The Trouble with Orphans

In the old dispensation books (and magazines and newspapers) used to be published and then gradually disappear. A few copies of any particular print run would be kept in archival conditions in important libraries, but by and large they gradually mouldered away. In fact they biodegraded into mulch. Something similar happened to the 'copyrights': to the intellectual property that the publications crystalised. After a few decades, and with the exception of a very few masterpieces or works of genius, the intellectual property that they represented was of negligible value or interest, and they would sooner or later fall into the public domain, probably before the physical book biodegraded. At that point the 'IP' did not matter, or rather it mattered only to the public domain.

In the last 10 years there has been a growing tumult about 'orphan' copyrights. Or 'orphan works'. In the eyes of some of the key critics, eg James Grimmelmann, the real problem with the Google Book Search proposition and the Settlement that Google is reaching with Authors and Publishers is all about the orphans that are being swept up into the maw of Google's 7 million, and counting scanned digital books.

But the funny thing about 'orphan works' is that the very category is defined by the technology which makes it possible to replace or preserve printed books by digital books which could last forever. The books and photographs are no more 'orphan' than they ever were, it is just that they look like they should be imortal rather than biodegraded, so who can speak up for them on that? Suddenly old and mostly forgotten copyrights seem to have some possible value, because the digital books could last for ever, and who knows but some of them (a few) will surely have considerable hidden value? To many of the critics it does not seem right that this value should accrue or crystalise to Google (and to the Authors Guild and some Publishers), rather than to anybody else.

If you buy the idea that the 'orphan' status of a book (or some other piece of intellectual property) is more a function of the new technology than of the old which was around when the object was born or conceived, there is an interesting corollary. As technology improves the orphans become more valuable. The 'orphans' may indeed become a lot more valuable when computation advances again, as it will. Especially if the orphans can be used to construct something else, something that we dont yet understand. Who is to say what value they have? There is a lot in the Google Books Settlement about 'non-consumptive' research (which roughly means 'reading by computers and software'). Who knows how valuable that could become?

We may get a glimpse of this when Wolfram's intriguing Alpha project is unveiled. From Rudy Rucker's recent blog about what Alpha portends, it certainly sounds to me as though Wolfram and his team have been doing some pretty sensitive 'non-consumptive' reading of key reference books:

I asked him how he is handling the daunting task of finding out all the possible scientific models. “There’s only so many linear feet of reference books that exist in the world,” remarked Wolfram. “Nowadays when I go into a library I look at the reference shelves and try and estimate how many of them we’ve picked up. I think we’re close to ninety percent by now. Right now my office is mounded with books with bookmarks for things we still need to implement, and one by one the bookmarks and the books are going away.” www.hplusmagazine.com

When the database representation of what a book is about gets to be that powerful and expressive, non-consumptive reading is arguably more useful and valuable than the old fashioned human kind of reading. Orphan copyrights, in a clever enough computer environment, have much more value than their publishers or authors could have imagined....

New Site Releases

We have been making various enhancements to the Exact Editions platform in the last couple of weeks. In many cases these improvements just merge into the slipstream and practically nobody notices. There was a small improvement of this type yesterday, and I am going to mention it because it needs to be noticed.

For a good while we have offered power-users a keyboard command which speeds moving between pages {Ctrl+left, Ctrl+right, for page forward or page back}. These moves speed up reading and work for the double page view and the single page view. We have also recently introduced a 'fit to width' icon. These two functions work well together now as the browser 'remembers' your fit-to-width preference and so allows readers to zip through a magazine with pages fitting themselves to the circumstances of the individual browser in use at the time. This change is symptomatic of the need to keep a reading platform as unobtrusive and 'silent' as possible. Ideally the readers of the publications on our platform should not notice that they are using Exact Editions at all. They should be fully in the book or immersed in the magazine.

Exact Editions works best when the users really don't notice the fact that they are using a web platform. So we need to let users know about the Fit-to-width Icon, without ramming it in their face... Here it is:



We have a way to go yet, but gradually we seem to be getting there.

There are two more recent changes that merit a blog mention. Publishers sometimes wish to be able to sell a collection of books for a single price, as a set or shelf (whilst perhaps also wishing to sell them singly at individual prices). This functionality has been requested by several of our partners and is now supported. The management of 'title sets' in the Exact Editions platform is quite sophisticated and tracks through into the way individual accounts are managed, renewed, promoted and paid for.

We have also frequently been asked whether we can support 'territorial restrictions'. This is not something that generally appeals to magazine publishers, but many general interest book publishers have to support this concept of 'regional markets'. They simply do not have the right to sell the digital edition to a customer resident in Asia or the Australia. We can now support this requirement. Which is not to say it is an entirely good thing to have lots of them! Geographical restrictions on the web are a bore and they complicate both the e-commerce and the support function. Our system is country-based and is driven by the address of the credit card or PayPal account, it applies to the transaction. Once someone has bought a subscription they can read it anywhere, which is of course the way it works with physical books. So publishers and agents should be happy with that.

Note: I edited this post, shortly after posting it. One of the new features we introduced yesterday seems not to work perfectly on all the important browsers. Its a 'nice to have' rather than an 'essential' usability feature. So it may come back in due course...... Version control, version control! Keeping track of it on Web Services and on Blog postings can get complicated!

Folding Magazines

Some magazines will make a successful transition to digital subscriptions and digital distribution. Some will not. The commercial environment for magazine publishers is getting tougher, and the fall in advertising budgets across all media segments is not helping. The magazines that really need to build their digital subscription revenues should get going with the subscription service as soon as possible; and keep in mind that the Subscribers have to have a good reason to subscribe. The subscriptions will not come if all the content, or the better part of the content is made freely accessible on the magazine web site.

Two magazines on the Exact Editions platform announced that they were closing up last week. It has been no secret that The Press Gazette has been losing money for at least four years and for its last three proprietors, so no surprise but very sad to hear that its next issue will be its last. The Ecologist is also soon to produce its last print issue. Zac Goldsmith its wealthy and influential proprietor, writing in the Guardian, sees this as a positive step and not one motivated by the magazines losses. He points out that the magazine has never made money and he has never been in it for the prospect of profits:

What has changed is that we have reached a point – compounded by the recession – where we are not able to get as much value for money as we could from the internet. Online our potential readership is limitless. If we get it right, we can reach millions. We can launch campaigns and see immediate results. We can bring news to people when it matters – now. The format will change, of course, but we won't lose anything that has made the Ecologist vital and relevant. We will continue to provide the best analysis and the best investigations. We will continue to provoke, fearlessly, where that's needed. (Zac Goldsmith: Why the Ecologist has Gone Online)

When a publisher decides to cease print publication Exact Editions promptly removes the publication and its sample issue from the Exact Editions shop. We also arrange with the publisher to refund any subscriptions which have not been fully delivered (this is a very important obligation which any reputable publisher accepts), but we are also able to continue to offer access to the available back issues for the term of the subscription. So subscribers should not lose out. Whether the archive of back issues can be kept available in the long term or made available, perhaps as open access, in the longer term, will depend on the publisher's policy.

While we will miss these excellent magazines, the fact is that magazines always have been coming into and passing out of print. The challenge is to how deal with their post publication preservation. The challenge for the publisher of a magazine in the digital age is how to keep sufficient value in the premium subscription, whilst using the web to develop the maximum impact from the magazine's content, and its mission.

It is not an easy task. But making a successful magazine never has been easy.

Tank Magazine

Tank magazine which straddles the worlds of art, architecture, culture, literature and fashion, is now available on the Exact Editions platform.

• ToC
• Barack X
• Obama Springsteen
  

The Railway Magazine

This is the first IPC magazine to use the Exact Editions platform. Railway magazines seem to do well in this digital format (possibly because the archival search is strong).

• ToC
• Wrong kind of snow on the lines.
• 'Tender running' covered in depth
  

A lovely magazine. Toot toot!

Nostalgia for Books

Robert Darnton made an impressive cameo presentation speech at JISC's Oxford Conference on The Library of the Future (Presentations, Twittering). Darnton made some interesting points about Google Book Search and what libraries should be doing (appealing to Google's better nature and public spirited-ness, which may work?). One throw-away remark of his caught my attention:

"Someone born in 2010 will not feel nostalgia for the printed book."

He might be right about that. Think about the implications. This year, next year or the year after is a tipping point for digital books. He clearly isnt saying that three year olds will not be having Babar read to them in 2013. But it could be that a lot of kids will be having Babar read to them from iPhones or colour Kindles in 2013. A lot of folk in the publishing industry would say that Darnton is being a bit early with that conjecture, but if you look at the way that the iPhone and netbooks have jumped forward in the last year or two, he could be spot on. Bedtime stories in many households will be coming from mobile devices, of course with colour screens, in three or four years time. In three or four years time many households that cannot afford colour books will have mobiles with colour screens.

But I think that there is another implication of his remark. People will not in five or ten years time be feeling nostalgic for print books. They will be very excited about what you can do with real books, digital books. Sure printed books will still be collectable and valuable, some of us will prefer them to digital books. Just as a few of us prefer vinyl to digital recorded music, but it will be a small minority. It may be a very small minority. Do you still know people who use typewriters over computers, who use slide rules over calculators? Not many left.

When digital books have really arrived they will be so much better than print books that nobody will feel nostalgic for print. The books and the libraries of 2020 will be vastly more useful and vastly more accessible than those that we have now. Darnton is right. Also, though he did not say this: not only will the digital libraries be so much better than the merely print-based libraries of the 1970s, they will also be so much unlike our early efforts to create digital books and digital libraries, that readers of 2020 will be looking back on the primitiveness of our current Kindles, EPUBs, GBS and other efforts with embarasment. Do any of us remember how clunky the first calculators were? About digital books and magazines I am an unmitigated optimist.

Even about newspapers. The few remaining digital newspapers will be great once the publishers have learnt how to make them work. There is still a huge amount of fear of digital in the publishing industry. There needs to be more excitement and enthusiasm.

Who Wants to Own Books?

Do we really want to own books? Do institutions really want to own books? I am a bit agnostic about the first question, but I suspect that on the second question the answer is more clear cut. For quite a lot of reasons (but not because they might want to sell them) institutional libraries really do want to own the books they have. They want to be able to keep them for as long as they might need them (and a bit longer) and they want to be able to do things with them that they and their users have not yet thought about. They want ownership in the round.

These thoughts are prompted by the comment of a friend who is rather taken with the Spotify music service, which streams you as much music as you can listen to, but does it all on the fly. My friend is rather relieved no longer to be carrying his gigabytes of digital music and thinks that something similar may be on the cards for books.

Suppose that you could have access to pretty well everything ever published, but you did not actually own any of it? This new service (call it Yangtse Book Search or Facebook Library) would allow you to sample everything in its purview (search and browse access) but the full reading rights would be gently rationed. Leave on one side, for a moment how that deal would be negotiated with the authors and publishers: but look at the matter as a consumer. Would you be willing to pay $9.99 a month which gets you reading access to five books a month, and $19.99 a month which get you reading access to thirty books a month (US or UK market only -- not world literature in original languages)? Once you have selected books for your choice in that month they remain open to you for an agreed period. A slew of specialist technical and professional books will be outside the catchment zone. They would cost extra. Household or family access via the cable channel? No problem $29.99 a month for the 30 book offering.

I don't know about you, but I would be mostly content with access to that digital library, and with enough subscribers it would pay the necessary royalties to authors, agents and publishers (no doubt mostly usage based). But libraries would not be very happy with such a scheme. Libraries want to own books, and they want to own books which readers may never consult. Or hardly ever.

If persistent search but intermittent reading, is the future of our individual enjoyment of books, widely shared but not owned, it would seem to me that the Google Books Settlement has got things upside down. In the Settlement Google envisages delivering annual licenses to libraries for large collections of books (collections with shifting contents) but individuals will be able to buy 'life time' access (quasi ownership) to individual titles. The assymmetry in the settlement between the market for individuals and for libraries is striking, and not really explained or justified, but it may be completely the wrong way round. Perhaps Google should go back to the negotiating table with the Books Rights Registry and strike a different deal? Or is that a complementary proposition that the BRR should offer to a Google competitor? The competing service would have the franchise to sell 'term of copyright' licenses to libraries for particular titles and short term access rights to individuals. That should introduce some competition which could help to mitigate the monopoly charge.

A Democratic Quality to Digitization

Robert Darnton used this interesting phrase in his recent NPR comments on the Google Book Search project and the Settlement (a 7 minute interview here).

There is a democratic quality to digitization but if those supplying it are simply trying to maximise profits the whole thing could turn sour. (The Infinite Shelf .. On the Media, 27 March 2009)

Is it true that there is a democratic quality to digitization? I think there may be a profound truth there, and getting at it, may do something to reduce or quieten Darnton's worries. He is right to be worried. If Google were to become the predominant and monopolistic supplier of books (and other print, digital print, resources) through the web, that would be a disaster. But that is a big if because digitization of our print heritage is a broadly democractic shift. It is a democractic shift in much the same way as the invention and adoption of print led to, or was one of the necessary preconditions of the democratic thrust of the Enlightenment (see Darnton's original post on Google & the Future of Books). Darnton rightly points out that the democracy of the Enlightenment was partial and restricted in its reach by privilege

Far from functioning like an egalitarian agora, the Republic of Letters suffered from the same disease that ate through all societies in the eighteenth century: privilege. Privileges were not limited to aristocrats. In France, they applied to everything in the world of letters, including printing and the book trade, which were dominated by exclusive guilds, and the books themselves, which could not appear legally without a royal privilege and a censor's approbation, printed in full in their text. (NYRB 12 February 2009)

The web is putting the final nail in the coffin which restricted the privileges of print (bolstered by the legal privilege of copyright), initially to men (rather than women), the rich and then the wealthy, the formally educated and which even now in our own time excludes some. The democratization implicit in digitization works in two ways. It works for the universality and openness of distribution because it is now a fact that digital copies and digital access are available at marginal cost for everyone. A lot more stuff will be free, partly because advertising which accompanies or supports it can generate profits, but also because it really is dirt cheap to provide free web access. So cheap that to anyone who provides digital services, providing some services free, some access to content for free, is a no-brainer. Digital access is strikingly open and democractic in its thrust because it actually (and obviously) costs more to exclude someone or anyone from access to a web resource than to enable it for everyone. 'Open' is simply, for the supplier, the lowest cost access model on the web. Authenticating, selling, registering for or targetting access costs more. But the democractic bias of digitization works also at the point of creating digital resources. It is much easier to create and if necessary re-create digital resources than to look after them in any other way.

Moving from the democratic thrust of free access from digitization, a digital process is like a printer's press in that it enables us to originate digital masters. Digitization as a method of data capture, a means for transforming cultural objects to web presence, is also becoming more feasible and more necessary. Digitization as a process is democratic because it is repeatable and reliable and affordable. Digitization is also likely to be of higher quality if it is various and competitive (Google's problems with quality of capture are notorious). Digitization as a transformative process, relying on software, computers and scanning instruments, is becoming easier and cheaper at something close to Moore's law. Even Google's massive digitization project is now much easier and cheaper than it was when they started. Since digitizing books (films, works of art, music etc) is becoming more affordable and easier every year we should have more of it. We will probably soon have consumer-targetted, hand-held, intelligent scanners.

The real danger in the Google Book Search service and the Settlement is that libraries and publishers should start to think that digitization is best left to the uniquely specialised Google. To prevent a monopoly we need a choice of services which digitize books and print resources and serve them openly (or as commercial services) to audiences through the web.

I think Darnton is right, there is a democratic thrust to digitization and it is in all our interests that there should be lots of alternatives to the digitization engine that Google has created with the help of the New York Public library, the Oxford, Harvard, Michigan and Stanford University Libraries (of course many more univerisities are now in the Google ship). Surely, the Google Books Library, (for it is rapidly becoming that), needs to be watched so that it does not become an engine for monopoly pricing, but the best safeguard against this is to create and sustain alternatives. Having played a part in kicking off the Google initiative, Harvard can help the next and better proposition that comes along. Darnton as Harvard's librarian should be there to support it.

Networked Apps

There was a great deal of functionality promised in the Apple announcement of iPhone 3.0 O/S last week. Apple mentioned 100 end-user features and 1000 programmer API's. The SDK is now in the hands of developers and they are right now figuring out how it will all hang together.

One of the discussed technologies that intrigued me is Bonjour which is a type of easy, informal, local networking facility. A network for the nonce. With WiFi or Bluetooth and Bonjour a group of Macs, iPhones, or other devices will be able to share network functions or resources. So you will be able to say "Bonjour!" to your printer and print a page or more of copy.

Funnily enought there is at the moment no easy way of printing stuff off an iPhone. You can read pages of a book or magazine in an Exact Editions account on an iPhone, but there is no practical way of printing stuff off. It is possible to do a screen dump from an iPhone, but you then have to email the image to some account where you can use it, or edit it, or print it. In June with the release of the 3.0 operating system, and probably some new Apple kit, that will all change. There will also be some intriguing opportunities to share content between iPhones and other devices. This will encourage peer-to-peer promotion and viral marketing campaigns. How will authors and publishers react? Many publishers hate the idea of users copying content from one device to another, but it is something users will do and it can work in the authors favour if such viral copying encourages sales. It will be easier for publishers to get behind this concept when they are using a streaming service (such as Exact Editions) rather than a file-based download approach as with most eBook platforms. Using Bonjour to share a page or two of browser-dependent, evanescent and temporarily resident, content in a common reading experience will be one thing. Swapping whole content files between neighbouring iPhones and iTouches will be another nightmare scenario for music, film and book publishers. I guess that Apple will find some ways to limit that. But that could become a can of worms if it involves technical DRM.

By creating a rather supervised and enclosed media environment for publishers, Apple is attracting some scorn -- as a 'nanny' and a possible 'censor'. But Apple is also aligning itself with the owners of intellectual property and the providers of subscription services by claiming its 30% commission. Publishers may find this tariff a bit too rich and high, in the long run. But they will be reassured by the thought that Apple will be very motivated by its recurring media revenue streams.

Australia & New Zealand

Autralia and New Zealand joins the Exact Editions magazine store.

• ToC
• Luhrman's Northern Territory
• Art Deco Napier
  

Apple as a Retailer

Mike Shatzkin over at the Idealog Blog has taken aim at our recent posting about Apple, Amazon and Google. We are in agreement with Mike that this ebooks, digital books, story is a good deal more complicated than it first seemed. We surely are in the very early stages of the game. Too early to call a winner, probably.

But Shatzkin has not understood what Apple are doing with the strategy announced for the iPhone 3.0 SDK. They are tackling the retail environment head on and building the retail functions. Shatzkin thinks that Apple will fail the retail test. Did Mike view the video presentation with which Apple gave a preview of 3.0 SDK? Consider that the very first item that Scott Forstall discusses (before even 'cut and paste'!) is the way that they have enhanced the App Store. Note that its a store. A place where consumers shop. It is a retail store which enables developer creativity and it will support discovery of books, magazines, games etc, browsing and sampling, search, metadata, price choice and traditional bookstore price anarchy, and after sales support (though some fulfillment and much support will fall to developers and publishers). Most striking is the near total freedom that publishers are given on pricing (99c -- $999). Especially in comparison to Amazon's half-hearted effort to get a $9.99 ebook price, and Apple's notorious inflexibility on music pricing in the iTunes store. It is surprising that anyone would think that Apple who have made such a considerable success of Apple stores and online retail selling will find themselves out of their depth with digital books. Nobody would say that building a retail system for digital books is going to be easy, but Apple clearly are a good candidate to do it. Especially now that they have announced this co-optive strategy.

Have book and magazine publishers learned much from the mistakes that music publishers made with digital music? They surely have learned something, but we can be sure that Apple have learned through bitter experience from the mistakes that music publishers have been making with music (often at Apple's expense). Steve Jobs has been having too much grief with the music supremos, eg over price and DRM. This time Apple are stepping back, facilitating a more open retail environment in which the publishers and software developers are invited to decide prices and to create concessions, services and brand-oriented offerings which Apple will transact for them. If a publisher is foolish enough to foist DRM on his customers that too can go through the Apple system. Above all the fashion, style, presentation, pricing and packaging elements can be left to the publishers and content experts. Apple will stick to its knitting.

The Race for Digital Books and Apple's Lack of Strategy

The three biggest players in the digital editions or eBooks space may have already announced their presence in the market: Amazon, Google and Apple. Apple did it this week and I am not sure that onlookers have yet understood the Apple position. There has been a persistent view that Apple may be planning to develop an eBook or a digital books strategy. I think it is now clear that their very clever strategy is based on the insight that they don't really need one.

Amazon and Google have been shaping up for a tussle for a while, and seem to be pulling the book market from opposite ends like a giant Christmas cracker waiting for it to come apart in their hands. With a bang. Apple, on the other hand, has been sitting coyly on the sidelines, with Steve Jobs publicly and sceptically wondering whether there is going to be a market for digital books.

The announcement earlier this week about Apple's iPhone OS 3.0 made it at last pretty clear how Apple is going to become a player and the strategy is so simple and solid that I am surprised that more of us did not see it coming. Apple has taken the very sensible position that it doesn't need to be a big player in the digital books or the ebooks market to win the game hands down. Apple is going to let authors, publishers and developers get on with their business and work out how the digital books market is going to work and Apple is just going to collect the market-maker's fee for letting it happen, on and in the iPhone arena. Apple is being quietly agnostic about the way that digital books should work, it is just inserting itself in the situation with the proposition, that if they are to be sold on the iPhone platform, Apple will take a 30% commission.

To get back to the Christmas cracker that Amazon and Google have been pulling at: Google thinks that the future of books is a future of digital editions in a global digital library (managed of course by Google). This is a world in which books are in a database in the cloud. Amazon thinks that the future of digital books is a future in which we all have, Kindle-shaped eBook readers in our pockets in which we store the books that we own. From the Google end of the cracker we are talking about massive databases where most usage is surely going to be free. From the Amazon end of the cracker we are looking at file formats where a lot of books, certainly new books, will be downloaded and probably sold, mostly by Amazon. Google has recently been showing some mild indecision about its own vision, first in producing a new type of re-flowable file format for its GBS Mobile offering, and then by offering half a million 19th century eBooks to the world via Sony. I dont think Google is really going down the eBooks road but it does look a bit like backtracking. Amazon has also shown some mild indecision by producing a virtual Kindle a Kindle 'environment' for the Apple iPhone which means that you do not need to have the actual bit of Amazon kit to read the proprietary file format. Amazon may have wobbled, but Amazon seems to be sticking to the view that it is in the bookselling business rather than the library business. Interestingly enough both these bouts of indecision took place on the iPhone platform. What is this telling us?

The position that Apple have announced for themselves is stylish, decisive and agnostic. Apple doesn't mind whether books are based in the cloud as web resources, or shipped around the internet as book-specific file formats. Web-based books, digital editions and ebook file formats can all run easily on the iPhone if that is what is needed: "Open house, come over here and play". That is the message from Cupertino. But Apple is also saying that if you want to trade these new booky gizmos on the Apple platform and sell them through the Apple e-commerce system, you will be expected to pay 30% of the gross to Apple. While you are at it you might as well call them Apps. In consideration for this courteous invitation, Apple will handle the transaction and any strictly necessary hosting fees.

Since Amazon have a track record of obtaining 55-65% discounts from book publishers, and since Google's terms have trade for the Settlement have been announced at 38% (plus a bit more), the Apple share does not look too greedy. But for the daily expense in running the Store it is a fat margin. Apple will thus appear to most publishers and authors as a reasonable partner, a less monopolistic partner, than either of the other West coast web giants, and since Steve Jobs is quite agnostic about the way in which the books will work Apple has a good chance of coming up with the prize hidden inside that cracker. If this is a race, I am tempted to call it for Apple. But there are quite a few laps to go yet.

Google Books on Sony eBook Reader

Sony has done a deal with Google to make 500,000 public domain books available to users of the Reader device. This suddenly jumps Sony ahead of Amazon in terms of the race to get the bighest number of titles accessible from the Kindle or the Sony Reader. The Kindle owner has about 250,000 to choose from.The books on their way to Sony will be the 500,000 titles with cleaned up ASCII from the recently announced Google Books Search mobile operation. 500K titles are public domain worldwide, (about another million are available to US users of Google Book Search but they would not figure in the deal because the Sony reader has an international reach). The Google Books implementation will still be superior, because it will offer both the ASCII text and the backup page images, which are presumably not in the Sony versions.

Believe me, a lot of the books are very, very boring. Hardly of interest to anyone, in amongst the cobwebs there is a lot of wonderful 19th century literature, and we will see how Sony can tidy up a way of selecting relevant titles (Austen, Dickens, Twain) from this vast stockpile and then present them to readers who can only carry around 1.000 or so downloaded titles on the Reader device.

This is clearly an alliance between Google and Sony. That much is apparent. But who is competing with whom? Is it a matter of Google against Amazon (Google trying to slow up the advance of the Kindle, so that the concept of books as dataservices can get time to gell)? Or of Sony against Amazon (capture the mind-share for the worldwide eBook reader market, since Kindle seems to have won that match already in the USA). Or of Google against Apple (by showing that the iPhone is not the only mobile device which can carry a lot of good books)? Or is it really a matter of Google competing with Sony and the publishers (by showing that there are so many good books out there for free, that the market for paid for downloadable books is going to be a tough proposition to sell to consumers). On the face of it, giving away free access to half a million books when your device can only hold a very few of them is a trifle strange. Google ends up being the winner in that comparison.

Perhaps the way in which Sony delivers on this announcement will make it clearer who is competing with who. Come to think of it, since the Kindle can only be sold in the US and Google has another million books which can only be treated as public domain within the USA, should we be expecting the Kindle to emerge with access to these 1 million restricted titles? According to the NYT article Google is willing to make its catalog of digitised books available to "any other e-book distributor that shares its goals of making books more accessible." I will be surprised if that happens, but we live in strange times, and certainly Amazon shares with Google the goal of making books more accessible.

Google Library Expert on a Pod Cast

Fruitful discussion with Frances Haugen on the Library Gang Podcast (50 mins). She is an impressive spokes person for Google Book Search. She spoke well about Google Mobile and Catalogues and metadata (deep waters here). There were places where she had to be very careful about what she says (not allowed to talk about the Settlement before the judge's ruling this summer). She stressed that they really have a lot to do now to make the Settlement work. There is real pressure now to deliver: "Unfortunately, there is a lot of things that legally we have to do in the next two years we do not have as much design freedom as might be ideal."

In Frances's discussion of the way the mobile service was developed I was struck by the sense that the Google implementation is something of a compromise and also hard to achieve (the page image is available at one remove). The text files developed for the Mobile application is enhanced, "very nuanced": they needed to "understand what the text meant in the layout of the page" (eg to ignore headers and footers). We can be sure that there is a huge amount more that Google can and will do to find meaning and structure in texts and moving away from page layout may help this effort. It could also be that the decision to in large part omit illustrations and photographs from the Settlement-sanctioned commercial offerings has encouraged Google to move more towards a continuous text stream interpretation of the text. She was also quite cagey about whether they will do anything major in the near future about magazines and periodicals, but they clearly have long term ambitions in that space.

Joe Wikert's Magazine System

Joe Wikert works for O'Reilly Media Inc. and has an excellent pulpit at Publishing 2020 Blog. Yesterday he was blogging about his ideal magazine system.

Once upon a time I subscribed to more than a dozen different magazines. Keeping up was overwhelming at times, particularly since many of those magazines were a half-inch thick or more. (Anyone remember the good old days when Wired used to have some serious heft?!) Now I can count my magazine subscriptions on one hand. I still crave the content and the writers, but I prefer to read this information sooner than the print model allows. (A Model for the Magazine Industry)

The Exact Editions system gets close to being in his plan for the magazine industry, but we are missing the target on some of his goals:

1. Joe wants to have access (so that he can choose) to every magazine on the planet. Steady on Joe, do you mean that the system should support every magazine in every language?Tthat is a pretty big number. We are talking maybe 20 or 30,000 consumer and special interest magazines world wide. Long way to go! This is what I would call a reasonable unreasonable goal. But, I agree with Joe that this has to be the distant target: consumers will want a magazine system to support them if they decide that they want to read Spanish-language, English-language and Japanese-language magazines on a mix and match basis.
   
2. Joe wants to be able to read the whole magazine exactly as it is, the full contents, on his preferred device. We can comply with that and the Exact Editions system also provides access to the archived issues to all current subscribers. The archive will go back as far as the magazine publisher has provided us with PDF files. So the Exact Editions system is possibly giving Joe more than he asked for. Archives are easy for digital editions.
   
3. But archives are available because the consumers subscribe to magazines as branded entities. Joe Wikert is looking for a system which would allow him to have roaming access to any magazine that he chooses month by month (admittedly for a pretty high 'eat all you can' price of $50 a month). Selling a revenue-sharing model to magazine publishers for this universal access scheme is going to be a tough proposition.
4. Joe wants his system to deliver the content wirelessly to his various devices. Exact Editions can comply with that, provided that the device supports a standard web browser. PC, Mac, netbook, iPhone, Wii -- sure those devices are all fine (Joe may not yet be using the Wii for his magazine reading but he should try it out now). The problem for us is the Kindle. We dont yet support the Kindle, but I am confident that Exact Editions will support the Kindle just as soon as it supports standard web browsing and sells its platform in the European market from where most of our current magazines are sourced. It would be nice if the Kindle also had colour. Consumer magazines really need colour.

On one point, we completely agree with Joe Wikert. Magazine publishers absolutely need to get their digital offerings in place fast. At a price and in a format which all their consumers can enjoy.

Google Books Search: What is Good for Google is Good for the USA

There was an important Conference on the Legal and Publishing impact of the Google Books Settlement at Columbia Law School on Friday. Several attendees, led by Peter Brantley, were actively Twittering the event, see #gbslaw for the Twitter-stream. There are one, two very useful reflective summaries posted by Peter Hirtle (lawyer at Cornell Library).

Apparently one of the recurring themes in the conference was this mantra "What is good for Google is good for the USA." I am sure that it was said in jest/irony, but that must nevertheless have made the Google participants unhappy. Even if ironic, the comparison is wounding. Just now being compared to General Motors is nearly as bad as being compared to AIG, and is frankly worse than being compared to Microsoft (which would also be very unfair and unwelcome to Google, but the comparisons are coming...). The mantra is especially unfortunate, since it is far too close to the bone: the whole way the Google Book Search settlement is working out is far too US-centric, as though Detroit was the market, and the accessibility of digital books in the rest of the world was not a matter of importance to the US or to Google. General Motors has been building inefficient and slipshod cars which had limited appeal in the rest of the world and failed the ultimate tests of quality engineering and sustainability. Could Google fall into a similar trap of building too much, too wastefully, for local demand and national circumstance without full attention to all the factors which build quality, openness and sustainability? Apparently some anxieties on this score were raised at the meeting. Somewhere in the Twittering I saw someone questioning how the US would feel if another country adopted a similar approach a private enclosure and database representation of all the books in the English language held by French libraries (the French or even more probably the Chinese Union Database Library? It will probably happen). Can you imagine the uproar? Senator Conyers would have most unfavoured nation legislation in train within a twinkling...

A lot of the books from these dusty stacks in Michigan and California are foreign published. Through the group of libraries in the US with which it is collaborating Google will catch in its net of NotYet OutOfCopyright but OutOfPrint titles a vast swathe of books originally published by British, French and German publishers. Google has apparently spent $7 million in the last two month on press advertisements in over a hundred countries to advise authors and publishers of the rights that they may have in the Settlement to the use of their books in the US market ($7 million on print ads for the legal notice, few text database projects have had a total investment this large). But the authors of those books are also readers and if the eventual legal and technological effect of the Settlement is to make the access to those books much less viable in the countries in which they were written or published?

Spare a thought for Google: not only it is it being compared to General Motors, they now also have to deliver on the very substantial obligations which the Settlement imposes on them, in particular to roll out commercial services to libraries and to individuals (to reiterate: these obligations are only to deliver services to the US market). This is going to keep Google very busy. Many critics of the Settlement have pointed out that it creates an enormous (millions of books) private preserve for Google, from books which look more like they belong to the public domain, either because they are orphan, or because they close to orphan. This monopolistic position is seen as an obstacle to competition. Of course it is in one way a matter of enormous advantage for Google.

But there is another way of looking at the situation. Google is now under the obligation, the heavy public expectation of delivering services from this massive collection. I believe that it will be under a very heavy public expectation and moral obligation to deliver, or find some legal way to enable, similar services to overseas markets. Google has assumed an onerous obligation to curate and deliver services for a large class of legacy titles. Inevitably it has been taking short-cuts, there is a weird absence of metadata, it has missed some quality goals, the books are not always exciting, many of them are out of print for good reason, I suspect that the difficulty and the importance of this legacy task will in itself make it impractical for Google to be the innovator in the book space that it might like to become. It is much easier to deliver an innovative and truly revolutionary social service for book readers when you are not curating 10 million titles. Hirtle concludes his excellent notes with this:

Yet while there may be great disappointment with the process used to generate the settlement, I also detected no incipient revolution against the settlement itself. No one was calling for rights holders to register and submit comments to the court (as they can do until 5 May). No one was saying the court should reject it and tell the parties to start over. Yes, the class may be too large and the mechanism too crude, but we created this problem when we abandoned formalities, lengthened copyrights, and started treating every copyrighted item in the world like it was a Disney movie. Given this procrustean bed we have made for ourselves, the settlement may be our only way out. Yes, Congress should create a compulsory license authorizing the use of out-of-print books - but don't hold your breadth waiting for that. In the interim, the settlement may be the best we can hope for - even though it has the potential to radically alter all of our worlds. (Hirtle: Library Law Blog)

Google will proabably get its way, for the most part, with the Settlement, but it may also find the bed it has made for itself, with the aid of Publishers and the Author's Guild, somewhat procrustean. The tasks it faces are Herculean. It will surely get a lot of attention from lawyers (within and without the business). There will be worries about monoploy and anti-trust but there will be plenty of competition.

Ebooks, Online books, Digital Editions and Content

One of the problems which the eBook market faces is that we are not completely secure about what to call the thing that we are bringing into being. What are we talking about when we talk about eBooks? There is a fair old jumble of substantives clamouring to receive our attention: digital books, ebooks, electronic or computerised texts, textual databases, interactive texts, online books (or texts), plain old content, digital libraries, digital editions, web editions, etc. So here are some proposed definitions and qualifications:

An eBook is something which, in the general case, requires a dedicated eBook reader for it to be read. That is to say, an eBook is something that you will find in a Kindle, or a Sony eBook reader.

Distinct from the eBook is the file format in which the text is held. This might be something like the proprietary format of the Kindle (AZW) or it might be non-proprietary like the EPUB, formerly Open eBook format. An eBook will have a file format, and although it will generally be read through (on?) an eBook reader, this could be a virtual or layer of eBook reader not necessarily the physical hardware system for which the eBook was originally devised. So we have the Stanza reader on the iPhone or the PC which will read a lot of different books in the same software environment. Also we have the recently announced Kindle App which in a manner of speaking puts a virtual Kindle on the iPhone (and a similar trick could be performed for other hardware platforms). File formats, we have to point out, have different instances, and publishers and booksellers may sell individual copies of the eBook and track their destination through digital inventories. File formats can also be corrupted and encrypted, some publishers corrupt files by encrypting them in Digital Rights Management software. This practice (DRM) is a really terrible idea which insults and damages the market, but publishers are tempted to use it because digital files have marginal cost to copy and if books are encoded in file formats they look terribly vulnerable to illegal acts.

The file format for eBooks works to define and individuate particular books or titles, or works, or serials or issues (yes plenty of confusion there unless you keep all those matters straight). The Google Settlement has also introduced the fascinating new concept of an insert, and an insert generally does not contain its own illustrations but it, probably, will contain its own children's book illustrations, diagrams, charts and graphs (but not maps). I hope that is all perfectly clear, if it is not and further perusal of the Draft Settlement leaves you in any doubt I suggest that you engage the services of a copyright lawyer (preferably one with a background in the part-work printing industry).

Having introduced the topic of Google Books, we should explain that whilst it is generally sensible to ask about the file format for an eBook, it is generally not relevant to ask questions about the file format of digital editions. Here we may be engaging in some creative definition making, but we define and differentiate Google Book Search books and Exact Editions magazines and books as digital editions rather than eBooks. Digital editions are made from books as files, but it is not helpful to think of them as having a file format. The PDF which the publisher produced or the scanner generated is used to create a database, but the format of the book as input has little to do with the format of the book as it is used or browsed by the consumer. The Google and Exact Editions systems deliver them to users as a service, searchable, citeable and potentially shareable, but they are web services in which each printed page has a corresponding web page, a web page with a JPEG at the centre and chatter of more or less relevant HTML around it. One might think of the individual book as the total of its urls, and thus postulate the individual title as having a web file format defined by its web instances. But this is not too helpful because the books are held in a database and it is the functionality of this database and the API's to it, which effectively generate and limit its performance and usability. So unlike eBooks, digital editions, we say, do not have file formats and its not relevant to use the language of unit sales or DRM. Digital editions come from databases that host them, probably in the cloud, and this is a completely different ball of wax -- nor should you be deflected from this perception by the confusing fact that Google Book Search (and Exact Editions) offer you the opportunity to download a PDF, whether of individual pages or of the whole work.

That may be enough confusing terminology for one day, but we will doubtless return to the subject in future postings.

Kew

Kew, the quarterly magazine of the Royal Botanic Gardens is now in the Exact Editions store. I guess its our first gardening magazine, and it also sits well in the Ecology group.

• ToC
• Darwin anniversary.
• Kew will give you advice on what to plant.
  

Improving Searchability and Findability

We have enhanced the searchability and findability of the Exact Editions service with a site release which is being rolled out today. The internal name for this enhancement is 'universal preview' and it brings magazines more into line with the way books are handled on the Exact Editions platform.

1. Users can now search every issue of every title in the store. A search for Omdurman will bring up search results and fragments of pages. No full view pages. The first result of a search for Tony Blair is a page which is available in full view (its in a trial issue)
   
2. Users can browse all the content, but only at thumbnail size. If any publisher chooses not to allow archival searching and thumbnail previews, this can be accommodated.
   
3. Contents pages and front covers can be zoomed up to full size.
4. The text of covers and contents pages will get pulled into search engines (Google and others).
5. Existing "full" trial issues are undisturbed, and still feature on the magazine's marketing page.
6. The grid of all issue covers on the marketing pages are now live click-throughs to the thumbnail previews.

We expect that this change will improve the traffic to sample issues, to searches and subscriptions to magazines in the service. There is a cost attached to offering free searching and search results from all the archives (an order of magnitude increase in the content searched from typical queries) but the efficiency gains we have realized since moving to Amazon S3 more than offset the cost of the additional database activity. So this improved accessibility is a direct benefit of cloud computing.

Amazon's Kindle on the iPhone

At the launch of the Kindle 2 a couple of weeks back, Jeff Bezos dropped some heavy hints that users would soon be able to synchronize their Amazon eBook content between the Kindle and other mobile devices. Yesterday they launched the Amazon App for the iPhone. This is a fascinating development, and I am sure that there will be plenty of ramifications. It has to be a good step for the overall development of the digital books market. Here is why:

• It is a significant step away from the Amazon exclusivity that the Kindle appeared to embody. All the sales will still be going through the Amazon e-commerce system, but this move shows that Amazon reading experience will not be stuck within a totally proprietary environment.
• As well as being a sign that Amazon is a bit more open than we thought, this move shows that Apple too is more open than some of us might have supposed (Apple's approval is needed for the App to get into the App Store) .
• The Amazon books might look better on the iPhone than on the Kindle. Books no longer need to be stuck with its grey-scale only eInk environment. The iPhone, of course uses colour, so at least the covers of books and magazines in the Kindle format can now offer colour, at least on the iPhone. I wonder when Amazon will get this organized?
  
• The Kindle still looks like an overly proprietary, insufficiently mobile, over optimised and limited, format, from which support might one day be withdrawn: but now at least there is a graceful way for Amazon to bow out if they decide to move on. They can allow the format and their licensed offerings to continue and survive on the Apple hardware (and other synchronised devices) when they finally decide to get out of the dedicated eBook hardware market. And my bet is they will.
• We don't know how Amazon's license with the publishers works. Clearly Amazon reckons that it allows them to do synchronised distribution to the iPhone. This may be allowable under the terms of the license because Amazon can guarantee that the iPhone is tied to the Kindle owner's account. A more 'untethered' form of mobile phone could pose them with a licensing issue. They are probably stuck with the deal that they originally promoted and offered to publishers. I suspect that there may be some tight and tricky corners for them to negotiate.
• Still no sign of the Kindle in international distribution. Perhaps Amazon's biggest problem here is figuring out a profitable and effective deal with carriers (they have a very unusual deal with Sprint in the US). Perhaps 'tethering' the Kindle to some other mobile platform will be a way to cross into Europe. Do I hear Kindle knocking on Nokia's door, or Vodafone sidling up to Amazon?
  

Perhaps there is a bit of cox and box going on between Amazon and Google. A few days before Amazon released Kindle 2, Google announced the availability of Google Book Search for mobile (at this point, this is most evident through the iPhone accessibility). Now Amazon have surged around the flanks of the massive archive of old-Google books, with their own outflanking movement. There must be a chance that Amazon will put their Kindle content onto the Android platform. We live in interesting times.

African Perspective

I have just had a short holiday in the Sudan. I was born there 60 years ago and have always wanted to go back, since I have plenty of childhood memories.

It was a great visit and good to see, when I got back, that one of the latest magazines to use the Exact Editions platform and to enter the store is the BBC World Service's magazine Focus on Africa. This is our second African current affairs title, and our first BBC title. It might even become a bit of a breakthrough with the BBC, who publish lots of magazines, which is a cool thought after hot and dusty Khartoum. You don't need to spend long in Africa to realise the enormous clout that the BBC has in that continent. My visit was a holiday, a trip back to my roots, but it left me reflecting on the narrowness of much new media innovation. Here are a few items for consideration:

• The internet is every where in Africa even in remote towns. Wifi in our hotel worked just fine and was free to residents and their visitors, but my iPhone only worked as a phone. No data services seemed to be enabled. I guess that Apple and its partners will soon solve that.
  
• Mobile phones are really important to much of the population. People were happy to lend us their phones, even strangers in a crowd would pass us a phone if we asked to make a call. Mobiles are the only easy way of getting round the massive Khartoum/Omdurman conurbation by taxi (maps and street locations are vague): all we needed to do was to ask our taxi driver to ring our host on his mobile phone and then get directions to our destination, directions which we obvioulsy could not understand since the conversation was entirely in Arabic (most taxi drivers had a smidgin of English).
• Mobile phones are already very prevalent in the universities, but computers and netbooks are not common among the students at the universities we visited (Bakht er Ruda and Ahfad). The mobile phone is going to have huge educational impact in Africa.
• There are a few English language universities (Ahfad is one) but much of the schooling and college education in the Northern 2/3 of Sudan is in Arabic. Bookshops mostly have Arabic language books.
  
• eBooks and digital editions could have a huge educational impact. But not whilst they are all in English (wake up Amazon) and not while the territorial rights situation is so complicated and unworkable. It is really nuts that the Kindle is only for sale in the USA. Google will be hamstrung and pilloried if its Google Book Search remains only really useful in the USA. It is time that the English language publishing industry started thinking outside the London/New York/Hollywood axis.
• We met many very friendly people and were given much generous Sudanese hospitality. But the regime is not very popular and is repressive. We met some activists and people were not afraid to speak out. But two of the interesting people we met were arrested shortly after we left the country. I guess some monitoring of mobile phones and internet use is going on. Privacy issues matter and should be hardwired into good web design. Not every country has an effective Supreme Court and a Bill of Rights.

I was hoping that this would be an Arabic Kindle:



It was shrinkwrapped but not, alas, the Arabic Kindle.

Mslexia

Mslexia, a magazine for writers and poets and creative readers, joins the Exact Editions store.

• ToC
• Interview with Isabel Allende.
• Directory with a ton of resources.
  

Focus on Africa

Focus on Africa published quarterly by the BBC World Service joins the Exact Editions store.

• ToC
• Special feature on Barack Obama.
• I have just been to the Sudan, so I did a search. Cool that we find the name in a map.
  

Summer is Here!

Two new titles have gone live today and both have me dreaming about the sun and beaches. What credit crunch?

Living Abroad and Spain Magazine

Why the Kindle does not have enough Kith

The iPhone is an amazing device, but we are going to look back on it in a few years and marvel at its already much too apparent limitations. For the size, it has a fantastic screen, but it is small. We eagerly await the Netbook-sized iPhone, iPhone maxi or Mac mini, with a screen of similar quality but reasonable dimensions. (say 20cm rather than 8cm diagonal). It should be with us by September/October.

The iPhone even in its small format is becoming the preferred platform for digital editions and ebook development. I doubt that the new improved Kindle will disrupt this triumphal march. Here is one reason why: one of the more important iPhone features, neglected by the dedicated eBook platforms, is that it is very easy to take a snapshot of your screen and email or sms it to someone else.


A screen grab from the Continuum Directory of Publishing 2009

This limited copy-ability, share-ability, via mobile, is a very important feature for use with digital editions which has been overlooked by commentators. It is important because it is now easy to share snapshots of your books with friends and network contacts. This development from the mobile platform is accelerating our tendency to develop social reading habits. We like to share our insights and the references we find in books, and the iPhone makes this easier than many other device to do this. Oddly, it is even easier than on a desktop or notebook computer, because the iPhone interface, for all its simplicity has brought these features to the surface. It is easier and more natural to make a screen grab on an iPhone and email it to a friend than it is on most Macs.

Why haven't the dedicated eBook devices enabled similar screen-grab and shareability behaviours? Three reasons occur to me. The first is that were any form of copying a design feature, 'selling the concept' of the Kindle, or the Sony eBook, to publishers or authors agents would have been harder than it already is. OK it is not hard now, but it probably was an uphill struggle two or three years ago when the ventures were being planned. The second reason, is that the devices do not support emails or SMS, which is to say they are dedicated eBook readers. But that is an easily remedied design limitation: why were they designed in such a way that it is not easy to become a community of Kindle readers, or to engender a tribe of Iliad enjoyers? Which gets us to the real reason why the dedicated eBook readers do not enable the rather limited content-sharing that is facilitated by the iPhone and its cousins. The real reason is that the eBook reader is based on a deeply flawed model of reading which supposes that reading is just a matter of providing a text to the human brain/mind in the most convenient format. A view which sounds plausible, but is radically mistaken because in many ways that are important reading is more like eating a meal: sharing, comparing, offering, tidying up afterwards, reflecting.... not simply a matter of digesting. Reading is deeply social, was made more so by the invention of print, and the exciting future of the mobile network is that it will show us new ways in which to enjoy social reading. The company of books and each other.

One to Watch?

Outsell, the respected, opinionated and energetic, information industry consultancy and reference resource, reckons that Exact Editions is one of the 30 industry innovators to watch in 2009. They published the press release in December, but Google Alerts has only just alerted me to it (wake up Google!). Well, for sure they are right, but we get in there with some pretty impressive and distinguished company: the British Medical Journal, Thomson/Reuters, The Guardian, Nature, PLoS (Outsell are covering all the angles!) not to mention Google and Safari (is that Safari Books or the browser? Could be either: maybe they know that Apple are going to launch an eBooks tablet with a souped-up Safari, but probably they mean Safari Books). There are some other relative unknowns in their list: so keep your eyes skinned for Brown Book and Flat World Knowledge -- mind you I have heard of that lot. They are aiming to open source the college text book market. Bold and timely. Bold oxymoronic title too, when you think about it.

Good luck to all the other innovators. Look forward to comparing notes in 2010!

The Breakthrough to Online Magazines?

Tom Colvin who has a wide-ranging blog, Becoming a Writer Seriously, has bought a digital subscription to PC Utitlities and he approves of the Exact Editions platform

I love Great Britain’s PC Utilities Magazine. But getting the issues has been a problem as I move back and forth between two residences in different parts of the world. I’ve even encountered problems with Mexican customs, which sometimes wants a fee since the magazine comes packaged with a DVD full of computer programs.

But no longer. I just purchased a one-year online subscription via Exact Editions in the UK. The subscription costs noticeably less than the print edition. As a bonus, I get access to the past 20 issues, as well as to all of the 1000’s of software programs it has offered on its DVD’s. While I’ve already got all of those issues in print editions, I now don’t need to carry them from residence to residence — and I can let the magazine’s search facility to find what I’m looking for, a major time-saver.

Exact Editions represents quite a number of UK-based magazines, several of which will appeal to writers.

Now that I’ve broken through to online magazines, I may next subscribe to the online edition of PC World and Publisher’s Weekly. I’m delirious. (Becoming a Writer Seriously)

While we are delighted by Tom's appreciative note, we have to point out that we do not alas offer subscriptions to PC World or Publishers Weekly. Well not yet, but we would love to be able to do so....

Since this a week in which Belkin have been caught out astroturfing, we come right out and say: we have never met Tom Colvin, and have no connection with him.

But of course we like his views and now we know about his blog we like that to.

Sponsored Subscriptions

Dazed & Confused who have been using Exact Editions for a couple of years have found a new way of generating sponsorship revenue and new subscriptions. This month the sponsor is Selfridges, the department store. Selfridges are sending emails to their customers offering them a free one month access to the magazine. At the end of the sponsorship period, or when a new issue of the magazine appears, the user accounts expire. This is an important way for magazine publishers to provide sample access to the current issue and also a way of generating advertising/sponsorship revenues.



Since the service can be co-branded for both the magazine and the sponsor this has an important effect on the perceived value of the sponsorship.

News Stand Sales: Are They the Solution?

There is no doubt that the physical distribution channel for magazines in the US is in major crisis. In the last month some of the major distributors have pulled out of the market, and it is now being reported that circulation of consumer titles through news stands collapsed in the second half of 2008. Audience Development offers an Analysis:

In the last week the fragile newsstand distribution system has essentially broken down. Two of the four major wholesalers have, in effect, exited the business. Publishers and the remaining wholesalers are scrambling to pick up the scattered pieces. If this wasn’t enough, the recently released second-half 2008 ABC and BPA newsstand sales data revealed (based on a preliminary analysis) that the unit sales of audited publications fell a devastating 14.9 percent and the revenue declined a record 6.7 percent.

The story behind the dysfunctional newsstand distribution business is so convoluted that it makes Tim Geithner’s stimulus plan explanation seem clear by comparison. But regardless of its complexities one thing is sure—there is plenty of blame to go around for the collapse of the distribution channel. It includes wholesalers seeking massive unilateral price increases and a ranting former channel partner that apparently would rather sue than try to find a reasonable solution. Equally culpable are the publishers and their National Distributor representatives that have allowed, largely for competitive considerations, channel conditions to reach these devastating proportions.

The system is very broken, and a major part of the problem is that the news stand sales for magazines (and for newspapers) have been barely profitable, even loss-making for years. News stand sales matter much less for the dollars and dimes that are generated from circulation, than for the way they build an audience for print-based advertising. Magazines that sell for a dollar or two on the news stand generate negligible revenue for the publisher ('returns' from unsold stock run at roughly 50% - -consider the cost of that). So this crisis in news stand sales comes just when the advertising market is already falling fast.

There is no quick and easy solution, but there is a solution and building digital subscription revenues and digital circulations has to be a key part of the response of the magazine industry. The British consumer magazine has not become as over-dependent on advertising as the American market, but it is suffering from the same general malaise. Advertising revenues are slowing fast and revenues from subscriptions and news stand circulation have been neglected in recent years. Obviously digital subscriptions can now play a key part in rebuilding the audience and generating profits from circulation.

How Will We Read? Google or Kindle

Yesterday, Amazon announced the Kindle 2 at a Press Conference at the Pierpoint Morgan Library. A few days ago Google released Google Book Search Mobile, an implementation of their rapidly growing digital library. What do these two events tell us about the way that Amazon and Google see us reading digital books?

1. Amazon have 230,000 books available for purchase on the Kindle. Google have 1.5 million.
2. The Kindle is still only available to US purchasers. The Google Book Search resource can be used eveywhere, but only 620,000 of those titles can be read in full and accessed page by page ex-USA.
3. To read the digital books in the Amazon collection you need to first buy a dedicated reader which will cost you $399. The Google titles can be read on any system which supports a web browser.
   
4. The Amazon collection includes many front list titles, many new best-sellers and they are often priced at $9.99 (ie less than the price of the equivalent hardback). All the Google books are old titles, many of them of very little interest to today's audience. But there are plenty of great works of literature and masses of curiousities (its a bit like Great Granny's library). They are all free. They are all free....
   
5. You can import free books to the Kindle system (eg from a PDF file), but you can certainly import those titles to whatever device you are using to access the Google collection.
6. Amazon's system allows the text of any book to 'flow' into a scale and type size that suits your reading style. Google BSM also now allows for a downloadable 'reflowable' version of the text.
   
7. Both systems will allow you to download a book to read it on a plane (or on the subway, where you can not access broadband). But for some of the older books, the Google ASCII downloads are sub-standard.
   
8. Amazon gives much more information about the books in the system. Google has very limited meta-data and it is not at all easy to tell what books they have in their 'library' (which given the absence of a catalogue may be too polite a term for it).
9. Amazon and Google's systems both 'look' rather monopolistic, but at this point the Google system is free, so it may be churlish to worry about the Google monopoly just yet. Amazon's potential monopoly may worry publishers, but Amazon today has plenty of competition from other systems which operate a similar downloadable ebook service (Sony, Iliad, Plastic Logic coming etc).
10. Every book and every page in the Google service can be directly cited and referenced, which makes their books much better for bloggers and social networks. Amazon's file format is non-standard, proprietary and wrapped with its own form of DRM (digital rights management).
    
11. Kindle's still lack colour. 16 shades of grey is the best that can be offered for illustrations. Few of the books accessible to Google BSM have any colour, but when contemporary titles are offered on the Google platform. Colour will be no problem for Google.
12. Neither platform supports the concept of 'first sale' (ie second hand books). Google because it is fundamentally an access model, Amazon/Kindle have DRM.
    
13. You can't read Google Books on a Kindle and you can't read the Kindle books on a PC or a mobile phone. But there have been rumours of Amazon making an announcement of a mobile version of the Kindle system (and Bezos mentioned synchronisation at the press conference) so this might be coming. If and when that happens mobile users will be able to compare Kindle books and GBSM books on the same device.

I have not been keeping the score on these comparisons. Many of them are qualitative trade-offs on which different constituencies will break in opposed directions, but my sense is that in the big picture Google is winning this hands down. The library of our future is going to be much more imbued with Google than with Amazon innovations. Starting from a large and substantially free and open foundation, Google will be attracting many developers and innovators to their track. It will be fascinating to see whether some Android (Google Mobile Phone) devices appear that are specifically geared to the books/newspaper market. Google is aiming to make its Book Search a resource for the whole web and will build a system with which many other web services can interoperate. Amazon is building a system which will allow individuals to purchase and collect titles in a format which suits them and their private needs. Google is aiming at aggregation and integration, Amazon is limited in its vision to using the web as a distribution medium

Theming and Branding

The Exact Editions web service can be branded, or if you prefer, themed to support a magazine, or to support an important advertiser. When you think about it, the service can also be customised to support both. The magazine subscription that goes to the ordinary subscriber should carry the magazine's branding, but important advertisers might wish to offer the magazine (or a short-term subscription to the magazine) to its own audience. This may be an important message for the big brands that have traditionally found magazine audiences to by a key segment. Here is an illustration of the 'furniture' that can be branded for a sponsor.....



Customising the favicon... that is what I call attention to detail!

Subscriptions and Advertising Revenues

We have noticed that some big and very successful magazines are showing an increased interest in the prospect of building digital subscriptions. Subscription revenues are looking attractive and necessary as advertising revenues in magazines and newspapers shrink. Gradually the largest magazine publishers are thinking about the potential for digital subscriptions, see some comments from Hearst's John Loughlin. He reckons that each new email address is worth 80c to them. Using the back of the only available envelope, and factoring in conservative renewal rates, each new subscriber to a digital magazine is worth at least £20 and as much as £300 to the publisher..... Since the marginal cost of doing a digital edition can be effectively zero offering digital subscriptions in this market has to be a no-brainer, (Exact Editions will assume all the costs if the magazine has a solid market and good digital prospects. We trade the costs for a modest commission on sales). Its time I dropped John Loughlin a note about digital subs.

Google Book Search Mobile

Yesterday Google announced a mobile implementation of their Book Search service: Google Book Search Mobile.

There are 1.5 million books available for complete reading on your mobile phone (iPhone or Android recommended), but less than half of them will be available outside the USA, for copyright reasons previously discussed on this blog. In an email forum a Google engineer estimated that 620,000 are readable ex-USA. 40% of a huge library is even so a very large library. There are some wonderful gems in the collection (Mark Twain, Florence Nightingale, Charles Dickens and lots of wonderful Victorian stuff). But I think that they are all really old books -- browsing these stacks is a bit like sniffing around a very dusty and arcane book depository from about 1898. Some of these tomes have not been touched for decades.

If you like reading on your iPhone you now have a wonderful library of treasures to explore. You will need a battery booster.

There are some surprising features of the implementation. First, the system works by piping an ASCII version of the text on to your screen, so that it can 'reflow' to fit the dimensions of your screen. For some of these old books the ASCII version that Google infers from OCR is poor, in cases unusable. Google will have to improve it (we can be sure that some engineers there are already relishing the challenge -- improving the quality of the ASCII is a key requirement for the other things which can grow from GBS). Second, Google offers a 'version' of the printed page which you can tap through to, if you want to check up on the doubtful ASCII. This is not the full page of the book, but a section of the page or column of print synthesised for display. So the text appears in the original typeface and linebreaks but without the full page detail, without the original linespacing. Nor can the images be expanded in the usual iPhone style. This strikes me as an odd and complicated compromise. I wonder whether Google is paying too much attention to the temporary limitations of today's screens. Will there be another, richer, enlargeable, photo-realistic layer for the A4 mobiles that will surely appear next year?

It will be interesting to see how enjoyable this platform becomes as a reading environment. It is certainly great for browsing and for searching. Will consumers expect this open and free library to become the foundation of their individual digital libraries? One guesses that this is the Google intention.

Newspapers, will they be paid for and will they be digital?

The answer to this question is obviously yes, and yes. But there is a widespread and total conviction in the newspaper industry itself that paid for digital newspapers will not fly. Anyone who doubts this is considered to be an unrealistic dreamer. Roy Greenslade, who puts out great blogs about newspapers for the Guardian subscribes to this view. But Roy is not blinkered and the other day he mentioned a countervailing opinion:

"Giving away information for free on the internet while still charging 50 cents to $1 for the print version of the paper was one of the most fundamentally flawed business decisions of the past 25 years. Newspapers told their paying customers that the information truly had no value." - Professor Paul MacArthur, Utica College, New York. Greenslade, quoting Storch

This seemed such a sensible and sane view that I hunted down the original interview. You will find a good deal of balanced reason in the Professor's views. From the passage quoted he goes on to say:

Why would anyone pay 50 cents for something he or she can get for free? This poorly conceived and obviously flawed strategy has helped put the newspaper industry into its current financial condition and hastened the demise of many publications. Any newspaper that attempted this strategy deserves the consequential losses.

The rest of the interview is also good sense. Sooner or later newspapers, which have become over dependent on advertising, and magazines that rely 90% on advertising, will realise that digital subscriptions are a good source of revenue. Sooner or later newspapers will stop obsessing about the fact that they all carry the daily news (in different selections, shapes and formats) and learn to live with the fact that they each and everyone have a style and editorial format which endears them to their readers, and for which some readers will be willing to pay reasonable subscriptions for a good digital service.

Professor MacArthur is also acute on the Detroit newspaper crisis (the 2 dailies in Detroit have moved to stop home delivery 4 days of the week).

It makes them irrelevant. The Detroit papers are breaking the newspaper habit. They are telling their customers, "You can no longer trust us to deliver the news on a daily basis."

Detroit seems to be as sadly out of touch with the business of newspaper publishing as its car industry.

Google Book Search and the Tragedy of the Anti-Commons

Michael Heller, a property lawyer at Columbia University, has coined the term the 'tragedy of the anti-commons'. This is a twist on the more familiar idea of 'the tragedy of the commons' -- which is thought to be the cause of such ecological disasters as the implosion of fisheries, perhaps even the nearing apocalypse of global heating. Heller's insight is that too much private ownership can be as much of a problem as too little: “When too many owners control a single resource, cooperation breaks down, wealth disappears and everybody loses.” He gives plenty of examples in his book The Gridlock Economy -- the book's argument is forcibly stated in its subtitle: How Too Much Ownership Wrecks Markets, Stops Innovation, and Costs Lives.

There is a good chance that the Google Books Settlement is going to show us all how this tragedy of the anti-commons works out in the world of books. The Google project, which is backed by the American publishers and American Authors's representatives should be (in my view will be) a wonderful resource for American universities, schools, public libraries and through them for American consumers. By 2011, if the Settlement is approved, at least 5 million out of print but not yet out of copyright [OOPnotYOOC] titles will be available to readers in the US market. This resource will have little opportunity to work so well for authors, readers and consumers in the rest of the world. The books will by and large not be available in the rest of the world (perhaps in American embassies?).

Google is already serving a very different and vastly narrower view of Google Book Search to the rest of the world (even to Canada and Mexico). Books which are public domain and wholly visible and readable in the US are not visible and readable elsewhere. And this copyright caution about territorial rights is unlikely to change, because the Settlement, when it is approved, is only going to be approved and agreed for the US market. Google has been persuaded (or has volunteered?) to accept the territorial restrictions and complications inherent in the market of copyright books. In my view, Google will not risk starting court actions in other jurisdictions, for the very simple reason that they might be lost, or worse still settled on a different basis from the US dispute. Google will be bound to leave the ex-US position of its wonderful aggregate of unloved (mostly 'orphan') copyrights in a national limbo. The orphans will remain unloved outside the 50 states.

The complexity of the rights situations of these millions of titles is effectively unmanageable and un-negotiable, which is pretty much what Michael Heller means by a tragedy of the anti-commons. By developing and growing an intricate and incredibly complex system of rights for different legal regimes and market territories the publishing industry has produced a system where a negotiated and innovative new service is probably impossible. It would take something like a new Berne convention on copyright to make this a level plane for all jurisdictions.

One might say that this hopeless and impenetrable thicket of rights which are largely historical and dormant is a problem for the rest of the world and for scholars outside the US. It is not a problem for the US, or for Google. Well maybe..... but it is also possible that this lack of international and global relevance will undermine the authority and the prestige of a US-centric resource. I wonder whether US scholars will accept a situation in which citations and references cannot be made and verified in a global context?

There is another dimension in which the impenetrable complexity of the rights position OOPnotYOOC titles: illustrations and photographs in these titles are in effect excluded from the scope of active exploitation by Google. Interestingly enough, Children's Book Illustrations are to be treated differently. They are defined as 'inserts' and therefore fall within the scope of the settlement and will presumably be in the searchable and readable services that Google produces. But, in the place of ordinary illustrations and photographs in books which are not 'Children's Books' we should expect gaps or blanks, such as one already finds in the Google Book Search service. Eric Rumsey thinks that I may be on my own in reading the Google Settlement this way, but some apparently well-informed, anonymous, commenter makes a similar point in a comment on the Martyn Daniels blog. Why should illustrations in Children's Books be treated differently from those in other books? I suspect that the publishers and the Authors Guild felt that they could negotiate with certainty on these rights (as also on quotation rights, rights in poetry etc) but they knew that they could not negotatiate for the owners of artistic rights.

Will it matter that Google Book Search, when it is marketed as a commercial subscription service for libraries and universities cannot be accessed or read in the world at large? Will it matter that many of the photographs and illustrations in millions of the OOPnotYOOC titles will not be there? Yes, it will matter, and that it matters will be another instance of the tragedy of the anti-commons.