Report on Library Publishing Services

An interesting report on the development of library publishing services was published in March (LINK)

Here is a description of the survey and report:

Over the past five years, libraries have begun to expand their role in the scholarly publishing value chain by offering a greater range of pre-publication and editorial support services. Given the rapid evolution of these services, there is a clear community need for practical guidance concerning the challenges and opportunities facing library-based publishing programs.

Recognizing that library publishing services represent one part of a complex ecology of scholarly communication, Purdue University Libraries, in collaboration with the Libraries of Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Utah, secured an IMLS National Leadership Grant under the title “Library Publishing Services: Strategies for Success.” The project, conducted between October 2010 and September 2011, seeks to advance the professionalism of library-based publishing by identifying successful library publishing strategies and services, highlighting best practices, and recommending priorities for building capacity.

The project has four components: 1) a survey of librarians designed to provide an overview of current practice for library publishing programs (led by consultant October Ivins); 2) a report presenting best practice case studies of the publishing programs at the partner institutions (written by consultant Raym Crow); 3) a series of workshops held at each participating institution to present and discuss the findings of the survey and case studies; and 4) a review of the existing literature on library publishing services. The results of these research threads are pulled together in this project white paper.

There are several sets of recommendations and here is one set on developing best practices for library publishing:

• Develop meaningful impact metrics for library publishing services to demonstrate the effectiveness and value of library-based publishing programs and inform resource allocations.
• Establish editorial quality and performance criteria to increase the value and longevity of the publications that library programs support.
• Promote sustainability best practices to improve the long-term strength and stability of library publishing programs.
• Develop return-on-investment justifications for funding library publishing programs to support increased library budget allocations in support of such programs.

Several years ago (2007) I wrote a post asking why more libraries didn't have their own publishing programs and here is the link to that post.

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MediaWeek (V5, N29): UK Frees Journal Articles, Amazon in Japan, Revising HigherEd, Blackboard Myths, Translations + More

UK is about to open up academic publishing.  (Guardian):

Though many academics will welcome the announcement, some scientists contacted by the Guardian were dismayed that the cost of the transition, which could reach £50m a year, must be covered by the existing science budget and that no new money would be found to fund the process. That could lead to less research and fewer valuable papers being published.

British universities now pay around £200m a year in subscription fees to journal publishers, but under the new scheme, authors will pay "article processing charges" (APCs) to have their papers peer reviewed, edited and made freely available online. The typical APC is around £2,000 per article.

Tensions between academics and the larger publishing companies have risen steeply in recent months as researchers have baulked at journal subscription charges their libraries were asked to pay.

More than 12,000 academics have boycotted the Dutch publisher Elsevier, in part of a broader campaign against the industry that has been called the "academic spring".

Why Amazon will have a hard time in Japan.  I guess we'll see if they're right.  (JapanTimes):

The problem they’re having in Japan is trying to negotiate that same kind of deal with domestic publishers. Like any long-established industry in Japan (or almost anything for that matter, from the nation’s government to even its foster care system), they are resistant to change. They don’t want to rock the boat, or experiment with new things. They don’t like the idea of cutting back on their wholesale prices, and thus reducing their profits. Especially to a big, foreign company from the U.S. Not after they’ve been doing things their own way for so long.

While Amazon is struggling to get publishers signed on for e-book distribution, Rakuten already has deals with a majority of them. A big part of that could be that Rakuten is a domestic Japanese company. They know what the publishing companies of their own country want and how far they’ll be willing to bend. Another factor could be that they’re not after drastically reduced wholesale pricing like Amazon is. Rakuten knows Japanese customers are used to paying high prices for media like books, music, and movies, and they’re not trying to change that. Besides, they’re already the equivalent of Japan’s own Amazon.com. They don’t need to revolutionize the book selling market to make their name, they’re just trying to break into the e-book market.

Interesting piece from Fast Company about revising the HEd curriculum (FastCo):

The opposition of “liberal arts” and “vocational education” carries with it a lot of residual 19th-century class snobbery as well as 20th-century quantitative bias. In the real world of the 21st century, there aren’t “two cultures.” We need both. As a cartoon circulating on Facebook would have it, “Science can tell you how to clone a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Humanities can tell you why this might be a bad idea.”

To get us thinking about the possibilities of real educational reform, I propose a Start-Up Core Curriculum for Entrepreneurship, Service, and Society (hokey, yes: SUCCESS). Neither a Great Books common core (which, however profound, rarely connects to a student’s specialized major) nor the duck, duck, goose model of distribution requirements (where students are left to make coherence from a welter of rhetoric, statistics, art appreciation, natural science, foreign language or other course offerings), the Start-Up Core Curriculum isn’t just about content mastery, but about putting deep knowledge along with basic skills into practice to address intractable real-world global problems.

Stop complaining: Five Myths about Blackboard (Inside HigherEd):

Myth #4 - Blackboard's Challenges Are Around Technology: It is easy to look at Blackboard's core Learn product, compare the platform against modern LMS's designed solely for cloud delivery (such as Instructure's Canvas), and conclude the Blackboard has a technology problem. The reality is that Blackboard has a large number of skilled developers and the capabilities to quickly design next generation cloud based learning services. Learning platforms that would benefit from all the Blackboard has learned about scalability, usability, and reliability. Blackboard's challenge is an installed user base of educational institutions that are reluctant to make big changes (for good reasons).   Everyone at Blackboard knows that mobile learning, interconnected platforms, and software as a service e-learning is the future. The key is figuring out how to help higher ed clients build that bridge between a legacy and modern e-learning infrastructure.  This is where the Services division will be so important, as change management is the most important and difficult component of increasing productivity (supported by technology) in higher ed.

From the Economist a look at book translations in Stories from Elsewhere (Econ):

The Illinois-based Dalkey Archive Press, which has been publishing international literature in English for 25 years, says the lack of literature in translation is a cultural crisis that is growing worse. Faced with such a homogeneous reading culture in her adopted Britain, Meike Ziervogel, a German native, started Peirene Press in 2008 in her north London home. She joins a handful of publishing pioneers such as New York’s Europa Editions and Rochester University’s Open Letter, which are working to chip away at the navel-gazing literary culture of Anglo-American letters. She publishes three novellas (each shorter than 200 pages) a year in English by celebrated European authors who are barely known outside their home countries.

From my twitter feed this week (slow week);

Hands-on: nearly instant photofinishing direct from your smartphone ArsTechnica

Library Groups, EFF Hit Back in HathiTrust Case http://www.PublishersWeekly

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AAUP Panel Meeting: Content Chunking and New Revenue

Several weeks ago I was invited to speak at the annual Association of American University Presses (AAUP) meeting on a panel discussing the ‘chunking’ of educational content.  My inclusion was appropriate given my current involvement with educational and academic publishing companies that are looking at ways to monetize the selection and packaging of ‘chunked’ content.  Increasingly, faculty and university administrators want more creative control over the material they assign their students with the added benefit of being better able to manage costs.  I would expect that publishers should want and also be able to take advantage of this.  The practice of ‘chunking’ content in education is not new and, in my own experience, I’ve seen large educational publishing companies create entirely new workflows around providing custom versions of their own materials to educators

In my discussion at AAUP, I focused less on my current work and and more on the trends I see in the marketplace overall.  I began my discussion by observing that ‘chunking’ in educational content is inevitable and inexorable.  As most publishers will admit, the process has been growing rapidly (often illegally) over the past 20 years but maybe largely uncounted in terms of value.  A comparison to the music world before iTunes is always referenced but ‘chunking’ has also been used in newspapers, journals and magazines, television and other media segments for many years.  Education is just late to the party.

Naturally, during any changing market sometimes the incumbent market participants can be disadvantaged; in education, because the market is so heavily concentrated on four large players, they have the most to lose when faculty and administrators’ decisions about content and pricing attain a broader scope.  Rather than choose one textbook and a package of assorted articles and textbook content, a faculty member may now effectively combine the two into a package that specifically matches their class objectives.  Now, rather than being the primary suppliers of content assigned, once-dominant textbook publishers may suddenly find themselves one source of many.

In other media segments, we have seen some price erosion as content has been disaggregated (from album to track, for example) and that is likely to occur in education as well.  It’s too early to tell whether this is good or bad but pricing is already a key factor to students, faculty and administrators; it’s easy to see how a faculty member would opt for affordability especially when coupled with greater latitude to choose content.  Currently, evidence suggests that 'chunked' prices are consistent with current ‘full book’ content but remains to be seen whether these prices will be pushed downwards in the future.

COPE is a concept many in the media industry (and consultants) have been touting for a long time: Create your Content Once but have the ability to Publish it Everywhere.  This is compatible with the practice of creating new xml based workflows so you can repurpose your content to fit differing circumstances, without having to rework it or reinvent new production processes.  Currently, most of the publishers we work with only have the ability to provide pdf files to us but, as more customers demand disaggregated or ‘chunked’ content, publishers will need to rebuild their workflows.  As a consequence, the market will also demand better meta-data to support the sale and distribution of this content and we are seeing publishers start to address both of these challenges.
(Note – at this point in my presentation, I referenced the size of the education market and the revenue associated with certain segments and titles using charts from PubTrack).

As I suggested above, we see the following as drivers to a more ‘chunked’ publishing environment:

• The need to more affordably manage the cost of education and materials
• The desire to provide more choice to faculty and educators in the selection of course content
• Provision of intuitive and flexible content creation processes
• Delivering sharing and collaboration across ‘networks’
• Migration to electronic delivery of content
• Growth of open-access and ‘free’ content
• Growing expectation for highly customizable solutions for publishers and institutions

Currently, text-based content is the focus of the custom model in education; however, multi-media (digital) content is often requested, used and produced.  At many universities, for example, faculty lectures are recorded and distributed, YouTube is considered an important resource and webchat, web demos and other interactive technologies are used extensively.  Importantly, we will begin to see our publishers provide digital elements like these for use by faculty in increasing numbers, and our platform has been built to accommodate the delivery of content in various formats.  We will soon be expanding our library accordingly.  These content additions will raise the complexity in delivering a solution to faculty that remains easy to use.  Given this increased complexity, our challenge will be search and discovery – delivering the precise content requested – for which we will rely on metadata supplied by publishers.  We hope publishers appreciate these shared challenges.

All-campus (or all-systems) approaches to addressing some of the drivers I note above are becoming more common.  At Indiana University (IU), they have established a campus-content platform through which faculty can choose and assign content while providing a consistent experience for students.  A key aspect of this implementation is that Indiana has entered into direct agreements with several publishers to host their content (with preferential pricing) on this platform.  In theory, the IU students benefit from the university’s negotiating power over the publishers, and many other universities view IU as a leader in this arena because of the way they have approached relations with publishers.

There are numerous other examples offering similar approaches to the management of content on campus including programs at MIT, the California State University (CSU) system, an initiative in Minnesota and several others.  CSU partnered with Cengage earlier this year and is seeking other similar publisher relationships.


In closing my comments at AAUP, I noted some market dynamics that indicate ‘chunking’ is already relevant.  In particular, permissions revenues (which have long been considered ‘found-money’) are growing at a far greater rate than overall revenues for many publishers.  I heard this repeatedly at AAUP indicating that my prediction that ‘permissions’ revenues will become a primary source of publisher revenues is already taking place.   Additionally, the four large education publishers have all beefed up their own custom publishing solutions – which, for the most part, operate as ‘closed-gardens’ – and have seen significant revenue growth because of their investments.  (Much of this may be substitution revenue).  In the future, I expect all publishers to either have their own custom platform and/or to participate in solutions provided by platform providers such as CoreSource, CourseSmart and VitalSource.

We believe the recent Georgia eReserves case gave impetus to digital solutions that can render content easily accessible and reasonably priced and I have seen an uptick in publishers seeking advice on this point.  The Georgia case made clear that publisher content is being used in disaggregated form by many educators across universities but, because there has not been a ‘marketplace’ (similar to iTunes), much of this content has been appropriated without due payment to the publisher.  Improvements to the clearance and permissions process have helped but the effort to “do-the-right-thing” still remains cumbersome.  As a result of this, it seems inevitable that there will be much more competition in providers offering platforms and solutions to publishers that can delivery content that maximizes this opportunity.

In conclusion, I hope we can first agree on a different term than ‘chunking’ since this implies that the material doesn’t have uniformity and/or pedagogical veracity of itself.  Perhaps because we are currently ‘chunking’ content that has been created as a component (not a stand-alone) and a component then ‘chunking’ may be appropriate now but not for the future.  In the future, faculty will want to find and assign (buy) individual items and thus your editorial processes (as a publisher) will need to be re-thought.  Often, it is not possible to anticipate how customers will use our products and in a disaggregated world these uses will explode.  We must provide them some basic building blocks and tools which, on a very basic level include, re-flowable content, descriptive details and information, metadata and keywords.   Some publishers are starting to develop this so don’t be left behind.

Here are the slides from this presentation:

AAUP Annual Meeting Panel Meeting: Content Chunking

View more presentations from Michael Cairns.

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MediaWeek (V5, N28): Amazon & Search, British Comic Books, Henning Mankell + More

From The Nation a look at the evolution of search in the Amazon.com bookstore (The Nation):

The glory soon faded, because the high print orders shrank when the returns came in. Only a few of the remaining superstores—alas for the Borders that once graced Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square, a monument of civilization—still offer recondite books, as opposed to their 100,000 usual suspects. But Amazon survived, and evolved, and so did our ways of working with it. From the start, it transformed one ancient and tedious task: finding and ordering books for college and university courses. For decades, university teachers had compiled their reading lists from the massive, closely printed volumes of Books in Print. These tools of the teacher’s trade were as infuriating as they were indispensable. Publishers exist—or so every university teacher secretly thinks—mostly to take books out of print immediately after you have cast them to play a central role in your next term’s courses. Printed catalogs necessarily came out with far too long a lead time to keep abreast of these decisions, publisher by publisher. You could check your syllabus as often as you liked against the most recent Books in Print and still find yourself hung out to dry when, two weeks before the term started, the university bookstore sent notice that your most important texts were out of print or out of stock. After the 1979 Thor Power decision, which prevented publishers from writing down the value of their inventories for tax purposes, cancellation notices carpeted the floors of faculty mailrooms every August and January like autumn leaves in Vallombrosa. Amazon, by contrast, provided information about a book’s availability as current as the publishers themselves could keep it. A new distribution system couldn’t solve the underlying problems: publishers still took good books out of print when they stopped selling and ratcheted up the price of serious paperbacks until students couldn’t afford them. Still, by the late 1990s, even if you never bought a single book from Amazon, you found yourself relying on the information that this public-spirited firm made freely available.

The above quote is especially interesting to me since as President of Bowker we had to contend with that "public-spirited firm" as our BooksinPrint business became (almost) collateral damage in the expansion of Amazon.  Competing with 'free' is never fun.

The New Statesman suggests there's a missed opportunity for British comic book publishers (NS):

While it's not completely crazy to argue that UK box-offices show a clear appetite for superheroes that domestic properties could capitalise on, it does make a lot of assumptions that aren't correct. Leaving aside the fact that cinematic popularity rarely translates into periodical sales, even in America, then by Abbott's logic there's a market for domestically-produced transforming robot toys going completely untapped over here as well. But what could we do to make British Transformers compete with the real Transformers, except ghettoise them by making them Brit-specific? British superheroes suffer exactly that problem – their Britishness becomes the defining characteristic, crippling their appeal from the start.

 A Henning Mankell interview from The Telegraph:

Mankell has nothing but praise for Branagh, who asked him for permission to play therole when they met at a Swedish film festival. He is pleased about his friend’s knighthood because it acknowledges Branagh’s place in the pantheon of the great British actors he admires. He ranks Branagh with Sir Alec Guinness for ability to convey emotion and thought while “listening into the silence”.

On top of his already prodigious output, Mankell has written a miniseries for Swedish television about his late father-in-law, Ingmar Bergman. The series, which will be filmed later this year, is not a pious memorial. Although Mankell created Wallander before he married Bergman’s daughter Eva, he sees similar flaws in the two men. “They both refuse to compromise over their work and they both let their families pay the price.”

I wonder how his own family views his adventures. He has been held at gunpoint in Africa and in 2010 was briefly reported dead after Israeli forces stormed a Gaza-bound aid boat he was on. “Maybe I wouldn’t have gone if I’d had small children. But my children are grown up. No, I don’t think I have treated my family as badly as Wallander does.”

You are going to have to go a long way to find a literature related story as inane as this one (Departures):

When searching for a summer read—or a smart approach to dressing this season—look no further than the Great American Novel for inspiration.

From my twitter feed this week:

For Journalists mostly from CJR Copywrong, How well do you know fair use. CJR

Fantastic photos of street life in London in 1876: http://bit.ly/N9CRFh 

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BISG Metadata Summit July 24th.

From their announcement

Product metadata is the connective tissue of the book industry, binding publishers and authors to data aggregators, retailers, and others. But information about the products we sell is only valuable when it's accurate, timely, complete, and updated – and too often, that's not the case.

BISG’s Metadata Summit presents a unique opportunity for executives representing all points in the book supply chain to discuss the benefits and challenges of maintaining quality metadata.

In this intimate, exclusive setting – limited to 25 attendees, director-level and above – Brian O'Leary (Magellan Media Consulting) will present the results of BISG’s new report on Development, Use, and Modification of Book Product Metadata. Publisher and retailer representatives will then engage in a conversation about how industry partners can work together to ensure quality product metadata. A room-wide discussion will follow.

Presenters:

· Brian O’Leary, Founder and Principal, Magellan Media Consulting

· Phil Madans, Director of Publishing Standards and Practices, Hachette Book Group

· Ashleigh Gardner, Director, Content Management, Kobo

· Matt Supko, Technology Director, American Booksellers Association

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Pan Am in Tehran

Yes, if you look closely there is a person in there and it's me.  Sitting in row 2; approximately, and just about to depart the plane which is on the tarmac at Tehran International airport.  Over the northern summer in 1972, I got to travel with my Dad back to the UK (from New Zealand) where he left me and went on to Columbia Business School for the summer.

There are four photos in this sequence which also includes a full length image of the entire plane set against a brilliant blue sky, and seeing that Pan Am 747 brings back a lot of memories.  This jet named Clipper Pacific Trader was with Pan Am from 1971 (when it was delivered) to 1984 but at one point it was loaned (oddly) to Iran Air.  Interesting that we were flying on an almost new aircraft at the time and Jumbo jets were still very new generally.  People used to come to the airport to see them!

Naturally, through the power of the internets you can trace this aircraft's entire history all the way to the bone yard in Arizona where it now sits on blocks.  Everything has been removed including the wings and the fuselage and it just sits there like a beached whale. 

Another weekly image from my archive. Click on it to make it larger.

In addition to the images I've posted on Flickr and those I've periodically posted on PND, I have now produced a Big Blurb Book: From the Archive 1960 -1980 of some of the images I really thought were special.

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MediaWeek (V5, N27): Julian Barnes, eTextbooks Anyone? Inheriting eBooks + More

Julian Barnes writing in the Guardian about his life as a bibliofile:

By now, I was beginning to view books as more than just utilitarian, sources of information, instruction, delight or titillation. First there was the excitement and meaning of possession. To own a certain book – one you had chosen yourself – was to define yourself. And that self-definition had to be protected, physically. So I would cover my favourite books (paperbacks, inevitably, out of financial constraint) with transparent Fablon. First, though, I would write my name – in a recently acquired italic hand, in blue ink, underlined with red – on the edge of the inside cover. The Fablon would then be cut and fitted so that it also protected the ownership signature. Some of these books – for instance, David Magarshack's Penguin translations of the Russian classics – are still on my shelves.

Ten reasons students aren't actually using eTextbooks (Edudemic):

When e-textbooks were first introduced, they were supposed to be the wave of the future, and experts thought we’d see e-reader-toting students littering college campuses, and of course being adopted in droves by online university students.

But they haven’t taken off quite as expected: according to market research firm Student Monitor, only about 11% of college students have bought e-textbooks. So what happened? Here, we’ll explore several reasons why students aren’t yet warming up to the idea of e-textbooks today.

 Amanda Katz on NPR asks whether your grand children will inherit your eBooks (NPR):

In the age of the e-book, the paper book faces two possible and antithetical fates. It may become something to be discarded, as with the books that libraries scan and cannibalize. (In the introduction to another book, Unpacking My Library: Writers and Their Books, Price mentions the severed book spines that hang on the wall at Google, "like taxidermists' trophies.") Alternatively, it may become a special object to be preserved and traded. My grandfather's copy of War of the Worlds obviously falls into the second category — but very few of the millions of books published since the mid-19th century are ones you'd want to own. If Amazon has a "long tail" of obscure but occasionally purchased titles, the tail that goes back 150 years is near endless and thin as thread.

Meanwhile, the kind of "serial" book sharing (as Price describes it) that occurs over time is giving way to simultaneous, "synchronous" sharing. With the Kindle, you can see what thousands of other Kindle readers are highlighting in the book you're reading — a fairly astonishing innovation. But the passage of books from hand to hand, gathering inscriptions along the way, is not part of the e-book economy. Will your grandchild inherit your Kindle books? No one knows, but given password protection and the speed at which data becomes obsolete, that seems highly unlikely.

Real time language translation for in-class lectures is tested in Germany and could expand their pool of foreign students$  Maybe the could work on comprehension next (Chronicle):

The translation system could be an essential tool in making Karlsruhe and other German universities more attractive to international students, perhaps even allowing them to eventually abandon language requirements if it proves reliable enough.

Many students, in Germany and elsewhere, are also interested in translating from English into their own languages, especially Chinese, Mr. Waibel adds. “There’s tremendous potential for this,” both in classrooms and more generally, he says.

Even students who feel comfortable in the language in which a lecture is being delivered have said they find the automatic translator useful. Some have said they find that having a transcript in German helps improve their German and allows them to better follow a lecture, even if they don’t use the translation component.

Here's proof there's always a silver lining.  Sometimes in lace and satin.  And naughty.  (Observer):

"Once women see that sex shops are clean and then they visit again. Once they feel comfortable and realise that they are not the only people in the world trying to do something different they start asking the questions they would have asked years ago if they realised there was someone to ask."

Lesley Lewis, who first worked as a dancer in Soho in 1979 and now runs the famous French House pub, said the new generation of visitors were a welcome addition.

"Soho was always a place where people could be themselves. In the past it was gay men holding hands and if now it's women going to sex shops after reading Fifty Shades of Grey then that can't be a bad thing. Long may it carry on like that," she said.

From Twitter:

The Library of Congress curates 88 books that shaped America http://j.mp/Lc7bfU

Lectures go digital. NYTimes

The World's 54 Largest Book Publishers, 2012 PublishersWeekly 

OCLC & EBSCO Develop Partnership Offering Interoperability of Services 4 Libraries and Increased Options for Discovery Press Release

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