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A Question of Intent

Category: Copyright Law
Via Tess, my goddessly assistant: "Grokster," she informs me, "is everywhere." Indeed it is.

The Supreme Court had a field day with the issue of intent - also ruling on posting the 10 Commandments in the same fashion. If the intent of technology is to violate copyright, it's illegal; if the intent of posting the 10 Commandments is to advocate a particular religion over others, it's illegal. They're drawing parallels where there shouldn't be parallels.

As they say, who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? Is Scalia now The Shadow? Who can judge what "intent" actually is? Because even my seven-year-old is smart enough to lie when asked, "Did you really mean that?" In fact, she's smart enough to lie to HERSELF. Intent is a murky issue. There are those who've congratulated the Court for bypassing the issue of technology for the "real" issue - but the fact is, once again, the Court has failed to understand how technology works, and what security needs to be in place to prevent copyright violations, and has focused instead on the vagaries of human behavior.

Spankings all around to the Court once more for not getting it.
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Posted by Laura Dawson , June 28, 05, 11:02 AM , comments(0) , permalink , Email this post

Putting the Toothpaste Back in the Tube

Category: Publishing , Copyright Law , Google
The Guardian this morning reports on the fuss raised by publishers over Google Print - the nonstory that will not die.

Google, as usual, is well ahead of its time on this one - and as with most ideas whose time has not yet come, this one is most difficult to explain, much less get buy-in. (As my knowledgeable colleague the Data Queen tells me, "People keep explaining it to me and I understand it, but then because the public is at least ten or fifteen years away from the mental shift required to make it a success...I promptly forget what it is.") The AAP is apparently asking Google to stop scanning in titles for six months till they can establish the legality of what they're doing - concerns over piracy abound, not necessarily from web users, but from those who are handling the files.

Which makes about as much sense as publishers being afraid their printers will steal the text of their books and sell those illegally. Or being afraid that people will plop down in a big chair in Barnes & Noble and read a book onsite rather than buying it and taking it home. Or being afraid of libraries.

Google Print is just another way of categorizing and distributing - and ultimately selling - books. As with any sales channel, there are risks (anytime you invent something new, you invent the peril that comes with it - inventing a car necessarily invents the car accident; inventing an airplane necessarily invents the plane crash). Trying to stop the progress of invention, however, is not simply foolish - it's pointless. Asking Google to stop scanning for a while, so as to figure out what injunction to slap them with, is a little silly. Better to spend the effort on working with Google to invent better security for those files.
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Posted by Laura Dawson , June 27, 05, 9:37 AM , comments(0) , permalink , Email this post

Piracy? What piracy?

Category: Copyright Law
If there can be said to be a traditional view in the world of content distribution, it's that China is rife with pirates. Philosophies abound as to why this is - that content thievery occurs because said content is not readily available for sale, that pilfering has gone undetected in the US and therefore un-prosecuted - all of which sparks a vicious cycle of not offering content to China, hence upping the ante for more piracy.

But Warner Bros. announced on Monday that it had established a deal with TOM Online, whereby TOM will distribute Warner Bros. content over wireless broadband. Ringtones, games...what's that you're sniffing? Could it be the sweet smell of cold hard yuan? The prospect of paying customers finally outweighing the fear of thousands of Chinese cellphones buzzing illegally with "wascally wabbit" ringtones?

Good for Warner for recognizing a great new frontier when they see one. It only took a billion Chinese waving money at them.
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Posted by Laura Dawson , June 21, 05, 11:14 PM , comments(0) , permalink , Email this post

June 21, 2005

I ran across this old (in Internet terms) story from MSNBC.com, posted on June 15th. The salient quote:

Nearly half of all Americans avoid shopping on the Internet because they are worried their
personal information will be stolen, according to a survey released Wednesday by an industry group.

The news this week seems to center around the data breach at CardSystems Solutions, where hackers made off with hundreds of thousands (at last count) of records relating to Mastercard and Visa accounts.


Suffice it to say, this isn't going to help the cause of e-commerce at all. But like all accidents, it points not simply to how far we have to go (in terms of security, in terms of consumer confidence, in terms of understanding all the ramifications of e-commerce), but how far we have come.
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Posted by Laura Dawson , June 21, 05, 7:26 AM , comments(0) , permalink , Email this post

You've Got Ads - Maybe

Category: E-commerce
Via Tess the Indispensable - Paul LaMonica's roundup of Internet companies. He has an interesting quote from Martin Pyykkonen at Janco Partners:

"We haven't seen much activity on the Internet from the traditional ad agencies. They have had their head stuck in the sand," said Pyykkonen.

Meanwhile, back at the AOL ranch, Boss Parsons has decided to allow the thundering herds to stampede inside the corral for free - because presumably all the big bucks internet advertising Pyykkonen says is buried in the sand will pay for the content.

Either he knows something the rest of us don't (wouldn't it be pretty to think so), or this time next year the branding iron will have changed shape. Again.
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Posted by Laura Dawson , June 17, 05, 8:42 AM , comments(0) , permalink , Email this post

The Wonderful World of Bar Codes

Category: Metadata , E-commerce
It's not only ISBN-13 that's throwing retailers into a tizzy. On a larger scale, it's the move from the UPC to the EAN - from tracking things at an SKU or pallet level to tracking them on an item level.

This means not simply the scanners picking up the new bar code, but subscribing to data pools on the back end so that the bar codes actually match up to something.

The purported reason for the transition (and there is always a purported reason, for easy explanation to those who otherwise wouldn't care) is so US retailing can join global commerce (the rest of the world, with the possible exception of Ireland, operates on the EAN). And there is a great deal of truth to this as well - from Asian students ordering engineering textbooks from Amazon to exporting Nikes to South Africa.

But it actually also means dealing with products on an individual level, tracking inventory more closely, streamlining orders...and saving bucketloads of money.

But meanwhile, the US consumer-goods supply chain is facing a heck of a gap between where it is now, and where it will need to be in 2007, when suddenly there are no more UPCs being issued and all you can get is EANs.

In other news...the goddessly Tess tells me that a friend of hers was fired from Wells Fargo for his . As usual, management generally takes a while to catch up to things - blogs are clearly not going away, so the best practice is usually to design some human-resource policy to account for it. However, many companies are simply doing the draconian - surgically excising the blogger in question.

Your smartest employees are probably the blogging employees - those with something to say, who are actually thinking about their work and taking the time to write about it - and rather than punting them out of your company (and possibly into the arms of your competitors), constructing a policy to handle blogs is probably a lot more enlightened.

But as the CFO from one company I used to work for once scolded me, "This enlightened management shit is just...shit. It pisses me off. You come to work, you do your job. End of story."

Right. ;)
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Posted by Laura Dawson , June 16, 05, 8:15 AM , comments(0) , permalink , Email this post

Been to AOL yet? Made it your home page?

Category: E-commerce
Thought not.

(I visited this morning and personally found it to be the equivalent of USA Today, content-wise.)

In other news, the Michael Jackson verdict has eaten all the newswires and there is no other news.
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Posted by Laura Dawson , June 14, 05, 8:34 AM , comments(0) , permalink , Email this post

A Slow Day in the Book Industry

Whether we are all waiting breathlessly for the Michael Jackson verdict, wilting in the NYC humidity, or just suffering from Monday brain-deadness...the truth of it is, there's not much happening of note right now. So...we return to Bowker, which seems to be a nearly-endless fount of news these days.

The longest-running on-again/off-again relationship in the book world - Bowker & Ingram - is on again after a few years of acrimony between the two. Having ripped all of Bowker's data unceremoniously out of its system, Ingram is now supplying Bowker with data based on Book in Hand work in its warehouse.

Additionally, Syndetic Solutions - the library enhanced-content service run by Allan Graham - is now a Bowker acquisition. Syndetics gets its data from Ingram - cover images, descriptions, etc. Via Syndetics, Bowker will receive all of Ingram's data.

However, we are assured, "both companies will continue to sell and market their products separately."

Increasingly, it seems, they're becoming the same product, but whatever makes you guys feel better....
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Posted by Laura Dawson , June 13, 05, 9:12 AM , comments(0) , permalink , Email this post

Amazon.com - The Elephant That's Not in the Room Anymore

Category: Publishing , E-commerce
A little squib about Amazon.com in MobyLives this morning (2nd story) got me thinking. Moby's headline was Why notice this particular problem over so many others? Indeed. (See the CNN article that spawned Moby's coverage.)

When Amazon.com came on the scene, they went to a great deal of trouble to assure the book world that they were for real, they cared, books mattered to them. The book industry is notoriously mistrusting of newcomers - witness Microsoft's lessons in the e-book realm when they tried to get rid of the ISBN because it "didn't make sense"; Dick Brass got told, in no uncertain terms, that Microsoft could stand to learn a thing or two before coming in and dictating to an industry that had been around a heck of a lot longer than some newfangled software.

At any rate...in the late 90s, Amazon.com had a huge booth at BEA, sponsored banners, advertised in book trade publications, sent reps to industry meetings (like BISG and AAP), and in general bent over backwards ingratiating itself to the industry. Cindy Cunningham, now at Corbis, was a key Amazon.com player in the creation of ONIX - and later she was the cover girl for Library Journal.

Ten years after Amazon.com debuted, they appear not to give two hoots about the book biz anymore. When Barnes & Noble wants to prove to publishers that they've sent around bad data, they go to Amazon.com, clip a screen shot, and send it to the publishers in question - Amazon.com does not correct, massage, or otherwise touch book data, but runs it in as received; whereas Barnes & Noble employs some 20 data editors to take care of online content issues.

There are no Amazon.com reps at any industry gatherings anymore. They haven't had a booth at BEA in quite some time. If someone has a question about how Barnes & Noble does things, there are some 6 or 7 people who are readily available to answer it; at Amazon.com, whom would you call? Ingram's doing their distribution and drop-shipping; they're running in raw data feeds from publishers - there is no liaison between Amazon.com and the rest of the world.

They seem to have ceded the book playing field entirely. Even Wal-Mart (in the guise of Anderson Merch) shows up at some BISG task force meetings. Amazon.com appears not to be concerned with the very technology it introduced to the industry itself.

The book industry probably ought to stop treating Amazon.com issues as news to the book business. Amazon.com's not in the book business. And they seem to be saying that with silence towards the industry that's as loud as any shout.
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Posted by Laura Dawson , June 10, 05, 9:45 AM , comments(0) , permalink , Email this post

Advertising in College Textbooks

Category: Publishing
Via , my goddessly assistant - McGraw-Hill's Canadian arm, McGraw-Hill Ryerson Ltd., is offering ad space in its college textbooks. The McGraw rep assures the world that all proceeds will go to a nonprofit dedicated to faculty development (coincidentally, two McGraw-Hill Ryerson execs sit on the board of this nonprofit) and to conferences sponsored by McGraw.

Even admen can't quite get their heads around this one. Says one, "What's next, university professors with logos on their blazers like NASCAR drivers?"

It'll be interesting to see how far this goes. Years ago, we used to laugh at the idea of ads above urinals. Now there are ads IN urinals (below the fold).
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Posted by Laura Dawson , June 8, 05, 9:06 AM , comments(0) , permalink , Email this post

Funding Online Content

Category: Publishing , E-commerce
As fast as the online content industry is changing, there is One Great Unsolved Issue that I've noticed over the last 10 years. How do you fund it?

AOL has just announced that it's making its content available for free. This is huge, given that proprietary content was one of their biggest (and some, myself included, might say their only) selling points.

Content is cost-heavy, that's for sure. You can't create it with a cute piece of software, and retain any sort of market differentiation, because your competitors will have that same piece of software in a heartbeat and up the ante - online content with any value requires human labor. SMART human labor. Human labor with something to say...and a need to get paid for saying it.

And then there's the consumer, who has no intention of paying for it. Companies try hard to get around this, but it's an inevitability. AOL's been losing customers, the New York Times is routinely mocked for charging for some of its online content (though I've come to accept that I am apparently the only person on the planet who's peeved that you have to pay to do the crossword puzzle online), and one of the great lessons of the dot-com bust is that content, far from being king, is more like the aging relative who stubbornly just won't kick the bucket - everybody comes to see her, but supporting her is...a drain.

Meanwhile libraries bemoan their lack of relevance. (Yes, I'm actually going somewhere with this.)

When was the last time you went to your library? Me, either.

But I access it online all the time. The Brooklyn Public Library has all these databases - Gale, Wilson, Ebsco, et al - where I can look up old articles, get biographies and encyclopedia entries - FOR FREE. I just enter in my library card number and I'm off to the races.

As content ventures flounder for a revenue model, they might consider partnering with libraries - licensing their content to library servers, who would then make it available through their online portals. The budgets for online content at libraries are skyrocketing - the budgets for actually BOOKS are plummeting.

This way, the content creators get paid, the libraries get to offer relevant and amazing resources, and we're all happy.
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Posted by Laura Dawson , June 7, 05, 8:44 AM , comments(0) , permalink , Email this post

Watching Bowker Reinvent Itself

Category: Google , Metadata
Bowker's got a tough row to hoe these days, as companies like Ingram, Baker & Taylor, et al license their data for use on the web. Years ago, they were the only bibliographic-data game in town. But the competition's gotten stiffer - even librarians are looking things up on Amazon.com rather than checking the BIP database. A few months ago, I was giving a presentation to some independent presses, and one guy asked me, "What's the point of Bowker these days?"

Apart from being the US ISBN agency, which is crucial business for them now that the ISBN is changing to 13 digits, Bowker's been forced to find new markets. And I think that their latest effort - hooking up with Content Directions, and turning ISBNs into DOIs - is a very smart move on their part. As more and more publishers sign on to the Google Print project, those DOIs are going to improve search results and make Googling books even stronger.

Very strategic, and great timing. I'm impressed.
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Posted by Laura Dawson , June 6, 05, 3:31 PM , comments(0) , permalink , Email this post

More pondering

Category: Metadata
As I was walking around the small press area of the show floor, I was handing out "ISBN-13 for Dummies" brochures at just about every booth I encountered. What's disturbing to me is that at least half of the folks in the booths there assumed they really didn't need to know about this. One man was fully, wholeheartedly misinformed about bar coding and nothing I could say to him would move him from his position.

 The lowdown is here.
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Posted by Laura Dawson , June 5, 05, 3:31 PM , comments(0) , permalink , Email this post

BEA - the aftermath

Category: Publishing , Google , E-commerce , Industry Events
Well, that was exhausting.

The numbers aren't out yet for BEA attendance, but I can personally attest that it was impossible to move on Friday. The general consensus was that this is good - but let's remember that this is New York, that US publishing is still by and large located in and around New York, and...well, I don't even have to finish this sentence....

Things got saner on Saturday. The talk of my particular stratum of the crowd was the article in the NYT Book Review about co-op - an article which runs in the NYT periodically, in various flavors, and which IS NOT NEWS. Deciding to get scandalized about it now is a little like finding a glimpse of stocking something shocking.

One swift spank to the Times - they know better over there.

The man of the show appeared to be Tom Turvey of Google Print - standing-room-only at "Google University", and at the publishers' presentation on Thursday the moderator had to keep reminding the audience to stop asking Turvey questions and to direct their inquiries to the publishers working with Google Print.


Underrated - the series of presentations on publishing in China, co-sponsored by the NYU Center for Publishing, also on Thursday, were not as well attended as they should have been. My friends, Robert Baensch is a prescient man. The Chinese are flocking to the cities from the provinces. What does this mean? It's not rocket science - more education. Huge market for books over there. Huge appetite for work over there (can you say "outsourcing"?). A burgeoning labor-and-information market. And meanwhile we sit here wringing our hands over...CO-OP???

Wait - I have to spank the Times one more time.

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Posted by Laura Dawson , June 5, 05, 1:09 PM , comments(0) , permalink , Email this post
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