The Digital Sphere: Opportunity for Growth or Existential Threat?
The 2010 Book Conference, held at the University of St. Gallen, 6-8 November will feature a special publishing panel.
About the panel:
Digital technologies are not mere tools applied to stable phenomena. Instead, they are essential factors in the creation of a new space — the digital sphere. Although the digital sphere shares many characteristics with traditional productive and social realms, it also introduces mechanisms and possibilities that make it profoundly distinct.
The digital sphere provides novel opportunities and challenges to the publishing industry, raising key questions about the ways in which publishing and related sectors might be accommodated. The panel serves as a forum for the examination of these possibilities through a consideration of key questions, such as:
- Is the book publishing industry in better shape than the music industry, and therefore better equipped to cope with digital downloading?
- What does social media mean for book publishing?
- Is the ‘long tail’ approach to sales and distribution just fashionable hype, or can it lead to increased profits? If yes, for whom?
- Is downloading of greater interest to publishers than Print on Demand?
- How big of a problem is piracy? Is it an inevitable fact of life or a profound threat?
- And, more generally, what is the publisher’s role in the digital sphere? What is the key to success in this realm?
Comprised of professionals from the publishing industry, the panel will include:
Click here for more information on this featured publishing panel, or here for more information on the 2010 Book Conference.
(Image: Anthony Mattox)
From Edward Nawotka at Publishing Perspectives…
The “freemium” publishing model, advocated by proponents such as author Chris Anderson and that has been popular with computer software, is now making in-roads into academic textbook publishing. Case in point: Flat World Knowledge –- the three-year-old textbook publishing company that offers students the ability to read their books online for free, while selling them a variety of alternative formats and add-ons, including POD editions, e-books (in epub, .mobi and PDF formats), audiobooks, and study aids, such as interactive quizzes and flashcards.
Launched in 2007, the company has since published a total of 24 textbooks; with the first, Launch! Advertising and Promotion in Real Time by Mike Solomon, going live online in March 2009. At present, some 1,300 professors at 800 different colleges in the United States (a majority are community colleges), and some 50 throughout Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, have adopted the books.
In all, some 140,000 students are expected to be using Flat World textbooks in the coming semester, with more than half of those expected to buy add-ons. More…
From Patrick Kingsley at The Guardian…
If you’re reading this article in print, chances are you’ll only get through half of what I’ve written. And if you’re reading this online, you might not even finish a fifth. At least, those are the two verdicts from a pair of recent research projects – respectively, the Poynter Institute’s Eyetrack survey, and analysis by Jakob Nielsen – which both suggest that many of us no longer have the concentration to read articles through to their conclusion.
The problem doesn’t just stop there: academics report that we are becoming less attentive book-readers, too. Bath Spa University lecturer Greg Garrard recently revealed that he has had to shorten his students’ reading list, while Keith Thomas, an Oxford historian, has written that he is bemused by junior colleagues who analyse sources with a search engine, instead of reading them in their entirety.
So are we getting stupider? Is that what this is about? Sort of. According to The Shallows, a new book by technology sage Nicholas Carr, our hyperactive online habits are damaging the mental faculties we need to process and understand lengthy textual information. More…
An interview with principal reviser Russell David Harper
From The Subversive Copy Editor…
Russell David Harper is the only person on the planet with all of the following qualifications: He has worked as a manuscript editor for the University of Chicago Press for more than a dozen years, and he contributed to the fifteenth edition of The Chicago Manual of Style. For nearly three years, he kept a finger on the pulse of CMOS readers by serving as editor of the online Q&A. He is a technology wonk (I’m sorry, Russell, but I looked it up to make sure, and you are a wonk), with experience in typesetting, proofreading, and printing. And for good measure, he’s a polymath, a published author, and a kind and generous and funny person whose patience and reliability under pressure are legendary.
Because of his unmatched experience in Chicago practices and his techie leanings, Russell was decided to be a perfect choice to serve as principal reviser for the sixteenth edition of The Chicago Manual of Style. As principal reviser, he was responsible for drafting a detailed outline and summary of the new edition and, in cooperation with the Manuscript Editing Department at the University of Chicago Press and the CMOS Board of Advisors, for writing the manuscript itself and serving as its nominal author through all the stages of publication. For the interview…
By Chris Cameron at ReadWriteWeb…
There’s a memorable scene in the movie Minority Report where a man reads a futuristic newspaper with rich embedded multimedia updating live with breaking news. While we are a long way seeing anything like this in the hands of the general public, a German newspaper has taken a small step in that direction with the release of a special augmented reality (AR) edition of its Friday magazine.
Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ), Germany’s largest national newswspaper, has partnered with Munich-based AR vendor metaio to provide subscribers with an immersive reading experience that hints at the future of publishing. The experience is similar to Esquire’s augmented reality edition from November of 2009, but with advancements that have been made to smartphone AR technology, a desktop webcam is not needed to view the content. More…
From Nicholas Dames at n+1…
“Ceci tuera cela”: the famous slogan of Claude Frollo, the archdeacon of Notre-Dame in Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris, as he touches a printed book and glances nostalgically at the cathedral towers. “This will kill that.” It’s not hard to sympathize these days. Hugo had to reimagine the 15th century in order to evoke a major shift in technologies of the word. We just have to hold our smart phones while looking at a copy of Hugo’s novel—or read Hugo’s novel on our smart phones. Resistance is futile: welcome to our new digital overlords!
But Hugo’s resigned pessimism as well as his technological determinism, are, I think, unwarranted now, for reasons both abstract and pragmatic. The abstract reason is that technological changes to literacy have slow and unpredictable effects. Right now many digital formats are still straightforward recreations of the book; the Kindle and its cousins reproduce a mise en page that hasn’t changed in fundamentals since 13th century scribes at the new universities of Western Europe offered harried students books with running heads, chapter titles, indices, and the like. What remains to be seen is if, and how, digital technology changes that format at all. More…
The Digital Sphere: Opportunity for Growth or Existential Threat?
The International Conference on the Book has long served as an inclusive forum for a wide range interests and concerns. It welcomes people from a breadth of academic disciplines and professional areas and continues this spirit of openness at the 2010 Book Conference in St. Gallen, Switzerland.
At the same time, the conference also highlights especially important issues facing the book in this era of flux. Consequently, this year’s Book Conference will feature a panel session focusing on the publishing industry and its relationship to the growing influence of digital technologies. The panel will feature distinguished experts on publishing who will consider the key question: The Digital Sphere: Opportunity for Growth or Existential Threat? More…
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…
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…
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
- Jochen Gutbrod, Holtzbrinck Group, Stuttgart, Germany
- Tom Hall, Lonely Planet, London, UK
- Stephanie Jacobs, German Book and Font Museum, German National Library, Leipzig, Germany
- Vincent Kaufmann, Media and Communication Management Institute, University of St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland
- 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
- Andy Renggil, Media Control AG, Zurich, Switzerland
- 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 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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
