BISG/BIC White Paper on identifiers

BISG/BIC has commissioned Michael Holdsworth, formerly managing director of Cambridge University Press, to write a white paper on identifying digital content. It's out, available, posted:

The Identification of Digital Book Content is intended to stimulate debate in the book industry about how digital book content should be identified and to encourage further work on the development and implementation of identification standards and best practices for such content.

I've read the paper - it's really good and should indeed spark a lot of discussion. We'll be covering it in Identifier Committee meetings at BISAC - those who are interested should go to the BISG website and sign up for that committee. We'll be sending around a new meeting time soon (having it after the BISAC General meetings hasn't been too inspiring, frankly).

More Muzing

Don Henderson left me a comment yesterday (my comments indicator isn't working properly for some reason, so it looks like there are 0 comments for that post, when in fact if you click on "comments" you'll see his post). He very justly corrects me - it's LEE Ho who's the VP of marketing over at Muze...JEFF Ho works in marketing at McGraw-Hill and I got them confused.

At any rate, Don goes on to say "There are plenty of Muze personnel left". Indeed! But my question is...how much experience do they have in the particular market Muze addresses? How much institutional knowledge is left when so many of the folks who have been with the company for years have now left? What's to prevent Muze from making the same mistakes over and over again when that institutional knowledge is no longer there?

Since I left in November 2006, the company has been gutted. I'm sure many wonderful people have come in to replace those who have left or been laid off, but that kind of turnover has a profound effect on a place. It's not a question of moving bodies and minds around - when turnover is that high, there's a sacrifice in the organic growth and cohesion of a company. And I wonder if Muze can make up for that.

Muze has amazed me before. It began in 1990 (or thereabouts) in a warehouse in Williamsburg. I came on board in 1995, at the tail end of the warehouse phase - wires and cables draped from ceiling to floor; running the copy machine too long would blow a fuse that would take out the entire video department; it was a bizarre combination of old and new that was right out of a Terry Gilliam movie. In that environment, we played and learned and developed amazing applications. Moving to Soho in 1996, the Skunkworks mindset continued. It was a place of extraordinary inventiveness.

And yet...it wasn't sustainable. Through massive mismanagement, Muze lost several dozen people, many of whom flocked to Barnes & Noble.com. (I was one of them - I went in 1998.) The mismanagement continued - we'd hear things about one disasterous CEO after another. When I returned in 2006, it seemed that things had stabilized...but this was deceptive, obviously.

No one running the company has ever known quite what to do with it. It is such a promising enterprise - and it attracts extremely gifted people - but every single CEO it's had has wanted to turn it into something it isn't. This last round...turning it into a company that distributes actual content instead of simply catalog metadata and sound samples...was particularly ill-thought-out. Acquiring the Loudeye assets was a mistake. It diverted the company from its core business. Muze, I think, is not a company to be transformed. It's a company that needs to make the best of what it's got - and it's got quite a lot.

I'm interested in what Peter Krause and Paul Parreira at Tactic Company are going to do - I believe they have taken the best in what Muze has to offer (editorial and data creation) and are making a business of it.

How Can They Have A Layoff If There's No One Left At The Company?

Just in time for Christmas, Muze has laid off an undisclosed number of staffers from its Seattle office. John Cook of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer apparently got a tip that 75% of the Seattle contingent was let go, but the new VP of marketing, Jeff Ho, disputes this:

"It is not that big of a cut," said Ho, who declined to disclose the number of employees at the company....Ho said the company is "right sizing" the digital media delivery group, which is based in Seattle.

Ho added (rather ominously) that in terms of severance packages, the laid-off employees were "taken care of". When Muze laid me off (at Thanksgiving of last year), I was taken care of, too - with a whole two weeks' severance.

Predicting that Muze strips the company of its assets and sells them off, and folds like a Japanese fan.

More Muzers

In an attempt to counter the torrent of departing Muze personnel, two executives have been added to the team in New York: Joslyn Lane, Managing Editor of Media Information (replacing Paul Parreira and Peter Krause), and Lee Ho, VP of Marketing (replacing someone whose name I forget because he wasn't there long enough for it to stick).

Meanwhile, Mike Pegan, former director of sales for Muze, is now back at AMG.

Harvard Coop: ISBNs are our intellectual property

In what must be one of the most incredible arguments in the world of book data, the Harvard Coop has been punting students out of its store for jotting down ISBNs and pricing information (in an attempt to do an online search to see if they can find the books cheaper elsewhere) - on the premise that the ISBNs are the bookstore's intellectual property and the students are thus violating copyright law by taking them down.

Here's the real deal, in case anyone is wondering: 

If an ISBN is anyone's property, it's the publisher's property. The publisher bought and paid for the ISBN. The Coop is way out of line on this one. What those students are doing is completely legal. The only way the Coop could justifiably kick students out of the store is if they have a policy stating that comparison shopping is not permitted in the store.

This situation, however, adds fuel to the textbook-pricing-is-out-of-control fire - and furthers our own argument that digital textbooks are pretty much the only way costs are going to come down on textbooks, and that libraries will be playing an increasing role in textbook distribution just as they do with scholarly journal distribution. For more on this, see the latest issue of The Big Picture, or download our white paper, "What Publishers Should Know About Libraries."

IDPF approves Open Publication Structure 2.0

The members of the IDPF have approved the Open Publication Standard v. 2.0, according to Publishers Weekly:

The IDPF adoption of OPS 2.0 along with the ".epub" file format that goes with it (the OPS 2.0 standard uses the .epub file extension for reflowable text) means that publishers can now create one digital book file instead of the 6 to10 formats previously required....The new standard also means interoperability for ebooks with consumers now being able to read non-DRM digital books on any software or device that uses the .epub standard.

Woo-hoo! So now you can download MobiPocket ebooks to read on your Sony Reader, right? 

The Big Picture - nterview with Steve Potash, CEO Overdrive-Digital Library Reserve

In this issue of The Big Picture:

THE DOWNLOAD: - by industry consultant Laura Dawson
INTERVIEW: - Steve Potash – CEO of Overdrive-Digital Library Reserve
TIA - THIS ISSUE'S ACRONYM - EAN
INTEL: COMPANIES - Overdrive teams up with Navy General Library
INTEL: PRODUCTS - Google Custom Search Business Edition launched
INTEL: PEOPLE - Former Muzers join MyStrands
THE JOB EXCHANGE - Visit the new LJNDawson.com on-site job board!

From The Download:
"I recently did a consulting gig for an e-commerce website whose database was about 10 years old. Essentially, we scrapped the old database and built a new one – which involved some very careful, step-by-step cleansing of their metadata before plugging it into the new structure. Titles, author names, subject classifications – all had to be gone over with a fine-tooth comb in an Excel spreadsheet.

Not the sexiest gig in the world, and I believe the lead developer (and he’ll confirm this for me, I’m sure) was bored out of his mind with that process. But immediately upon pumping the cleaned data to the website, customers wrote in to say they could find products more easily. (I was shocked, frankly, that customers would take the time to do this – you’re supposed to be able to find things; that customers don’t take this for granted while shopping online just tells me how bad search is these days.)

Finding products more easily, of course, leads to better sales results. If you can find it, you can buy it..."

Click here to access our newsletter archives and read the August 8, 2007 issue in full.

Capturing HP7 Reading Activity Online

XML in Publishing

Francis Cave and Alex Brown are running an XML in Publishing workshop which looks pretty fascinating. According to Alex's post on the Griffin-Brown blog, the course covers

• the basic principles of mark-up languages
• the roles XML can play in publishing
• what it is like to work with XML data.

The course is being offered on 9/25 at the Publishing Training Centre at Book House. (More or less the UK equivalent of the NYU Center for Publishing.) You can find out more here.

The Big Picture - Interview with Cliff Guren, Microsoft Live Search Books

In this issue of The Big Picture:

THE DOWNLOAD: - by industry consultant Laura Dawson
INTERVIEW: - Cliff Guren - Director of Publisher Evangelism, Microsoft Live Search Books
TIA - THIS ISSUE'S ACRONYM - BIC/EDItEUR
INTEL: COMPANIES - MediaBay dissolves, liquidates
INTEL: PRODUCTS - The inevitable Harry Potter hubub
INTEL: PEOPLE - BISG out of office indefinitely
THE JOB EXCHANGE - Visit the new LJNDawson.com on-site job board!

From The Download:
"I was talking to a young man recently who works in IT at a major publishing house. He has just started grad school, and was kind of in shock at what libraries had to offer. “Whatever it is that we can think of for our books,” he said, “they’ve probably already invented it.”

I don’t know that I would quite go that far, but it is true that libraries have done a lot more with search and categorization of content than publishers are aware of. And as publishers enter this age of Google and Live Search, of widgets, of social networking – as publishers look at what technology can do to help potential readers discover their books – they probably could stand to look at what libraries have already done so they don’t re-invent the wheel..."

Click here to access our newsletter archives and read the July 24, 2007 issue in full.

Digital Standards

Yesterday's meeting of the Digital Standards subcommittee of BISAC was actually less fractious and more consensual than I'd anticipated. (For starters, Google and Microsoft were on the same page regarding formats - neither is particularly interested in proprietary formats, but are looking to differentiate their services with their own search capabilities once files are delivered to them.)

The committee is chaired by Kent Freeman, of Ingram Digital Group, who's found himself in a Michael Corleone-esque position regarding BISAC: "Every time I try to get out, they keep pulling me back in!" Attendees ranged from Google/Microsoft to publishers (Random, Wiley), to service providers (Quality Solutions, FYI, Bowker, yrs truly) to distributors (Ingram). Peter Brantley of the Digital Library Federation also attended (by phone), as did Nick Bogaty of IDPF.

Essentially, Chris Hart of Random House discussed the issues he'd brought to AAP regarding digital distribution, and with his help the committee was able to divide issues into those around "discoverability" vs those around the actual content itself. Kent decided to keep us focused on discoverability and search at first, and gradually lead in to the sticky issues surrounding content delivery between trading partners.

Google presented its Book Crawl specification, which was really interesting but only in the beta-est of betas right now. All in all a terrific and informative meeting. You can join up here.

Google Book Search Gets Accessible

Google Book Search announced last week that it has added a dimension to its public domain material that allows it to be accessed by disabled readers. Some of this functionality was developed by T. V. Raman, a Google technologist who cannot see. So that's pretty cool. It's good to see Google's taking disabilities into account in their search function.

Charts! We have charts!

In addition to the aforementioned white paper, I've also created two charts that will be useful particularly to independent publishers, but I wanted to mention them here because others might find them useful as well.

The first, "The ISBN Trail", traces the ISBN throughout the book supply chain. It gives a clear picture of why the ISBN is important, what it's used for, and why it's crucial that it not be re-used - why an ISBN needs to be unique for each book you're selling. So if you're having trouble educating people inside your organization, this chart may prove quite useful to you. Very expense-able at $9.95.

Likewise, the "Metadata" chart follows a book's metadata throughout the supply chain as well. It's different from the ISBN chart because so much more goes into metadata - reviews, cover images, tables of contents, etc. - and this chart tracks the points at which these things are added to the overall metadata package, who adds them, where the potential breakdown points occur, and why your listings look like they do on Amazon, B&N, Alibris, etc. Again, very expense-able at $9.95.

ABEbooks looking for a catalog manager

From the HR Department at ABEbooks:

Catalog Manager – AbeBooks.com

 
Did you ever think of books as high-tech? 
 
Are you exceptionally analytical and creative, and ready to help grow AbeBooks’ existing and new business initiatives? Are you visionary and entrepreneurial, able to identify and determine strategy to drive new growth opportunities? Do you have great interpersonal and communication skills, and can you drive initiatives through by building consensus?


AbeBooks is looking for a unique person who can step in immediately and provide product direction and business leadership to drive results for our Catalog and related products.  If you are able to independently manage multiple projects and deliver high-quality results, then you are the person for us.


Candidates must have a demonstrated track record of successfully leading cross-functional teams to launch quality products. They must be comfortable within a fast-paced, innovative environment and have worked with various functional teams within a company as well as external companies and vendors.
 
RESPONSIBILITIES:
 
Products:

• Fulfill the primary mandate of growing and maintaining the catalog and it’s content as a product of AbeBooks.
  
• Defining the product strategy for our Catalog Product Line and become the “Catalog Evangelist”, creating and managing a Catalog Roadmap.
  
• Developing product specific business cases, recommendations and requirements
  
• Prioritizing product requirements and making trade-offs within the product     development process
  
• Tracking performance metrics of current products and services
  
• Working within the Product Management Group to ensure the success of catalog related products that are owned by other Product Managers.
  
• Leading a wide variety of projects, including new product analysis and development, profit and loss forecasting, industry analysis and building alliances
  
• Owning the product throughout the execution cycle, including gathering product   requirements, defining product vision, creating design concepts, and working closely with engineering to implement and iterate
  

 
Data:

• Manage and organize the acquisition, importing and updating of catalog data from various sources both external and internal 
  
• Defining and then monitoring levels of quality for the data
  
• Tracking catalog data metrics
  

 
Corporate Relationships:

• Engaging with partners, such as Fillz, Bookfinder and LibraryThing as well as other external entities to drive product plans and requirements.
  

 
Industry Standards:

• Researching and keeping abreast of industry standards regarding cataloging (e.g. Book Industry Study Group (BISG), ISBN, OCLC, ONIX, et. al.)
  

 
QUALIFICATIONS:
The successful candidate will have

• at least 3 years of experience in product management, preferably in a software or web site company.
  
• Experience in managing cross-functional technical projects and the ability to interface with technical teams and influence their decision-making are also requirements.
  
• Highly organized,  excellent interpersonal skills and an affinity for technology
  
• Demonstrable experience in identifying new business opportunities and in developing and implementing plans that capitalize on these opportunities
  
• All candidates must have a BA or BS; an MBA is highly desired; a degree in a CS field is a huge plus.
  
• Proficiency in Excel and PowerPoint; the ability to write SQL queries is an asset.
  

 
Please direct all resumes to hr@abebooks.com or fax to Attention: Human Resources, 250- 475-6014.  We appreciate your interest in AbeBooks!