Education and Barnes & Noble. Cengage Learning of Stamford, Conn., made four proposals. Also, a pitch arrived from CourseSmart, the world's biggest e-textbook website. "Publishers would prefer to sell you digital rather than printed materials," Bruce Hidebrand, executive director of higher education for the Association of American Publishers, wrote in an e-mail.

The art of slow reading (Guardian):

Hitchings does agree that the internet is part of the problem. "It accustoms us to new ways of reading and looking and consuming," Hitchings says, "and it fragments our attention span in a way that's not ideal if you want to read, for instance, Clarissa." He also argues that "the real issue with the internet may be that it erodes, slowly, one's sense of self, one's capacity for the kind of pleasure in isolation that reading has, since printed books became common, been standard". What's to be done, then? All the slow readers I spoke to realise that total rejection of the web is extremely unrealistic, but many felt that temporary isolation from technology was the answer. Tracy Seeley's students, for example, have advocated turning their computer off for one day a week. But, given the pace at which most of us live, do we even have time? Garrard seems to think so: "I'm no luddite – I'm on my iPhone right now, having just checked my email – but I regularly carve out reading holidays in the middle of my week: four or five hours with the internet disconnected."

Elsevier turns medical content comprehension into game (MinOnline):

Elsevier developed this novel approach to professional information with an iPhone game developer Legacy Interactive. Lisa Hassbrock, head of consumer marketing, product development, Legacy Interactive, tells minonline that Elsevier surveyed medical students who were purchasing its other products on whether they would use an app such as Top Doc and they saw the potential market. “Given the cost of developing iPhone apps, and the early state of the industry, Top Doc can be considered an experiment—a relatively low risk way to gather information about the potential business opportunity, models, and market,” she says. Elsevier and Legacy Interactive are jointly marketing the product among their respective audiences.

From the twitter:

BBC Audiobooks buyer promises big investment and celebrity titles. Guardian

Google is financing projects to test their digital library AP

Hearst Magazines Outlines Major App Rollout For Second Half Of 2010 PaidContent

How to survive as a small publisher. Guardian

In sport: You don't win anything with kids - can we prove them wrong again? (Guardian)

Silos of Curation - Repost

Originally posted on April 29, 2009.


Publishers curate content but they don’t really do it well. And that’s a shame, because curation will be a skill in high demand as attention spans waver, choices proliferate and quality is mitigated by a preponderance of spurious material. That’s why companies such as LibraryThing, Goodreads, Shelfari, weread, BookArmy and others like them may be positioned to leverage communities of interest that mimic the ‘siloed’ offerings that larger and more mature publishing companies have successfully been offering their customers in law, tax and education for many years.

Trade ebook sales are only 1% of total revenues and, while they are growing rapidly, they may take as long as five years to reach 5%. In other publishing segments, this growth curve would be viewed as a failure as information and education publishers actively manipulate the market to their advantage to force faster adoption of e-content. In pushing adoption of eBooks, trade publishers do not have many of the advantages that information and education publishers have. Generally speaking, information content is more transactional: Looking up a reference, seeking a specific citation or definition or article. Educational content is modular with material that is created for specific purposes but which can also be “rebuilt” for other purposes. In both cases, the producers of these products exert some control over their delivery and have impressed on their markets a platform for delivery. (I have discussed this platform approach here).

There are several reasons information and educational publishers are able to pull off the platform approach. One is that they have successfully aggregated content around discrete segments: law, tax, financial, higher ed, k-12, etc. This, in turn, has enabled them to clearly identify their markets and build solutions that match their customers’ needs precisely. That is not the case in trade publishing.

Trade publishing can be anarchic and it is not uncommon for a publisher of primarily gardening and lifestyle books to publish three or four mysteries as well. While aggregation into silos of content – becoming the Science Fiction or the Christian publisher (as West and Lexis became the legal content silos, for example) – is possible it may not be likely. While this strategy may appear logical, I don’t believe there is a sense of purpose within trade as there is in Information and Education. And as publishers continue to be preoccupied with their own corporate brands, the desire to focus on content silos becomes less apparent. Since content is the foundation of the ‘platform’ approach evidenced in the other segments, a similar strategy will not apply in trade.

Something similar to the platform approach may take shape in a different way with intermediaries playing the role of curator. This is an approach that companies such as Publisher’s Weekly or The New York Review of Books might have adopted if they had been more prescient. The capability to guide consumers to the best books, stories and professional content within a specific segment (without regard to publisher or commerce) may come to define publishing in the years to 2020. (See Monday’s post). Expert curation can simplify the selection process for consumers, aggregate interest around topics and build homogeneous markets for commerce. As an added benefit to these intermediaries’ customers, publishers will chose to focus intensely on each segment and offer specialized value-adds particular to that segment. As content provision expands – witness the delivery of all the books in the Google Book project – readers will become increasingly confused and looking for help. It seems inevitable that intermediaries between publisher and e-commerce will meet that need.

BookArmy was launched by Harpercollins earlier this year while the other companies have been around for a while. BookArmy has taken a (thus far) universal approach and lists all books rather than those only published by Harpercollins. BookArmy may or may not be successful, and it is intensely difficult to launch a site like librarything or Goodreads that grips the imagination and passion of its audience, but that is what makes these sites ideal incubators for new thinking and new approaches to publishing. In their current states most (all) of the curation is provided by the community and tends to be post-publication focused. Having said that, it would not be too difficult to see a new ‘layer’ of curators emerging who could provide direction and recommendations to readers on forthcoming titles. And, in addition, these curators could manage their subject “silo” to help readers better understand and explore their subject without regard to the publisher. Experiments in this area have started with, for example, LibraryThing working with publishers to provide a reviews program for forthcoming titles.

Readers don’t really care how many books are published in a year but they do care about knowing which titles they should read based on their interests. Increasingly help will be on the way but it is most likely to be presented as agnostic of publisher and curated around logical subject classifications.


See also Brand Presence - some earlier thoughts on publisher branding.

Concorde G-BSST 1973

Concorde G-BSST 1973

A weekly image from my archive.

I never flew on Concorde although I almost got the upgrade of upgrades once flying from Kennedy to London in 1990. A mix-up with my ticket put the kibosh on that and I never had another opportunity. This is Concorde 002 (G-BSST) one of the original prototype planes that flew between 1970 and 1976 when it was retired. This is another image I didn't take and I first thought this was taken in the UK; however, thanks to web research I believe it was taken at Tullamarine in Melbourne in June 1972. The family was traveling from Melbourne to Perth and Concorde 002 was on a round-the-world marketing and sales promotional jaunt. The plane returned to London in early July and later that month British Airways (BOAC) and Air France ordered 5 and 4 planes each. Despite some interest from other airlines those were the only orders ever received. Now the entire fleet is retired, and in an odd coincidence, I can look out of my office window and see one of the British Airways production aircraft sitting next to the USS Intrepid.

CCC Beyond the Book with Coker, Salley and Nelson.

A new podcast from Copyright Clearance Center’s Beyond The Book site, features a panel discussion for the Independent Book Publishers Association at their annual “Publishing University” program.

In this episode, featured guests Mark Coker of Smashwords, Jack Sallay of Vook and O Magazine Books Editor Sara Nelson explain the ongoing e-publishing revolution with E-Magination: What’s Now & What’s Next in Ebooks.

The podcast and transcript are available in the respective links below:

Podcast

Transcript

The Baked Beans Are Off

When I joined Macmillan, Inc in 1989 the company was rounding out the decade nicely having gone from losing over $1mm per week and a share price less than $2 in 1980 to one sold to Robert Maxwell for 19x earnings and $92 per share. Application of economies of scale helped build Macmillan to a $2billion publishing conglomerate where each newly acquired publishing company was just ‘more beans for the baked bean company’ which was how senior executives referred to their “factory acquisition” process. In fact, some of the executives, notably CEO Bill Reilly, had come from industrial manufacturing and had a deep understanding of how to effectively apply scale economies to operations.

All the largest publishing companies were following a similar ‘baked bean’ approach as the industry consolidated: Publishing lists were separated from their original companies and progressively (sometimes immediately) overhead expenses were eliminated as the acquired company was absorbed. At one point, I was tasked with following up on the ROI for a slew of companies acquired over a two year period. This proved difficult because their operations had been so effectively integrated into the parent company that constructing a post-acquisition income statement proved virtually impossible.

Fast forward 20 years and the scale economic model is falling apart for trade publishing. So effective at applying scale to accounting, manufacturing, management, production and other overhead, it is ironic that in the internet world everyone now has access to similar scale benefits. Publishing companies now realize they have achieved scale advantages in the wrong functions. Scale advantage in editorial, marketing, promotion, and content management is almost non-existent to the degree that will ensure competitive advantage, yet these are the functions important to future success. (As an isolated example, I would argue that authonomy.com by Harpercollins represents an attempt to build scale into the editorial process).

We all know seismic change – prevalent everywhere - has to come to the cost structures of publishing companies. Squeezed by downward pricing and potential revenue share models that provide more to authors and contributors, publishers will wonder where the money is going to come from. The scale model that built companies like Macmillan, Inc. is irreparably dead to anyone thinking about the future of publishing. The only way out – and it’s not an easy suggestion – is to recognize that those functions that used to provide scale benefits are no longer doing so and need to be carved out. Some of this has happened in manufacturing where companies like Donnelly and Williams Lea have taken over the manufacturing and production function for companies: Those departments no longer exist at the publisher. Decisions to outsource non-value added functions such as accounting, distribution and fulfillment and information technology must be made as the publisher contemplates their future. Once unencumbered, the real test will be whether publishers can re-work their structures so that they build scale economies in those functions that do provide value: Content acquisition, editorial, marketing & promotion and content licensing and brand building.

There is little evidence that this is happening or that the realization has set in. Instead of seeing a publishing company improve their performance over ten years as Macmillan did in the 1980s, we are likely to see many examples of the exact opposite over the next ten. Will companies rise to the challenge or are they so wedded to the old ‘baked bean’ model that they expect it to go on forever? Clearly, it won’t.

MediaWeek (Vol 3, No 28): Students study habits, The future of our Bookshelves, Trends in researchers and libraries.

The Atlantic looks at reports that college students don't study as much as they used to. These are eight possible reasons which they expand upon (Atlantic):

• Study Leaders Cite Professor Apathy
• Modern Technology Not to Blame
• Grades Becoming Less Important Than Activities
• Increase in 'Temporary, Adjunct' Faculty
• Advent of Pass-Fail Classes, Fewer Language Requirements
• Studying Methods Became More Efficient
• Rise in Publishing Requirements Means Professors Assign Less Work
• More Working Part-Time as Scholarships Decline
• Students Less Comfortable With Long-Form Reading

Nathan Schneider writing in Open Letters Monthly: On the decline of print which while delayed now seems inevitable (OLM)

The decline of actual, physical book-publishing has been taking longer than it was supposed to. Way back in 1992 Robert Coover announced in The New York Times that printed books were as “dead as God.” His doomsday was premature. But the digital offerings of Amazon and Google, along with their ever-better delivery devices, promise that finally the end may be nigh. Crotchety complaints about screen-reading aside, it should be obvious to anyone who cares about information that in many respects digital text is a superior technology to the printed page. On Google Books, I just searched “the printed page” (without the quotation marks) across “some seven million volumes of books,” instantly returning results in 76,000 of them. And that is not mere statistical flourish; for the several years since I lost my borrowing privileges from research libraries and have had to leave my source texts behind, I’ve come to rely on Google and Amazon searchable previews. My old dream of a possessionless library, unencumbered and mobile, seems possible again. The very meaning of the word “book” has become something more powerful, dynamic, and accessible than ever before. Every good reactionary knows well that there arises, in the process of using these wonders, the opportunity for laziness. Days, weeks, and years of archival labor are replaced by a keystroke and, with it, much of the discipline, erudition, and tenacity that the old ways required. But there’s no time to be nostalgic and grumpy. Living well with technology has always been a matter of beating it and abusing it. No one cared much about the electric guitar until somebody turned it up too loud. Now our job is to figure out how to be cleverer than the search engine; when certain ways of finding information become easy, the knowledge really worth having becomes what those methods don’t turn up, what the crawlers somehow managed to miss. As the Temple of Knowledge comes to look ever more like the Googleplex, public libraries are downsizing their reference desks, presuming that for every query an internet search will suffice. ... So far, for all the wonders they offer, the digital alternatives to a bookshelf fail to serve its basic purposes. The space of memory and thinking must not be an essentially controlled, homogenous one. Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s iPad are noxious ruses that must be creatively resisted—not simply because they are electronic but because they propose to commandeer our bookshelves. I will defend the spirit of mine tooth and nail.

David Brookes in the NYTimes also wonders at the efficacy of books versus the internet (NYT):

A citizen of the Internet has a very different experience. The Internet smashes hierarchy and is not marked by deference. Maybe it would be different if it had been invented in Victorian England, but Internet culture is set in contemporary America. Internet culture is egalitarian. The young are more accomplished than the old. The new media is supposedly savvier than the old media. The dominant activity is free-wheeling, disrespectful, antiauthority disputation. These different cultures foster different types of learning. The great essayist Joseph Epstein once distinguished between being well informed, being hip and being cultivated. The Internet helps you become well informed — knowledgeable about current events, the latest controversies and important trends. The Internet also helps you become hip — to learn about what’s going on, as Epstein writes, “in those lively waters outside the boring mainstream.” But the literary world is still better at helping you become cultivated, mastering significant things of lasting import. To learn these sorts of things, you have to defer to greater minds than your own. You have to take the time to immerse yourself in a great writer’s world. You have to respect the authority of the teacher. Right now, the literary world is better at encouraging this kind of identity. The Internet culture may produce better conversationalists, but the literary culture still produces better students.

American Research Libraries blog notes the amicus filing in the Costco vs Omega watch case (ARL):

And that is why this case is important for libraries. In its amicus brief, LCA notes that “[b]y restricting the application of Section 109(a) to copies manufactured in the United States, the Ninth Circuit’s decision threatens the ability of libraries to continue to lend materials in their collections.” There are millions of volumes in library collections that were manufactured abroad. A more precise estimate than “millions” can probably never be known, though, because there is no reliable way of knowing where books in library collections were actually manufactured. So, if the Supreme Court agreed with the Ninth Circuit, and libraries determined that they could not find an alternative to the traditional first sale doctrine rationale for circulating foreign-manufactured works, they would face an impossible task in determining which of their books could not circulate under the new rule.

Also related a brief filed in the case of Pearson vs Textbook Discounters (JDSupra) Fastcompany makes up for lost time (10yrs) in extrapolating the changes in academic libraries to bookstores (Fastco):

The change in publication habits for periodicals, and plain ol' text books too, has been so severe that a new library building, commissioned in 2005 and due to open next month, actually has 85% less shelf capacity than the previous edifice. That's a massive reduction in storage volume, and a pure reflection of the fact that bytes don't weigh anything. It's also the next logical progression in the modernization of library systems. Remember card catalogs? They were once a staple of any visit to a library, and their often hand-typed and hand-annotated reference cards were vital for finding the right book in a collection. But the card index was a perfect contender for digital replacement, even in an era when computers were mainly text-based. First they came for my card catalog ... then they came for my books ...

In a Podcast from OCLC and JISC, Lynn Silipigni Connaway asks, "what does the digital information seeker look like". (JISC):

New research from JISC suggests that the way people look for information in libraries and online is changing. JISC recently commissioned a report2 from the OCLC to bring together a number of different studies in the area. Senior research scientist Dr Lynn Silipigni Connaway at OCLC Research in the US talks to Nicola Yeeles about how researchers ‘bounce’ and ‘whirl’ and what that means for the library of the future.

Also OCLC has a number of podcast available for free via iTunes. From ACRL: 2010 top ten trends in academic libraries (ACRL):

The ACRL Research, Planning and Review Committee, a component of the Research Coordinating Committee, is responsible for creating and updating a continuous and dynamic environmental scan for the association that encompasses trends in academic librarianship, higher education, and the broader environment. As a part of this effort, the committee develops a list of the top ten trends that are affecting academic libraries now and in the near future. This list was compiled based on an extensive review of current literature.

From the twitter this week: Tom Sutcliffe -Throw the book at clichéd blurbs - Independent. Over the top blurbing. If the new Tom Jones album is that bad, I must hear it. Telegraph Marketing a stinker. Do good buildings make for better educated children? Observer Huge for me, but I was lucky. Seabury Hall PwC Technology Forecast 2010 Issue 3:Tapping into the power of Big Data: PWC Tech Report Nerd alert - interesting. Can Bloomberg Law Compete With Westlaw and LexisNexis? - LawBlog WSJ The textbook system is broken: high costs, poor information for students, bad books: Chronicle In sports, Iniesta was the mvp of the tournament for me and well done Spain.