LJNDawson.com, Consulting to the Book Publishing Industry
Book Publishing Industry Consultant
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And in other news
Category: E-commerce
My daughter's teacher tells her, "If you're bored, that must be because you're boring." People, we can't have that. We need NEWS!!!!

Today is pretty much all about immigration. Lou Dobbs's head is going to blow off tonight, and I intend to watch. Naturally, Paul Krugman has the necessary counterpoint tonic.

Meanwhile, Marty Manley from Alibris has a blog now. Don't everybody rush over there at once.

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Posted by Laura Dawson , March 27, 06, 5:10 PM , comments(0) , permalink , Email this post

You say matzah, I say matzoh
Category: Google
An interesting observation by David Weinberger: Type "matzah" into Google, and get nearly 600,000 hits; type "matzoh" (a correct variant spelling) and get 325,000 hits. More reasons librarians go nuts.

Not to bash Google too much - how did I find that article about Wise Birds, anyway...? However, this is just a blog. If it were a research paper, I'd want the BEST article about librarianship and information literacy. This might be it, but I have no idea.


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Posted by Laura Dawson , March 22, 06, 6:01 PM , comments(0) , permalink , Email this post

BookTechExpo
Category: Publishing , E-commerce , Bookselling
Had the privilege of moderating a panel discussion at BookTechExpo this morning, on technology trends in publishing. Panelists were Jack Farrell of McGraw-Hill, Christopher Hudson of MOMA, and Niko Pfund of OUP.

In our conversations prior to the panel, it became clear to us that "book publishing" no longer consists of print-on-paper. Digital production and distribution of content has affected ALL publishers, whether it's through automated publishing software systems (Vista, Bookmaster, Quality Solutions), increased use of EDI in the distribution channel, or developments in graphic design.

And on the consumer end, of course, there's an ever-expanding market for information - Internet search engines, courseware such as Blackboard, and online subscription services have made it possible for consumers to have immediate access to content. And they like it. Consumer desires for immediate gratification, seamless integration, and easy access to relevent information are not going away.

We touched on a number of interesting topics - such as outsourcing (particularly to China), the fact that assistants are the folks who tend to know more about technological solutions, how online selling enables a publisher to market directly to consumers, the symbiosis between "online learning centers" and print material. Very thought-provoking, very fun discussion.

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Posted by Laura Dawson , March 21, 06, 10:48 PM , comments(0) , permalink , Email this post

Post NISO conference
Category: Metadata , Industry Events
Just back from a conference in Bethesda at the National Library of Medicine on identifiers.

The central problems being addressed were: What makes a good identifier, how are identifiers embedded in working systems, and what technical/service infrastructure is necessary to build effective systems around good identifiers? (All of these questions were asked to determine what role NISO should have in developing identifier standards.)

The crucial issue was one of trust. A community has to have confidence in its identifiers; organizations have to know what other organizations are using it; Pat Stevens referred to this as the "fabric of trust", which I thought was a great way of describing it. We discussed, in breakout sessions, the example of the "ESBN" issue that is now confronting the book industry - we don't know who the ESBN people are, what they intend the identifier to be used for, how it's different in nature from the ISBN - and without that trust, people are not going to adopt it. As Stuart Weibel of OCLC said, "The only guarantee of the usefulness and persistence of identifier systems is the commitment of the organizations which assign, manage, and resolve them".

And as we developed ideas in further breakout sessions, the issue of trust continued to come up. If a community is not fully engaged in and supportive of an identifier, nothing about that identifier is going to work. However, identifiers can be pushed too far. I brought up the example of an overly-effective identifier - the ISBN - in the case of Barnes & Noble's database. The top-selling ISBN at Barnes & Noble when I was there was...biscotti. This metaphor continued to crop up throughout the meeting - it's now apparently taken on mythological proportions.

We discussed different types of identifiers, which Stuart labeled as "opaque", "sequentially semantic", and "encoded semantics" - and what the effectiveness of each is. An opaque ID is one that has no intrinsic meaning; a sequentially semantic ID is one which has meaning only in relation to others like it; an encoded semantic ID is one where you can look at the ID and determine attributes from the structure of the ID. An ISBN is an encoded semantic ID - publisher prefix, check digit, country code, ID of the actual product. Another word for an encoded semantic ID became (in shorthand) a "hackable" identifier - once you de-code or reverse-engineer it, you can find other products of the same sort. We discussed the positive and negative qualities of each of these types of IDs, and naturally concluded that you'd need different types for different functions and that even a "hackable" identifier was not necessarily a bad thing. (Which is largely the type of conclusion we came to about everything, it being a NISO conference.)


Another interesting notion we discussed a little - and which I'd like to see more discussion on - is the idea of identifiers as world views. What one leaves out, in defining what one is identifying, is as important as what one puts in. When you say an ISBN is an identifier for a book, what specifically about that book are you identifying? The hegemony that identifiers necessarily impose is an interesting one (a little more philosophical and political than practical, but still fun to think about).
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Posted by Laura Dawson , March 16, 06, 3:00 PM , comments(1) , permalink , Email this post

Lou Dobbs is a Blithering Idiot
Category: Copyright Law , Google
This time I didn't say it...Thomas Friedman did. For a great debate on Friedman vs. Dobbs, check here.

The goddessly Tess, meanwhile, continues to feed me fun tidbits. In France, we hear that it is NOT fair use to make a backup copy of a DVD. However, the real fun is still with Google. Apparently a porn site is suing Google over fair-use issues - Google displays this site's "intellectual property" (sorry) in its Google Image search. Why subscribe to the porn site if you can get the images for free? Google argues that it merely displays thumbnail images, but according to this article, "Perfect 10's lawyers argued that the thumbnails, which it notes are quite a bit larger than the average thumbnail, have value to the magazine because it sells small images to a British cell phone company.

Curiouser and curiouser. We like us a good IP rumble.
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Posted by Laura Dawson , March 3, 06, 10:23 AM , comments(0) , permalink , Email this post
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