Online Dictionaries Threaten Paper Ones

When I graduated from high school, my grandparents gave me a big dictionary and thesaurus. They got me through college splendidly; I still have them - but I keep them for sentimental reasons. In fact, I haven't bought a new dictionary in 20 years.

Lately I've taken to using The Free Dictionary - which has a thesaurus and links to several encyclopedias. It's never let me down - and I do put some pretty heavy demands on a dictionary, as a crossword freak.

So I wasn't surprised to see this article about the demise of the print dictionary, particularly this quote:

In the past four years, sales of English-language usage guides and dictionaries have plummeted by 40%, while other reference books, including maps, atlases and encyclopedias, have also shown a significant decline, according to research by Book Marketing Limited. Some publishers have even predicted that dictionary sales could cease completely.

Swets's New Search

Swets Information Services has added MuseGlobal's Content Mining functionality to its federated search tool - SwetsWise Searcher. Content Mining allows SwetsWise to rank search results so that users get the most relevant results first. According to LibraryJournal, "This allows users to combine terms and refine their search for deeper digging." LJ has more here.

DRM is not copyright; copyright is not DRM

The more I read about Google, Microsoft, Apple, the DMCA, etc. the more it strikes me as important to note... that DRM and copyright are not the same thing. DRM is a way of managing copyright on digital products. Advocating a better way of managing copyright (and preventing piracy) is different from advocating the abolishment of copyright. They're related, but not identical.

Check my newsletter next Tuesday for more - I'll be pontificating about this in The Download.

Valenti gone - DMCA to follow?

And now we enter...

...the run-up to BEA. I'm scouring the web and my email alerts these days looking for news, and it's scarce. Are you guys all holding back announcements till BEA? Leaving folks like me to twist in the wind - I may be forced to opine, God help us, just to stay in business.

Overdrive to distribute Alligator

Overdrive announced yesterday that it has acquired the rights to distribute the blues catalog of Alligator Records to libraries via their Digital Library Reserve download system.

Libraries in OverDrive's network will soon have access to music from Albert Collins, Buddy Guy, Johnny Winter, and other top blues artists available through the Alligator Records label. The collection will add a large, quality list of blues music titles to OverDrive's digital library of more than 100,000 video, music, eBook, and audio book titles-- the only collected works that library patrons can browse, download and view, or listen to all on a single system.

EU to the rescue

The ALA reports that the European Union has created a resolution to the problem raised by Google's digitizing "orphan" and out-of-print titles - books whose copyright holder is not immediately apparent.

The group recommended that digital copies of orphan works—for whom no copyright holder can be identified—be made available for noncommercial purposes after a thorough search for copyright holders is completed, according to a European Commission press release.

For materials that are out of print but still under copyright, the group proposed that libraries be granted a license that bestows nonexclusive and nontransferable rights to digitize and make their holdings available to users on a closed network of other European libraries, museums, and archives.

This seems like a great solution that the US could adopt. But copyright is so aggressively guarded here (to wit: DMCA), it may be some time before publishers see the benefits in providing the text for search.

Speaking of Amazon

Amazon confirmed yesterday that it was looking closely at the MP3 market. It is expected that its service, which could launch as early as next month, will differ from its rival by selling music without anti-piracy measures.

No word on which labels, besides most likely EMI, will participate in the DRM-less store.

Back in the Bubble?

Amazon posted a huge increase in revenue this last quarter over the same period last year - 33%! - and Google did similarly - 63%! I have to confess when I saw Google's numbers last week, I did a double-take.

For those of us in the books and technology space, this is certainly good news in the aggregate. It occurred to me last night that we seem to have reached the infamous "tipping point" - text is not getting any less digital. And while certainly the ever-growing pile of books-I-have-to-read on my coffee table is a testament to the usefulness and value of print, the technologies behind creating those print books, distributing them, finding out about them, selling them - this is all digital.

Ebooks themselves will find their place in the natural stream of 0s and 1s, just as downloadable music and video are - first with textbooks and then with other sorts of titles; the usual combination of expense and accessibility has already started to work in the textbook sector. That stream of bytes is not getting any smaller. It will only get inexorably bigger.

Kindl-ing

Word on the street is that Amazon's finally going to launch their Kindle this spring for around $400.

It can't do worse than the Sony Reader.

Again, I'm struck by the sheer ugliness of its design. But maybe there's a reason for that ugliness? Any design people want to weigh in here? To me it looks like we time-traveled to 1982. And not in a hip, ironic way.

Children in Wales think they can't afford libraries

According to a study done in Wales, reported via Teleread, schoolchildren in Wales believe "they had to pay to borrow books." Rather like renting movies, I suppose.

This comes as libraries are reinventing themselves as media service centers - lending not just books but movies and music; providing Internet service; even shipping to homes.

I wonder about services like Booksfree, which seems to be reinventing the wheel (except you have to pay) - they were a client of mine while I ran the books product at Muze, and I just could never figure out their value prop. That you never have to leave the house? As libraries go increasingly digital, that's not much of a selling point. Better they should offer their delivery service TO libraries than compete with them....

POD still growth area

An underreported squib from the London Book Fair: IBS (a former client of mine) did a survey of its publisher clients and discovered that 52% considered print on demand to be a major growth sector.

Additionally, 28% regarded ebooks as potentially profitable in the near future, and 45% said "selling digital content" was an area of growth - what the difference is between these two, I am not exactly sure.

To hearten those of us in BISAC, 13% said "trading standards" were representative of major changes in the industry.


The full report can be found here.

LibraryThing at CIL

While the London Book Fair winds down, Computers in Libraries is in full swing, and Tim Spaulding of LibraryThing spoke there about their new widget for OPACs. According to Spaulding's blog:

In keeping with our policy on thingISBN, our "related editions" widget will be free—allowing any library in the country to "FRBRize their catalog" without paying LibraryThing or anyone else a dime.** The paid widgets will include book recommendations, tag-based browsing, ratings, reviews and so forth. We'll only be releasing two or three at CIL, but the rest will come out over the next few months.

BBC America Audiobooks to buy Audio Partners

This morning's Shelf Awareness has an item about BBC America Audiobooks purchasing Audio Partners' list of titles - literary works, mostly. Geared towards strengthening BBCA's library products, this purchase will allow Audio Partners to expand their direct mail and Internet sales businesses.

MySpace to the Rescue

PW reports this morning on a really cool item: Women & Children First, the Chicago independent bookstore, was experiencing some serious financial hardship until they posted a forthright account on their MySpace page, explaining that the owner had cut his own salary by 80% and they had had to reduce store hours just to stay in business.

The response to the posting was immediate, and overwhelmingly positive. Not only were sales Friday and throughout the weekend the highest Bubon and Christophersen had seen since Christmas, but 30 new members paid $25 each to join the store’s club, which entitles them to a 10% discount and a subscription to the store’s e-newsletter. Other nonprofit groups have contacted the store in the past few days, offering to host fundraisers. And the store’s Internet sales have "gone through the roof," said Bubon, to the extent that one employee has been assigned just to fill Internet orders.

Last month I gave a presentation at the Mountains & Plains Booksellers Association on just this sort of thing - using Web 2.0 tools such as MySpace to boost sales and improve your community presence. In this case, Women & Children First used MySpace to stay alive.

Virginia Tech thoughts