Google as an aggregator of Book Services

A friend asked me the other day whether we were concerned that Google may simply come to dominate the digital book publishing space. Well in one way there clearly is a concern. If Google were to become a monopolist in the digital books/subscription services area, many companies would find it hard to compete.

Suppose that Google were to start selling access to digital book collections would that be a concern? These thoughts were in part stimulated by the announcement of a Google API for viewing Google Books (see our comment here). But they were further encouraged by our own announcement, today, of a platform from which publishers can licence and sell access to their own books.

Should we be worried if Google were to make a similar announcement (they may have such a development well in hand, as has been foreshadowed by well-informed observers, eg Personanondata)? The short answer is "No, this is not a concern", Google very probably will do this and when it does the position of competitor/complementor companies and technologies will be clearer.

At some stage Google should offer or enable a method through which titles deposited by publishers on the GBS platform can be licensed. But how Google will do this (whether they will be 'trading for their own account' or merely facilitating the creation of digital markets -- eBay-style) is a pretty good question. My own guess is that Google has enough on its plate trying to develop and energize its advertising platforms to spend too much time figuring out methods of selling access to content. But when they do start, we will all be in attendance.

Berkshire Publishing Shop

Berkshire Publishing have launched a shop using the Exact Editions platform and our e-commerce solution. So their customers can now license their major reference titles online, either for individual use or for institutional subscriptions.

The Berkshire 'home page' on our system has a look and feel which reflects the publisher:


















All the text in the reference works is searchable, and to an extent the books are also viewable for free in the shopping environment. The limitation is that the pages can only be seen in the 2-page form, which is reasonable for browsing but not at all comfortable for reading. Here is an entry from The Berkshire Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction on 'Fly-by-wire'.



















One of the advantages of showing the 2-page view is that users can then see and benefit from the links in the books. Here is a page of internal navigation links from that book:
















This innovation marks an important step change for Exact Editions. In working with book publishers we intend to make it easy for them to create a direct-to-customer e-commerce offering for their titles. Berkshire's titles are all searchable for free because the depth and value of these titles is gracefully and thoroughly exposed by searching. They are for sale and at reasonable prices because the publisher knows that they have a real market in schools, colleges and among experts. Karen Christensen, Berkshire's publisher, is keen to push the envelope on ways in which traditional reference can become even more relevant and indispensable in the web eco-system.

There is a surprisingly widespread myth in some web circles that all content on the web will be free and attempts to sell subscriptions will not work. Our experience with consumer magazines and the STM publishers experience in selling periodical subscriptions to institutions shows that this is nonsense. Book publishers need to stop sitting on their versos and start offering their goods through the web medium. The challenge now is to provide scaleable and easy to navigate services for end-users.

The Exact Editions system has been generalised in some crucial ways to support this development. One development has been the new form of searching and full-content browsing which the Berkshire shop is showing to full effect. Another development has been to make our 'e-commerce solution' a highly customisable framework, in ways which also retain the benefits of scale among a diversity of publishers. There is a page where our alternative shopping links can be reviewed. There is scope for many more shopping niches and many more currencies.

Google Book Search API

Google have announced an API to their Book Search service. Some explanation and a demonstration of how this can be used at the Librarything. Publishers may be uneasy about the way this tips the information flow about books in the direction of Mountain View (Eoin already is). Amazon and the major publishers must be thinking about the implications of this: will all commercial transactions go with a Google information flow?

The API could be either a step in the direction of Google becoming the primary source of all books through the web (its an API to the viewability of books, but access rights go with viewing opportunities, and it would not be so difficult to extend the API so that it interacts with Google Checkout). For the sake of a healthy publishing industry one hopes that there will be many alternative and additional sources for access to digital books. Google has to build an API (it certainly should not be criticised for doing so) but its implementation and regulatory focus on Google's dominant position could become a matter of concern -- also to Google.

What do we do best?

It is sometimes quite difficult to understand the core competence of the business that you run. I was musing about this following a conversation with a book publisher who has been looking at our system and likes it. He thinks that it handles his books well, that we appear to be easy to implement, easy to use, little investment is required and we appear to fit in with the strategic direction of the company he is running. He also appreciates that our platform would be customised to match the requirements and style of his company. He went on to say: "But aren't you really a half-way measure whilst we work up to creating our own in-house content management solutions and creating our own in-house e-commerce system and hosting our own books and customers on our own servers?"

I didn't have the perfect answer for him there and then (though I think I did refer to computing in the cloud). I am not sure that I have the perfect answer now. But I am absolutely sure that he will not want to build his own proprietary e-commerce and content delivery system. I guess that even the largest publishers Elsevier, Wiley and Pearson etc will be making big mistakes if they reckon on building their own customer and content delivery systems in the days of cloud computing.

But I have been thinking about how we are also looking to outsource as much of our business as we can provided that the outsourced service is reliable and cost-effective and scaleable. After all we don't want to run our own boxes, or employ more database managers than we absolutely need. The answer for this mid-sized publisher and for us is that you really only want to hang on to the functions that are essential to your business and which you do better than anybody else. Increasingly IT functions will not be the function that anybody wants to retain in-house. We are looking for better ways to outsource important but non-distinctive functions to Rackspace, PayPal, Amazon S3, OpenID etc....

One function that we would still find it quite hard to outsource is customer service (we can do more to automate it, but we have no plans to outsource it to the sub-continent in the manner of Dell). On the other hand we would be very reluctant to hand this crucial function back to the publishers and they are by and large very happy to leave the responsibility with us. I am not sure that customer support is one of our core competences, but it is a reputation-maker and a reputation-breaker. Whatever you do best, you need to make sure that your customers are happy with it.

Orphan Copyrights

At the recent Tools of Change conference I met up with Peter Brantley, the Executive Director for the Digital Library Federation. We had a very brief conversation about Orphan Copyrights and I suggested to Peter that he produce some thoughts on the subject for the Exact Editions blog. He has produced some specific and intriguing suggestions in an essay which should attract discussion. Since his essay is in part a call-for-action which may involve lots of parties -- the posting is now up on his Shimenawa blog.

I particularly like the features of Brantley's proposals that amount to an Adoption Agency for Orphan-ed copyrights (improved access, digitization, take-down provision, escrow account, and reconciliation of public and private interests). This is a set of important issues which is best tackled by the broadest possible range of interests.

Site Licenses in the Night

We expect to do business 24X7. So customers buy magazine subscriptions at all hours, and it is fun to look at our shop in the morning to see how many Americans, Japanese and Australian customers have done business overnight; but I did not expect that we would be selling institutional licenses at the weekend. Our institutional customers can sign up on-line and complete the purchase by informing us of their IP range.

This last couple of days we sold site licenses on Saturday and Sunday in countries which have our western weekend. From this I conclude that librarians work at weekends. Well, I kind of knew that already, but its nice to have it confirmed.....Is it also important that site licenses carry the kind of price (lowish as institutional prices go -- €300.00) that a librarian can sign off on her own decision on a Sunday?

Site licenses for our consumer magazines are proving to be popular.

This demand from institutions for campus wide access to a digital editions of the whole magazines, is a market which most consumer magazine publishers are simply unaware of. Book publishers also do not appreciate how much they are neglecting a market which wants their books -- as digital resources.

Green Web Services

Although it is reasonably obvious that digital magazines are much less damaging to the environment than printed consumer magazines (Chris Anderson has a weirdly contrary view), it is quite hard to do serious measurement of the ecological cost of digital publishing. Steve Souders has done some analysis of web sites with Yslow in an attempt to put some cash/calory value on the inefficiencies of the Wikipedia home page. This is highly conjectural and guesstimatory but probably important. O'Reilly are publishing his book.

The technicalities of the Yslow plug-in (its a plugin to a Firefox plugin ) are well beyond me; it checks whether the inspected web page could make fewer HTTP requests, uses a CDN, puts CSS at the top, JSS at the bottom, avoids redirects etc. etc. If you understand all that (which I dont) you will want to plugin Yslow to your already installed Firebug.

This kind of measurement is obviously not the whole picture and Yslow is primarily tackling the problem of why some pages are slower than they should be (slow partly because they waste energy). Its only part of the picture because what happens on the web page in a browser is one thing, how much power the databases consume behind the scenes are another ball game (possibly more important in ecological impact). These issues will concern us as we move towards cloud computing. Apparently Google and Microsoft are anxious about the ecological costs of cloud computing, and are aiming at frugal computing.

Utopia

Utopia is now digital in Exact Editions

• ToC
• Another design magazine with fabulous ads.
• A bath with a view.
  

New African

New African is in Exact Editions.

• ToC
• Kenya What Really Went Wrong.
• Why Africa?
  

Flash on the iPhone?

Rumours have it that the iPhone SDK due to be launched today will not support Flash. Steve Jobs is being quite rude about Flash. But perhaps this is all part of some complex 3 way face-off between Adobe with its well entrenched position on PDF, Acrobat and Flash; Microsoft with its new and promising Silverlight; and Apple which has its own good reasons for not being beholden to anyone for a plug-in.

Who knows? Well it matters to us, perhaps indirectly benefiting us, because quite a number of the semi-plausible way of rendering documents in browsers use Flash (most of the plausible ways of rendering video in browsers also use Flash). But the Exact Editions system doesn't work that way. We only have a modest requirement for Flash in our 'Clipper'. So these problems for Flash are mostly problems for someone else.

On the other hand the urge to use Flash (0r PDF) is the result of a deeper 'missed turn'. Browser plug-ins, however nifty, are seductive short cuts which may encourage content owners/creators to miss the potential of web development. If content has to go into proprietary wrappers that may be a headache for us all. The content may be lifeless rather than fully engaged.

Microsoft's Book Search

Microsoft has a very nice implementation for its Book Search.

See here for some examples 'C Elegans and Mutations', or 'Girard and Scapegoats', and 'Quine and "semantic ascent"'

When you mouse over the individual titles in the search results the second panel shows information specific to the title: including a rule which shows the distribution of the search results within the title (the rule is imperial rather than metric, or maybe its binary: it has 32 segments). That must all come up on the fly. It is impressive what computing clouds can now do for us. Lorcan Dempsey, who notes this strong feature of the Microsoft presentation, calls this immediacy of information flow glanceability.

Tools of Change

I love the quotation attributed to Zhou en Lai -- on being asked what he thought of the French Revolution, he replied "Its too early to say". I love it because its so cautious, so careful and so definitively correct, but also engaged ("Mr Zhou: You mean the French Revolution is still happening?"). Its always going to be too early to say.

I feel like reaching the same conclusion about the extent to which publishing is now about building communities, or whether book and magazine publishers should really be engendering conversations. That seemed to be one big theme at this years Tools of Change Conference in NYC (you can reference presentations by Stephen Abram, Douglas Rushkoff 'Whose Story is this Anyway, When Readers become Writers', Gavin Bell and Ben Vershbow 'Books as Conversations'). Excellent presentations they were, but all a bit too much under the sway of the 'social graph' which has become the analytical mode of the moment.

Publishers still need to concentrate on presenting content in the right way. Priority number one. The 'right way' includes with the appropriate access networks; and the right meta-data. Maybe that is all -- and communities may be another story. Michael Bhaskar at thedigtalist is hitting the right notes.

Dumbo feather

Our first Australian magazine, on its own in our Australian shop.

• ToC
  
• Could you wear this?
  
• Gardening.
  

Opera and Google Documents

Opera, the browser, continues to impress. As does Google Docs. But there are one or two issues to think about before you chuck out Firefox and ceremonially burn your .doc documents.

First off, Google Docs does not support Opera. On the Google Docs systems requirements page they say "Google Docs is not supported, and probably won't run on (Opera)." Well it sort of runs on Opera on my Mac but only in a 'view' mode. I guess this may change now that Google is (probably) paying money to Opera for prime position on the Opera mobile platform.

Before you get too committed to Google Docs you may want to think about just how good it is as a collaborative environment. Its really, really good at this; much more straightforward and intuitive than MS Office. Last week we were having a good discussion with some potential partners about the comparative merits of our platform. They had fielded an excellent set of questions for us and forwarded them as a link to a Google spreadsheets document, which we were sharing online in a Skype conference call. Before the Skype call, we tracked back through the revisions to the document and found some benchmarks that they had established with a competitor. The revisions had not locked out the previous column of tests and I am (fairly) sure that we were not meant to see the comparisons that were unearthed. Collaborative tools may be more collaborative than intended. I like a partner who is prepared to share their evaluation with us, especially when they appear to have looked at the opposition, but "open-ness" has its limits.

10 Lame Excuses

Frank Anton, CEO of B2B publishing company Hanley Wood has produced a devastating list of 10 deadly sins that lead B2B companies into a spiral of purgatory in a challenging economic environment. The list is at Folio. Technophobia (along with "inferiority, complacency, coziness, stinginess, cluelessness, disorganization") is one of the sins:

Trade publishers that have underinvested in electronic media are now playing catch-up—and are paying the price, Anton said in reference to his ‘technophobia’ sin. Hanley Wood’s online advertising has seen growth over the last couple of years, and Anton expects that revenue to grow 40 percent this year.....

Magforum has asked us to compile our own list. Not so sure about the deadly sins, but here is a list of 10 lame excuses for doing nothing about digital editions:

A digital magazine will take away my print sales (and not having one will preserve your print sales?)

The decision about digital subscriptions rests with our IT department (not sure how, when or why IT departments became charged with strategic marketing decisions)

The decision about digital subscriptions rests with our Web Editor ( ditto above ...)

Our digital committee makes decisions about our digital strategy (or no decisions at all.....)

We are going to re-purpose all our editorial and make it freely available on our web site. ( but surely your editorial is your crown jewels..)

Our Repro house does not return our PDF's to us ...(and whose content is it?)

I am not sure that our customers would buy a digital sub. Isn't all content on the web free? (No, definitely not- quality editorial and searchable archives are not, in most cases, free)

We've asked all our current subscribers (print) and they say that they like to have the magazine in their hands. (yes, and they are your print subscribers but there's a whole new market out there)

We don't want to be seen next to our competitors ( isn't that how newsagents sell magazines?)

Our readers will see that we sometimes repeat the editorial........

BUT.....the majority of publishers are genuinely embracing digital editions and believe in the following revelations:

Digital Web Editions are a fantastic way of reaching a new audience

Digital Web Editions with searchable archives are complementary to the print edition

Digital Web Editions are a good way of marketing the print product

Digital Web Editions sold with a print subscription build subscriber loyalty

Digital Web Editions help sell advertisements

Digital Web Editions appeal to an increasingly eco-friendly society

Digital Web Editions assist with product development ( statistics of web activity show what is being read)

A Sale a Second

Earlier in the afternoon (at 13:05:22) someone in the UK bought a subscription to Quest Bulgaria one precise second before someone in France bought an annual subscription to Le Monde Diplomatique (at 13:05:23). Google tells me that there are just over 31.5 million seconds a year, and if we suppose that each subscription is worth £16.877 on average ....... I make that something over £500 million a year when we are handling subs every second throughout the year.

Dream on! Think about the customer service! How many publications would be called for to attract 30 million subscribers? Still its nice to know that we can handle an order a second when we are busy :-)

Print in the Cloud

Nicholas Carr has been writing in interesting ways about Cloud Computing. One of the key vectors in this meme is the idea that devices, machines, desktop applications, software itself gets virtualised.

As the cost of computing power and storage capacity has continued its decades-long freefall, it’s become possible to turn more and more hardware into software code – to use a single powerful computer to run many virtual machines........ Virtualization simply turns the hardwired instructions into code and gets rid of the physical machinery. That not only saves a lot of cash, it makes the radical automation of formerly manual IT processes possible. From Turing's Machine to the Computing Cloud

'Virtualisation' is another manifestation of that old computing trend for processes to become more abstract and more generic, and more efficient and more scaleable because they are more generic. Sixty years ago a computer was programmed by flipping switches and setting valves. Once there were operating systems the machine settings were left to look after themselves. The history of computing is a story of processes becoming more virtual and more automated at pretty much the same rate as the cost at which hardware falls.

Books are now in the process of being 'virtualised'. Print is being sucked into the cloud. The Google Book Search project is virtualising libraries and the Exact Editions process works in a parallel fashion for individual publications: magazine issues and books. If you pushed me as to exactly where the digital issue of one of our magazines now is, I would be hard pressed to answer: "On some Rackspace servers in Texas or in a building near Heathrow" -- if you really must have a location. But 'it' is 'backed up' elsewhere in the cloud and our process works across a group of servers, so one is really much happier with the idea that our magazines now have virtualised locations, ie specific urls, one for each page, and for each page in a style of viewing. The virtual address of a digital magazine is a much more important feature than its physical address. The magazine issue is no longer a downloadable file it is not resident on the hard disk of a PC, it is now part of a database system which communicates with other web applications.

For me, one of the most interesting and hardest to comprehend consequences of this turn towards abstraction and virtualisation of digital print is that all print will be treated in the same way. Books, magazines, newspapers, packaging, instruction manuals, court reports, patents and of course advertisements....These virtual digital-formerly-known-as-print objects will soon be "talking to each other" whilst we are nonchalantly searching them.

Opera X 2

The publishers have put up a new trial issue of the magazine Opera. This is the current March issue and it also include a 48 pp supplement covering the career of Luciano Pavarotti as recorded in the magazine.

There is a warm mid-career review from George Gualerzi, published in 1981; but warm though it is, Gualerzi does not shirk the Pavarotti problems (John Allison's phrase in his judicious editorial)

Opera

Pavarotti in Opera

Page 15

Opera is also the name of the valiant, free, originally Norwegian and still independent browser. I have started using it. For 18 months I have used Safari and Firefox (since upgrading from Windows to a MacBook) but in the last few weeks I have noticed that Gmail (and Google Reader) seems to be running a 'slow script' which hobbles both these browsers. Opera seems not to be affected, and it has a number of nice features, including speed (also Speed Dial and the pw manager Wand). I think I will gradually convert to it.

The Value of an Index

Serious scholarly and technical books have indices and serious readers use the index heavily. They do so partly to avoid reading the books more than is necessary. Because we read books efficiently by not reading them more than we have to (you can probably tell at this point that I am deeply under the influence of the very wise, short and much talked about but little read book: How to Talk about Books You Haven't Read).

Although scholars will often browse and read a technical or deep book by filleting it and raiding it through its index, the index also serves the obvious and primary purpose of enabling us to search books that we have already read, and locate specific pages. The index of a traditional book was there because we did not have search engines. We did not have searchable texts. However, indexes are still a very attractive way of entering and browsing a serious book. For example consider the index to Lawrence Lessig's Code Version 2.0. As soon as I glanced at that book's index I wanted to see what Lessig had to say about Berners-Lee.

Lawrence Lessig

Code Version 2.0

Page 399

If you click on that fragment of the index, you will jump straight through to the index where the page references are live (this becomes clear once you have clicked through to the index page, where all the page references have bounding boxes, this does not show up in the clipping which is just a fragment of a JPEG, but a fragment that links); since the book is Open Access you can immediately navigate from the index to the page where Lessig notes how the inventors' ambitions for the web grew when they realised that with an open system documents could link to anything, to any document or any object in the HTTP network

Lawrence Lessig

Code Version 2.0

Page 146

What lesson can we draw from this example? One lesson is that links are the core of the web. The original point of the web is to facilitate citation and linking. But the second lesson that I draw from the example, is that indexes in printed books are still a very good way of approaching the books especially when they are digital documents. Authors and scholars working in the traditional mode were building links to their text when they made their indices. They were working in the way of the web before there was any possibility of a an instant live linking of documents, one with another. It could well be that one of the most valuable aspects of a digital book in the Exact Editions format is that the index is fully linked and the navigation of a book via its index is even easier in digital format than it is in printed volume form. It is obvious that the traditional Table of Contents is a crucial way to navigate a digital book, and so the pages in the ToC should be live-linked, but it may not be so obvious that the index is equally important and helpful to deep readers. Sure, we know that we can search the whole book very easily, but a good index helps us to interpret a book through the author's perception. Very valuable.

Lessig into Politics

Lawrence Lessig may be about to announce that he is running for Congress. He has been an early and strong Obama supporter. It would be interesting if it happens; Obama for President and Lessig in Congress?

Lessig will not be worried if both his supporters and his critics scour his publications for clues to his political motivation and for controversial issues which will be aired in the election process. The Exact Editions Lessig mini-library facilitates searching and cross-comparisons. I guess the 'black' propagandists of the Republican right may be searching it for inconsistency right now ;-). Mind you would'nt it be cool if we could put Obama's book The Audacity of Hope into an Open Exact Editions format? Perhaps every politician running for office should make his publications open, at least during the election campaign.

I suspect that Bloomsbury would do no damage to sales and will attract some worthwhile interest if they were to put Gordon Brown's two books into an open format. Since Random House will want to recoup the $9 million advance on Tony Blair's forthcoming book, it is unlikely that it will be appearing with a Creative Commons licence any time soon.

Please stop dialling my ISBNs

Google have recently enhanced Google Docs so that one can send out emails with data fields and get the respondents to fill in a results form in the spreadsheet. Doesn't that sound great? I have been very impressed with occasional experiments with Google Docs. I have merely toyed with the spreadsheet but used the word processor a few times and was very impressed by the Presentation. It doesnt have all the bells and whistles of PowerPoint (and isnt that a solid recommendation?) but it works very slickly with the web and has some great collaboration features. It also allows you to publish the Presentation (see the end of this blog for the Presentation, I did not in the end need to present to the O'Reilly Tools of Change conference this week).

GigaOm was my lead to Google's web-aware survey form. But I am not quite sure about his gripe about Windows Mobile.

......consider Windows Mobile. If I have a spreadsheet full of phone numbers, I should be able to select a number and dial it. But the Mobile version of Excel is so true to the original, it doesn’t think about data in the context of being a phone. So I have to manually copy the number to the clipboard, create a new contact with that number, and dial it.

I dont think a spreadsheet can be expected to know that a number which could be a telephone is a phone number. We have this potential problem with phone numbers and ISBNs in print. The Exact Editions system parses PDF files before databasing them so as to sort out and mark up phone numbers and ISBNs. Although we currently only identify phone numbers when they have the proper International prefix, it would be nice if there was a way of identifying and "internationalising" ordinary phone numbers. So the system would need to know the context in which an Italian magazine was using one number, and quietly supply the +39 prefix. My colleagues tell me that should be possible. In which case, I guess it will be done, sooner or later.

It sounds like a lot of work. The conversion process would need to be carefully designed so that we did not find ISBNs triggering phone calls and were not accidentally Skype-ordering books off Amazon when all we wanted was a takeaway pizza. Here is the presentation that I was not called upon to give:

Tools of Change

I have been in New York for the O'Reilly group's Tools of Change conference this week. Many strong presentations, but it was especially interesting to see who was there and who was not. Some of the major publishers had a lot of staff there. Someone at Random House told me that they had 40 people there; Penguin/Pearson and Macmillan each had 10+. Who was not there? Adobe and Microsoft were represented, but if Google, Apple or Amazon had staff at the show I did not meet them or see them on the list of attendees. No speakers. The representation was overwhelmingly from the book publishing industry. Hardly any audience from the magazine or newspaper sectors.

What should we take from this? Well Google (GBS), Apple (iPhone) and Amazon (S3 and Kindle) are going to shake the publishing industry this year and their innovations are disruptive but are not really aimed at the publishing industry (except the Kindle). They do not need to be at the Tools of Change meeting or any publishing event to shake the industry. The coming revolution in the publishing industry is endogenous and will be disruptive, but publishers need to respond and some of the big publishers know this.

Two of the best talks: Aaron Swartz on Wikipedia and Open Library, and Tim O'Reilly on the Complications of Free.

Publisher's Catalogues

Most book publishers produce Catalogues of their publications, either seasonal lists (the publisher's year has only two seasons: Spring and Autumn) or subject catalogues. These printed catalogues are an important sales tool, particularly valuable to exporters, trade buyers and librarians. In some cases the publisher will make the Catalogue available as a PDF file from their web site. This is generally a good idea, because the Catalogue will get additional circulation and the creative and design effort that has been expended on the print catalogue should be used to maximum advantage.

Publishers who use their print catalogues in this way should seriously consider using the Exact Editions platform to accelerate the use and access to their Catalogue information. The benefits that come from using this platform include:

1. automatic click-throughs from ISBNs to a retailer of choice (and/or to the publisher's own web site).
2. fast and efficient search
3. ability to link directly to individual catalogue pages from web site or from email campaigns and blogs
4. immediate access – no downloads required
5. comprehensive usage reports

We have prepared a very straightforward packaged solution implementing this service for publishers at a highly competitive rate. We also provide the service in a branded format that can be tightly linked to the publishers' existing web services. Any publisher interested in the potential of this service should check out The Bookseller special issue which uses the Exact Editions platform in exactly this way, then email us for a Rate Card.

Getting the Right Scale

Exact Editions uses a pragmatic assumption that magazines (books) can be flicked through 16 pp at a time, or browsed 2 pp at a time, or when you want to read an article you devote the whole screen to the page. Having 3 levels of resolution is reasonably straightforward and allows us to build a generic platform. But the pages of magazines and books come in all shapes and sizes, and the monitors or screens through which users see the pages are equally diverse.

There are clear elements of compromise in the solution we have developed, and subscribers sometimes ask for an additional level of magnification, or for a user-controllable zoom option. We had such a request yesterday and Tim Bruce, our Technical Director, produced a reply which may be of broader interest:

Q: Is there a Controllable Zoom In/Zoom Out button on the Site.

A: Short answer: no.

Longer answer: To resize the page images reliably we'd currently need to use Flash or a similar plugin. We don't want to do that, as we'd prefer to deliver pages quickly which "just work" wherever you are - from an older browser through to the iPhone. That means keeping Flash use to an absolute minimum (currently just in our clipper tool).

The iPhone illustrates a growing support in browsers for full-page zooming, where the user can zoom everything on the page - text and images - to whatever size they like. This feature is currently supported on the iPhone, Internet Explorer 7, Firefox 3 (still in beta), Opera and it should be in the next release of Safari. I'd expect it to be in general use this year.

So much talk of the iPhone. I think I am going to have to get one soon!

Clipping from Books

The Exact Editions platform supports a *Clipper* which helps you to cut a selection from one of the JPEGs which show the detail of a magazine/book. The Clipper tool also provides information on the publication and a link back to the source. The Clipper was designed for magazine columns and it now works well with books, especially if you need to blog a short quotation:

Lawrence Lessig

Free Culture

Page 61

The limitation of no more than 12% of a page, per clipping, remains. It is there as a marker for traditional views on the permitted extent for 'fair use', or 'fair dealing'. One supposes that as publishers realise the advantages of sanctioning and enabling fair use through Clippings, especially those which provide a citation, there will be pressure for this limit of 12% to be raised.

University of Michigan has 1 million Google Book Searchable books

What an amazing achievement:

Here is the millionth book.
Paul Courant's blog about the milestone.

In a very few years all 7.5 million bound volumes (that must include magazines and newspapers) will be searchable, by anyone, anywhere. That is right the University of Michigan will allow searching of its collections by anyone (not reading of entire volumes or even pages, for reasons of copyright, but searching). It can hardly be imagined what potential this has for scholarship (especially in the humanities). Michigan's reputation will soar (rightly). Universities are highly competitive and international competition is getting more urgent, this is a knowledge race. Michigan will be at the head of a chasing pack.

We can be sure that this is putting competitive heat on universities and their planners everywhere. The book publishing industry and the magazine industry are well behind in rising to meet this challenge, whereas the scientific periodical publishers have matters well in hand (not quite as well in hand as Google).

A Lessig Library

Exact Editions now provides open access to a Lessig mini-library, an account with 3 of Professor Lawrence Lessig's published books in it.



http://www.exacteditions.com/lessig

The books carry the Creative Commons license and what our service adds to the readily available PDF file versions are some features that will matter to close students of Lessig: (1) the books can be searched quickly, severally or individually (2) each page can be cited or linked as a separate url (3) the Tables of Contents and the Indices provide clickable navigation (4) the works should be accessible from any web-enabled device with no special software required (eg from an iPhone as well as ordinary computers).

Here are some interesting pages: a highly clickable index, a page with a diagram, a search for 'rivalrous' and a search for 'Posner'.

Our service is pro bono. It does incidentally demonstrate some of the advantages of the Exact Editions systems (that is pro our bono) and it also may help to generate some donations for Creative Commons and some sales of the books. On every page there are links to CC and to Amazon for the purchase of printed copies.

Books -- streamed or downloads

Sara Lloyd at thedigitalist (a Pan/Macmillan blog) picks up on the contrast we drew between services which stream digital books and those which offer downloads (along with Google Book Search, Amazon Search Inside and the Open Content Alliance, Exact Editions is squarely on the streaming side of this divide). So of course, we think that there is a lot to be said for the streaming approach.

For example it has recently occurred to us that as a platform which provides access but does not offer a download, we are in a good position to offer promotional access through WiFi hotspots. Why does the access-streaming solution win over the 'download a file' approach, in WiFi environments? For two main reasons, first because the support issues are minimal and secondly because there is no download to 'walk out' of the WiFi hotspot -- which means that premium content can be given away in a reasonably precise location, and only there. So any magazine publisher or book publisher who likes this market and the project of geosampling should give us a call. If you can see an interesting market through promoting digital print in a WiFi shop window, or alongside one of the big consumer brands that is going for WiFi (think Virgin, McDonalds or Starbucks), then you should email publisher@exacteditions.com and we will see if we can pop you into the zone, where your stuff can be sampled and tasted.

Reverting to the Macmillan blog, one has to agree with Sara that the traditional eBook mindset often goes with an over-rigid view of what reading is, and a monolithic view of what a book is. If you want to challenge the traditional and monolithic view of what a book is and how it should be read, you must read Pierre Bayard's book How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read. It is a brilliant and deeply wise, funny and subversive book by a Professor of literature at the Sorbonne (and bien sur I have not read it {all{yet}}). The book is short enough to demand no more than half a day of unreading time. And if you decide not to read it, please remember and repeat the Wildean aphorism with which Bayard begins his book -- "one should never read a book that one intends to recommend, it prejudices one so....." (slightly adapted).

Amazon is buying Audible

Audible has arguably been more successful at promoting and publishing audio books than anybody has been at promoting and publishing eBooks. Correction: that is not even arguable. Audible has been really successful with audiobooks and nobody has yet been really successful with eBooks. It is certainly intriguing that Amazon, with its own Kindle, will be able to pipe audio and ebook through the same device. Apple has had an effective relationship with Audible, and they may not be too pleased to see Amazon as the new owner.

An Audible overlay should go well with the Kindle, but this is making Amazon very committed to the download model of eBook distribution. Apple, on the other hand, has been making moves in the direction of a streaming/access model for film distribution. Google Book Search is at the streaming/access end of the spectrum. So who is going to get this right? If Amazon, Google and Apple are going to have a tussle over books, they are coming at it from different angles. Which certainly makes life interesting.

Edward Tufte on the iPhone

Edward Tufte's explanation of what the iPhone has done right (BTW its a BIG file and 5+ minutes here). And a few suggestions about what it has not got quite right. I wish I could use the phrase 'computer administrator debris' with similar quiet disdain. 'PowerPoint' is another term of disapprobation in the Tufte vocabulary. We know exactly what he means.

Tufte thinks that the iPhone is really showing the way that information needs to be presented in computer interfaces: touch, slide and zoom. Key verbs. Tufte is hugely influential, hat tip to Jimmy Guterman on O'Reilly Radar for the link.

Print Working with the Grain of the Web (2)

There are plenty of signs that the web is influencing the way we like to see our print products designed and the way prints work. Here is Bo Sacks reporting on the marked tendency for magazines and newspapers to slip into a smaller format, easier to squeeze into a web window without painful shoe-horning. And according to Silicon Alley Insider Google is now encouraging the use of barcodes, printed in newpapers or magazines which will be picked up and interpreted by mobile phones. What would a digital edition do with such a bar code? Well assuming that the bar code was telling you where the nearest Pizza restaurant is, then I guess that is what the digital edition will tell. Google is the biggest 'ad resolver' so my guess is that the link will have to go through Google.

Omnivorous Magazine Readers

In March last year, somone subscribed to 6 magazines at once. Last weekend an existing subscriber, renewed his/her subs and went from 3 to 10 magazines. That seems to be a pretty convincing tribute to online access as a means of consuming magazines.

Clickable ISBNs: Who Owns the Clickability?

We have been supporting clickable ISBN's for just over a month. And we now have a rather rich example of the potential of this enhancement. The Bookseller (central source of industry information for publishers and booksellers in the UK) are using Exact Editions to make their substantial bi-annual Supplements available through the web. The main (adult) title has 8,943 ISBNs in it which are all now live links (I can promise you that they all work and I have clicked every single one ;-)). The children's books Supplement has 1,767 (yep they all work too).

Here is a typical page with 16 jackets, 16 corresponding live links for the ISBNs, and as it happens some live phone numbers, which is very handy if you want to order some of the books and need to get in touch with Prestel or Macmillan distribution straight off the page. Clicking on the link at the top left of the array (the title is Bob Dylan: the Drawn Blank Series) takes you straight to a page of Google search results on the ISBN.

The Bookseller

Buyer's Guide Spring 2008

Page 9

Google do a pretty good job on searching for ISBN's (as one would expect). But there are lots of ISBN resolvers that the page could link to: Amazon, Waterstones, OCLC's WorldCat.

This is a promotional service for the Bookseller, so they get to determine to which service the ISBN linker will target. This is after all an open and free service where we know nothing about the users, do not track their sessions, and know nothing of their identity. But we are also offering this linking service for our paid subscribers, for publications to which they subscribe. Looking at usability from the customers point of view, it seems appropriate that deciding the preferred ISBN resolver should form part of the user's preferences on her individual account. The user should be able to select the ISBN-resolver that will be most useful to them. So, in our view the Publisher owns the choice for default clickability (and the Bookseller may wish to develop its own business model to exploit this service with individual ISBNs getting different treatment, they will certainly get some very useful aggregate stats), but the individual subscriber who is paying for a service should be able to choose his own bookshop/library.

When it comes to owning the 'relationship' it seems to us that publishers can and should own the default, and different magazines/publishers may have different choices, but customers should own and control the over-ride. The final say is always with the customer. Does that seem like the right policy?

Although this application of the Exact Editions system adds value for magazine publishers and subscribers, it will probably be of even greater interest to book publishers. Many book publishers offer their catalogues on line as PDFs, but the Exact Editions system is faster, more searchable and better with links which have an obvious application in e-commerce.

Searching is fast:

Penguin 84
Bloomsbury 67
Quercus 43

Continuum Theology Titles

Continuum are showcasing 6 of their current and forthcoming theology titles on the Exact Editions platform at http://www.exacteditions.com/continuum

Each book has a 32pp sample available for searching and browsing. The Continuum editors also write an active theology blog and it seems likely that they will be blogging about and linking to the samples.

René Girard is an intellectual giant (theologian, anthropologist, philosopher and literary theorist) so his latest book Evolution and Conversion will be much discussed. The opening pages are now accessible to anybody with web access.

The Uses of Amazon and the Future of Ideas

Lawrence Lessig's book The Future of Ideas is now available for free from his web site (here for future reference is the explicit link for the PDF http://thefutureofideas.s3.amazonaws.com/lessig_FOI.pdf -- note the use of S3). It looks like a great book and while I now have the PDF download on my Mac I am still going to buy it from Amazon. The book was first published by Random House in 2001 and Lessig with their agreement now makes it available for free under a creative commons license which sanctions any non-commercial reuse of the copyright. If I had a Kindle I could buy it from Amazon in that format. Random House would, if I prefer, sell me an eBook version. Amazon will also kindly let me search inside in another digital format.
So much choice -- really too much format choice. But we wonder how much arm-twisting Professor Lessig had to engage in to persuade Random House to allow him to give the book away. There is also some irony in the fact that Lessig's book is being given away using the Amazon S3 service (presumably because in that way Lessig, with his limited resources can cope with immense or fluctuating demand). When Amazon planned their superb service S3 (Amazon Simple Storage Service) did it cross their mind that one of its uses would be to facilitate the giving away of digital books that might otherwise be sold by Amazon? Some irony, but so what? Lessig, Random House and Amazon are to be commended for their open-ness and their generosity.

Wal-Mart cuts the long tail

According to the New York Post, noted by Bo-Sacks, Wal-Mart is cutting 1,000 magazine titles from its range of stocked items. Since Wal-Mart delivers about 15% of US magazine retail sales that is a big bite out of the long-tail. Major business titles, including The Economist, BusinessWeek, Forbes and Fortune, are trimmed in the cull.

The clear message for those publishers in the long tail (you have to have a very short tale to put The Economist and BusinessWeek in a long tail) must be to get their magazines onto a digital platform, preferably one that is scaleable and essentially immune to tail diseases. According to Bo-Sacks "industry sources with knowledge of Wal-Mart's plans, the company's Sustainability Committee-and its commitment to reducing waste-played a key role in its decision."

Would that really be the reason for Wal-Mart's decision to chop its magazine tail? Conceivably yes, the slowest selling newstand magazines are very wasteful in generating returns (magazines that are shipped 2 ways and then pulped are hugely wasteful, and such returns can reach 50% on the most specialist titles). Oddly enough the leading theorist of the Long Tail Chris Anderson (editor of the magazine Wired) has recently suggested that the printed magazine is less ecologically damaging than its digital equivalent. His arguments are stretched and the conclusion only stands up on a very wobbly leg, if you think that the magazine industry carbon deserves credit for the existence of primeval forests. Perhaps Chris needs to have a word with Wal-Mart?

Jobs cuffs the Kindle

Steve Jobs was interviewed by the New York Times shortly after his MacWorld presentation on Tuesday:

...... he had a wide range of observations on the industry, including the Amazon Kindle book reader, which he said would go nowhere largely because Americans have stopped reading.

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

This is really odd, because most techies will read about the MacWorld presentation through blogs or newsreports or through online versions of newspapers like the NYT. Millions of people have now read about Steve Jobs saying we dont read any more. An awful lot of what we do on the web is to read, so its simply a nonsense, no starter, non sequiter, not at all true, to say that people dont read any more. If you use the web you read a lot. The web is a literary medium to its core, down to the last little hyperlink.

The real challenge is that most publishers (of magazines, books and even newspapers) do not yet do a very good or reliable job of publishing their books, magazines and papers on and through the web. If most books were on the web, there would be a lot more reading of books. Contra Steve Jobs, the Kindle is flawed from the bottom up. He should have said people do an increasing portion of their reading on the web, so its kind of irrelevant (or 'loopy' to use a Jobs word) to build a specialist book reader. Books need to be on the web and playing their full part in the digital dance. A specialist book-reader also misses the point that Steve is missing. We want to read more through the web, and building a specialist and compartmentalised book reader risks further ghetto-isation of the book.

Not to worry, we are in a transitional phase. Almost all scientific, technical and academic periodicals are now published primarily through the web. Most scholars read them using their web versions (mostly PDF files). Fifteen years ago nearly all access was via print.

Where the scholars, engineers, doctors and academics have gone, consumer markets will follow. In five or ten years time we will happily access magazines and books mainly (but not exclusively) via their digital editions.

Print going with the grain of the Web

It is an article of faith for Exact Editions that:

Print works well on the web when it is represented exactly the way it is.

Exact Editions works on the assumption that the web can re-present print perfectly adequately and there are many advantages in having magazines (and books) accessible on the web as exact replicas of the print editions. Actually, buried beneath this 'article of faith' is a very deep conviction that print publications are incredibly strong and will survive and prosper as digital editions (oddly enough, many in conventional publishing doubt this).

On the other hand, we do in various ways try to enhance or improve the print editions so they work better as a web resource than would a mere print replica. First, by making the titles individually and collectively searchable. Second, by adding elements of helpful interactivity (clickable contents pages, e-mail addresses, URLs, phone numbers and ISBNs, for example).

For all these reasons, we find it hard to think of digital publishing as being inimical to print publishing, to reading, or indeed to civilisation as we know it. If you want some gloomy hand wringing about the future of print, of fiction and of literacy you can find it here, here and with rather more insight and optimism here.

We have been thinking more about the ways in which print and digital can interact. And it really is a matter of interaction. This is not a market in which digital will simply replace print and paper. Publishers, booksellers and retailers really need to think long and hard about the immense advantages of working with a medium in which print sales can be used to help digital sales, and vice versa. Having a physical bookstore or news kiosk on the street is potentially a great way in which to leverage digital sales. Having a virtual bookstore or kiosque is an amazingly good way in which to leverage sales of the printed book or to garner more print subscriptions for a magazine. Getting the two media flows to work together is the biggest challenge that we face.

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.

The World Today

The World Today joins the shop:

• Sapphire mining.
• Jacob Zuma.
• What are we doing to our forests?
  

Total Spec

• T of C
• Wrestling
• Reviews
  

Some Good Things Predicted for 2008

1. Apple's multi-touch interface will spread from the iPhone and enrich the way we use personal computers (Microsoft will introduce something similar).
2. The Google phones (Android) will show, once and for all, that we do not need dedicated eBook readers, and Exact Editions' magazines will be as easily read on Android devices as on iPhones.
3. Safari and some other browsers will offer resolution independent imaging, so that photos or digital editions can be easily resized to fit the viewing environment.
   
4. Google will not tell us how many books are searchable through Google Book Search. But best estimates will conclude that there are over 4 million titles in GBS by the end of 2008.
   
5. A much improved Kindle II will appear in the summer from Amazon. But it will still lack colour, and it will not be easy to get hold of one (insufficient E ink). Do not count on them reaching the UK.
6. One of the UK's big magazine publishers will finally enter the digital magazine age and offer digital subscriptions to (nearly) all their magazines. The big 6, in our view, comprise: IPC, EMAP (we may by then have learned to call it Bauer), BBC Magazines, NatMags, Future and Conde Nast. The big American magazine companies will not be leading the way -- Hachette in France have already done that in 2007.
   

Growing Functionality in 2007

The Exact Editions system added some important functionality this year.

1. In July we added The Clipper to the toolbar (its a publisher/opt-out tool, so some accounts will not have it). This allows users to make limited clippings from their magazine subscriptions, for example to include a clipping and citation in a blog. One of the heaviest users of the clipping tool is a Finnish blog about running.
2. In September with advice and help from Le Monde Diplomatique we introduced a French Language version of our interface (tool tips in French!), and LMD was the first French language periodical on the platform.
3. At the same time we introduced a French Shop. This may seem like a small thing, but the shop is now a 'versionable' layer of code, so there can be a shop for any service which needs to deploy the Exact Editions content engine. For different currencies and languages or specific groups of publications. There will be many shops federated within the Exact Editions platform in the coming year.
4. For the first 18 months Exact Editions was only able to provide single user password controlled accounts. From October 2007, institutional access was introduced (another publisher-dependent option).
5. Also in October Berkshire Publishing became the first book publisher to use the platform for promoting its reference titles.
6. In December ISBNs became a standardly clickable feature in the Exact Editions platform. Clicking on an ISBN takes you to a page like this.

If there is a common theme to these developments it is that a web service needs to extend its capapbilities so that it can serve more users (Francophone web users or institutions), and in a more pervasive and interactive way (Clipping/citations and interactive ISBNs).

Another common feature of these enhancements is that the development cycle was quite short, no more than a few months, and in some cases a few days. A web service can build its functionality gradually and cummulatively, but it can do so much more quickly than the traditional software package. Where innovation is needed, audiences are much preferable to installed bases.

Prospects for Magazines

David Hepworth, whose day job is at Development Hell, writes a well-informed but sometimes rather jaundiced column on the magazine business for the Guardian. This week's column is typically bleak on the industry's prospects for 2008 and it includes this comment:

The chief executive of one big publisher of women's weeklies told me that he had given up pretending with investors and was prepared to confess that he could not see a way that his company would ever make money out of the internet. History will either see this as a hopeless lack of vision or admirable good sense, depending on how things work out.

The subtitle to Hepworth's column has the heading: "It is not that people have fallen out of love with mags - they just don't want to pay for them". Well that is plain wrong. Perhaps Hepworth's views are conditioned by the woes of the music industry, which has a serious format/service problem. CDs are a product that consumers no longer want to pay for, but magazines remain very popular as a format. Magazines are still attracting subscriptions from consumers, and the good news is that digital subscriptions are working.

What about advertising? One of the big challenges for Exact Editions in the next year will be to help magazine publishers to show that advertisements in digital magazines adds significantly to the value of the magazine proposition for advertisers. Magazine publishers tend to attract significant and highly targetted niche markets. These collections of consumers remain very valuable and yes -- hopeless lack of vision is more of a problem.

Are Knols the Google Kindle?

Yesterday Google announced (see Udi Manber on the Googleblog) that it was developing and supporting a Wikipedia-like network of Knols which will provide us all with authoritative, collaboratively-authored, information resources. Here are some enthusiastic responses from John Batelle and Peter Suber.

Amazon announced that it was putting SimpleDB its enterprise-scale cloud-based database into private beta. Here are some enthusiastic responses from Nitin Borwankar and Erick Schonfeld.

Google and Amazon are two terrific companies. These both look like important announcements. But we wonder if they will both appear to be significant in 12 months time? My money would go on the SimpleDB service (though I am not competent to judge its technical plausibility). A cloud-based generic database, relational/object oriented, with scaleable and low metred access charges? Sounds like the way to go.

Google becoming a content publisher with a service to rival or complement Wikipedia? Hmm......I doubt that Google is the right environment in which to grow that project. For sure Google will be more concerned about the Amazon announcement than Amazon will be by the Google announcement. Google's knol universe looks a bit like the mis-step to accompany Amazon's Kindle. Some innovations simply do not work, even when they are launched by innovative companies.

On the basis of recent developments, one should be properly sceptical with any new product or service which begins with a 'k'. Apple's smart new touchscreen laptop/tablet will appear in January and it will not be called the Klamshell or the Kaboose. I will lay you long odds on that.

The Optimal Term of Copyright

Rufus Pollock, a researcher at Cambridge University, has produced a rather brilliant but difficult, because formal and mathematical proof (whilst yet embodying many empirical propositions), that the term of copyright should be much lower than it is now, and that it should in general become shorter as technology advances. He suggests that the optimum term of copyright should be about 15 years from creation. The argument is complex, but he provides some neat informal guidance vis:

........consider the situation with respect to books, music, or film. Today, a man could spend a lifetime simply reading the greats of the nineteenth century, watching the classic movies of Hollywood’s (and Europe’s) golden age or listening to music recorded before 1965. This does not mean new work isn’t valuable but it surely means it is less valuable from a welfare point of view than it was when these media had first sprung into existence. Furthermore, if we increase protection we not only restrict access to works of the future but also to those of the past.
As a result the optimal level of protection must be lower than it was initially in fact it must fall gradually over time as our store of the creative work of past generations gradually accumulates to its long-term level. Forever Minus a Day?...

Pollock does not consider the related question: how will the efficient and optimal pricing of information services respond to changes in technology which reduce barriers to access? As more information becomes available how should a commercial information supplier i.e. a publisher, price his subscription services? How much should be given away and what to charge for that which is sold?

Clickable ISBN's

The Exact Editions system now makes ISBNs clickable and the first examples (for subscribers only, as the issue is behind the subs pay-wall) are in the current issue of Opera magazine.

This is the example that I tried first:

Opera

January 2008

Page 95

Which today takes you to this page. ISBNs have recently gone to 13 digits (that allows for a lot of books and publishers) but Amazon is currently using a look-up table for the 13 digit numbers, which is why you land on a results page. Currently we target the Amazon UK pages by default, but this should become a configurable option.

Clickable phone numbers and clickable ISBNs......more good things for the iPhone.

EMAP consumer titles sold to Bauer

EMAP has sold its consumer magazines to the German media company Bauer, but was not able to realise a satisfactory price for the B2B businesses. When the company was put on the block the commentators thought that it would be the consumer magazines that would be hard to sell. Perhaps Bauer know something that the industry pundits and the EMAP management did not understand. Consumer magazines could yet become a growth business. EMAPs consumer business has been rudderless in the last few years -- certainly without a discernible digital strategy -- so perhaps all that is needed to turn them round is some pruning, some investment and some loving attention. Getting a digital strategy that boosts advertising and circulation has to be a part of the new direction for consumer magazines.

ACAP and OpenID

A year ago there was a flurry of legal action between Google and European newspaper publishers. A group of publishers (newspapers, book publishers and others) have since supported the development of a new and more complicated protocol which is intended to supplement and, to an extent, to replace the 'robots.txt' protocol that regulates the behaviour of spiders and search engines. ACAP (Autormated Content Access Protocol) is the result. This proposed standard has received sceptical notices from O'Reilly Radar and Lauren Weinstein. And a damning and derisive review from Martin Belam.

The whole ACAP initiative and the publisher gripeing about Google is misplaced. Rather than figuring out how to control and micro-manage the existing search engines, publishers need to be prepared to be as open as possible, whilst still selling what they determine they can sell by way of subscriptions. While ACAP isnt as goofy as file-based DRM, it could only be developed by a publisher mindset that is looking in the wrong direction. The evolving standard that we should really be concerned about is OpenID. This standard will be important and useful to subscription-serving publishers because there is a great case for providing subscription services which inter-operate and recognise their varying membership policies. Publishers need to spend more time on enabling communities of readers and less time devising protocols for micro-managing copyrights. See the Radar post on OpenID. See also WhatIsOpenID.

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.

Magazine Subscriptions as Christmas Presents

Exact Editions now has a very straightforward process through which you can give a subscription to a digital magazine for Christmas (or as a present on any other occasion). I can think of two people who will be getting Opera from me this year and one who should receive Le Monde Diplomatique. We should give this present-giving feature more publicity, and two possible angles of interest spring to mind.

1. We could emphasize the ecological benefits of giving a digital magazine subscription. The digital edition must have a very small carbon footprint in comparison to the carbon costs associated with conventional print magazines. But it is not an easy matter to say how much less the carbon footprint of the digital offering is than the print magazine. Some back of the envelope calculations suggest that a digital magazine must be at least 90% lower in its carbon footprint than the printed equivalent. It would be good if someone could confirm or qualify this guesstimate.
2. But the second angle of attack -- through which we might spark interest in the digital gift idea is the very convenience attached to giving a digital subscription. You only need to know the email address of the recipient (which is a slight problem for me since I know the email addresses of only about half of my nephews and nieces -- the ideal target for quick and troublefree Christmas shopping). But once you have the email address you can even leave the selection and ordering of the present to the very last minute. In fact we will surely get some Christmas presents ordered on the 25th for delivery on the 25th -- can you think of a better way of covering the embarassing fact that you spilt/broke/lost/forgot Brother-in-law's present and only realised this late on 24th when all the shops are shut. Digital magazines are perfectly convenient in this regard, and so should appeal to a wide audience of late and/or forgetful givers.

Any ideas for how we can develop some viral marketing along these lines will be received with gratitude and the best third-party suggestion submitted to feedback@exacteditions.com or in comments to this posting will be rewarded with a free digital subscription.

Digital Books in 2008?

The London-based Bookseller's Association has just released a report, Embracing the Digital Age, on the coming tide of digital books. It is short, non-technical, pithy, well-researched and free. It is possibly too sanguine about the potential for traditional bookseller involvement in the developing digital market. But the text points towards challenging opportunities for booksellers who can re-invent and re-position their business. The main authors (Francis Bennett and Michael Holdsworth, both experienced publishers rather than booksellers) clearly believe that the book trade is entering a transforming phase. Right now. But they acknowledge that it is not easy to produce firm evidence for the immediacy of change and opportunity:

We have been asked on a number of occasions to define the size of the digital market. How large will it be in two or five years’ time? Without such a figure, we know that some larger organisations may find it difficult to justify investment in digital processes. We have asked this question of experts in the UK and the USA, and no one has come up with a satisfactory answer. We are not surprised by this. (Embracing the Digital Age p 11.)

Another recent report, MarketIntelNow's: ANWO eBooks survey suggests that the coming change may be closer and more radical than most publishers or booksellers suppose. This report costs $995, so I will probably not read it, but we can glean some of its findings from the excellent interview with Marie Campbell at the TeleRead blog. She thinks that the publishing market will boom with digital. The right environment will materialise soon, like almost now (her interview was just before the Kindle release). Demand is highly elastic, publishers will soon find this out and then prices will rapidly drop. (Digital prices) "may start around $10.00 each, but come down in the 2008-09 timeframe and approach $5.00." As she puts it the publishing industry is "blessed with ELASTICITY". She reckons that the $5.00 price is approaching the point of pain for publishers and at that stage advertising and sponsored books will take over. They will be big, but the gains in advertising will accrue to the biggest players -- because only the biggest networks can monetise the clickstream (the free, but copyright, digital book market is where Google, Apple and Amazon will have the big literary fight -- my guess).

If Marie Campbell has got her reasearch and her analysis right, the Christmas book market in 2009 will be disrupted by digital books. Digital books will be really happening then. So what do we do in 2008?