The text of a presentation delivered at the recent NFAIS national conference, covering various scenarios for the future of publishing. The argument is that these future scenarios are already evident in the world of the present day, though in embryonic form, and that by studying the “embryos,” we can make reasonable predictions as to where things are headed.
Should search engines license content for crawling? A potential German law thinks so.
Patron-driven acquisitions programs may supplant inter-library loans for ebooks, which in turn could get more publishers to support both PDA and ILL.
Strategy is difficult, especially when the fundamental premise of strategic business decisions may have changed. Wiley and Worlock appear on the stage contemporaneously to offer examples.
In a business environment characterized by risks, upstart innovations, and even contempt for the law, publishers have to ward off threats the old-fashioned way, by out-innovating their rivals and preempting new services.
A recent study of preservation practices for digital materials raises fundamental questions that aren’t so easy to answer.
A new report for the Center of Economic Development suffers from a strong bias in its authorship. But beyond that, its implicit complaints, if addressed completely, would lead to a trainwreck in the world of scholarly communication. Is nobody thinking these things through?
A profile of predatory author-pays OA publishers pulls a punch or two, but reveals that all models have extremes. What we do to make these extremes truly marginal and unacceptable is a larger question.
The future of copyright will apparently involve catching up with technological change, cultural expectations of fairness, creative pressures for re-use, and many other factors. The Chefs cook up an interesting set of scenarios and ideas on this month’s question.
PDA programs set up a kind of bookstore within library OPACs. It is possible to expand the range of these programs to enable the purchase of books by individuals on their own account–a new service for patrons and an income stream for libraries and publishers alike.
The transformation of all publishers is underway, and this interview from a popular magazine’s editor sounds all too familiar as we adapt to evolving markets, possibilities, and expectations.
An odd circumstance of the book business is that no one really knows which books are sold to libraries and how important libraries are to overall book sales. At the heart of the problem is the fact that Amazon, which sells books to libraries, does not share any sales data. This post suggests a couple ways to get at that data in the face of Amazon’s obstinacy.
When on-demand systems for bookselling, such as patron-driven acquisitions, are set up, they create an unexpected problem: How do you know the book will still be available when you finally get around to ordering it? The bookstore of last resort is a preservation-based commercial venture to ensure that books are always available.
Can we learn a lesson from a prior clash of RWA and FRPAA years ago?
Scarcity limited the amount of material, hence the amount of editing necessary to make sense of what we had. Now, with more information than ever, the value of editing should be increasing. Perhaps we’re just not as aware of it as we should be.