From Claire Cain Miller at The New York Times…
Monday was a day for the history books — if those will even exist in the future.
Amazon.com, one of the nation’s largest booksellers, announced Monday that for the last three months, sales of books for its e-reader, the Kindle, outnumbered sales of hardcover books.
In that time, Amazon said, it sold 143 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books, including hardcovers for which there is no Kindle edition.
The pace of change is quickening, too, Amazon said. In the last four weeks sales rose to 180 digital books for every 100 hardcover copies. Amazon has 630,000 Kindle books, a small fraction of the millions of books sold on the site.
Book lovers mourning the demise of hardcover books with their heft and their musty smell need a reality check, said Mike Shatzkin, founder and chief executive of the Idea Logical Company, which advises book publishers on digital change. “This was a day that was going to come, a day that had to come,” he said. He predicts that within a decade, fewer than 25 percent of all books sold will be print versions. More…
The 2010 Book Conference held at the University of St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland, 6-8 November, welcomes three new speakers to its international line-up of plenary speakers.
Rafael Ball
Professor Rafael Ball is currently Director of the University Library Regensburg in Regensburg, Germany. After receiving his doctorate (Dr. rer. nat.) in biology in 1994 from the Institute of General Botany at the University of Mainz, he went on to train as a scientific librarian at the Library Management School of Frankfurt from 1994-1996. Following this, he took the position as the Head of the Central Library at the Research Centre Jülich where he stayed from 1996-2008 before moving on to the University of Regensburg. More…
Stephanie Jacobs
Dr. Stephanie Jacobs studies history of art, German studies, philosophy and psychology at universities of Bamberg, Bonn, Berlin (Germany) and Perugia (Italy). Her doctoral work at the Free University of Berlin concentrated on German and French book illustration in the 19th century. Jacobs was awarded scholarships in Herzog-August-Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, Bibliothèque Nationale Paris, and the Mellon Center of Yale University. More…
Wulf D. von Lucius
Wulf D. von Lucius is the Director of Lucius & Lucius Verlag in Stuttgart, Germany and has been with them since 1996. Since 1970, he has been engaged in honorary positions in the book trade, both nationally and internationally, with a focus on copyright. He was chair of the STM Copyright Committee from 1990-93, Chair of IPCC 91/92 and 97/98, Chair of the German copyright committee 1994-2008 and was on the IPA’s Copyright Committee from 1997-2000. More…
Want to get your publications underway now?
We are now accepting submissions for the next volume of The International Journal of the Book. The next submission deadline is Monday 2 August 2010.
Refereeing of submitted papers will commence shortly so start the submission process early by submitting your proposal.
Paper submission guidelines are available online.
From Laura Miller at Salon…
When I was 12 years old, I read most of the plays of George Bernard Shaw. That’s not to say that I understood the plays of George Bernard Shaw, or even that I passionately loved them. They just happened to be around the house, in a set of neat little green paperbacks left over from my father’s college days. I doubt that puzzling over the mysteries of “Pygmalion” taught me much about the British class system, but it definitely got me into the habit of searching for understanding in the pages of challenging books.
A study recently published in the journal Research in Social Stratification and Mobility found that just having books around the house (the more, the better) is correlated with how many years of schooling a child will complete. The study (authored by M.D.R. Evans, Jonathan Kelley, Joanna Sikorac and Donald J. Treimand) looked at samples from 27 nations, and according to its abstract, found that growing up in a household with 500 or more books is “as great an advantage as having university-educated rather than unschooled parents, and twice the advantage of having a professional rather than an unskilled father.” Children with as few as 25 books in the family household completed on average two more years of schooling than children raised in homes without any books. More…
By Geoffrey A. Fowler and Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg at The Wall Street Journal…
Writer Karen McQuestion spent nearly a decade trying without success to persuade a New York publisher to print one of her books. In July, the 49-year-old mother of three decided to publish it herself, online.
Eleven months later, Ms. McQuestion has sold 36,000 e-books through Amazon.com Inc.’s Kindle e-bookstore and has a film option with a Hollywood producer. In August, Amazon will publish a paperback version of her first novel, “A Scattered Life,” about a friendship triangle among three women in small-town Wisconsin.
Ms. McQuestion is at the leading edge of a technological disruption that’s loosening traditional publishers’ grip on the book market—and giving new power to technology companies like Amazon to shape which books and authors succeed.
Much as blogs have bitten into the news business and YouTube has challenged television, digital self-publishing is creating a powerful new niche in books that’s threatening the traditional industry. Once derided as “vanity” titles by the publishing establishment, self-published books suddenly are able to thrive by circumventing the establishment. More…
From Michael Cairns’ Personanondata…
Clearly one of the most (if not the most) contentious issue regarding the Google Book Settlement (GBS) centers on the nebulous community of “orphans and orphan titles”. And yet, through the entirety of the discussion since the Google Book Settlement agreement was announced, no one has attempted to define how many orphans there really are. Allow me: 580,388. How do I know? Well, I admit, I do my share of guess work to get to this estimate, but I believe my analysis is based on key facts from which I have extrapolated a conclusion. Interestingly, I completed this analysis starting from two very different points and the first results were separated by only 3,000 works (before I made some minor adjustments).
Before I delve into my analysis, it might be useful to make some observations about the current discussion on the number of orphans. First, when commentators discuss this issue, they refer to the ‘millions’ of orphan titles. This is both deliberate obfuscation and lazy reporting: Most notably, the real issue is not titles but the number of works. My analysis attempts to identify the number of ‘works’; Titles are a multiple of works. A work will often have multiple manifestations or derivations (paperback, library version, large print, etc.) and thus, while the statement that there may be ‘millions of Orphans titles’ may be partially correct, it is entirely misleading when the true measure applicable to the GBS discussion is how many orphan works exist. It is the owner (or parent) of the work we want to find. More…
By Sue Halpern at The New York Review of Books…
As just about every sentient being knows, Apple Computer launched its “revolutionary,” “game changing,” “magical” tablet computer, the iPad, on April 3. This was after years of rumors, dating back almost a decade, but starting in earnest in February 2006, when Apple filed a number of patent applications that hinted at its intentions to move into touch computing. Though this turned out to be the prelude to the iPhone, tablet rumors began building again throughout the summer and fall of 2008 and into 2009, despite consistent denials from the company. By following the age-old dating protocol—flirt, be coy, don’t call back, flirt some more—Apple successfully turned up the dial on desire: here was a device that, sight unseen, large numbers of people wanted and believed they had to have, even without knowing precisely what it was or what it did.
In October 2009, at about the same time that rumors about the phantom Apple tablet were beginning to swirl, but before they coalesced into a media suck, the bookstore chain Barnes and Noble issued a product announcement of its own. It was getting into the electronic book reader business (again, ten years after its failed RockBook launch) with a small device called the Nook, reminiscent of Amazon’s popular electronic book reader, the Kindle, whose dominance it meant to challenge. More…
Table of Contents
Editorial by Laurence Lannom, Corporation for National Research Initiatives…
The current issue is devoted to the topic of digital library efforts in China. With the help of Sam Sun, long-time CNRI employee and Beijing native, we have gathered a group of authors who speak authoritatively on current projects in China. Four of those articles, primarily describing current and past projects from a non-technical perspective, appear in this issue while some of the more technical articles will appear in issues later this year.
Many D-Lib readers will be unaware of the activities in China, which are extensive and growing. If you read only one article in this issue, it should be the Overview article by Xihui Zhen, which I think most readers will find of great interest. Just as China is assuming a larger and more important role on the world stage, so too it seems to me will they assume a larger and more important role in the digital library world as time goes on. The size of the various projects, the number of universities and research groups in China addressing the issues, and the vast sweep of Chinese history and culture that remains to be digitized and integrated into the world of digital libraries would seem to guarantee that. More…
By Manisha Verma at 3quarksdaily.com…
Last month I subscribed to the New Yorker on my Kindle for a 14-day trial period. I wanted to gauge if I indeed preferred it to the physical magazine, whose subscription I had failed to renew for almost a year. Within 2 days, I found the magazine back in my mail box - there in all its flesh and blood. What went wrong? I hadn’t ordered to subscribe to it, then why had it arrived in my mail? Amusingly, I continued to receive the magazine in my mail for many weeks in a row. Clearly, something had gone awry with their systems. Until it dawned on me that the publishers had decided to promote the magazine for free over the digital version offered by Amazon on Kindle. To confirm the assumption, I checked up with Amazon on its kindle store where it declared that “We will share the name, billing address, and order information associated with your newspaper or magazine purchase with the publisher, who is under obligation to keep that information confidential. We will not share your credit card information or e-mail address. Publishers may use this information for market analysis and for other purposes”. More…
The first plenary speaker confirmations for the 2010 Book Conference, at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland, are now online. This year’s conference will feature the following plenary speakers and panel members:
- Jens Bammel, International Publishers Association, Geneva, Switzerland
- Herbert Burkert, University of St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland
- Lucy Küng, University of Jönköping, Jönköping, Sweden
- Eric Merkel-Sobotta, Springer Science+Business Media, Berlin, Germany
- Ernst Tremp, Abbey Library of St. Gallen/University of Freiburg, St. Gallen, Switzerland
Please continue to check the conference website for further additions to the line-up of plenary speakers as well as parallel sessions at the 2010 Book Conference.
The Books and Publishing Newsletter re-launch marks the start of a new approach to connecting with and reaching out to our Books and Publishing Community. The newsletter will be sent out on a monthly basis and will contain important community news, conference updates, and publication information.
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From Juli Weiner at VF Daily…
In a move that’s clearly intended to out-postmodern MoMA’s acquisition of the @ symbol, the Library of Congress has announced this morning that it has acquired the entire Twitter archive. “Every public tweet, ever, since Twitter’s inception in March 2006, will be archived digitally at the Library of Congress. More…
From Ken Auletta in The New Yorker:
On the morning of January 27th—an aeon ago, in tech time—Steve Jobs was to appear at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, in downtown San Francisco, to unveil Apple’s new device, the iPad. Although speculation about the device had been intense, few in the audience knew yet what it was called or exactly what it would do, and there was a feeling of expectation in the room worthy of the line outside the grotto at Lourdes. Hundreds of journalists and invited guests, including Al Gore, Yo-Yo Ma, and Robert Iger, the C.E.O. of Disney, milled around the theatre, waiting for Jobs to appear. The sound system had been playing a medley of Bob Dylan songs; it went quiet as the lights came up onstage and Jobs walked out, to the crowd’s applause.
In the weeks before, the book industry had been full of unaccustomed optimism; in some publishing circles, the device had been referred to as “the Jesus tablet.” The industry was desperate for a savior. Between 2002 and 2008, annual sales had grown just 1.6 per cent, and profit margins were shrinking. Like other struggling businesses, publishers had slashed expenditures, laying off editors and publicists and taking fewer chances on unknown writers.
For more…
2010 Book Conference
University of St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland
6-8 November
- Rafael Ball, University Library Regensburg, Regensburg, Germany
- Jens Bammel, International Publishers Association, Geneva, Switzerland
- Herbert Burkert, University of St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland
- Stephanie Jacobs, German Book and Font Museum, German National Library, Leipzig, Germany
- Lucy Küng, University of Jönköping, Jönköping, Sweden
- Wulf D. von Lucius, Lucius & Lucius Verlag, Stuttgart, Germany
- Eric Merkel-Sobotta, Springer Science+Business Media, Berlin, Germany
- Ernst Tremp, Abbey Library of St. Gallen/University of Freiburg, St. Gallen, Switzerland
If you intend to present a paper at the conference, your participation begins by submitting a paper proposal. More information on proposals, presentation types, and other options available here. If your proposal is accepted, you will then need to register for the conference.
Those who submit paper proposals should register following the acceptance of the proposal. Conference delegates who do not intend to present may register at any time. 2010 Book Conference registration options.
From Terje Hillesund in First Monday:
This paper focuses on changing reading characteristics and presents a study among a group of expert readers. Considering technological bases of reading and applying corporeal and material perspectives, this study examines manners in which proficient readers handle printed and digital texts, attempting to explain differences in digital and paper–based reading. Based on findings, this paper reflects on how long–form text can be productively transferred into the digital reading space.
For more…
From Dan Visel at if:book, A Project of The Institute for the Future of the Book…
Buried in the middle of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques, a book digressive in exactly the right way, is an astonishing argument about writing. Lévi-Strauss considers what the invention of writing might mean in the history of civilizations worldwide, arriving at a conclusion that still surprises:
The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. Such, as any rate, is the typical pattern of development to be observed from Egypt to China, at the time when writing first emerged: it seems to have favoured the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment. This exploitation, which made it possible to assemble thousands of workers and force them to carry out exhausting tasks, is a much more likely explanation of the birth of architecture than the direct link referred to above. My hypothesis, if correct, would oblige us to recognize the fact that the primary function of written communication is to facilitate slavery. The use of writing for disinterested purposes, and as a source of intellectual and aesthetic pleasure, is a secondary result, and more often than not it may even be turned into a means of strengthening, justifying or concealing the other. (p. 299)
An idea this inflammatory is perhaps one that can only appear deep in a book like this, where the reader will find it only by mistake. But this is an argument that I haven’t seen resurrected in all the present talk about what’s happening to reading and writing in their present explosions. One sees on an almost-daily basis recourse to the position of Socrates in Plato’s Phaedrus – technology, no matter how simple, inevitably leads to a lessening of human facilities of memory – but this is something different, and one that I think merits consideration. Periodically, I wish that someone would present a cogent argument against reading, rather than the oft-regurgitated pablum that “at least the kids are reading.” More…
From Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times:
In his deliberately provocative — and deeply nihilistic — new book,“Reality Hunger,” the onetime novelist David Shields asserts that fiction “has never seemed less central to the culture’s sense of itself.” He says he’s “bored by out-and-out fabrication, by myself and others; bored by invented plots and invented characters” and much more interested in confession and “reality-based art.” His own book can be taken as Exhibit A in what he calls “recombinant” or appropriation art.
Mr. Shields’s book consists of 618 fragments, including hundreds of quotations taken from other writers likePhilip Roth, Joan Didion and Saul Bellow— quotations that Mr. Shields, 53, has taken out of context and in some cases, he says, “also revised, at least a little — for the sake of compression, consistency or whim.” He only acknowledges the source of these quotations in an appendix, which he says his publishers’ lawyers insisted he add.
“Who owns the words?” Mr. Shields asks in a passage that is itself an unacknowledged reworking of remarks by the cyberpunk author William Gibson. “Who owns the music and the rest of our culture? We do — all of us — though not all of us know it yet. Reality cannot be copyrighted.”
For more…
Google, copyright, and our future
From Lawrence Lessig at The New Republic…
In early 2002, the filmmaker Grace Guggenheim–the daughter of the late Charles Guggenheim, one of America’s greatest documentarians, and the sister of the filmmaker Davis Guggenheim, who made An Inconvenient Truth-decided to do something that might strike most of us as common sense. Her father had directed or produced more than a hundred documentaries. Some of these were quite famous (Nine from Little Rock). Some were well-known even if not known to be by him (Monument to a Dream, the film that plays at the St. Louis arch). Some were forgotten but incredibly important for understanding American history in the twentieth century (A Time for Justice). And some were just remarkably beautiful (D-Day Remembered). So, as curator of his work, Grace Guggenheim decided to remaster the collection and make it all available on DVD, which was then the emerging platform for film.
Her project faced two challenges, one obvious, one not. The obvious challenge was technical: gathering fifty years of film and restoring it digitally. The non-obvious challenge was legal: clearing the rights to move this creative work onto this new platform for distribution. Most people might be puzzled about just why there would be any legal issue with a child restoring her father’s life’s work. After all, when we decide to repaint our grandfather’s old desk, or sell it to a neighbor, or use it as a workbench or a kitchen table, no one thinks to call a lawyer first. But the property that Grace Guggenheim curates is of a special kind. It is protected by copyright law. More…
Imagining the future of libraries
By Lisbet Rausing at The New Republic…
Imagine a new Library of Alexandria. Imagine an archive that contains all the natural and social sciences of the West—our source-critical, referenced, peer-reviewed data—as well as the cultural and literary heritage of the world’s civilizations, and many of the world’s most significant archives and specialist collections. Imagine that this library is electronic and in the public domain: sustainable, stable, linked, and searchable through universal semantic catalogue standards. Imagine that it has open source-ware, allowing legacy digital resources and new digital knowledge to be integrated in real time. Imagine that its Second Web capabilities allowed universal researches of the bibliome.
Well, why not imagine this library? Realizing such a dream is no longer a question of technology. Remarkable electronic libraries are already being assembled. Google Books aims to catalogue about 16 million books. The nonprofit Internet Archive already has some 1 million volumes. Public expectations run ahead even of these efforts. To do research, only one in a hundred American college students turn first to their university catalogue. Over 80 percent turn first to Google. More…
From Patricia Cohen in the New York Times:
Among the archival material from Salman Rushdie currently on display at Emory University in Atlanta are inked book covers, handwritten journals and four Apple computers (one ruined by a spilled Coke). The 18 gigabytes of data they contain seemed to promise future biographers and literary scholars a digital wonderland: comprehensive, organized and searchable files, quickly accessible with a few clicks.
But like most Rushdian paradises, this digital idyll has its own set of problems. As research libraries and archives are discovering, “born-digital” materials — those initially created in electronic form — are much more complicated and costly to preserve than anticipated.
Electronically produced drafts, correspondence and editorial comments, sweated over by contemporary poets, novelists and nonfiction authors, are ultimately just a series of digits — 0’s and 1’s — written on floppy disks, CDs and hard drives, all of which degrade much faster than old-fashioned acid-free paper. Even if those storage media do survive, the relentless march of technology can mean that the older equipment and software that can make sense of all those 0’s and 1’s simply don’t exist anymore.
For the article…
The Italian government has signed a deal with Google to put the contents of two national libraries on the internet.
From BBC News…
Up to one million antiquarian books - including works by Dante, Machiavelli and Galileo - will be scanned and made available free on Google Books.
There is no copyright issue as all the works were published before 1868.
The Italian authorities welcomed the scheme as budget pressures have cut the amount that can be spent on preserving the collections in Rome and Florence. More…
Steve Jobs discussing the iBooks application for the Apple iPad at its debut in San Francisco, January 27, 2010 (Tom Avelar/Bloomberg/Getty Images)
From Jason Epstein in the New York Review of Books:
The transition within the book publishing industry from physical inventory stored in a warehouse and trucked to retailers to digital files stored in cyberspace and delivered almost anywhere on earth as quickly and cheaply as e-mail is now underway and irreversible. This historic shift will radically transform worldwide book publishing, the cultures it affects and on which it depends. Meanwhile, for quite different reasons, the genteel book business that I joined more than a half-century ago is already on edge, suffering from a gambler’s unbreakable addiction to risky, seasonal best sellers, many of which don’t recoup their costs, and the simultaneous deterioration of backlist, the vital annuity on which book publishers had in better days relied for year-to-year stability through bad times and good. The crisis of confidence reflects these intersecting shocks, an overspecialized marketplace dominated by high-risk ephemera and a technological shift orders of magnitude greater than the momentous evolution from monkish scriptoria to movable type launched in Gutenberg’s German city of Mainz six centuries ago.
Though Gutenberg’s invention made possible our modern world with all its wonders and woes, no one, much less Gutenberg himself, could have foreseen that his press would have this effect. And no one today can foresee except in broad and sketchy outline the far greater impact that digitization will have on our own future. With the earth trembling beneath them, it is no wonder that publishers with one foot in the crumbling past and the other seeking solid ground in an uncertain future hesitate to seize the opportunity that digitization offers them to restore, expand, and promote their backlists to a decentralized, worldwide marketplace. New technologies, however, do not await permission. They are, to use Schumpeter’s overused term, disruptive, as nonnegotiable as earthquakes.
For the full article…
From Miguel Helft in the New York Times:
In another blow to Google’s plan to create a giant digital library and bookstore, the Justice Department on Thursday said that a class-action settlement between the company and groups representing authors and publishers had significant legal problems, even after recent revisions.
In a 31-page filing that could influence a federal judge’s ruling on the settlement, the department said the new agreement was much improved from an earlier version. But it said the changes were not enough to placate concerns that the deal would grant Google a monopoly over millions of orphan works, meaning books whose right holders are unknown or cannot be found.
The department also indicated that the revised agreement, like its predecessor, appeared to run afoul of authors’ copyrights and was too broad in scope.
The revised agreement “suffers from the same core problem as the original agreement: it is an attempt to use the class-action mechanism to implement forward-looking business arrangements that go far beyond the dispute before the court in this litigation,” the department wrote.
The department asked the court to encourage the parties to continue discussions on further changes to the settlement, which it said had many public benefits.
For the full article…
Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com
From Eliot Van Buskirk in Wired.com’s Epicenter:
Now, the hard part.
Before it existed, Apple’s iPad was infused with the wishful expectations of a thousand hopeful constituencies, none with more at stake than a host of media businesses still grappling to find a killer app in the digital domain. Now that we know what the iPad does, though, it’s still an open question how the much-heralded device will actually improve their fortunes.
The good news is that book publishers, magazine publishers, newspapers, the recorded-music industry, television studios, game developers and film studios — all of whom need some form of lifeline, some desperately — each have a place at the iPad table.
But in the advertiser-supported niches, print analogs still command higher advertising revenues than their digital equivalents. So, the question will turn on two issues: Will publishers get to control the customer relationship to a greater extent than has been possible with iTunes? And will publications be the kind of shiny eye candy that advertisers crave, but now delivered on a bright, crisp, LED-backlit touchscreen instead of heavy-stock glossy paper.
For the article…
From Brad Stone at The New York Times…
One of the most significant applications for the iPad may be Apple’s own creation, called iBooks, an e-reading program that will connect to Apple’s new online e-bookstore.
Mr. Jobs said Apple so far had relationships with five major publishers — Hachette, Penguin, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster and Macmillan — and was eager to make deals with others. Publishers will be able to charge $12.99 to $14.99 for most general fiction and nonfiction books.
Apple’s announcement that it was diving into the growing e-book business put the company on a collision course with Amazon. Mr. Jobs credited Amazon with pioneering e-readers with the Kindle but said “we are going to stand on their shoulders and go a little bit farther.”
John Doerr, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist who serves on Amazon’s board and is also an adviser to Apple, said there could be room for both companies, noting that Amazon sells many books to iPhone owners who use its Kindle application, which will also work on the iPad.
“I don’t think Jeff Bezos is going to leave the e-book business,” he said, referring to Amazon’s chief executive, “and I don’t think it will be confined to the Kindle.” For more and the full article…
Amazon will roll out an updated Kindle. Publishers and readers are likely to choose between it and an Apple tablet computer.
From Brad Stone and Motoko Rich in the New York Times:
SAN FRANCISCO — It’s a formidable high-tech face-off: Amazon.com versus Apple for the hearts and minds of book publishers, authors and readers.
Amazon’s Kindle devices and electronic bookstore now dominate a nascent but booming market, accounting for more than 70 percent of electronic reader sales and 80 percent of e-book purchases, according to some analysts. And on Thursday it will take a page from Apple and announce that it is opening up the Kindle to outside software developers.
Apple’s much-anticipated tablet computer, which is widely expected to be announced next Wednesday and go on sale this spring, will be a far more versatile (and expensive) device that will offer access to books, newspapers and other reading material through Apple’s popular App Store on iTunes.
…
But publishers can anticipate another high-tech heavyweight entering the business: Google, which has pushed its own plans to begin selling e-books.
“The more companies that control consumer transactions, the more important the publishers’ role will be,” said Mike Shatzkin, chief executive of Idealog, which helps publishers develop digital strategies. “If Apple enters this market, and in three months Google follows, we may be looking at a completely different e-book world in the next year.”
For more…
A response to the recent Google Books agreement by the Open Book Alliance is reported in the San Jose Mercury News for 14 November.
On Friday night, the advocacy group Open Book Alliance issued this response to the Google plan:
“Today, Google, the Authors Guild, and the Association of American Publishers released their revised book settlement proposal in an attempt to fix the deeply flawed legal agreement.
“Open Book Alliance co-chair Peter Brantley said, ‘Our initial review of the new proposal tells us that Google and its partners are performing a sleight of hand; fundamentally, this settlement remains a set-piece designed to serve the private commercial interests of Google and its partners. None of the proposed changes appear to address the fundamental flaws illuminated by the Department of Justice and other critics that impact public interest. By performing surgical nip and tuck, Google, the AAP, and the AG are attempting to distract people from their continued efforts to establish a monopoly over digital content access and distribution; usurp Congress’s role in setting copyright policy; lock writers into their unsought registry, stripping them of their individual contract rights; put library budgets and patron privacy at risk; and establish a dangerous precedent by abusing the class action process.’”
Denny Chin, a United States District Court judge, is overseeing the Google books case.
From Brad Stone and Miguel Helft, in The New York Times.
Google and groups representing book publishers and authors filed a modified version of their controversial books settlement with a federal court on Friday. The changes would pave the way for other companies to license Google’s vast digital collection of copyrighted out-of-print books, and might resolve its conflicts with European governments.
The settlement, of a 2005 lawsuit over Google’s ambitious plan to digitize books from major American libraries, outlined a plan to create a comprehensive database of in-print and out-of-print works. But the original agreement, primarily between Google, the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, drew much criticism.
The Justice Department and others said Google was potentially violating copyright law, setting itself up to unfairly control access to electronic versions of older books and depriving authors and their heirs of proper compensation.
To read more…
From John Carlo Bertot, Paul T. Jaeger, Charles R. McClure, Carla B. Wright, and Elise Jensen,
The findings … demonstrate that public libraries continue to expand the public access computing and Internet services and training available to patrons. As has been the case for several years, virtually all public libraries are connected to and offer public access to the Internet, with an increasing number offering wireless access as well. The vast majority also offer a range of services and training related to the Internet. While patron and community demand for Internet access, training, and services is so routinely extensive that most libraries cannot meet these needs during normal times, the unprecedented economic downturn has further stressed library resources through reduced operating hours and more demand for library services and resources — particularly Internet–based services (CNN, 2009). In addition, libraries continue to struggle with issues of infrastructure as the types of Internet–related services become more complex and bandwidth–intensive, require a range of building technology upgrades, and continual staff skills development.
More…
From Bruce McCall Vanity Fair
Hotel rooms now provide Gideon Bibles only as pay-per-view TV channels. Librarians recently thrown out of work are forced to take jobs assembling Kindles. The Cassandra Report forecasts that more than fifty warehouses across the U.S., long used as book storage and shipping centers, will shortly be converted to video-game facilities. Rare-book collectors are switching to classic Betamax movie videos of the 1970s and 1980s.
Dire omens indeed, in line with a recent survey that found that more than half of all Americans didn’t read a single book in the previous year—doubtless a conservative figure, because everybody lies about their reading habits. The trend toward a bookless society is gaining almost daily as a TV-besotted, iPhone-bedazzled, time-starved, speed-crazed populace becomes ever less willing to seek information and entertainment by concentrating their minds on endless lines of type.
More….
By Dennis G. Pelli & Charles Bigelow Seed Magazine
Nearly everyone reads. Soon, nearly everyone will publish. Before 1455, books were handwritten, and it took a scribe a year to produce a Bible. Today, it takes only a minute to send a tweet or update a blog. Rates of authorship are increasing by historic orders of magnitude. Nearly universal authorship, like universal literacy before it, stands to reshape society by hastening the flow of information and making individuals more influential.
To quantify our changing reading and writing habits, we plotted the number of published authors per year, since 1400, for books and more recent social media (blogs, Facebook, and Twitter). This is the first published graph of the history of authorship. We found that the number of published authors per year increased nearly tenfold every century for six centuries. By 2000, there were 1 million book authors per year. One million authors is a lot, but they are only a tiny fraction, 0.01 percent, of the nearly 7 billion people on Earth. Since 1400, book authorship has grown nearly tenfold in each century. Currently, authorship, including books and new media, is growing nearly tenfold each year. That’s 100 times faster. Authors, once a select minority, will soon be a majority.
More….
From Laura Miller Salon.com
Oct. 6, 2009 | Technology changes at a dizzying rate, yet somehow our ways of writing about it don’t. Take that hoary chestnut, the “future of the book” piece, which first appeared with the introduction of CD-ROM encyclopedias (remember Encarta?) in the late 1980s and achieved its nth iteration on Thursday, when a front-page story in the New York Times announced the debut of the “vook,” a video-book hybrid, four of which have just been released by Atria Books.
The unfortunately named vooks consist of text and video clips produced in concert to form integrated works. You can read/watch them with a Web browser, but they’re primarily intended for mobile devices like the iPhone and meant to win over those people you see on the subway or in airports frantically pounding their thumbs through endless rounds of Frogger instead of reading a David Baldacci novel. The spectacle of people not reading in public has become a motivating trauma for many publishing executives of late. Brian Tart, publisher of Dutton Books, told the Times’ Motoko Rich, “You see people watching these three-minute YouTube videos and using social networks, and there is an opportunity here to bring in more people who might have thought they were into the new media world.”
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From Ellis Weiner The New Yorker
Hi, Ellis—Let me introduce myself. My name is Gineen Klein, and I’ve been brought on as an intern to replace the promotion department here at Propensity Books. First, let me say that I absolutely love “Clancy the Doofus Beagle: A Love Story” and have some excellent ideas for promotion.
To start: Do you blog? If not, get in touch with Kris and Christopher from our online department, although at this point I think only Christopher is left. I’ll be out of the office from tomorrow until Monday, but when I get back I’ll ask him if he spoke to you. We use CopyBuoy via Hoster Broaster, because it streams really easily into a Plaxo/LinkedIn yak-fest meld. When you register, click “Endless,” and under “Contacts” just list everyone you’ve ever met. It would be great if you could post at least six hundred words every day until further notice.
If you already have a blog, make sure you spray-feed your URL in niblets open-face to the skein. We like Reddit bites (they’re better than Delicious), because they max out the wiki snarls of RSS feeds, which means less jamming at the Google scaffold. Then just Digg your uploads in a viral spiral to your social networks via an FB/MS interlink torrent. You may have gotten the blast e-mail from Jason Zepp, your acquiring editor, saying that people who do this sort of thing will go to Hell, but just ignore it.
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From Motoko Rich at The New York Times:
Kate Lambert recalls using her library card just once or twice throughout her childhood. Now, she uses it several times a month.
The lure? Electronic books she can download to her laptop. Beginning earlier this year, Ms. Lambert, a 19-year-old community college student in New Port Richey, Fla., borrowed volumes in the “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” series, “The Lovely Bones” by Alice Sebold and a vampire novel by Laurell K. Hamilton, without ever visiting an actual branch.
“I can just go online and type my library card number in and look through all the books that they have,” said Ms. Lambert, who usually downloads from the comfort of her bedroom. And, she added, “It’s all for free.” More…
By Motoko Rich at The New York Times:
Just reading a book is so old school.
The comments section on author blogs and on Amazon.com already permit readers to air their views, question an author’s premise or add their own knowledge to the content of a book.
Now, in an experiment developed by SharedBook, a company that designs customized books and allows readers to annotate documents online, the publisher of “Nurture Shock: New Thinking About Children,” a book about parenting by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman that went on sale last week, is inviting readers to make notes on three chapters of the book.
Starting Sept. 14, chapters concerning praise for children (and why too much is not a good idea), the importance of an extra hour of sleep and the prevalence of lying among children, will be posted on PoBronson.com, Nurtureshock.com and Twelvebooks.com, the Web site of the book’s publisher, the imprint that released the book. Readers will be able to highlight a word, a sentence or a paragraph and add notes that will be integrated as footnotes on the text. More…
From Emma Jackson at University World News:
The University of Michigan’s library has partnered with Booksurge, a print-on-demand service owned by Internet retailer Amazon, to make thousands of rare and out-of-print books available for one-off printing through digitisation.
Customers will be able to browse more than 400,000 titles on Amazon.com where the digital files can be printed on demand by Booksurge and shipped to the buyer in as little as two days.
All of the titles are public domain and were scanned into digital files through the university’s internal scanning programme and a partnership with search engine Google over the last five years.
According to Maria Bonn, director of scholarly publishing at the library, more than 3 million titles have been scanned. More…
Join us in Frankfurt for the Frankfurt Book Fair on your way to Edinburgh!
Package Options:
14 October 2009 – One day ticket to the Frankfurt Book Fair to include a guided tour and discussion at 11:00 am for our group. Remainder of the day free to enjoy the Book Fair.
Or
13 October 2009 – In addition to the above, this package will consist of two nights’ accommodations at the Ibis Frankfurt Airport Hotel to include breakfast and taxes.
For more information please see the Conference website.
The Conference Dinner will be held in The Drawing Room in Abden House. The venue is conveniently located at 1 Marchhall Crescent in Pollock Halls at The University of Edinburgh. Abden House is a grand Scottish baronial-style mansion. It offers magnificent views over beautiful gardens. Surrounded by mature trees, with views to Arthur’s Seat, these gardens feel as if they’re in the heart of the countryside, rather than in the middle of a capital city.
For more information please see the Conference website.
How about trying something that’s a wee bit different!! An entertaining way to find out about Edinburgh’s history & Traditions, experiencing the two sides of Edinburgh, the Cultural and the Darker, joining the gang of one of Edinburgh notorious criminals. Tales of the witches, hangings, Burke & Hare the infamous serial killers. Also visiting Edinburgh’s elegant Georgian ‘new town’ creating a unique blend of ancient and modern architecture, to get a sense of Edinburgh moving into a more modern enlightened and industrial era.
For more information please see the Conference website.
Accommodation for the 2009 Book Conference in Edinburgh, Scotland may now be booked. Please see the Conference Accommodation webpage for more information.
Alistair McCleery, Ediburgh Napier University, Ediburgh
www.Book-Conference.com
Alistair McCleery 
Professor Alistair McCleery, Professor of Literature and Culture at Ediburgh Napier University, is Director of the Scottish Centre for the Book. The Centre was established in 1995 and acts as a focus for research and knowledge transfer in publishing, the material book and print culture. Professor McCleery and his team undertake a range of commissioned research on the social and economic aspects of the publishing industry and on the creative industries in general.
Professor McCleery has published much work on the history of the Scottish book trade as well as on its contemporary prospects. He was jointly responsible for the 2004 Scottish Arts Council report on The Strategic Future of Scottish Publishing. Professor McCleery is the author of some 70 refereed articles and book chapters. Past publications include The Book (2001), the first CD on book history, and The War Poets at Craiglockhart, a website devoted to Owen, Sassoon and their meeting at Craiglockhart Hospital. More…
John W. Warren, RAND Corporation, UK
www.Book-Conference.com
John W. Warren is Director of Marketing, Publications, at the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research institute that helps improve policy and decisionmaking through research and analysis. John has nearly two decades of experience in the publishing industry, with special focus on marketing and digital publishing. Previously, John managed marketing efforts for Mexican publisher Fondo de Cultura Económica, Sage Publications, and Sylvan Learning, Inc., and has provided consulting services to firms seeking to expand business in Mexico and South America. He has presented at major publishing conferences in the United States and internationally. He has a Masters in International Management from the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies (IR/PS) at the University of California, San Diego.More…
Lorraine Fannin, Scottish Publishers Association, Scotland
www.Book-Conference.com
Lorraine was Director of the Scottish Publishers Association and CEO of its successor organisation, Publishing Scotland from 1987 – 2008. She is also a member of the Board of Trustees of the National Library of Scotland and of Edinburgh UNESCO City of Literature. She was formerly a member of the British Council Publishers Advisory Committee, the Publishing Qualifications Board and the Institute of Publishing Advisory Board.
Michael Frase, University of Technology Sydney, Australia
www.Book-Conference.com
Professory Michael Fraser is the Director of the Communications Law Centre at the University of Technology Sydney. Professor Fraser was CEO of Copyright Agency Limited for twenty one years, and a founding director of Australian, foreign and international copyright management companies and organisations. He is highly influential in changing policy in Australia and internationally, to develop copyright, communication and commerce for creators, the content industries and the public interest. He has changed attitudes about access to content and copyright, and provided commercial returns for rights-owners as well as social and cultural benefits for stakeholders. He is an innovator who, without precedents, created new markets that provide consumers access to creative content and copyright management. He has extensive knowledge and experience in digital media and is a noted figure in Australia and overseas for his constructive role among key decision makers in envisioning and building the knowledge economy. He established and led a not for profit copyright management company (CAL) from start up to achieve annual revenues of over $120m with double digit growth each year. More…
Bill Bell, Centre for the History of the Book, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK
www.Book-Conference.com
Bill Bell is Director of the Centre for the History of the Book at The University of Edinburgh where he teaches in the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures. He specialises in Nineteenth Century literature and culture and has written extensively on the sociology of the text, the history of the book, and theories of cultural production. He has held visiting posts at The Australian National University, The University of Ottawa, and St John’s College, Oxford. More…
From Priya Ganapati at Wired:
As books make the leap from cellulose and ink to electronic pages, some editors worry that too much is being lost in translation. Typography, layout, illustrations and carefully thought-out covers are all being reduced to a uniform, black-on-gray template that looks the same whether you’re reading Pride and Prejudice, Twilight or the Federalist Papers.
“There’s a dearth of typographic expression in e-books today,” says Pablo Defendini, digital producer for Tor.com, the online arm of science fiction and fantasy publisher Tor Books. “Right now it’s just about taking a digital file and pushing it on to a e-book reader without much consideration for layout and flow of text.”
With the popularity of the Kindle and other e-book readers, electronic book sales in the United States have doubled every quarter. Though still a very small percentage of the overall book industry, sales of e-books touched $15.5 million in the first quarter of the year, up from $3.2 million the same quarter a year ago. By contrast, the printed book market sales in North America alone was nearly $14 billion in 2008. More…
Martyn Wade, National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh, UK
www.Book-Conference.com
Martyn Wade joined the National Library of Scotland (NLS) as National Librarian in 2002, after 25 years experience in the public library sector. During this time he worked in a number of rural and urban authorities, including London Borough of Sutton, Leicestershire and Cambridgeshire, and was formerly Head of Libraries, Information and Learning with Glasgow City Council.
Throughout his career he has taken a particular interest in developing integrated customer and citizen focused services, and under his leadership NLS has developed a reputation for innovative developments aimed at widening access to the Library’s collections, expertise and services. More…
Common Ground Publishing has launched a new imprint, Books and Publishing.
You can now submit proposals or completed manuscript submissions of:
- individually and jointly authored books;
- edited collections addressing a clear, intellectually challenging theme;
- collections of papers published in The International Journal of the Book.
Books should be between 30,000 words to 150,000 words in length. They will be published simultaneously in print and electronic formats.
Dylan F. Tweney, Wired Gadget Lab:
Amazon is almost certain to announce a large-screen Kindle on Wednesday.
In the world of e-book readers, that’s huge. But if Apple fulfills expectations and releases a tablet-style computer later this year, it’s going to render the Kindle — no matter what screen size — almost instantly moot.
Amazon’s Kindle is far and away the most popular e-book reader; Amazon probably sold half a million last year and may sell a million Kindle 2’s this year. Yet the Kindle’s 6-inch screen, while impressively readable and crisp, is only slightly larger than a 3? x 5? index card. That’s why many magazine and newspaper publishers are excited about the prospect of a larger Kindle — let’s call it the “Kindle XL.” Even if it’s not as large as Plastic Logic’s promised 8.5? x 11? screen (due in early 2010), a larger screen would provide lots more room to display the day’s news, attractively laid-out feature stories, and, of course, advertisements.
From Brad Stone and Motoko Rich of The New York Times:
Most electronic devices are getting smaller. Amazon’s Kindle electronic book reader is bucking the trend.
Amazon on Wednesday introduced a larger version of the Kindle, pitching it as a new way for people to read textbooks, newspapers and their personal documents.
The device, called the Kindle DX (for Deluxe), has a screen that is two and a half times the size of the screens on the two older versions of the Kindle, which were primarily aimed at displaying books. The price tag is also larger: the DX will sell for $489, or $130 more than the previous model, the Kindle 2, and willgo on sale this summer.
Jeffrey P. Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, speaking to a crowd of journalists and Amazon employees and business partners on the campus of Pace University, said the new Kindle was a step in the direction of a long-dreamed-of “paperless society.” More…
Congratulations to John W. Warren, the winner of the International Award for Excellence in the development of the book for his paper Innovation and the Future of e-Books.
Abstract: The technological development and cultural acceptance of e-books today parallels the state of the printed book in the 15th century. E-books are increasingly available from a variety of distributors and retailers, and work on a myriad of devices, but the majority remain simply digitized versions of print books. Some devices or platforms include such tools as word definitions, highlighting, and note taking, but many of these tools simply mimic what students and researchers have traditionally done with printed texts.
This paper examines three examples of innovative e-books in order to illustrate the potential and pitfalls of electronic publications. The first is a history e-text that includes 1,700 primary-source documents—such as Presidential memos, reports, and even audio and video clips—linked from footnotes, providing a treasure trove of research material to readers. The second is a novella in hypertext form. The third example examines digital textbooks that include multimedia, assessment, and other digital tools. Each of these cases demonstrates creative approaches, business models, and methods of review that point to the enhanced, interactive, interlinked future of the e-book.
6-8 November 2010
University of St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland
http://booksandpublishing.com/conference-2010/
Gobinda Chowdhury, Professor, Information and Knowledge Management Programme, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University Technology Sydney, Australia.
Gobinda Chowdhury is a Professor within the Information and Knowledge Management programme in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at University Technology Sydney, Australia. After acquiring an honours, a postgraduate and two PhD degrees, he worked as an academic and a researcher in different parts of the world for nearly two decades. Before joining UTS, he was a Senior Lecturer at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, UK, and prior to that an Associate Professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. More…
Michael Fraser, Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia.
Michael Fraser is a Professor with the Faculty of Law at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia. His areas of expertise include copyright law, copyright licensing, communications and media law, and digital and content and e-commerce. More…
16-18 October 2009
University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland
www.Book-Conference.com
The New Temple of Knowledge: Towards A Universal Digital Library has now been published.
This book describes the current situation of libraries as scientific archives, the history from which they come, and the various procedures that are being implemented to bring order to that immense and growing informative universe. Subsequently, the authors delineate a final model of development that may take us completely through the passage from printing press days to the digital era — a transformation that today is still somewhat Utopian but, sooner rather than later, will be feasible. Their proposal is that technology develop a model previously considered, one that is ideal from the viewpoint of logical analysis and inspired by the Popperian vision of knowledge as an objective World in which all manner of conjectures and arguments are interwoven.
The first issue of Volume 6 has been published and is now available in the online bookstore.
