I mean, this is embarrassing

It’s been 13 days since my last post. Forgive me.

I’ve been productive, though! If you go to the Book Business website, you can download my webinar, Digital Strategies: Getting the Most Bang for Your Buck. I know there were questions that didn’t get answered, and I hope to answer them in the coming days. If anybody has any new questions, and I’ll answer them here.

I also have an article coming out in the Summer issue of "Library Trends". If you don’t have a subscription, you can access it at your local library!

“Yeah, Microsoft – that defunct company”

Tim O’Reilly has a really cool post on his blog about Amazon’s un-ecological approach to things lately. A (large – please forgive me, Tim) excerpt:

But as Amazon’s market power increases, it needs to be mindful of whether its moves, even those that may be good for the company in the short term, are ultimately destructive of the ecosystem on which they depend. I believe that they are heading in that direction, and if they succeed with some of their initiatives, they will wake up one day to discover that they’ve sown the seeds of their own destruction, just as Microsoft did in the 1990s.

At O’Reilly, we have a motto: "Create more value than you capture." It’s a wise motto for companies far bigger than we are to adopt. If you do that, you ensure a healthy ecosystem. If you capture more value than you create, watch out, because stagnation is on the way.

Amazon has, so far, created huge value for the publishing ecosystem. Now, as they become more powerful, they need to be especially watchful that they don’t irreparably damage an industry on which they too depend.

A friend of mine responded to this with, "Yeah, Microsoft – that defunct company." And I admit I had the same thought – Microsoft is in no danger of dying anytime soon. But they did indeed do some damage to themselves, just as Apple did (anyone remember when Apple was struggling?), just as IBM did. In fact, IBM might be an even better example.

Tim’s post is a good thought. It’s a responsible thought. (But – as others have pointed out – not all businesses are responsible.) In the words of .38 Special, "hold on loosely."

Cool blog

In yesterday’s Big Picture, I listed a bunch of blogs I follow, and I found a new one today: The CITE. It’s run by Mark Nelson, who comes out of NACS, ECAR and EDUCAUSE. He tackles issues in textbook publishing, which is of course a hotbed of digital experimentation. Cool!

Textbook publishers sue GSU

I’d wondered when this was going to happen. In the white paper I wrote last year about publishing and libraries, Convenient Convergence, I proposed that textbook publishers look at licensing their content to libraries, so that students could seemingly access their textbooks for "free", and textbook companies could continue to get paid, just under a different model.

Looks like Georgia State University’s library has gone ahead and done something just like this – only without making a licensing deal with the publishers involved (Oxford, Cambridge and SAGE):

As of Feb. 19, the university’s library electronic course system listed more than 6,700 works that were available for more than 600 courses, the lawsuit said. By allowing such widespread access, students can obtain many of the required reading materials for their courses without ever setting foot in a bookstore or spending any money for them, the suit added.

OUP, CUP and SAGE have filed suit. According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

New York attorney R. Bruce Rich, who represents the publishers, said other universities, when notified, have worked out license agreements with publishers over the use of copyrighted materials.

BookMooch

CNet reports on a service called BookMooch.com, a book-swapping website run by John Buckman. Members pay a fee to join, and then trade books for free online. (They have to pay for postage, but that’s all.)

However, Buckman’s taking in money as an Amazon affiliate. He’s got a widget called the Moochbar, which links members’ wish lists to Amazon. For every 25 books traded, someone actually will purchase a book, and Buckman makes the affiliate fee.

CNet points out, however, that Buckman’s service is primarily of interest as a long tail phenomenon:

Apart from still-negligible sales, what should be more of a wake-up call to the book industry is how the site is tapping into the so-called long tail of book retail with a social, free service. The long tail, as the theory goes, accounts for as much as 60 percent of the goods sold in an industry, or all those unpopular works that find a home with only a few. It’s said that the lion’s share of Amazon’s book sales come from works that have a low sales ranking.

What’s more, within the next nine months, Buckman expects to have the inventory of books–distributed among its members–that would rival that of the largest book wholesaler in the United States. BookMooch now has an inventory of about 480,000 books among its 70,000 trading members, but at its growth rate it should rival Ingram Book Company’s 1 million books by early 2009, Buckman said. BookMooch’s decentralized warehouse of books serves the long tail the same way that centralized warehouses like those of Ingram’s serves the top of the tail.

JISC Report: Metadata for Digital Libraries

The Joint Information Systems Committee has just issued a report on metadata and libraries in the digital age, available here. Judy O’Connell’s blog Hey Jude helpfully digests some of the more critical points with Paul Anderson of Intelligent Content:

The problem for librarians is that when you are creating things like e-books, you have to think about a different set of ‘quality’ criteria because these digital objects will not be used in the same way that physical books are. They will need to designed so that they can be searched, for example, or delivered as separate pages. For the average library user, accessing information that spans multiple digital sources is increasingly a messy process and for those who are used to search tools such as Google and Yahoo this new and highly fluid environment can be a considerable barrier to accessing information from digital libraries and online collections. What is concerning about this is, unless we are careful, people will increasingly see the search results thrown up by Google, Yahoo etc. as the be-all and end-all of a particular area of interest or subject.

Cooled Kindle

The Sacramento Bee has a considered piece this morning on the Kindle – now that the hype has faded a bit. It’s a good assessment by someone who isn’t a gizmo-freak. Something I hadn’t heard of to date was the NowNow program:

The Kindle has many sophisticated features. One is the interactive NowNow program. How does it work?

Amazon.com describes it this way: "(The service) answers a question you may have about literally any topic. When you ask a question, our workers will surf the Web to find the answer. They will then send your Kindle up to three answers to each question."

To test it, I sent this question: What is the meaning of life?

Amazon.com’s "workers" were fast in their responses. One lengthy response focused on the philosophy expressed in the five-book "The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy" series by the late Douglas Adams.

A second offered an answer that noted, "Some philosophers have asked questions like, ‘What does the question "What is the meaning of life?" mean?’ and also questioned whether it is a meaningful question."

A third was the most straightforward and our favorite: " ‘The Meaning of Life’ was a 1983 Monty Python movie.’ "

Author Author

This is turning out to be Author Week. First we hear that the Lonely Planet author Thomas Kohnstamm never went to Colombia even though he wrote part of the guidebook about it.

Then JK Rowling arrives in New York for the copyright-infringement suit against RDR Publishing regarding the lexicon they published about the Harry Potter books. (Should be a trademark-infringement suit, but it isn’t – go figure.)

Then we hear that computers are now writing books. Well, maybe those computers will stay out of trouble.

Harry Potter Copyright Case

Some questions:

1. Why is Warner Brothers involved in a book case?
2. Why isn’t Scholastic/Bloomsbury involved?
3. If Rowling was deceased, would this even be an issue?
4. Is it possible to legislate for or against books that might be written in the future, even if the author has expressed her intention to write them?

The Big Picture Specials!!!

• Book Industry Acronym Glossary
  A compilation of initialisms and acronyms that proliferate throughout our business. Sitting in conference sessions, gathering at industry events, we’re frequently confused by all this alphabet soup – this glossary (BIAG?) is an attempt to put definitions at our fingertips. We’ve also included two useful flowcharts: Tracking the ISBN and Book Industry Metadata Supply Chain.

• The Big Picture Year One
  A compilation of the hottest industry news and interviews from the first year of LJNDawson’s industry newsletter, The Big Picture.
• You can buy them here – subscribers to The Big Picture get a discount!