Beyond the Book: Peter Brantley Interviewed

From Copyright Clearence center's beyond the book series an interview with Peter Brantley of the Internet Archive and Open Book Alliance (Podcast):

“I wouldn’t say I’m concerned about the future of authors,” Peter Brantley tells Chris Kenneally, “but I think that authors have something to be concerned about as we move into a digital future.”

The director of the Internet Archive’s BookServer project, a not-for-profit digital library, and a co-founder of the Open Book Alliance, Brantley shares insights on the perils for authors hoping to “navigate and arbitrate what their rights are to recreate their product in a digital environment.”

With the excitement and freedom of digital publishing, Brantley warns, there remains a need to remain watchful. “It’s not just that authors [now] have an opportunity to create trans-media works that are new and fresh with new material,” he notes. “They also have an opportunity to create trans-media works that are new and fresh from old material. And, again, trying to work through how those things are created, distributed and how the rights are arbitrated for that content, is a big challenge.

MediaWeek (Vol 3, No 36): Graphic Conrad, Books and Houses, Television, Disney's Education Play and Twitter

Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness has been published as a graphic novel (Guardian):

To reinforce the geographical and historical immediacy of Conrad's tale, the graphic novel is interspersed with excerpts from The Congo Diary – the journal Conrad kept of his 1890 voyage up the river.Anyango's research also led her to the story of a man from a village in the Upper Congo called Nsala. She came across a photograph of him sat on a step contemplating the hand and foot of his daughter, which had been cut off by guards sent to his village by the Anglo Belgian India Rubber Company. The men, ordered to attack Nsala's village for failing to provide the company with enough rubber, devoured his wife and daughter, leaving only the child's hand and foot."I put him on one page, and similar portraits on others, so the Congolese characters have resonance at least for me, even if they remain stereotyped because of the existing narrative," she said. In her efforts to ensure the authenticity of the uniforms she drew — the protagonist, Marlow, is given a cap with a prominent Belgian lion badge — Anyango was shocked to discover how markedly Belgian perceptions of the occupation of Congo still vary. For some, it is a shameful episode in the country's history, while others still view it as a benign experience despite the evidence uncovered by recent histories such as Adam Hochschild's 1998 book, King Leopold's Ghost, which laid bare the barbarism inflicted on Congo.

Contemplating the end of the physical book (WaPo):

But what a loss to the ways books represent, bedevil and impeach us. They represent us, of course, as anyone knows who has made basic decisions about which books go in the living room and which get confined to less public places. That they bedevil us is clear if you have moved recently or live burdened with closets filled with books -- books under the bed, books in the attic -- or if you have ever saved a book for years or decades only to discover, upon desperately needing it, that it has been lost in the general deluge of too many books. But they also impeach us, and it is that function that electronic readers can never replicate. A wall of books is mortality made geometric, a pattern of hope and loss, ambition and failure. There's so much fraud lurking on our shelves, fraudulent books such as "My Sister and I." Purported to be by Nietzsche, it is suspiciously more readable, lurid and fun than anything by Nietzsche. But there's also the record of our own fraud, the books we intend to read but never will, the books of which we remember no more than what is printed on the dust jacket -- yet claim to possess in some deeper way. There are books we pretend to keep for reference, but in fact keep only because they look so damn fine on the shelf. And then there are the books where should-have-read blends with may-have-read, and we're too embarrassed to confess we can't remember which is the case ("Catcher in the Rye"). There are also the books of hollow triumph, the great tomes of philosophy read in college, which remain on the shelves like snapshots taken from the summit of Everest or like pants in the closet that will never again slide up our thighs without tearing.

The noise about online TV may not matter: Old line media firms are firmly in control of internet video (Economist):

Even Google, the arch-disrupter, is looking tame. The firm is building its browser and search bar into high-end televisions, hoping that couch potatoes will use it to look for programmes. If some of them can be directed to shows on YouTube, Google will be able to siphon advertising away from television. It would be a fine plan if YouTube had lots of high-quality programmes, but it hasn’t. (The Onion, a humorous website, once imagined a YouTube contest challenging users to make a “good” video.) So YouTube will probably have to pay top dollar for films, limiting its appeal and turning a once subversive force into a humdrum distributor. Old-fashioned television is hardly being swept away. At present people watch online video for three hours per month, according to Nielsen, compared with 158 hours for old-style television. And the early evidence suggests that those whizzy new connected sets are not always connected. A recent poll for Forrester Research found that many people didn’t fully understand the devices they had bought, and only a few had recommended them to their friends. They may learn. But such apathy from early adopters suggests that content owners will have plenty of time to prepare for the revolution.

Looking at Disney's education play in China (Economist):

The initial development costs, which Disney has not disclosed, must have been huge. Within a decade the programme will have a material impact on Disney’s results, predicts Andrew Sugerman, who runs it. Disney hopes to keep doubling the number of Chinese students it teaches every year for a while. This is a risky venture—long-term, complex and in an area China considers sensitive: education. Yet the potential rewards are huge. The very complexity of education means that it is less vulnerable to the piracy that usually stops Western media firms from making money in China. A bootleg copy of “Mulan” is much cheaper than the real thing and possibly just as good, other than the fact that it is stolen. It is harder to fake a good education. Disney’s focus groups find that for Chinese parents, “education means everything”. English, in particular, is viewed as a ticket to the wider world, says Mr Sugerman. Studies commissioned by Disney estimate that the market for children’s English-language education in China is growing by 12% annually and will reach $3.7 billion by 2012. That may be too modest. Adele Mao, an analyst at OLP Global, a research and consulting firm, reckons the market is already nearly $6 billion a year and is growing by 20%. There is an equally dynamic market for adult education. One Chinese company which caters to all ages, New York-listed New Oriental Education, has a market valuation of $3.8 billion. Dozens of others have entered the business.

From the twitter: Grisham Dreams of a Desk Job - NYTimes. His own #jobsivehad Source Interlink Takes on Massive Photo Digitization Project Folio PND Blogpost: Elsevier Introduces SciVerse PND A significant change for the platform. Los Angeles Times: Our 12 favorite non-book literary oddities on EBay Jacket Copy

Animals in War Monument Park Lane

Animals in War - Mayfair London 2009

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

For a nation that supposedly loves animals the British certainly put them through a lot. Finally, they have their own memorial that sits in the center divide running down Park Lane. Inscribed in the portland stone is the inscription:
"This monument is dedicated to all the animals that served and died alongside British and allied forces in wars and campaigns throughout time. They had no choice"
This image was taken in April 2009.

Elsevier Introduces SciVerse

I've mentioned that information and academic publishers are starting to open up their data to third party applications providers and, in the process, enable greater utility for their subscribers and users. SciVerse, announced today by Elsevier, is a platform for doing just that. For a publisher of this size and importance to academics, professionals and institutions this initiative should be considered quite important as it represents a significant (and logical) step in the evolution of information database publishing.

As the press release states, SciVerse is "an innovative platform that integrates the company's key products and encourages the scientific community to collaborate on the development of customized search and discovery applications. Elsevier has committed to releasing the APIs (application programming interfaces) for all of the content on SciVerse and will offer application development support tools on the site."

SciVerse will be impressive from the start and will incorporate ScienceDirect, Scopus and targeted web content from Scirus, Elsevier's science-specific Internet search engine. Built into the platform will be some basic but useful technology which will enable efficient cross database searching and other functionality, but what Elsevier is banking on (and, it seems a pretty safe bet given the quality of this content) is that third party application providers will provide significant ingenuity in building applications that Elsevier's subscribers will find useful. As Jay Katzen, Managing Director, Academic & Government Products, Elsevier notes,

"SciVerse is a start of a new journey for Elsevier where we plan to provide customized search and discovery solutions and increase interoperability within our products and third party services. We recognize that it is critical to involve the researchers and librarians in the creation of solutions as they are in the best position to identify and address their search and discovery challenges. By providing our content APIs later this year, we will empower researchers and developers to build custom applications to enhance their workflow and share these applications with the scientific community within SciVerse."

Elsevier will open up SciVerse to the developer community (many of whom are likely to be their subscribers) later in the year and the mechanism for doing this isn't clear; however, it is likely that their will be some type of registration and/or approval process similar to the Apple apps store process. Whether or how Elsevier will share in revenues that may be generated by some of these new apps is also unclear; however, should this be a practical outcome of this initiative it may end up driving some substantial incremental revenue for Elsevier. Most importantly though, this initiative will ultimately tie Elsevier content even firmer into the workflow and processes of their customers as these applications address specific problems for customers. This aspect shouldn't be under valued as an important contributor to the continued growth of the Elsevier product line. It will be interesting to see how other information and academic publishers react to this news.

Cal State's Digital Marketplace Announces Pilot

The Digital Marketplace, an initiative of the California State University Office of the Chancellor, announced plans today to launch a pilot to license digital course content from Bedford/Freeman/Worth, Cengage Learning, McGraw-Hill Education, Pearson, and John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Students will purchase their personal-use subscriptions for the digital content through their local campus bookstore. More from the press release:

“Offering faculty the choice of a licensing model gives them the option of finding the highest quality content at the lowest cost,” said Gerard L. Hanley, PhD., Senior Director of Academic Technology Services for the CSU. “The purpose of the Digital Marketplace is to provide everyone access to quality, affordable educational content. This is a wonderful example of an academic institution and publishers working together for the benefit of our students.”

“Wiley is pleased to join this venture to promote learning by providing students with quality products at the most affordable price points,” said Bonnie Lieberman, Senior VP and General Manager, Higher Education, Wiley.

“For the past several years, we have offered numerous low-cost options to professors and students, but we are continuously exploring new avenues, and we are excited about this new model for teaching and learning with digital materials,” said Tom Scotty, President of Sales, BFW Publishing Group.

"Pearson supports the efforts of instructors at CSU to explore the effective deployment of digital course materials that hold the promise of more effective learning,” said Don Kilburn, CEO of Pearson Learning Solutions.

“We are continuously looking for ways to deliver content to students in the format that is most engaging to them,” said Rik Kranenburg at McGraw-Hill Education.

“Cengage Learning is pleased to be a leader in CSU’s Digital Marketplace and we are committed to providing students a range of high quality, high value course content in formats and at price points to meet each student's budget and learning style,” said Rich Foley, Executive Vice President, Sales & Marketing, Cengage Learning.

The pilot program will collect and analyze student and faculty user data during the fall 2010 term to learn more about usage and preferences for digital materials.

MediaWeek (Vol 3, No 35): Ads in EBooks? Twitter Links

Ads in eBooks? Not so fast (Techcrunch):

It’s a compelling argument, but like so many compelling arguments made about the future of books, it’s also hampered by consisting almost entirely of bullshit. For one thing, publishers are really not geared up to sell ads: they’d have to recruit armies of ad sales people who would be forced to actually sit down and read the novels and historical memoirs and chick-lit-churn-outs that they’d be selling against. Not going to happen.

And even if publishers do hire these crack ad teams, they’d be asking them to perform an almost impossible task: to accurately predict the readership of forthcoming books. Magazines and newspapers are able to tell advertisers weeks or months in advance what their circulation is likely to be, and so how much bang brands can expect to get for their buck. By contrast, even publishers with decades of experience have no idea whether a given title is going to sell one copy or a million. Which advertiser would have bought ads in the niche-niche prospect ‘Eats, Shoots and Leaves’ when the book was published in late 2003? And yet by January 2004 it had become an international bestseller. Traditional ad sales people would be constantly chasing their tails to try to keep up with such an unpredictable industry.

More importantly, though, any direct comparison between books and magazines (or newspapers) is completely misguided. Yes, both formats deliver words to readers’ eyes but where a magazine is designed for light reading – something one skims in a doctor’s waiting room, fully expecting to be interrupted at any moment - a book is a fully immersive experience in which the readers expects to be transported completely to another world.

From the twitter (@personanondata) Open for 98 years the Hood River Public Library is forced to close. Oregon Public Broadcasting OPB Travesty. Amanda Knox senses the pen is mightier than the penal code Guardian How Entertainment Weekly Embraces the Digital Age RWW. Lessons/suggestions for book publishers. A Look at the Reading Habits of E-Reader Owners - WSJ

Repost: The New Publishing Experience: Build Your Own Book

Originally posted July 10, 2007.

Traveling to a new location for vacation (and sometimes business) can be an exciting event and generally a lot of planning goes into the effort so you make the best use of your time. Often building your ideal itinerary may necessitate the purchase of several travel guides (or in my case diligent note taking in the cafe at BN) and I can only imagine that this situation is even more relevant if you travel as a family. Having had a great time - and probably seeing only half of what you thought you would - you leave the travel guides behind in the hotel room because they don't fit in the bags.

What if you were able to build a specific guide before you left that you could either print out before or carry with you as an electronic e-book? This is an idea that Penguin publishing unit DK are experimenting with which allows users to select content from their travel guides and build their own guide. I found the site a little clunky but the idea is sound and as a electronic platform DK could be in a position to offer far more content than appears in their DK travel books. If Penguin has other travel related content this could also be integrated with the DK travel content to create a distinct product that perhaps has more breadth than a user could get other than buying multiple books.

Travel (book) related websites are (or have the potential to) generating decent advertising revenues. Since a travel guide is a glorified directory it will not be long until the web is the primary mode of distribution for this content as has been the case with traditional data driven directories (i.e. booksinprint). As e-products, the integration with content from other publishers, map applications, photos, video and Podcasting is not far away. For example, I want to visit Boston and I build a travel book that includes a history and background information on Boston, a walking tour of North Boston, a satellite map, restaurant recommendations in an around the walk and after lunch I want to go to the Museum of Fine Arts where I buy admission tickets, add the highlights of the collection tour and download the MP3 audio tour. Ultimately, I want this 'packaged' so that I can either print it out and/or retain as an e-book or e-collection for future use.

But wait a minute, does the interaction end there? Conceivably, I will be taking pictures and forging my own impressions about the visit. And perhaps I want to include experiential things, like what I had for lunch and whether I liked it. So the publishing platform I use to create my travel book of Boston should be something I can edit outside the confines of the publisher supplied content. As such the DK application is not so functional but there are options elsewhere that are starting to appear - and in the future there maybe nothing to stop DK from adding this functionality.

One such application has been developed by SharedBook a software company in lower Manhattan. Sharedbook works with content owners who want to extend their relationship with their customers and enable them to self-select content and build their own book and in the process adding their own content. SharedBook works with customers who may not seem like publishers such as Regent Cruises and legacy.com but the functionality is similar to what I describe above. Clients of Regent cruises are able to select some core content to create their book while also adding their own specific content. So they can add pictures, annotations or full length essays on their cruise experience. There are a surprising number of clients who take advantage of this program since it serves as a high quality memento of their journey.

Sharedbook has a relatively easy to implement solution and their model has enabled 'non-publishers' to treat as 'content' assets that otherwise would remain one-dimensional as marketing or promotional material. In the case of traditional publishers, the Sharedbook platform can allow publishers to engage their customers directly and perhaps with a stronger link because the publishers content goes along with the customers positive experience. Obviously, customers pay for the privilege of creating their unique books but the prices are both reasonable and set by the content owner.

Back to my Boston example and using a SharedBook I could have a coffee table book produced with all the elements I selected before I left, those I added during my trip and the those I added after I return home. Once home I could scan the MFA ticket stub, the restaurant menu and add photos with annotations. Then I have my own memento of my trip. Models such as those I have described above will become more prevalent as publishers see the value in opening up their content repositories and allowing consumers to interact with their content. It is a trend worth following.


UPDATE: I wrote the above yesterday on the train back from Washington. Kassia Krozser of Medialoper and Booksquare was also writing about SharedBook at the same time. Here is her take.