Sampling Magazines as they are Published

We have put up a service which is a promotional exercise for the Catholic Herald. Its a browseable, searchable but not properly readable digital sample of the weekly magazine/newspaper which we sell for them as a subscription service. You can try it out from their web pages or from this link:

http://www.exacteditions.com/sample/catholicherald

If a viewer of this sample tries to click through to the full page size, they are politely informed that the 'thumbnail' two page view is the maximum that they get for free. They are then encouraged to subscribe to a print edition or the digital version. We will be tracking the usage of this service and its effect on subscriptions. I predict that the print subscriptions will benefit more than the digital. Its also interesting to note that the classified advertisements are more useful than one might imagine, because the clickable links in the ads are all clearly clickable and usable as navigation aids (the tool tip gives you the address of each link).

Pages entirely composed of classified ads should ideally be available in 'full scale'. Actually, it is not super easy for our system to deliver this. But it should come -- at that point classified ads with all the interaction that they carry in our platform should come into their own as web resources.

Beyond the Papyrus?

I noticed yesterday that there had been a spate of sales in the last month for our magazine Ancient Egypt. I wondered whether this was a matter of Cleopatra finally acquiring a taste for Dazed & Confused or Ptolemy getting the hang of digital magazines; but a colleague pointed out that in all likelihood its a matter of pyramid selling.......

Google Book Search is it Rudderless?

Some librarians are complaining that they have been used by Google (hat tip to David Rothman) and they worry that Google is now losing interest in the library market. Google certainly seems to have backed away from publishers (no longer attending the main trade fairs, not making a concerted pitch towards them). So is the Google Book Search project losing its direction? Here are three guesses about that:

1. Google has made tremendous progress with the data capture project. There are no public aggregate statistics, but Michigan passed the 1m books target earlier this year, so I would estimate that Google Book Search has over 4 million titles contributed by the libraries, plus perhaps 1 million from publishers (Springer will have over 30,000 now). (If anyone has any good data on this please add as a comment). So in this sense Google Book Search is working very well as a powerful data-service, but no one at Google has a good idea about how to drive the books operation as a commercial service. Text-driven advertising is not going to monetise most of the books in the collection. GBS is a computer science project which is working really well but it is hard to see how it can become a pay-for-itself proposition. I think this is why Microsoft pulled out of its 'shadow Google Book Search' play, a month ago. It didnt see the point of being second best at something which might not have a commercial justification even if they were 'first best'. Microsoft doesnt believe in fundamental computer science engineering the way that Google does. The GBS project is not losing its direction, it was just a 'moon shot' with a long time to come to fruition. Come back in 10 years time. By then the computer science on handling a 50 million volume text database will be part-done. Google is not being slow or neglecting anybody. Its just a huge project.
   
2. Google is waiting until the legal mess around the status of in copyright titles is cleared up before putting a clear commercial direction on the Google Book Search service. So GBS is not so much rudderless as in 'legal limbo'. The direction will be resolved as part of a settlement with the publishers and authors and this settlement will give Google a big head start in providing a commercial book service, sanctioned by the publishers. Peter Brantley is worried that this may be where we are. But I am not convinced, because I suspect that Google is more interested in prolonging and delaying the legal issues than it is in reaching a settlement. Google gains by prolonging the dispute, because its hard to negotiate what it wants, and in the end technology will 'prise open' the copyright position that publishers (and agents) will never agree to surrendering. Publishers and 'old fashioned' authors and agents want to maintain the requirement that texts may only be copied with explicit permission. Google doesn't think like that and takes the view that texts like any physical object can be digitised, and that the digital object can be computed without permission, (though accepting that secondary commercial exploitation may need explicit permission). So Google is not expecting a legal victory, or a negotiated agreement anytime soon. If we think that the Google Book Search project is all about delivering books in the largest possible numbers, in the best possible format, to the greatest number of human readers, they had better get on and settle the disputes and start rolling out the commercial services before Amazon has walked off with all the commercial advantage using its Kindle. Google is just being too slow to get commercial because of legal hassles.
3. Finally, there is the possibility that the Google project really is 'rudderless' and they would have been better off taking on board explicit bibliographic and librarianship skills from the begining and they they can still do this and need to change tack in order to do so. They would need to re-orient and declare open some of their proprietary positions, perhaps they could co-opt Brewster Kahle, but an 'open source' revision to their project might have some benefits. Having a complete input from librarians and using the objective of creating a free open library of all no-longer-in-copyright material would have been a worthy target for Google and perhaps they will revert to operating in this way, if they decide that the legal obstacles to a fully commercial service of the kind that they are building are perhaps too fraught and tricky for them. Google Book Search is somewhat rudderless, because they have not defined the appropriate goal for their massive enterprise.
   

I tend to alternate between (1) and (3), but that may mean that I am wrong about (2) also. It could be that Google is well advanced with plans for a commercial version of Google Book Search and will launch a 'pay per view' implementation next week. Who knows?

How Should Publishers Price Digital Books?

Seth Godin has some intriguing and radical reactions to the Kindle. Hear his conclusion:

A lot has been written about how cool the screen is. It is cool. A lot has been written about the offbeat interface (not so good) and the seamless downloading (a wonder.) This is all irrelevant to me. What's worth commenting on is how close the Kindle comes to revolutionizing the way ideas are sold and spread, and how short it comes out in the end (for now.) My bet is that this is just round one. Round five could be/should be powerful indeed. (Random thoughts about the Kindle)

There are many other ideas in the piece. I was struck by Seth's suggestion that the pricing of books is whacked (ie too high). This despite the fact that many of the books available for the Kindle have a $9.95 price (ie a lot less than the corresponding trade hardback). Seth got on the phone and tried to persuade Amazon that they should ship every Kindle with some free books including several that Seth was prepared to offer them. That is not such a bad idea, though one understands why Amazon passed on the offer.

We wonder whether Amazon might not shift to a 'book club' model of distribution (did I somewhere see Mike Shatzkin suggest that Amazon might do this?) and the Kindle book-club would certainly be jump started if each Kindle came with 100 titles that the user could select from the 'premium offer shelf'. Publishers would collectively hate the still greater pricing power that such an approach would bring to Amazon, but authors and publishers individually would leap to see some of their titles included in the 'premium offer shelf'. Competition is tough.

There is a lot of resistance amongst publishers to the idea that the prices of books will come down as they go digital. A publisher (academic books, high level, limited markets) with whom I was discussing the Exact Editions platform said that our proposition for the end-user (a one year subscription tied to an individual account) was really more like a long-term library loan than anything else. Not a book purchase. Of course, we are not used to the idea of book libraries charging for loans (video libraries are a different matter) and publishers are not used to thinking of their role being 'library-like'. But roles are changing. My academic publisher friend decided that a one-year loan of one of his typical titles would probably be fairly priced at 60% of the full volume price. I suspect that he may be being a bit cautious and might gradually move to 40% if he finds that there is little substitution between book purchases and long-loans. But who knows? Pricing is mostly guesswork.

The value of an index and of free search

The Exact Editions platform makes it easy for publishers to offer free searching of their titles. The publisher can decide how 'restrictive' the search results will be, but even on the most restrictive view, the search results can be quite informative. For, example if you search in Debrett's Peerage and Baronetage on your own name, (click on the Debretts link if you wish to see any of the links which follow) you will find out whether you have aristocratic connections. As I expected, the Hodgkin links to the aristocracy are very tenuous. But a search for 'Thatcher' gets 19 hits, mostly for Margaret, which shows that she made quite an impact on the higher echelons of British society.

Searching Debrett's Peerage is a free offering. It should be a useful first step for any keen family historians and amateur genealogists. The publishers are happy to provide limited free research because the snippets with which the results are presented are helpful, but do not give the game away. Here is one of the 19 fragments which the 'Thatcher' search threw up:

That is a very small fragment of a page, but the selection of JPEG fragments which come with any search should in most cases be sufficient to alert the family historian to some basic guidance and, if a vein of blue blood is struck, the possibility of consulting the book in a library, or to obtaining a subscription.

Now comes the difficult part. How does the publisher alert the public to the fact that this limited but useful free service is now available? That is the challenge of the web....

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?

Zoomii

Zoomii is an imaginative way of using and displaying front covers (works fine in Firefox, not in Opera and Safari). It is an alternative interface to Amazon which gives you a good way of shopping for Amazon titles using a 'virtual bookstore' with the covers on shelves, face-out and clickable to purchase or get more data. I really like the way that it is built on Amazon bookstore meta-data, uses Amazon's S3 and Amazon EC2 (Amazon's cloud computing infrastructure) and of course guides you to Amazon's e-commerce system (it should get a promising flow of affiliate income). This is a business built by, with, from, on, and in front of Amazon. Chris Thiessen, the developer has a blog which reads as though it must be pretty much a one man (woman) and a baby effort. Isn't that cute? Isn't the achievement impressive?



One subtlety appeals to me, you can save bookshelves you may have generated. Here is my shopping cart for P G Wodehouse books. Hat tip to PersonaNonData and Brantley.

Is Google good for Writers?

This issue of whether Google helps the writer and the researcher seems to me a more important question, with a more clearly positive response, than the bugbear which is apparently agitating Nicholas Carr "Is Google Making us Stupid?". Nicholas Carr quotes various pessimists. For example, Maryanne Wolf who, perhaps worried that the web is encouraging intermittent and chunky reading, posits that "Deep reading is indistinguishable from deep thinking", or Richard Foreman who suggests that under the pressure of information overload we are losing our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance”. Foreman suggests we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”

These worries are fashionable, but they are border-line silly. This suspicion that we may be losing the ability to engage in "deep reading" or "dense inner repertories" really needs to be set against the question: How does the web (for which "How does Google?" is a surrogate) help us to engage in better writing, and deeper intellectual inquiries? If it does that, it is arguable that our dense inner repertories can look after themselves.

Does Google help the researcher and the serious writer? It seems blatantly obvious that it must. If so, the readers will benefit and some of them will read deeply of the results. But it is still rather early to tell how, and in what ways, a program such as Google Book Search may help the researcher, the serious reader and the serious writer, to write. Peter Brantley, in a discursive, inconclusive and even rambling, blog, raises many interesting questions about GBS as a reading system.

What is difficult here is intentionality. It is extraordinarily difficult to determine what a user's intentions are as they navigate and browse through a sea of text. It is relatively easy to give them intellectual "snack food" - places cited in this book; a timeline; historical figures. Those might drive clicks, and ultimately ad sales, but they might not actually help the user in their quest.

We are dumb animals after all, most of the time. We click on bright shiny objects, and are easily distracted. Designing a product to best meet the diversity of a user's intentions is very different than designing a product to maximize revenue. (Brantley: Book Search as a Product)

I have the impression that Peter may be expecting too much of GBS, and too much of Google. Google Book Search may well turn out to be a less than ideal platform for reading (which may happen if we are distracted magpie fashion by too many shiny objects), but it is surely shaping up to be a wonderful platform for research? Some of Google's critics suppose that the aim of the GBS project is to capture, corale and deliver to readers the whole of the world's literature in a readable format. But perhaps the business goal has all along been to produce a complete searchable index of literature, not the monopolistic reading medium. I am sure that GBS, as currently conceived, will never be a satisfactory platform in which to present and therefore publish all that can be published. Writers, designers and (even) publishers are too creative for all literary products to fit ideally in one representational and ideal reading platform, with a common architecture and apparatus.

In the end Google Book Search may work best as index and as a search tool because it enables us to obtain access to many different reading and writing styles, and to search books in a variety of digital manifestations. That Google should confine itself to this important but rather limited goal may be one outcome from any negotiated solution to its legal battles with copyright holders. But it would be good to have more evidence that Google Book Search is already helping scholars to write wonderful PhD's. It is a mild worry that the most credible example that I have seen of how GBS is helping scholarship is highly anecdotal and more than a year old (cited by Vielmetti in a comment on Brantleys' piece). It would be pleasing to have some richer, more recent and more substantial examples. Or is Google Book Search still too unrepresentative to be completely useful as an index to 19th century literature? Perhaps it really is too early to tell.

A magazine without single page views?

Well its really a catalogue (not a magazine) for a trade show:





The organiser wanted us to produce the catalogue with no option for 'single page' views. When I overheard discussion of this request, I assumed that it would not be practical, but I am pleased to say that the Exact Editions platform can be adapted to meet this slightly unusual request.

Why would the customer want this? His principal reason was that he wanted to make sure that his advertisers would get maximum exposure and was concerned that browsing users might simply skip all the single pages devoted to ads.

A Page for Shops

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

Steppe

Steppe magazine is added to the shop.

• Table of Contents
• A colour photograph taken in 1907!
• Hats
  

Pricing and Digital Editions

Eoin Purcell (whom we only know through the blogosphere) has followed Exact Editions closely and he makes a comment about the pricing of our recently released titles (Sawdays and Debretts). Eoin thinks the pricing is very reasonable (Debrett's individual is £75 and institutional is £295 per annum) and, by email, wonders whether we 'advise' the publishers, or whether they make up their own minds. Mostly they make up their own minds, but of course they sometimes consult us.

The pricing of the Sawdays books seems to me quite low (£1.99 to £6.99), but it is not so low that it would be a concern to us (at some point, we will say to a publisher: rather than charging one really ought to give the book away!). If the Debretts publishers had asked us how they should price their resources, this is the kind of response we might have given them:

1. consider what the competitors are doing
2. we can offer two servicies (1) to institutions (2) to individuals
3. probably important to consider which type of market is more important to you in the long term (my guess for this book would be the institutional market)
4. the individuals market is also important for creating the institutional market (librarians are more likely to subscribe to services which they hear that their members want) and the individual enthusiast creates an awareness buzz
5. pricing can be changed (but not too often or too dramatically without causing upset to your market)
6. its very important to remember that the pricing for a YEAR. 12 months only. But you should expect most subscribers to renew (especially the institutions) and in the longer term you will make much more from renewals than for one off non-renewers. The pricing should be such that the individual or the institution sees that it is good value to renew next year (even if they didn't use it as much as they thought they would -- which will often be true).
7. beneath some level the pricing is not elastic. I dont know what that level is, but my hunch would be that there is not much difference for your book between take-up at £200 per institution and £250, but that there is a reasonable difference in take-up between £200 and £600 per institution (similarly there may not be a huge difference between £45 and £55 per individual, but there probably is a big difference in take up between ££60 and £95 per annum). I think very few individuals not closely related to the Duke of Westminster will pay for an online annual subscription over £100.
   
8. Just guesses!

Actually that last piece of advice is the key. Just guesses! All this is guesswork. We none of us yet know how much digital literature will be free and what the right prices are to build up a culture of loyal subscribers to premium content. I have a strong suspicion that the right prices are going to be a lot lower than the premium prices charged by STM publishers for institutional access.

Its also the case that a digital platform offering 12 month licenses offers publishers a very interesting opportunity to test pricing strategies which they would not be able to do with print offerings.

Reference and Accessibility

As you get older (its more than 30 years since I started out as a greenhorn philosophy editor) you begin to notice that its sometimes quite hard to read the typeface of the books you want to read. Especially when the books are paperback reprints of books that were originally published in a larger hardback format (eg wonderful book on Leonardo). Since the cost of reformatting a major book are trivial, I used to complain about those mean-spirited publishers of great books who did not make any effort to ease the legibility of their republished books for over 50s.

No longer. Publishers are absolutely right not to reformat their popular paperbacks but to leave them exactly as they were in their originally published format, exactly as they were when they were first reviewed. This conclusion was inspired by the kerfuffle surrounding the issue of 'how many ISBNs should a book have?'. See Brantley's posting and reactions summarised on Publishing Frontier. The most extraordinary thing about these discussions is that it appears that many publishers believe that a digital format which does not allow or facilitate consistent citation is an acceptable format for their books to appear in. If the original typography, layout, design and pagination of a book is lost (and all these 'reflowable' formats for ebooks fail in this regard) then it is much harder, perhaps impossible, to devise a consistent way of citing it and referring to it.

When harping on in this respect on the importance of citations and consistent reference schema, within a book and between books, I sometime feel that I may be veering in the direction of millenarianist fanaticism ("prepare for the universal digital library by rendering all pages into consistent web resources, for the digital universe of cloud computing is nigh"). Peter Brantley may even have accused me of such a "born again" approach.

But before dismissing this preference for reliable references, properly evinced by publishers who stick with their original typesetting when they produce a trade paperback in shrunken dimensions, remember that 'Cloud computing' also needs consistent schema for access (so urls matter) and for searching (so proprietary file formats don't help). ISBNs only belong to formats which can be properly cited and searched. Give SKUs to formats which dont literate in the cloud computer. They arent real books so they dont need an ISBN!

The problem of re-sizing pages for the over 50's is going to be solved by our browsers with resolution independent scaleable graphics.

Sawdays

Sawdays, the Bristol-based, ecologically sensitive, travel publishers are using the Exact Editions platform to provide digital access to some of their titles. The 'Sawdays shop' opens today and will have a policy of completely Open Access for five days (till close of business on Friday 20th). The Exact Editions system is a 'streaming' system, it does not involve file downloads, so there is no likelihood of all the cats getting out of the bag whilst providing a limited window of 'Open Access'.

Technical note: sure someone could 'steal' all the content whilst its on open access, but they will get nothing more useful than would be obtained by photocopying or scanning all the titles from physical copies. A serious pirate would probably do that because they should be able to get higher quality scans from a professional scan.

One of the Sawdays books is a guide to Pubs & Inns of England & Wale
As the Exact Editions platform now supports automatic linking from post codes, this guide will help the exploratory drinker by providing handy Google-map directions as to how to get there. One of my favourite pubs in the guide is the Mole at Toot Baldon. Excellent food and Hookie beer. The link we provide on how to get there is keyed to the post code. I like the way that Google Maps helpfully suggests 'make this my default location'. The temptation to make your 'local' your 'default location' should be resisted, however good the beer.

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.

Debrett's

We have opened a shop for Debrett's through which they are initially offering indvidual and institutional licenses to their formidable (3000 pp in print) and authoritative Debrett's Peerage and Baronetage.

The resource will clearly have a strong appeal for the growing interest in family history and genealogy and the publishers have generously allowed free searching from the Debrett's shop. That is right 'free searching' but browsing limited to the 16 page view; but come to think of it Exact Editions is really subsidising the free searching, since its our servers that are spinning away 24X7. The user can search for free 'Snowdon' (30 results), or 'Harrow' (more than 200), or 'Groucho' (9), 'Chelsea Arts' (10).... etc. Fascinating browsing in the free shop.... which may tempt you to buy an individual license (only £70).

The book comes through in an undeniably readable format on our platform. Here is a tiny snippet of the list of bishops, or to use the correct term "Lords Spiritual":

Debrett's Peerage & Baronetage

Debrett's Peerage & Baronetage

Page P1523

and it is enlivened by thousands of heraldic crests:

Debrett's Peerage & Baronetage

Debrett's Peerage & Baronetage

Page P620

These can be merely glimpsed in the thumbnail page images. But the glimpse helps to give a sense of the book and its quality:

http://www.exacteditions.com/exact/browse/455/525/3731/1/66?dps=

Sky Writing and Earth Writing

Yesterday the second iteration of the iPhone appeared. Much anticipated and even with the hype not a disappointment. The iPhone and the soon to arrive Google Android are opening up a new wave of geo-rooted software.

Google Maps/Google Earth is helping a lot of this innovation and it is extraordinary how much can be done with the resource. Gutenberg would have been amazed that there is now a buildings-in-Google-earth typeface. One could even write a poem with it. A greetings message will illustrate the potential:

http://www.geogreeting.com/view.html?yGovmywoUqoyBqoa

The Carbon Footprint of Digital Print

What is the carbon footprint of a digital book? We have to make some possibly heroic simplifying assumptions. The first point to note is that a digital book has a very, very low carbon footprint if no one reads/accesses it. This is a matter of some concern to librarians and archivists who may wish to simply preserve, or 'back up', large amounts of literature which will be little read. It can be held in computer memory for an infinitesimal energy cost. Well done the New York Public library and Oxford's Bodleian for using Google Book Search to archive books which will cost much more to move from the stacks than is spent on their digital archive. It is also very relevant that the ecological cost of printed books and magazines come up front: in the making of paper, the manufacturing of books/issues, significant numbers of which are 'returned' through the distribution channel and all of which may be bought but not read.

The carbon footprint begins to mount if the digital book is used. So let us assume that digital books are used in a service which has high throughput and which will deliver pages to customers at a price which will not be greater than the Amazon s3 service. Since Amazon is already delivering such a digital service with the Kindle, any seriously competitive digital publishing system will need to use a cost base with comparable or lower charges. The published tariffs of the s3 service tell us that a digital publisher should not really be paying more than 17c per GB for delivering content. A large digital distributor (eg Amazon itself) will obviously be paying a lot less than 17c, and the s3 scale goes down to 10c per GB for users who take up more than 150 TB a month. Now we can make a heroic guesstimate of the cost per digital book delivered. We need two more parameters:

1. How many books do we get for a Gigabyte of delivered content?
   
2. What percentage of the cost is attributable to electricity or to atmospheric pollution?

With a very rough back-of-the-envelope this looks like $100 per million pages delivered. If we say a typical book is read once page by page, for 200 pages, we have approximately 50 digital book-readings per $1 of server cost. Now how much of that $1 is attributable directly to energy costs, and how much to Amazon's margins the investment in computers, land etc? This envelope is getting rougher all the time, and I dont have the patience to plough through the details of Amazon's annual reports to find hard data on their energy expenditure, but if we say at most 50% of Amazon's web service costs are energy costs, it looks as though the $1 of server cost is translating to 50c in electricity, or about 1c per book-reading (10/20 book readings per kWh).

1 c or 1 penny is still a cost, but its not a big deal. Distribution costs do not disappear from the equation when we go digital, but they do almost vanish. Digital books cost almost nothing in the distribution chain and they have a much smaller environmental footprint.

What does a conventional book cost in energy? What is the carbon footprint of a typical book or magazine? According to David Reay quoted from the THES, a typical book costs 4.5 kWh or 3 kg of carbon dioxide:

What with production and transport, the average paperback has eaten its way through 4.5kWh of energy by the time it gets to a reader. In terms of climate impact, this is equivalent to about 3kg of carbon dioxide emissions for every glossy new textbook. So, for a print run of 10,000, there is a cost of 30 tonnes of carbon dioxide not mentioned on the dust jackets.

Digital books and magazines are at least two orders of magnitude more efficient than the print equivalents. These calculations may be back of the envelope, but they point to the urgent need to move to a more sustainable distribution system for the health of our planet and the long-term benefit of book and magazine publishing.

Digital Books Don't Smell

So what?

Exactly. There is really no possible interest in this line of discussion. I cited with approval Robert Darnton's recent piece in the New York Review of Books on the Digital Library. But I missed this truly silly paragraph:

Books also give off special smells. According to a recent survey of French students, 43 percent consider smell to be one of the most important qualities of printed books—so important that they resist buying odorless electronic books. CaféScribe, a French on-line publisher, is trying to counteract that reaction by giving its customers a sticker that will give off a fusty, bookish smell when it is attached to their computers.

Do you credit that statistic about French students? There are lots of reasons why French, Italian, English, American students do not buy electronic books but them not smelling has nothing to do with it. CaféScribe is not French, but based in Salt Lake City. I am sure that their sniffy sticker was just a publicity stunt, like their alleged poll result. So lets hear no more about the snags of odourless digital resources. Of course physical books are different and give us information that digital does not; of course historians and textual scholars should examine first editions with care and attention to every physical detail in real libraries, but there is no need to exaggerate.

Oddly enough, I revisited that paragraph of Darnton's (having originally skipped it) reading the blog of Hugh McGuire, who some years ago launched a wonderful complement to the digital library of our future: LibriVox. Public domain talking books. Digital books probably should never have an odour, but they can certainly be more useful when they are digital and also audible.

Promotional Codes

Magazine publishers find that special promotions can work well in recruiting new subscribers, especially when targeting a particular mailing list. We now support promotional codes. See our shopping basket. Quest Bulgaria are the first magazine to have taken advantage of our system.

Pages and Page Numbers.......

Many digital edition platforms ignore and eliminate traditional pagination. They create a 'reflowable' text which has a loose format which adjusts its shape to the device on which the text is displayed. Exact Editions (along with Google Book Search and most of the PDF-based digital magazine systems) is firmly page-centric. And we actually use the pages, by making the Tables and Indices live resources.

So we hit problems when publishers play fast and loose with page numbers. We met this problem today with two very different publications. The first a distinguished and intellectual magazine which has a lot of ads occuring in an unpredictable pattern within the whole magazine. So page 8 in the table of contents may really be the 18th page and page 10 the 23rd. Only the editorial matter is paginated. Such an arrangement is easy enough for a human to navigate but it gives our algorithms indigestion (hiccoughs?). The only acceptable solutions we can think of is to suggest to the publisher that they impose a traditional (ie normal) pagination, or that they supply a PDF where all the ads are collected at the back. There may be publishing objections to these solutions, so it is not certain that we can help them with a digital edition.

The second problem today was a book (I look forward to seeing it since it covers the best pubs in the UK), but awkwardly for us the index is based on a numerical ordering in which the pubs appear in the book, rather than simple pagination. As it happens, I have just bought another and weighty tome (letters from and to Wittgenstein) in which the indices are 'entry' ordered rather than page-derived. Putting all the correspondence with Wittgenstein in a date order and then using the numerical order of the letters for a scholarly apparatus rather than the pagination, makes clear editorial sense. I am pleased to say that our algorithms can probably deal with the pubs, so Wittgenstein's letters would be a comparative breeze. If Wiley/Blackwell are looking for a new digital platform we can help out.....

Loose-leaf publishing is another matter. We have wondered about it, but for the moment we shall walk by on the other side.

More new Stuff: Petticoats and Widgets

The widget is a bit easier to explain, but we will ruffle the petticoats in a minute; as for the widget, you can kick the tires of this widget immediately by clicking on the front cover of New Humanist in the right hand column. That is a front cover image of the monthly publication. The humble New Humanist widget keeps track of the front cover of the current edition. A widget that guards a monthly periodical is going to have less to do than a widget that tracks the progress of a weekly; and when we distribute a daily publication, the front cover widget is going to be quite busy. The widget is simply a short chunk of HTML which you can copy and paste into any blog or web page, so it is also a convenient way of providing some viral promotion.

Now if you click on our New Humanist widget, what happens?

If you have done that, you will have plunged straight into the petticoat version of the magazine in a new window. This is a minimal view of the current issue of the magazine which allows you to 'search' it in full, to see search results and to navigate the thumbnail-image overview of the full magazine. Try a search for 'dawkins' to see what you get.

So the idea is that a magazine publisher can promote the current issue of the magazine with this widget, and the potential audience will get some awareness of the contents but they will only be able to go so far, and they will have a reminder that they can go further by subscribing to the magazine (either in its print or in its digital edition). The appropriate call to action can be inserted as a link in the panel that politely informs the audience that 'This preview only allows you to see thumbnails of the pages....'.

Petticoats, because we used this analogy when we were discussing the idea and considering how we could provide access to full versions of content from current issues whilst not giving the whole show away. We thought it was a bit like the can-can dancer on Montmartre, she can reveal a lot of leg confidently because the petticoats provide adequate cover (this is our thumbnails only view), or she can reveal all in a barely readable form (this would be our double-page view, and is a pretty generous offer), or at the extreme she can provide complete open access. That means taking off all restraints and is quite hard to do if you also plan to sell something to the paying customer....

Geo-links from Dive

Here is a page in an open free sample issue of Dive magazine which shows our post code links.

If you click on the post code, TR27 4HN for Gulfstream Scuba Ltd you get straight to this Google map of the shop's location.

Dive

October 2006

Page 108

A passing observation: I love the way that Google Maps now gives you some photographs of places close to the postcode or location that you have given for a map request. If you click on the photo the precise location on the map comes up with a larger version of the photo tethered to it.

Green

Welcome to a new magazine in our Australian shop. This was our quickest magazine into the shop. Only one day, the publisher could work very fast as we moved from test files to release version (I think he may have been up all night) because he had been let down by another digital system at the last minute and had already promised his audience a digital edition.

• Table of contents
• Going solar
  
• An eco-house with a fabulous library
  

Darnton on Google and Libraries

There is an entertaining and instructive piece about libraries The Library in the New Age and their exciting future, from Robert Darnton (distinguished historian of print and librarian at Harvard) in the current issue of the New York Review of Books. A lot of his focus is on Google and Google Book Search, but the conclusions of the article are surprisingly conservative: "Meanwhile, I say: shore up the library. Stock it with printed matter." It is as though Darnton is reluctant to risk a political or philosophical view on the way the digital library should evolve: as though it were not a historian's job to make that risky judgement.

Arguably this caution comes from a proper historical modesty, but Darnton recognises the importance of the digital turn for libraries, and big decisions will come his way this year and next. He is, after all, the director of Harvard's library, one of Google's founding partners and the richest academic library in the world, so Harvard will be setting standards and should be blazing trails. Perhaps he will be bolder in a digital vein when he orchestrates policy for his institution.

Books and will they always be Printed on Paper?

Richard Charkin (Exacutive Director at Bloomsbury and - to declare an interest - friend of many years standing) is quoted in the Guardian on the permanence of books:

'There will continue to be a market for printed books for a very long time. I believe the bulk of people will still prefer to hold, feel, treasure, give, receive, display and read a printed book.'

Although, in some moods I am inclined to agree with Charkin: what if he is whistling in the breeze? Here are five reasons why print books may (mostly) disappear from the publishing scene (I agree that there will still be a market for second-hand printed books even when most people prefer to buy a digital book):

1. Moore's law. If/when an acceptable and popular form of digital book arrives, the digital channel will benefit from Moore's law:- in this context this means that digital will become more attractive with respect to printed books at a rate approaching 50% per annum. Just before the Charkin comment, Gail Rebuck is cited to the effect 'e-book competitors will not kill the book but happily co-exist with it in a bright new bi-literary environment.' (Its not a direct quote). But that surely will not happen, because a digital solution will be getting better so much faster. How publishers can respond to a distribution channel that gets better (cheaper, more profitable. more capacious, better value) at 50% per annum is another matter.... but it will make it very difficult for printed books to be in a steady-state of peaceful co-existence, as it were 'always with us' like hardback and paperback editions.
   
2. As more of our cultural environment migrates to the web (photos have gone with a flicker, music is going with an iTune, radio is on its last FM and TV is on the way via YouTube; film will certainly go digital), do we think that books alone of our mass culture formats will remain primarily analog in print? On the contrary books will be and are being sucked on to the web because those who live and work in a web environment, need digital books to be on the web.
3. Energy. Books are heavy on energy. Are we sure that printed books will still be so popular when they cost £50/$80 or £15/$17.50 for mass market paperback. That may happen if oil goes to $300 a barrel.
4. Digital editions will at some point begin to be perceived as better/more useful than print books. At that point, publishers, authors and designers will invest a great deal of effort in making them even better, in providing functions that print books cannot. And at that point Moore's law (or perhaps its Metcalfe's law) will come in with a vengeance.
5. Libraries are going digital with enthusiasm and digital libraries will be much better than we can currently envisage. Digital literature will be the golden age of the library and we will all use digital library services.
   

At the moment CEO's and captains of publishing houses feel the need to be cautious and to reassure their markets and their audience that change will be gradual and not disruptive. But if the change is disruptive and imminent the publishing houses who have already geared up for digital distribution and marketing will be at an advantage. I think most CEO's in the business know that, and they also know that they are not too well prepared for it.

A lot of this is generational. I also like printed books and I am sure that I will still be reading them in 10 years time, but I suspect that by then most of my purchasing will be of digital books and my children will think it a bit odd that I still like reading from print editions.

Making a Live Post Code

The Exact Editions import process now makes post codes live, clickable, resources. We have been doing this for a week. It is not easy to predict all the doors that this might open for our publishing partners. But it is very clear that it makes advertisements more useful and more interesting. Take a simple classified ad in the Quaker weekly The Friend, which we distribute every Friday. The Penn Club has a regular ad in the magazine:

The Friend

23 May 2008

Page 18

That clipping shows you the ad, but it does not show you the live links (post code, email and url), for that you need to have a subscription to our service. If you were a subscriber you would note that the post code was highlighted, and that the link takes you to an optimal view in Google Maps. If you subscribe to one of our magazines you can state on your preferences page which map system you want to use (Multimap and Street Map UK are also supported). We have a number of other resolvers in hand...... and will gradually add post code systems from other countries.

Google has for some time provided live geo-links from some of its books. But their approach is based on selecting books with a strong geo-interest (for example this travel guide to Ecuador) and then providing a constructed map view of the places mentioned in the book (probably more difficult, but less scaleable than our zip-code resuscitation method). So far as I know, neither Google, nor any other digital edition platform has yet done automated linking from post codes to a mapping system. But, of course I could be wrong about this and will print a correction if someone can produce the counter-example(s).

There is also the important difference that the Google system is really producing an annotated map from a book, whereas our system is providing navigation links from explicit items within the text. One might say, that if a post code deserves to be printed, it merits being made into a navigation link. Its simply more useful and more valuable that way.

Going Local

Yesterday's FT had a piece about mapping as an interface to the web. This is one view on why this change is important:

Erik Jorgensen, a senior executive in Microsoft’s online operations, says the software company is building a “digital representation of the globe to a high degree of accuracy” that will bring about “a change in how you think about the internet”. He adds: “We’re very much betting on a paradigm shift. We believe it will be a way that people can socialise, shop and share information.” 'Way to Go? Mapping to be the Web's next Big Thing', Financial Times, 21 May 08

Google, Nokia and others are investing in parallel projects. The article speculates that controlling the geo-interface may put one company in a dominant position. But perhaps that will not happen, in part because their is an open source foundation under construction in OpenStreetMap, Its coverage is improving in Wikipedian fashion (getting better all the time). The current view of Florence is good on the railways and autostrada, but lacking in detail.

As it happens we have started adding geo-tags to our data this week (so we can now render as live links, post codes mentioned in text or advertisements). We will blog about this shortly. As a side note: one guesses that geo-coding will become important to us all for one reason not mentioned in the FT's article yesterday. But headline news on the front page. Oil goes to $135 a barrel. It is not really a paradox to suggest that we may care more about exactly where we are, as we learn to travel less.

Will Digital Books and Magazines Have Skype Conversations in Them?

Sure, it is already happening. Today I followed a link from Om Malik, where he was talking about movie clips popping up within Skype conversations (apparently that is coming -- and I totally agree that Skype video calls work very well, so why not include video in the conversation?). Anyway, Om was citing the way that TV shows are now using Skype interviews, here is a link to Oprah doing it. Well that is interesting, and the Skype conversation banner is carrying an ad for Borders, and when I take a closer look at the TV show, I realise that it is actually being replayed on the People magazine web site. So here we have a Skype conversation, carrying a Borders ad, taking place on a TV show, with a recording of a live interview promoting the sale of a book on spiritual well being, distributed on a magazine's web site. And not forgetting that we accessed all that from a blog.

I lost track of the number of media channels covered by that description, but does anybody doubt that the web is leading us to multimedia engagement with our audiences?

When are e-Books coming?

For years I have been on the Liblicense list, which is widely read by university librarians and academic publishers. It is a big list with several thousand adherents, but librarians are not particularly vocal (that comes with needing to be quiet in the library -- yeah, I know, very feeble joke) and many publishers sign up to the list but keep their heads down (because they dont want to be exposed as money grasping scoundrels -- even more feeble joke). So the list is quite controversial but not that busy in view of the emotions it sometimes engenders.

One of the regular communicators is Chuck Hamaker (of the University of North Carolina, Charlotte). Today he commends a recent newsletter from the Association of American University Presses and in particular some promising signs of innovation from MIT Press. But he also includes an injunction to publishers to get a move on with digital books:

Come on, get to it--make e-books practical and workable, please!

I suspect that a lot of publishers feel as though they are stampeding into an e-books future, but to the university librarian it looks as though the industry is slow off the mark. In one way Chuck is clearly right. Academic research journals have been digital for years, and academic books are by contrast scarcely available in digital form. Time to hurry up!

Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and Google's Algorithms

We recently discovered that Google was no longer finding the home page of one of our partner publishers because the description of the magazine Quest Bulgaria on their home page was pretty much identical to the description on our system. Our derivative entry knocked them out, rather than the other way round, because our site is busier than theirs.....so given more weight by Google.

This was a puzzling and unwanted result so the publisher quickly changed the description on our system (our publishers can do this in real time through a form in which they edit the blurb), and Google is now finding Quest Bulgaria again (at the moment we come in a respectable third on the Google search). It was not difficult to make the changes and to invite the Google spider to return, but as one of my colleagues observed: Google is finding that it is not possible to be an accurate measure of the web because the way in which it maps and cadastrates the web is itself changing and deforming the natural shape of the web. My colleague finds Heisenberg's uncertainty principle at work here, but I am not so sure about that, it may simply be a lack of competition which is allowing the Google algorithms to become over bossy and over fussy. Would web spam be just as bad if there were three broadly competitive search engines at work? And if web spam were reduced would Google get subtler at discriminating between content which has a difference of function even though little linguistic difference on the page?

Where Google got the idea.....

Google's Book Search project is possibly their most ambitious undertaking. From one point of view it is an attempt to reverse engineer a proposal entertained by Alan Turing 60 years ago. He was wondering how to design a computer which would have a very large, efficient and affordable digital memory. As a thought experiment he considered the potential for using books ( a library) as a system of machine memory:

We may say that storage on tape and papyrus scrolls is somewhat inaccessible. It takes a considerable time to find a given entry. Memory in book form is a good deal better, and is certainly highly suitable when it is to be read by the human eye. We could even imagine a computing machine that was made to work with a memory based on books. It would not be very easy but would be immensely preferable to this single long tape. Let us for the sake of argument suppose that the difficulties involved in using books as memory were overcome, that is to say that mechanical devices for finding the right book and opening it at the right page, etc. etc. had been developed, imitating the use of human hands and eyes. The information contained in the books would still be rather inaccessible because of the time involved in mechanical motions. One cannot turn a page over very quickly without tearing it, and if one were to do much book transportation, and to do it fast, the energy involved would be very great. Thus if we could move one book every millisecond and each were moved ten metres and weighed 200 grams, and if the kinetic energy were wasted each time, we would consume 1010 watts, about half the country’s power consumption. If we are to have a really fast machine then we must have our information, or at any rate a part of it, in a more accessible form than can be obtained with books. (a lecture to the London Mathematical Society in Feb 1947, quoted by Hodges: Alan Turing -- the Enigma, p 319)

Turing emphasizes the crucial importance of referential transparency in designing book-based machines ("...right book and opening it at the right page, etc. etc...."). There is no point in having a digital book unless the system can locate each and every constituent element within each and every book efficiently. File-based e-book systems have papyrus-like referential opacity. Google Book Search is certainly not making this mistake. Efficient search, random access, referential precision and interoperability will work together in the digital library.

I do not seriously suggest that Google took the idea for their great project from Turing, but it is remarkable that Turing's modest proposal is being captured in ways that he could not have imagined, but of which he would surely have approved.

To Reflow or to Cite?

The Association of American Publishers have produced a letter in support of the IDPF's EPUB standard. There are so many things wrong with this approach that it is hard to know where to start. This quotation is representative of the substance of the letter:

....For books with text that can be reflowed, many publishers would like to create and deliver to retailers and/or wholesalers EPUB files. If a proprietary e-book format is then needed, it is expected that the retailer and/or wholesaler will take on the effort to convert the EPUB file in a scalable, high fidelity way that either preserves the layout and design of the original or otherwise delivers the content in a rendering acceptable to the publisher.

First, let us grant that EPUB has a role to play as a safe and neutral file format for the various proprietary eBook standards to aim at as a conversion bridge. But it is really a very small role, and in my view PDF will be a much more important archival and preservative file format than the EPUB specification. Second, of course we are in favour of standards and different sectors of the industry collaborating to support them. But nearly everything else about the AAP's letter is off-base or highly debatable.

• It is not clear that digital books really have to have a file format. Thinking of books as digital text files is not the way that Google Book Search works (nor is it the way we think at Exact Editions). Books are the building blocks of Google Book Search, but they are not necessarily or primarily files. The GBS view has them as collections of web pages (managed by a scaleable database that hosts many books).
  
• Then there is this new 'reflow' concept. There is a growing general presumption that reflowable books are desirable. Transitive activity verbs tend to have a positive connotation. It is better that you have a book that you can {copy, lend, read, sell, flow, reflow} right? Well maybe, but a reflowable book is a book that you can not cite, that you probably cannot bookmark, that a search engine will not be able to directly search...... From many standpoints reflowable books/texts are a second best idea. Do we hear librarians, historians and curators calling for reflowable books: with tables and indexes which lose their bearings, pages that cannot be cited and typography that is messed up?
• If you decide on a distribution channel that permits 'reflow', your book in that format will not have determinate page references and citations. That is such a big loss that every book which is 'reflowable' may need to have a referentially stable primary edition.
  
• What on earth can the AAP mean by expressing the hope that the industry will have 'completed' the transition to the EPUB standard by October 2008? Completed what?

It is a mostly waffly and empty letter and will not carry weight in the tussle between Google (which should have minimal need for the EPUB format) and Amazon which is broadly on the books-are-a-file side of the fence and ought to be using EPUB for its Kindle, but is not. Whether digital books are citeable and searchable, page-fixed, digital resources; or electronic texts within a Kindle/Sony/Iliad reader will be clearer in a year or two. I doubt that it will be settled by October of this year.

Final irony. Reflowable and easily copyable texts have their purposes. One of them would be to make it easier for people to copy statements put out on the web. The AAP letter is such a circumstance, but so far from being in a reflowable or easily copied format, their letter has been put up as a simple JPEG and I had perforce to retype the passage quoted above (any errors of transcription are mine).

Sara Lloyd's manifesto and captcha finally gotcha

This looks pretty interesting (and it looks like the first installment of a multi-part manifesto). I particularly liked her way of putting things here:

The publishing model has evolved over history in a very slow, organic fashion. The sedate pace of change has suited publishers. Stated simply, the journey of a text from author to reader has been a linear one, with publishers traditionally fulfilling the intermediary roles of arbiter, filter, custodian, marketer and distributor. There has been some blurring at the edges, some tinkering with the process, but little radical change. In the literary world, agents have, at least partially, usurped the arbiter and filter roles. Retailers have become, to some extent, marketers and, occasionally, have even become publishers themselves. However, by and large, the stages in the process have been clearly delineated and the role of the publisher clearly defined. From a print perspective at least, publishers have offered one key, relatively unique set of abilities: to produce, store and distribute the product to the market. The rise and rise of the Internet has begun to disrupt this linear structure and to introduce the circularity of a network. More challengingly, perhaps, it has raised the distinct possibility of publisher disintermediation by more or less removing as an obstacle the one critical offering previously unique to publishers - distribution. (the complete article will appear in Library Trends)

Read the piece.

The reading/writing process is indeed, now, rather circular. One of its circularities is that when writing a blog one has to 'read' some 'machine unreadable' text in order to prove that we are not machines, but truly human. The captchas on Blogger are getting really tricky.






I am sure that the captchas are more iffy than they were a month ago. Does this mean that computers are getting better at pattern recognition and the randomised but possibly still human-readable images need to be even more convoluted? Or is it that my brain is getting fuzzier and my cerebellum more Turing-mechanical and senescent? Well you can be the judge of the matter. But if this blog suddenly stops with no explanation, and there is a prolonged silence for a matter of weeks, there is no need to send out search parties, no point in sending me belated fan-mail, you can assume that the captchas have ratcheted up to another level of difficulty and I have been completely defeated, silenced, by their 'disrupted linear structure' (to use Sara Lloyd's apposite phrase).

Incremental Improvements

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

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

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

Or see them all here

http://www.exacteditions.com/acblack

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

Tips For Dealing With Information Overload

Philippe Lenssen at Google Blogoscoped, asked 14 talented people how they cope with the digital onrush. There are some helpful suggestions (and don't we all need it). But I was gobsmacked to see that he had sought and actually elicited advice on this matter from Noam Chomsky:

«I wish I could answer sensibly. I just can’t. You should see the room in which I’m working. Piles of books, clippings, manuscripts, notes,... All sorts of lost treasures buried in them.

That doesn't help me much. But I am massively impressed that Philippe can obtain advice on organisation from one of our intellectual giants. (Philippe --- that really was the Noam Chomsky?). Do you think Sean Connery would have any advice for me on how to keep my desk tidy? Or would Sophia Loren deign to advise me on improvements for our garden?

I think Matt Cutts's simple suggestion is the one that I will take away:

At the beginning of the day, write down the 1-2 things you really want to accomplish that day. That will help keep you on track.

The thing that most helps me to stay on track, hour by hour, is our home-grown customer relations wiki-database-blog. For some reason it is called Crumb. I am hoping that one day some Ruby ace will enhance Crumb so it can answer my emails for me.

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.......

A Publishing Ontology

Yesterday I was listening to two of my colleagues discussing our platform and what should be done with a catalogue, when I realised that I did not have a clue as to what was going on. When geek-talk overwhelms me I tend to reach back for philosophical roots.
-- "Hang on a minute -- I interjected -- you are talking about our ontology. I didnt realise that we have an ontology".

Well it turns out that we do, and I am begining to get the hang of it. There are four important types of entity in the Exact Editions universe. (1) Publishers, who come at the top of the tree (of course) who control access, deliver content, they may need branding, they may get subscriptions and revenue, and they will expect to get usage statistics; then there are (2) Publications, which may be of various subtypes (eg magazines, brochures, books, catalogues etc), publications will have their own 'entry point/home page' and our usage statistics will be aggregated for the individual publication; then there are some special publications which have peculiar characteristics for example they may have earlier or later issues: (3) Issues. Searches can be aggregated across issues of a single publication. At any rate yesterday's geek-speak was hovering over the question of whether publishers' catalogues have issues or not, since they can certainly have (4) Supplements. We decided that some catalogues are issue-like. Publisher's seasonal lists have a periodical frequency which makes them a bit like issues of a periodical. At any rate, our ontology now allows for the possibility.

In fact we are still only scratching the surface. If you want to get tied in absurdly complex knots we have to introduce you to the topic of loose-leaf-publications........It will make Being and Nothingness feel like child's play.

Amazingly Compilcated Viewability Restrictions

One hesitates to recommend a 50 minute podcast. But this chat at Talis's The Library 2.0 Gang had some interesting comments. The focus of the discussion was on the recently release Google Book Search Viewability API, and there seemed to be fairly general agreement that it was a step in the right direction but not yet enough.

Google needs to loosen up a bit and open up some more to enable some really interesting literary mashups to take hold. There were some particularly interesting contributions from Frances Haugen, a Google Book Search Product Manager. She spoke passionately and idealistically about the aims of the Google Book Search project. She agreed that an API which allowed some server-side interactions would be a good idea. But in passing she noted that there were legal issues and limitations. I was particularly struck by her comment that the Google rules on access limitations on international viewability are 'amazingly complicated'.

Google's lawyers are being strict on the extent to which works which may not be public domain in other countries can be accessed/viewed outside the US (but the majority almost certainly are in most places). It is not surprising that such a set of house rules limits the extent to which a useful API can be defined. The problem is not so much copyright, as the differing terms of copyrights in different jurisdictions and the penumbra of uncertainty about who has what.

Google Book Search will work better for Google if they can outsource the business of establishing who has clear title in a text and where. That could mean negotiating with publishers before digitising the text. It may come to that, and Google Book Search will be more comprehensive and more accessible when it does so.

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.

Google Catalogs is in Limbo

Google Catalogs seems to be neglected. I checked it out earlier today and could not find a single Catalog with a 2008 publication date. I did find one catalogue with £ prices, and I had not realised that the Catalogs service ever included any British catalogue companies (we have catalog vendors and catalogue companies depending on where we are?).

Google Catalogs was launched in 2001, and uses rather similar technology to Google Book Search. I doubt that it was a deliberate dummy run for the books project (originally Google Print), but I am sure that useful lessons were learned. Google's books project began to see the light of day in 2004, first at Frankfurt for the world of publishing and then with various Library partnerships. Mind you The Google Book Search History page, from which I have checked these dates, could do with an update. A lot has happened since 2006. Michigan did tell us in February that they had got through 1 million titles (most but not all from the Google partnership). The Google project is coming on apace and some fresh initiatives will confirm the seriousness of their intent.

Thumbnails

Thumbnails are useful. I hope that the institutions that are taking out site licenses to our magazines will include thumbnails of their front cover in their OPACs (see the source code of this page for the relevant HTML). Sometimes a front cover is worth 10,000 words.

Maybe we should offer subscribing institutions a free widget which will keep itself up to date and carries the front cover of the current issue and then links the student straight through to the full content (within the limits of the IP range of course). Is that a good idea, or tiresome?