A Democratic Quality to Digitization

Robert Darnton used this interesting phrase in his recent NPR comments on the Google Book Search project and the Settlement (a 7 minute interview here).

There is a democratic quality to digitization but if those supplying it are simply trying to maximise profits the whole thing could turn sour. (The Infinite Shelf .. On the Media, 27 March 2009)

Is it true that there is a democratic quality to digitization? I think there may be a profound truth there, and getting at it, may do something to reduce or quieten Darnton's worries. He is right to be worried. If Google were to become the predominant and monopolistic supplier of books (and other print, digital print, resources) through the web, that would be a disaster. But that is a big if because digitization of our print heritage is a broadly democractic shift. It is a democractic shift in much the same way as the invention and adoption of print led to, or was one of the necessary preconditions of the democratic thrust of the Enlightenment (see Darnton's original post on Google & the Future of Books). Darnton rightly points out that the democracy of the Enlightenment was partial and restricted in its reach by privilege

Far from functioning like an egalitarian agora, the Republic of Letters suffered from the same disease that ate through all societies in the eighteenth century: privilege. Privileges were not limited to aristocrats. In France, they applied to everything in the world of letters, including printing and the book trade, which were dominated by exclusive guilds, and the books themselves, which could not appear legally without a royal privilege and a censor's approbation, printed in full in their text. (NYRB 12 February 2009)

The web is putting the final nail in the coffin which restricted the privileges of print (bolstered by the legal privilege of copyright), initially to men (rather than women), the rich and then the wealthy, the formally educated and which even now in our own time excludes some. The democratization implicit in digitization works in two ways. It works for the universality and openness of distribution because it is now a fact that digital copies and digital access are available at marginal cost for everyone. A lot more stuff will be free, partly because advertising which accompanies or supports it can generate profits, but also because it really is dirt cheap to provide free web access. So cheap that to anyone who provides digital services, providing some services free, some access to content for free, is a no-brainer. Digital access is strikingly open and democractic in its thrust because it actually (and obviously) costs more to exclude someone or anyone from access to a web resource than to enable it for everyone. 'Open' is simply, for the supplier, the lowest cost access model on the web. Authenticating, selling, registering for or targetting access costs more. But the democractic bias of digitization works also at the point of creating digital resources. It is much easier to create and if necessary re-create digital resources than to look after them in any other way.

Moving from the democratic thrust of free access from digitization, a digital process is like a printer's press in that it enables us to originate digital masters. Digitization as a method of data capture, a means for transforming cultural objects to web presence, is also becoming more feasible and more necessary. Digitization as a process is democratic because it is repeatable and reliable and affordable. Digitization is also likely to be of higher quality if it is various and competitive (Google's problems with quality of capture are notorious). Digitization as a transformative process, relying on software, computers and scanning instruments, is becoming easier and cheaper at something close to Moore's law. Even Google's massive digitization project is now much easier and cheaper than it was when they started. Since digitizing books (films, works of art, music etc) is becoming more affordable and easier every year we should have more of it. We will probably soon have consumer-targetted, hand-held, intelligent scanners.

The real danger in the Google Book Search service and the Settlement is that libraries and publishers should start to think that digitization is best left to the uniquely specialised Google. To prevent a monopoly we need a choice of services which digitize books and print resources and serve them openly (or as commercial services) to audiences through the web.

I think Darnton is right, there is a democratic thrust to digitization and it is in all our interests that there should be lots of alternatives to the digitization engine that Google has created with the help of the New York Public library, the Oxford, Harvard, Michigan and Stanford University Libraries (of course many more univerisities are now in the Google ship). Surely, the Google Books Library, (for it is rapidly becoming that), needs to be watched so that it does not become an engine for monopoly pricing, but the best safeguard against this is to create and sustain alternatives. Having played a part in kicking off the Google initiative, Harvard can help the next and better proposition that comes along. Darnton as Harvard's librarian should be there to support it.

Shopping Around

The Exact Editions service started with an 'aggregation' model for digital subscriptions to magazines. There is an Exact Editions shop where you can buy most of our magazines. Then we added 'shops' for magazine subscriptions in Euros, and another for Australian magazines. As we have started working for book publishers we have worked with a different model. We are building shops 'per publisher' branded for each publisher. There are now shops for Berkshire Publishing, Debretts, Alastair Sawday's, Profile Books, Time Out and recently Gower. There is a page on our service where all these shops and more can be referenced.

The book publisher's shops are branded for the individual publisher. Different shops, different publishers, different languages, different currencies -- but for the individual who buys a subscription there is only one account, one service. All his/her/its content goes in the same account ('its' for the institutions -- did not earlier mention the various 'institutional shops' we now support). As was to be expected, users are now buying collections of mixed magazines and books in the same shopping basket. This ability to buy, search and read books and magazines in the same way from different publishers will become an important factor in our appeal to small and medium-sized publishers.

Here is a mixed shopping basket, which has the 'look and feel' of the Gower shop because the two Gower books were those most recently added to it.



What you cannot do at the present time is buy books and magazines priced in different currencies in the same shopping basket. Mind you, this isnt a real limitation because you can buy in different currencies from the same account. PayPal or your credit card can see to that.

A Page for Shops

The Exact Editions system supports e-commerce solutions for various currencies and for different publishers. There are now a few more 'shops' on our page which lists the various options. This all started when Le Monde Diplomatique asked us to support their french language edition, which of course had to be priced in Euros. It was Napoleon who first noticed that the English were a nation of shop-keepers.

Incremental Improvements

Web software has the massive advantage that you can make incremental improvements to a steadily improving service (and web services do seem to steadily improve -- we trust that Exact Editions is). There was a small new release for our service today, and users will not notice anything.

The main change is that it makes it easier for us to set up 'shortcuts' for content that we are hosting for our clients. It logs the user into the right account and takes her straight to the right place in the information space. We put this switchboard into immediate effect for 3 catalogues for A&C Black, which are here:

http://www.exacteditions.com/acblack/andrewbrodie
http://www.exacteditions.com/acblack/music
http://www.exacteditions.com/acblack/children

Or see them all here

http://www.exacteditions.com/acblack

Our publishing partners will now be able to direct their customers directly to individual catalogues, if needed to a particular page in the catalogue, or to a page from whence the whole collection can be searched. It is quite difficult to do this sort of operation with PDF files (that was a British 'quite' which means 'probably very'). We needed to get our ontology straight before we built this 'switchboard'. I am told it works a bit like Clapham Junction.

Magazine Subscriptions are Getting more International

Magazine subs through the web will inevitably attract a larger and more international audience. Looking at our service yesterday (we can see the sales popping along in real time) I noticed 10 subs from 6 countries which went in this order: United Kingdom, Brazil, United States, France, United States, United Kingdom, France, Brazil, Norway, Canada..... Its not just that the market is international, the choices betray our global interests and our enjoyment of national cultures. Quest Bulgaria for the UK, Ancient Egypt and Le Monde Diplomatique for Brazil (bien sure en Français), Music Tech and Calcio Italia for the USA. Magazines are great cultural ambassadors.

Tabs in the Kiosk

You probably noticed that we recently inserted some tabs on the home page.

Its one of the great advantages of the way the web works, hierarchical (page oriented -- but forking), that makes it possible for such a tabbed system to accommodate 100's of magazines. We will need something else when we have 1,000s of titles. I guess the 'kiosk' will feel more like a library at that point.

Institutional Sales

There is an old rule of software development which says that it is a very bad idea to talk in public about developments before you implement them. But this is August, and blogs are not press releases, so here goes.

We have had a growing chorus of requests for institutional access to some of our magazines. Mostly from universities, but not just from them, also from businesses.

We have decided that we will support institutional access via IP-addresses, but whether or not any specific publication will be available this way will depend on our publishers. If a publisher does not want to support institution-wide access it will not be available from us. We have also decided that our publishers will set the prices (all the prices in our service are set by the publishers). So we expect to support IP-based subscriptions to some of our magazines in Quarter 4.

Also, we will not be offering aggregated packages. It will be entirely up to the subscribing institutions, the libraries or universities, to decide which magazines they need.

New Consumer

The Guardian this week produced its list of top 100 media types (those who wield the most power in the UK media sectors). It strikes us as a crazy list (registration may be required). Barely a representative from book publishing (Marjorie Scardino of Pearson doesnt really count, her background is in newspapers). Eric Schmidt of Google comes in at (1) and Facebook stops the list at (100), with a great many here-today, gone-tomorrow, journalists, pundits and media personalities in between them. Its a nonsense list. If Facebook deserves to be there at all it should be in the top 10, and I wonder how many Googlers think that Schmidt is really more influential than Page and Brin?

Much more interesting is the list produced by New Consumer in the current issue. The magazine's Top 100 Ethical Heroes. You should get a subscription. Here are a couple that I was pleased to see:

New Consumer

July/August 2007

Page 22

And

New Consumer

July/August 2007

Page 29

Perhaps Jamie Oliver is more deserving of his place in this list, than Gordon Ramsay is of his position of 90th in the Guardian's.

Open Archives (5): Mousetraps and Cafes

The business of selling subscriptions has changed. Fifty years ago, the 'mousetrap' model of subscription-selling ruled. There are two parts to this commercial strategy: first you must have a fantastic product, a piece of cheese which smells terrific and which appeals to all the mice; second you need to have a well designed and secure cage -- and for consumer magazines, quarterly direct debit payments and a continuous flow of new issues, fitted the bill. Once the first piece of cheese had been tasted and the direct debits were in place, the mice tended to stay in the cage and renew their subs. Everyone was happy.

In fact, publishers, fifty years ago, had another factor working in their favour -- the mice were mostly hungry. The system worked even better if they were starving (there were no satirical magazines when Private Eye was launched, and Rolling Stone showed that rock could be intellectual, so these magazines grew like topsy).

Things have changed. The marginal cost of supplying information through the web is close to zero. It is effectively zero. When printing on paper, the marginal cost of supplying an additional copy is always significant. The web is now a medium through which vasts amounts of information are available to anyone with a broadband connection. Too much. The smell of cheese no longer has an attraction. With this abundance comes a wandering audience which knows that it can have everything, or at least anything that is particularly relevant.

On the web users are always one click away from something else, and the idea of a content cage or content silo makes little sense. Increasingly we are moving to a 'cafe' society, where abundance prevails and users expect to help themselves in a convivial atmosphere. The publisher is no longer a gatekeeper (severe frown, rejection looms), but an orchestrator and a host or service provider (friendly smile, no need for bouncers here). In H A Simon's words "Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention".

Acquiring a subscription is still an attractive proposition, but it has to be presented more as club membership, as bestowing privelege in the core audience, with a premium service. If some are excluded, that may be an unfortunate commercial necessity. But in an information-rich culture our consumers value their priveleged information more if there is the prospect of sharing this (albeit after a lag) with the broader community, and they wish to be seduced with attention and selection rather than swamped with everything. Information subscription services need to be self-selective, individually definable, in an age of abundance.

The moving wall of a potentially Open Archive helps develop this 'cafe' society: of provisional exclusivity and selective membership.

There is still a role for subscription, but its use is primarily to enable the consumer to select the sources which he/she particularly wishes to receive and to enjoy them in the best possible ways. Excluding others from the information is not a primary objective (except in highly competitive situations).

There is a balance to be struck here and how the balance is struck will vary from one magazine to another. So the wall can be a moving wall -- in two senses, (1) month by month, issue by issue, more is included (2) if the publisher decides to stretch or reduce the gap between publication and Open Access, then this can be done.

O'Reilly is now selling Chapters

Interesting post from Tim O'Reilly. I have not counted how many different ways they can now sell or package rights in their books. But there must be at least a dozen e-commerce options, apart from the obvious one of buying the book as a physical object.

Every chapter costs $3.99, which buys you a PDF. If you were thinking of getting started with Ruby on Rails.....

Open Archives (4): Citeability and Moving Walls

There is a strong case for Open Access to scientific research and scholarship published in article form. This was crystalised in the Budapest Open Access Initiative in 2001. Scientific and scholarly research publications benefit from being openly accessible, because the value of the underlying research is enhanced when it is made freely, easily, accessible to other researchers. If scientific research is to be effective it needs to be cited and referenced; it is clear that open web-based publication makes it easier for researchers to cite the work of others in the field. Open web-based access is the way that research in an internet age can be most efficient.

The Budapest programme specifically limited its recommendations to:

The literature that should be freely accessible online is that which scholars give to the world without expectation of payment. [my emphasis].

This is an important limitation. For sure, commercial consumer publications are not obliged to follow the STM (Scientific, Technical and Medical) and other scholarly periodicals in providing free and Open Access to their magazines. After all most consumer magazines pay their contributors, often very handsomely. Yet it may well be in the interests of a successful consumer magazine to make a substantial portion of its archive freely accessible as a web resource. Why should this be?

One reason -- is that Open Access to an archive enhances the authority and renown of a magazine. Consumer magazines are often quite specialist, quite limited, in their appeal. But this tight focus is part of their strength and gives them potentially authoritative status. The reputation of a magazine or a periodical is immediately enhanced if its articles can be effectively cited, referenced, commented upon, by others. The prevalence and searchability of the web has enormously increased the extent to which magazines can build a reputation through links and citations. Citeability/referenceability/linkability is the strongest reason for making some portions of a consumer magazine archive available as a digital resource.

This way bloggers, enthusiasts, journalists, emailers, advertisers, and reviewers will pile in to amplify the reputation of the publication. An obvious way of gaining the advantages of a citeable archive, whilst not giving away the baby with the bath water, is for the publisher to make the archive freely available through the web, outside of a 'moving wall, so that issue become available after a period of some months (6 months, 12 months -- whatever is judged necessary to maintain the perceived value of the personal subscription). The concept of a Moving Wall in this sense comes from JSTOR -- an archival system for scholarly periodicals. Interestingly, JSTOR was originally set up simply as a way of archiving and aggregating inaccessible periodical archives, but they are now trying to reach through to an Open Access model (or a more Open model).

So making portions of a consumer magazine archive Openly Accessible makes sense if this significantly enhances the reputation and the authoritative quality of the publication, and if it does so without damaging the commercial prospects of the magazine. We think that in most cases it will clearly do so, but it is a matter for publishers to decide and our system enables publishers to control the extent to which the archive is open.

Because Exact Editions is a middle-man we have an interesting perspective on the dilemma of Open-ness. We do not publish magazines and our subscribers are always subscribing to a magazine where the publisher has control of the product, the subscription price, frequency, extent, design, copyright etc. Exact Editions is a distribution partner whose reward is a small commission on the digital subscriptions sold. So we are keenly interested in having more subscribers.

Furthermore, the way our deal works with the publishers we absorb the distribution and maintenance costs of the digital edition. So it costs Exact Editions, not the publisher, a bit more to maintain an Open Archive. We think these costs are easily containable within the parameters of the small commission we obtain from selling additional digital subscriptions, so we encourage our publishing partners to offer Open Archives with a moving wall. The marginal costs of maintaining Open Access are marginal. So you dont need to feel sorry for us!

On the other hand, if you enjoy the open archives and never buy a subscription you can thank us as well as the publisher for making this service available. We like subscriptions best, but we also like appreciative feedback or fan mail ;-)

Open Archives (1): How Open?

Exact Editions has recently improved its content management system, so that a publisher can determine HOW MUCH of the magazine archive should be exposed for open access to the general public, the general web user.

Our system is set up so that a publisher can offer five levels of access to an archival resource:

1. An archive can be completely closed except to subscribers. This might be an appropriate solution for certain types of B2B publication (eg membership only magazines). None of the consumer magazines in our shop is completely closed.
2. All the magazines currently in our shop have at least one, open, free trial issue. We will maintain this option for the publishers who want it.
3. A publisher may opt to make all except the last year of the publication 'Open Access'. We call this option a 12 month moving wall.
4. A publisher may opt to make all except the last six months of the publication 'Open Access'. We call this option a 6 month moving wall. We will also support more current, more proximate, moving walls: three months, two months, one month, should this be needed.....
   
5. Finally, a publisher might opt to offer the magazine as a completely free 'Open Access' resource. Currently we are delivering The Publican for CMPi on this basis.

There are good reasons why some magazines should be completely Open Access -- many scientific periodicals have moved to this model of distribution. They now have to pay their costs by levying a charge from the contributors or sponsors of the research reported. Also, Open Access makes complete sense for magazines which are essentially free in print; but we think it is unlikely that a consumer magazine which is completely Open Access will sell many personal subscriptions.

So complete and immediate Open Access is not recommended for a consumer magazine which aims to sell personal subscriptions. But it, of course, does not follow that a consumer magazine which aims to sell digital and print subscriptions should be completely Closed. Far from it. But there is an interesting question as to "How Open should a consumer magazine be?" when it wishes to sell the most possible subscriptions? We will look at this issue in the next few days.

An intellectual and thoughtful reader

Has just subscribed to 6 magazines. It seems probable, by his choice of magazines, that he (for it is a 'he') is a distinguished intellectual. Anyone who reads all these magazines regularly is going to be very well informed; the choice, in the order in which they were selected:

London Review of Books
Prospect Magazine
Rare Book Review
The Spectator
Le Monde Diplomatique
Literary Review

We said that we would mention in the blog when we first sold a 'six pack'. Our next target is to have a subscriber who takes 12 titles all at once. I was confident that we would do a six-pack in 2007, but am not so sure that we will do dozen-at-a-time anytime soon; but we will try to note such an omniverous choice in the blog, whenever it occurs .

As we add more titles, the advantages of having several subscriptions in the same account becomes more compelling, so we should be finding a lot more triplets and quads in the months to come.