Mae West was a Bibliophile

"Is that a library in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?" Lorcan Dempsey found the connection, reflecting on Peter Kaufman's startling prediction: by 2020 an iPod sized device will be able to contain all the media content ever created. Kaufman is just extrapolating the familiar Moore's law trends. iPod style computer disk memory is now 3.6 millionth of the price of 1982 costs. So its not hard to believe that such a small device could contain a million times more content in 15 years than it does now.

The talk which accompanied Kaufman's ppt is pretty interesting. He points out how the world of content (published, played, filmed) is becoming totally integrated. How everything is potentially 'advertisable against' and how information content needs to be and become more sustainable and computable (means at the very least findable, authorised, visible, discriminable). He also points to an important paper by Michael Jensen which can be read here.

eBooks and Libraries

There is a fascinating post from Adrian Hon and lots of good discussion on the revolution facing the book publishing industry (noted via Charkin blog). Adrian is amusingly rude, but spot-on, in his criticisms of the book publishers current web offerings:

Most of these sites are so awful that there’s plenty of room for easy improvement, providing that someone else smarter doesn’t step in and capture all the traffic first. Maybe that someone will be Amazon with Shelfari, or some unknown web 2.0 upstart. But at this rate, it most certainly won’t be traditional publishers. And whoever captures the traffic can capture the sales.

There really isnt an adequate business model for ebooks that any major book publisher has yet produced and the marketing efforts on behalf of printed books are feebly unimaginative. On the other hand many of the large STM (Scientific Technical and Medical) publishers have produced effective systems for selling access to technical literature (especially scientific periodicals). Its not as though publishers could not devise a digital strategy.....

There is much of interest in the comments on Hon's original posting. But, there is one deep running problem in this discussion of ebooks. The focus is all wrong in being a focus on BOOKs, as individual titles. This discussion should be on elibraries not on ebooks. Hon says:

Physical books are about to be superseded by more advanced technology that will allow for the mass and trivial pirating of every single book ever published.

Maybe, but then again maybe not so straightforward. What if ebooks are primarily distributed and accessed via a system such as Google Book Search? That is not so easily pirated. In such a system what matters is that books can be easily accessed, searched and cited; any pirated digital copies are of no real use without the database access system. Hon also makes the comparison with the iPod. But the success of the iPod system is mistaken by ebook enthusiasts. The key advance of the iPod was that it was a half-decent personal music library. Not that it was another MP3 Player.

In thinking about ebooks we need to think about elibraries first and foremost. Publishers need to think about how their content will be digitally accessed and how it can be sold, and profitably given away. Publishers distribution options have always been title-focussed in the past. They need to start thinking more broadly.

How are libraries of digital content to be accessed and services allocated? The hardware on which ebooks can be read or consulted is not so important.

The Clipper

Exact Editions now has a new tool -- a Clipper -- which allows readers to extract clippings from magazines on the Exact Editions platform and reproduce the exact clipping in a blog.

You can access the Clipper from the tool bar. There is a new icon which comes up in full green when you are on the Full Page view. This is the icon:




Clicking on that icon gives you a view of the page from which you can select the rectangle which you intend to Clip. For example, this clipping from the current issue of The Spectator:

The Spectator

21 July 2007

Page 5

Perhaps its no surprise that The Spectator is supporting Boris Johnson, but his video diaries will be a popular source of amusement.

As this clipping shows -- the Clipper will, by default produce a citation for each extract. Also, a subscriber who clicks on the clipping will jump straight to the full content, while a non-subscriber will be offered the change to buy a subscription.

There is a general presumption for 'fair dealing' in the use of copyright material. We have given the Clipper tool a default limit of 12% of a print page. Publishers who wish to encourage citations and clippings can request that the maximum is raised. Likewise, if any publisher wishes to prevent any form of clipping or explicit citation the tool can be withheld entirely from a publication. Since citation enhances the reputation of a magazine, we think that this option is not likely to appeal to many publishers.

Are newspapers in trouble?

Its good to lose touch occasionally; I have just had a week of holiday in Elba (a beautiful island and a great holiday). No contact with the web for a week, just a steady flow of emails to view on my Blackberry. So a very good holiday -- and as I tune back into the flow of blogs and trends and technology opinions there seems to be plenty of grounds for gloom about newspapers:

• Greenslade on falling ad revenues for US newspapers.
• Jeff Jarvis says that newspapers have to think of themselves as a service.
• The New York Review of Books blames journalists and the newspaper owners.
• Scott Karp thinks that blogging is the solution, but the finances are still problematic.
  

But if newspapers are really in such trouble why are Google (and Yahoo and Microsoft) so interested? Even interested in the old print technology....

Once newspapers have the confidence to produce and sell subscriptions to digital editions they will begin to see how their businesses (service businesses for sure) can still be highly profitable on the web.

New Consumer

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

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

New Consumer

July/August 2007

Page 22

And

New Consumer

July/August 2007

Page 29

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

Athletics Weekly

AW is the latest addition to our service. The magazine has been running for over 60 years and brings weekly results and reports to athletics fans in the UK and overseas. Noteworthy in the free trial issue:

• An interview with the great Haile Gebrselassie.
• A guide to getting the results from your next road race into the magazine.
• Masses of links on the fixtures pages. Many fewer on the results pages. I guess that is to be expected?

This title was the speediest yet to join our service. We first heard from them less than a month ago, and after a few emails and some trial runs the magazine is now a fully fledged part of the service. I guess that you can count on Athletics Weekly to be fast out of the blocks.

Social Documents

It looks as though there is a new category of web application emerging: services which encourage the sharing, posting and processing of online documents. Techcrunch mentions two of the more prominent: Scribd and Docstoc..... the Techcrunch comments also mention Thinkfree.

Its not completely clear how these services may evolve and what new forms of writing and reading they may encourage, but this has to be a hot area when you look at the enormous success in the last couple of years of YouTube and Facebook, MySpace etc

Exact Editions is a technical service for publishers, and it may be my failure of imagination that cannot see it becoming a social end-user tool. On the other hand there is clearly an unmet need -- on Saturday I was hearing of such a need from a friend who has built up a database of literally hundreds of peace agreements (Sri Lanka, Sudan, Burundi etc -- unfortunately/fortunately its a hot and growing area in international law). She was explaining the difficulty of satisfactorily providing access to them through the web. HTML versions and PDF versions have obvious drawbacks. There is also the need to provide precise citations and comprehensive searches and for the database to grow gracefully. Exact Editions would be a good solution, but its hard to see the business model and our process is one which still requires a significant degree of human intervention and some investment on our side.

Hmmmm. Anybody got any suggestions? I know we could do it pro bono, but that is probably not scaleable.

Flickr Typefoundry?

Eric Kastner's clever simple idea:

Exacteditions

Hat tip to John Naughton.

If the iPhone is the best eBook Reader ever .....

And it is. What follows?

1. The iPhone will be much more important as a new way of promoting and selling physical books, than it will be for selling digital books..... for the next few years. Few of us want to read digital books all the way through on our handheld, but the iPhone is a bookshop window with an infinite catalogue. In your pocket. This is very good news for Amazon and publishers who want to sell you print copies. Its good news for all small publishers who want to sell books direct through the mail. Publishers need much better websites with more digital samples on their pages. The digital book market will follow more slowly.
   
2. The iPhone does not support Flash (and that is not an oversight and its a decision that will not be rescinded). YouTube is already on the iPhone because YouTube/Google have re-engineered the database so that YouTube doesnt need Flash. It uses H.264 which is what AppleTV will also build on. This is a big change for publishers who have used Flash for digital books. Harper Collins and Random House will be re-engineering their book display systems. Its again good news for Amazon Search Inside and Google Book Search who do not.
3. One of the things wrong with the eBook reader concept is that it compartmentalised books. As though an eBook reader could manage with a Black on White only capability. There is no reason for this and the Apple engineers have produced a user interface through which all print products are equally accessible. Newspapers, magazines, journals, books, Bibles, concert programmes, user manuals and printed packaging. Sooner, well before later, we will be able to read and search anything through the web which has been printed. Even cereal packets, and especially seed packets, wine labels and user manuals. The iPhone is good news for printed ephemera.
   
4. Apple will not own the books market, or the digital books market, the way it is hoping to 'own' or predominate in the music and Hollywood digital distribution channels through iTunes. Books, magazines and newsprint will be much more open, because all that is needed to sell them and make a market is the infrastructure to display and search them. All that the consumer needs is a web browser and access to an e-commerce system. Again Amazon and Google are in poll position. Google will soon be selling pay-per-view books.
5. Because there is no library equivalent for books built into the iPhone, in the way that there is an iTunes for music, all those players who have a potential to fill this space will move aggressively to help fill the gap. Look for OCLC, the LibraryThing, Amazon, Bowker, Google to market and promote metadata through the iPhone eco-system. When you key an ISBN into an iPhone, what is going to happen? Apple need an answer to that question. Metadata is going to be very big on the iPhone.
6. Because we will carry our iPhone everywhere and because we get used to searching book catalogues, bookshops and libraries from our peripatetic window-on-the-library, we will inevitably get used to doing a lot more snippeting and browsing. Comments, snippets, citations, gobbets and controversies will grow. Deep reading will diminish. Deep listening is also a declining skill.
   
7. Digital books, newspapers, magazines will gradually grow to become ambient, transient and omnipresent. Not sure that anyone has yet subscribed to one of our magazines from an iPhone (but I wouldn't know if they had, and I was surprised to find that a subscriber to the Baptist Times was reading it on his Palm). Digital subs through the iPhone are on their way.
   

The iPhone's initial reception tells us that it will be a huge success. The best review I have seen is at Engadget. There are some interesting comments by Marc Hedlund at O'Reilly.

An analysis of the news weeklies

Magforum has a useful round up of some of the new entrants in the weekly news segment. Tony Quinn reckons that the Economist will fight off the various new challengers to its crown, as the.... pre-eminent London/International business, current affairs weekly, newspaper/magazine. In fact, it is not easy to define exactly what the Economist's slot is, but it does whatever it quintessentially does very well. One million+ copies a week sold. Most of them on subscription.

But the Economist is not (yet) as big as the biggest US titles (Time, Newsweek, and it may be level pegging with Business Week though it seems to be growing faster and may well be more profitable then any of them); and, especially in the US market, The Week has made spectacular advances in the last four years. One can see why magazine founders/strategists at the BBC, News International and the Guardian may be eyeing the US market carefully in the view of The Week's powerful performance.

Two things struck me from the Magforum analysis:

1. One should not forget that other languages have spectacularly successful titles in this slot. Stern gets a circulation of 1 million every week.
2. None of the new launch challengers to the throne of the Economist (five current/imminent launches are mentioned) has, so far, come out at launch with an effective digital edition strategy. Why on earth not? Having a good web site is not good enough, though very necessary, when digital editions can be given to all new subscribers, and can be used for low-cost promotion to all potential new subscribers? Given the costs and distribution obstacles to launching a primarily print product, this oversight is unforgivable. This is a slot (whatever it quintessentially is) in which the digital edition has a strong role to play. Time-challenged, technologically savvy, international and mobile, these readers are digital consumers. And the fact/opinion that the Economist does not do an adequate job with its own repurposed HTML version is no excuse!
   

Noted from MagCulture

Hard Problems and Fuzzy Solutions

Google Book Search ('search the full text of books and discover new ones') now supports 'text versions' of some of the out-of-copyright books that are in the Google Book Search database. Google Blogoscoped has a report. This is interesting, Google are OCR'ing books which have been scanned and figuring out how to reconstitute a reasonable ASCII version of the underlying text. Its also interesting that it is not possible to get a consistently good result -- mind you Blogoscoped picks a hard example, a Shakespeare text with 'f's' for 's'es'. But computing the underlying text of a book if you don't already have it is a really hard problem.

So what? Well it suggests that pirating books in Google Book Search is, and is likely to remain, a very tough proposition. Easy to make dumb copies, easy enough if you can invest the effort in re-keying, but to make accurate, usable, automated copies with the text in the file, from an image file. Don't even try. Google, with all their software geniuses can't do it, so there is little chance of a pirate in Macao being able to get a quality solution. Exact Editions has a very similar production and content management system to the Google Book Search service. So it looks as though its going to remain very difficult to produce useful pirate issues of Exact Editions magazines unless the pirate gets access to the publisher's copies of the PDF files. PDF files contain a lot more useful information than the dumb JPEGs that Google Book Search and Exact Editions ship out to web browsers. Publishers who care about their digital rights should be very careful with the security of their PDFs.

Fuzzy solutions? That is easy, even a poor machine-readable text version is pretty good for automated searching witness the way Google, Yahoo or MSFT Live already search out of copyright books. The fuzzy solution has been working for a while.

Bye Bye the eBook reader?

Personanondata finds an in interesting YouTube 'concept' for an Apple eBook reader.

The movie shows an iPod which fits into a folding tablet device which opens out to give two reading pages. Cute. I slot my iPod into a Bose speaker system, why shouldnt I slot my iPod into an eBook tablet?

But this vision of the book-specific hardware is all wrong. Yesterday Apple launched its eBook reader the iPhone. The hardware-specific eBook reader was and is a mirage. The eBook reader that matters is the humble familiar web browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera -- you take your pick). Steve Jobs says that the iPhone is the best iPod ever. Its also the best eBook reader ever. The best phone, the best music player and the best eBook reader ever. All in one package, which does the phone and email as well. The iPhone will read Exact Editions digital magazines, but we still need photographic proof of that.

Google Book Search wasnt the first, but its method shows that digital editions will be page based (five years ago that was NOT obvious). All print pages will be web pages. Are becoming web pages. Once that equivalence is accepted its all down to the software which has to work within a web browser (preferably not Flash -- which the iPhone does not support) and to the databases which run libraries and subscription services. Pages matter. Libraries matter. Databases matter most of all. eBooks dont... They really dont, they are just collections of web pages.

Permaculture

• Table of contents
• Classified Exchange, lots of links
• The Founders Story
  

47th title in the shop. All the readers of this magazine care about the environmental impact of publishing and the ways in which digital editions can reduce that impact.

Print lives on the web (1)

There is a view that the web is such a potent and direly competitive medium that newspapers, magazines, books will not be able to meet the challenge. As though these wonderful cultural artefacts will be replaced by something else....... whatever that may be.

We think this gloom is misplaced. Print thrives on the web, and so far from being dead it gets a second life when relaunched as a digital edition and a searchable resource.

And its all too easy to underestimate the amazing cultural and social attachment we have to these systems of communication.

As an instance of the unreasonable love of newspapers and newspaper culture, consider Scott Walker, assistant managing editor of the The Birmingham News, Birmingham Alabama, who has re-engineered a coin-operated newspaper box so that it now sits in his living room and displays on an LCD the current front pages of his favourite newspapers.



We think its time that some devotee of magazines, took a leaf from Scott Walker's book and made the real coffee-table magazine. Manolis Kelaidis is already building the book with circuitry which hyperlinks.

Hat tip to Martin Stabe.

Environmental magazines

The Press Gazette today has a special section on the environmental agenda in the newspaper and magazine industry. It includes an important article from Peter Phippen, managing director of BBC magazines. As he says, we need 'a combination of rapid technical innovation and significant behavioural change'.

Press Gazette, 22.06.07, p 18. For digital subscribers link here.

Then Phippen covers key aspects of the distribution and recycling chain: the BBC is now using paper only from sustainable sources, paying careful attention to the way waste is generated, particular focus on polylopes and cover mounts. Its all praiseworthy and 'steps in the right direction'. But Phippen does not mention digital magazines or a digital strategy. What a missed opportunity! Get the digital magazine strategy right, and the BBC will not only save money, it will improve revenues and profits. Of course it will dramatically reduce its carbon footprint at the same time.

"Rapid technical innovation and significant behavioural change", yes that is something for the magazine industry to embrace at its core. Get the digital strategy in place. This is much more important than 'cutting down on cover mounts', though that is also a priority.

Rock Sound

• Marilyn Manson
• Biffy Clyro Puzzle
• Frank Carter [Gallows]

So we now have 46 titles in the Exact Editions shop.

Dennis Publishing

Timing is everything in magazine publishing. In business.

The Guardian tells us that Dennis have sold some of their big US magazines for £121 million (think that is only a rumoured price). A year ago EMAP simply closed the US edition of its FHM which competes with Dennis's Maxim, included in the sale. But Dennis will hold on to The Week, which has been extremely successful in the US. Growing rapidly in the last three years.

EMAP are reportedly being circled by Private Equity. Perhaps the winning PE house should simply put Felix Dennis in charge.

Open Archives (5): Mousetraps and Cafes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

O'Reilly is now selling Chapters

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

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

Open Archives (4): Citeability and Moving Walls

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

The Budapest programme specifically limited its recommendations to:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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