Suzanna Ellison leaving McGraw-Hill

Suzanna Ellison, sponsoring editor of Psychology textbooks at McGraw-Hill, has announced that she is leaving MH to work in market development at Wiley. She will be at McGraw until February 8th.

Outsourcing issues - who cut the cable?

CNN is reporting this morning that there's a major internet outage across Asia, the MidEast and northern Africa. Meaning that India's bandwidth has been cut in half. Apparently an undersea cable got snapped - Egypt thinks it was a boat anchor. More news here.

Amazon to buy Audible

For $300 million, Amazon will be acquiring Audible.com - Amazon issued the press release this morning at 7 a.m. This is on the heels of the departure of COO Glenn Rogers.

More iPod ick

The Santa Rosa Press Democrat has a great piece today about downloadable audiobooks and libraries.

Libraries in Sonoma, Lake and Mendocino counties are allowing patrons to download audiobooks from their Web sites - for free.

With a library card and a personal computer, books can be downloaded in a matter of minutes and transferred to a portable listening device for easy transport around the house, on the trail or in a car....But as with any new technology, the audiobook service includes technical glitches that may leave many library patrons frustrated.

Macintosh users in particular will be disappointed to learn that they cannot use the new service at all.

This means that iPod owners - who represent a huge share of the MP3 market - won't be able to store books on the popular devices.

The problem is that Overdrive, who is the main supplier of downloadable content to libraries, has a partnership with Microsoft. Apple will not work with Overdrive.

Apple will, however, work with Audible. Audible has an exclusive deal with Apple (which I believe is due to expire shortly).

Audible does not have a significant library business. (HELLO?????)

And it may be that Apple's not interested in going into the library because of course...libraries don't SELL content. They LOAN it. But there are some pretty awesome ways to make a buck in library land with digital content - even if that content appears "free" to the end-user. There are subscription fees. There are FTE charges. Many companies are doing enormously well this way - Thomson, Dialog, EBSCO, CSA, Ovid....These companies are not exactly startups. Not hurting for money AT ALL.

A library model, for Apple and whomever they work with, would be incremental income (significant incremental income) to them - just as it is to traditional publishers. Libraries don't eat into a publisher's business. If someone wants to own a book, they'll own it. If someone wants to own a song, they'll own it. But libraries are a way of allowing users to sample, to play, to enlarge their desires. And ultimately they'll buy more.

It's Monday and I am not skiing. A little crankiness is in order, I think.

Damn the iPod, damnit!

My iPod blew on Friday night.

Neither Windows nor iTunes would recognize the damn thing. At first, iTunes was telling me I had a device called "hegsie" that had 1700 gigabytes of space, most of which was taken up by non-audio files. My iPod is very sensibly named "Laura's iPod", and I don't know who this ridiculous "hegsie" is coming in and imposing itself on my iTunes.

I rebooted, reinstalled, restored, did all the "R" things. And by Saturday afternoon, "hegsie" had disappeared entirely. But "Laura's iPod" did not come back.

Because I restored the iPod to its factory settings (following the instructions on the Apple website!), I consequently deleted all the files off it (though they are still on my computer).

So now I have a blank iPod, which my computer will not recognize. I can't load it with audiobooks and music and videos. My workouts at the gym are...uninspired. That happy place I get to on the elliptical machine? No soundtrack for it anymore.

The iPod is not making the sad face, but I am.

Ebooks up, audiobooks down

The AAP released sales figures for the fiscal year ending in November 2007, reports Shelf Awareness this morning. Notable stats (to us, anyway):

Sales of ebooks rose 36.4% over 2006. Sales of audiobooks declined by 24.1%, which I found quite surprising given the hype around audiobooks in the previous year. I'm wondering if it's because the only downloadable games in town are Overdrive (which does not have a commercial application, only one for institutions) and Audible.com (which does not have an institutional strategy, only a commercial one). MediaBay went out of business last year. It may also be due to the migration from CD audiobooks to downloadable ones - there's bound to be a dip as people learn new technologies. And, as belts tighten in this economy, it may also be that audiobooks are proving to be a luxury that consumers are deciding they can live without.

Michael Eisner gets into digital book marketing

The New York Post has a squib this morning about Michael Eisner's new company Vuguru, an internet production studio. Apparently he's hooking up with Robin Cook, who has a new book coming out. Vuguru will be producing 50 2-minute videos for release on the web, which will serve as "prequels" to the novel. Says the Post:

Publishers have attempted to use the Internet to market books and attract new readers with little success, but G.P. Putnam president Ivan Held thinks this could be a breakthrough approach.

"One of the challenges for the industry in marketing books is how to bring in new readers," Held said. "This concept will certainly help reach a new audience as well as hook the consumer on the book before it ever comes out."

GAO goes digital

The General Accountability Office has announced that it will stop printing most of its (billions of) reports, issuing them electronically instead. (The Office of Management and Budget announced last week that it would stop printing copies of the federal budget.) However, notes the Federal Times, if Capitol Hill still requires printed reports, the GAO will do custom print jobs.

Borders staffs up in IT

Borders announced that it has hired Gary E. Baker to serve as VP of IT Delivery Services. With deep background in IT (he hosts a radio program called "Internet Advisor" on Saturday nights), Baker will be responsible for

the development and execution of IT strategic processes related to the delivery of technology as well as leading teams to ensure that business goals are met through delivery of necessary IT products and services, among other duties.

NISO releases RFID best practices for libraries

NISO released the news the other day that its RFID Working Group has finalized best practices for using RFID in libraries. Serving in the group are Brian Green of EDItEUR (and the International ISBN Agency), and Jim Lichtenberg, who runs the New Technologies committee for BISG. According to the press release:

The NISO recommendations for best practices aim to promote procedures that do the following:

• Allow an RFID tag to be installed at the earliest point and used throughout the lifecycle of the book, from publisher/printer to distributor, jobber, library (shelving, circulating, sorting, reshelving, inventory, and theft deterrence), and interlibrary loan, and continuing on to secondary markets such as secondhand books, returned books, and discarded/recycled books.
• Allow for true interoperability among libraries, where a tag in one library can be used seamlessly by another, even if the libraries have different suppliers for tags, hardware, and software.
• Protect the personal privacy of individuals while supporting the functions that allow users to reap the benefits of this technology.
• Permit the extension of these standards and procedures for global interoperability.
• Remain relevant and functional with evolving technologies.

Peter Brantley on Google

The Chronicle of Higher Ed has an interview with Peter Brantley, executive director of the Digital Library Foundation on the possible settlement that Google is preparing in response to lawsuits from publishers and authors. The Chronicle, unfortunately, requires a subscription for web access. But Peter Suber posts a fair-use excerpt on his website.

Meg Whitman To Retire?

The web is abuzz this morning with rumors that Meg Whitman, CEO of eBay, is planning to retire.

Breaking the news, the Wall Street Journal says:

The timing of Ms. Whitman's retirement is of her own choosing, say people familiar with the situation. Not long after she joined eBay, Ms. Whitman declared that no CEO should stay more than a decade in the same job because people need new challenges and organizations need fresh perspectives. While she has backed away from that comment in recent years, Ms. Whitman now appears to be making good on that early pledge as she approaches her 10-year anniversary as eBay CEO this March.

eBay is a significant retailer of used books, through its acquisition of Half.com. Mostly, though, it's sad to see a woman CEO of a Fortune 500 company (only 2% of Fortune 500 CEOs are women) leaving the arena...and being succeeded by a guy. Now less than 2% of Fortune 500 CEOs are women.

Steve Jobs to Publishers: Drop Dead

The NY Times reports this about Steve Jobs's appearance at Macworld the other day:

Today he had a wide range of observations on the industry, including the Amazon Kindle book reader, which he said would go nowhere largely because Americans have stopped reading.

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

Not a very nice thing for the brother of Mona Simpson to be saying.

Macbook Air vs Kindle?

Yesterday at MacWorld, Steve Jobs debuted the Air, a superslim laptop that weighs maybe 3 pounds. I've been saying this for a while, but I'll say it again - dedicated ebook readers will soon be outstripped by light/thin laptops that have far more functionality than the readers do. I think investing in standalone ebook readers, as opposed to multi-functional machines like iPhones and laptops, is needless. Reading's not enough - you want to be able to share what you're reading with people. And while the Air certainly has its problems, it's a sign of things to come - I'll take Jobs's design and know that he's going to fix storage and port problems rather than relying on Jeff Bezos to come up with a Kindle that can send email.

OCLC extends partnership with Blackstone Audio

The Book Standard reports that OCLC's NetLibrary division announced that it's extended its contract with Blackstone Audio to distribute Blackstone titles digitally. Previously, NetLibrary only supplied downloadable audio in a pay-for-purchase model; now it is offering audiobooks as a subscription service for libraries who wish to participate that way:

"Blackstone Audio has enjoyed a successful partnership with NetLibrary as a provider of eAudiobooks for purchase," said Steve King, director of digital sales for Blackstone Audio. "We anticipate continued success with NetLibrary in offering a subscription option to libraries that would prefer the convenience of this model."

Glenn Rogers leaving Audible

Glenn Rogers, COO of Audible and an incredible, reasonable, smart, kind, awesome, all-around-good-guy-mensch, is leaving the company to go back to consulting. I worked with Glenn when I was consulting at Audible and he is fantastic.

Good luck, Glenn!