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.