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December 15, 2007
“If I saw it in Wikipedia, it must be true!”
Illustrating the M. C. Escher–like nature of information authentication on the Net, here’s an e-mail we received from one of our authors, Professor Gregory J. E. Rawlins, whose latest book on technology is in progress and online:
so i'm doing (yet another) rewrite of the book and i'm in the second
chapter, part of which is on slavery. i'm googling to check a fact and come
across the wikipedia page on slavery in medieval europe. skimming down the
page, one interesting fact that i'd unearthed maybe a year ago in an obscure
journal caught my eye: at least 10,000 european slaves were sold in venice
in the early 15th century. ha! i think to myself, i better hurry up and
finish this damned book! others are ferreting out the same obscure sources
i found over the endless years of research on this damned book! so i click
on the reference for the factoid and... it points to me :).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_trade_in_the_Middle_Ages#_note-17
wikipedia is backing a statement of fact with a reference to an online,
not-yet-published book. at least they should have looked up my detailed
references to the literature to support the factoid in my notes just in
case i was just making stuff up....i blame google for this though since for
certain obscure things googling them turns up my book draft at or near the
top, so presumably other folks out there are linking to other bits and
pieces of the draft. of course i'm pleased, but you should fear for the future my friends :)
best,
gregory.
December 5, 2007
Editorial Integrity and the Sponsorship Model
Some online publishers searching for alternative business models to the traditional one, where the readers pay for content, arrive at the sponsorship and advertising models, where private interests pay the publisher to make content available for free. This is in return for some benefit to the sponsor, which may involve a sponsor logo or pop-up integrated with the content, or an unobtrusive URL at the bottom of a page. There is no definite recipe.
The practice raises two issues immediately: the privacy of users, and the objectivity of the sponsored content. On the latter issue, in this month’s Condé Nast Portfolio Jeff VanDam writes an article called “Pharma’s Fees: How the big drugmakers tend to your doctor”, in which he lists seven of the international pharmaceutical giants and traces approximately $9 million they’ve spent supporting doctors’ research. He points out one example that illustrates the problem of objectivity in sponsored publishing. GlaxoSmithKline (makers of Paxil and Zantac) paid $150,752 to pediatric allergist Todd Mahr, who participated in a clinical trial for their anti-asthma drug, Advair Diskus. He subsequently “coauthored a 2006 paper that recommended Advair-style inhalers; footnotes in the paper refer readers to GSK’s website.”
Whether actual or perceived, the potential influence a paying sponsor has over the content it endorses challenges the essential advantage traditional publishers have over their Web-based colleagues: their reputation for authenticity established over years, the “brand” or covenant they have with their readers to publish the truth. Many readers take for granted that, prior to publication, “brand name” publishers put content that bears their imprimatur through an authenticating process that includes selection, peer review, editing, fact checking, permissions acquisition, and proofreading. The sponsorship model threatens to weaken this covenant with the readers.
December 4, 2007
Paradoxical Economics: Publishing in an Age of Abundance
My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep; the more I give to thee,
The more I have, for both are infinite.
—Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
Back when books were things, it was easier to measure success or failure based on quantifiable metrics like print runs, sales, years in print, citations. Paper books are finite, present as mass; they take up shelf space. If I loan you my copy of Romeo and Juliet, I’m left empty-handed. Just as if you pay me to siphon the gas out of my tank and put it into yours, you drive and I stand still. That’s the economy of scarcity. Publishers are still struggling to impose on their e-books these outdated business models from the age of print, and finding that friction results.
Readers don’t appreciate it when their e-reader screens go dark in midsentence because the read-ometer stopped running; librarians suffering from shrinking wartime budgets resent paying for “a copy” of an e-book (which is really quite ethereal in nature and not a copy at all) and then being required to treat it like a finite artifact and loan it out one at a time, rather than offering network access to all readers.
When mass transmutes into the infinite, when books become e-books, the age of abundance arrives and the rules change. New roles for publisher, author, and reader are evolving, and new tools are required to establish and convey the value of ideas and information. What used to be freely exchanged—like knowledge—one now pays consultants for. What used to be sold—like a copy of a book—is free. We need to develop new value paradigms to accommodate the creation and evolution of knowledge in and between humans, perhaps adapting our old business models from books (per-copy), entertainment (performance), and school (tuition)—but perhaps the Internet-based value exchange is in fact something startlingly new.
Meantime, while there is so much struggle in the publishing business about commoditizing current-copyright content for sale, how to do it, what to charge whom for how much, a tidal wave of unprecedented proportions swells beneath and may soon force publishers to recognize that neither they nor their business models may ultimately prevail in the Internet-based publishing domain. The online newcomers to publishing do “get it,” but large and impressive as it is, Google Print is but one company scanning in books and making them findable through its proprietary technology.
The catalyst for change can be found in the organizations that capitalize on the free, open, and distributed architecture of the Internet itself, like the Open Content Alliance and Europe’s books2ebooks, which, day after day, are scanning in the millions upon millions of books from libraries all over the world, and making them freely available. They are making available to us the books that form our collective recorded world culture since the time of the first book. Searchable. Alterable. Taggable. Query-able. Recombine-able. This is the new abundance, and what are we to make of it?
November 30, 2007
Kindle Value-Chain Change
Considering Amazon’s new “front door,” its e-reader Kindle, as a stocking stuffer, I think about the $400 price tag and ask “What is it?" and “Is it worth it?” and “Why does it matter?” In fact, it is not just another proprietary e-reader. And unlike the BlackBerry, it is not a handheld device trying to be all things to all people, a cellphone that’s also a web browser, address book, doc reader, record player, with a keyboard so small your fingers get stuck. The Kindle appears to be an extremely slick cash register at the front end of the ubiquitous online content retailer, Amazon. A cash register its users pay to own, and then pay to use.
The e-books themselves are relatively cheap for this device, at $9.99. But when considering the “cost” of individual e-books, aren’t we really focusing on the wrong thing, the list price of an “object”? Publishers and booksellers have this holdover habit of sticking a price onto what in the online world is a completely artificial “commodity”—access and display of a screenful of letters powered by zeroes and ones. In fact, the only covers or pages or boundaries around online books are those deliberately built into them by their developers so that we retro humans will feel that we are dealing with something familiar, so we won’t be afraid.
This price-per-book business model can’t last; it’s an artifact from an earlier age when reading meant holding a thing—a book!—in your lap while decoding its meaning, thinking, memorizing (remember Fahrenheit 451), internalizing. Paying a “list price” begs the point of what’s really for sale here. It’s a distraction that really doesn’t matter in the least.
What’s for sale is us—our attention, our associative thought paths as we navigate around Amazon. It’s all recorded, from first lighting the fire and flipping the Kindle “on” switch, to pressing the “buy” button. At Amazon, I might even be able to buy my own words back again, if I am lucky enough to have my blog listed as one of the otherwise free Internet resources available through this device—for as low as $.99 per month. The reason Amazon can afford to deep-discount not only its real books, but also its e-books, is that it is holding for itself and its shareholders, presumably for its own commercial exploitation, the priceless value unique to this global online medium of ours, the recorded behavior of its millions of customers worldwide. Us. You and me. Our searches. Our log files (those many clicks behind the patented “one click” that makes shopping so easy). Our searches, profiles, ship-to-and-bill-to buying histories. Upstream from this data, recording what used to be private information kept in people’s heads, not their handhelds, Amazon with its seductive new Kindle “front door” sits in a very powerful position indeed.
November 29, 2007
Reading dwindles as Kindle kindles?
Just as Amazon is positioning its new $400 e-reader as a tempting stocking stuffer, news arrives about a drop in the U.S. literacy rate. The Boston Globe reports this morning that U.S. fourth graders are losing ground in literacy, for the first time lagging behind Russia, Hong Kong, and Singapore, according to an international study recently completed at Boston College. Apparently the children are not alone. We spoke to a New York City book publicist yesterday, seeking services for an author. She declined, noting that these days, her firm doesn’t do much with “text-intensive” adult books. “Most people are reluctant readers,” she noted, and thus her firm is concentrating on graphic novels, “by far the fastest-growing market in publishing today—it’s just huge.” These are picture books for adults, a kind of comic book on a larger and higher quality scale. Publishers Weekly reported that sales for this type of book “hit $330 million in 2006, a 12% increase over revised sales figures for 2005.” Just for the sake of juxtaposition, look at a New York City newspaper from a hundred years ago—at that time there were many independent newspapers to choose from, published every morning, afternoon, and evening—and you’ll find wall-to-wall prose on just about every oversized page, with graphics being the exception rather than the rule, serving avid rather than reluctant readers.
November 26, 2007
This week’s Newsweek devoted its cover story to Kindle, a new product recently released from Amazon, a $400 e-reader to follow in the footsteps of similar devices such as Sony’s Reader Digital Book and the Rocketbook, promising clear readability thanks to sharp e-ink contrasts, interactive functionality similar to that found in the old Voyager Expanded Books, and, best of all, huge storage capacity and persistent wireless connectivity.
The “always on” aspect is exciting, for there is nothing more frustrating than traveling from hotspot to hotspot and having to pay for each connection. Based on our own airport bookstore purchases last year, we’d save money by paying $400 for the device and then $10 for each e-book title. But we’d have less on the bookshelves in the end, to share with families and friends. Doing all one’s e-info shopping through Amazon promises one-click ease and benefits, to be sure; it will be interesting to see how their portal approach will allow content from diverse sources to propagate through their commercial channel.
While this device represents one further step in freeing books from containers, it also hints at the dark side of the digital divide. On one hand, in the Newsweek article cited above, Google’s Dan Lansing notes: “Say you are trying to learn more about the Middle East, and you start reading a book, which claims that something happened in a particular event in Lebanon in ’81, where the author was using his view on what happened. But actually his view is not what [really] happened. ...there are other people who have written about it who disagree with him, there are other perspectives”—and your e-book’s connectivity could provide instant access to those competing perspectives. On the other hand, objectivity is not always the goal: there is the case of Tiananmen Square, where Google apparently helped the Chinese government make sure that a Google search on this placename conducted from within China yields a quiet park rather than the scene of the bloody student revolt in Spring 1989.
Without a foundation in physical containers such as books, all is mutable, as the inhabitants of Orwell’s Animal Farm learned when they watched their 7 Commandments written on the barn wall mutate from “all animals are equal” to “all animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.”
November 10, 2007
Roland Clement, artist, naturalist, and former Audubon Society Vice President, gave a presentation in Gloucester today to celebrate Rachel Carson’s 100th, and specifically her book that launched today’s environmental movement, Silent Spring. He noted that the local, U.S.-only ban on DDT that resulted from this book’s publication has had little impact on the chemical’s deadly global effects, and that in fact, today there is more DDT manufactured and sold than in the 1960s. “We are witnessing its effects in terms of diminishing fish and fowl all around us.” He noted that the chemical companies have a far broader reach than they did back when Kennedy was president, when Clement himself testified to a Senate committee on the poisonous effects of DDT. He noted that now these companies participate in and donate to many of the organizations (such as, we assume, his own Audubon Society) which are tasked with preserving nature rather than controlling it through chemicals. He counseled his audience not to get emotional about the loss of birdlife all around us, but to wait for the proper time before acting in concert. He recently donated his papers to a New England university and is considering publication of further work on environmental activism.
November 1, 2007
The “content imperative”—the need for ideas and information to find and serve readers in whatever medium possible—came home today, when Joseph E. Garland formally asked us to publish his Unknown Soldiers, a collective memoir of infantrymen whose World War II “battle books” include Sicily, Salerno, and four straight months spent on the open, flat Anzio Beachhead, being shot at and bombed ceaselessly and around the clock. The book ends after the 45th Thunderbirds liberate the Dachau concentration camp.
Joe wants the book published now, not only to honor his fellow authors (four remain from the original 30 he interviewed), but in time to make a difference to a country again engaged in war. The 87 hours of conversations he taped with his platoon mates will contribute to the online version. It will appear under OBS’s Protean Press imprint.
October 29, 2007
A publisher recently sought out our advice about “the value question” of offshore production opportunities. He is being courted by a company offering online publishing services at significantly less than the going stateside rate. His local vendor has built up trust with his staff and familiarity with his publications; this value is easy to appreciate but more difficult to quantify. “Where is the best business value for my company?” he asked. To reduce risk and maintain stability, he opted for a blended solution, continuing to rely on the local vendor for in-depth domain knowledge and information services, and experimenting with outsourcing for non-mission-critical tasks with clear specifications, like file tagging and conversion. He also began to refocus his organizational vision to begin solving his publishing issues enterprise-wide, rather than on a project-by-project basis, by building an infrastructure that can automate repeat tasks across many projects. To facilitate this thinking, we set up a demo to show how adoption of an Open Source Framework solution could help streamline and centralize operations, and reduce costs, while leveraging the distinctly human attributes which “Hal” hasn’t demonstrated yet—knowledge, trust, and a sense of humor.
October 16, 2007
Following the Fair, we spent a day in Greece in search of the man with the keys to the icebox holding the 5,300-year-old Eismann or “Oetzi,” a mummy with perhaps the oldest intact human DNA on the planet, discovered in 1991 by tourists in a melting glacier in Tyrol, Austria, back when global warming wasn’t yet a household phrase. Oetzi died wearing a woven grass cloak, and shoes made partially of bearskin and grass and made with such sophistication that some are considering commercial production today. He carried a wooden backpack and some Bronze Age weaponry. Apparently his 57 tattoos were not so much decorative in nature as indicating an early form of acupuncture to address his physical ailments.
Back then, Oetzi seemed to us to be the perfect subject for an online publishing project, as interest in the ancient mountain climber crosses many disciplines—anthropology, biology, politics, medicine, climatology, ancient history, general trade—and can be explored in many media. In the early 90s, the Oetzi trail led to Innsbruck, where international scholars gathered around the mummy. He’s moved to Italy now, and many continue to research Oetzi, despite what some call a mummy’s curse (see the BBC’s coverage of the “curse”) that has claimed 7 of those close to Oetzi. Our own plans to pursue the project by contacting a doctor with a key to the icebox ran aground when we learned that Professor Friedrich Tiefenbrunner of Innsbruck had recently died. However, we hope someone out there will revive the idea.
October 13, 2007
On arriving in Frankfurt, Germany, for our 20th Frankfurt Book Fair, culture shock first manifested itself in the pocketbook. A $50 Travelers Check cashed in at the on-site bank returned 26 euros, enough for lunch and a postcard. Our apartment’s landlady requested cash up front. We haven’t experienced the dollar’s loss in value quite so much at home yet!
The balance has shifted in other ways as well. As part of the Digital Marketplace, we were one of three American companies among the more than 20 exhibitors, a major shift from earlier years, when U.S. companies had more prominent presence. After three solid days of manning the stand, one of us reported having had just one conversation with someone whose first language was English.
Building the online infrastructure is turning out to be a worldwide effort running on fast-forward! Much of the implementation work (such as software engineering and design, customization of open-source software, file conversion, search engine optimization, and customer support) is offered by relatively new players, many from the Subcontinent, offering substantial economies both in terms of hourly rate and in scale (four companies we spoke to each had approximately 400 employees and could turn a one-off customization into a new software feature with great speed and economy). The value of a lower hourly rate is hard to quantify in terms of amount and quality of work done, but clearly international production teams are becoming the norm.
In the online arena, the “content imperative”—the drive that ideas have to find and serve their readers in whatever medium possible—offers a new competitive arena for publishers where, increasingly, they share an infrastructure with which to publish their content. The Frankfurt market was hot for U.S. publishers selling content, particularly among medical and STM publishers we spoke to, who reported greatly increased sub rights and overseas licensing deals initiated by publishers and new, nontraditional e-publishing players.
Beyond the Fairgrounds, one of the biggest changes we noted: “No Smoking” signs have sprouted in airports and restaurants. In the Bahnhof, yellow boxes on the platforms indicate smoking zones between trains. In recent years, graffiti—once unheard of in Germany—has begun to mark some of the trains, which are not always as punctual as in earlier years.
We took one train out to Butzbach, where one of us spent childhood years on an Army base, and found the scores of buildings recently abandoned, yet in excellent repair, and guarded by occasional pairs of German police officers, as well as the occasional woman with a baby carriage. Along streets named after states—Texas, New Jersey, Massachusetts—the school and the PX sat behind padlocks and barbed wire. This fit into a postcard motif that was new this year: “Then and Now.” The “Then” shows Frankfurt in 1947, the bombed-out ruins in black and white; the “Now” shows new and strong Frankfurt in full color.
October 7, 2007
OBS is participating in the Frankfurt Book Fair in Frankfurt, Germany—we are at Stand # 4.2-J439, in the Digital Marketplace. Almost every publisher on the planet will be there as well, like every year for the last hundreds of years! OBS’s theme this year is Metamorphosis, celebrating the radical change that our industry is now undergoing in response to digitization.
We have participated actively in the fair since 1992, when OBS brought the first Internet link to the Frankfurt Book Fair, and over the years have delivered papers and online projects there as well:
Online publishing represents a qualitative change in publishing, not just another file format. It is changing the way we communicate, think, write, and do business. It remains to be determined how this sudden and mass migration of our recorded culture to an intangible, online environment will affect global literacy, the bedrock of the publishing industry. What does it mean for book publishing, for example, when people communicate by beaming photos and iPod tunes to one another, text messaging each other with their thumbs while driving a car, instead of giving undivided concentration, attention, and thought to the acts of reading and writing? OBS attends Frankfurt this year to learn how our peers worldwide are responding to our rapidly unfolding online metamorphosis, and to share what we have learned after 25 years of e-publishing.
September 30, 2007
Joseph E. Garland, author of over 20 books, and a venerable “old soldier” from the US 45th Infantry Division, is 85 years old today. Since meeting Joe 15 years ago, OBS has republished one of his books, The Gloucester Guide, and today continues to serve as “catalyst” in getting his WWII platoon’s story, Unknown Soldiers, published, whether that will be on paper, on the Web, or both. He started writing the memoir in 1943 when he was 20, not long after taking a leave of absence from Harvard to pick up a gun, join the Infantry, and go off to Europe to fight the Nazis. The book includes the many stories and perspectives of others in his Intelligence & Reconnaissance platoon, following their path up the boot of Italy and on to the liberation of Dachau ...
July 15, 2007
At the American Association for Clinical Chemistry Annual Meeting in San Diego, the new international Editorial Board of “Young’s Effects Online” convenes for the first time, with distinguished doctors and scientists from around the world—India, Germany, Sweden, and the United States—collaborating on this lifesaving resource. “Young’s Effects” serves as a dashboard to some 50 years of research in peer-reviewed literature, is regularly updated by its authors and editors, and constitutes a resource unequalled in the industry. We discuss editorial standards and strategies in merging medical content from around the world, content management issues (including conflict resolution), integration of international symbol sets, adoption of international standards for naming conventions, revision of the business model to incorporate Open Access, and free distribution of the information to colleagues in the developing world.
June 25, 2007
“Agile Publishing” is the theme at this year’s George Washington University Summer Publishing Institute, where master’s degree candidates in GWU’s new Master of Professional Studies in Publishing program finish up their degrees. Students are learning about customer-centric approaches to publishing in the new and rapidly evolving online environment, and how other publishers are coping with the real-time demands to give their readers what they demand—online content—while maintaining successful print businesses. How will our 500-year-old print industry rise to this immediate and compelling challenge, and survive to prosper amid such drastic changes? Lively discussions lead one student to announce that she’s learned so much and is so jazzed up that she’ll network with the other students she’s met here and start her own company rather than wait for the traditional publishing industry to catch on. OBS serves on the Advisory Board for this program, and gives presentations on “The Top Ten Traits of Agile Publishing,” “Scrumming and other Production Techniques,” and “Content as a Service.”
May 31, 2007
BookExpo America, New York City
This is a fair where the publishing houses meet their market, the bookstores, and present the new books for the coming year. Whereas the Frankfurt and London Book Fairs highlight rights, and networking among publishers, BEA features lots of marketing glitz. Every year we see fewer independent bookstores perusing among the publishers’ stands, and a larger presence of the big chains like Barnes and Noble. These chains assume a larger and larger footprint on our industry as they expand beyond bookselling into print on demand and publishing itself, by establishing their own vanity presses and even imprints. This year featured a large number of the former, companies like iUniverse, AuthorHouse, and Amazon’s BookSurge. With one of these presses, and for an investment of under $1,000, any author can now publish his own book and get it to market at the big online bookstores, in weeks or months.
The means of production are now indeed in the hands of the masses.
June 13, 2007
American Association of University Presses
This year’s Annual Meeting in Minneapolis features a startling and inspiring presentation by Rice University Press’s new leader, Chuck Henry, detailing the phoenix-like rise of the new online-only Press. Ten years ago, the press shuttered its doors as a print operation, primarily for economic reasons all too familiar to the university press world—high paper prices, distribution problems, inefficiencies and costs of making things work using legacy software, competition with trade houses, dwindling library budgets.
The press now is creating a new intellectual platform for academicians and publishers:
“Rice University has re-launched its university press as an all-digital operation. Using the open-source e-publishing platform Connexions, Rice University Press is returning from a decade-long hiatus to explore models of peer-reviewed scholarship for the 21st century. The technology offers authors a way to use multimedia—audio files, live hyperlinks or moving images—to craft dynamic scholarly arguments, and to publish on-demand original works in fields of study that are increasingly constrained by print publishing.”
A picture is worth a thousand words, as the cliche goes. Henry’s presentation of the medieval Bayeux Tapestry, turned by Rice University Press into an online classroom, clearly demonstrates that Rice is leading online publishers to a new generation of publishing in which PDFs and copies of books may play a decidedly minor role in a vital scholarly community.
April 13, 2007
Biblioteka Alexandrina, Egypt
George Washington University and the World Bank are sponsoring a series of publishing workshops for the developing world. OBS serves as co-presenter at this spring’s workshop in Egypt, and learns much about the world of Arab publishing from participants at the Library of Alexandria, site of the oldest known library on the planet. It was here that Alexander the Great sought to gather all the recorded knowledge of the world of his time. While the original library was burned by Caesar, today’s Library is a stunning architectural showpiece.
We discuss differences between our countries’ publishing systems, highlighting areas such as editorial and production processes to authenticate information as true, and explore the promise of technical advances such as The Espresso Book Machine donated to the Library by the World Bank, which can download files for any book, then print and bind that book in a matter of minutes. We also explore open-source and Web 2.0 solutions to answer publishers’ needs to reach their global markets.
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