Today's Big Picture

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• THE DOWNLOAD - Making Information Pay - By Laura Dawson
  
• TIA - THIS ISSUE'S ACRONYM - MIP – Making Information Pay
  
• INTEL: COMPANIES - Ingram Digital, OUP form distribution partnership
  
• INTEL: PRODUCTS / SERVICES - Muze releases XML-based MuzeMusic 2.0
  
• INTEL: PEOPLE - Scott Lehr joins MusicIP as VP of Sales
  
• THE JOB EXCHANGE - Listing the hottest industry vacancies

Readability of Scanned Books in Digital Libraries

The wonk factor is only outweighed by the coolness factor here: the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, held in Florence, Italy, has released its proceedings. And what I'm really excited about is the article "The Readability of Scanned Books in Digital Libraries." You can download the whole thing, but here's the abstract:

Displaying scanned book pages in a web browser is difficult, due to an array of characteristics of the common user's configuration that compound to yield text that is degraded and illegibly small. For books which contain only text, this can often be solved by using OCR or manual transcription to extract and present the text alone, or by magnifying the page and presenting it in a scrolling panel. Books with rich illustrations, especially children's picture books, present a greater challenge because their enjoyment is dependent on reading the text in the context of the full page with its illustrations. We have created two novel prototypes for solving this problem by magnifying just the text, without magnifying the entire page. We present the results of a user study of these techniques. Users found our prototypes to be more effective than the dominant interface type for reading this kind of material and, in some cases, even preferable to the physical book itself.

It's about time someone studied this and measured it!!! I remember last year's BEA where Cliff Guren was showing some differences in competitors' scanning efforts (ahem) and Microsoft's; that was very eye-opening, and made me wonder about kids' books and all the illustrations. Anyway, cool beans!

B&N's new position

B&N announced yesterday that it's created a new position: Chief Merchandising Officer. Very smart idea - now they should do it for the website. According to the press release, Carey is quite the powerhouse:

After joining Barnes & Noble in 2003 as Director of Newsstand, Mr. Carey completely overhauled the system for ordering and replenishing magazines and newspapers, developing what is widely regarded as the most efficient supply chain in the industry. Under his leadership, Barnes & Noble has dramatically increased magazine sales, consolidating its position as one of the top magazine retailers in the United States.

Authonomy

Carolyn Pittis's presentation at MIP included information about Authonomy, the new HarperCollins website for writers and readers. The Guardian ran a piece this morning about it - called "How to Outsource the Slush Pile" - in which the columnist says of the social networking functionality:

Thus, the democracy. No longer will the disgruntled writing masses be able to complain that their work has not been published because it has been vetoed by elite, snobbish publishing industry professionals. Now they will be kyboshing each other. (Or launching each other's careers.)

True dat, as my 14-year-old says constantly. However, Gawker - in a post called "How Not to Get Published" - takes it one step further:

I'm just going to say it: this is a retarded idea. It's an example of everything wrong with the Internet: supposed to help people or create new avenues of communication, but actually designed to be a pointless waste of time.

Yikes! As one Gawker commenter put it: "I thought Gawker already had this feature?" The time-wasting part, one thinks.

Coelho's free books

TorrentFreak has an interesting post today on author Paouo Coelho, whose books sell somewhere in the vicinity of a bazillion. He's put his books on BitTorrent, among other sharing sites, and noticed a spike in sales as a result:

“Harper Collins, for example, decided to offer a new book of mine every month, for free reading.” This, together with the pirated copies worked out really well, and the book sales went up. “If you go to the New York Times Bestseller list, you’ll see that the Alchemist jumped to the #6, and the Witch of Portobello is in the extended list"....Most people still prefer to read a real book however, pirated ebooks are more often used to preview. This can always change in the future, but for now Coelho is not impressed by the ebook reading devices that are out there, and many of his readers seem to agree.

“A (real) book is easy to carry, easy to read anywhere. Reading a book on a monitor on the other hand is very tiresome, and it would be even more expensive to print (considering cartridge prices) than to buy a paperback,” he says. What the movie and music industry can learn from Coelho, however, is that availability is of the essence, and restrictions will only lead to reactance.

MIP tomorrow!

The Book Industry Study Group's annual Making Information Pay conference is on tomorrow from 9-12 at the McGraw-Hill Auditorium at 1221 6th Avenue. The program, co-presented with Mike Shatzkin of the Idea Logical Company will include:

Carolyn Pittis – Senior Vice-President, Global Marketing Strategy & Operations, HarperCollins

Michael Raynor –author of the best-selling book “The Strategy Paradox” and a leading consultant with Deloitte Consulting LLP

Michael Cader – Founder, Publishers Marketplace

Todd Anderson – Director of the University of Alberta Bookstore

Malle Vallik – Director, Digital Content & Interactivity, Harlequin Enterprises

Gwen Jones – Vice-President, Publisher Information Systems & Technologies, John Wiley & Sons

Neil DeYoung – Director of Digital Media, Hachette Book Group, USA

Julie Grau – Senior Vice-President & Publisher, Spiegel & Grau, Random House Inc

Yes, I'm Twittering.

What the HELL is going on with PW?

BHL Raises Eyebrows

Swinging political philosopher (and Random House author) Bernard-Henri Levy is giving Parisians plenty to gossip about. While his actress wife, Arielle Dombasle, has been in the City of Light, BHL has been in New York squiring stout-hearted Irish brewery heiress Daphne Guinness, according to the New York Daily News.

Since when have they become Page Six????

Back to the Future

Barnes & Noble is apparently selling magazine subscriptions again on its website. They did this shortly after they launched the site, in 1997, but they dismantled this program a few years later. Interesting that they're going back to initiatives that they abandoned after the crash - rumor has it they're developing an ebook program as well.

Endeca in the OPAC

The Massachusetts Library Association Conference has its own blog, and today there's a great post about how the Phoenix Public Library system used Endeca in its OPAC, and walked away from ILS-vendor-supplied OPACs.

Phoenix was aware that the browsing function was going to be a challenge. Librarians “squawked” about using BISAC subject headings. Then one Phoenix librarian had a revelation. Book Industry Standards and Communications (BISAC) using Endeca for browsing was going to be a challenge. Used BISAC subject headings. “Its not about us, it’s about them” It’s people speak not catalog speak.

Peter Olsen out at Random

The Times just reported that Peter Olsen will be stepping down from Random House's helm "in the next few weeks." CEO since 1998, Olsen "has come under mounting pressure in recent months as Bertelsmann’s financial results have been damaged by lower profits at Random House and steep losses in its American book clubs, which he also oversees."

Ironically, Olsen had dismissed Ann Godoff in 2003 for similar reasons, "saying in a news release that she ran the only unit 'to consistently fall short of their profitability targets.' In an interview, he said it would have been disingenuous to attribute her exit to other reasons."

And more on Amazon/BookSurge

The complaints that we have received have come from across the country. It appears that the markets involved are national in scope. Thus, it may be more appropriate to refer this matter to one of the federal antitrust agencies for review.

For these reasons, and based on the information that has been provided to us, the Attorney General's office does not plan further action on this matter. However, and as noted before, this is not a conclusive legal opinion and anyone feeling that they have been harmed and wish to pursue a remedy should consider consulting with private counsel.

Writer's Weekly responds by squealing indignantly, and promptly educating readers as to how to file an antitrust complaint with the Department of Justice.

NY Center for Independent Publishing talks about Amazon and BookSurge

An interesting post on the NYCIP website about Amazon's insistence that POD publishers use BookSurge or stock copies of their books in Amazon's warehouse - Lloyd Jassin, the chair of NYCIP, has some rather odd assertions.

The first is this: "Traditionally, bookselling was separated from publishing, with booksellers (including Amazon) realizing the benefit of combining the wares of many publishers." This actually is not accurate. Perhaps reflective of the last 20 years, but bookselling is a much older business than that, and I think many of us can remember Doubleday bookshops, Scribners bookshops, and the like. Bookshops started out as the front-of-the-store to printing presses. So to say that bookselling should adhere to "tradition" by separating itself from publishing is, to use Jassin's own term, "specious reasoning".

Jassin also predicts the following:

If I had to guess, I'd say in the next 24-months Google buys Ingram (Googlegram?) for its digital group assets (including Lightning Source), and it out-Amazons Amazon by creating the ultimate digital warehouse/distributor in the sky.

If Google were to exhibit digital favoritism, it would steer book buyers to its wholly owned and super-efficient Lightning Source imprint. Amazon owns the online store. Google owns the web. Amazon merchandises books. Google sells them contextually. Balance is restored to the planet.

To which the only judicious response is: WTF?????

Ingram is a family-owned company that is doing extraordinarily well and always has, and which will definitely NOT sell off its digital group (which is a relatively new business for it) to Google even if such an offer were made. And a hostile acquisition would be seriously damaging to the business.

Jassin's an entertainment lawyer. He ends his piece by citing Napster. There are indeed many similarities between the music and publishing industries, but I think he needs to dwell a little more in the book world if he wants to make accurate assertions.

Faber goes POD for OP books

The Guardian had a great article on Friday on Faber's new imprint:

The new imprint, called Faber Finds, will publish such classic titles as Angus Wilson's Anglo Saxon Attitudes and John Betjeman's Ghastly Good Taste, as well as relatively recent titles such as John Carey's acclaimed biography of John Donne. Faber Finds will make use of print-on-demand technology in order to allow for print runs of between one and 50 books at a time, thereby avoiding the financial risks associated with traditional publishing's requirement for large-volume print runs.

Apparently the literary agency Peters Fraser & Dunlop has also cut a deal with Lightning Source to release POD versions of works which are out of print, but still in copyright - appealing to writers who want to have their OP works available for order over the web.

The Guardian article continues:

The Amazon Tax

In 1998, I got to Barnes & Noble a year after its website had launched, and there was a lot of hoo-ha over sales tax.

Ordering over the web was seen as ordering by catalog - you don't have to pay sales taxes unless you're in the same state as the company. So if you order turtlenecks from L.L. Bean, for example, you don't have to pay taxes unless you are in Maine, where L. L. Bean is headquartered.

At Barnes & Noble, the Riggios spun off the website into its own separate company, and sold half of that company to Bertlesmann. This way, they didn't have to charge sales tax on website orders from outside of New York - it was a separate company from B&N, Inc., and had no physical presence in 49 states.

This made everyone insane.

It diluted the B&N brand. Because they were two different companies, run by two different sets of officers, they were very compartmentalized. The stores were not trained to refer people to the website. Web customers couldn't return books to the stores if they'd ordered the wrong thing. People would print out web pages and take them into the stores, and couldn't get the books they wanted - the stores couldn't even order the books. There were two sets of distribution channels. There were separate warehouses. There were separate relationships with vendors.

And of course the customer didn't understand AT ALL what it meant that there were two different corporate entities called Barnes & Noble.

Eventually the Riggios realized that it might be worth charging sales tax for the convenience of having a single company with two distribution channels. So Bertlesmann was bought out, and the companies merged. There are still two sets of officers, but the back office is much more integrated than it used to be. There's cross-promotion between the website and the stores. It makes sense.

New York just instituted a law determining that Amazon affiliates count as physical presences in the state. In other words, if I sell used books on Amazon from my big storage closet that also houses my clothing, empty boxes I think might be useful someday, Rollerblades and ice skates, my old journals from college, miscellaneous office supplies, and 37 mismatched winter gloves - that storage closet counts as a New York shop. And I have to charge sales tax. Even on the mismatched gloves, if I am selling them (which I am happy to do if anyone wants them).

The caveat is that I must sell over $10,000 worth of merchandise for this law to apply to me and Amazon. Somehow I cannot see selling $10,000 worth of used books and mismatched gloves.

Additionally, this law does not apply solely to the affiliates - in other words, ALL of Amazon's inventory is subject to sales tax because my fragment of it is physically located in New York (and presumably I wouldn't turn away anyone who showed up at my doorstep wanting to buy it on-site). Because my inventory shows up in a search result for "used books and odd gloves" along with all the other inventory in all the other affiliates' shops, my inventory more or less contaminates theirs and they have to charge New York sales tax as well. It's guilt by association, sort of.

I would argue that the tax law should only apply to the inventory that is physically located in the state where the customer is ordering from. I think the New York law overreaches a bit. Another solution is a universal sales tax...but that's not going to go anywhere fast. The US doesn't like flat taxes.

I mean, this is embarrassing

It's been 13 days since my last post. Forgive me.

I've been productive, though! If you go to the Book Business website, you can download my webinar, Digital Strategies: Getting the Most Bang for Your Buck. I know there were questions that didn't get answered, and I hope to answer them in the coming days. If anybody has any new questions, email me and I'll answer them here.

I also have an article coming out in the Summer issue of "Library Trends". If you don't have a subscription, you can access it at your local library!