Twittering Friends and eMail Friends

One of the really great things about Twitter is the way that it enables you to build up real, but virtual, and in some cases one-sided, friendships with people in other countries that you would otherwise never have met. I now have about 30 such Twitter friends (as well as 100+ Twitter acquaintances) whose postings I usually look out for. Here are a few of them, in an East to West order: Virginie Clayssen, I like that her tweets are mostly in French, Ian Davis, whose technical tweets are worth attention, Eoin Purcell, whose taste in sandwiches is probably reliable,, Jose Antonio Furtado, with an unrivalled stream of topical epublishing tweets, @Personanondata, who should probably be forgiven for being a Man U supporter, Fred Wilson, a NYC VC with lots of ideas, @MikeCane whose tweet stream is sometimes too fast and fran/phrenetic for me, Don Linn who has a dry sense of humour and a touch of Damon Runyon in his tweets, KatMeyer who has a Pacific Coast style of tweeting, as does DannySullivan (roller blades) and Kirk Biglione (shades and cocktails), who in typical Californian style, between them know so much more about search engines and DRM than I could ever get to grips with.

Thanks then to my Twittering friends and twitting aquaintances (are there really 124 of them?). I learn a lot from them every day. This is all by way of also thanking an email friend (Alain P) who sent me a link today to a blog post by Bill Hill, all about advertising in newspapers and magazines. I like this line in the blog:

Web technology today doesn't yet support ads you really want to view.

Bill Hill thinks that getting this right -- making ads really glossy and seductively attractive is one of the next big tricks for advertising on the web. I wonder if he thinks that this free and open service from Dazed & Confused is yet doing that? The Exact Editions platform is pretty close to delivering high quality photo-shoot ads such as are found in Dazed & Confused in such a way that you really want to look at the ads. These rich visual ads are of course even more seductive to subscribers who get the full size page. Put this rich visual delivery onto the iPhone and the fact that all the phone numbers in the directory are clickable, is a step which delivers exceptional value to customers and advertisers alike. I dont think magazine and newspaper publishers have yet taken stock of the fact that iPhone digital editions will greatly leverage the value of direct response from the ads themselves. See this direct customer response from printed phone numbers in the Exactly App video. The screen of an iPhone is already crisp and bright enough to deliver a really good view of a glossy ad, the trick which the advertising and publishing industries now need to solve, is how to make those phone numbers as valuable to the advertisers as they are convenient to readers. This is not a big step.

Dazed & Confused in page-flow mode in the Exactly App

The Idler

The Idler joins Exact Editions. This is not the original Idler in which many of Samuel Johnsons Essays were first published but (to quote Wikipedia) " a bi-yearly British magazine exploring alternative ways of working and living, still published today." Reckon that 'still' is a bit cheeky. What does Wikipedia mean? The Idler has just joined Exact Editions. Wake up wikieditors!

• ToC
  
• The Wit and Wisdom of Andy Warhol
• The QI Manifesto (Ten Steps to Making your Life more Interesting)
  

Exactly: A Magazine App for the iPhone

Exactly is a free App for the iPhone which can be downloaded from the Apple iTunes Store here.

If you have an iPhone and are in the magazine business you should download it and check it out with the hundreds of free sample magazine issues that are open to any user of the Exact Editions store.

If you dont have an iPhone this short (c. 5 minute) video will give you a good overview of the power of digital magazines on this platform.

There are three major advances which magazine publishers should focus on:

1. First, PageFlow (similar to CoverFlow for CD collections) allows users a rapid and compelling way to browse the whole magazine and feel its richness and visual quality. You need to see this segment of the video for this alone.
2. Second, all the phone numbers, email addresses, web links, and Post Codes (Zip Codes) will be live and clickable and this gives the user/reader many more ways in which to respond to and interact with the magazine and its advertisers. This is a digital magazine which is much more responsive and dynamic than any 'page turning' or 'brochure-ware' version that one may have seen a few years ago. (Small qualification: a few of these links may not work. This will almost certainly be because the page, or the area of the page, on which the 'dumb' phone number appears, was vectorised before the PDF was printed. In this case information is wiped from the file before the Exact Editions database has access to the information).
   
3. Finally, this highly interactive digital extension to the magazine really just IS the magazine in a digital format. Because the Exact Editions process is largely automated, it is -- in principle -- rather straightforward and efficient to create a digital version of any magazine. In fact we will do a sample issue that can be trialled through the Exactly App for free (offer open to all mainstream magazines). It also follows that the existing audience will recognise and respond to the magazine in its digital form pretty much as they do in print. There is not a big learning curve for users (there is a small learning step as they figure out how to use the touch screen and the orientation of the device -- but this is the kind of 'playing' that iPhone users like to do with Apps).

This last point is particularly important to magazines because of the crucial importance of branding in the magazine world. Magazine publishers often talk about their digital activities as 'brand extension', but the prospect of being able to simply park your magazine (with all its back issues) on the iPhone platform is really as much a matter of brand consolidation as of brand extension. Publishers have to do this to defend and to extend their presence in the consumer's mind-share.

The key importance of branding and the need for magazines to develop the value of their brands (usually corresponding to the magazine's title: Vogue, The New Yorker, Wired etc are all bigger brands than their owner Conde Nast). Enabling a publisher to put their own branded magazine App directly in the iPhones App store, and for sale in the Apple e-commerce environment will be our next step. Stay tuned.

Is Google Making the Celera Mistake?

Celera was the company founded by Craig Venter, and funded by Perkin Elmer, which played a large part in sequencing the human genome and was hoping to make a massively profitable business out of selling subscriptions to genome databases. The business plan unravelled within a year or two of the publication of the first human genome. With hindsight, the opponents of Celera were right. Science is making and will make much greater progress with open data sets.

Here are some reaons for thinking that Google will be making the same sort of mistake as Celera if it pursues the business model outlined in its pending settlement with the AAP and the Author's Guild:

1. The task and the cost of curating the data cannot be separated from the responsibility and the expertise of those who generate it. Celera's hope for massive private value in its private databases was undermined by the preference for publicly funded research to go its own sweet way into the public arena. Does Google really want to manage and control, assume the responsibility for all those who write books and how they can be distributed? Does Google and the Books Right Registry really think that Authors want their activities to be regulated in this fashion?
   
2. Genomic databases are extraordinarily valuable, it does not follow that you can sell them as big ticket items. Is there a massive market out there for closed subscription databases to millions of books sold to institutions? Celera did make some sales of its promised proprietary databases, but it was never believable that there was available funding to support a market for billions of dollars per annum on genomic databases. Those chimerical numbers were needed to support the astronomical market cap Celera briefly touched. Google may not have such sky expectations of its digital library subscription revenues, but I wonder how well the expectations that it does have, match with the funding currently available to the public library system and educational institutions?
3. PE was very good at building automated sequencing systems and selling them to researchers. Very, very good. It turned out to be not nearly so good at building a business to manage, curate and exploit genome databases that would be licensed to scientists and researchers. Such different activities do not mix, and your customers are likely to suspect a conflict of interest, and this is one reason why Celera was spun-out from Perkin Elmer. Google is very good, six times "very good" at managing search-sensitive advertising and large scale intentional databases drawn from web use. Are Google's customers going to be happy working with a system in which their reading attention, and referential record is always being calibrated and used to influence their buying pattern and subscription budget?
   
4. Hubris. Almost certainly in the case of Perkin Elmer, but they did have the sense to pull back. With Google it is hard to say..... hubris and ambition are sometimes confused, or mistaken, the one for the other.
   

There are plenty of differences between these two situations. Nor am I suggesting that all literary copyrights should be put into the public domain (nor indeed should all genomic data be treated as public). Differences and contrasts abound, but Eric Schmidt should put Sulston and Ferry's book The Common Thread on his summer reading list.

Magazines on the iPhone with Exactly app

Good to see magazine publishers alerting their subscribers to the use of their publications on the iPhone and iTouch.  In this week's Athletics Weekly the column below appeared. Nice!

Publishers working with Exact Editions can now offer their subscribers their content on-the-move, anytime, anywhere. Very cool! And with the new 3GS iPhone announced yesterday download speeds are going to be even quicker.

Athletics Weekly

June 4, 2009

Page 9

If you have access to iTunes you can download the Exactly app for free.

Why the iPhone is a Better Reading Environment III

The Berkshire Encyclopedia of China in coverflow mode

The Page-turning feature that one frequently finds on Flash solutions for digital magazines or digital book readers, has always struck me as a dire software innovation. Unecessary, slow, boring -- because the page turning is always the same experience. Gimmicky: I have even seen versions which emulate turning a creaking page of parchment! An example of software ingenuity which is orthogonal to the direction of travel. I suspect that the method was originally introduced because Flash can be quite slow with large book files and the page turning covers up the download delays.

So, I was not overjoyed to see the first Dutch review of Exactly comparing the App's 'pageflow' feature to page-turning Flash catalogues (read the review in Google's englished version here). The review is otherwise OK, (I think its quite polite, but Google or I may have misunderstood something), but this seems to be a false comparison. Pageflow has some crucial advantages which page-turning does not match:

1. The context of the book or the magazine is preserved in pageflow because the reader actually sees the pages flowing past in rapid sequence (it will be rapid if the connection is good) This is giving us a lot of information and it is preserving and in some respects enhancing the utility of the print object. The codex was a great invention! With a book you have a sense of 'how far' through the book you are. Using the slider button in Exactly you can actually navigate, slide through, the whole package and you can't do that with the merely serial page-turn in Flash.
2. Although thumbnail pages do not give you enough detail to read a page properly, they give a surprising amount of information, even in books that are mostly full of plain text. The advertisements in magazines or illustrations in fancy books are clearly very handy in the thumbnail mode.
3. Connected point: some of the puritanical types who argue for eBooks, seem to assume that the only point of a book is to read it. Perhaps because we have also lived with magazines, we think that skimming is good. There are many ways of reading a book or a magazine, and reading some of it and skimming the rest is OK (in my book). The pageflow mode is ideal for skimming. Please skim with a good conscience using pageflow.
   
4. Final point: the ergonomics of the iPhone. Taking advantage of the iPhone's shape and size, pageflow enables the iPhone to be useful in different ways according to the way you orient it. The portrait mode (right way up) is obviously the right way to read a portrait page. With Exactly the reader has two landscape options, 90° anticlockwise which puts the App and the iPhone in pageflow mode, and 90°clockwise which gives the best landscape mode for reading close text. I hope that this option set (which I have only as yet seen in Exactly) becomes a general convention for iPhone Apps that want to use pageflow or coverflow. Notice that the small size of the iPhone makes this use of orientation as giving alternative modes of navigating the text an even easier and more attractive option. I am sure that the mooted iPhone/tablet will also support these features and gestures, but if Apple had started with a tablet the size of the MacBook Air, we might not have seen orientation as such a strong element in their 'touch' interface.

Using pageflow to find a specific page

Swing the iPhone to read the page selected

Once again the small size of the iPhone is, in a curious way an advantage, in that it has pushed Apple and App developers to innovate. The Kindle did not originally offer a landscape mode, but perhaps under the influence of the iPhone it now does. It is a matter of some interest to me that the 4th side of the iPhone (180°rotation), the portrait mode -- wrong way up, has not yet been found a use within the Exactly App. Perhaps this should become a way of navigating a library, of switching between books or magazine titles within a subscription? I am sure that the development team will think of a better use and a better solution.... but turning the book upside down surely has its uses?

A New iPhone App: "Exactly"

Apple yesterday accepted the digital editions App that we have been developing for some months. It is now has in the App Store. Exactly is the Free Exact Editions App, from which any title on the Exact Editions platform can be read on the iPhone.

Search for 'Exactly' in the iPhone App store and you will find it there, with this brief description:

Exactly brings magazines and books to the iPhone in their original full-colour format. Each page is delivered just as it appeared in the print edition, but with live links to web sites, phone numbers and more. Access free content from over 80 titles, or use your www.exacteditions.com subscription to read the latest issues on the day they're published.

• Pinch or double tap pages to zoom.
• Swipe pages left and right, or tap the page edges to flip to next/previous page
• Use the animated thumbnail view to flick through the pages.
• Tap any page links to web sites, email addresses, phone numbers or maps.
• Tap contents-page links to jump to a particular article.
• Network connection required.

Free, gratis, etc

More stuff will be added to the App in the coming months, and we expect to deliver Branded Apps through which magazines and books (maybe newspapers?) will be sold directly on subscription through the App store. This is an exciting new stage in the development of the Exact Editions reading platform. We think the iPhone has a lot going for it and we aim to make it work well with digital editions.

Maybe the coolest feature of the Exactly App is the way that it gives the user a new way of accessing a publication. 'Pageflow', similar to the 'coverflow' with which users can skim their CD covers on the iPhone. The 'pageflow' feature comes when the iPhone is twisted 90° anticlockwise.

Pageflow of the magazine Opera

When the iPhone swings back to the portrait mode the publication will be open at the page reached in skimming the pageflow. If you close the Exactly App and then open it a few hours or days later, it will open at the title that you last looked at, exactly at the page you had reached when last reading the magazine or book. I find this most helpful. The framework Apple have built for making these Apps is ingenious. I am sure that there will be lots more good stuff coming, from Apple and from the Exact development team.

Twitter and the Wossybookclub

In conformity with our policy of conducting R&D on the project of a Twitter Book Club in public (see earlier posts here, here and here) and in response to the first session of Jonathan Ross's wossybookclub, which took place yesterday, it seems appropriate to give some provisional reactions to it in the open:

1. The session clearly worked. It ran for an hour and wossy must have been busy, since everything went through him (as a retweet or a response by him). 130 postings in an hour. The style of discourse was thus more like a chat-show on radio -- with no possiblity for genuine group discussion. This does put a lot of focus on the keyman, and suggests that the specific format (a 'star' formation with everything going through wossy) may not be completely scaleable. Would wossy be able to cope with an Oprah-size audience? The @atwossybookclub currently has under 6,000 followers. What happens with 60K followers at a book group? Managing 130 interactions in an hour of tweeting strikes me as pretty good going, and I can't see Jonathan Ross wanting to do this for two hours.
2. As well as the public and official record of tweeting at @atwossybookclub, there was a parallel search stream at #wossybookclub; making this an official back-channel may be a way of broadening the audience without putting wossy in hospital with RSI
3. The author (Jon Ronson, on holiday in Sardinia, and tweeting from his iPhone) contributed to the discussion. A book group with the author present and listening! That clearly works, and perhaps the idea needs to be adapted, shall we say Twitter-twigged, so that Twitter becomes a medium for online 'author signing sessions'. Kind of virtual 'author tours'?
   
4. The web service at our end also worked: The Men Who Stare at Goats was open to the whole web for precisely an hour. This time the switch was flipped manually, but it could easily be automated. 30/60/90 minute sessions pre-set to be open for particularly topical books or TV shows? Usage increased, it was busy, but it certainly wasn't overwhelming (the servers were not seen to emit clouds of white smoke and steam). Next time the publisher may wish to consider opening the book up for discussion a few hours before the discussion begins, that would encourage Tweeting participants to reference the digital edition, which in turn will encourage more people to buy the digital edition.
5. There was one reference to a specific page in the book, and wossy RT'ed this. Since we put it up using bit.ly, we know that it was activated nearly 300 times. A citation that went into the #wossybookclub was only hit 23 times. So the audience was looking at the links as well as reading wossy's tweets. For a first time live book club session on Twitter that looks to be a pretty strong validation of the concept.

Wossy has said that he does not want to develop the vehicle for personal gain. We can understand that position, but it might be worth reconsidering. If Wossy wont, I hope that Stephen Fry will. Doing 50 books a year would be A LOT of work and for the publishing industry it could be a highly significant new sales channel. The concept of 'celebrity-led' book reading and online book discussion has a lot going for it, but it will work even better if there is a stronger commercial infrastructure (perhaps funded by sales of the digital editions that would be used in the Tweeting). We look forward to seeing the proposition evolve and to working with publishers who are keen to develop the digital audience -- Picador and PanMacmillan have been excellent partners and promoters of this exploration, as has Jon Ronson the author.

I enjoyed the book (read the digital edition, of course) and you can still buy a subscription to the digital edition here (limited to purchasers in the UK and Eire); and in all parts of the world you can read the clever opening chapter here. Having read the book and raved about it to one of my children, I am now committed to buying a copy in print (son is out of webshot) and will certainly catch the film when it comes out later in the year with George Clooney and Ewan McGregor.

Twittering Publishers

Twitter may be a lot more important for publishers than most of them (us) realize. Few publishers would have a clue as to what Twitter means to their business model. Since Twitter still has not worked out its own business model, a matter of some general amazement to the illustrious VC's and industry watchers who follow it, this may not be all together surprising.

But here are three reasons why publishers of books and magazines should be VERY interested in Twitter:

1. A great deal of Twittering is really about linking your friends/followers to stuff that you have seen or read. Twitter is an ideal medium for sharing information about good books or magazines, especially as they get on to the web as genuine web resources. All those tinyurls and bit.ly's are citations. This is the direct response network that the web has promised publishers and authors.
   
2. (With apologies for a fragment of technospeak here), the Twitter 'social graph' with its asymmetrical follow/follower relationships is functionally analogous to the 'lectoral graph' of our reading patterns. You may have read a lot of the books and magazines that I have read, but there will certainly be a lot of non-overlap, and we will be as patchilly intermittent in our following as many of us are in our reading. Being able to connect to people who have read the same stuff as us, may be as important to us as being able to search the books that we have read or will read.
   
3. The key role of 'bestsellers' in the world of publishing and the importance of 'celebrities', or 'real experts', in the world of twitter. Trade publishers know how important celebrities are to publishing, so we had better figure out how this celebrity-hood in Twitterdom can multiply or interact with success in bookselling or digital magazines.
   

I have no more idea than anyone else what the ultimate or even the proximate business model of Twitter is going to be. My own hunch is that 'real time' search is not the key issue, much more important is the pattern of relationships and the elaborate web of communication that the service is weaving between its millions of users. This is why we have been following the Twitter Bookclub rumblings with avid interest, and helping the wossy project to get going with a digital edition of the first selection The Men who Stare at Goats. Something interesting will happen in this space in the next few months, if not with the wossybookclub, then with something similar. By this time next year Twitter will have found a business model and I will not be surprised if some strands of that model are quite closely intertwined with what publishers have done and need to do.

If writers and readers enjoy talking, twittering and sharing their experience of reading, then more books will be read, more books will be sold and the publishers who facilitate this will have played the part of concierge, that is their digital metier.

PS You can follow my Twitter stream here. And you can follow Daryl's here.

Goats and Crop Marks

There has been rapid movement on the Twitter book club front, since our posting of a few days ago. Twitter moves very fast and wossy has announced his first few titles. As luck would have it the first pick, The Men Who Stare at Goats, was in short supply in the bookshops and at Amazon -- a film is coming out later in the year, new printings must be in hand. There were ebook and audio book editions available but not many print copies in the warehouse.

At any rate Picador (PanMacmillan) who publish the book in the UK realised the advantages of having a digital edition of the book available to the wossy book club. They also saw that the streaming solution that Exact Editions provides is an excellent way of amplifying the immediate impact of the Tweeting that is going on as we speak, the streaming solution can be opened up for a publicity phase, much more feasibly than a download ebook solution. So they asked us to put up a sample, and to offer subscritpions to the digital edition when the full sampling spree comes to an end. The sample is here.

There is the added bonus that bloggers can use the ExactEditions clipper tool (works much better with FireFox) to post small tweet relevant quotations (limited to at most 10% of page). Which is why the crop marks matter, its on the basis of crop marks, or preferably with trim boxes set, that Exact Editions know the boundaries of a page in the PDF files that publishers send us. Unless the publisher requests greater openness the clipping is restricted to 10% of the page which is close to a traditional understanding of reasonable copying for purposes of quotation, appreciation etc (ie 'fair dealing').

The Men Who Stare At Goats

The Men Who Stare At Goats

Page 1

When it came to putting up the book in a test account, I noticed that there was quite a bit of discussion in the office about whether the PDF file had crop marks or not. Somehow this struck me as very funny as I had this image of the goat nibbling its own crop marks. So I was delighted to find that there really are goat crop marks in the page layout of the title, at least at the bottom of the page: there are ornamental goats at the corners. On the recto page the goat has keeled over and on the verso page the goat is the right way up. Here is an ex-goat, or what Monty Python would call a no-longer-goat:

The Men Who Stare At Goats

The Men Who Stare At Goats

Page 7

The Twitter Book Club

At the weekend we were startled to find that Jonathan Ross had a stunningly good idea. An idea that should have occurred to us sooner. Wossy, who twitters a lot, thought about starting a book club and one of the books he mentioned for his wheeze was the Bloomsbury book, Kate Summerscale's, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher. This mention alerted us because that is one of the titles in the Bloomsbury Library offering that uses the Exact Editions platform. One of my colleagues either follows wossy, or has a Google Alert out for Mr Whicher: not completely sure which, er....

If you do not live in the UK, you may not know too much about Jonathan Ross. But you can tell he has quite a hold on his audience when you see that his crowd of Twitter followers exceeds 250K. How then should a Twitter book club work? Well it could simply be a stream of tweets about a particular book and wossy has pushed off with one already. The Men Who Start at Goats. Follow the conversation here.

A good idea which could be even better. Here are our suggestions for how this could evolve into a commercial proposition for someone:

1. A celebrity chooses the book and each book gets a week of attention. Wossy has done this bit
2. Wossy needs to persuade the publisher (and the author or agent, if they need persuading) that this is a good idea and put the book on Open Access for a week whilst the Twitter stream goes to full volume. While this happens the book will get a lot of attention. In the shops. The Open Access platform might be a streaming solution such as Exact Editions runs, so the taps can be switched on at the start of the week and off at the end. (If any agent thinks that putting a book on open access for a week is going to exhaust the market for his book, he needs to find another profession, or another author).
   
3. Not to beat about the bush (pulling the light from out of the bushel), there is another big advantage of using the Exact Editions platform in a promotional event such as this: every page in the books can be the subject of a direct link. Tweets can cite the books as they appear in the discussion. This type of public conversation really needs a method of targetting specific pages. Especially since Twitter is not going to have the space to allow real hand-crafted, cut and pasted, quotations. (Light goes back behind bushel, muttering that any distribution system for this idea, also has to handle the e-commerce).
   
4. After the week of tweeting and general discussion, the Open Access finishes but the printed book can of course be acquired through the bookshops, or a digital subscription to it taken out through the digital platform.
5. At this point some costs have been incurred and a slice of revenue would be earmarked by the distribution and e-commerce platform (bushel smiles). For the sake of argument a Scribd type of percentage might be enough.
   
6. That still leaves the majority of the revenue from this exercise which clearly goes to the publisher and the author.

Why are we broadcasting this idea in public, rather than gently sidling up to Wossy, or Stephen Fry or Oprah or whoever, with an NDA in our fists, and persuading them to do it? Mostly because NDA's seem such an untwitterish way to think about it!

Perhaps someone has a better idea. At any rate there is no copyright in ideas, and not much of a copyright in twitter streams: so if there is a better idea about the twitter book club it has our blessing. Meanwhile, if anyone wants to bounce the idea back at us, we look forward to hatching plans with publishers, agents, Oprah, Stephen Fry, the Real Shaq, or whoever. Let's see it working.... Twitter is good for books.

Why the iPhone is a Better Reading Environment II

The touchscreen interface to the iTouch and the iPhone was a crucial innovative step. So far as I know, Apple got this right from the beginning. No false steps. Just a really good system that is steadily getting better (OK -- I grant you that the touch screen keyboard is not yet the best part of the iPhone system).

There are two key ways in which the touch interface helps the iPhone to become the best digital reading device, in spite of its very small size.

First, the touch screen allows the user to shrink or enlarge the page with simple 'pinch' or 'spread' moves of paired fingers. Because we use our fingers to stretch or compress the page, and the image responds immediately, it is very easy to achieve a high level of control of image resolution. It would be much harder to do this work with the conventional touchpad or mouse of a desktop PC. The facility with which the page can be resized (web page, or digital facsimile, eg JPEG in the case of Exact Editions) means that on the iPhone platform, at least, there is much less pressure for the 'reflowable' text beloved of eBook enthusiasts. There is really no need to reflow text to achieve a different point size, when the whole page can be resized with finger pinching. In fact, the digital edition on the iPhone wins this contest hands down because, of course, images and complex layouts are also easily and straightforwardly resized on the iPhone. This is notoriously difficult to achieve on specialised ebook devices -- they tend to be defeated by highly illustrated format, or books with lots of tables and code. The touchable screen with its rescaleable pages solves these problems at a stroke (or at worst with a pinch). Just use the image in the book or magazine as the designer laid it out.

But the second, equally important, advantage of the touch screen interface to the text on an iPhone is that it has forged a very direct relationship between the text as presented on screen and the functionality available to users with the text. We only need to touch the text to act through it. To use it to launch our actions. The links, the urls, the email addresses (and with Exact Editions the telephone numbers) within the text become tangible, immediately indexical resources.

A page of Time Out London with live links in green

The text contains the link (it was there explicitly in the book), markup ensures that the system (the iPhone) knows that a link is a link, or a postcode is a postcode, and the user knows (or after a little trial and error discovers) that by tapping a link she will jump to a web page, a post code will jump to a Google map, and a live phone number will initiate a phone call, from the iPhone.

Necessity is the mother of invention, in the case of the iPhone, as elsewhere. There is not enough room on the device to support a mouse-device or a touchpad, other than the screen. So the screen had to be touchable. But there is no doubt that the Apple engineers have crafted an extraordinarily effective solution. As more books are piled into the iPhone's eco-system, I think we will see that there is a growing realisation that the digital text of a book or a magazine should be seen as the starting point for network based interaction with it. The text itself is the starting point, within it are located the points, the referrers, codes and symbols which engender user interaction. The digital version of a text, having many explicit or implicit resources for linkage and reference becomes a hypertext in its own right and one which engages the reader in more than mere reading. Much of this interaction will be initiated by finger gestures. For sure, reading is part of the point of a digital edition, but equally, it has to be said that, pointing is fully a part of the reading of a book on the iPhone.

There is another key feature in the iPhone device which makes it such a good reading medium. Orientation. But we will discuss that on another occasion....

Putting up Shelves in Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Library Online went live last week. It had been announced at the London Book Fair a few weeks ago. This is a library proposition in two senses: it is a plan for selling subscriptions to groups of books through public libraries, and it is a set of themed shelves of books from the overall Bloomsbury list. A proposition for libraries and a plan for offering a customisable and curated library from Bloomsbury. They explain the concept as follows:

.......... using existing technology in libraries across the country, Bloomsbury is rolling out a groundbreaking e-lending strategy which will allow readers to read collections of bestselling books at local library terminals or with the use of a library card on home computers and internet enabled devices.

The Bloomsbury Library Online will consist of a number of themed shelves: children’s books, sports titles, international fiction, Shakespeare plays, reference books and more. They will launch with a shelf of Book Group titles including Galaxy Book of the Year, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, by Kate Summerscale, Orange Prize longlisted Burnt Shadows, by Kamila Shamsie, word-of-mouth phenomenon The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Shaffer, and international bestseller The Death of Vishnu by Manil Suri. Embracing the advantages of the online format, users will be able to read the book, search the text, access author interviews, reviews, press features, and links to specially commissioned reading group guide. Bloomsbury web site

Bloomsbury's project required us to develop our platform in ways that we had not previously considered necessary. They wanted to be able to sell books as groups, and although this was not part of the formal requirement, we suspected that the next publisher to adopt this strategy would wish to be able to sell books in groups (ie 'shelves') but also to sell the same books as individual titles, both to individuals and to institutional subscribers. And the next publisher would want to include the same book in multiple shelves, and then remove them from some shelves.....There were also knock on effects on the way that the site would be navigated, the marketing pages within the site would unfold, and the way in which promotions to titles or groups of titles would work. Finally, we needed to understand what happens with renewals, when books are coming into and perhaps falling out of shelves in midstream? In short, what had looked like a fairly simple additional requirement led us to take another look at our ontology. Until this point about shelves came up, I dont think I had grasped that we already had an ontology. In January we did not have an ontology for shelves of books, but now we do. Since Bloomsbury appear to be capable of producing a lot more shelves, this is a good thing.

The Exact Editions platform can now manage sets of books aggregated by a publisher (Bloomsbury's Teen Fiction Shelf, or their Book Group Shelf), as well as individual books and collections of books that might be selected by an account holder. We are not yet managing sets of sets of books, but I understand that it would be possible to do this, should the need arise. And it surely will arise: eg within a large fiction collection, where you might want to be able to group all the titles by a particular author as a sub-shelf, within the overall shelf of detective fiction. We will not however be working with shelves of books that are not members of shelves... this conundrum can be left for the digital remainder merchants.

Why the iPhone is a better Reading Environment I

People have noticed that the iPhone is becoming a great environment in which to do some serious reading. But I am not sure that we have yet fully recognised why it has changed our expectations of the optimum digital reading environment. One point was recently well made by Hugh McGuire the Canadian blogger, publisher, philosopher. (He also leads Librivox).

My experience of reading news on iphone is totally different than reading on the web: on the web I flit from place to place, on the iPhone I read much like I would a newspaper ... going through the whole thing, reading multiple articles. And as mentioned I might possibly pay for it on the iPhone.

I think this is a fascinating shift in my content consumption ... back to an older, more focused kind of reading. (Quoting Hugh McGuire from an email).

This is a subtle point. The iPhone is a better reading environment because it is NOT completely of the web. I think its really a point about the way Apps work on the iPhone, rather than the way that the web, or Safari, works on the iPhone. In my experience, browsing the web on my iPhone is just about as mercurial and unsticky as browsing from the laptop, but the apparatus of the App (only one App at a time, they take a moment or two to fire up) tends to give them some valuable friction. A retaining wall, which if it is not a 'walled garden' is something like a 'reader's carrel'. There is a threshold with each App, which keeps you within the App in which you are browsing; whereas when one is reading a news site on the wild web it is just too easy to be distracted. Every link is a link out. Its too easy to flip over to something else, there are no boundaries to a web newspaper or a web magazine. But there are some subtle boundaries to an App which is branded for a newspaper or a magazine.

It could be that the 'Appy' quality of serious reading on the iPhone is the key to developing an effecitve publishing culture in that environment. There is a lesson here for book, magazine and newspaper publishers. Get your Apps in order!

There is another reason that the iPhone reading experience is subtly different. Touching. There is something special about touching what you read, more about this on another occasion....

Kindle and Digital Magazines

We are quite often asked whether the Exact Editions platform works on the Kindle. To which we have a number of answers:

1. The Kindle is not available in Europe so we have never tested it and are not sure whether the web pages we serve would work on the non-standard browser that the Kindle offers its users. There is no word on when the Kindle is coming to Europe and I would say "Dont hold your breath".
   
2. The Kindle does not support colour, and most magazines really benefit from colour, so we dont regard the Kindle as an ideal magazine reading platform.
3. The Kindle supports re-flow (text can expand or shrink more or less at will) that is not a feature that would work with Exact Editions. We deliver pages the way they were designed. Exactly as they were laid out by the artist or repro house.
4. The Exact Editions pages and images can be easily zoomed or shrunk (especially on the iPhone). That doesnt work on the Kindle.
5. The Exact Editions system makes pages highly interactive, so web urls are live as are email addresses, phone numbers can be clicked to call (again a great resource on the iPhone, but no help on the Kindle)
6. The content on the Kindle is tightly controlled by Amazon, and they probably would not be pleased to have content passed their way be a technology partner (Apple are very different on this) and they strike tight and onerous deals with their publishing partners. Probably no room for Exact Editions in that clinch. If Amazon wants to have magazines on their platform they will approach the publishers direct.

It is not quite a matter of chalk and cheese, but it would be fair to say that Kindle looks at the world of digital books and digital editions in a very different way than Exact Editions. We feel that Google and Apple are more kindred spirits.

GBS: What if the Judge rejected the Settlement?

Here is an interesting comment on the Google Books Settlement that came up in an email exchange a couple of days ago:

I don't think anyone (other than the plaintiff's lawyers) feels good about the settlement as written. As Pamela Samuelson noted, "the settlement, if approved, will shape the future of reading, research, writing, and publication practices for decades to come." I don't think anyone knows what this future will look like, which is troubling.

I have not, however, heard with certainty that the court has the ability to modify the settlement. So the best we could hope for is that the settlement is rejected and the parties in the suit then reopen the discussion, but this time with the open and active participation of public interest groups, librarians, and a broader range of authors and publishers (in order to better represent the diverse interests of the class). I think that there is a snowball's chance in hell of that happening. If it did, it would take years.

So the bottom line, if the settlement is approved, the public in the US will have access to millions of volumes that are otherwise inaccessible to them. They will get it online via book search, and they will get it through the free license to public libraries (something that there was no reason for Google to include, except out of public interest). As long as we have a copyright system that treats every out-of-print scholarly work as if it is the latest Hollywoood blockbuster, I don't see any other way we could get access to this content.

...... it may not be perfect, but that doesn't [necessarily] mean that it isn't good.

This came from Peter Hirtle, a lawyer and a librarian who blogs at LibraryLaw. I find this pretty convincing but also depressing. Peter Hirtle presumably shares some of the reservations of Pam Samuelson, perhaps also of Bob Darnton, but he thinks that the Google Books Settlement will give us a lot that we would not otherwise get. Realism beats idealism.

It could be that the Google Books Library would be a lot better if it was more open and now is the time at which the demands for open-ness should be made. Whether or not the judge has flexibility in making his ruling, it would seem clear that the court of public opinion will have an effect on the way in which Google and the Books Rights Registry operate, post settlement.

Is it even possible that the best solution for Google might even be to have the Settlement rejected, or thrown back for negotiated amendment? If the Settlement and its anticipated services rolls out just as it has been formulated, specified and agreed by the parties, Google will be required to become an enforcer and an exploiter of the intellectual property in the orphan copyrights. Google will be in a very prominent and exposed position, comparable to Elsevier (which has become a kind of whipping boy for libraries and universities), or even worse, it will become subject to monopolies investigations.

I am sure that Google would deny that rejection would be an outcome that they desire. Hey they reached agreement with the plaintiffs and have a lot invested in making the settlement work! But they did agree to a postponement and if the Settlement is rejected, there is only one company that can really make a more open solution work. Google. Google would then probably propose to simply run a search service with most content well sheltered behind a meagre snippeting results service which will not have significant liabilities for Google. They would retreat to their original 'card index', simple search solution. Access will be restricted unless the plaintiffs can propose and agree to a solution which will meet the judge's tests. The Publishers and the Guild will be in a much more awkward position. Chess players have a term for it: zugzwang. None of the legally permitted moves is attractive and its the Authors and the Publishers turn to move. Are the Authors going to pay for the Books Rights Registry? Are they going to really want to sue Google till the pips squeak? Are the publishers going to insist that searching and promoting the discoverability of orphan books is not a good thing?

No. Google has shown that it is willing to do some work, to solve problems and move things forward. The publishers and the authors have no consistent leadership and will dance attendance to the tune that Google composes. The judge has a strong hand to play here and it will be in all our interests (Google's, authors, and publishers included) if he puts some public interest algorithms into the equation of settlement.

The New iPhones

In early June Apple is going to release its new 3.0 operating system for the iPhone. It seems quite probable that they will then, or shortly afterwards, release some new computer models. A new Mac mini, a new MacBook, or something like a blown up iPhone, a 10" touch screen, tablet style media player, a not quite netbook. Speculation is rife.

In about 6 weeks we will know some of the answers. A larger form iPhone that is touch screen and is media-oriented is quite likely. The success of the iPhone App store demands it -- last week the billionth App was downloaded. Apple was able to spread the success of the iTunes store by implementing it for Windows (6 months after the initial iTunes Store was launched in 2003) and that move played a big part in the success of iTunes and the iPod. Such a move is not going to work for the App Store, where most of the best software depends critically on the hardware, the geo-sensing and the touch-screen interface. So Apple will extend the range of its App Store software by extending the breadth of its hardware platform (there will probably be a low-end nano iTouch as well as an upscale iTablet before long).

It is a curious feature of the iPhone and the App store ecosystem that from the publisher's point of view the consumer's device works more or less like a dongle. Apple sell you an App for your specific account, tied to your credit card. You can work with an App on your iPhone and use the same App on your iTouch but you can't shift it to another platform. Oddly enough you can't even print from an App, and there have not been too many complaints about this, though Apple will remedy the deficiency with the forthcoming upgrade to the O/S. Apple sells software and it is in Apple's interests for free software to be given away (that broadens the appeal of the hardware and the platform) and it is in Apple's interests for software to be sold (Apple takes a 30% cut on everything that passes through its tills on the App Store). We have not seen a wave of pirated Apps and I suspect that Apple will make sure that this does not happen. They will not need to resort to DRM to do so.

For plenty of reasons, book publishers should not be thinking about DRM. But a lot of them do, and some of them are insisting on it for their eBooks. For those publishers, the fact that the Apple environment doesn't need it is an obvious attraction. The fact that Apple is also projecting the style and elan of Prada, rather than the sheer efficiency and economy of Primark will be another attraction for many authors and publishers contemplating iPhone ventures.

The sheer quality of the hardware (the brilliant screen) and the innovative touch interface give Apple a unique platform for media deployment. As the form factor gets a little bigger it will be brilliant for books, especially for digital editions - which map the quality and layout of a well designed printed volume. Just at the moment the world of digital publishing is preoccupied with the concern that Google and/or Amazon are going to end up being the monopolist of world literature. Mark my words: by the time of this Autumn's Frankfurt book fair, Apple will be another focus for monopoly concern. Can you have three non-collusive monopolists in the same market? Or is that a competitive situation?

The Berkshire Encyclopedia of China

A massive new title is now in the Berkshire Publishing shop on the Exact Editions platform. The Berkshire Encyclopedia of China has nearly 1,000 entries and comes in 5 volumes in the printed edition.




The printed volume sets will be released and sent to subscribers shortly, but the whole work is now searchable and freely sampleable on the Exact Editions platform in the service we are running for Berkshire.

Here are some sample entries:

Climate Change—​International Cooperation
Currency Valuation
Deng Xiaoping’s Southern Tour
Feng Shui
and we must have
Panda

not forgetting the complex index, with a lot of links.

The key thing about a big reference book such as this is that we can enjoy the richness of the search results. 163 hits for 'Deng', 17 for 'HIV', 106 for 'Canton', 16 for 'Guangzhou'. 'Nixon' gets 39! and 4 for 'Obama'. I wonder how many 'Obama' mentions there will be in the next edition?

Cloud Computing and Content Services

Richard Wallis who blogs as Panlibus for Tallis (the Solihull UK-based library automation specialist which seem to be going places after 40 years of quietly honing their LMS in the black country), has an interesting post on the way that library suppliers are moving into the cloud. Of course that is going to happen, and it will be interesting to see how OCLC, "the 500 lb" gorilla impacts the traditional library automation market. Especially with Google "the 15 million book" gorilla, hobbled by obvious metadata shortcomings, lurking in the background. Following on from Richard's post, I started to wonder how the content aggregators are going to react to the opportunity and challenge of selling content services within a cloud computing framework.

A recent survey paper from Berkeley summarises the hardware innovations of Cloud Computing as follows:

1. The illusion of infinite computing resources available on demand, thereby eliminating the need for Cloud Computing users to plan far ahead for provisioning.
2. The elimination of an up-front commitment by Cloud users, thereby allowing companies to start small and increase hardware resources only when there is an increase in their needs.
3. The ability to pay for use of computing resources on a short-term basis as needed (e.g., processors by the hour and storage by the day) and release them as needed, thereby rewarding conservation by letting machines and storage go when they are no longer useful. Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing (p 1)

A service model and a charging system of this kind would be very attractive to content users if it could achieve the radical cost savings typical of cloud computing. Service subscribers would jump at the promise of a service which gives them the 'illusion' of access to infinite information, (this is where the Google library of at least 10 million books comes in) and which eliminates the need for upfront commitments. The first and second capabilities are straightforward, but there does not appear to be a rationale for 3. The problem is that Information is not rivalrous. From the supplier's point of view, whether as creator or as intermediary, there is nothing saved when users do not use a resource. The intrinsic value of copyright resources does not increase because less use is made of them. Paradoxically the value of a scientific resource such as Science Direct actually increases if its usage is widespread. From the information suppliers standpoint the 'trick' is to maintain the illusion that a resource is effectively available wherever it is needed, even though a great deal is being charged for it and the barriers to entry and easy use are high. Paying for the resource on a short-trem or intermittent basis is unlikely to appeal to the rights holder. I suspect that the Books Rights Registry will be slow to sanction Google in the introduction of an hourly 'pay as you go' access model to its main collection.

A solution to this conundrum will emerge, and I suspect that it will evolve in the direction that publishers and rights holders want their information to be accessible, searchable, citeable, and to a limited extent viewable for free. But they do not want to give it all away. The necessity and the attraction of charging for data and content will be limited to services which are in some extent premium, whether by virtue of extreme topicality, of outstanding readable quality, or of additional value services. The Exact Editions service already deploys a cloud-based content management system it will be interesting to see how our partner publishers evolve solutions for end-user pricing and public access (all our public-facing services are now searchable without need for a subscription or controlled access). In fact every page can be viewed at thumbnail size without the need to register an account. Perhaps we need to evolve towards a stage where every citation at least delivers a thumbnail view even of 'closed' pages.

The Press Gazette is Saved

The magazine has been bought by Mike Danson's Progressive Media group. When Wilmington announced a fortnight ago that they were closing the magazine it was withdrawn from the Exact Editions shop, though subscribers still have access to their accounts. It looks as though the magazine will resume publication in May and we hope that it will continue in its successful digital form on the Exact Editions platform. More definite news later in the week.

A new publisher with entrepreneurial vision could push the magazine back into the mainstream of British media coverage. Promoting the digital edition and selling subscriptions to it at an attractive price should be a part of that vision.