More on the Frankfurt Book Fair

Upcoming: InfoCommerce 2006 Conference

The InfoCommerce 2006 conference, regarded as the "working conference for the thinking publisher" is scheduled to kick off October 10-12, 2006, in Philadelphia.

According to a recent for the event:
"Publishing insiders acknowledge that some of the most exciting and lucrative connections - among people, companies and ideas - are made at the conference. The theme this year is 'Becoming One With Your Market.'"

Find a scheule for the event, as well as a list of session topics here.

Google Blogs Book Search

Google's got yet another blog running, to add to the already existing 22 some-odd blogs - this one "Inside Google Book Search" looks at what's going on in the Google Book Search (previously 'Google Print') Project - something we've not heard much news on lately, particularly from the publishing sector.
What IS going on with Google's project these days?
According to the site, with the "Sample Pages View" - "If the publisher of author has given us permission, users can see a limited number of pages from the book." and with the "Full Book View" - visitors can read the entire book via Google Book Search "...if the book is out of copyright, or if the publisher or author has asked to make the book fully viewable."

With 'buy this book' and 'find this book in a local library' links Google Book Search is much more than a digital card catalog and extract repository.

In an attempt to curb any negative publicity regarding copyright issues with the project, the site also hosts a News and Views section where authors, publishers, and readers, etc. can and have shared their project participation 'success stories.'
In further defense of the project Google writes, "Some of our critics believe that somehow Google Book Search will become a substitute for the printed word. To the contrary, our goal is to improve access to books ? not to replace them...

Post NISO conference

The crucial issue was one of trust. A community has to have confidence in its identifiers; organizations have to know what other organizations are using it; Pat Stevens referred to this as the "fabric of trust", which I thought was a great way of describing it. We discussed, in breakout sessions, the example of the "ESBN" issue that is now confronting the book industry - we don't know who the ESBN people are, what they intend the identifier to be used for, how it's different in nature from the ISBN - and without that trust, people are not going to adopt it. As Stuart Weibel of OCLC said, "The only guarantee of the usefulness and persistence of identifier systems is the commitment of the organizations which assign, manage, and resolve them".

And as we developed ideas in further breakout sessions, the issue of trust continued to come up. If a community is not fully engaged in and supportive of an identifier, nothing about that identifier is going to work. However, identifiers can be pushed too far. I brought up the example of an overly-effective identifier - the ISBN - in the case of Barnes & Noble's database. The top-selling ISBN at Barnes & Noble when I was there was...biscotti. This metaphor continued to crop up throughout the meeting - it's now apparently taken on mythological proportions.

It must be February

Information Wants to Be Paid for By Advertising

Silicon.com reports today that the World Association of Newspapers is going to "challenge the exploitation of content" by search engines by...well, they haven't decided what they're going to do yet. They're French.

But their argument is similar to what a lot of publishers and authors are arguing regarding Google Print - that even the metadata required for listing a product (whether it's a book, a news story, or any other piece of intellectual property) is worth something. A headline (or book title), a photo (or a picture of the book jacket), a little blurb on what the thing is about - that's enough to get an advertiser interested. Will publishers and authors see any revenue from ads on Google? Will newspapers likewise see any revenue from ads on search engines?

The search engine's argument is that it provides "exposure" for products like books and music and news stories, and it's up to the publisher to actually SELL the stuff and make THEIR share of the money. The cost of listing is paid for by ads. In other words, what Google does with your metadata is their business.

This comes up at meetings with publishers periodically - can anyone claim ownership of metadata, or is it in the public domain? The fact that a news story is about orange groves - can someone make that determination and say, "I own the relationship of this news story to that subject of orange groves"?

Or is making that relationship considered creative and copyrightable work? Someone else could read the story and say, "That story's about the effects of hurricanes on local economies."

The more search engines are capable of doing, the more interesting copyright law is going to get.

Sales up!

The Book Standard reports that book sales are up 9.3% over last year, and that the Internet is playing a crucial role there. Data, folks, is the unsung hero here. Without accurate metadata about your products - be they books, toys, lawn chairs, what have you - you will not get those products in front of the customer very efficiently. The more trade we do electronically, the more of a priority your product data becomes. Get it right, people.

One way to do so is to use a system designed specifically for publishers. Bookmaster North America is one package; Quality Solutions is another (and QSI has just released a product geared to smaller houses). Bowker also offers data-cleansing and formatting services for small and large presses.

Data's not going to get any less important....

Diamonds are a girl's best...search engine....

Speaking as a typical femme who adores jewels - ADORES THEM, do you HEAR???? - ahem...David Weinberger writes about faceted classification. It is utterly fascinating, and he does a far better job explaining it than I ever could...He doesn't have permalinks, so keep scrolling till you get a headline called "Faceted classification at work".

In other news, everybody but me was off work today. I, however, worked like a dog.

ESBN, WTF?

Today's Joho the Blog - the blog by David Weinberger - contains a letter from Chris Matthieu, apparently the creator of the ESBN, an identifier for e-books. Matthieu's site is minimal, but in his letter to David he claims to be solving problems with his identifier that an ISBN cannot.

However, the ESBN is not an ISO standard, so its existence makes me wary.

Meanwhile, the goddessly  informs me that all the news is Paris Hilton and Angelina Jolie. Personally, I've been following the JT Leroy story, and the James Frey story. Fake Writer Day, as Gawker declared it. The JT Leroy story is far more interesting - although looking at the pictures, anyone who had doubts as to whether or not that person was a girl is...probably still wondering whether Boy George was gay.

ISBN-13 made last week's Publishers Weekly cover, as well as a more substantial article inside. And yet...there are those still scratching their heads and wondering if this is important. Ducking and covering works, too.

Fair Use

I got an email the other day from a client who aggregates content for redistribution - this email was from a company called XB90.com. They are a company that goes around swiping bloggers' RSS feeds without approval/permission (and certainly no compensation), and then if you don't wish to participate in their distribution service (which is also free), you have to "opt out".

Kind of like Google Print's reading of copyright law- "we have the right to copy and distribute your stuff unless you tell us not to."

No, folks, that is not the way it works. XB90.com's site is down today, but there are plenty of others who step into the vacuum. Om Malik has a great piece on this - and as usual, all roads lead back to Google - in this case, the AdSense program.

At some point someone's going to realize that great content is not just a vehicle for advertising, but a product in and of itself.

November 28, 2005

New York magazine jumps into the Google party this week with a snappy summary of all that's been going on. But it's the London Times that adds a new argument. In an article by a small publisher, it's noted that if Google scans all scholarly books into its databases, even for search purposes, libraries won't need to buy so many books. A user can enter a search term, find the exact books that the search term appears in, and discover whether or not it's even worth cracking the covers of the books - or ordering them via interlibrary loan. The number of books in any given library will decrease - there will be more sharing of titles. And so publishers will find fewer buyers, will publish fewer books, etc. etc.

In other news, we're back on the GDSN train - trying to synch up book databases so they can be used by grocery stores, drugstores, other-than-bookstores. Why is this such an obsession: well, anybody who's been to my house has seen all my books. I am a far worse book fiend than shoe fiend - and I have an impressive shoe collection. Stores like Wal-Mart, Target, Wegman's, Publix - these are selling books now, as we all know. What some of us might not know is that they are selling a tremendous number of books. All using data that's insufficient, inaccurate, and in some cases barely even there. Still, they are managing to keep the book industry pockets pretty well lined in ways that traditional booksellers seem not to be able to do.

So why the push on data?

Because if the book industry cannot continue to make it easier for those stores to sell books - if the book industry cannot get its shit together and present non-traditional book outlets with good sales data, there's gonna be no incentive for them to continue to sell books. Books will be replaced by DVDs, music, video games, magazines, whatever stores find (when they finally wake up) is easiest to sell - and good data makes a thing easy to sell. And then, we'll find, we'll have made it harder for people to buy books. We're already competing for mind-share here, folks. Why make it more difficult on ourselves?

A great convergence

Stanley Greenfield is brilliant.

On Sunday, I came across this little gem about selling books by the chapter or passage, citing programs in development by Google and Amazon. Stanley, of course, has been doing this for YEARS - he began in the 1980s, with Dial-A-Book, where you could call up and hear the first chapter of a book. As the Internet took hold, Stanley digitized these chapters and distributed them to Amazon, B&N, Borders, Ingram, B&T, plus all the independent Internet bookshops.

There was a period during the bust, as these bookshops began collapsing like a house of cards, when a lot of us were wondering whether Stanley would be able to make it. The market for digitized chapters seemed to shrink drastically, and it seemed like he'd saturated it.

But he held on. Stanley is both wise and tenacious, and he knows a good thing when he's got it. He drove his own costs down - he was one of the first people I ever knew who outsourced to Asia. And lo and behold...now that Amazon is doing "", now that Google is contemplating a "book rental" program (hello? anyone ever hear of ebrary?), Stanley looks damn near prescient.

Then there's China.

In the 1970s, Stanley was doing a lot of business with China. Now that China's opened up again, Stanley's got a whole infrastructure of contacts there, already in place - he knows how to work the government, and the kinds of political/economic machinations that thwart a lot of US companies are a breeze to him because he knows the ropes already. Yesterday, Stanley sent me a press release which began thusly:

Xinhua China Ltd.., the majority shareholder of the largest book
distributor in the People?s People?s Republic of China, has signed an
agreement with Dial-A-Book Inc. to mount more than 25,000 Chapter One book
browsing excerpts of English language books on its dealer network in China.

Too Busy Working to Blog

Right, so we won't call October our most productive month ever, blog-wise, though work-wise there's a whole lotta shakin' going on. But there are some good things to report: Muze is looking for a few . Muze is a fun company to work for - I enjoyed my time there considerably.

Google continues its steamrolling of the book industry. On 10/27, several librarians in the CUNY system and I gave a presentation at BMCC, where we each tackled a separate facet of the Google presence in libraries. This is an ongoing project (in other words, more presentations, articles, etc.), but in the short term you can access my bit of it here. (Thanks, Hamid!)

The Charleston Conference is next week, and I will be on the Batphone on Saturday discussing publishers and ISBN-13.

We're treading water here, not suffering from lack of business but from lack of FUN NEWS!  us your squibs, people - Tess and I can't do it alone....

October17, 2005

Still haven't managed to figure out the Google-AOL-Yahoo business, and now Barry Diller goes on and acquires MySpace.com. While Murdoch puts in a bid for...no, wait, it's MURDOCH who bought MySpace.com, while Diller's...actually not done anything new, but is now explaining what the f* he was thinking about his AskJeeves.com acquisition.

Mad shuffle on the West Coast. Glad to be in NY, where life is all about 13-digit ISBNs and how to sell books in grocery stores.

The truth is, grocery stores are in some jeopardy themselves...from the big boxes like WalMart which are also selling food. And if the Times Select thing would work for me - it keeps sending me in circles, all of which involve taking my credit card information and none of which ultimately result in my actually GETTING the article - I'd have some nifty quotes for you on the subject of supermarkets in peril. Stupid Times. At any rate, trust me on this one - the Times is never wrong except when it comes to WMD, datelines and bylines, and...well, yeah, okay, don't deflate me before I've said anything.

The point is, more and more books are being sold in what the business calls "non-traditional outlets" - in other words, not in bookstores. Groceries are a significant chunk of that change. (Of course, books only represent less than 1% of that particular market - they mean far more to us than we do to them.) If that market dries up, and is taking over by price-bulldozing WalMarts and Costcos and what have you, where does that leave the book market?

(Of course, if supermarkets did item-level tracking - merchandising by SKU rather than by price - they'd be able to actually COMPETE with those big-box stores...but that's too haaaaaaaaaaard.)

Yes, this NY Times business has made me cranky. First rule of thumb for e-commerce: MAKE SURE YOUR FRIGGING FEATURES WORK BEFORE YOU LAUNCH THEM.

Pain Points

Folks, dual-numbering on bar codes (ISBN-10 and ISBN-13) is okay.

The truth is, if you make your books easy to sell, people will sell them. No bookstore is going to turn down your book because your bar code is aesthetically unappealing. If they can scan it (easily), then that's all they need to know.

Do not pay attention to fussbudgets telling you they won't accept product if it has dual numbering on it. If they really don't accept it, those particular fussbudgets won't be working at that company anymore.

For heaven's sake.

Like I was saying....

Shelf Awareness reports this morning:

General retail sales figures for August show a tough retail climate--even before Hurricane Katrina hit. A sales decline of 2.1%, largely because of gasoline price rises that seem tame compared to early September's, was twice as high as forecasted.

Apparently retailers are leaping onto the blame-Katrina bandwagon pre-emptively.

MSNBC issued an interesting report yesterday. It seems that consumers are using their cars less - combining errands, looking to save gas - and so their shopping habits have changed.

The longer-term impact may well create even more business for one-stop-shop retailers like supercenters and warehouse club stores as we watch our expenses.

Additionally, this report implies, supermarkets will be increasing their offerings.

So, folks, if consumers are not getting in their cars and driving to the bookstore...why not increase the selection of books at the big-boxes and supermarkets? And if we're headed down that road, why not incorporate book industry data in the Global Data Synchronization Network?

Because at some point it's not going to be a lovely nice-to-have; it's going to be essential if you want to sell books in this country. And as gas prices go up, as consumers dial back their spending, as retail consolidates, it's going to be essential sooner rather than later.

Some Vitriol With Your Morning Coffee?

As Ophelia, the-little-hurricane-that-could, chugs its way up the East Coast, the morning pundits maintain a surprisingly consistent attention span - Friedman, Dowd, Wonkette, even Damon Wayans have nothing good to say about the administration. Now we seem to have discovered the cure for ADD - moral outrage.

So what does any of this have to do with publishing, content delivery, etc? It's more of an overall economy thing. Retail sales, according to the Department of Commerce, have sunk by 2.1% for August. Two more airlines are declaring bankruptcy. And while gas prices fell by two cents today, overall they are higher than they've ever been. Wal-Mart blames fuel prices for its performance issues.

The economic picture is looking pretty grim. And while the conventional wisdom is that when the economy sours, bookselling improves (because overall, books are cheap entertainment), the last few economic downturns haven't proved that out - where the economy went, so did the book sector.

In terms of online content, well, that's always been something of a luxury investment. If there are cutbacks to be had, it's generally in the world of content development. Trust me - I've been fired/laid off enough times after a downturn to know.

So what does that mean - it means that as an industry we have to be really smart about developments. I've been thinking a lot about Global Data Synchronization. (Oh, Bowker? Bowker??? Anyone home???) All the economic signposts point to getting book data into a mass-merchandising data pool, where stores can download the book data along with grocery data and clothing data and hardware data and salt-and-pepper-shaker data - and hone their sales, and be smart about selling and merchandising.

As consumers become more and more dependent on the big box stores (and even while fuel prices are hitting them, they're certainly hitting specialty stores harder) in tough economic times, the book industry is going to have to compete not just with other entertainment items such as movies and music as we have in the past, but also with groceries, clothing, office supplies, health and beauty products, and dog food. In other words, retail is flattening and books are just another commodity - and as the economy gets worse (and it will, there's very little doubt about that), efficiencies are going to continue, the big box stores will overtake the little guys, and it is seriously time to get smart about joining the rest of the retail world. Books do not occupy a privileged position in retail anymore.

Some questions

Il Ritmo

The Book Standard features an article on Ritmo Latino, the Spanish-language music chain that's expanded into the book market. One thing I found interesting - some of these stores have Internet cafes, where customers can "go online for 'see inside the book' features."

Big question: are these features in English or Spanish? The US book-content market has been looking for a Spanish-language solution - bibliographic data, reviews, summaries, author bios, tables of contents in Spanish rather than English - and if Ritmo Latino is getting this content from somewhere, plenty of people would like to know where. If Ritmo Latino is composing this themselves, there's a lot of money to be made here.

If neither, then once again this points to the underserved Latin market and someone really ought to be getting a jump on getting book information to the Spanish-speaking customer in their own language.

AOL follow-up

Via the goddessly Tess, this piece from Newsday revisits AOL a month or so after its content was unleashed for free. Their big claim to fame - offering full coverage of the Live 8 concerts.

"Offering niche content, such as online webcasts like Live 8, is key to AOL's ability to distinguish itself and compete, said Walton of Walton Holdings."

Truthfully, the Live 8 concerts were broadcast live on numerous websites, the BBC among them. So I don't know how "distinguishing" these kinds of content offerings are...when lots of other websites are offering them as well.

The Google Threat

10 years ago, Amazon was poised to take over the world...with a homepage that looked like . With content updated daily, an e-newsletter service, and a million titles for sale...everyone in the book world was wary. Who was this guy - the book industry is fairly incestuous and nobody had ever heard of this clown Bezos before. Where was he getting his money? And what was Amazon going to turn into?

That last question was the most disturbing of all. At B&N, trying not to outpace the competition but simply catch up, not knowing what Amazon would do next was unnerving, to say the least. But it wasn't simply about competition - what was Amazon selling, exactly? Books, yes. Information? Content? News? Was it a bookstore, or a magazine that sold books? What should B&N try to be?

Ultimately, the dust settled on these questions. Now Amazon is not the bogeyman it used to be. For that, we have Google.

Moby Live's guest essay this week is the garbled latest in "sky is falling - and it's all Google's fault" kvetching. As with the issue of outsourcing (Lou Dobbs, don't even get me started), the question is not whether gathering information about users and what they're searching on should happen. It is happening. The salient question is, how should that be handled?

Haven't seen too many essays about that. Anyone wants to send me one, you know where to reach . I'd be grateful to leave all the kvetching behind.

More Muze News

Oh boy!

Biblio.com, the used/OP site, has paired up with Muze to provide actual descriptions of the titles they carry. If you've tried searching for OP titles, frequently you'll be frustrated by the descriptions - they're limited to descriptions of the actual condition of the book (which is helpful) rather than plot summaries, reviews, etc. (which would be even MORE helpful). Finally, Muze's catalog is large enough to support such a necessary project (and it takes a while to aggregate enough OP data to do so).

Unfortunately, Biblio's catalog runs some 21 million items deep. And while Muze has OP data going back before 1995, there are always going to be a significant number of Biblio's titles that will never have the marketing information that the more recent or well-known titles do. It'll be interesting to see how (or if) Muze handles this. For the most part, Biblio's customers are not going to be searching for that early Shirley Jackson title, or the book one's mother wrote in her youth - they're looking for used copies of Harry Potter, plain and simple.

The Wonderful World of Bar Codes

It's not only ISBN-13 that's throwing retailers into a tizzy. On a larger scale, it's the move from the UPC to the EAN - from tracking things at an SKU or pallet level to tracking them on an item level.

This means not simply the scanners picking up the new bar code, but subscribing to data pools on the back end so that the bar codes actually match up to something.

The purported reason for the transition (and there is always a purported reason, for easy explanation to those who otherwise wouldn't care) is so US retailing can join global commerce (the rest of the world, with the possible exception of Ireland, operates on the EAN). And there is a great deal of truth to this as well - from Asian students ordering engineering textbooks from Amazon to exporting Nikes to South Africa.

But it actually also means dealing with products on an individual level, tracking inventory more closely, streamlining orders...and saving bucketloads of money.

But meanwhile, the US consumer-goods supply chain is facing a heck of a gap between where it is now, and where it will need to be in 2007, when suddenly there are no more UPCs being issued and all you can get is EANs.

In other news...the goddessly Tess tells me that a friend of hers was fired from Wells Fargo for his . As usual, management generally takes a while to catch up to things - blogs are clearly not going away, so the best practice is usually to design some human-resource policy to account for it. However, many companies are simply doing the draconian - surgically excising the blogger in question.

Your smartest employees are probably the blogging employees - those with something to say, who are actually thinking about their work and taking the time to write about it - and rather than punting them out of your company (and possibly into the arms of your competitors), constructing a policy to handle blogs is probably a lot more enlightened.

But as the CFO from one company I used to work for once scolded me, "This enlightened management shit is just...shit. It pisses me off. You come to work, you do your job. End of story."

Right. ;)

Watching Bowker Reinvent Itself

Bowker's got a tough row to hoe these days, as companies like Ingram, Baker & Taylor, et al license their data for use on the web. Years ago, they were the only bibliographic-data game in town. But the competition's gotten stiffer - even librarians are looking things up on Amazon.com rather than checking the BIP database. A few months ago, I was giving a presentation to some independent presses, and one guy asked me, "What's the point of Bowker these days?"

Apart from being the US ISBN agency, which is crucial business for them now that the ISBN is changing to 13 digits, Bowker's been forced to find new markets. And I think that their latest effort - hooking up with Content Directions, and turning ISBNs into DOIs - is a very smart move on their part. As more and more publishers sign on to the Google Print project, those DOIs are going to improve search results and make Googling books even stronger.

Very strategic, and great timing. I'm impressed.

More pondering

As I was walking around the small press area of the show floor, I was handing out "ISBN-13 for Dummies" brochures at just about every booth I encountered. What's disturbing to me is that at least half of the folks in the booths there assumed they really didn't need to know about this. One man was fully, wholeheartedly misinformed about bar coding and nothing I could say to him would move him from his position.

The lowdown is here.