Librarians Puzzle Over E-Books They May Buy but Not Truly Own

Buy a print book and it's yours forever. Buy access to an e-book and a publisher can set limits on what you do with it. Recently, public libraries have had a tussle with a commercial publisher, HarperCollins, over e-book use. Academic libraries and scholarly publishers are watching closely.

In February, HarperCollins announced a checkout limit for new e-books it licensed to libraries. Twenty-six was the cutoff, the publisher said. Once that limit was reached, it would be time to pay for another round of access—the equivalent, irate librarians argued, of having to buy another copy of a print book.

The debate prompted calls for a boycott of HarperCollins. As of May 10, more than 65,000 people had signed an online petition, "Tell HarperCollins: Limited Checkouts on E-Books Is Wrong for Libraries."

That kind of negative publicity catches the attention of other publishers and librarians, even if they don't traffic much in the kinds of popular material HarperCollins handles. James R. Mouw is the electronic-resources officer and interim head of collections at the University of Chicago libraries.

"We've certainly been tracking the whole HarperCollins thing closely," Mr. Mouw told me. When a publisher introduces a pricing model "where maybe once you buy it, you don't have it forever," it's a trend that research libraries need to watch, he said. "When we buy a book, we're buying it for the long term."

Nearby, at the University of Chicago Press, they're also keeping tabs on the HarperCollins situation. "I've been saying to people that though I don't agree with the exact way HarperCollins has approached this, I do appreciate that they've brought this into the open a little bit," said Garrett P. Kiely, the press's director. "We haven't really dealt with these issues of how we treat libraries."

From The Chronicle of Higher Education

Amazon Signs Up Authors, Writing Publishers Out of Deal

SEATTLE — Amazon.com has taught readers that they do not need bookstores. Now it is encouraging writers to cast aside their publishers.

Amazon will publish 122 books this fall in an array of genres, in both physical and e-book form. It is a striking acceleration of the retailer’s fledging publishing program that will place Amazon squarely in competition with the New York houses that are also its most prominent suppliers.

It has set up a flagship line run by a publishing veteran, Laurence Kirshbaum, to bring out brand-name fiction and nonfiction. It signed its first deal with the self-help author Tim Ferriss. Last week it announced a memoir by the actress and director Penny Marshall, for which it paid $800,000, a person with direct knowledge of the deal said.

Publishers say Amazon is aggressively wooing some of their top authors. And the company is gnawing away at the services that publishers, critics and agents used to provide.

Several large publishers declined to speak on the record about Amazon’s efforts. “Publishers are terrified and don’t know what to do,” said Dennis Loy Johnson of Melville House, who is known for speaking his mind.

“Everyone’s afraid of Amazon,” said Richard Curtis, a longtime agent who is also an e-book publisher. “If you’re a bookstore, Amazon has been in competition with you for some time. If you’re a publisher, one day you wake up and Amazon is competing with you too. And if you’re an agent, Amazon may be stealing your lunch because it is offering authors the opportunity to publish directly and cut you out.

“It’s an old strategy: divide and conquer,” Mr. Curtis said.

Amazon executives, interviewed at the company’s headquarters here, declined to say how many editors the company employed, or how many books it had under contract. But they played down Amazon’s power and said publishers were in love with their own demise.

“It’s always the end of the world,” said Russell Grandinetti, one of Amazon’s top executives. “You could set your watch on it arriving.”

I Was an Under-Age Semiotician

But there was more than just the-latest-from-France fashion to semiotics in those years. As a good friend once observed, it left many of us with an intoxicating sense that the everyday world — particularly the world of media — contained a secret layer of meaning that could be deciphered with the right key. (Some of that allure was packaged neatly into the “Symbology” discipline of the “Da Vinci Code” novels.) As we grew older, many of us started using different conceptual tools, but it was that initial rush during our semiotics years that got us started: that exhilarating feeling of being 20 and gaining access to a hidden world of knowledge. By the time I started writing books about technology and media in my late-20s, the sentences were shorter and the arguments less prone to putting themselves under erasure, but what animated my work was the sense that computer interfaces or video games had a subtle social meaning to them that was not always visible at first glance. That perspective was also the legacy of my semiotics years, and it turned out to be much more durable than the prose style.

I know of very few friends from that period who continue to practice Theory as it was taught to us then. But a striking number of semiotics students have gone on to influential careers in the media and the creative arts. (Perhaps anticipating this development, during my tenure at Brown the concentration was renamed Modern Culture and Media.) NPR’s Ira Glass, the novelist Rick Moody, the filmmaker Todd Haynes, Eugenides himself — all spent their formative years in the semiotics program. The antihero of Sam Lipsyte’s hilarious 2010 novel, “The Ask,” takes theory classes at a college clearly modeled on Brown. (Lipsyte was in fact my roommate for most of my college career; I like to think the stinging parodies of semio-babble in that book were modeled on his other friends.) A long list of aspiring semioticians went on to play important roles in the early days of digital media. Looking back, I suspect the semiotic worldview — with its constant emphasis on “textual play” — gave us conceptual antennas that helped us tune in to the hypertextual chaos of the Web when it first emerged.


Semiotics, for all its needless complications, still taught us to look for new possibilities in the ordinary, turning signs into new wonders. For all our talk about being post-everything, the most interesting thing about us turned out to be what we were pre- .

from The New York Times

Do Androids Dream of Electric Authors?

One day, I stumbled across a book on Amazon called “Saltine Cracker.” It didn’t make sense: who would pay $54 for a book entirely about perforated crackers? The book was co-edited by someone called Lambert M. Surhone — a name that sounds like one of Kurt Vonnegut’s inventions. According to Amazon, Lambert M. Surhone has written or edited more than 100,000 titles, on every subject from beekeeping to the world’s largest cedar bucket. He was churning out books at a rate that was simply not possible for a human being.

So who was Lambert M. Surhone? Just looking at the numbers, you could argue that he’s one of the most prolific creators of literature who ever lived. But was he even human? There are now software programs — robots, if you will — that can gather text and organize it into a book. Surhone might be one of them.

Whatever he was, Lambert M. Surhone worked under the auspices of a German company, VDM Publishing. In addition to selling conventional books, VDM also extrudes thousands of paperbacks every year using content available without cost on the Internet. These books, or booklike products, lie in wait for the distracted shopper, someone who might think, Oh good, I really need a tome on Spearman’s law of diminishing returns, so I’ll just go ahead and pay $84. And with one overhasty click on the “Place your order” button, the shopper can pay a lot of money for a book that turns out to be warmed-over Wikipedia.

VDM Publishing puts a notice on the cover of its books, boasting “high-quality content by Wikipedia articles!” Still, not every buyer sees the disclaimer. Librarians, for instance, report that they must be vigilant in order to avoid wasting money on the robot-books. Readers complain that the books proliferate like kudzu in online stores.

But the invasion of robot-books is unsettling for another reason. I think we can all agree that it’s O.K. for robots to take over unpleasant jobs — like cleaning up nuclear waste. But how could we have allowed them to commandeer one of the most gratifying occupations, that of author?

From The New York Times

Best-Selling Author Gives Away His Work

A publishing industry that is being transformed by all things digital could learn some things from Paulo Coelho, the 64-year-old Brazilian novelist. Years ago he upended conventional wisdom in the book business by pirating his own work, making it available online in countries where it was not easily found, using the argument that ideas should be disseminated free. More recently he has proved that authors can successfully build their audiences by reaching out to readers directly through social media. He ignites conversations about his work by discussing it with his fans while he is writing.

That philosophy has helped him sell tens of millions of books, most prominently “The Alchemist,” an allegorical novel that has been on the New York Times best-seller list for 194 weeks and is still a regular fixture in paperback on the front tables of bookstores.

This week Mr. Coelho releases his latest novel, “Aleph,” a book that tells the story of his own epiphany while on a pilgrimage through Asia in 2006 on the Trans-Siberian Railway. (Aleph is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, with many mystical meanings.) While Mr. Coelho spent four years gathering material for the book, he wrote it in only three weeks.

Spreading the word about the book should be easy; he has become a sort of Twitter mystic, writing messages in English and his native Portuguese and building a following of 2.4 million people. (A recent example: “When your legs are tired, walk with your heart.”) In 2010 Forbes named him the second-most-influential celebrity on Twitter, behind only Justin Bieber.

Mr. Coelho continues to give his work away free by linking to Web sites that have posted his books, asking only that if readers like the book, they buy a copy, “so we can tell to the industry that sharing contents is not life threatening to the book business,” as he wrote in one post.

From The New York Times

Major Publishers Join Indiana U. Project That Requires Students to Use E-Textbooks

Major Publishers Join Indiana U. Project That Requires Students to Use E-Textbooks

September 15, 2011, 7:00 am

By Jeff Young

A game-changing e-textbook project at Indiana University—in which the university requires certain students to purchase e-textbooks and negotiates unusually low prices by promising publishers large numbers of sales—now has the participation of major textbook publishers, and university officials plan to expand the effort.

Today McGraw-Hill Higher Education announced that it has agreed to join the project, which has been in a pilot stage for more than a year. A handful of other publishers—John Wiley & Sons; Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishing Group; W.W. Norton; and Flat World Knowledge—have signed on to the effort as well.

Here’s how it works: Students in a select group of courses are required to pay a materials fee, which gets them access to the assigned electronic textbooks or other readings for the course. The university essentially becomes the broker of the textbook sales, and because it is buying in bulk and guaranteeing a high volume, officials say they can score better prices than can the campus bookstore or other retailers.

How good are the prices? Bradley C. Wheeler, the university’s vice president for information technology who is leading the e-textbook effort, says that students save more money through the program than they would if they bought a printed book and resold it at the end of the semester (a common practice among cost-conscious students). A McGraw-Hill official said the deal gave the university a 20 percent discount off its usual e-book prices.

Mr. Wheeler also said that the university’s deal with publishers gives students access to the e-textbooks for a longer period of time than publishers traditionally allow for electronic copies. Typically, the digital textbook files self-destruct after a set period of time, usually a semester or a year. For e-textbooks at Indiana’s program, students are allowed to read the electronic copies for as long as they are enrolled at the university.

The university put out a call for proposals last year asking publishers to participate, and Mr. Wheeler said he still hopes to sign on more publishers. He said persuading the publishers to agree to the price and access terms took some doing, and he described the negotiations with McGraw-Hill in particular as “a very long discussion.”

Officials from McGraw-Hill say that what led them to join was that the model helped them encourage use of the company’s new digitally enhanced textbooks, including its McGraw-Hill Connect line of titles that include online quizzes for students and other features.

This is the first time McGraw Hill has signed an institutional subscription for its e-textbooks, but it hopes to sign similar deals with other universities, said Tom Malek, vice president for learning solutions for McGraw-Hill Higher Education.

He said the Indiana model will help solve another problem faced by professors—that their students often wait to purchase textbooks and are therefore not ready to do assignments at the beginning of the semester. “Now everyone has the materials on the first day of class,” said Mr. Malek.

Each professor at Indiana can decide whether to participate in the e-textbook project. So far 22 courses have done so, and last month the university released a report outlining how those professors and their students (1,700 in all) liked the arrangement. It included data from surveys of students in 12 of those courses—1,037 students.

More than half of them—about 60 percent—said they preferred the e-textbook to a traditional printed copy. But the satisfaction varied wildly by course. In one case, only 36 percent of students preferred the e-textbook, though officials say students in that course were unhappy because the professor made little use of the required textbook so they felt they got limited benefit from the required fee. In another course, 84 percent of students said they preferred the e-textbook to print.

Slightly more than half of the students surveyed—about 55 percent—said they read less of the e-textbook than they would have read from a printed copy, while 22 percent said they read more from the e-textbook than they would have from a printed copy.

Officials were watching closely to see whether students simply printed out the e-books and read from those paper copies. According to system logs, 68 percent of the students printed no pages, while 19 percent printed more than 50 pages.

The report makes it clear that the university is pushing forward with the project: “In summary, we believe that the future is digital and that this model is an important step towards that future.”

 

From The Chronicle of Higher Education

In Case You Wondered, a Real Human Wrote This Column

“WISCONSIN appears to be in the driver’s seat en route to a win, as it leads 51-10 after the third quarter. Wisconsin added to its lead when Russell Wilson found Jacob Pedersen for an eight-yard touchdown to make the score 44-3 ... . ”


Those words began a news brief written within 60 seconds of the end of the third quarter of the Wisconsin-U.N.L.V. football game earlier this month. They may not seem like much — but they were written by a computer.

The clever code is the handiwork of Narrative Science, a start-up in Evanston, Ill., that offers proof of the progress of artificial intelligence — the ability of computers to mimic human reasoning.
The company’s software takes data, like that from sports statistics, company financial reports and housing starts and sales, and turns it into articles. For years, programmers have experimented with software that wrote such articles, typically for sports events, but these efforts had a formulaic, fill-in-the-blank style. They read as if a machine wrote them.
But Narrative Science is based on more than a decade of research, led by two of the company’s founders, Kris Hammond and Larry Birnbaum, co-directors of the Intelligent Information Laboratory at Northwestern University, which holds a stake in the company. And the articles produced by Narrative Science are different.
“I thought it was magic,” says Roger Lee, a general partner of Battery Ventures, which led a $6 million investment in the company earlier this year. “It’s as if a human wrote it.”

Experts in artificial intelligence and language are also impressed, if less enthralled. Oren Etzioni, a computer scientist at the University of Washington, says, “The quality of the narrative produced was quite good,” as if written by a human, if not an accomplished wordsmith. Narrative Science, Mr. Etzioni says, points to a larger trend in computing of “the increasing sophistication in automatic language understanding and, now, language generation.”

The innovative work at Narrative Science raises the broader issue of whether such applications of artificial intelligence will mainly assist human workers or replace them. Technology is already undermining the economics of traditional journalism. Online advertising, while on the rise, has not offset the decline in print advertising. But will “robot journalists” replace flesh-and-blood journalists in newsrooms?

from The New York Times

The death of books has been greatly exaggerated

But hang on a minute. Anecdotally, that's a pretty awe-inspiring collection of proofs. But the plural of anecdote is not data. What is the data telling us?

According to Nielsen BookScan, the publishing industry standard for book sales data, book sales are pretty healthy, with one significant proviso which I'll come to. Ten years ago in 2001, 162m books were sold in Britain. Ten years later – a decade in which the internet bloomed, online gaming exploded, television channels proliferated, digital piracy rampaged and, latterly, recession gloomed – 229m books sold. So, a 42% increase in the number of books sold over the last 10 years.

But wait, say the gloomy. What about the cash? Haven't publishers been forced by avaricious retail giants into a fearsome downward spiral? Discounting has sharpened, but not as much as you'd think. The standard discount on the recommended retail price of a book in 2001 was already at 17.6%. In 2010 it was 26.7%. We'll return to this later.

Even with this discounting, last year UK consumer publishing drew in sales of £1.7bn, up 36% on 2001. Adult fiction saw an increase of 44%, to £476m; and young adult and children's fiction, realm of all those pesky copiers and pirateers and downloaders, saw sales more than double to £325m.

[...]

We must look to the US for the early signs. Ewan Morrison states in his piece that "Barnes and Noble claims it now sells three times as many digital books as all formats of physical books combined." Well, not quite. That figure is for online sales through bn.com only. In its most recent quarterly sales report, B&N reported an overall increase in sales at bn.com of over 50%. For the year, Barnes and Noble's total sales across all its business were up 20% to a record $7bn. But Barnes and Noble is still losing money ($59m in the fourth quarter), for the good reason that it's struggling to compete with the new, very big, very scary kid on the block: Amazon.
Ah, yes. Amazon. The boogeyman. A company now worth almost $90bn (£55bn). If you're an independent bookseller, Amazon must look like a cold, relentless stealth bomber casting its shadow over the pavement outside. But to the publisher and the writer, don't things in Amazonia look rather different?

For one thing, people are buying more and more books in Amazonia, and more and more of them are on Amazon's ebook platform the Kindle. In May this year, Amazon announced that, for the first time, it was selling more Kindle versions of books than paperback and hardbacks combined, and (here's the thing that doesn't get quoted so often) sales of print books were still increasing.

Amazon also announced that, in the year to May 2011, it had seen the fastest year-on-year growth rate for its US books business, when expressed in volume and in dollars. This included books in all formats, print and digital. In the UK, less than one year after opening its UK Kindle store, Amazon.co.uk is selling more Kindle books than hardcover books. And again, this is while hardcover sales continue to grow.

from The Guardian (UK)

The End of Newspapers?

Journalists are now in the same situation as steel workers in the 1970s: They are destined to disappear, but they don’t know it.

That was the assessment of a banker from BNP-Paribas at the French national press federation’s conference in Strasbourg in 2006. His words caused a sensation, but the statistics support him: Having lost more than 2,300 jobs last year, the French press is going through a crisis similar to America’s.
Every national daily in France, apart from the sports daily, L’Equipe, has lost money. In the United States, only 300,000 people now work in newspapers, compared to 415,000 a decade ago.

According to the management consultants Bain and Company, the Internet increased its share of global profits in the creative industries from 4 to 22 percent in the last 10 years, at the expense of the press, which saw its profits fall from 40 percent to 14 percent.

from The New York Times

Internet and supermarkets kill off 2,000 bookshops

Heavy discounting by supermarkets, the rise of internet retailers and the growing popularity of e-readers such as the Kindle have forced nearly 2,000 bookshops to close since 2005.

There were 2,178 high street bookshops left in Britain in July, according to research carried out by Experian, the data company, compared with 4,000 in 2005. A total of 580 towns do not have a single bookshop.

from The Telegraph

Great digital expectations

TO SEE how profoundly the book business is changing, watch the shelves. Next month IKEA will introduce a new, deeper version of its ubiquitous “BILLY” bookcase. The flat-pack furniture giant is already promoting glass doors for its bookshelves. The firm reckons customers will increasingly use them for ornaments, tchotchkes and the odd coffee-table tome—anything, that is, except books that are actually read.

In the first five months of this year sales of consumer e-books in America overtook those from adult hardback books. Just a year earlier hardbacks had been worth more than three times as much as e-books, according to the Association of American Publishers. Amazon now sells more copies of e-books than paper books. The drift to digits will speed up as bookshops close. Borders, once a retail behemoth, is liquidating all of its American stores.

Having started rather late, books are swiftly following music and newspapers into the digital world. Publishers believe their journey will be different, and that they will not suffer the fate of those industries by going into slow decline. Publishers’ experience will, indeed, be different—but not necessarily better.

from The Economist

Did Apple Conspire with Book Publishers?

While everyone is consumed with deciphering how the bid by Google (GOOG) to acquire Motorola Mobility Motorola Mobility (MMI) will affect the dominance of Apple (AAPL) in the smartphone market, Apple has other fights on its hands. Among them is a class-action lawsuit filed recently that alleges the company conspired with major book publishers to keep e-book prices high by implementing the so-called "agency model," which allowed publishers to set the price instead of Apple. Was this an actual conspiracy, or was it just a way for Apple and the publishers to compete with the dominance by Amazon (AMZN) over the growing market for electronic books?

from Business Week

Are books dead, and can authors survive?

Will books, as we know them, come to an end?

Yes, absolutely, within 25 years the digital revolution will bring about the end of paper books. But more importantly, ebooks and e-publishing will mean the end of "the writer" as a profession. Ebooks, in the future, will be written by first-timers, by teams, by speciality subject enthusiasts and by those who were already established in the era of the paper book. The digital revolution will not emancipate writers or open up a new era of creativity, it will mean that writers offer up their work for next to nothing or for free. Writing, as a profession, will cease to exist.

from The Guardian (UK)