Large Double Page Spreads

We have added a new function to our interface. The Large Double Page Spread icon on the toolbar:



This richer double-page view comes in to its own when you are reading an article spread across a double page, Le Monde Diplomatique on the Basque problem. Where it may be a trifle awkward to read one page, and then the facing page.

Mind you it is also sumptious for rich double page pictures or advertisements.

I dont think I can see the joins in those JPEGS, and that is how things should be if the Trim Boxes are set.

Will we still be seeing snow on the top of Kilimanjaro in 2015? Maybe not, but I think magazines will still like to make a feature of good legs.

Libraries working with Google Book Search, Or Not

At the weekend there was an interesting article in the NYTimes about the increasingly wary reaction of libraries to the Google Book Search proposition. Major research libraries are looking for a more open distribution model, without Google proprietary restrictions, and supporting the OCA (Open Content Alliance); and more are realising that they can do their own thing.

Interesting comments on this article from Michael Cairns at PersonaNonData, and from Peter Brantley at O'Reilly. Interestingly different, but they both highlight the idea of Digital Interlibrary Loan.

But I am not sure that the concept of Digital Interlibrary Loan really holds up. Well it works fine if digital libraries are composed of Books-as-files, since you can of course loan and track a PDF file; but if digital libraries are databases of searchable books and manuscript collections, where the book lives by virtue of being searched with and linked to other books, the concept of an interlibrary loan is redundant. Consider this question: how are you going to find this rare out of print book which might be available to you through digital interlibrary loan? Before you can borrow a book you need to know that it exists. So you are going to search for it in the complete library catalogue which provides full text searching as part of the catalogue, and then offers you Google-style snippets of the content. That is roughly the way things are going to work in state of the art libraries in 2010. The catalogue you are searching is in a library on another continent. And yet the book looks really good so you want to have it on interlibrary loan.....

But, but hold on a minute, you have been searching it and snippeting it and its already 'on' the server where you are searching the catalogue, so having it available to read digitally is just a matter of being able to access, search and read every page. Its just a matter of access and of lifting up the snippeted grid that stands between you and the book in all its veridical, full text, scanned image, glory. There is nothing to be loaned, its just a matter of providing access. Once books are searchable through the web, the idea that they need to be loaned is otiose. Before we get to digital interlibrary loans we are going to have campus to campus digital walk-in access......

PayPal Coverage

Our payments for subscriptions runs through an automated e-commerce system which relies heavily on PayPal. PayPal handles the major credit cards for us and subscribers in the developed world can join in with little difficulty. PayPal does a good job for us. The list of countries where PayPal works looks impressive, but note that for many of them one can only send money.

There is a problem for many readers in countries where PayPal purchasing is not supported. We have been selling Le Monde Diplomatique like hot cakes in the last two weeks, and we would be selling many more hot-cakes if PayPal had complete African coverage.

We would be very interested to hear about alternatives. But I suspect that there are no easy answers to this question and a large part of the problem is that many of the countries where the PayPal writ does not run are under restrictive foreign exchange controls; government control is the underlying issue. Getting a decent global infrastructure for web-based e-commerce is not a shoe-in.

Quixotic?

We have always taken the view that the publishers who use Exact Editions to provide access to the magazines on our platform, own the subscription lists that accrue through the process of selling subs. As far as we are concerned they also own the aggregate usage date which we carefully collect and supply for them through a stats account. In our production process we enhance the PDFs which are our source documents, and so far as ownership goes they also own these improved PDFs. [The PDFs are only enhanced by us so that we can build a better database, we do not of course use the PDFs in a delivery mode].

These are valuable assets, and I sometimes wonder whether our policy in not claiming any ownership over these intangibles is altogether prudent. Its possible, that if our company was part-owned by a VC we would have been required to take a more aggressive view of our own contribution. Would there be a case for asserting part ownership? Maybe, but on the whole, and with the benefit of reflection, emphatically NO.

Our position is right on this. Quixotic perhaps, naive I concede, but right and strong. Exact Editions does have some important intellectual assets, but claiming any proprietary stake in the copyrights of the publications or the subscriber lists which attach to publications sold on susbcription, is not one of them. Our position is stronger precisely because our process enhances the value of what the publishers are doing, and that is the way we intend to keep things.

Call this a hostage to fortune if you will. But we think of it as a basis for collaboration.

The Importance of Magazines?

Mark Chillingworth at Information World Review reports that Google are unlikely to extend their book search program to magazines.....

Google has damped down speculation that it will extend its Google Book Search platform to include magazines with an ISSN number. Technical difficulties with digitising magazines and a lack of existing archives were cited as the main reasons.

Chillingworth quotes Jens Redmar (Director Google Book Search in Europe) as saying:

"Magazines describe a trend at the time. A historic book has more valuable information than a historic magazine." Periodical publishers have also failed to create archives of their content, which Redmar sees as essential to a successful search tool.

We can agree that consumer magazine publishers have by and large failed to create archives of their content (amazingly many still do not archive PDFs of their current issues), but this has nothing to do with the value of these archives. It is really very odd to say that a historic book is more valuable than a historic magazine. What on earth can he have meant? Historians find contemporary magazine archives an invaluable tool.

IWR is a reliable magazine, indeed a valuable magazine, but I am not sure that this report really stands up. Google Book Search after all already includes a great number of issues of historic magazines. Here is one from the Bodleian and here is a typical page [Though the Google meta-data gives me a shudder: "blackwoods magazune By william blackwood sons" where did the magazune come from, and has the apostrophe gone awol?]

Google and Copyright

Google have just announced a new set of Content ID tools which will help copyright owners protect their content on the YouTube platform. More detail is given here. These new policies and the copyright ID platform may enable Google to shrug off or negotiate a way out of the onerous suits it faces from Viacom and the UK's Premier League. But it also seems to back away from the idea of establishing a 'fair use' of video clippings or quotations -- a contentious issue which is at the heart of the YouTube success. The new Google approach appears to give copyright owners total control over the distribution of their video content.

Google will have to make similar proposals to the owners and custodians of literary copyrights. We can expect a comparable "highly complicated technology platform -- [with] content identification tools" to be in preparation for the Google Book Search platform (they already have much of it in place already) . It would be hard to go before a judge saying that literary copyrights are going to be treated differently from video copyrights. I predict this is going to lead Google to handing a lot more power to its Publisher partners and less leeway to its Library partners in the construction of the Google Book Search 'library'.

Some of the Google statements are quite striking and humble:

No matter how accurate the tools get, it is important to remember that no technology can tell legal from infringing material without the cooperation of the content owners themselves.....The best we can do is cooperate with copyright holders to identify videos that include their content and offer them choices about sharing that content. As copyright holders make their preferences clear to us up front, we'll do our best to automate that choice while balancing the rights of users, other copyright holders, and our community as a whole. [See videoID-about]

It is especially tricky to see how one can automate the choices of copyright holders whilst balancing the rights of users....As John Batelle wonders its not at all clear what happens to fair use. But book publishers will certainly welcome the idea that they might be given more control 'up front'. Its what they have been asking for all along.

Trouble is that literary copyrights can be a lot more confused and complicated even than video copyrights. All serious literary publishing requires that scope be given to 'fair use'.

The Radiohead Strategy and the publisher's variation

Radiohead's new disk, In Rainbows, is going to be, is already a smash hit, a commercial coup for the band and a pathbreaker when it comes to music distribution. A VC, Fred Wilson, estimates that it may have grossed them $6.5 million in four days. Not bad.

Books are different from music (especially in that 'downloads' are not the way forward; since digital editions are much more promising); but there is a lot that book publishers could learn from the Radiohead example. Precisely because books can be exposed through the web, without being usefully or viably downloaded, the web is a great medium for promoting new or topical books. But publishers really arent doing this.

Here are some topical books which their publishers should be promoting through the web by either offering a significant chunk for free open access, or providing open access to the complete edition for a limited period. All these books would sell in much greater numbers this Christmas if they were promoted in this way. In one or two cases we may find something from them on Amazon, Search Inside. but there is very little from the books themselves on the publisher's own web sites. Why arent these titles being promoted through the web with substantial extracts? Or the whole edition a la Radiohead?

Pears Cyclopaedia 2007-2008, Penguin £20. This is a title which absolutely should be exposed in full from the Penguin website for at least a month.

My Manchester United Years, Bobby Charlton, Headline, £20. Surely at least a chapter should be shown from the Headline web site -- where it is hard to find the book -- and why is there no Search Inside from Amazon?.

Exit Music, Ian Rankin, Orion, £10.99. The publisher offers us an interview and an audio extract, but no facsimile of the print to whet our appetites. Nothing would be lost, no twist at the end revealed, and many buyers would be won over if the publisher hosted a 32 or 64pp sample.

The Wild Places, Robert Macfarlane, Granta, £18.99. This author writes so beautifully and is still relatively unknown. Arguably his book should be open access for a few months since very few readers will be satisfied with just a web-read or a web-browse. There is some limited exposure on Amazon Search Inside.

An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore, Bloomsbury, £14.99. The author has just won the Nobel Peace Prize. The book sold well last Christmas, but with vigorous promotion this title might sell even better this year. Given the environmental message of the author it is strange that Gore has not insisted that his publishers promote with open access versions of his book. The book is so beautifully produced that more copies would surely be sold.

An Inconvenient Truth is a very Radiohead proposition. And the message of the book is important for us all. Book publishers have a huge advantage (contrast with the music industry); since temporary open access through the web does not diminish the appetite for a book. With all good books the demand will be stimulated. So why are not new titles made available on publication through the web at least for a few months, AS A MATTER OF COURSE?

.... it really is a no brainer as Radiohead are showing us. (OK, yes there is another view on the Radiohead caper -- see Eoin Purcell).

The Wire

The Wire "...seeks out the best current musics in, and between, all genres; and is committed to investigating music's past as well as its present and future..." (from their FAQ). The latest magazine in the Exact Editions shop.

• Reviews 50 or 60 of them,
  
• e.g. of Cornelius Cardew.
• Von Südenfed.

From the editorial:

The Wire

May 2007

Page 6

Large or Small?

We had some interesting feedback from a new subscriber the other day:

This is my first adventure into a web magazine, and I am amazed at the size I can get by zooming into a page, showing the images so clearly that you can almost see the structure of the cloth. I am sure that in the months ahead, I am going to enjoy having a subscription magazine on line.

"The structure of the cloth" suggests that this subscriber was commenting on Selvedge which does have some wonderful fabrics in its pages:

Selvedge

Sample

Page 11

When you really want to study a cloth closely, a very large image (that may require a good deal of scrolling) is not going to be a problem. In fact the Selvedge images are not so large, but I can see what our subscriber means by enjoying the structure of the cloth.

These thoughts were neatly counterbalanced with some testing I did with the Apple iTouch earlier in the week. Apple's London store had run out of them but I was able to spend half an hour playing around with one of the demo models and confirmed that its a perfectly feasible way of reading our magazines. To read the text you need to use the built in 'magnification' system on the iTouch's version of Safari, but, in spite of their small scale, the screens are amazingly sharp and bright; the devices are very compelling. I can see reading/browsing magazines on the iTouch or the iPhone will become addictive. I reckon that we are inevitably going to look for bigger and better screens and smaller and more portable devices. The question of the appropriate scale for viewing a web page remains moot. More, in all dimensions is the way things will work. Nano and Peta together, please!

The Catholic Herald

The UK has a postal strike and The Catholic Herald has made this week's issue temporarily available as a free trial issue. This is your chance to sample their tricky crossword before it withdraws behind the pay-wall next Saturday.

The Catholic Herald

6 October 2007

Page OBC

Just to get you started, 14 down, Africa's oldest republic (1847), has to be 'Liberia'?

Radiohead and the Future of Print

OK, I know that is a mildly ridiculous headline. But hear me out. The Oxford-based band Radiohead have made a move which is giving the music industry the jitters. Radiohead are launching a new album without the help of the majors and they are asking their fans to pay what they want to pay for it ("its up to you") if they download the music digitally. They are also selling an expensive package of physical goods CD/DVD vinyl disks etc. for £40/$80. Michael Arrington thinks this marks a turning point in the inevitable march of music towards free. Jeff Gomez (at the Print is Dead blog) notes the control with which Radiohead have managed this publication process themselves:

So with one fell swoop Radiohead shatters half-a-dozen rock-star rituals, and further makes the existence of record labels a questionable thing in a digital age.

Jeff does not ask whether print publishers are similarly vulnerable. But the question hangs in the air (it is a Print is Dead blog, right?). On the other hand, maybe print publishers are in a better position. After all, in a curious way the Radiohead exercise is lavishing particular attention on the packaging and the physical product. There is even a book in the package as well as the CDs and the vinyl. One can see that £40 package becoming a collectors item. It is possible that as we embrace the digital, the quality and the value of print magazines and books will actually increase (though as a luxury item) whilst the digital versions become the most popular and evanescent form in which the works are enjoyed.

Pdfs, downloads and reading a magazine on the plane

"Exact Editions is great, but why not offer a downloadable version of the magazine, like a PDF?" This seems like a very reasonable request and its one of our more frequent themes in customer support. Here are some of the reasons we do not offer a PDF or issue-download solution:

1. If we were to offer this our publishers would reasonably insist on some sort of DRM solution. We do not think DRM (so called 'Digital Rights Management' software) is a solution to anything. The publishers would require a DRM system because without it piracy would be rife. Think about it: if it were to be as easy to download issues of magazines from Exact Editions as it is to search issues of magazines we would become a type of Napster service for magazines. Publishers who care about their subscription revenues (most consumer magazine publishers do so care) would hate this.
2. Issue download systems appear to be attractive to users who do not consider the difficulties and inefficiencies involved in storing, managing, saving and searching across issues. By providing a convenient and shared access service, Exact Editions is able to solve all these maintenance issues at a stroke. Downloads may appear to be a reader convenience but they can rapidly become a maintenance nightmare.
3. The most frequently offered reason for wanting a download is that web access is unpredictable (eg only available through a modem), or we have often heard that users like to read their magazine on the plane, the train etc. There is, of course, reason and force in these requests. But it should be recognised that there are countervailing advantages in a system like the Exact Editions access system which means that you can log in to your subscription from any web-enabled device. There are advantages in not needing to download. Planes and trains are rapidly acquiring in flight web access, and as they do so it will be possible to log in to your Exact Editions subscription whether or not you have (a) remembered to carry your laptop on board (you will use your iPhone or the headrest-mounted web monitor); or (b) remembered to download an issue of a magazine to your laptop.
4. In short: the web will soon be everywhere and when it is everywhere and omnipresent, having access to all or any magazine issues will be much, much more important than being able to download individual issues.

PDFs are a brilliant file format for printing and they were at one time the only option for reading magazines and printed books. No longer. Same arguments apply to Flash and all the other file-download solutions out on the market. Database service to which the consumer will have access are generally to be preferred.

Le Monde Diplomatique

Is the first title in our French Shop/Kiosque Francaise. And here is the opening of the first article in the free trial issue:

Le Monde diplomatique

Juillet 2007

Page Une

A very big step for Exact Editions

You may not notice our big change of today, when you go to our home page its pretty much as usual:

http://www.exacteditions.com/exact/browseEditions.do

The new feature is a tiny link at the top right to French shop.

http://www.exacteditions.com/exact/login.do?username=shop.fr

Pas grand chose, you may say. But its a big step for us. Maybe several big steps. We now have a generalisable shopping system and can cope with shopping in different currencies. We have an interface and tooltips that can be spun into other languages. I am sure that there would be some work for us to do Japanese and Arabic, but the European languages should be OK.

So we need more French magazines.......BTW I love the concept of a 'Kiosque anglophone'. The French language is so precise and elegant. Much, much better than an 'English shop'.

Widgets and Namespaces

Having just had four days holiday without web-access, one realises that things move too quickly right now. Here is some stuff that I hope to catch up with:

Tim O'Reilly posts about Adobe opening up Share, a generalisable document widget system. A kind of YouTube for documents. Looks interesting and one more copyright challenge for publishers and authors to think about. Yet another reason for keeping close control of those PDF files before they get shared in ways that were not possible a few years ago! But, I wonder whether Adobe have positioned this quite right: {I only raise the question} - perhaps the 'Share' concept is missing the revolutionary point about the YouTube analogy. YouTube was viral because it was very easy to share videos that way, but I reckon that the key step forward with YouTube (and similar services) is that they have shown how it is possible, useful, viral and creative to QUOTE videos. Quoting is much more productive and creative than another potentially abusive sharing technology......The problem of standards, of 'fair use' and techniques of digital quotation through the web (which is one step beyond citation and mere linking) has not yet been solved.

The Exact Editions/Berkshire announcement drew an insightful and appreciative response from Outsell:

There are services which offer similar opportunities, Amazon’s Search Inside! being a prime example. However, the functionality is limited when compared to Exact Editions, both for the publisher and the end user - through Amazon, users can only search inside one book at a time, for instance, and can never look at every page of a single title. This move from Berkshire may indicate that book publishers are becoming less cautious about exposing their content on the web, and more likely to start experimenting in earnest with ways in which the networked environment can not only help to boost sales, but can also deliver valuable new functionality around existing content.

I suppose Kate Worlock's way of putting this point makes it clear that the Exact Editions service is also doing what the new Adobe system is doing, but our system makes it easy for the publisher to control and brand the content in the network environment, and with our clipper the quotation carries the attribution/citation with the quotation. Her conclusion is the essence: "Not only boost sales but deliver new functionality....." I will remember to reuse that phrase (with proper attribution to Kate Worlock of course).

This looked interesting on harmonising meta-data: Lorcan Dempsey blog, on why we need a Strunk and White for namespaces.

Finally, just before I took my break, Richard Charkin said goodbye to Macmillan and set sail for Bloomsbury. The trade press reports it here. Richard is such a talented academic and STM publisher that I will lay long odds that Bloomsbury will now make some forays in that direction. STM publishing has become way too congested, predictable and costive. Time for a shakeup and some innovation. Bloomsbury could do that.

Garden Rail and Narrow Gauge World

Garden Rail and Narrow Gauge World come from Atlantic Publishers. They are the quickest titles into the system, since it took 3 weeks from the preliminary inquiry email we had from their publisher, for the contracts to be exchanged, the archive of back issues to be processed and the titles now to be in the shop.

How beautiful is a Garratt and how evocative the Baldwin?

Exact Editions for Book Publishers

The patter of references to Google Book Search in these blogs since August may have betrayed our interest in offering a service to book publishers. We have for some weeks been testing how Exact Editions works as a promotional service to book publishers and the first customisation is now in the open for Berkshire Publishing at http://www.exacteditions.com/berkshirepublishing.

Berkshire Publishing is a young and highly innovative publisher of academic and general reference titles (Berkshire MA not UK). They have produced a list of outstanding and ambitious multi-volume reference works in the last decade. We are pleased to be helping promote these great resources in a web environment. The entire books are available and searchable for a limited period through this promotional service. A typically bold move from Berkshire's CEO, Karen Christensen. Her decision makes me wonder why publishers do not as a matter of course make their new titles available for free for a limited period through the web? Surely there is no better way of promoting a title? Opening access for a limited period makes complete sense. Complete commercial sense if the aim is to sell more books.

The Berkshire Encylcopedia of World History runs to well over 2,000 large format, double column, pages. It employs three different page numbering schemes over five volumes. So it was quite a challenge for our automated clickable-indexing system. Here is a typical index entry (hint: the clipping is a link to the index page. You will need to click on the clipping, which is just a fragment of JPEG to see the live index pages):

Berkshire Publishing

Berkshire Encyclopedia of World History

Page 2188

With such a large book, in several volumes, instant searchability encourages a different sort of browsing. Here are the results of three searches on three african geo terms: Khartoum, Tanzania, and Durban. For the Tanzania search its very handy the way that the search term is highlighted in the thumbnail images on the search results; and then again on the page when you click through. Here is the first result on a search for 'China' + 'Buddhism'.

Berkshire Publishing

Berkshire Encyclopedia of World History

Page 268

Which (if you click on the clipping) takes you to the very map which tells the story of the spread of Buddhism. These books are hugely informative and for a month or two available to all and to everywhere.....

Calcio Italia

Calcio Italia, a new magazine in nostra edicola for followers of Serie A

• Plenty of sold out back issues. Calcio Italia needs a complete digital archive.
• Adrian Mutu gets my vote for player of the season.
• Channel 4 have always had good coverage of Serie A. Cool that the publisher already has an ad for the digital edition of Calcio Italia in the Channel 4 web service.

This is our first football magazine and the 56th title in the shop/kiosque/edicola.

File conversion or interoperating services?

A few years ago, the standard view was that magazines and books needed a suitable digital file format in which they could be stored (something which might become an industry standard like the MP3 was for music). The internet was the powerful new way in which publications would be shipped. To this way of thinking, digitization was all about electronic delivery. It seemed kind of obvious that this was the road ahead, and most of the companies, our competitors, that offer a digital magazine platform have this kind of technology. It usually means a proprietary and non-standard file format, often a modified form of PDF.

There is a huge amount of baggage that comes with this way of looking at things. First, it seemed that publishers would only work with this sort of system if there was a workable technology for DRM (Digital Rights Management and there were lessons here from the music industry). Second, once we see the web as a way of providing users with issues as downloadable files, we have a lot of problems about making magazine archives searchable, and over co-ordinating the usage of copies of stuff that ought to be handled through a network resource. Third, there was a big problem in deciding whether digital books or magazines should be adapted and deformed so that their format changed in a digital version from what it was in print.

All these issues are being chased to ground by a consortium which works with book publishers. The International Digital Publishing Forum with its new proposed Open eBook Publication Structure Specification.

These standards may serve a useful purpose, but it could all be a real diversion. The Google Book Search way of handling digitization may be the way forward. In which case DRM was always a bad idea. Print will always be page-based and digital print will respect the conventions of pagination. Archives should only be searchable via a network service. References and citations should always target the source. Search services matter and distribution services are beside the point. And file formats need be of no concern to users. Access management is key, just as digital rights management is otiose.

In this new world the standards that matter will be to do with making different web services inter-operable, not with harmonising the formats in which texts are held.

Google Book Search Project or the Human Library Search Project?

Siva Vaidhyanathan discusses how the Google Book Project threatens copyright in a short podcast, posted at First Monday (hat tip to IF Book blog). Siva says that Google is 99% certain to lose its copyright case in the courts (although he also mentions that a settlement is quite possible, so I guess he means that Google will lose or settle in a way which loses the key issue). Siva is a lawyer and he is 99% sure that Google will lose. I wonder how the case looks to the Google lawyers?

But Professor Vaidhyanathan is not a Luddite, he is very much in favour of the project of a global, universal, web-based library; but not as a private venture. He draws the comparison with the Human Genome Project. Making the universal digital library, through which all out-of-copyright information could be accessed, is worthy of national and international support.

We’re willing to do these sorts of big projects in the sciences. Look at how individual states are rallying billions of dollars to fund stem cell research right now. Look at the ways the United States government, the French government, the Japanese government rallied billions of dollars for the Human Genome Project out of concern that all that essential information was going to be privatized and served in an inefficient and unwieldy way.

So those are the models that I would like to see us pursue. What saddens me about Google’s initiative, is that it’s let so many people off the hook. Essentially we’ve seen so many people say, “Great now we don’t have to do the digital library projects we were planning to do.”....... transcript

A very interesting idea, and it would need drivers like Jim Watson, John Sulston, the NIH and the Wellcome Trust to make it happen (and the Health component will be a big part of the public justification). Digital magazines will be part of such a global library and some of their archives will be freely accessible. All published magazines should be searchable through the web and that will happen because it obviously needs to happen and because it will enormously increase their value when it does. As Siva says the next five years are going to be interesting.

Why aren't all Phone Numbers Clickable?

One of the Exact Editions innovations is that we render phone numbers clickable (provided that they are in the 'international format'). This means that readers browsing our magazines can to click on the phone number to call the listed phone number (assuming that they have VOIP or Skype), which probably belongs to an advertiser. Here is an example:

AnOther Magazine

Spring / Summer 2007

Page 416

The clickability of the phone numbers does not show up on the clipping (the clipping is after all just a fragment of the JPEG) so you will have to click through to the full page to see the live links. But this instant connectivity is a huge advantage of the digital edition over the print edition. I am surprised that the Exact Editions innovation has not yet been more emulated. In fact any decent web site that seeks telephone response should enable this straightforward connectivity. Why aren't phone numbers on web pages standardly clickable (as emails and urls are almost always)? I have no idea, but since Skype is becoming omnipresent and as more web pages are being viewed on mobiles, or iPhones, its an idea whose time has come.

Linkage on the web is so important. It can not be underestimated. Which reminds me, we noticed, via Eoin Purcell, that Google have introduced their own clipping tool, and it seems to be a neat piece of code. But it would be even better if the Google clippings carried a decent citation. With the EE clippings the reader sees where the page reference for the clipping and jumps straight back to the context from which the clipping has been taken. With the Google clipping-citations you jump back to a catalog entry. If you click on the stockists fragment above you go straight to the page. Since this issue of AnOtherMagazine is over 400 pages that precision is helpful!

Sense and nonsense on eBooks: consumers and patrons

Peter Brantley and Ben Vershbow run excellent blogs that anyone interested in digital libraries should follow. They have some insightful postings on the recent Amazon (Kindle) and Google (MyLibrary) developments: Ben here and Peter on Google's MyLibrary. But they also contribute some frankly dumb and thoroughly misleading ideas to the discussion. Item: after some shrewd analysis of the shortcomings of the reported/conjectured spec. for the Kindle, Ben Vershbow asks us to:

...... project forward a few years... this could develop into a huge money-maker for Google: paid access (licensed through publishers) not only on a per-title basis, but to the whole collection—all the world's books. Royalties could be distributed from subscription revenues in proportion to access. Each time a book is opened, a penny could drop in the cup of that publisher or author. By then a good reading device will almost certainly exist (more likely a next generation iPhone than a Kindle) and people may actually be reading books through this system, directly on the network. Google and Amazon will then in effect be the digital infrastructure for the publishing industry......[e-book developments at amazon, google]

Wait a minute, doesn't Ben realise that people are already reading books on the network? Reminder: the scientific, medical, technical and legal literature has largely migrated to the web already. In universities, the reading matter for most of the technical subjects studied, is accessed almost entirely through the web. The brute fact is that when people go on to the web what they are doing most of the time is reading. Often what they read is literature, extended text. Most of this literature that has gone on to the web already, a lot of it out-of-print or scholarly periodicals but some of it the very latest research, has migrated in the form of PDF files, or print repurposed as HTML. Those texts are 'books', however inadequate their file format and however proprietary their publisher platforms. It is a complete nonsense to suggest that "actually reading books directly on the network" is any kind of innovation or step forward. There is nothing futuristic about people reading on the net.

On the contrary, the embarasment of the publishing industry is that people spend most of their time on the web reading and commercial publishers have so far failed to provide an adequate way for web users to read, search, consult, cite, snippet, bookmark, share, savour etc.... most of the 100,000 new books published each year (scholarly periodicals excepted).

Because there is so much literature already available and more or less directly usable on the web, it is most improbable that any new hardware or software eReader environment is going to establish a proprietary format. There is not going to be a better eReader than the omni-purpose web browsers (although Mozilla, IE, Safari etc will of course be improved in ways which may help readers and searchers). Also, because so much of what we read on the web is now freely accessible (all those out of copyright texts, self-published theses and reports) Ben's hypothesis of a largely commercial jukebox, pay as you go, Googlised network for literature is implausible. There may be a lot of paid for network-based reading in five/ten years, but there will remain vast acreages of freely accessible (advertising-led) literature available to us all. Subscription-based publishing, as it evolves, is going to have to be very well integrated with all the free and immediately accessible literature that is already on the web. And with the vast amounts that will be pouring out of Google Book Search and similar projects.

Commenting on this paragraph of Ben's, Peter Brantley sees a fork in the road:

This is a critical cognitive and more importantly business development split - will ebooks be consumed over the network, or will the older model of downloadable and packaged books into dedicated readers persist? [What Books? Where Books?]

OK, its pretty clear that we will take the first fork in his disjunction -- downloadable books and dedicated readers are clearly a no-no. But hold your horses, what does Peter mean by using the phrase "consumed over the network"? 'Consumed' is exactly the wrong word to use. It is already taking us in the wrong direction, down the second fork. Books are going to be accessed over the network. 'Consumed' suggests that the resources are scarce, that issues are to be delivered, that books will be downloaded, that readings are rivalrous not collaborative and interpretative, that we are talking products not services.

The key issue in all of this is not eBooks, but how digital libraries will be accessed and how individuals will have rights to search, read, use and enjoy the books that will be in them. Will they be public or commercially run libraries? Will they support institutional or individual access or both? We never consume libraries, we patronise them. The ways in which digital books will be patronised and supported is a topic worthy of serious investigation.

Pricing Digital Editions

Part of our deal with publishers is that they get most (sometimes it seems like 'nearly all') the revenue from the subscriptions we collect. They also get the subscribers lists (email addresses , country of residence and subscription dates) this being pretty much all the individual identifying data that we collect. They also have the responsibility for setting the price of the annual subscriptions that we sell on their behalf.

It quite often happens that a publisher will ask us for advice on the price that should be set.

Our answer will often touch on these points:

1. An annual sub to a digital edition service should be at least 10% cheaper than the print subscription. This is what the market expects.
   
2. In some cases the digital subscription can be as much as 50% off the print sub.
3. We discourage the publisher from making the price too low, since if the price is very low our fixed percentage commission gets to be too low to be interesting for us. Also, there is no point in charging very little for a digital sub, because it is significantly easier and cheaper to give a subscription away than to charge for it. Rather than extract $2 or £1 for an annual sub to 50 weekly issues, we would recommend giving the content away through Open Access.
   
4. We also advise our publishers that it is not possible or sensible to try to price differentially for markets in different global regions. The price set is being quoted in £UK but one should also think how this price is going to be perceived in eg the $US. At present many British (or European) prices are going to seem very expensive to international markets.

Why should digital editions be cheaper than print subscriptions? Since it is at least arguable that digital editions are better than the print parents, that is a good question. And hard to answer. But one reason for charging less is that the digital subscriptions are limited to one user and to one year of access. A print subscription by comparison is often passed around among several readers (this can not be done with the digital subs), and the subscriber will retain the physical issues of the magazine after the subscription is ended. With the Exact Editions system the reader has no retained back issues when the subscription period finishes.

Anyway, the short answer is that digital editions ought to be cheaper than their print equivalents. Subscribers expect them to be so. But by how much the price should be reduced? That is a matter for complex judgement. Its more a matter of art than science.

Pricing a service appropriately is a difficult issue.

Pavarotti dies -- Amazon has an E-book reader and Google rattles the cage

The event of the week was the death of Pavarotti. Opera recently joined the Exact Editions service and the free trial issue has just one mention of the great Luciano. (If you look at the page --note that the saved search highlights the search term). Perhaps it is appropriate that this is a page on which there is a great picture of the newest operatic mega-star Netrebko.

This sad and moving news should not obscure the earth-shaking announcements about books through the web coming from Amazon: the Kindle as a new eBook reader (more of a well-placed leak in the NYT than an announcement); and from Google a personalisable MyLibrary service. Along with the MyLibrary service (which feels a bit like a knock-off of the excellent LibraryThing), Google simultaneously announces a clipping widget -- which allows a blogger to quote a passage by clipping a portion of a page from a JPEG image of that page. It is kind of Eoin Purcell to point out that this is very much like the Exact Editions clipper.

Speaking of kindness -- is the Amazon a 'Kindle' as in kindly? Or a 'Kindle' as in kindling? I bet it is the latter -- but if we start kindling Joyce or Shakespeare, does not that give one an odd connotation of burning books? Not to worry, it will not catch on -- it is an eBook reader and loyal readers of this blog know that we consider this a misconceived category.

The Trouble with E-Readers

You will find an instructive account, from personal experience, of the deficiencies of the New York Times E-Reader at PersonaNonData. The commercial ineptitude of the NYT is startling, no follow-up calls during the promotional free trial, the dithering over Times Select, and the general uncertainty about what a great newspaper should now become. When the story about this new (Microsoft) E-Reader first surfaced, we wondered why no one was mentioning the old Microsoft eReader (has everybody forgotten what a flop that was?). The deficiencies in the two systems seemed to be remarkably congruent. The killer punch is here in Michael Cairns's review

In my experience there seemed to be less opportunity for engagement with the Reader than with the paper version. I am not sure why I felt this - perhaps it is a tactile thing - but I found myself preferring to buy the paper. I found it frustrating that I couldn't permalink to articles as can be done on the (NYT) web site and attempting to jump to the article on the NYTimes.com is not possible. (PersonaNonData)

There is the rub. If the digital edition makes you feel less engaged than the paper version, the digital edition is bound to fail. When it comes to digital editions, if you can't link to it and you can't easily jump out of it, forget it. The prestigious newspapers who have invested in the Microsoft E-Reader have probably pushed themselves and their readers into a cul de sac.

There is a deeper question here about why it is that newspaper and book publishers continue to fall for the concept of an ebook or an ereader.......No special environment or device is needed.

AnOther Magazine

AnOther Magazine joins the shop. Or yet another magazine (55th) joins the shop. This is an enormous magazine (400pp in the trial issue and counting); like its brother AnOther Man and its sister Dazed & Confused the magazine is full of wondrous photography, much of it in the ads.

• If you like legs as much as Dolce & Gabana. There are lots more here and here, and here.
• An interview with Mia Farrow. Extraordinary photos.
• Swarm theory.
• And there is an insert for Swarovski. Yes we do inserts, in the same way we handle a full scale supplement (eg Blueprint's Who designs your life?).
  

Old media, new media

Some interesting advice from a young fogie, Ben Goldacre, apparently ensconced in one of London's smarter Gentlemen's clubs (hat tip to Martin Stabe).

10 bits of advice about what to do and not to do about newspapers and their web sites. Mostly very sound. These two caught my attention:

(8) Make all of your content work on mobile phones, blackberry browsers, old computers, and PDAs. You have no idea how many people own these. You have no idea how bored they get at the bus stop, on the loo, and in meetings under the table. ..........
(9) Do not use flash, or other complicated animated web nonsense. It looks good on the developer’s laptop, when they come to show you the site, but it’s slow to load, and irritating to browse. ...............

So keep it simple is a big part of his message. But we would say that there is an even more basic rule. Make the newspaper, the magazine, the periodical, the printed supplements and the special issues, make them all Digital Editions. Make them available on the web. The print publication can speak for itself and stand for itself on the web. Once you have done that well (and hardly any newspapers have done that at all well), you can spend time on inventing the most impressive array of additional web services. You can even spend your afternoons in the Garrick or the Carlton drinking chablis with a good conscience and your young advisers.

Copyright in a technological flux

Microsoft, Google and others, working through the C&CIA (a technology trade group), has mounted a campaign Defend Fair Use for the liberal interpretation of fair use/fair dealing for copyright materials. It is surprising to see Google and Microsoft as allies... but of course they have a fair point. In a clever piece of timing, today, Google's YouTube strikes a deal through which it will remunerate music copyright holders for the 'performance' of their materials on submitted YouTube videos. The artists' deal was negotiated by the Perfoming Rights Society. According to the Guardian the deal could be worth 10s of millions of pounds. I wonder how they know that?

At the very same time, in a text-book illustration of how not to mount a pressure group the STM (Scientific Medical Technical) publishers have announced PRISM which has drawn understandable derision from the blogosphere. To see how botched a PR move this is, take a look at Andrew Leonard on Salon. The STM publishers are very worried that they may lose a profitable market because scientifc researchers are being encouraged to make their research Open Access (ie freely available, especially when the research has been publicly funded). Their PR move has really just drawn attention to the impossible position they appear to be defending -- that it is a good and necessary thing for the results of publicly funded research not to be freely available to the public. Whatever you do, you dont want to appear to be arguing for that.

These are difficult issues, but Google and Microsoft appear to understand better how to manage and present a case than the Association of American Publishers. Anyone seriously concerned about copyright and the impact of technology on our current practice, should take a look at Pamela Samuelson's Preliminary Thoughts on Copyright Reform. Professor Samuelson points out that any major statutes on copyright are unlikely in the next few years. She does not say this, but we may conclude that the practice on copyright will be reformed by technological breakthroughs more than by legislative fiat. As the Chinese proverb has it:- "when the typhoon rages the bamboo bends". Clever of the MCPS-PRS Alliance to bend with the YouTube hurricane. Clever of Google to let it be known that 10s of millions will be going to musicians who may have been ripped-off, just when they are mounting a campaign for relaxations in the expectations of fair use.

Opera

Opera joins the Exact Editions shop. The free trial issue has plenty to tempt the keen opera buff:

• A profile of the sensational, and stunning, Anna Netrebko
• Plenty of reviews of CD's, of DVD's and Books.
• Why would anyone wish to be reincarnated as Scarpia? Yehuda Shapiro provides some justification for his perverse choice.

Historic Motor Racing News

I will soon stop counting, but this is our 53rd title.

• A spectacular front cover and contents clickable from there.
• This is a magazine with an international editorial coverage. As you can tell from the masthead (or is that a mastfoot?).
• It also has some intriguing small ads. I have always fancied a Lola.
  

Amazon becomes a publisher with PrintOnDemand

A couple of week's ago we referenced the new Amazon service Create Space. Last week the development drew some interesting discussion on the Charkin blog: see notes and discussions 'On Retailers Becoming Publishers', 'Death of the Publisher?', (NB the question mark) and 'Print on Demand'. There was a deal of concern expressed in the comments that Amazon may be in too strong a position and that publishers may get 'disintermediated'. But I suspect that the Amazon threat to book publishers from this service is limited. After all Lulu (which was only mentioned once in the discussion -- by Dan Penny) has for some time been doing for self-publishers pretty much what Amazon Create Space promises to do, and Lightning Source (not only them, also Antony Rowe) does for publishers a similar job. Its funny the way that the company that initially defines a market service on the web has a good chance of holding it and maintaining market leadership, even when big competitors come in with technically sweet alternatives. I suspect that Lulu and Lightning Source have established important bridgeheads, and they will be hard to dislodge. Even for Amazon.

Perhaps the most significant aspect of the Amazon announcement is that it is really an endorsement of what Lulu is already doing. And the key point about that, which the Charkin discussants mostly missed (include me in that) is that the act of writing and publishing your own book to semi-professional standards is being radically democratised. There could well be a million or more ISBN-ed titles published each year in the US and the UK before long, (yes Lulu and Amazon make it easy to get your own ISBN). Some of these books will be very good books, and a few of them will be best sellers. If I was a book publisher or literary agent I would be closely studying the Lulu and Amazon Create Space lists or employ someone in an "A&R" role to do it for me.

Successful self-published authors are not unknown, but they have usually been picked up by real publishers after their first or second book, or after their first mainstream reviews. One of the the most successful self-published author of recent times is Edward Tufte. He has also achieved standards of quality design and successful promotion that almost certainly would not have been his with any publisher. If you don't know Tufte you should probably buy one of his books. I suspect that most readers of this blog will be familiar with his work and the lessons that he draws from this remarkable diagram of Napoleon's Russian Winter.

You can buy Tufte's books from Amazon, they are cheaper than from his own web site, but I doubt if he needs to give them a 50% discount.




The Minard diagram also plots the size of the average print run over the last 150 years. Moscow represents the invention of photolithography 50 or so years ago, which meant that it was no longer necessary to cause books to be written in metal before reproducing them in reasonable numbers. ;-).

AnOther Man

We had some feedback today asking for more fashion magazines. So this fits the bill.

• AnOther Man is a long magazine, our longest trial issue 320 pages
  
• And full of beautiful pictures. Some to do with J G Ballard, beautiful people, and Ian Mckellen.
• And this page has a record number of links. Have never seen so many on a single page. Over 200 and we missed a few.
  

Quest Bulgaria

Our latest title

• Start from the Table of Contents of a trial issue
• Help with the Bulgarian menu
• Get about by train, or bike
  

A University Press Report

A few days ago, Charkin Blog mentioned a report on University Publishing in a Digital Age. Its an interesting report and Peter Brantley mentions it today. Brantley links to a location where the report can be read and commented upon in CommentPress "an open source theme for the WordPress blog engine that allows paragraph-by-paragraph commenting in the margins of a text". What an interesting idea, and congratulations to the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan and the Institute for the Future of the Book for putting it to work. Simple but very effective and I hope that they get a lot of comments (is this the first?). The Ithaka report is exactly the kind of consultative/informative document for which the CommentPress solution is well suited.

The University of Michigan has been at the front of the charge with Google's Book Search. But its time the libraries began to steer the Google Book Search project. So its encouraging to see the American universities and their presses begining to seize the challenge of digital publishing.

Intelligent Life and Bright Paper

The Economist -- which may be the most valuable and interesting magazine on the planet -- is about to launch a new magazine called Intelligent Life.

I am such a fan of The Economist that I will be pleased to be proved wrong, but the announcement gives me a sinking feeling. There is surely some hubris in launching a magazine with this title. The web site gives nothing a way (that is not a good sign -- the web site for a magazine which is going to be launched in less than a month should give a lot away).

The current edition of the parent magazine has a fascinating piece on how a cellulose, paper-like, substance can store electricity as a capacitor and as a battery. If you need to know more, I refer you to Professor Ajayan's web page. He has done the research. Who knows, in a few years time we may be reading newspapers and books on a paperlike substance, like a large pocket handkerchief, which holds its own electricity and navigates us to any web page. By then the web will be a superset of all printed literature.

Since the alarms of last week, Skype has returned in a reliable form. In fact, it seems to be a lot clearer. No background muzziness. Have we been palmed off with a phony explanation. Were Skype surreptitiously improving their network software whilst appearing to heal a bug?...... I am also relieved to hear that its not Microsoft's fault. Though the first Skype explanation did sound a little bit as though it was.... ("those dunderheads in Redmond with their routine patches" did appear to be the subtext).

Skype and the challenges of 24/7

Yesterday Skype had a major software failure across its network. It seems to be persisting today. I had not realised how much I now use Skype, and quite how much I depend on it. I am not in the mood for complaining, even though I am a paying Skype user (Skype Out is a great aspect to the service). I just hope that they come back on line soon and that there is no deep flaw in the code. That would be a nightmare!

Any business that runs a 24/7 service will have sympathy for the engineers in Luxembourg.

Why do I use Skype so much? The first reason is that because its a VOIP system and completely web-based, every name and phone number on our wonderful CRM system is a click a way from a phone call. Since I have never been good at managing Address Books, this is a great boon. I can also note the phone call on the integral Wiki within the CRM. This home-brewed CRM -- fondly known as Crumb -- is even more integral to my daily work than Skype.

The second reason is that Skype is extremely easy for conference calls (and if you have Skype Out you can run the conference and bring in participants who will not realise that they are being Skyped). The third reason is that Skype links beautifully from the links on our digital magazines. Here is a page with lots of live phone numbers -- but please only try them if you really need to ring up!

idFX

This is our 50th title. Its another gorgeous magazine for designers. So here are some pages to whet our appetites:

• The contents page.
• Amazine Brazilian furniture from the Campanas brothers.
• Paradise recycled. Dont you really want to be there?
• How to deal with a Flat Screen TV.
  

Google Maps will be embedable

Its hard to avoid Google. They are doing so much, most of it very well. The latest innovation to catch our eye:

Google will be releasing a new feature next week that will enable people to easily embed a Google Map into their Web site or blog, just like you can do with a YouTube video. No coding or programming required; just copying and pasting a snippet of HTML, a Google spokeswoman says. (from Elinor Mills on CNET)

How immensely useful, Google maps can now become an even more essential, an even more networked, reference resource. As Elinor says this sounds like YouTube for maps. Will such widgetised maps now come with little counters telling us how many people have viewed this particular embedded map? One can be sure that Google will know this statistic:- perhaps they are introducing the feature so that they can better understand how maps are used.

Book Searching is not the same as Book Preserving

It has been fairly clear to the library community for a while now that the Google Book Search project is not going to deliver sufficient quality that 'preservation' is assured. There is now a rather detailed critique at First Monday, from Paul Duguid. His essay (noted via Peter Brantley) focuses on some editions of Sterne's bizarre novel, Tristram Shandy, included in GBS in several editions. His conclusion:

The Google Books Project is no doubt an important, in many ways invaluable, project. It is also, on the brief evidence given here, a highly problematic one. Relying on the power of its search tools, Google has ignored elemental metadata, such as volume numbers. The quality of its scanning (and so we may presume its searching) is at times completely inadequate [14]. The editions offered (by search or by sale) are, at best, regrettable. Curiously, this suggests to me that it may be Google’s technicians, and not librarians, who are the great romanticisers of the book. Google Books takes books as a storehouse of wisdom to be opened up with new tools. They fail to see what librarians know: books can be obtuse, obdurate, even obnoxious things. As a group, they don’t submit equally to a standard shelf, a standard scanner, or a standard ontology. Nor are their constraints overcome by scraping the text and developing search algorithms.

When I mentioned the article to a friend he said that it was possibly a little unfair. But I guess that is the issue that Google has to confront. If Google is going to assume the responsibility of scanning, and to speak plainly, the responsibility of establishing, these texts, it will attract the highest standards of scholarly nitpicking. Which is often and notoriously unfair. That after all is why Professors study the early editions of Tristram Shandy. They are professional and unrelenting pickers of nits. Companies such as ProQuest are used to collecting and aggregating materials with careful and scholarly procedures. They know that they will be pilloried if and when their scanning is unreliable or their selections are unwarranted.

I think that Dr Duguid has some good points, but there is perhaps more of a case to be made for Google than he allows. After all his paper is a very good example of how easy it is to cite and use the material that Google is assembling. He clips and shows the messy pages he has found. Scholars will like that (as those in Europe will dislike the fact that for strange copy-right related reasons the Google citations do not work. In the US that link will give you the first/?second page of the Harvard edition. Nothing visible in Europe.).

But I also wonder about Google's methodology. Why should they ignore the way that librarians and scholars have assessed this material in the past? Not recording volume numbers seems like a laughable error. On the day in which the New York Times reports Google's and Microsoft's urgent drives to capture and utilise health records, we may wonder whether the medical services which Google develops can possibly be so apparently haphazard as the Book Search record appears to be.

Site upgrades

Every couple of months we have a site upgrade. The software that runs our service, the databases and the individual user accounts, is enhanced with a new version. We do this so that additional features can be added to the service, and usually there are some small but subtle changes to our interface. Today, our Technical Director told me that there had been a site upgrade and that with luck no changes at all would be apparent. Why have a change which changes nothing?

While I was pondering this, he told me that the point of the new release was so that we could accommodate linguistic changes......So here is a clue:

numéros | préférences | à propos | contact | déconnexion

About half the consumer magazines in the world are published in languages other than English. At some stage we need to be capable of delivering them.

Dont you love the newsagents that you see in big capital cities that are stuffed with magazines and newspapers in umpteen different languages?

Google Videos Canned

Google aims to prune the number of services it offers, and has announced that it is closing the program that allowed you to rent or buy videos from its video store service. See Philipp Lenssen's posting and the comments at Google Blogoscoped.

This is a surprising decision. Sure there will have been good reasons for it -- maybe Holywood didnt like the model that Google was pushing, and so it was hard to fill the store. Or there may have been other good reasons for stopping a program which encouraged users to rent and buy from Google; but read this quote from the Google email:

As a valued Google user, we’re contacting you with some important information about the videos you’ve purchased or rented from Google Video. In an effort to improve all Google services, we will no longer offer the ability to buy or rent videos for download from Google Video, ending the DTO/DTR (download-to-own/rent) program. This change will be effective August 15, 2007.
................................................{snip -- note about compensation}.....................
After August 15, 2007, you will no longer be able to view your purchased or rented videos.

This is pretty bald. If I have understood it correctly the email is saying "you bought it, but with less than a week's notice it won't be yours anymore"? That seems like a pretty graceless way of serving customers/subscribers.

After this mess-up, Google will need to be very careful about the way it offers subscription services to media content in future.

If Google is thinking of pruning its services, maybe it should take a look at Google Catalogs. With its limitation to US-only Catalogs and its inability to tie in to the e-commerce systems of the Catalog companies, this has always seemed to me like one of the good Google Ideas that really dont cut it. And yes it really was a good idea.

Amazon is innovating in all directions

Google rightly gets a pile of credit for its rapid innovatory pace. But people tend not to focus on how well Amazon is doing in the innovation stakes. Their impressive S3 has been around for a while and is very good value in providing deep infrastructure for developers. But lots is happening at Amazon. Three typical developments caught our attention in the last week.

1. Amazon Flexible Payments System enters beta. From the description, this sounds like a very serious and useful piece of infrastructure for e-commerce. It led us to wonder whether major libraries are already using Amazon services. If they do, Amazon FPS would be a very important framework for new library services (eg IP address-based access to consumer magazines). Do libraries order books via Amazon? I feel I ought to know, but my awareness of the library supply market is very rusty.
2. Amazon do a rather nice click through on front covers for the magazines they sell in the US market. We had never noticed this before and it may have been going for a while. This is a tiny feature but since it touches on magazines we were intrigued. Amazon will surely do more with magazines one day.
3. PersonaNonData led us to review their Books On Demand service. It certainly looks like a very appropriate part of their range of services.
   

Magazine Week

Its good to see that Magazine Week, which we blogged earlier in the year, is coming to fruition. I like the 10 amazing facts about magazines.

Jeremy Leslie blogs that the YouTube video produced in support makes him weep. He is right. The idea of a YouTube video is good, but this promo is cringe-making, and way too self-regarding. Magazine Week needs an altruistic, engaging, or 'other regarding' aspect if it is to make a similar impact to World Book Day.

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.

Harry Potter is also a Rare Book

The first edition of the first issue is rare and valuable. We missed the midsummer frenzy, but several members of my family have already purchased and consumed the final installment.

One of my favourite magazines, Rare Book Review, in its latest issue, reminds me how valuable that first edition would now be if we had not allowed it to be read to destruction:

Rare Book Review

Aug/Sept 2007

Page 17