Making Information Pay: Higher Ed Special Program

The Book Industry Study Group is extending their successful Making Information Pay Seminar Series to the Higher Education market. They are hosting an event on February 9, 2011 in New York City. From their press release:

Book companies focusing on the higher education marketplace can learn the ways in which new media is impacting how and where college students are acquiring course materials when the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) hosts a new half-day live conference, titled What College Students Think: Making Information Pay for Higher Ed Publishing, February 9, 2011 at the Yale Club of New York City.

In the tradition of BISG's highly-successful Making Information Pay conference series, What College Students Think: Making Information Pay for Higher Ed Publishing will present a tightly-focused agenda featuring perspectives from senior executives at industry-leading companies. Rather than providing a broad industry perspective, however, this program is being specifically tailored to the needs of higher education executives in acquisitions, development, media, marketing and sales who need to understand the changing needs of the college students using their materials.

"Today's college student is learning through an expanding array of media channels ranging from traditional textbooks to online learning platforms to websites, social media and mobile applications," said Angela Bole, Deputy Executive Director of BISG. "BISG is happy to be able to expand the successful half-day Making Information Pay conference series into a new annual program focusing solely on the higher education marketplace. This new program will take the industry a long way toward understanding how to compete for adoptions in today's world of open source and online educational products."

In addition to expert speakers, What College Students Think: Making Information Pay for Higher Ed Publishing will feature exclusive preliminary findings from BISG's newest research survey, Student Attitudes Toward Content in Higher Education. Powered by Bowker's PubTrack Consumer, this major new survey is providing in-depth analysis into how students currently enrolled in 2-year, 4-year and for-profit institutions perceive and use different types of educational materials in their course of study. The survey is sponsored by Champion Sponsor, Xplana, with additional sponsorship from Baker & Taylor, Budgetext, CourseSmart, Follett Higher Educational Group, Kno and Pearson.

"An event like this, designed particularly for higher education professionals, is critical given the challenges and opportunities facing this market from both a content development and a distribution standpoint," said Kelly Gallagher, Vice President of Publishing Services for Bowker. "The timeliness of this event, and the relevance of the data presented, will help academic publishers walk away with tangible insights into these areas."

What College Students Think: Making Information Pay for Higher Ed Publishing is organized by the Book Industry Study Group with Anchor Sponsorship from Bowker's PubTrack Consumer. Program and speaker management is being provide

d by Ted Hill of THA Consulting. For more information, or to register, click on the Logo:

Additional event sponsorship opportunities are available. Contact Angela Bole at angela@bisg.org or 646-336-7141 for details.

MediaWeek (Vol 3, No 47): Digital Collections, Moleskin, Amazon & Tax, Author Interviews, National Digital Library

This edition slightly shorter than normal given the Thanksgiving weekend. Check out these job opportunities if you didn't see them last week (PND). From the LA Times a short article on digital libraries (LAT):

Equipped with imaging equipment far more powerful — and often less expensive — than a decade ago, libraries of all sizes are transforming their physical collections into virtual ones. The ultimate goal is to digitize troves of books and documents long hidden in basements and to share them with the world in electronic form. "Name an institution, and if they have books they're looking to digitize them," said Nick Warnock, president of Los Angeles-based Atiz Innovation Inc., which sells a variety of scanning rigs that allow library technicians to scan as many as 800 pages a minute. The final result is a digitally bound book made from images of the original. Warnock said his business has doubled this year as more libraries and other organizations become aware of the value of scanning older documents. The company says it has sold more than 2,000 of its scanning stations to libraries and government agencies around the world, including Stanford, UCLA and the Getty Center. The lowest-cost Atiz rig, called the BookDrive Mini, sells for around $6,000 without the pair of cameras. Canon models that go with it range from $500 to $7,000 each for high-end models.

And what is note book producer Moleskin up to you ask? (PrintMag):

Despite Moleskine’s understandable support of print, the company has been trying to reach into the digital world. In 2009, it introduced MSK, a program that formats web pages for printout so they can be tucked inside notebooks. It’s not the most elegant system, but it’s a first step toward envisioning a digitally minded Moleskine. The next step is the iPhone app that was initially scheduled to be released last summer. It is now on hold, but the company says it will be a digital correspondent to the paper notebook. A draft press release suggested it would “take geopositioned written or visual notes and share them on social networks.” The layout could be changed to match users’ favorite Moleskines, and notes could be put in MSK formatting and printed out. Users would launch the app by plucking a digital version of the elastic band.

Amazon's Lack of Tax Issue (Salon):

Sales tax is a touchy subject for Amazon. Local retailers have long protested that online stores' tax-free status gives them an unfair price advantage. Amazon, wary of provoking state or federal authorities, has played down this advantage. It doesn't tout tax savings anywhere on its site or in other marketing efforts. In a brilliant report on Amazon's tax strategy, Michael Mazerov of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out that company representatives have long argued that Amazon's tax advantage is not a big deal. "People shop online for convenience, for huge selection and great prices, and not because of any sales tax issue," a spokesman said in 1999. And an executive once told a group of state tax administrators that "we don't consider tax as a competitive advantage." (The company didn't respond to my inquiries about its tax policies.) But Mazerov argues that Amazon's actions suggest that taxes have always been a primary consideration. Jeff Bezos, Amazon's founder, moved from New York to Seattle to start the company. "We could have started Amazon.com anywhere," he told Fast Company in 1996. "We chose Seattle because it met a rigorous set of criteria." Among other things, Seattle had lots of talented tech people, it was a nice enough place to attract many more smart people, and it was close to a big book warehouse. This was true of the San Francisco area, too, which Bezos had also considered for Amazon's headquarters. But Bezos saw one major problem with San Francisco—it's in a big state with high taxes, meaning lots of customers would be subject to sales tax if they bought stuff from Amazon. "I even investigated whether we could set up Amazon.com on an Indian reservation near San Francisco," Bezos told Fast Company. "This way we could have access to talent without all the tax consequences. Unfortunately, the government thought of that first."

David Rothman on Creating a National Digital Library System (Atlantic). The article is long but here is a sample (and the comments are useful also):

A library plan and related initiatives should include the actual collections, not just for traditional education and research but also for job training; tight integration with schools, libraries, and other institutions; encouragement of the spread of the right hardware and connections; and the cost-justification described in the stimulus proposal. Multimedia is essential, and Kindle-style tablets will almost surely include color and video in the future, blurring distinctions between them and iPads. But the digital library system mustn't neglect books and other texts. Old-fashioned literacy, in fact, rather than e-book standards, should be the foremost argument for a national digital library system--as a way to expand the number and variety of books for average Americans, especially students. Without basic skills, young people will not be fit for many demanding blue-collar jobs, much less for Ph.D.-level work, and economic growth will suffer (PDF). Even recreational reading of fiction, not just nonfiction, can help develop the comprehension needed for the job-related kind. But by the end of high school, most young people in the United States no longer read for fun. E-books and other technology could expand their reading choices and make books more enticing, through such wrinkles as Kindle-style dictionaries and encyclopedia links to help students better understand the words in front of them. The need is there. Decades ago when I worked the poverty beat at a factory-town newspaper in Lorain, Ohio, on Lake Erie, west of Cleveland, I did not see even pulp-fiction titles in the apartments of typical welfare mothers. Most middle-class homes also tended not to teem with books--probably true in New York or Boston as well. And this antediluvian era was years before distractions such as super-cheap video games, $67 color televisions from WalMart, cellphones, social networks, and, of course, other sites on the World Wide Web. The 2010 Kids and Family Reading Report sponsored by Scholastic says more than half of the surveyed children read for pleasure between six and eight years of age, but that the statistic drops to a quarter for those between 15 and 17. For 15-17-year-old boys, the fraction of recreational readers is a mere fifth--maybe one reason why so many men are falling behind women in earning power.

A great collection of audio interviews with authors on the BBC website:

Great writers have always fascinated their readers. We want to know how they create the characters we love or hate, the evocative settings, and the plots that have us reading late into the night, desperate to know what happens next. Throughout its history, the BBC has aimed to help audiences delve into the imagination of writers. This collection of interviews with some of the 20th Century's most read authors reveals something of those imaginations and the personalities which lie behind some of the greatest modern novels.

From the twitter (@personanondata): Norwegian publishers offer reward to solve William Nygaard case: Guardian Book Industry Study Group Webcast - Digital Books: A New Chapter for Reader Privacy. Nov 30th, 1pm BISG New media and the future of books-Interview with Chi Young-suk (Elsevier, IPA) JoongAng Daily

Thanksgiving 1968

Thanksgiving 1968

A weekly image from my archive. Click on the image to make it larger.
The lobby display at the Siam Intercontinental in 1968. This would count as my first Thanksgiving - although I think that's the middle brother not me. The family had recently arrived in Bangkok where we stayed for about a year before we moved to New Zealand. PND senior was resident manager at the hotel and we lived above the store. I like the pineapples and bananas as part of the display - very authentic.

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Job Opportunities

I rarely do this and maybe I should do it a little more. I am often asked to recommend someone or I'm presented with a position that isn't for me and I will forward a name(s) to those asking. I do my best to help out (and I hope that's reciprocated for me personally - and I think it is).

Here are a few positions I have heard of recently:

Senior Director of Research: This position is in the legal market working for a company that provides insight and value added research. The position will be highly visible within the organization and among the responsibilities are the following:

• Spearhead, direct, and oversee all company research projects from research design to implementation, analysis and product development:
  
  • including research and surveys for both editorial and commercial projects and broader research efforts, including those related to integrated services and systems that support law firms and vendors.
• Publish and disseminate research findings, and offer lessons learned on business of law topics to the field by interacting with others external to to gather input into research design and focus.

This position required prior experience managing a research staff and contributing to research projects.

A major publisher is looking for a Corporate level director of digital strategy: This position is for someone very familiar with digital publishing, business strategy and corporate development. Ideally, the person will be 10/15yrs into their career with top tier strategy consulting experience as well as domain (publishing) experience. Located in NYC.

Director of Metadata Services for a large data company. This is a confidential search but if you have management experience, bibliographic database experience, budgeting and staff reporting experience in a complex business organization then this may be of interest.

The position of Linux Systems Administrator will be responsible for implementing and maintaining reliable, scalable and secure Red Hat and Debian based server environments for several product lines and services. The position will require an excellent understanding of common application topologies (including the LAMP stack and Weblogic based 3-tier applications), performance management and capacity planning of a dynamic and complex environment. The ideal candidate will be a proven technical leader with solid operating system administration skills and the ability to maintain a positive attitude while working in a dynamic, fast-paced environment.

(I have only a casual understanding of what any of that means). There's some light programming as well.

If you are qualified and interested in any of these positions let me know and I will forward your details to the right person. All these positions are with different companies and are being handled by different people.

michael.cairns at infomediapartners.com

Take A Holiday Reading Survey for A Cause

From Publishing Trends:

Welcome to our Holiday Books: Giving and Getting survey, which we hope you'll fill out (and ask your friends to fill out as well). For each person who completes the survey, Publishing Trends will donate $1 to Room to Read (http://www.roomtoread.org).

Take the survey here:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/JZ7PCVY

It focuses on the books you'll be giving (and hoping to get) this holiday season, as well as where you go for gifts (your company’s warehouse? Amazon?) and other book-giving etiquette issues, holiday parties, and more. It’s fun to take—we promise—and the results will be included in the December issue of Publishing Trends.

The survey closes on Tuesday, November 30.

Happy holidays,

Laura Hazard Owen

Editor, Publishing Trends

Speculation over Reed Elsevier (Again): Missing the Bigger Point

Several UK Sunday newspapers report new speculation about the future of Reed Elsevier and specifically whether the company could be ripe for a private equity buy-out. Shares were volatile on Friday in what could be more a reflection of market boredom than anything else. Since Erik Engstrom took over the CEO role a year ago, analysts have speculated that the company would either shed assets or be taken private given the company's languishing share price and inconsistent performance across the group. Last week the company confirmed their full year guidance which calls for "modest" erosion of margins given a strained revenue outlook (Bloomberg):

“As previously stated, a modest reduction year-on-year in adjusted operating margin is expected due to a weak revenue environment and increased investment in legal markets,” the London-based company said in a Business Wire statement today. “Any sustained recovery is expected to be gradual and remains dependent on economic conditions.”

Subscription sales in many professional markets are still constrained by “low customer activity levels and budgets,” while advertising and other cyclical markets continued to stabilize, according to the statement.

“In the second half we have continued to sharpen our focus in key markets, through new product development, increased sales and marketing activities, and portfolio realignment,” Chief Executive Officer Erik Engstrom said in the statement.

Weakened renewal subscriptions are likely to constrain revenue for sometime given annual subscription cycles in addition to weakness in the professional markets such as their legal market. The company has sold off some smaller business and products - last week they sold a German business unit to Wolters Kluwer for example but in total these seem minor compared with what analysts and potential private equity investors may be contemplating.

The Telegraph tries to put some more meat on the bones of a somewhat old story by suggesting that the management team at Reed Exhibitions is working with private equity groups Cinven and Apax to prepare a bid for the Exhibitions business unit. Private equity as said to respect the management of the group: Whether Engstrom respects them on Monday morning may be another story.

These titillating financial stories gloss over some difficult issues for Reed Elsevier. In particular, the company is likely to see significant competition from Bloomberg as that company aggressively targets the legal and regulatory market place. Unfortunately for Reed, they may be strategically limited by not having a strong financial and business news unit which is the core of Bloomberg and which Thomson West - their other competitor - possesses in Thomson Financial & Reuters. (A deal between Reed and Reuters would have been strategically more important than the deal the company ultimately made to acquire Choicepoint). Whereas information companies built their businesses over the past 15yrs on organization around silos - financial, news, medical, legal, etc. - the rapid improvement in search, taxonomies and user interface are enabling information companies to 'reintegrate' their siloed content. This is where Reed maybe disadvantaged vis a vis Bloomberg and Thomson and whether that can be solved by taking the company private is a crap shoot. But then, that's what private equity is good at.

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Michael Cairns

See also Crains (Reg Required). C/P headline into Google.

MediaWeek (Vol 3, No 47): Tolstoy's Family, Hornby's Kids, King James Bible, Brighton Rock.

Leo Tolstoy's impressive family tree (Independent):

But it’s not just his work that has spread across the globe – it’s also his descendents. Leo and his wife Sofia had, during their long and tempestuous marriage, 13 children (five of whom died young). During the revolution, members of this large family fled Russia. In the hundred years since his death, the Tolstoy diaspora – now numbering over 300 – has fanned out, with family clusters in France, Italy and Sweden, and descendants to be found as far afield as Uruguay, Brazil and the United States. The importance of family to Tolstoy was enormous, according to Orwin. “For him, the family was the lynchpin that brought together nature and civilization, happiness and duty.” Tolstoy’s work itself often features pretty hefty family dynasties: War and Peace includes characters based on Tolstoy’s own relations (Princess Mary and Nicholas Rostov, for example, were modelled on his parents). Orwin adds that “he could never have written Anna Karenina without his family experience. When Tolstoy describes Anna’s clandestine visit to her son Seryozha, he is drawing on his personal observations of the love between mother and child at Yasnaya Polyana.” Rosamund Bartlett, author of new biography Tolstoy: A Russian Life, adds: “In his earlier life, family meant everything to Tolstoy - although he withdrew from family life in his later years. He was forever seeking in his fiction to recreate the lost paradise of his early childhood, which is one reason why his family estate Yasnaya Polyana was so important.”

Tolstoy in Worldcat Inside Nick Hornby's Ministry of Stories (Observer)

Author Nick Hornby and art entrepreneurs Ben Payne and Lucy Macnab open the first Ministry of Stories centre in east London. Based on Dave Eggars' San Francisco project 826 Valencia, the volunteer-run Hoxton Street Monster Supplies aims to inspire children in creative writing. It has already found favour with David Cameron and his 'big society' agenda.

Robert McCrum in the Observer takes a look at the King James bible as it turns 400 (Observer):

As well as selling an estimated 1bn copies since 1611, the KJB went straight into our literary bloodstream like a lifesaving drug. Whenever we put words into someone's mouth, or see the writing on the wall, or go from strength to strength, or eat, drink and be merry, or fight the good fight, or bemoan the signs of the times, or find a fly in the ointment, or use words such as "long-suffering", "scapegoat" and "peacemaker" we are unconsciously quoting the KJB. More astounding, compared to Shakespeare's prodigal 31,000-word vocabulary, the KJB works its magic with a lexicon of just 12,000 words.More than this enthralling matrix of linguistic influence, there's the miracle of the translation itself, a triumph of creative collaboration (54 scholars in six committees), outright plagiarism and good old English pragmatism. The Authorized Version's mission statement was a masterpiece of lowered expectations. Its aim, it declared, was not "to make a new Translation, nor yet to make of a bad one a good one, but to make a good one better, or out of many good ones, one principal good one, that hath been our endeavour".

Movie trailer for the remake of Graham Green's Brighton Rock (Guardian) Lonely Planet has identified their list of the world's greatest bookstores (LP):

Bookshops are a traveller’s best friend: they provide convenient shelter and diversion in bad weather, they’re a reliable source of maps, notebooks, and travel guides, they often host readings and other cultural events, and if you raced through your lone paperback on the first leg of your trip, the bookshop is the place to go for literary replenishment. Taken from Lonely Planet’s Best in Travel 2011, here are our picks for the best spots to browse, buy, hang out, find sanctuary among the shelves, rave about your favourite writers and meet book-loving characters.

From the twitter (@personanondata) Elvis Costello's list of the 500 Greatest Albums Ever: http://tinyurl.com/2taw3s iPad 'newspaper' created by Steve Jobs and Rupert Murdoch Guardian UWash Report - How Students Use of Information in the Digital Age PND Can't Pick a College Major? Create One - WSJ Wolters Kluwer buys Lexis Nexis Germany from Reed Reuters

And in sports a great article charting the launch of the (un)Manchester United team FC United of Manchester (Observer). Things are looking good for Man Utd at the moment (BBC) though we should have won at least four more games.