Emma: Le papier ne sera jamais mort

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42nd Street - The good old days of the mid 1990s

42nd Street Peep Show

This was image was taken in July 1993 was I walked across from Port Authority to Times Square and the image is approximately where MacDonalds now stands if you know the block between 8th and 7th Avenue.  Until the later 1990s the Times square area wasn't as G rated as it is now but I just wish I had taken more photos. 

During this month there was an open air art installation which is why I had my camera with me and the rest of the images showing installation pieces which included placing odd statements of the theater marquees are located here on Flickr.

This one isn't part of the Blurb book I remind everyone about but it will probably be in the next one.

You will notice that a peep was only 25cents in those days.  Something to reflect on.

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Cengage Reports Second Quarter

Cengage reported their second quarter results two weeks ago (Feb 13) and their analyst meeting was also the first time new CEO Michael Hansen led the discussion.  As the chart on the left indicates the second quarter 2013 showed significant deterioration in performance relative to the same period last year.  This also follows a weak Q1.  While results are disappointing it is harder to discern if Cengage is truely in trouble as some analysts suggest when they confuse the company's operating performance with their considerable short and long term debt situation.  There is little doubt the company will be forced to refinance their debt but whether they will do this by taking advantage of bankruptcy law is still an open question.  There was no indication on the call that this was being considered.

The Q2 $48 mm variance was explained as a result of the following issues:

• Texas - National Geographic sale was non-recurring revenue
• Channel partner issue - Not identified but also mentioned last quarter
• Enrollments - declining
• Research segment - under pressure

Hansen took the audience through his update which included a state of the business - enrollment continues soft, exposure in the library market mainly affecting Gale, the impact of a non-recurring sale in the same quarter last year and generally 'performance pressure' in higher education, which he then followed with an update on his strategic initiatives.

During the last call, it was noted the company had received some materially bad news from one of their significant channel partners.  Revenues were impacted and Hansen undertook personally to get this relationship fixed which he says he has now done.  Ordering from this partner is now back on track (although he didn't indicate the financial terms needed to fix this issue nor whether the lost revenue would be recovered).

His 'to-do' list includes setting up his new executive team which he has completed and then executing on several key strategic initiatives. These are as follows:

• Optimize existing solutions: Legacy print, increase digital homework solutions, align pricing and sales approach
• Mind Tap: accelerate development and lead the market, establish a dedicated team: relaunch Fall 2013
• Digital road map: delivery solutions that make learning fun, effective provide superior performance, invest in highly competitive, differentiated solutions
• Establish a key performance measurement program

It is early days yet to show results but these are definitely the areas where Cengage needs to establish itself as educational publishing moves forward as education becomes based more on technological solutions rather than bound print.

There were several other bullets of note from the question and answer period:

• Slowing enrollment down 1.8%
• Library reference:
• Public libraries: 57% say spending will be flat or lower
• Three years in a row state support has declined
• Gale exposed but continue to invest in the segment - negotiating partnerships to expand the segment

• Shift to subscription models impacts the recognized revenue
• "Research": 18% decline in print and 11% decline in revenue
• Gale is flat - 70% of revenue is in electronic

With respect to their digital offerings he spoke about "attach rates" where a book is associated with a digital offering.  The 'attach' part of this being the percentage of students with the electronic component.  With their student home school helper for example they have seen significant increases in sell-thru versus the print only offer.  The re-invigoration of MindTap will be important for the future of the business and is currently offers over 600 solutions.  Their 2nd generation offering will be launched for the Fall semester and will be focused on two disciplines and Hansen suggested the company was looking for distribution/exposure rather than revenues in this cycle.

On a related call from the private equity company Apollo which has an investment in Cengage there was some discussion of their investment in Cengage.   It was noted that Apollo had reduced their position in the company: After refinancing during the last quarter, the CEO James Zelter noted: "They came out with numbers that definitely surprised us" and we "thought the exposure was too large given the new information" so we "monetized a chuck of the position which obviously realized a loss" and as "new information comes out we will reevaluate" our position accordingly

Transcripts:
Cengage - Company
Apollo - SeekingAlpha

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MediaWeek (V7, N10): Grey House, Student Data, Amazon, Newspapers +More

There's still a lot of money in print. Grey House is taking over print titles from EBSCO (PW) and has made a business of taking over legacy print titles from a range of publishers including EBSCO, Bowker and Proquest.

Grey House Publishing will become the publisher of the print editions of the H.W. Wilson product line under a new exclusive license between EBSCO Publishing (EBSCO) and Grey House. Wilson publishes a range of reference work for the library markets and is best known for Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature, first published in 1901. The deal with Wilson comes shortly after Grey House and EBSCO announced that Grey House would become the publisher of the print editions of the Salem Press product line. First titles to be published under that agreement are currently at the printer.

Big data pool of student achievement information is being created. Where's the concern? Reuters

The database is a joint project of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which provided most of the funding, the Carnegie Corporation of New York and school officials from several states. Amplify Education, a division of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, built the infrastructure over the past 18 months. When it was ready, the Gates Foundation turned the database over to a newly created nonprofit, inBloom Inc, which will run it. States and school districts can choose whether they want to input their student records into the system; the service is free for now, though inBloom officials say they will likely start to charge fees in 2015. So far, seven states - Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Massachusetts - have committed to enter data from select school districts. Louisiana and New York will be entering nearly all student records statewide. "We look at personalized learning as the next big leap forward in education," said Brandon Williams, a director at the Illinois State Board of Education.

Why do we trust Amazon - from New York Magazine:

Amazon is good at sorting and ranking things—we understand that. It knows exactly how many boxes of diapers my kids have ever used. It knows every book I’ve considered. It’s also clear that Amazon doesn’t care about what it sells; it just cares about the selling. To Amazon, a book isn’t really a book. It’s the result of a database query that Amazon will seamlessly transmit over its Whispernet or via USPS to your doorstep, if that’s still your thing. To the shopper, Amazon, with its records of browsing and buying, is not a store nor a website, but more like a ghost limb, for grabbing whatever is needed or wanted.

A long look at Advance Communications changes to the way they run their newspapers with a focus on the Times-Picayune (CJR)

American newspapers have lost more than half their advertising dollars in the last five years, an existential threat to an industry that in 2007 depended on ads for three-fourths of its revenue. The Times-Picayune is no exception to the trend. Its advertising has plunged 42 percent since 2009, according to an analysis of figures its publisher gave The Wall Street Journal in September.

There is no sure answer for what to do about this. Still, by now, most major newspapers have begun moving to strategies that play to their strengths: charging core readers online while allowing casual visitors 10 or so free stories a month; increasing the price of the paper, sometimes by charging an upsell fee for bundling digital access with print; shoring up Sunday circulation; and attempting to convert ad departments into marketing-services operations that provide more holistic solutions to local promotion, like website creation, social-media help, app creation, and the like. These and similar strategies are based on the value of the content, and on a hopeful bet that newspapers can keep significant subscription revenue in the coming all-digital future.

Advance is following the industry into marketing services. But mainly it has stuck by what was conventional Web wisdom from before the recession—chasing clicks. In the new NOLA model, editors push reporters to increase “inventory,” more content with fewer journalists. And more of its remaining resources are in sports and entertainment. In this system, a distracted click on a story that says, in its entirety, “Hornets officially announce their nickname will be changing from Hornets to Pelicans,” is worth as much as one on, say, a prison exposé. More, actually, since the former comes with less time and effort.

From my Twitter stream:
Bertelsmann takes control of BMG - FT
Online data errors cost US groups $10bn -FT
At South by Southwest Education Event, Tensions Divide Entrepreneurs and Educators Chronicle
Launch of Digital Public Library of America Chronicle
Ebooks: newspapers should capitalise on their archives Guardian
Comixology launches online self-publishing platform for comic books The Verge

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Bangkok Klong: Wash Day 1969

That's the real color of the water and no she's not having a swim.   There's a photo later on in this set of a guy clearly brushing his teeth.  Of course it is entirely possible that the woman in this photo is in far better health that the tourists on the sightseeing boat.

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.

I now have an iPad version of this book for sale ($4.99) on the Blurb site which you can find here: STORE

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HBS Doesn't Teach Accounting

When I was in business school accounting was the worst class I took. Unfortunately, accounting turned out to be fundamental to where I ended up in my first job and I decided to enroll at NYU to build my skills. I didn't get what I needed at grad school. I was reminded of this experience when I read this interview with Clayton Christensen and I wished we had the type of options available to us when I went through business schools. Our accounting professors were average as well.

Christensen: Journalism, certainly, and publishing broadly. Anything supported by advertising. That all of this is being disrupted is now beyond question. And then I think higher education is just on the edge of the crevasse. Generally, universities are doing very well financially, so they don’t feel from the data that their world is going to collapse. But I think even five years from now these enterprises are going to be in real trouble.

Howe: Why is higher education vulnerable?

Christensen: The availability of online learning. It will take root in its simplest applications, then just get better and better. You know, Harvard Business School doesn’t teach accounting anymore, because there’s a guy out of BYU whose online accounting course is so good. He is extraordinary, and our accounting faculty, on average, is average.

Howe: What happens to all our institutions of advanced learning?

Christensen: Some will survive. Most will evolve hybrid models, in which universities license some courses from an online provider like Coursera but then provide more-specialized courses in person. Hybrids are actually a principle regardless of industry. If you want to use a new technology in a mainstream existing market, it has to be a hybrid. It’s like the electric car. If you want to have a viable electric car, you have to ask if there is a market where the customers want a car that won’t go far or fast. The answer is, parents of teenagers would love to put their teens in a car that won’t go far or fast. Little by little, the technology will emerge to take it on longer trips. But if you want to have this new technology employed on the California freeways right now, it has to be a hybrid like a Prius, where you take the best of the old with the best of the new.

The rest of that interview is here in WIRED

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MediaWeek (V7, N9): ISBNs, Books & Commuting, Course Guides, Music Money + More

The Economist readers in the group may have seen that the lowly ISBN made it into the newspaper this week. It wasn't a particularly good article and I said so. (Economist):

This is a curious article: In some cases, it misses the point and, in others, it misinforms the reader about how the publishing industry currently works.

There is no doubt that the ISBN--as a global standard for the identification of physical product--is facing, or will soon face, a challenge as physical books become eBooks but its irrelevance is still a fair distance off. A mix of formats (electronic and paper)is likely to exist for many years (particularly with the variability in markets around the world for adoption of the eBook) and the use of the ISBN is long and deeply embedded in all significant publishing systems from editorial to marketing to royalty accounting.

Further, it is hard to agree with your statement that the ISBN hampers small publishers when the past ten years have seen the most significant growth in small- and medium-sized publishers in history. Both Bowker and Nielsen report these numbers each year for the US and UK markets. One circumstance you allude to is that in 'olden times'--when we had more than two significant bookstore chains (in the US)--there was no question as to whether to obtain an ISBN; however, a publisher today could make a perfectly valid decision not to acquire an ISBN and simply sell their book or eBook through Amazon . . . and they could do okay with that. But why would any publisher with a book offering legitimate sales potential want to exclude all other retailers? That would be hard to understand.

Assigning an ISBN to a book never guaranteed 'mainstream' publication - it's not clear what you mean by that. Certainly, retailers would not (do not) accept a book without an ISBN but, by the same token, B&N won't accept your book simply because it has an ISBN. There's a little bit more to it than that. I wrote about the prospects for the ISBN back in 2009 and reflected on the ASIN situation. It's not new and it was never altruistic. Here it is, if interested: http://personanondata.blogspot.com/2009/08/isbn-is-dead.html

The other identifiers you note are interesting but don't really apply or fit with the requirements of the book (e- or p-) supply chain. There's no question the industry needs to think differently about identifiers but I don't think that's a point you end up making. Even if a book can be easily downloaded and paid for, someone still has to do the accounting and make sure the right publisher gets the right payment so they can the pay the author and contributors their share. Individuals and small publishers could possibly do without an ISBN but, in doing so, they may only be limiting their opportunities.

Commuting on the Underground: John Lanchester rides the London Underground (Guardian):

This is an academic finding that hasn't crossed over into the wider world. I've never seen a film or television programme about the importance of commuting in Londoners' lives; if it comes to that, I've never read a novel that captures it either. The centrality of London's underground to Londoners – the fact that it made the city historically, and makes it what it is today, and is woven in a detailed way into the lives of most of its citizens on a daily basis – is strangely underrepresented in fiction about the city, and especially in drama. More than 1bn underground journeys take place every year – 1.1bn in 2011, and 2012 will certainly post a larger number still. That's an average of nearly 3m journeys every day. At its busiest, there are about 600,000 people on the network simultaneously, which means that, if the network at rush hour were a city in itself, rather than an entity inside London, it would have the same population as Glasgow, the fourth biggest city in the UK. The District line alone carries about 600,000 people every day, which means that it, too, is a version of Glasgow. 

There are quite a few novels and films and TV programmes about Glasgow. Where are the equivalent fictions about the underground? New York has any number of films about its subway – The Warriors, the John Carpenter movie from 1979, is one of the best of them, and explicitly celebrates the network's geographical reach across the whole city, from Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx to Coney Island. New York also has Joseph Sargent's The Taking of Pelham 123, an all-subway-located thriller, among many other cinematic depictions. Paris has the Luc Besson film Subway, and plenty of other movies. London has next to nothing. (Let's gloss over the Gwyneth Paltrow vehicle Sliding Doors – though not before noting that the crucial moment when she either does or doesn't catch the train is on the District line, at Fulham Broadway. Spoiler alert: in the version in which she rushes and successfully catches the train, she dies. A District line driver would call this a useful reminder that this isn't the national rail network, and there will be another one along in a minute.) There's a wonderfully bad Donald Pleaseance movie from 1972 called Death Line, set entirely in Russell Square underground station; there were some episodes of Doctor Who in the 60s, which seemed scary at the time, about the tube network being taken over by robot yetis. To a remarkable extent, though, that's it. London is at the centre of innumerable works of fiction and drama and TV and cinema, but this thing at the heart of London life, which does more to create the texture of London life than any other single institution, is largely and mysteriously absent.

American Public University and their course guides is an interesting project (CampusTech)

The online course guides project is an award-winning academic technology initiative to match every one of APUS's online courses with an online library course guide, a new approach to offset the high cost of traditional print text books. Now that the project has successfully completed guides for a little over half of the university's course offerings, further practical metrics may be applied to the initial statistical analytic framework to widen the project's focus from course guide completion rates to higher levels of quality assurance and sustainability.

Analysis on data reported on the music industry indicates that some music artists can make money (Atlantic):

Last month, Northwestern University law professor Peter DiCola released the results of a fascinating survey that tried to discern exactly how much income most working musicians make off of people actually paying for their recordings (or in some cases, their compositions). His very broad answer was between 12 and 22 percent, depending on whether you counted pay from session playing (shown as "mixed" below). If that doesn't sound like real money to you, consider how you'd react if your boss suddenly said you were getting a 10 percent pay cut tomorrow.

DiCola's study isn't perfect. It analyzes answers from roughly 5,300 musicians who volunteered for the survey, meaning it lacked the element of random sampling that most social science work strives for. The participants were overwhelmingly white (88 percent), male (70 percent), and old (the largest demographic was 50-to-59-year-olds). Almost 35 percent were classical musicians, and another 16 percent were jazz artists. In short, this isn't going to offer a crystal clear financial portrait of your up-and-coming Pitchfork darling.

Nonetheless, the results do offer insight into how workaday guitarists, saxophonists, singers, songwriters, and timpani players -- 42 percent of the group earned all of their income from music-related work -- earn a living. And music sales (or streams) are usually a small but by no means insignificant piece of the picture.

Do we own our eBooks? Covering old ground at Salon:

Switching devices presents another headache for readers. Late last year, independent booksellers made a deal with Kobo, an e-book retailer that also sells its own e-reader devices. The indies now sell both the devices and Kobo e-books. People who want to support their local independent bookstore might contemplate switching from the Kindle to the Kobo, but if they do they’ll have to leave their (DRM-protected) Kindle books behind on their old device. If you are an early e-book adopter who wants to keep and reread the books you bought for your Kindle, you’re locked into the Kindle platform.

Tablets like the iPad are slightly different. The tablet’s owner can install numerous proprietary apps to read a variety of e-book formats, but the titles have to stay in their own walled gardens. You can’t move your Kindle books into your iBook library, for example. This is a minor annoyance, but annoying all the same! When I got my first iPad, I mostly bought Kindle e-books because Amazon’s app was more versatile. Since then, iBooks has outstripped the Kindle app, especially when it comes to working with books used for research, and I would much rather read and organize all my e-books in iBooks. I can’t. Given such restrictions, it’s debatable whether or not I truly own them.

From my twitter feed this week:

PressBooks Goes Open Source To Let Authors Create Book Sites In Seconds Techcrunch

Not the Same Old Cup of British Tea NYT Watch. 
RR Donnelley results hit by $1bn impairment charge http://ow.ly/i6Qkk
OCLC and ProQuest Collaborate to Enhance Library Discovery. PRNewswire 
What the Library of Congress Plans to Do With All Your Tweets Time 

In sports:
Lancashire County Cricket sign path-breaking 10-year deal ESPNet PND Senior in the news - Congrats & Great News!
 

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