Phone Numbers and Books

Yesterday one of our publishing partners asked that the phone numbers in their catalogue should not be 'live'. Incidentally, they were very pleased to have the ISBNs targetting their e-commerce engine, but for some reason not so keen on the phone numbers being immediately usable. Ours not to reason why..... the numbers were switched off. We have had such requests before, and it is not difficult for the database to switch phone numbers 'off', (ie to 'non-clickable') if this is requested. It can be done for a whole publication, or even for individual phone numbers within an otherwise 'live to call' publication: (my colleagues will not thank me if this leads to a torrent of requests for shielded phone numbers).

It seems to me absolutely right that authors or publishers should decide for themselves whether links are to be live in their publications. This is not a decision that should be taken by other players in the process. But the reason for having the numbers in the image but not clickable, not immediately usable, struck me as strange: "I honestly do not think anyone will be calling us from Skype or from an iPhone".

I am probably a minority in using Skype (Skype Out) and the iPhone every day, but I know plenty of academics who Skype a lot, and I am sure there are lots of librarians and booksellers getting into the habit of requesting books, even placing orders, from their iPhone. There will be a LOT more next year when the Android phones start landing.

It is surprising to me how often one goes to web sites that have lots of phone numbers and there is no automatic way of using the phone numbers -- except 'cut and paste' (which is not a lot of good to iPhone users). The idea that phone numbers should be dead is by no means limited to book publishers. Web publishers make the same mistake. I guess not supporting 'cut and paste' on the iPhone is another example of underestimating the way that users will use resources that we make available to them. Users will always do more with whatever is given to them than we can anticipate.

Reckoning with the iPhone

The Exact Editions platform has worked on the iPhone from the start. Here is a shot of a search on a Berkshire Publishing title, The Berkshire Encyclopedia of Extreme Sports




Notice the search terms highlighted in blue. But the iPhone has some peculiar features and the question is 'How much should a platform which addresses the universal web try to accommodate the peculiar strengths and limitations of the iPhone?' Especially since it seems quite likely that Apple will soon produce some intermediate products which might be a larger iTouch, or a MacBook that shares the wonderful touch and gesture interface of the iPhone.

We have introduced some iPhone friendly aspects to our software already, and the latest addition is going to help iPhoners who dont want to do too much hunting around for the toolpanel on our interface. The Exact Editions platform now puts up a chunkier, but cut down version of the toolpanel when it detects that the user is working from an iPhone. There will be a few more nudges like that, but we have no current plans to develop iPhone specific media. Any subscription that our customers choose to buy should work on the vast majority of web environments (OK, if you are still running Netscape Navigator 2.0 you may have a few problems).

Here is a shot of the iPhone friendly toolpanel (note the clickable phone number):



Any iPhone enthusiasts who want to try a book on the iPhone should consider one of the pocket-sized Economist books. If you are looking for a digital magazine to test readability in your cuppped hands, I would recommend PC Utilities magazine. If you just want a freebie to put the platform through its paces, the Bookseller supplements are a good place to start. Lots of clickable ISBN's, clickable phone numbers and urls there.

ISBNs per Title, per Edition, or per SKU?

This topic is really only for publishing and logistics nerds. Since I am not nerdy enough, I am not really qualified to opine on the matter (but when did that stop anybody?). Anyway we find it an intriguing and perplexing issue. PersonaNonData today has a report on the flux that digital publishers find themselves in. Should there be as many ISBNs for each title as there are conceivable ebook formats? If so, there are going to be a very great many ISBNs, since it seems quite feasible that there are going to be a dozen, or perhaps many more. ebook/digital formats. Sure the market will settle down in due course to a few favoured formats. But that could take a while, and in the interim the ISBN system will need to cater for a very large set of potential numbers.

I have a suggestion: where titles go into a format where there are in effect many individual instances of the work then that format should have a separate ISBN attached to it. The ISBN system was introduced so that books would have a standard method of stock control. ISBNs are SKU's. So digital platforms where copies of books are handed/downloaded to readers/purchasers the SKU specific to that channel serves a purpose. For digital platforms which are based on an 'access' system, which would include Google Book Search, and Amazon Search Inside, there is no need for a separate ISBN, because there are no 'units' that need to be tracked. Exact Editions is another such access system and there is no need therefore for publishers to assign separate ISBNs to their titles in the Exact Editions platform. The identifiers that matter for 'access' systems are the urls which comprise the book's web presence.

I suspect that Exact Editions can hide behind the skirts of Google Book Search in this issue. It is pretty unlikely that Google will be prevailed upon to find and provide separate ISBNs for the millions of titles in its database. Very unlikely, because the ISBN fees for such a large number of titles will be a tidy sum. Very unlikely, because for many of the titles in Google Book Search, Google has no better idea than anybody else to whom the ISBN should be assigned. One of the difficulties with the Google Book Search project is that it is unclear who owns what. Who needs to be consulted about what? If Google knew how to assign ISBNs it would know which were the publishers to approach for permission to do so. Might as well ask them for permission to database the book at the same time?

Publisher's Catalogues -- the Book Buyer's Perspective

PersonaNonData notes a thoughtful posting on the role of catalogues in today's market from Arsen Kashkashian who is a buyer in a Boulder bookstore. Arsen's recommendations are interesting and progressive, but the situation is both more complicated and in several respects simpler than he allows.

• "The catalog would be available online, and each store would access it through a distinct login." But a publisher's catalog to the extent that it is a promotional tool should be 'open access' without need for a login (there is no reason for keeping any potential customer or intermediary out of a catalog). But maybe it should also be presented in a customised way for an individual store.....So simpler but more complicated than one might suppose.
  
• "Each buyer would be able to sort the catalogs however they wanted." Does Arsen mean that the buyer should do the sorting, searching, tagging.... and these are all different... or that the publisher should pre-sort? The requirement may be both simpler and more complex than it appears.
• "An alert system could let buyers know of all the changes or additions that have happened since they last placed an order." But isnt there a role here for the publisher's catalog/seasonal list, which needs to be relatively unchanged as a 'print-type' publication, and the continually updated catalog in HTML format? This is what the Exact Editions catalogue system enables. But the situation is both simpler and more complex than it appears, as we need the 'periodicity' of a seasonal list and the 'updateability' of the web catalog. The print/PDF/digital edition requirement is simpler than it may appear. But the web requirement may be more complex.
  
• "The publisher's online catalog would dump the purchase order directly into our computer system." This is what our live ISBN system enables (for PDF catalogs outsourced on the ExactEditions database), but the natural implementation is to collect the data on the publisher's or on the wholesaler's database system. Again this is simpler than Arsen's requirement (provided the publisher/wholesaler can resolve ISBNs) the catalog with live ISBNs does not need to know anything about the e-commerce system and its workings. But the requirement is again more complex than it appears, because as we have just mentioned, wholesalers are involved. The database catalog system has to be able to work with bookseller's systems, publisher's systems and also wholesaler's.
  

A key to making order out of this confusing situation, is to focus on these two features of the situation: promotional materials need to be published and as openly available as possible. Second, the book business (for librarians and well as retailers) is blessed with an amazingly unniversal product code: the ISBN. Automated systems need to leverage the value of these product codes and a catalog which is alive to ISBNs can be integrated with many other systems (bibliographic, transactional, or statistical) through the ISBN data. Use it.

The Future of Search and the Future of Magazines

John Battelle and Danny Sullivan have been sponsored by Thomson Reuters to write some pieces on the future of search. They are two of the shrewdest commentators on internet search so the essays will be worth reading. John Battelle has an exceptional feel for the overall commercial space in which search operates. Danny Sullivan has a terrier-like persistence which means that when he has really researched a topic, you are unlikely to find a better or a more judicious summary of it anywhere else. These guys are definitely worth reading.....

John Battelle's first piece works over some ideas that he has been poking around for some time. Searching on the go, with interaction between the web and the environment in which you move. His is an example of geo-vino-price-sensitive searching for the best deal on a bottle of Stag's Leap Cabernet as he hurries through the aisles of a supermarket pointing his phone/camera at the labels on the wines he passes (this all seems a bit furtive to me and I wonder whether John really does the shopping in his household?). My own geo preference is for a similarly priced bottle of Castello di Ama and I am not going to nickel and dime the enoteca over the last €1.50; but de gustibus non est disputandum.

John Battelle also blogs yesterday about the future of magazines (zero/niente/nil future, sooner rather than later, is my summary of his view). He is far too gloomy about that. This kind of woe/weltshmerz tends to hit magazine people who have really migrated to the web (John was a founding editor of Wired which is not to be confused with our wonderful music magazine The Wire); they tend to lose sight of the potential for magazines to be reborn digitally on the web and for subscribers to enjoy them. Some magazines have more or less given up editorially in the face of the web (has this happened to Newsweek or Time?)-- whilst others, such as the Economist and the Scientific American just keep on getting better.

In one respect the post-Battelle retail future is bright for magazines:- digital ordering and digital delivery is a breeze. Magazines and books is one of the few product categories that have well organised UPCs (universal product codes, ISSNs and ISBNs) and they can easily become digital, so the magazine publishers will be doing OK when bookstore and newstand browsers realize that they can point their iPhone at the UPC on the back of the book/mag and order a digital subscription rather than lug the pile home. 'Sale or return' is going to be a real disaster when this starts happening and the kiosk owner is going to have a struggle. Furthermore with a decent digital magazine you get access to the archive (the vintage numbers). You can't do that with a bottle of Stag's Leap: you can't track back through the vintages or order digital delivery (yet).

Come to think of it, if you could do one you could do the other. I quite fancy the idea of subscribing to a digital wine with archived and digitally 'remastered' vintages.......

Google Catalogs Again

Perhaps I should have mentioned in yesterday's blog that there is a sentimental interest in Google Catalogs from the Exact Editions side. When we were planning our platform in early 2005 we decided that the minimum level of functionality for a digital magazines service, as we conceived of it, was to be as good as Google Catalogs. I am not quite sure why we picked on Google Catalogs as our benchmark, rather than Google Books (which was above the parapet as Google Print when we were prototyping), but I guess that it was partly that the Catalogs service included the double-page view which seems to be essential for magazines. And there may have been other reasons that I cannot now recall. So that is why we noted yesterday with mild tristesse that Google Catalogs seems to be dormant. Our benchmark is fading....

It is ironic that this decay for Google Catalogs should be happening just as we are finding that Book Publishers Catalog(ue)s work well in our platform. But the Exact Editions service is very different in being primarily driven for publishers, and paid for by them, (the Google Catalogs service kept the vendors at arms length and was free). We are not trying to aggregate Catalogues in one repository, but to supply a service to independent publishers web sites, the more the merrier. It is, of course, vastly too small and specific a service opportunity to be of any commercial interest to Google. There is also a very specific reason why book catalogues can be more valuable as digital editions than apparel catalogs, books are really completely exceptional in having a universal and widely used product identifier. The ISBN. If there were ISANs (International Standard Apparel Numbers) Google Catalogs would have linked to them and Google would have become a close ally of all Catalog vendors.

Google Book Search is a completely different kettle of fish. Unlike the Google Catalog system it is already beginning to connect with the publishing and selling opportunities of publishers (see the way that all (?) CUP's current output, today 35,227 titles, can now be searched with Google Book Search). GBS will indeed be an enormous success, it already has the critical mass to succeed, but it does not follow that it will inevitably lead to a Google monopoly for digital books. There will always be scope for independent technical initiatives (for some books the Google system is not a good solution) and publishers are much more likely to be squashed by Amazon's terms of trade than by Google's. Google is becoming a significant ally for the independent publisher and we doubt that it will buy Ingram/Lightning Source, Jassin's suggestion, which already has a significant collaboration with Microsoft.

Hart Publishing

Hart Publishing are using our platform to make their 2008 books catalogue more accessible and more searchable. The ISBNs link nicely through to the appropriate page on the Hart web site.

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.

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