Book Orbit

How do we read books online?

2010-01-19T15:03:00.003Z

This is such a wonderfully interesting article. I opened it as a link from a trusted Tweeter, thinking I’d just scan the headline, and ended up spending ten minutes reading it over my sandwich!

Martin asks a very sensible question. In the ‘hoop-la’ over electronic delivery devices, we have got a little tied up with the question of how we find information. Of course that’s a very useful and important question to ask. But, as he says, wouldn’t it be worth us taking a step back and asking how we read information. Or, rather, how we are likely to read in the future. The way he teases out the implications of that approach are extremely apposite.

Martin’s article is mainly about reading journal content. But it is certainly relevant to those of us concerned with the future of the book. In fact, this gets to the heart of one of my bug-bears about this wonderful electronic future we are facing in the books industry: will it be at the cost of the integrity of the very thing we are looking to advance? I’ve written about such things here. And I probably will again.

Anyway, I would heartily recommend Martin’s article. He looks at all the formats through which we have consumed (journal) content since its invention, including paper, photocopy, printed, PDF, PDF-on-a-computer, mobiles, e-readers, and webpages (oft-forgotten!), and, looking forward, to a tablet-orientated future.

One comment from me is this: let’s not forget the origins of the www! What do I mean? Well, the more we extract content from the web (that is, from the inter-related, inter-operable web of html as originally envisaged by the founders of the Internet) onto a device (even if that device has some kind of search or store or retrieval function of its own), could it not be that we are impoverishing the reading experience? For it’s the world-wide web as a whole that can supply the depth and breadth of knowledge required: not objects-in-themselves, whether that be a paper, a journal, a book, or whatever. It’s understandable that we’ll need to (in some way) extract the mass of content onto a non-inter-operable platform, but we shouldn’t work that way to the exclusion of serving the Internet itself. For the Internet is the starting-point for real value in the reading experience.

Anyway, have a look and see what you think.

Where have you been?

2010-01-19T14:38:00.004Z

I'm sorry for the lack of posts recently! Normal service is now being returned for the new year!

Research scientists and social networks (part 2)

2009-11-19T10:20:00.004Z

In my last post I introduced a theme that I’m going to follow up over the next couple of posts: are social networks really being used by research scientists?

It’s a valid question, I argued, because not every segment of the academic – let alone the general – publisher marketplace has the same information needs and workflow systems. The working day of a research scientist needs to be considered for what it is – not for what we think it is – in the same way as a social scientist’s needs to be, or a literary critic’s needs to be, or a Dan Brown reader’s needs to be.

I suggested that the premise that for a social network to succeed, it relies on the following assumptions:

that the target user audience has something they want to share
that they want to share it
that they have time to share it

So are these premises true in the case of research scientists?

I work within academic science publishing. I talk to scientists often. I’m married to one! So although these thoughts are not quantitative, they are qualitative.

So what about the first question: do research scientists have things they want to share?

This very interesting article by Kent Anderson of Scholarly Kitchen suggests not.

But I think the answer is ‘yes’. Sure, some information that a research scientists produces falls under the category of ‘restricted’. But lots doesn’t. There are insights about recently published papers and science presentations or discussions, as well as information about grants, careers, science policy, and other items can all be of interest.

Some people say: ‘there are other means for scientists to access this information; in fact, more controlled ways, like RSS or Google News’.

True, but there’s nothing like social media to flag up that little-known paper, research finding or presentation. And the beauty of social networks is that, once they are posted about, they enter a web of interest and engagement from a community which adds to their value.

Anyway, more about that in the next post, when I move on to the second question: if it’s true that research scientists have information to share, do they want to do it? That’s a more knotty question. More next time…

Research scientists and social networks (part 1)

2009-11-12T15:09:00.004Z

Next week, I’m going to post a few thoughts on the development of social networks by publishers.

'Ah, that's what you write about most days', you say! Well yes - but this time, I'm going to be looking at one group of people in particular - the research science community.

Why? Well, let's take a step back. When we think about social networks, we tend to assume that their tentacles of influence will reach into every single market in the world. It's unstoppable.

But is that right in the case of research scientists? After all, there are some differences in the way scientists work, compared to say lawyers or students or nurses. Research scientists have different information requirements. They have different methods of sharing information. And most of all they have different issues to do with data sensitivity.

So, at any level, we shouldn't assume that research scientists are as likely as any other constituency to dive head-first into social networks. It may be true, but we shouldn't assume that ...

As a structure for this series of posts, I'm working on the premise that for a social network to succeed, it relies on the following assumptions. It pre-supposes:

that they have something they want to share
that they want to share it

that they have time to share it

In other words, if it’s going to secure a critical mass of users, a social network needs to have people with something to write about, a reason to write about it, and time to actually do it.

And I'm just going to be asking: is that true in this case of the research science community?

Keep your eyes peeled for more next week...

Reading books on an iPhone

2009-11-10T14:37:00.004Z

Usually, people assume that the iPhone is not the best device for reading books. And so most industry observers have been waiting for the advent of the (fabled) Apple Tablet as the device that (probably) would be the tipping point for an iTunes-like book store.

However, here’s an interesting article suggesting otherwise. Analytics firm, Flurry, has published a report which shows that in the last four months, book apps have exceeded the popularity of games apps – with one out of every five new apps launching in October having been a book.

This is an interesting trend for publishers to take note of, for a number of reasons:

It suggests that Apple could be in a position to take market share from the Amazon Kindle
It suggests that, in spite of its display screen losing 2 inches to the Kindle, people may nevertheless be happy reading books on the iPhone
It suggests that iPhone book reader apps may be an avenue worth exploring for publishers
It suggests that ‘mobile’ might trump ‘clarity’ as people decide how to read books on mobile devices.

Cory Doctrow and a gauntlet thrown down to the publishing industry

2009-11-09T16:29:00.007Z

I remember going to a seminar with Cory Doctrow in London about 5 years ago. I hadn’t heard of him much then. I quite enjoyed it. But most of all I was struck by the impression of being in the presence of someone who had a strong, a burning, almost a ferocious desire to prove something.

Now, everyone involved with book publishing knows what that is. It’s the desire to overturn the established publishing model.

Here’s his challenge to the publishing industry, laid out in a special guest slot in Publisher’s Weekly: it’s an experiment to prove that he can publish a book with the same degree of margin, profit and success as any publisher can. It’s a challenge to the brewers of this world that his home-made beer is superior. And this time, he’s got science to back him up.

Here he is in his own words:

This business of my giving away e-books is a controversial subject. I encounter plenty of healthy skepticism in my travels, and not a little bile. There's a lot of people who say I'm pulling a fast one,
that I'd be making more money if I didn't do this crazy liberal copyright stuff, or that I'm the only one it'll ever work for, or that I secretly make all my money from doing stuff that isn't writing, or that it only works because I'm so successful. Of course, when I started, they said it only worked because I was so
unknown. People want proof that this works—that I'm not deluded or a con artist.

But it's hard to prove. I don't have a time machine I can use to republish all my books without the free downloads and compare royalty statements. And the skeptics aren't the only people who claim I've got it wrong. There are also the True Believers. The True Believers are the people who say that I'm a fool to
give 90% of the cover price of my books to the publisher and bookseller. After all, I have three or four million people a day who read my blog. I could just self-publish all my material and get it directly into the hands of my readers, and pocket the lion's share of the income.

I'm a contrarian on both of these propositions: that I'm losing money by giving away e-books, and that I'm losing money by using a publisher. I have a nice little Goldilocks gig going—not too hot, not too cold, just the right amount of DIY, independent publishing and just the right amount of professional support and administration from my publisher to sell. But I'm as curious about both propositions as anyone. While it's fun to argue about whose intuition is more correct, I think facts on the ground beat a priori assumptions every time. So I've come up with an idea to get some facts in evidence, while making some money and raising a little hell.

So what do you think? Can this work? Is it real science (see here for a very subtle analysis of why he might be wrong)? If you're a publisher, does this concern you?

Interactive children's books

2009-11-04T12:16:00.006Z

Here's an interesting new type of children's book from Macmillan: Room on a Broom. It's a a picture book in the old fashioned sense but also a fully interactive experience - it includes a CD that provides an animated version of the story, games, activities, extras - and even a facility for 'creating your own story' (you know: when you make a decision for a character within the story-line, and that decision takes you in a certain direction, and so on, and so on).

It reminds me of those old books I used to have as a child: the Fantasy Forest series of books... Do you remember them? You would get to page (7) and then be able to turn either right (go to page 75) or left (go to page 112).

Not so slick, but still, I enjoyed them. My favourite was 'Dungeon of Darkness'!

Understanding the reasons for textbook shenanigans

2009-10-28T12:00:00.004Z

Textbook pricing is a difficult, complex and even polarising issue for academic publishers - but at the same time it's important from time to time for publishers themselves to step back and be reminded of the reasons why many of their customers are complaining.

Textbooks are very expensive. No question about it. And that causes our customers to come up with ways of getting around the purchase of a £120 book they desperately need - but simply can't afford. Some of these ways are innovative; some are illegal. But whilst none of these are excusable (because they essentially constitute theft), they are understandable. And if publishers understand this, maybe we can work more closely with customers for mutual benefit

Here's a few ways in which customers will look to acquire textbooks more cheaply than RRP, ranging from the obvious to the innovative:

Second-hand textbooks, sold online or via a scheme local to a university campus or geographical area
Ebooks (a whole new debate - but yes, we need to mention them, because (at least in theory) these can and should be cheaper than print hardbacks)
Campus stores running a legitimate (ie. publisher-mandated) textbook 'hire' scheme
Students running an illegitamate (ie. not publisher-mandated) digital textbook 'hire' scheme
Professors who recommend previous editions (which can be bought cheaply) to their students, highlighting the chapters in which there is outdated or redundant information
Students purchasing international editions (a perennial problem for global academic publishers)
Digital piracy
And, the old favourite, photocopying

Can you think of any other ways? Please comment below.

100 ways to use Twitter in your Library

2009-10-14T13:24:00.002+01:00

A great article. Worth reading if only for the '10 best library feeds to follow'. Here are the first few suggestions:

Read the latest news: Many major news sites, like MSNBC have Twitter feeds. This makes it easy to quickly check up on news and find the latest information.

Identify experts in a specific area: Find out who’s talking about subjects that interest you or your patrons. You can’t get the same affect by using traditional email and resources.

Find out what other schools and libraries are doing around the world: Get ideas on how other libraries all over the globe are using Twitter effectively in their library.

Share a tip on finding or accessing information online or in the building: Spread the knowledge of your learning with others. If you’ve found a website that has specific resources or data, send a tweet and let everyone know.

Posts can link to interesting news stories about literacy or about libraries. When appropriate, the posts can link to a library’s own website and blog for more in-depth information.

Use Twitter as an assessment tool: For example, subscribe to a handful of patrons or students, in return they should follow you also. By tweeting, you can learn about such things as what services are being used the most in the library.

Find contacts working on similar projects. Stumped about a presentation or project you are working on? Twitter is a great way to find others that have had a similar problem and get a swift response.

Patrons can ask questions about specific materials. Let your patrons know if you have a certain book or article they are looking for or let them know where they can find it. This also will keep up the community feeling that your library is looking for.

Search Twitter for references to the ALA (American Library Association): If it’s something there you can respond to then go ahead. If it’s not something in your area, then pass along the information.

Sound strategy for your social media

2009-10-14T09:50:00.005+01:00

Here's an interesting article from The British Computer Society (BCS) detailing some of the ethical and regulatory issues stemming from engagement with social media.

All these issues need to be faced up to and addressed if you're interacting with customers on social networks.

Is the Kindle going global?

2009-10-07T11:02:00.005+01:00

The Kindle may be finally going global!

Amazon announced late Tuesday that it was introducing a new version of its Kindle e-book reader that can wirelessly download books in the United States and more than 100 countries. The Seattle-based e-tailer said international customers will have access to about 220,000 book titles at its Kindle Store compared with the 350,000 titles available to U.S. customers. Publishers involved with the store include Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, Lonely Planet, Harlequin, Penguin, Bloomsbury, and Hachette.

Searching with Cuil

2009-10-06T13:21:00.005+01:00

I've been using Cuil for search for a while now and would like to take a moment to extol its virtues.

What is it? Cuil makes (some) use of principles of semantic search and, therefore, will always provide a different 'angle' on how the content of your page registers on SERPs. Try putting in a few entries and get a feel for how different your results are when compared to Google!

So what are these semantic principles? They're used to improve online searching by using data from semantic networks to disambiguate queries and web text in order to generate more relevant results. In other words (here's my very potted summary): when you type in a search term, most engines are interpreting this as a search for a specific document or item. But in semantic search, the engine assumes that there is no particular document which the user knows about that s/he is trying to get to. Rather, the user is trying to locate a number of documents which together will give him/her the information s/he is trying to find. So it's better for general research. This is the principle that Cuil works on.

Will it catch on? Of course, at the moment, Cuil is a gnat on an elephant's back. But it claims that it can index web pages significantly faster and cheaper than Google (due to the back-end search architecture and relevance methods). Semantic search is developing apace and some people are claiming that Cuil beats Google, Yahoo and Bing in one particular metric: amount of time spent on a site after referral from a search engine. That's a key stat and indicator of how successful a search engine really is.

Why should I care? Because Cuil is much more 'content' and 'relevancy'-driven, the key point is that it might show you some 'black-spots' in which your web copy or your product information is not hitting the spot. Try typing in some product terms and see what comes up. And put it this way, semantic principles aren't going to get less important in a hurry ...

And finally, here's the screenshot you come to when you access:

A primer on ebook readers

2009-10-06T10:32:00.003+01:00

Here's an interesting summary of the recent history, the challenges and the formats of ebook readers. It won't be news to many of the readers of this blog, but might be a useful summary for some.

Justin and the Sony Ebook Reader

2009-10-05T13:52:00.002+01:00

Although it's the only main-stream Ebook Reader that has been available to users in the UK so far, the Sony EReader has played the rather anonymous 'younger brother' to the Kindle over the last 18 months. But maybe they're now making their play, Here's a launch advert on prime time TV with a slick advert featuring Justin Timberlake (I'm a big fan), Super Bowl player Peyton Manning, America’s Next Top Model judge Nigel Barker, comedienne Amy Sedaris and ESPN reporter Erin Andrews. The campaign includes broadcast, online, radio and newspaper advertising. As this article points out, it is working along the 'expert' concept: each celebrity talking about something they 'know'.

Slap an App around it ... and I'll buy it!

2009-10-05T12:00:00.006+01:00

Here's a very interesting article from today's Media Guardian.

It appears that web applications (API) are starting to change the way publishers will be able to monetize their content. For years now, of course, we've had the despairing argument from publishers (particularly news publishers) that customers don't want to pay for content online, since it is assumed that it should be free.

But slap an app around it and deliver it on a mobile device, and it appears users are willing to part with their cash to read it. This holds even if the app is little more than an aggregator or search engine for the content (ie. if it supplies a little 'order' to the content it is displaying, but not much more). In other words, what users would expect for free on a browser, they are seeming to agree needs to be paid for on a mobile interface such as an iPhone or other Smart phone.

Why? The article seems to suggest there's a certain psychology involved. Mobile consumers can be persuaded to part with some cash, they argue, because they are already used to paying for lots of things on their mobile:

People are used to paying something for content and services on a mobile phone, whether it's a text message or a download or ringtone or wallpaper, There is a comfort factor. In that medium people are more aware of the need or requirement for some sort of payment. (Tim Faircliff, General Manager of Consumer Media at Thomson Reuters and Co-chair of the Association of Online Publishers)

I wonder how many traditional book publishers are developing apps like this to 'envelop' their content - rather than complaining that no one want to purchase their PDFs online?

Books and Vooks

2009-10-01T12:09:00.006+01:00

I've been reading this article from the New York Times on 'vooks' this morning.

Apparently, Simon & Schuster (but I'm sure many other publishers too) are moving forward rapidly to sell and promote multi-media 'hash' titles, in which videos, audio or other online features are scatteded throughout the electronic text that can be viewed online or on an iPhone or iPod Touch or other device.

Of course, the 'vook' format is great for titles with an academic or reference content.

But what's interesting here is the speed with which what we call 'trade' titles (novels, fiction, and so on) is receiving the same treatment. Examples given include HarperCollins The Amanda Project (teenage) and Level 26: Dark Origins (CSI spin-off), in which additional web video is essential for the moving forward of the plot (ie. you can't read the book without it).

The tone of this piece is generally sceptical about such development, which no publisher should be, but I think the author is right when he comments:

Some publishers say this kind of multimedia hybrid is
necessary to lure modern readers who crave something different. But reading
experts question whether fiddling with the parameters of books ultimately
degrades the act of reading.

This is something I've written about before here.

Be positive about the future of books online

2009-09-28T13:42:00.006+01:00

This looks like it was a really interesting event: a discussion between four very interesting representatives of online content:

Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson (also author of Free, posted about here)
John Sargent, Macmillan US CEO (Macmillan Publishing have been at the forefront of experiments in online publishing, particularly through NPG)
Gary Hoenig, General Manager and Editorial Director of ESPN Publishing (behind a recent subscription experiment with The Insider magazine)
Alan Murray, Executive Online Editor of the Wall Street Journal (who of course have attempted various paid-for and free content models on their own, huge, content-rich website)

Reading this Publisher’s Weekly summary of the event, what struck me as interesting in this debate about the future of books was not the thoughts of the newspaper/ magazine publishers, but the book publisher’s. Here’s how it is reported in PW:

He offered resistance to some of the fundamental premises espoused by other
panelists—as books, he noted, are different than newspapers or magazines:
generally one-off sales, rather than subscriptions through ongoing serviceable
customer relationships. In a world of free online content, he suggested, it was
difficult to be upbeat about the future of the book, which he noted, unlike
music or magazines, require a significant investment of time and attention from
the consumer.

So he was much more negative than the others about the future of books online! Don’t you think that we (book publishers) of all people can be more positive than that about the future of books … please comment below.

Website Health Check

2009-09-28T10:33:00.003+01:00

Hi all, I'm back from my break and so the blog will now resume! Keep reading for news and information on books and the future of books online.

For anyone involved with the sales and marketing of ebooks, here's an interesting booklet from Google examining common website design and optimisation issues, from the point of view of a customer. There's nothing in here that's too complex, so this will be interesting for anyone starting out on an SEO journey for books on their website. It discusses 10 ways to improve your site performance and online profitability.

Plus, if you fill in their survey, you have a chance to win a free website health check from one of their Conversion Professionals.

I'll be back soon

2009-09-18T10:00:00.004+01:00

I'm away now for a week but Book Orbit will continue when I return. See you soon.

Library Blogs (3)

2009-09-18T09:52:00.005+01:00

The third in my series of interesting librarian blogs. This one is called socialnetworkinglibrarian and is written by a librarian and social marketeer - and therefore has a particular emphasis on social networks in libraries. There's a recent post on interesting librarians to follow on Twitter.

Library Blogs (2)

2009-09-16T16:01:00.005+01:00

Here's the next in my series of interesting library and librarian blogs: Remixing Libraries. It covers new library developments and the growth of the digital library, particularly with regards to social networking.

More to come later in the week.

Library blogs (1)

2009-09-15T16:59:00.003+01:00

Knowbodies seems to be an interesting current awareness blog that provides news about websites, technology, resources, applications, trends and all manner of things that might be of interest to librarians and others with a professional interest in finding information. If you're involved with e-books and libraries, might be worth signing up. I'll be posting a few librarian blog suggestions over the rest of the week.

The smell of e-books

2009-09-15T09:30:00.008+01:00

Further to my post yesterday about ebook smells, here's some more news about the notorious aerosol e-book enhancer.

Looking at the site again last night, this must be a joke, right? Apparently Smell of Books™ is available in five designer aromas:

Classic Musty Smell (Promotional line: “When was the last time an e-book made you sneeze? Probably never. It’s a scientifically proven fact that e-books lack the necessary “character” to trigger a strong physical reaction. Our Classic Musty Scent solves that problem. Your e-book reader may be new and made of plastic, but now your e-books can smell like vintage classics. Classic Musty Scent is like having the collected works of Shakespeare in a can.”)

Scent of Sensibility (Promotional line: “Women will love this specially engineered designer book aroma. The scent of violets, horses, and potpourri. It’s like living in a Jane Austen novel!”)

Eau You Have Cats (Promotional line: “This special scent is guaranteed to please animal lovers and avid book collectors alike. It’s just like borrowing a book from grandma’s house.”)

Crunchy Bacon Scent: (Promotional line: “Crunchy Bacon Scent is the first aroma in our new Lifestyle Series™. Designed especially for the health conscious book lover, Crunchy Bacon is a low calorie, low cholesterol alternative for your breakfast reading enjoyment”).

Then I noticed this corporate disclaimer:

Please use in well ventilated area. May cause dizziness and hallucinations. May cause itching and runny nose. If symptoms persist for longer than eight weeks please consult your physician. Not for use on “real” books. Do not use while riding public transportation. Discard empty container with hazardous waste. Not for use as a room deodorizer. Not for use on burning books. Do not use on a Zune.

You’ve got to be joking, right?

Will there ever be an Apple e-book reader?

2009-09-14T15:44:00.012+01:00

Last week, Steve Jobs caused some consternation among various web communities who are associated with e-books and digital reading. In an example of the Chinese-whisper effect, this consternation originated was kicked off by comments (apparently off-the-cuff) he made at an Apple event in New York about the possibility of Apple never developing a dedicated e-book reader.

This TechCrunch post provides helpful clarification on what he actually said, and dampens down some of the panic:

Q: Has your opinion of e-readers changed?

A: I’m sure there will always be dedicated devices, and they may have a few advantages in doing just one thing. But I think the general-purpose devices will win the day because I think people just probably aren’t willing to pay for a dedicated device. You notice Amazon never says how much they sell; usually if they sell a lot of something, you want to tell everybody. We don’t see that it’s a really big market at this point. And in the future, the more general-purpose devices will tend to win the day. I’m not sure that Amazon, as an example, really cares that much about being in the hardware business. If I were Amazon, I’d love selling stuff where I didn’t have to have a warehouse, didn’t need UPS.

So not so much to worry about after all then.

But it is amazing the power Apple has in the market to 'define' trends - even in a sphere (digital reading) where they have made minimal impact so far (they haven't released a dedicated e-book reader. But I think he's right that 'one gadget fits all' devices will be the future, and the fabled Apple Tablet may be the first serious attempt at that, whenever it comes out.

Why e-books are more environmentally-friendly

2009-09-14T11:00:00.007+01:00

They may account for only 1.9% of total market sales at the moment, but our taste for consuming e-books may prove to have an agreeable side-effect.

A new study by Cleantech has suggested that there are significant environmental advantages to reading books this way, compared to the publishing of books, magazine and newspapers as traditionally understood.

Taking the Amazon Kindle as an example, the study demonstrates that purchasing 3 e-books per month for 4 years produces roughly 168 kg of CO² throughout the Kindle’s lifecycle; compared to the estimated 1,074 kg of CO² produced by the same number of printed books. Or, to take another statistic, the purchase of an e-book displaces the purchase of 22.5 print books. In fact, the report goes as far as to suggest that the carbon footprint emitted by an e-reading device is offset in just one year when compared to the carbon footprint of a book.

Of course this isn’t entirely surprising. The production of a book must be one of the most environmentally-unsound activities known to the industrial world! Think, for example, about the following functions in the life-cycle of a book:

The printing of a book
The factory processes required to glue together and cover a book
The distribution cycle, in which books (which are large and bulky items en masse) are packaged, crated up, handled in the warehouse, dispatched to countries across the world, displayed, sold, and then in all-too-large quantities often returned! (About a quarter to a third of books sold, it is generally accepted in the industry, are subsequently returned to the warehouse). And then, wait for it ... they are pulped (I would really love to see some data on how environmentally-effective the actual mechanisms of pulping are!)
The marketing of the book (which often involves large amounts of print material being sent indiscriminately around the world)
The process of writing the book (in which an author may have had to travel around the world for purposes of research)

Of course, none of this means that e-readers are without environmental impact. Consumer electronics, of course, are well-known for containing a variety of toxic materials in the electronics and circuitry – and, don’t forget, there are distribution and return costs associated with these products too.

Casey Harrell, an international campaign coordinator for Greenpeace, which monitors the environmental impact of consumer electronics, said e-readers remain something of an unknown variable.

In terms of the Kindle or other similar e-book gadgets, I don’t know what chemicals are in or out. Companies will want to brag about their eco-credentials, so if you don’t see any mention, they’ve probably not been eliminated.

But I may have found a way of sorting the problem! If you want to commit to a more environmentally-friendly way of reading, but miss the old-fashioned look, feel and ‘smell’ of books, try this: an aerosol e-book enhancer. Absolutely unbelievable! (I'm going to get some though, it'll go well with my iPhone) ...

Google Book Settlement

2009-09-11T11:59:00.002+01:00

And to follow up the post below, have a look at this very interesting article on the Google Book Settlement.

HT Michael Masnick

What’s the definition of a book?

2009-09-11T10:20:00.001+01:00

One of the many challenges that Google Books presents is, in my opinion, the definition of a ‘book’.

Why? Well, what is a ‘book’? It’s a linear, narratively-driven argument. It starts at the first chapter and ends at the last. It has progression and purpose. It is controlled by an author (or by a team of authors, under some unity of intention). It wants to inform you or convince you about something. When we pick up a book and read it from page 1, we assume that it is going to provide us with forward-movement, such that page 10 will build on page 9, and chapter 17 will build on chapter 16. That is the unique nature of the book. It needs to be understood as a whole.

Of course, in reality, life doesn’t work like that. We rarely have time to consume information in that way. We need to extract information from a larger whole. Whatever industry we work in, whether it is academic or professional, we bite-off and chew smaller pieces of content than we are presented with. We scan headlines in a newspaper. We scan SERPS from a search engine. We scan summaries and headings of reports. And then add to this mix the reality of how we consume information online. We read blogs. We watch snippets of video. We hop around widgets.

Somewhere in the middle of all this is the challenge for the publishing industry. We publish books. But aren’t books too big and unwieldy for the internet?

That’s where Google Books comes in, and why the recent publicity like this and this surrounding the end of the author agreement matters. Because Google wants to aggregate books into, for want of a better phrase, ‘smaller pieces’. What happens if a customer needs only the third chapter of that book to solve a problem? Well, Google wants to make it easy for you to filter the content you need from the chaff, and then they'll sell it to you.Now I’m ignoring the business case for all this – just for now. I’ll post about that some other time. And I think that delivering ‘data solutions’ to people is crucial and will be central to all our publishing efforts for years to come.

But my question is: how do you read a book as a ‘book’ like this? Will packaging, selling and delivering books in this way ultimately undermine their unique purpose in the world? Is Google Books capable of presenting book material and giving it the space it needs to breathe? Will it end up undermining the relevance of a book?

Eventually, publishers will need to decide whether – ironically – Google Books is in fact sacrificing too much of the quality of the book reading experience.

We may have eTextbooks, but how will we read them?

2009-09-10T10:29:00.011+01:00

I posted the other day about California’s impressive (but somewhat vague) plans for developing, financing and stipulating electronic textbooks as a required part of their curriculum. And a big part of that plan was mobile, or a ‘reading device in every student’s rucsack’.

But this grand design requires a suitable mobile format to match it. And of course that’s the alchemy that seems to have been forever out of reach to publishers and technology developers in recent years. And that’s true for the device that many have pinned their hope in more than any other, the iPhone.

In this very interesting recent article from the New York Times website, Texting? No, Just Trying to Read Chapter 6, Randall Stross observes:

Yes, the textbook can be digitized and displayed on gadgets that students can
carry everywhere. But the iPhone version is painfully limited in its usefulness.

And goes on with this indictment:

The standard-size printed textbook provides the maximum amount of text and graphics in a single view. Once cracked open, two facing pages supply about 155 square inches of real estate, an expanse populated by hundreds of words; the occasional chart, table or photograph; and lots of restful white space. All of this is visible without clicking, zooming or swiping. The iPhone has a grand total of six square inches of display. In my opinion, no amount of ingenuity will enable textbooks to squeeze into a credit-card-size space.

The whole article is well worth a read. It goes on to discuss the developments being made by one conglomerate software company, CourseSmart, about which I’ll be posting more in due course.

CourseSmart have recently released an iPhone app called eTextbooks, which lets students read their textbooks on the phone. But, as far as Stross is concerned, there’s nothing yet that can match the two-page spread of a print textbook on a computer monitor, let alone on the tiny iPhone screen.

The article goes on to discuss alternative format readers such as the Kindle and Reader, but suggests these two have their limititations in regards to textbooks.

Interesting challenges ahead for California, as if it didn’t have enough …

The future of libraries

2009-09-03T16:47:00.002+01:00

Here's an interesting video produced by JISC on the future of libraries. The question is: will we have librarians in the future?

It seems to me this video is spot on in arguing for an altered role for librarians in the future. Automated systems and search will no doubt become more and more efficient at finding information, but the ability to classify, guide and qualify information is unlikely to be automated so quickly. Thoughts?

Should publishers pay their authors to do marketing and publicity?

2009-09-03T09:57:00.008+01:00

It’s long been a maxim in the publishing industry that ‘authors are the best means of PR’. Sometimes, it feels like that should be changed to ‘authors are the only means of PR’.

But if authors are being asked to do the publishers' job of marketing and publicizing their own books, shouldn't the publishers pay them for it, as they would pay a staff member or outside publicist? In her article Publishers Must Change the Way Authors Get Paid, that’s what M.J. Rose argues. (Incidentally, she is founder of a website called Author Buzz which offers authors and publishers marketing solutions.)

Here’s what she says in her capacity as 'author':

It’s blatantly and patently unfair for us to invest in our own books and then
wait for our advances to earn out based on the same royalties rates we’ve always gotten.

And:

Be it $2,000 or $20,000, the money we invest should be discounted from the
advances we’re paid, allowing us to earn royalties faster based on an honest
up-front expenditure by the publisher.

And again:

And, it goes without saying, we should be getting a higher royalty rate. After
all, we’re doing more than writing our books, we’re business partners as
well.

Should publishers be changing their attitudes towards their authors?

Well, in my opinion, yes. The author is a vital source of marketing and publicity – and certainly I think there is value in considering this as a more formal ‘business’ relationship than sometimes it is. This is sure to be different for different kinds of publishing – what an ‘academic’ author can do will be different from what a children’s or teenage fiction author can do. But it might include a rethinking of the royalty/ advance model, a pre-project commissioning process, or some other means of formalizing the relationship to mutually-beneficial ends.

By the way, have you seen twelvebooks, a publishing company set-up and run by erstwhile Random House chief Jonathan Karp? It publishes 12 and only 12 books a year and makes each one its sole marketing focus for a month. Of 25 books they’ve published, 13 have become New York Times best sellers. Here

are Karp's 12 steps to more effective book publishing based on this premise.

What's so great about online advertising?

2009-09-02T14:40:00.014+01:00

I wrote yesterday regarding the number of advert impressions appearing on online social networks.

Of course, commitment to online advertising is increasing in all industries, including book publishing. So if you ask the question: 'how is the world going to find out about this product', more and more the answer will be: 'via display advertising'. It might come through social networks or it might come through Google SERPS or it might come through some other community platform - to be honest, it doesn't really matter. The fact is: online advertising is going to be more and more a part of publisher spend. It seems like a given.

But here's a question that's not always considered: what's the value of this spend?

Here's why it's worth asking. It is becoming common for marketeers – not least marketeers working with books or ebooks – to see online advertising as a panacea, as a catch-all solution, as the only thing that has to happen. Why? Because online ads seem to have so much going for them. They're trackable, they’re measurable, they’re accountable – and, what’s more, there’s an almost limitless capacity for impressions that has not yet been realised (think of all those searches that are not displaying your book or your ebook on SERPS yet - they could be!) Online advertising - espcially if it is handled in bulk - seems like a limitless ocean of quick-win marketing!

But what's the value of this spend?

In this excellent article by Jim Spanfeller, called Publishers are killing web advertising's potential with misguided pricing, we find a cogent argument suggesting that the value is less than you think. Spanfeller is the outgoing president and CEO of Forbes, treasurer of the Online Publishers Association and Chairman Emeritus of the Interactive Advertising Bureau. His central argument is that rather than 'whoring' ourselves out to this market, publishers should be placing higher value on their inventory, not less.

He argues that current practices have "fundamentally driven pricing down across the web" and that total ad revenue generated by ad network impressions is "so little that it is inconsequential to the bottom line of the business", less than 2% of total revenue.

He goes on:

A publisher can and should price their inventory at levels that will meet the
market expectations and drive their business model. What they should not do is
allow some sort of invisible hand (or should I say hands) to price their
inventory against a backdrop of objectives that can and often does change at a
moment’s notice. This practice has fundamentally driven pricing down across the
web and, perhaps more importantly, changed the success metrics from ones based on “demand creation” to ones driven by “demand fulfillment.”

In other words, Spanfeller criticizes publishers' willingness to take the easy route and use such channels without thinking. He argues that although online display advertising sounds like a quick-win (it gets the most eyes in front of your content for the least money), it may not be.

Why? Well, here are some examples:

16% of web users generate 80% of clicks and that this 16% represents the lower income and education segments of the total user base.
The more publishers use online display advertising, the more we invite and insert third party ad networks between ourselves and the customer, and provide the ad network (essentially, he says, "competitors") better understanding of user behaviour than the publishers themselves get. Giving would-be competitors a better understanding of your user base than perhaps even you have is not a great way to maintain the best value in your selling proposition.

The use of ad nets diminishes the value of a publisher brand and content by spreading it so widely, ultimately threatening existing relationships with advertisers. All the while, the networks gain from the publisher's investement, providing little else in return.

Here's the bottom line.

If publishers know that most of their spend will be committed to pushing out advertising to communities that are already there, what does it mean? It means there's no point building a community of their own. But that is precisely what not to do. It's the equivalent to being the slave of the 'middle-men' of a previous era - the resellers and book agents.

Publishers should think twice before throwing all their eggs into this particular basket. Don't rely on hitting existing communities with display advertising. Build those communities yourselves – take back control – and ensure your margins are held in tact.

Why aren't students buying textbooks?

2009-09-02T14:07:00.006+01:00

Worried about academic textbook sales in the new season?

Read what the universities themselves are saying to new students. Food for thought for everyone involved in the industry.

Why Sony's Reader lost to the Kindle

2009-09-02T10:45:00.002+01:00

Sony launched it's Reader to strong reviews a year before Amazon brought out the Kindle - but who's talking about the Sony Reader now?

Kindle sales could reach $1.2 billion by 2010, AdAge says, citing numbers by a Citi analyst; and Sony reported sales of 400,000 Readers to date in January 2009.

IMHO, it was simply a matter of customer relationship. All I ever heard about the Sony Reader premised it on its value as a technology. In contrast, all I ever heard about the Kindle was its value to people-as-readers. Sony had a good product, but Kindle jumped them with a wireless product with a larger array of titles available that focused on what I could get out of it as a reader.

Two quick thoughts:

The Reader wasn't an extension of an existing service, the way that the Kindle was for Amazon, so Sony have to somehow produce a catalogue of material behind it before to make it of genuine reading interest. I notice they have a deal with Google to utilise books.google.com content - hmmm!
As with all Sony, everything they do has a proprietary set-up which locks you in to their clunky software.

But all is not lost for Sony. The new Reader is due, and they're looking at using the ePub standard. And to an extent they will profit from the awareness and impact that the Kindle has achieved for mobile readers and digital reading in general. But it will need to focus on the 'reading' part, I think, more than the 'digital' part, if I'll be looking harder.

Advertising on social media

2009-09-02T09:28:00.003+01:00

According to this Comscore report, the number of adverts served on social networks is massively increasing as a proportion of the total.

Social Networking Sites Account for More than 20% of all online display ad impressions. 8.2% of all display ads on the Internet today in the US are being served on Facebook. MySpace has 9.2%.

"Over the past few years, social networking has become one of the most popular online activities, accounting for a significant portion of the time Internet users spend online and the pages they consume,” said Jeff Hackett, comScore senior VP. “Social networking sites now account for one out of every five ads people view online. Because the top social media sites can deliver high reach and frequency against target segments at a low cost, it appears that some advertisers are eager to use social networking sites as a new advertising delivery vehicle."

Terminating Textbooks

2009-08-25T15:00:00.005+01:00

Bracing for the Schwarzeneggrification of Textbooks

An excellent post from E-reads on the future of the textbook publishing market in California. Well worth a read.

A new way of thinking about authors

2009-08-25T13:11:00.007+01:00

The job of the publisher has always been that of the ‘facilitator’. We facilitate the transfer of information between two entities: the author – and the reader.

Traditionally that facilitation has taken place, you might say, remotely. That is, the format of the book is such that, once it is delivered to the market, the consumer has little or no subsequent connection with the author from which it came.

One of the themes I bang on about on this blog is how the digital revolution can re-connect those two entities: the author, and the reader. Why can’t we do more of it?

Here’s a site that might be a template for future activity: the Simon and Schuster PulseIt site for teenage readers. Screenshot below, but have a look for yourselves:

It’s a book social networking site where 14- to 18-year-olds can read and review new S&S titles online, create profiles, communicate with authors and other members, and earn points redeemable for prizes. The initiative is similar to Penguin UK’s Spinebreakers, which launched in 2007, for the same kind of market.

My question is: why can’t academic publishers have a model like this?

We’ve got the authors, who are ‘experts’ in their field and can provide value-add information to their book content. And we’ve got a market that’s saying they don’t want only the static information in book format but also live interaction with the source of that information. So how about it? A web platform delivering book and journal content, but also featuring:

Author videos
Webinars
Tutorials
Data Feeds
Blogs and interaction/ dialogue forums

The digital revolution in books tends to think along the lines of 'how can we sell a book online in more or less the same format as we sell it in print?' OK fine, but something like this is begging the question: 'how can revisit the very format of a book online, and then sell it?'

Something like that would be making something of the valuable author-reader relationship that, until now, I fear publishers simply haven’t capitalized upon for all it's worth.

Cory Doctorow on librarians and the new media

2009-08-25T10:08:00.003+01:00

A fantastic and insightful interview with the excellent Cory Doctorow on librarians and the new media:

Flat World Knowledge

2009-08-24T14:23:00.007+01:00

Flat World Knowledge, which I've written about before here, has just announced that it anticipates 40,000 college students at over 400 colleges will use its open source digital textbooks this fall.

This seems like big growth to me and an interesting insight into the popularity of ebooks in a student market. Flat World went live in Spring 2009 with 1,000 students from 30 colleges using its offerings.

Flat World is a publisher of open textbooks for higher education. The list is small so far but growing, mainly in business and economics, and into new subjects such as sociology and psychology. Their pricing/ business model allows students to access entire textbooks for free online; and then pay for added value up the scale. So: $19.95 for a PDF download; $29.95 for a black/ white printed version; $59.95 for colour; $39.95 for an audio version, and so on and so forth.

It seems to me there are three features that are likely to ensure the popularity of this content among hard-pressed students out there:

The option to break down and break out content; books are available by the book or by the chapter.
The claim is that all textbook material is 'device agnostic', making the content compatible with a range of devices, both mobile or desk-based.
The ability for the professor or teacher to customize the text for his or her own class requirements.

I wonder how long it will be before this company is knocking on the door of the traditional publishers asking for re-purposing deals?

The reader needs our help

2009-08-20T12:08:00.007+01:00

The more data proliferates on the internet, the more we need data authentication. You need to know who has written the information that you are reading or receiving – and sometimes that’s not always as transparent as you might think.

And that's nothing if not true for the publishing industry. Spammers, link hackers, online masqueraders are out there … And they might be looking to make money out of your content.

All publishers acknowledge that, in the future, their content is going to be increasingly delivered across multiple platforms. In other words, books are going to be sold and read not just on the publisher-controlled platform (the publisher.com domain, as it were), but also on 3P sites, mobile phones, e-reader devices, and so on. That presents a challenge for the publisher in terms of DRM. But think about the reader too. How does the reader authenticate a piece of content as being genuinely publisher-produced and genuinely publisher-controlled? They want to have assurance that what they’re paying to read is real. That's only fair.

The bottom line of all this is a business issue. If you’re in the publishing industry, the main (you might even say the ‘only’) capital you own is your intellectual property. Lose the authenticity of your content, and you lose your business.
So can the authenticity of content on the internet be controlled in the interest of both publisher and reader?

It seems to me that are two possible solutions:

The first is, we can let the reader be in control. I’ve written about that sort of thing here, but basically this means that the reader sets filters at their end, specifying the sites that he or she believes to be authentic. Techniques to do this would include RSS or Ajax.
But a second is to control content-authentication at the point of delivery. This of course is DRM. But DRM conjures up negative images: images of peevish, awkward, frustrating restrictions on content that the reader has already bought and has a right to access. IMHO, publishers need to be developing something softer and more behind-the-scenes to do the same job.

Here’s one technology advancement that could help.

Whenever a server delivers up a piece of content, it uses an authentication technique called the domain name system (better known as DNS). This is the building block behind IP addresses (what we see in our browser navigation bar): although invisible to us, every time you enter a Web URL, your browser quickly goes out and checks a DNS server to get the underlying IP address.

DNS information is tightly controlled and is generally only updatable by the company that owns the domain. So wouldn’t that provide an authentication service? Why can’t we build an application that we give to the reader, allowing their system to (essentially) recognise authentic content that comes from the publisher (whichever platform it is delivered from) and blacklist sites from which similar, but non-authentic, content is delivered?

This already happens in the realm of Email. Email authentication solutions add an additional piece of information on the DNS record that can only be updated by the domain owner. When an email domain is being validated, the receiving email server simply checks out the DNS records for that domain and confirms that the authentication "key" matches the one in the email. That's it.

So why can’t we do the same for book content delivered online?

These are surely the sort of ‘trusted’ publisher-consumer relationships that need to be developed over the coming years. Pay for content, and we’ll make sure you get the real deal.

E-books going large

2009-08-18T09:57:00.004+01:00

More news on the simulataneous release of The Lost Symbol in print and electronic book formats.

It'll be interesting to see whether ebook readers presenting film tie-in books can eventually integrate the text with video clips and audio overlays, as is suggested in this piece.

Why books people should use Twitter

2009-08-14T15:38:00.006+01:00

A fantastic post from harperstudio on why every Editor (and by extension every employee in the books industry) needs to be on Twitter now ...

And here's the video showing how not to do it ...

How much is in your Face?

2009-08-14T10:06:00.007+01:00

Scrambling to look up a word on an online dictionary yesterday, I came across this homepage for the site dictionary.com:

Is this the most in-your-face advertisment you've ever seen? The sponsoring product (in this case, some kind of washing detergent) is wrapped around the whole page, with the actual function of the page (the word search box) apparently buried in the middle. It just reminded me of a billboard. I didn't like itl

But then I thought about it again. Actually, is this so bad? Here's what I've been thinking:

The essential function of the page is not obscured (the search box is clearly visible)
This is not an information-transfer page, but a portal page, and so this sort of advertising isn't taking up valuable page retail space
Isn't it preferable to columns full of blinking, flashing or, worse, intersticial, 175 x 175 adverts abusing my eyes up and down the page? (like the random example below):

So the more I think about it, the more I think background images on portal pages like this work for me. Don't forget, if it was a landscape (like Bing, below), wouldn't we say that it was soothing, enjoyable or even pastoral?

The Lost Symbol

2009-08-14T09:48:00.005+01:00

I'd rather be slapped by a wet fish than ever have to read it, but I notice that Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group has announced a simultaneous publication of Dan Brown's forthcoming The Lost Symbol in print (hard and soft) and e-book.

A hardcover book usually sells for $25 to $35, while an e-book sells for less than $10; Knopf Doubleday is planning a first printing of five million copies of the thing.

So why the dual format release? It can only mean one of two things. Either the scale of the operation is such that, whatever the cannibalisation caused by the e-book, margins are considered sufficient to warrant the risk (in which case, it's essentially a test-case for other books). Or, the nature of the market is such that the publisher has no choice but to offer this format in addition to print (in which case, it's essentially a business decision).

Are people really buying e-books?

2009-08-12T11:53:00.001+01:00

Here’s some good recent evidence that trends are upwards.

The (excellent) International Digital Publishing Forum has just released data pointing to another record-setting month and quarter for e-book sales (in the US). Trade e-book sales were $14,000,000 for June, more than double last June's $5,900,000. Q2 wholesale trade sales rose to $37,600,000, from $25,800,000 reported for Q1.

Books on Twitter

2009-08-12T10:07:00.003+01:00

Further to my comments about the nature and definition of a book in the online space, here's the next thing: books on Twitter.

Follow this one @ElizWoodville.

Whatever next!

Awful library books

2009-08-12T09:24:00.005+01:00

Here's an article from the Guardian about Awful Library Books: a website listing titles with public library collections that are odd, outdated or just plain rubbish!

What books can learn from Digg

2009-08-07T14:00:00.007+01:00

What’s the ultimate goal of online advertising?

To produce adverts that are more and more targeted to what you – the customer – actually want to see.

Of course, Google have built their business on this model through AdSense, and very good it is too. But the adverts you see on SERPs are still essentially determined by a keyword or relevancy algorithm. The adverts you see are the adverts that you’re given to see by Google.

But what if you could have a direct influence over the adverts that appear on the page you're reading?

Here’s an interesting announcement from one of my favourite sites, Digg. They’re about to start rolling out Digg Ads.

Here’s how it works: an advert appears. If you like that advert, you Digg it (‘upvotes’); and the more votes it gets, the less advertisers have to pay. If you don’t like that advert, or if you think it is tactless, lazy or irrelevant, you ‘bury’ it, and it loses position on the page. The more you Digg an ad, the less the advertiser will have to pay; the more an ad is buried, the more the advertiser is charged, eventually pricing it out of the system.

What does this mean? Well, it gives you control, and it gives advertisers an incentive to produce content that will appeal to the people who are actually looking at it. And all this encourages participation and feedback, and a generally more dynamic site.

But that got me thinking… This model is about advertising, but couldn’t it also be applied to online books?

Here are a couple of applications that came straight into my head:

Apply it to the royalty model associated with an online reference book. Every time a chapter or article within that book is viewed, it will generate a royalty credit to the author. That way, we would be democratising the value of content within a larger whole by paying more to the authors who deserve more.
Apply it to a publisher-platform that is sold to a library or academic institution. Every user within that library or institution will be tracked, and the customer can then pay for what is truly being used by the readers, and not for the whole system as defined by the publisher, saving money.

Anyway, here's what it looks like on a Digg page; worth keeping an eye:

Who owns my books?

2009-08-05T11:11:00.007+01:00

An interesting audio recording from NPR on the issues surrounding 'ownership' of digital books, in the light of the recent Amazon scandal.

For those of you who haven't been following this story, US Kindle owners recently awoke to find a number of e-book titles they had ordered, paid-for and downloaded to their readers deleted remotely by Amazon, due to an incorrect publisher agreement. With delicious irony, one of the titles affected was Goerge Orwell's dystopian tale, 1984. It turns out, when it comes to digital books, you may not own what you think you own...

Last night as I was just falling asleep I heard a noise in the lounge downstairs. The thought crossed my mind: could it be that Waterstones had broken in through the window, cleared my copy of Ulysees from the shelf, and left a fiver on the table...?

New demographics for ebook consumption

2009-08-05T09:04:00.008+01:00

According to this new (subscription-only) Forrester report on e-book readers, there is a subtly changing demographic of interest and awareness that is just starting to come to light:

Translated, the type of consumers likely to buy such a device is slowly evolving. No longer will the target demographic be merely early-adopter techies. Now, future prospects are more likely to be female, less tech-optimistic, voracious readers (on average, 5 books per month), who buy and borrow books from multiple sources, as opposed to buying lots of books online.

I guess this is the standard curve of early-adopter to mainstream consumption, but it does suggest that the market is still open to new formats that can appeal to new markets. As the report concludes:

The big takeaway is that this could spell trouble for Amazon, if competitors can move in to better serve the later waves of adopters who don’t have as strong a relationship with the eCommerce giant.

Plastic Logic

2009-08-05T08:57:00.004+01:00

News of the progress of the Plastic Logic flexible e-reader is starting to hit the mainstream press.

It should do. It's one device that just might help to save their industry and their profit margins...

Linking in ... (Part 2)

2009-08-03T10:19:00.004+01:00

Last week I posted on LinkedIn as a business and marketing tool for content-providers. Here’s a follow-up thought, and something that I’ve found useful.

Start a group and maintain it as a repository of news, information and expert advice. It’s really easy – just a few clicks and you’re there. You could start one for your business, your competency, or, in the case of books, a subject or author-defined area of content. In addition, LinkedIn groups allow users to visit and to ask questions, plugging in to the Q&A function I posted about last week.

The best revenge is massive success

2009-08-03T09:27:00.009+01:00

Stephen King, William Golding, John le Carre, Anne Frank, J.K. Rowling, Joseph Heller, George Orwell. What do they have in common? Answer: they all experienced rejection from a publisher for their first novel.

In the academic sciences as well, this sort of story is all-too-common. Many a spurned author has a bitter tale of rejection for their paper by some 'money-grabbing' publisher (I'm paraphrasing!) And this story is usually followed by the gleeful recounting of its progress to massive influence and widespread acceptance in the community years later.

Now, in the latest open research initiative, here’s a new journal in the mathematical sciences devoted to publishing papers that have been previously submitted to, and rejected by, others. It's called Rejecta Mathematica.

Here’s their mission statement:

To recap our mission, Rejecta Mathematica is an open access, online journal that publishes only papers that have been rejected from peer-reviewed journals in the mathematical sciences. In addition, every paper appearing in Rejecta Mathematica includes an open letter from its authors discussing the paper's original review process, disclosing any known flaws in the paper, and stating the case for the paper's value to the community.

Prefixing each paper is an open letter, in which the author illustrates what they believe is the reason behind their work’s rejection and asserts their paper’s case.

It’s another stage in the progress of the open-source debate. Of course, academic publishers will point to the need for some form of peer review or editorial refereeing to qualify texts for publication; and in my mind that's absolutely right. But initiatives like this, in my opinion, will remain part of the rich tapestry of information-delivery in the academic world, for books as well as journals. And that's how it should be.

'The best revenge is massive success’, said Frank Sinatra.

And here's a final thought for you: what happens if your paper is rejected by Rejecta?

When you want something that you can't find

2009-07-31T11:57:00.005+01:00

An interesting article from eM+C on why online search sometimes fails us even when we want to find something to buy. If this is true for an object as simple as a potato ricer, how much more so for complex, information-driven purchases like book content?

Building publisher relationships now ... before it's too late

2009-07-30T11:56:00.012+01:00

It’s interesting to be watching (from across the ocean) the progress of President Obama’s agenda to reform and improve U.S. education systems. As you would expect, one major plank of this agenda is to harness the power of technology.

For example, this week the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act was passed by the President, and one key criteria is federal support for free, high-quality, online training courses in secondary and tertiary education:

The U.S. Department of Education would be authorized to make competitive grants available to eligible colleges, workforce programs or other entities to help support the development of these courses.

But this money ain't going to be put around for any old online resource! The Center for American Progress has 5 proposals for how this money should be spent:

Develop courses to educational, university, and labor market certification standards;
Promote broad-based development partnerships that ensure the widest possible adoption of courses by providers;
Use a common design architecture that permits course sharing, customizing, and updating;
Develop both stand-alone and faculty-mediated courses;
Provide for rigorous assessment of learning outcomes in each course

In other words, schools and universities are not going to be able to buy merely a catalogue of online courses freely available for download and hosted by the publisher (this is of course how we usually supply them!). Instead, they’ll be stipulating material tailored to fit within the structure of a specific teaching programme, aligned to the goal of producing vocational professionals with skills to succeed in the work-place. That’s the deal; that’s where the pot of money is going to be. Are publisher materials ready to fill this need? If not, we better start building these relationships ... and fast.

How stupid are we becoming ?

2009-07-30T10:55:00.011+01:00

An interesting post from The Economist Intelligent Life magazine: Is Google Killing General Knowledge?

Here's the story they tell that backs it up:

A former winner of the BBC quiz show “Mastermind” recently took part in a pub quiz which came down to a tiebreaker between his team and a group of young people who were relying on BlackBerrys. Anyone familiar with quizzes these days knows that this can happen, whether it is under the table or outside in the smokers’ zone; the combination of wireless internet access and Google searching is simply too powerful for some to resist and for others to prevent. In this case, happily, virtue triumphed and the team led by the Mastermind champion won. Then afterwards a young woman from the losing side came over and asked in baffled tones: “How did you get that?” So attuned was she to the idea that answering quiz questions was a task to be outsourced to the internet that she seemed not to understand the idea of general knowledge that was kept in the head.

Is Google compromising our capacity to store information in our heads? Maybe. But what I think is more interesting is how it's changing our habits of information consumption, particularly in STM.

The iPod Moment for Books?

2009-07-23T09:25:00.003+01:00

Rumours are that an announcement about the UK launch of the Kindle is imminent, and that maybe we're looking at a Christmas 2009 release over here ...

How might the Kindle shake up the UK book and e-book market? Will this prove to be the much-anticipated ‘iPod’ moment for books?

Here’s a (very) potted summary of what people tend to say:

Some still think that the whole industry is chasing the wrong tail. People are never going to read books online – not least on mobile devices – in the same way as they listen to music.

Some think that e-book readers are the future, but that the future is not yet, and that’s not going to change with the advent of the Kindle.

Some think that the mobile devices that are now out there are (for the first time) passing a ‘sufficient readability and portability’ quality test, but that the iPod moment is not yet because, not matter how good the devices, you still need a market psychologically prepared to download and read e-books, and we’re not there yet.

Some (probably the majority) think that e-books are the future, and that in fact the whole viability of book publishing depends on getting on board, but that tying the business to one outlet would be suicide. What’s needed, then, is (probably DRM-controlled) content out-sourcing to multiple devices, both mobile and in the cloud.

Some take this principle further and say that what’s needed is not merely digital content preparation, but the technical development of applications that will work with the Kindle, the iPhone and the new generation of Smart/ Android phones that are almost upon us. A publisher that controls not only the content but the delivery platform across multiple devices would indeed be in a powerful position.

Some people observe that publishers aren’t technology companies and could never achieve this, but think that we should wait until applications proliferate amongst mobile devices more generally. Then we can distribute content across multiple channels and avoid the monopoly of point (4) above. They point to the fact that within 12 months of release, Amazon had produced an iPhone-compatible Kindle app, acknowledging that the market needed to read Amazon e-books on the iPhone as well as the Kindle itself. So we should wait, watch, and make sure content is compatible for the apps that take off most in the market-place.

Will the launch of the Kindle on these shores clarify some of this for all us UK publishers … ?

Technorati Test

2009-07-22T10:46:00.007+01:00

This is a Technorati-load test: please ignore! Just a technical thing! Normal postings will resume tomorrow! Thanks, Tim.

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How do Scientists find Content?

2009-07-21T13:39:00.005+01:00

I've been reading the recently-published Outsell report: STM End-user Survey - Scientists and Engineers this morning (it's a subscription link if you're not an Outsell subscriber).

Here's one interesting finding. 62.4% of scientists use an internet search engine as the first port-of-call for information retrieval. Ah, well, you might say, that's not so surprising. But look at the comparable data:

19.1% use 'my organisation's intranet or portal'
7.9% use 'colleagues or experts inside my organisation'
1.7% use 'a vendor website' (such as ScienceDirect)
4.1% use 'my organisation's physical library'

Now obviously there's lots to observe here in terms of the knowledge economy in the industry. But it also got me thinking about what this is saying about the psychology of information retrieval. When most scientists think about retrieving information, what do they see in their mind's eye? A blank page, showing 10 short extracts of text, probably with a Google on top. How many publisher content-delivery platforms deliver content in that way? Where's the dislocation? Answers on a postcard ...

Linking In ...

2009-07-20T09:46:00.006+01:00

To be honest with you, the more I use LinkedIn, the more I like it. As well as being a great tool for personal networking, I'm increasingly seeing business and marketing applications for content-providers like book publishers.

I'm going to post a number of tips over the next few days.

Here's the first. Start to use the Q&A function. You can go in here and search (or advanced search) for questions posed by the LinkedIn community; these range from business to finance to management to technology questions, and many of them relate to quite niche content requirements. Try finding questions relating to your company's or content-provider's expertise.

Of course, this isn't a forum for a marketing pitch: but what's interesting is that, by answering these questions using your subject expertise or content, you can 'become an expert'. This is because the asker evaluates all the answers they receive in their inbox and rates the one he or she deems most apposite to their requirement. If that's you, then you get an 'expert badge', and that expert status follows you around wherever you go in the future. And it means that you, your company or your company's content will be positioned in the same way. A great avenue for long-term network PR positioning!

Shopping Cart Experience

2009-07-17T09:48:00.003+01:00

Selling books from a website? Some good tips on how to minimise shopping-cart abandonment during the e-commerce process.

HT: EMarketing Commerce

Free for free

2009-07-16T09:21:00.010+01:00

Further to my post about Chris Anderson's new book Free the other day, I've just seen that (through amazon.com) you can get a free-to-download copy for your Kindle here. Of course this is only for you if you have a Kindle, or the Kindle app on your iPhone or iPod Touch. But worth a look if you do.

Why are we Scared of the Kindle?

2009-07-15T14:21:00.009+01:00

Why are publishers scared of the Amazon Kindle?

On the one hand, there's the maths. At the recent launch of the new DX, Jeff Bezos claimed that for books available on the Kindle, digital sales comprise an additional 35% on the same book in print. In other words, imagine your paperback novel selling 100,000 copies per year on Amazon: if it was made Kindle-compatible, you can assume another 35,000 digital copies on top.

And it's not just unit sales. According to Bloomberg, publishers typically earn about $2.15 per digital book versus 26 cents for a print copy. What's not to like?

And yet have a look at these quotes from the industry:

The industry as a whole is a bit nervous about the Kindle and the possibility that Amazon will really lock up the e-book market. The early path it’s taken here could really determine a lot about where the industry winds up and where people get their e-books in the future.

Paul Aiken, Executive Director, The Author's Guild

We don’t want it to be where you can only get your book in one spot. We want what every publisher wants and what every author wants, which is ubiquity.

Maja Thomas, Senior VP, Digital Media, Hachette

There's the thing. Publishers and the publishing industry are running scared on this point about unique distribution. What about ubiquity? What about control? Will the Kindle tie up the market like the iPod? What happens if it does? How will we turn around to Amazon then and say: 'we want to sell our books through other channels'?

And that's where the lines are drawn for the moment. The promise of margins now vs. the risk of monopoly in the future.

Salad Days

2009-07-14T09:58:00.004+01:00

Ever wondered what customer innovation has got to do with bagged lettuce and books? See here for a great post from Jonathan Clark.

How free is free?

2009-07-13T11:51:00.005+01:00

I've got my copy of Chris Anderson's new book on order: Free: the Future of a Radical Price. I love his prescient arguments about the future of sales model in the electronic age: and what does this apply to more if not books?

I haven't read it yet, but here's a lengthy review comment from Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker, which I think is highly relevant to our industry. Are we also putting too much faith in 'free'?

There are four strands of argument here: a technological claim (digital infrastructure is effectively Free), a psychological claim (consumers love Free), a procedural claim (Free means never having to make a judgment), and a commercial claim (the market created by the technological Free and the psychological Free can make you a lot of money). The only problem is that in the middle of laying out what he sees as the new business model of the digital age Anderson is forced to admit that one of his main case studies, YouTube, “has so far failed to make any money for Google.”

Why is that? Because of the very principles of Free that Anderson so energetically celebrates. When you let people upload and download as many videos as they want, lots of them will take you up on the offer. That’s the magic of Free psychology: an estimated seventy-five billion videos will be served up by
YouTube this year. Although the magic of Free technology means that the cost of serving up each video is “close enough to free to round down,” “close enough to free” multiplied by seventy-five billion is still a very large number. A recent report by Credit Suisse estimates that YouTube’s bandwidth costs in 2009 will be three hundred and sixty million dollars. In the case of YouTube, the effects of technological Free and psychological Free work against each other.

So how does YouTube bring in revenue? Well, it tries to sell advertisements alongside its videos. The problem is that the videos attracted by psychological Free—pirated material, cat videos, and other forms of user-generated content—are not the sort of thing that advertisers want to be associated with. In order to sell advertising, YouTube has had to buy the rights to professionally produced content, such as television shows and movies. Credit Suisse put the cost of those licenses in 2009 at roughly two hundred and sixty million dollars. For Anderson, YouTube illustrates the principle that Free removes the necessity of aesthetic judgment. (As he puts it, YouTube proves that “crap is in the eye of the beholder.”) But, in order to make money, YouTube has been obliged to pay for programs that aren’t crap. To recap: YouTube is a great example of Free, except that Free technology ends up not being Free because of the way consumers respond to Free, fatally compromising YouTube’s ability to make money around Free, and forcing it to retreat from the “abundance thinking” that lies at the heart of Free. Credit Suisse estimates that YouTube will lose close to half a billion dollars this year. If it were a bank, it would be eligible for TARP funds.

Rupert Murdoch

2009-07-03T10:45:00.004+01:00

A very interesting interview with Rupert Murdoch here.

One comment stood out for me. Here's what he thinks about the value of Facebook:

Facebook is more of a directory. People go looking for
their relatives or their friends, who they are going to meet.

Is that right? Is it true that Facebook is a directory, and not a content offering? Well, whenever I log on to Facebook these days, I'm overwhelmed by pages full of content: videos, audio clips, etc; in fact, the welter of apps offering direct content uploads is a testament to this. But, that said, by and large, I guess he's right. I wouldn't visit Facebook with the purpose of finding content in the way that I would visit a blog, say. That is surely the space in which books content can nudge into. Just think what it would mean if we managed to really deliver quality and substantial book content on the web. Would content-driven sites take over from directory-driven sites?

Technology is great

2009-07-03T10:34:00.001+01:00

Ever felt like this about technology?

Seadragon

2009-07-02T15:23:00.005+01:00

Have you come across Seadragon? I like the look of this - it could be the answer to awkward, clunky image viewing on the web - and for online books showing diagrams, graphs and photographic imaging, that's essential.

What is it? A Microsoft development application that allows for much smoother deep zoom on large graphic files. It can be embedded via an Ajax technology or via the downloadable Deep Zoom Composer.

Why use it? Basically, it allows for much smoother viewing of large files - in our case, we'd be talking about large jpg images (for example, book covers) or pdf text files (for example, sample chapters) on elsevierdirect and sciencedirect. We all know how frustrating it is when you open a file (possibly, say, a sample chapter, as a 'try before you buy' function), only to find it taking 1 or 2 minutes to load. In the meantime, of course, you can see nothing - only a blank screen, In our business, where we're displaying content-rich, large files of all kinds, this is bound to be an issue.

So it cuts out blocky, slow downloads of large images and files. There's a good video demo - or see here for a blog entry on how this is all developing.

Really cutting-edge, and it would embellish the appearance and readability of any content-rich site!

Bloomsbury Library Online

2009-07-02T13:30:00.005+01:00

I've been hearing quite a lot of discussion recently about the Bloomsbury Library Online.

What is it? An e-books initiative for libraries in which themed ‘bookshelves’ containing hundreds of titles are sold via subscription to a library. Bloomsbury are using a technology partner called Exact Editions to deliver the ebooks and the ecommerce, and the scheme has already begun to roll out.

Although this is primarily a trade offering in the UK at the moment (the list of ‘bookshelves’ includes ‘travel’, ‘Shakespeare’, etc), one thing in particular struck me as pertinent in regards to academic books.

Library users can view these ebooks via terminals in the library building. But what is more interesting is that the technology also allows readers to log in remotely via a library portal link using their library card, for access via web browsers, including those embedded in iPhones or Blackberry devices. So for the first time we’ve got the possibility of libraries reaching a large market who don’t come in to the physical building – and of course that would mean additional subscription revenue for the publisher.

I gather that it's being trialed with a number of libraries in Norfolk.

And a quote from Richard Charkin too. (By the way, Richard gave me my first job - and I can put on record he's one of the men I've most admired in my professional career...)

Why pay for content?

2009-07-02T12:02:00.009+01:00

Last week I attended the Publishers Association event 'Why Pay for Content?' at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in London. It included some interesting perspectives on publishing models for digital content, including a short slot from Eric Frank, Founder and CMO of Flat World Knowledge.

What is it? It's a publisher of open textbooks for higher education. If you're a student, you get the book for free online. The revenue comes in from value-add upgrades: having accessed the books for free, students can purchase POD, audio or downloadable versions if they need to. Check out the video here:

What struck me was this though. FlatWorld also provides facilities for the instructor: if you're a teacher or lecturer, you get the freedom to edit the books to your liking. My question is: if textbook content is open to be mixed, matched, mashed-up and mangled together in this way, how can it still be called a textbook? Isn't that crossing the last rubicon of publisher-control, namely, the ability to say to the market 'this is a piece of content that we validate', via peer-review, or some other method? And if we lose that validation, what capital asset is left to the publisher?

But I'll be keeping my eyes on this.

Welcome to the Blog

2009-07-02T11:38:00.003+01:00

I'll be posting about all things to do with books and books online. It'll focus mainly on all things science and technology, because that's what I work in, and that's what I know best. But I hope as well you'll find all sorts of thoughts, comments, observations and musings on how books can take that giant leap into the digital orbit...