Mar 15, 2010

Let’s Make Open Access Work

Posted by Joseph Esposito under Authors, Business Models, Commerce, Controversial Topics, Experimentation, Research | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , |
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A Provost
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This is a blog post that will please no one. That is not the intention; I am not writing it to pick fights. But the topic is open access (OA), and on this topic, fights inevitably erupt; it is scholarly communications’ equivalent of the Culture Wars.  For my part, I stand with Voltaire:  The perfect is the enemy of the good.  Already in the background I can hear advocates of perfection beginning to sharpen their swords.

So, without reference to the many arguments on all sides of the matter, How can we make OA work?

For starters, we need a software platform. Initially this need not be complex, but it must scale to handle large amounts of material, and that material cannot be restricted to text or PDF files.  The platform might be a huge repository.  Or it may be several repositories, all of which are indexed by various means, including the most important one today, Google Web Search.  Qualified researchers may upload their work (which we still call “papers”) to this repository.  We have models for such repositories now at many universities, but the scale suggests another model, the huge “cloud computing” services of companies such as Google, Scribd, and Amazon, among others.  It is the miracle of Moore’s Law that makes these data centers possible at little or no cost to the user.  Consider for a moment that Google now permits a user to upload any document for online storage to the Google Docs application — for free.  That’s the kind of platform we require.

Second, unless we are willing to have the repository filled with junk, spam, and reckless outpourings, we need some way to filter papers that are uploaded.  In traditional publishing, the answer to this is simple:  have editors, including peer reviewers, assess papers prior to publication.  But this is costly and time-consuming; indeed, one of the reasons arXiv came into existence was to speed up the process.  Whatever the many merits of peer review, such review prior to publication may slow down the dissemination of ideas, and speed should be one of the goals of any OA service.

Thus, how to determine what can be posted and what cannot?  The answer is to formalize some of the policies that are now in place at many major universities, policies that I call “provostial publishing.”   Unlike traditional publishing, where editors review each paper for publication, provostial publishing is a means to determine which authors can post to the repository.  The requirement:  the author must be affiliated with or sponsored by an established institution.  Thus both Harvard and MIT have mandated that faculty deposit their papers into an OA repository.  No one is reviewing those papers beforehand; it’s enough that the authors have achieved a position on the faculty. Whereas editors select papers, provosts select authors.

Provostial publishing is a means to assert a baseline level of quality control for what would otherwise be open to massive abuse and “data dumping.”  We want OA to be open, but we don’t want it to be foolish.  So, for example, I have experience in the world of publishing and digital media and may be permitted to deposit papers in a repository in those areas.  (This, by the way, is precisely how Scholarly Kitchen operates.)  But suppose I were to hanker, say, to present my grand theory of cognitive science.  I have no credentials in the field, no doctorate, no research record.  My paradigm-busting paper on cognitive science would not have the blessing of a provost or other sponsor and would thus not be entitled to a place on the repository’s servers.  Similarly, a cognitive scientist with no experience in publishing, who has not gone through the years of apprenticeship, would not have access to deposit documents in a repository dedicated to publishing matters.  This is not a free speech issue.  The Web abounds in venues, but we needn’t open all services to anyone who comes along.

A large collection of papers openly available to anyone to read creates its own set of problems:  Which papers are worth paying attention to?  After all, not all of the provost’s picks get it right 100% of the time.  Our OA service needs a form of post-publication peer review.  And here we are quite fortunate, as the current crop of Web 2.0 services presents plentiful models for online commentary.  Professor Jones, who is a member of the faculty of Ultimate U., deposits her paper, “Specific Qualities of the Generic,” in an OA repository.  Indexed by Google and other services, the paper quickly comes to the attention of people working in the field, who post their critiques alongside Jones’s document.  The software enables comments and comments on comments; the paper lives with its commentary all around it — in one virtual place, for the convenience of all researchers.

It will be noted that some papers will attract a great deal of commentary and other papers none at all.  This is as it should be.  Papers with important information will be cited repeatedly, which in turn will give them higher search engine ranking and bring other readers to them (a process known as “the law of increasing returns“).

Our OA service has thus put an end to one of the most inefficient aspects of traditional publishing:  whether a paper is good or bad, it costs the same amount of money to put it through the editorial review process.  Post-publication peer review aligns effort and cost with the quality of the material.

This leads us to the economics of our new OA service.  By switching from pre-publication peer review to post-publication peer review — and placing a big bet on the utility of search engines — we have shifted the large, ongoing costs of managing a publishing operation to a one-time investment in the software platform, which enables the deposit and review of papers. Some current OA services charge large fees to authors, but this is because they are clinging to the editorial model of traditional publishing.  The combination of Provostial Publishing, cloud repositories, and post-publication peer review drives the cost of scholarly communications down and down. Recall that you can upload anything to Google Docs.  If the platform is properly designed, the marginal cost of adding new papers and commentary approximates zero.

To finance this service (putting aside the start-up costs), an author would pay to have his or her paper deposited in the OA repository.  We don’t know how much to charge, but we know the formula:  the number of papers multiplied by the deposit fee per paper must exceed the ongoing operating costs.  If those operating costs are, say, $1 million a year (it is simply astounding to see how little it costs to operate cloud-computing services once the underlying platform is built) and we anticipate that 1,000 papers will be deposited each year, the minimum cost to each author would be $1,000.  If we forecast 10 million papers, an author would be charged $.10.  It may be that we will find that the administrative cost to collect such small sums hardly make it worth the effort.  Perhaps upon being granted an advanced degree, a prospective author would simply write a check for $50 for lifetime deposit fees, subject always to the sponsorship of a provost or provost’s proxy.

One policy that I would strongly urge upon any OA service is to invite commercial exploitation, provided that such commerce does not require that any of the research material go behind a pay wall.  This recommendation runs counter to the common practice of stipulating that there will be no commercial use of the material.  Capital, however, makes things happen.  We cannot tell in advance what new services entrepreneurs will come up with, but we are likely to find exciting new add-on capabilities for the OA content.  It is one thing to insist that all research content be OA, quite another to banish financial incentives altogether.  The scholarly community would benefit from harnessing the profit motive to the aims of researchers.

What’s not to like about this model, which I contend could become economically sustainable in a short time?  Or I could say, What’s to like?  This model incorporates many of the innovations of services such as arXiv, PLOS One, DSpace, and BMC, but it does not deliver everything that we expect when we turn to an established journal.  The key to this model is to substitute information technology for human-mediated editorial activity and the investments in branding that go with it.  Perhaps the trade-offs are too great.  On the other hand, this kind of development may be inevitable, at least in part, for some disciplines.  Once established, such services may go through a process of continual improvement.  If they don’t satisfy the needs of the research community, they will disappear.

And then it’s time for the next experiment.

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Mar 9, 2010

An Interview with Kent Anderson at WritersCast

Posted by Joseph Esposito under Advertising, Authors, Business Models, Controversial Topics, Marketing | Tags: , , , , , |
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Our very own Kent Anderson granted a very thoughtful interview with David Wilk over at WritersCast.  It’s a wide-ranging podcast, with Kent quietly offering his comments about a multitude of Web issues, including the always stubborn problems of online business models.  David Wilk himself is a long-time industry professional, and his questions add to the piece.  Recommended for anyone interested in the business and policies of scholarly publishing.

 

Feb 23, 2010

Platform Wars Come to the Book Business

Posted by Joseph Esposito under Books, Business Models, Controversial Topics, Historical, Marketing, Technology | Tags: , , , , , , , , , |
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Microsoft Encarta
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During the Internet Boom era, some digital wag linked Bill Gates’ holdings in Microsoft to a real-time stock ticker and posted the service on a Web page.  Thus, you could see Gates’s fortune rise and fall in real time:  up $10 million, down $5 million, up $5 million, down $1 million, up $15 million — and up and up and up.  Besides the bizarre and even masochistic pleasure in watching the numbers, there was a lesson in this:  there is great economic value in owning a software platform, a suite of tools and services upon which third parties write applications.  Get enough popular applications and everybody, and that means literally everybody, has to purchase your platform.  As the Microsoft vision states, a computer in every home, a computer in every office — all of them running Microsoft software.

This lesson has not been lost on the bright fellows in Silicon Valley and its outposts around the world.  It’s a new idea for the book business, however.  Books have proprietary content (a book under copyright is a monopoly), but not proprietary platforms.  Anyone can get a book printed somewhere or build a Web site; anyone can  offer books for sale.  When the word platform is used by book people, they usually mean it metaphorically, as in “marketing platform” — the sum of all the potentially publicizeable connections surrounding a book or author that may enable a particular title to find a large, remunerative audience.

Not so today, however, where three technology giants — Amazon, Apple, and Google — are now implicating the book business in their attempt to establish a technical platform.  These are big players — and, more importantly, smart players — for whom books are the equivalent of software applications.

The idea is simple — get enough books running on your platform, and everyone will want to have access to that platform.

The risk for publishers, if not the likelihood, is that they will become collateral damage.

Amazon is primarily an e-commerce business (and not just for books), Apple primarily a hardware company, and Google primarily a media company, and the fate of books for the coming years is likely to be subordinated to the strategic impulses of e-commerce, hardware, and media.

I have been drawn in against my will to platform wars in the past, and I can tell any publisher that it ain’t no picnic.  In the 1990s, I went to work for Encyclopaedia Britannica, one of whose divisions (run by my colleague Dr. Stanley Frank), Compton’s Multimedia Publishing, had developed one of the world’s first multimedia CD-ROM encyclopedias.  In the print era, Compton’s had been Britannica’s junior brand, used to help sell the senior product (“Buy Britannica for yourselves and we will throw in Compton’s for your kids for free”).  With the advent of CD-ROM, Compton’s came into its own.  Priced at $800, half the price of the print Britannica, Compton’s multimedia product got rave reviews.  But it didn’t sell well.  So it was reduced to $600.  It still didn’t sell well.  And that’s when the platform wars broke out.

Microsoft had perceived at that time that it was strategically necessary for people to view the operation of CD-ROM-based content as an aspect of Microsoft DOS, the predecessor to Windows. Thus, it was essential to get some applications for DOS-based CD-ROMs. Hence the beginnings of Microsoft Encarta (for which I served as an advisor prior to joining EB).  Encarta, a multimedia encyclopedia, was sold directly to computer companies, a method known as OEM sales or bundling.  Now you would buy a personal computer for the kids and find that it came with an electronic encyclopedia.  Note the pricing:  a print set of Britannica averaged about $1,600, but a personal computer with a “free” digital encyclopedia thrown in went for about the same price.  Parents made the obvious choice:  buy the kids a personal computer.

Compton’s responded by getting into the OEM game itself.  I recall the first deals were for $25 per unit, sold directly to computer companies.  Then when Grolier entered the OEM market with a competing product, the price began to drop.  There were sales in the $15 range, then $10. My colleague told the company’s executive committee that he thought he could hold the line at $5 per copy, but soon the price of a CD-ROM encyclopedia had dropped to $0.50.  Not long after that, I was approached by a computer marketer who wanted to know how much I would pay him to bundle Britannica with his computers.  The benefit to Britannica?  The exposure of the brand.

I encourage all those publishers who believe that aggressive e-book pricing by Amazon is a good thing to think again. And don’t stop thinking when presented with an opportunity (I almost put quote marks around the word) to price books for Apple’s forthcoming iBookstore at $15.  If Apple could have gotten publishers to price the books lower, they would.  Indeed, how about free?  Free is a good price.  It will expose the brand, and don’t you want to participate in the future of the digital world?

Amazon’s strategy is to  lock consumers into its e-commerce platform, for which the Kindle (both the hardware and the software versions) is the net. Indeed, there is now speculation that Amazon may give the Kindle away for free to its best customers as a way to monopolize their online book purchases.  Apple, on the other hand, is in the business of selling iPod Touches and, soon, iPads.  The more books in the Apple bookstore, the better.  And if aggressive pricing means that the entire bricks-and-mortar supply chain goes up in smoke, who cares about all that old paradigm stuff?  As Mort Sahl once wisecracked,  the future lies ahead!

Book publishers have lost control over their own industry, not because consumers have won, but because they haven’t — they will be no better off with de facto platform dominance than anyone else except the company that controls that platform.

But for the next year or so, it could be a good opportunity to stock up on e-books. It will not be as good a time to publish them, however. For the immediate future, there will be such a thing as an e-book, but there is no such thing as an e-book marketplace. The marketplace is for technical platforms in which books are premiums whose role is to support the marketplace for platforms.

It’s good to look at how Google is playing this game. Google does not control a proprietary platform; rather, for Google the platform is the Web itself, a point made brilliantly by Tim O’Reilly in his “What is Web 2.0?” How can this be?  No one owns the Web.  But Google, as the index to the Web, occupies a privileged position.  As more content comes online, the need to look things up in that index grows.  This means more advertising to be sold on the many Google services. The Web is a rising tide lifting the fleet of Google’s many boats.

Google’s forthcoming Google Editions are still somewhat shrouded in secrecy, but what is known about them is that they will be displayed through a Web browser, not the proprietary formats used by Amazon and Apple. You can run a browser on virtually any computing device — though not (yet) the Kindle. Interestingly, whatever else that can be said of Apple’s forthcoming iPad, the iPad will be a great device to display Google Editions. Google is also creating incentives for others to sell Google Editions, something that we have not seen from either Amazon or Apple. It seems highly probable that Google will make a fair amount of money from the sale of Google Editions. I personally plan to switch to a Google Android phone the moment Google Editions launches, and I imagine the bulk of my e-book purchases will be for that venue.

But Google wins twice — from the sale of Google Editions and also from the sale of marketing services that publishers will invest in to drive Web traffic to the various sites, including the publishers’ own, that sell Google Editions. This is the incentive Google has in promoting the Web as a platform. Thus, the more e-books that are displayed through a Web browser, the better it is for Google. This does not mean that Google Editions are not in publishers’ interest. Indeed, I think quite the opposite.  What is not in publishers’ interest is being in a situation where there is no escape from the platform wars fought by others.

The good news about these platform wars is that no one has yet won. For publishers, the best strategy is to be present on all the competing platforms while exercising judgment as to timing and pricing.  This is also the time to explore other venues.

And perhaps it is also the time to wonder why it is that people outside the book industry developed the first major online bookstore, the first sexy e-reading device, and the premier search index to books.

With all the knowledge to be found in books, one might have hoped that publishers and not technologists would have carved out the path to the industry’s future.

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Jan 12, 2010

How Not to Negotiate for Digital Rights

Posted by Joseph Esposito under Authors, Books, Business Models, Commerce, Technology, World of Tomorrow | Tags: , , , , , , , , |
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Toi, Moi & Café
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There is an essay making the rounds of the Twitterverse by the distinguished editor Jonathan Galassi; it appears on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times, no stranger to good editors. The title is “There’s More to Publishing than Meets the Screen,” and that “more” is all the work a publisher does to bring a book into the world. The occasion of the piece is the recent announcement that the estate of William Styron was seeking to publish ebook versions of some of Styron’s works, and Styron’s original publisher, Random House, would play no role in it. How could this be? Galassi wonders. Random House helped to make Styron successful and thus deserves a place in the arrangement. The specifics of “place” are not spelled out, but we can assume that it means money or outright control of the management of the digital rights to Styron’s works.

I was very sorry to see this piece, as it seems to me to both entirely right from a moral point of view, but also sadly out of touch with what publishers actually do and why they are valued. This is despite the fact that Galassi is among the very best, and if he doesn’t know why people value publishers (at least that segment of the public that does), who does?

This story awakened memories in me, as Galassi (who could not possibly know this) was a major figure in my life. Many years ago, when I was a cub working at Rutgers University Press, I chanced upon an article of his in Publishers Weekly entitled “Publishing as a Seditious Activity.” At least I think that’s what it was called; I can’t find it anywhere on the Web. The argument of that essay was that publishers had to publish what had to be published even if the business case for such an action was hard or impossible to make. I immediately wrote Galassi and asked if I could meet him. He courteously made time for me at his office in New York City and advised me on how to pursue my career.

It was with Galassi’s example before me years later that I was prompted to fight to put Encyclopaedia Britannica online, despite the opposition of the Board. I was head of product development at the time (1992) and had managed to sneak some money into the budget to create Encyclopedia Britannica’s first CD-ROM. But I knew the CD-ROM was a useless publishing format. I was already examining online venues. By March of 1993, we had discovered the Internet and knew precisely what we were going to do. (As a point of reference, the Mosaic browser did not become available until six months later.) We just never told the Board until the product was ready to launch. I hate to think what would have happened to me had Britannica Online not been immediately successful. Sedition was not welcome in an institution that proudly asserted that it had been on this earth since 1768, making it only slightly older than some members of the Board.

Galassi’s moral argument to the Styron estate is that publishers invest time, money, and expertise into an author’s work and deserve to share in the rewards. Thus, the publisher of the printed book should participate in some fashion in the publication of the digital book, as the digital edition benefited from the editorial labors of the printed book.

The problem with this argument is not that it is not true (it is definitely true) but that authors cannot hear it; they don’t want to be beholden to any editor for the shape of their work, though they will diplomatically compliment editors in the Acknowledgments—typically by noting that an editor “helped me fulfill my vision.” My vision. The line-by-line editing of Random House’s celebrated Bob Loomis and the assiduous work of the copy editors can all be read as strikes against the author. As a sales pitch, Galassi’s comment may be heard as something of an insult.

At least that is how I hear it. “Dear author. You are justly proud to be the possessor of a bauxite mine. When you work with us professional publishers, we will process your bauxite into high-grade aluminum. Then we will use our extensive marketing network to shape that aluminum into various aluminum products, from the siding of a renovated home to the instruments in a space capsule. You must be very proud to be part of the extraction industry!” Of course, authors are not part of the extraction industry, nor even of the publishing industry. Authors belong to the recognition industry, and successful publishers court authors not by telling them how much they can help them but by alerting them to the broad public that is waiting to offer acclamation.

And this is what Galassi misses. He correctly notes that a publisher (in this case, Random House) will, among other things, introduce an author’s work to magazines and newspapers for publicity and rights sales, but doesn’t see the parallel universe that authors hope to participate in and e-books are ideally suited for. This is the online world, where not all of a publishers’ connections are the cozy ones around a midtown Manhattan lunch table. In an essay about digital editions of Styron’s work, there is not a single reference to Google or Twitter, though there is a plea that print will not die. An author or an estate may justly ask whether the publisher that worked so hard to bring a book into the world is the right entity to steward a book through cyberspace.

And so in the end Galassi’s argument rests on the high holy ground of moral rights, whereas authors and their heirs occupy the low ground of economic interest. We should not be surprised to see such an argument in the opinion pages of the New York Times, which increasingly has only its moral authority to rely on.

Or Galassi—and Random House—could change the story. Instead of talking about editorial prowess, the argument could be about online marketing, the building of an online community, the monetization opportunities of the author’s specially prepared Web site, the ability to monitor Web traffic and user activity through private administrative accounts, and the inventive management of the emerging online value chain. I hope Galassi is successful in winning the hearts of authors and their agents, but I would put more effort into appealing to their sense of themselves.

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Jan 8, 2010

The End of Kirkus Reviews: Gloom, Doom, and Sunshine

Posted by Joseph Esposito under Authors, Books, Business Models, Marketing, Reading, Social Media, Tools, World of Tomorrow | Tags: , , , , , , , , |
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Shelfari
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With the recent announcement that Kirkus Reviews is shutting down, the prophets of doom in the book industry have had a field day.  Once again we hear that the book industry is dying.  The causes are several, the condition terminal.  People don’t read any more; ebooks (assuming people will read them) will kill print books and with them, the industry; the economics are terrible; copyright is oh-so-old paradigm; the competition from other media is overwhelming; and why read if you can find a friend on Facebook  or Twitter?  Never mind that sluggishness in the book business mostly parallels the greatest economic slowdown in almost 30 years or that for all the challenges that the Internet poses to book publishers, what most people do most of the time on the Web is read and write.  Indeed, never before have as many people been more deeply engaged with text; and that this engagement occurs on a screen instead of a finely printed book is of small consequence.  Excuse me, but could somebody please make room for an optimist?

To be an optimist does not mean being a Pollyanna.  (The term “Pollyanna” to refer to an irrepressible enthusiast comes from the novel of the same name by Eleanor Porter, which was published in 1913.  The books in this series are still in print today.  Is the world better off today than in 1913?  Yes!)  There are some unpleasant trends in the contemporary business, of course, which, if not redirected, could indeed make it harder for good books to find their appropriate readership.  The loss of an organ of book media such as Kirkus is terrible.  And Kirkus is not alone; it is not so long ago that the Washington Post closed down its book review, and many newspapers and magazines have scaled back or eliminated their book coverage.  The New York Times Book Review, still the most prestigious of all reviews outside the world of specialist publications, has been dieted down to a small number of pages, and its troubled parent company has done little to reinvent it for a new life on the Internet.  If books are to be published successfully, how are readers to become aware of them?

What’s fascinating about recent developments in the industry is that some of the very same forces that are undermining the traditional means of bringing books to readers’ attention are now creating new venues for books.  The loss of the Washington Post Book World and Kirkus will be hard to shake off, but seemingly every day brings forth a new online service dedicated to books.  We may be witnessing the early stages of an enormous renaissance in book publishing, though many of the new titles will be unfamiliar to traditionalists as to format (more “e” and less “p”), the means of marketing (social networks as opposed to authoritatively written reviews), and the place of purchase (the new “local” bookshop is now a logical identifier on the Internet).

Perhaps the best known of these new services is Shelfari—and best known for the very good reason that the company was acquired by Amazon a few years back.  Like many other services, Shelfari aims to facilitate “conversation” among readers, literalizing the concept of word-of-mouth marketing by having people type in book lists and recommendations for others to see and comment upon.  Shelfari does not have the field to itself by any means.  FiledBy.com, which was founded by my good friends Mike Shatzkin and Peter Clifton and for which I serve as an advisor,  has established something that has no real print-world equivalent, a growing database of author listings, which are accompanied by tools that enable an author to take charge of some aspects of the marketing of his or her books.   This can be a neat service for any author, but perhaps especially the author of a book that was published some time ago and is in need of a little push to make it relevant again; or for the authors of specialized titles (I am thinking of academic books in particular) who have a stake in having their books receive recognition for professional reasons that go beyond the receipt of a royalty check.    Or there is LibraryThing, which may be the world’s largest book club.  LibraryThing encourages users to upload the titles of every book in their personal libraries.  It is extraordinary to contemplate how much time and energy people put into this service—and the possessors of large libraries even pay a fee for the privilege.  LibraryThing’s users can compare their libraries to others’, swap reading lists, gossip, do whatever it is that books inspire people to do.  How many new book purchases has LibraryThing inspired, I wonder.  Is the recommendation of an online “friend” better or worse for book sales than a searching essay in The New York Review of Books?

The list of the new online book services does not stop here.  For example, we could add GoodReads, WeRead, and many others to it, and if we tap into the right Twitter feed, new services will be brought to our attention regularly.   Nor does this include the uses of the Internet that the publishers themselves are now developing or the copious community tools of Amazon beyond Shelfari, which includes such things as user-generated reviews.  Contemplating the loss of traditional coverage for books is a bit like playing Whac-a-Mole:  for every one that gets knocked down, another—or several—spring up.

I confess to having been a bit doubtful about some of these new services, having grown up in the world of carefully edited, “fixed” content.  But my own experience is encouraging for anyone who loves books.  So, for example, I tentatively filled out a profile on one of these services, noting  one of the books I was currently reading.  The service immediately suggested that I connect with another user, who had listed 12 books he had read on his personal profile.  I was astonished to find that out of the 12, I had read 9, with 1 more on my to-do list.  LibraryThing (not the service I used for this example) says you will find people who are “eerily” similar to oneself, and I must say that this is true.  The gentleman with the 12 books in the photo was a younger version of my intellectual self.  How odd that I should have learned of him through the impersonal machine connections of the Internet, a relationship forged of bits, fiber optics, microprocessors, servers, and countless technical protocols expressed as unpronounceable abbreviations.

I will miss Kirkus if it is not reincarnated in some fashion, but it appears that a new marketing and communications infrastructure is being built for books and the people who love them.  Looking backward is pointless and painful.  Better by far to concentrate on the new ways to discover books and, yes, all the new ways to sell them.  And I can’t resist closing with a quotation from Groucho Marx:

Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend.  Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.

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Jan 1, 2010

Let’s Hear It for Reckless Enthusiasm!

Posted by Joseph Esposito under Authors, Books, Business Models, Experimentation, Newspapers, Research, Social Role, Technology, Tools, World of Tomorrow | Tags: , , , , |
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UNSPECIFIED - OCTOBER 10: In this photo illus...
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As we enter a new year, it’s good to set our sights on what we hope to achieve and how we plan to get there.

Let’s hear it for reckless enthusiasm!

It may seem out of character for a proponent of scholarly publishing to promote recklessness (or even enthusiasm, for that matter), but when I look back at the events that have brought about the important and welcome changes in scholarly communications in my (long) lifetime, I fail to see a case to be made for prudence.  Although most readers of this blog have been trained analytically and methodically and understand the virtue of placing one foot in front of the other, step by step, incrementally moving toward the consensually established goal, innovations of the best kind seem to take place in leaps and bounds—except when they don’t, when they crash and burn instead.

Thus I found myself in the mid-1990s, as the Internet bubble was just beginning to burst out of its Levi’s, sitting at a seminar organized by a major management consulting firm.  Most of the two dozen or so attendees were from the leading cable television and telephone companies.  (They were called RBOCs back then.)  The topic?  The explosion in network capacity, for which there was no known use; there wasn’t even an imagined possible use.  In the view of the consulting team and the bulk of the attendees, Wall Street had gone mad.  Where was the data, the programming, to come from that would fill all the miles of fiber optics?  What could possibly be sent though the underseas cables that could ever justify the cost of laying the cables in the first place?  Everyone shook their heads.  Too much capacity, not enough bits and bytes.  There were bad times ahead for network communications.

Of course they hadn’t heard of YouTube.  No one had even dreamed about YouTube or any of the other bandwidth-sucking Web services that were soon to spring from user-generated content.  UGC! What an amazing and entirely unforeseeable phenomenon!  There was no Wikipedia, no eBay; high school kids did not routinely create musical mash-ups on Mac laptops.  This was 15 years ago, which should give us pause when we try to think about what is likely to develop in the next 15.  Anybody care to write a five-year plan?  A three-year plan?

As I write this, the sneering of Bob Dylan springs to mind:  “You went to the finest schools, Miss Lonely “ and (from “Tombstone Blues”) “useless and pointless knowledge.” We are very well-read; it’s well-known.

So Wall Street went nuts and helped to build more network capacity than anyone could imagine how to use.  Internet connections rapidly migrated from universities to corporations and then to residences, where the speed of the typical connection leaped from 14.4 kps to 28 kps, and then briefly to 56 kps before entering the first rung of broadband (approximately 1 mps).  For a whopping $30 a month, my household now has incoming access  of 3 mps and comfortably supports 5-6 computers and the occasional iPod Touch, some of which are engaged in video chat and real-time movie viewing.    God bless those crazy people on Wall Street.

More importantly, the explosion in network capacity gave us cloud computing, and of course the preeminent cloud company, Google.  I defy anyone involved in scholarly communications to assert that the reckless enthusiasm that gave rise to Google and Google Scholar (and, soon, Google Editions) was not, in retrospect, a chance worth taking.  But at the time, it appeared to be gross foolishness—and it was.

Disruptions come from all directions.  Whereas problems stare at us in the face, solutions can sneak in through the back door.  Consider the twisted tale of newspaper recycling.  Twenty years ago this was viewed as a big environmental problem.  Newspapers were leveling forests; a paper was read once and then tossed away.  To deal with this, municipalities set up impressive recycling programs, with the goal of having today’s New York Times appear as tomorrow’s corrugated cardboard shipping carton.

It’s too bad we hadn’t yet imagined Craigslist.  By inadvertently serving to disaggregate the local newspaper, Craigslist drew away the leading source of revenue for newspapers, classified advertising. Among other things, this disruption is leading to the decline and possible disappearance of the printed newspaper.  This is a warped solution to the environmental problem of mountains of old newspapers (computers are not entirely environmentally friendly, and the loss of newspapers may take an awful toll on civic life), but it does suggest that careful planning does not always lead to the most effective solution.

To tap another American lyricist, Cole Porter:  “Life’s good, life’s grand./Future is all planned.”

It’s easy, of course, to preach the gospel of disruption at the expense of the established, the staid, the formal:  everyone would prefer to be Groucho Marx than Margaret Dumont.  When Wall Street parties, sometimes the next morning can look very ugly.  This appears to be the case with the gross overinvestment in residential real estate, though perhaps one day we will discover hidden value in the classic California home, with a three- (sometimes four- ) car garage and a structure that stretches out to the very limit of the property line.  There are indeed large investments being made today in scholarly communications that appear to be the economic equivalent of the 6,000 square foot starter home.  I personally am uneasy about the capital being poured into digital aggregations of books and journals and other materials locked into PDFs, aimed at the library market.  Where are the libraries going to find the money?  Why would you publish something in a format that you cannot read on an Android phone?

On the other hand, we don’t know how these aggregations will ultimately be used.  If we build it, they may not come—at least not now.  But in time, new uses for old capacity may come to light.  A huge aggregation of digitized books may find no more utility at first than their print counterparts, which often sit quietly and undisturbed on the library shelves.  An aggregation may have emergent properties that are not readily observed until the aggregation is put into place.  Will a digital mountain of books be of little use to the individual scholar, whose relationship to a book is direct and personal, but of great value to a data-miner, who (or perhaps which) discerns unanticipated patterns in the aggregation, leading to important new scholarly discoveries?  Time will tell, but time can only make that report if we make the wild and reckless investment in the first place.

Even recklessness, however, can be managed to some degree.  Not all reckless investments are created equal.  It appears to be the rule that a reckless investment to preserve a practice or institution ultimately yields very little in the way of serendipitous outcomes, but crazy projects designed to bring new capacity on board may come to delight us all.  This is the moral of cloud computing, and it may prove to be the benefit of massive digital aggregations.  The leadership of an organization has to struggle with this conflict—preserve the past or gamble wildly on the future?—which is a hard one, as the past is tangible, but the future is vague or unforeseeable.  At times, organization leaders simply have to take the leap, even without the support of a staff that has served the organization well over many years.

And this prompts my personal reckless enthusiasm:  to build infrastructure that enables an unmediated, direct connection between scholars and scholarly materials.  For example, there is a huge need for a new order of bibliographical records, which are transparent to end-users and easily integrated into machine-to-machine communications.  Such records will be very expensive to create; no one knows how they will ultimately earn their keep.  But then I think of these telco executives shaking their heads and saying, Where is the programming going to come from?

It will be there.


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Dec 3, 2009

The Scholars’ Catalog Project

Posted by Joseph Esposito under Business Models, Education, Reading, Research, Social Role, Technology, Tools, World of Tomorrow | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , |
[6] Comments 
Card catalogs
Image by bfurlong via Flickr

A few years ago I began to ponder the condition and fate of the university press world. This  culminated in an article I wrote for the Journal of Electronic Publishing called “The Wisdom of Oz:  The Role of the University Press in Scholarly Communications.” After I wrote that essay, I began to look around for some means of improving the fortunes of the press world and hit on the idea of creating a comprehensive online catalog for all university press titles, a catalog that could serve as a marketing tool, e-commerce site, and source of bibliographical data for other projects whose aims were not so plainly economic.

It was my good fortune to receive the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which underwrote a feasibility study that I wrote under the sponsorship of the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education (MITE). That study was submitted to MITE and Mellon several months ago.  As it delved into the specific offerings of vendors and included some confidential information, it was not suitable for publication.  Subsequently, I edited the document into a longish essay, which includes a summary of a survey of about 30 university presses.  That abridged document is now available online at Scribd and at MITE’s own Web site .

The project is now moving forward. A prototype is being built (the URL will be published shortly), and several presses have already sent in data feeds for their titles.  (Any not-for-profit academic publisher that wishes to participate in the project should contact me offline, and not just presses affiliated with universities.  For-profit scholarly publishers may be invited to participate at a later time.)

The catalog will launch into a very different world from the one that existed at the time of its conception.  There was no Kindle or iPhone at that time, nor were many scholarly publishers looking beyond the dissemination of PDFs intended to be printed out and read at the edge of the network.   Google had not yet begun its mass digitization project, nor had anyone even hinted that Google would shortly become, through Google Editions, a central player in the publishing landscape.

If so much can change in 4-5 years, why would we not expect that comparable changes are afoot even now? On the Scholarly Kitchen blog a month ago, I referred to this as “the Google decade.”  The moderator silently and innocently changed “decade” to “decades,” but, no, decade is what I meant.  Google (and Amazon, Apple, and any other “hot” company right now) has no more claim on the future of scholarly communications than AOL had even a few years ago.  We should not expect that Amazon can do it better always, whatever “it” is.

Comments on the catalog project would be much appreciated.

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Dec 1, 2009

A Library Card Under the Christmas Tree

Posted by Joseph Esposito under Business Models, Commerce, Controversial Topics, Marketing, Reading, Social Role, Technology, World of Tomorrow | Tags: , , , , , , , , |
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A&P, COFFEE, SANTA CLAUS
Image by George Eastman House via Flickr

As the holiday season approaches, many of us will be writing Santa with special requests for gifts.

All I want for Christmas is a library card.

Yes, yes, of course I have a library card, but that card is to my hometown public library.  I love our little library, but what I really want is remote access to the digital collections of the University of California,  one of whose campuses is a mere 100 yards from my house.  As I do not have a university affiliation, the only way I can use the digital collections is to go on campus and use a computer within the walls of the library.  This would not be so bad if I were involved with a research project that required me to spend the better part of a day at the library, but for the most part my research needs are one-shot questions — the need to look up a single article from a journal, perhaps, or a desire to check out the etymology of one word in the Oxford English Dictionary.  Remote access would be a godsend — or a Santa-send.

It’s mind-boggling that I cannot obtain it at any price.

Santa, I have been real good this year!

I can hear the objections from non-elves already.  I could purchase individual subscriptions to the publications, but no one who has added up these figures seriously believes that individual subscriptions are an option except in those cases where the individual requires not casual use of a publication but concerted, professional use (e.g., a library consultant who might subscribe to a journal on collection-building).  The cost of an annual subscription for individuals to the OED, for example, is $295 per year. If you look up a handful of terms in the OED each week (a credible definition of non-professional use), you begin to do the arithmetic:  $3 per look-up?  $5?  For this reason, most individuals make a default decision — subscribe to a handful of heavily used publications, get unauthorized access to materials that are too dear to purchase, and use the free, if often unreliable, resources of the open Web the rest of the time.  I suspect that the goal of unauthorized access accounts for a certain number of liaisons with librarians that are, as they say, “not in the catalog.”

Objection #2:  That’s why we need open access.  Maybe so, but it is hard to envision a method by which the world’s publications suddenly became available free of charge for the casual user.  Whatever one thinks of the social or moral aspects of the world of publishing, as a practical matter, access is a privilege.

Many people are knocking at the door, but only a few (those with access privileges) get in. As a businessman, I sense an opportunity here: How to monetize the pounding at the door?

One proposed solution comes from the library world.  Many librarians would like to be able to grant remote access to their collections for their institutions’ alumni, and alumni are willing to pay an additional, if modest, fee for these rights.  On the surface, this sounds like a neat solution.  A library already has much of the infrastructure in place:  subscriptions to publications, a means to make digital collections available remotely, and authorization schemes to determine who is and who is not an authorized user, not to mention years of experience in determining what materials are worth including in a collection.  Thus, a publisher that charges, say, $1,000 for an annual subscription to a library may grant alumni rights for an additional 10%.  This is potentially found money for the publisher and an additional service that universities could provide to their alumni, who may demonstrate their gratitude with donations—which could be used to purchase more publications.

On closer examination, however, it becomes clear that enabling libraries to become broader resellers of materials is not in the publishers’ interests.  The reason for this is that however one defines the relationship between a library and its parent university, a library is not the center of the universe.  (Whenever I talk to librarians about this relationship, I’m reminded of the incessant punning on “universe”/”university” in John Barth’s novel “Giles Goat-boy”.)  Alumni go out in the world to take jobs at corporations like Merck, Microsoft, Fujitsu, and countless others, where publishers have assiduously developed markets for their materials. An undergraduate who gets access to Lexis-Nexis may go on to become a senior partner at a Wall Street law firm, where the fees paid to Lexis-Nexis are staggeringly high.  If undergraduates carried their institutional access privileges with them through life, the markets for the sale of publications to the corporate and government sectors would collapse—and likely lead to a huge price increase to academic libraries to offset the loss.  While some publishers, particularly those with little or nothing in the way of corporate or government sales, may eventually decide to grant alumni rights to libraries, this will at best be a solution with gaping holes.  So, once again we are back to a library bypass strategy, which, I repeat for the umpteenth time,  is the single most pressing item in the world of scholarly communications today.

But still there is that knocking at the door.  It’s time for publishers to join hands and create a consortium whose aim is to monetize users like me, people who have a need to get access to the vast collections of a major university library, but whose anticipated use of any single publication is modest.  This is a prospective market segment that will pay for information—it is, in other words, a market and not an unfunded social need.  Consortia have served publishers well in other areas; consider CrossRef,  the Copyright Clearance Center, and the recent development of CourseSmart, a joint venture of the major college textbook publishers, whose goal is to advance the sale and use of digital textbooks.   A carefully planned joint venture could open up a new market segment.

Let’s imagine that all the publishers that currently market digital resources to academic libraries were to participate in the consortium.  For the price of a single subscription, an individual would then get remote access to a digital library on the scale of Harvard’s or the University of California’s.  The cost of a subscription would not be inexpensive — $500 a year?  $1,000?  Identifying the right price (or prices, as there could be a tiered model for users who access the service more heavily) would be an interesting exercise; perhaps there could be some guidance by deriving the allocated cost per undergraduate for the use of the library at a research institution.  But whatever the price, the proceeds, after subtracting the cost of operating the service, would be shared pro rata by the participating publishers.  My $1,000 subscription might yield $50 to Oxford University Press, $75 to Elsevier, and $2 to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

The reason publishers resist this kind of formulation is that they mistakenly add up the value of all the content they create (which is indeed worth a tidy sum) and confuse that with the amount of time an individual actually has to spend with any single publication.  Few people who are not themselves academics or professional researchers spend many hours doing research.  They can’t, as their days are filled with meetings, phone calls, email, and traipsing to and from airports and trade shows.  The question for publishers to determine is not how much is a publication worth but how much of an “information tax” they can reasonably impose on one hour of my time.

There are publications for which this will not work, namely, any publication that already has an established consumer market.  Let’s say (picking a few publications at random) that the Economist, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Review of Books were to be included in the service.  This would lead to many cancellations of subscriptions to those products in favor of the omnibus subscription to the consortial service (assuming no atavistic yearning for print editions).  The profile of a target publication for this service is one that is delivered electronically, has a casual readership beyond the world of specialists, and has little in the way of individual subscribers.

Even if publishers are cool to the idea of working jointly, they should consider the comment of Professor Stevan Harnad, who, speaking of another program to reach a new market segment, notes that such initiatives could hamper the movement for open access to research literature:

The current bids to “monetize” the existing OA content — whether from OA journals or from OA repositories — are likely to reduce the momentum (from both users and authors) to provide that missing OA content, as well as to reduce the institutional and funder momentum to mandate that they provide it.

I couldn’t have said it better.

Santa, it’s time to make the North Pole into a sustainable business.

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Nov 13, 2009

Publishing in the Google Ecosystem

Posted by Joseph Esposito under Authority, Business Models, Commerce, Controversial Topics, Copyright, Metrics and Analytics, Newspapers, Technology, Tools, World of Tomorrow | Tags: , , , , , |
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Image representing Google as depicted in Crunc...
Image via CrunchBase

A recent trip to Europe brought home to me the fact that the American and European publishing worlds are divided by far more than an ocean. In Paris as in New York, San Francisco, and Chicago, all publishing talk sooner or later turns to the matter of Google. But in Europe. the talk often turns ugly.

Whatever one thinks of Google (and all publishers think about Google), there is little doubt that in just a few years, Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have become the most influential people in the publishing industry, at least in the U.S., taking that distinction away from Jeff Bezos.

(Nostalgists recall when the Riggios (who control Barnes & Noble) ruled the roost, or, going back even further, when Harry Hoffman was the big dog.  I doubt that anyone currently active in the industry can remember a time when the most influential person in publishing was a publisher.  Bennett Cerf, perhaps?)

The European animus toward Google stems from many things, not least of which is that Google is viewed as very much an American company.  But beyond nationalist passions is a misunderstanding of the scope of the Google enterprise.  As fans of Star Trek know, resistance to the Borg is futile.  Google is now the defining entity in the information landscape.  To flourish, as best as publishers can hope to flourish, it’s necessary to find a place within the Google ecosystem.  There is no world elsewhere, no little pocket of commerce beyond the reach of Google’s audience aggregation, no opportunity to erect protectionist barriers or to appeal to the legacy of one’s own institutions.  To those who resent Google’s huge bulk and ambition, it has to be said:  Get over it.

Part of the resistance to Google derives from the company’s view of copyright, which, at least to European ears, sounds entirely wrong. Even for those, including myself, who have a traditional view of copyright (that is, during the term of copyright, copyright serves the interests of the producer), might pick nits.

However, it has to be said that whether Google’s view ultimately prevails or not (I think it will), obsessing about this one aspect of the Google program obscures what is happening in the marketplace and all the new publishing opportunities Google is creating.

For example, even as publishers take umbrage over the unauthorized digitization of copyrighted material in the Google Book Search project, it has to be recognized that the core Google search function, located at http://google.com, is a leading, and for many sites, the leading source of Web traffic.  Not all publishers value Web traffic as they should, which leads to an underestimation of Google’s significance.  If a publisher has traditionally worked through channels (principally bookstores, whether online or bricks-and-mortar), the implications of a direct relationship with end-users or customers may not be fully understood.

With the various Google Book Search features, publishers also have a number of intriguing ways to engage readers.  Google enables readers to search inside the book, which should yield more traffic, some portion of which can be converted to sales. Google also publishes its API (application program interface), which allows some of the features on its site, including the ability to search inside a book, to appear on the publisher’s Web site.

Let’s ponder this for a minute.  How many publishers could have created the “search inside” feature on their own?  How large does a publisher have to be to make this kind of IT investment?  And here Google is essentially giving it away to publishers.  I have heard Google referred to as “a taker, not a maker,” but if it is a taker, it’s one with an unexpected and apparently magnanimous ethical calculus.

The useful services Google provides to publishers keep growing.  Google Editions, which is expected to be introduced shortly, will enable the sale of ebooks.  Just what a publisher will be able to do with those ebooks is still something of a mystery — or at least it’s partly a mystery, making it hard to distinguish what Google plans to do with the endless speculation about Google’s strategy.  (This underscores the fact that Google is a premium brand:  the aura surrounding the company is many times larger than the company’s services themselves.)  From Google’s declared aim to allow online retailers to resell Google Editions, it appears probable that once again there will be a published API so that publishers as well as retailers can put the Google Editions on their own sites.  Google will charge for sales of Google Editions, but Google’s share is less than what publishers traditionally give to booksellers.  Google Editions will be viewable through any Web browser, which opens up intriguing questions as to whether this will serve as a form of DRM.  What happens when you close the browser?  If you can cache the ebook offline, can a browser-based solution allow copies to be shared?  We shall see, but in the meantime it appears that Google is trying hard to make their services palatable to publishers.  It’s almost as though Google is saying, “Look — you give us us mass digitization, and we will give you everything else.”

With the invention of the motion picture by Thomas Edison, the book lost its place as the center of the media universe.  All other innovations, from radio to television to the Internet, helped to push the book out further.  Now we live within a media landscape that has no center, but which does have a dominant issue, and that is the matter of online discovery, for which search engines, and Google in particular, are the dominant modes.

Google does not always behave the way publishers would like it to, but that’s true of any large company.  Nor is it always respectful of the media types that preceded it — the prerogative of the young, brash, and successful.  The question for publishers, however, isn’t whether Google sits up straight in class with its hands folded on the desk, but whether any publisher can afford to ignore this upstart.

For publishers, this is the Google century, or maybe just the Google decades, but either way, not to engage this extraordinary organization is likely to lead to obscurity.

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Oct 20, 2009

What is “Library Bypass”?

Posted by Joseph Esposito under Business Models, Experimentation, Social Role, Technology, Usability, World of Tomorrow | Tags: , , , , , |
[5] Comments 
Libraries almost invariably contain long aisle...
Image via Wikipedia

A recent piece in the New York Times on ebooks and libraries raises the question of how publishers will come to terms with the possibility that the sale (or lease) of one copy of a book will lead to multiple readers of that copy, undermining the market for that title.  While I’m confident that various practical lending schemes will emerge over the next few years, it’s also clear that publishers will be looking for other ways to reach paying customers.  A “library bypass” strategy is on everybody’s mind, or will be once ebooks pick up market share.

Library bypass is not yet another evil visited upon libraries by avaricious publishers.   In fact, it is very much the opposite.  A bypass strategy develops precisely because publishers are listening to libraries.  They hear two things:  first, libraries are short of funds and cannot purchase all the materials that they would like to; and, second, libraries increasingly are becoming publishing centers themselves, typically of open access material, and are casting a cold eye on yet another offering from a highly profitable publisher.  A bypass strategy is a prudent means to find other ways to derive revenue from publications without imposing a further tax on a library’s strained materials budget.

A bypass strategy typically involves the creation of an aggregation, whether by a publisher or a third-party, which is marketed directly to end-users.  I say “typically,” but please don’t look for evidence of such implementations under every rock.  Most of these “typical” programs are embryonic, put together by new companies seeking a toehold in the publishing marketplace.  (Some of these companies are clients of mine, but I will forebear making a plug here—but talk to me offline.)  These programs replace or will come to replace other programs, including the attempt (very expensive) to sell single titles of books or serials directly to end-users or some licensing schemes that are priced more for small businesses and libraries rather than for individuals. An effective pricing strategy would make all the digital resources of a research library available to individuals for a flat sum. How much that sum should be will be a matter of intense debate in the coming years. To put this in perspective, our household pays about $1,000 a year for daily home-delivery of the New York Times (and we would—happily–pay more if the paper included no advertisements).  There is a market here.

This raises the obvious question: Why aren’t libraries themselves getting into this area?  Good question. In some respects, they are.  For example, most public libraries allow patrons to access digital collections from home — all you need is a library card.  But these services are hardly comprehensive. University libraries typically have programs for members of the broader community, but these entail accessing resources from the library’s physical premises.  It’s more likely that an independent researcher (or simply an intellectually curious individual) would like to access materials like St. Jerome, from his study.  Our iconic prospective customer can be termed “St. Jerome in pajamas.”

Thus the entrepreneurs are making an attempt.  There are many, many obstacles to making such a program work.  For one, you have to arrange deals with all the publishers, which, frankly, is as hard a task as any in the world of media and communications.  Second, you need a tight set of business rules for revenue-sharing.  Third, you need very good information technology to track all this activity.  And you need a sophisticated authentication scheme to ensure that a small business is not trying to horn in on the price for an unaffiliated individual.  But seemingly insurmountable obstacles are the lifeblood of entrepreneurs.

Speaking as one of those unaffiliated individuals (a so-called independent knowledge worker), I wonder why it is that some companies won’t take my money.   I live 100 yards from a campus of the University of California, but cannot get remote access to the UC digital collection at any price. This situation won’t last; the pressure of a knowledge economy, coupled with the incentives of enterprise, will bring the riches of the world of information to my study.

My PayPal account is ready.

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