Lou Dobbs is a Raving Nutball

Via the goddessly - a brilliant idea in Bangladesh: an NGO has converted boats into mobile digital libraries, and thusly won a Bill and Melinda Gates Award. According to the ALA report, "The boats, which anchor at remote villages, rely on generators or solar energy and mobile phones for internet access." This just rocks. Recently, Nicholas Negroponte at MIT had the idea of providing African and Asian children with $100 laptops and free internet access - the program is supposed to launch in September.

Could we do that in the Bronx?

As we struggle to squeeze oil from stones, it would be worthwhile to realize that our most valuable resources are in fact the future minds that will pilot the world. And there's no guarantee they will come from the US. Increasingly, rooting for the US will be like rooting for the Lakers or the Giants - as my ex used to say, it's rooting for a corporation, not a meaningful scrappy team effort of your boys from the hometown....Alliances are shifting now, and of course it's making everybody anxious and uncomfortable, if not downright obstreperous.

Also via Tess, things that are supposed to make this blog massively popular. Excuse me while I do the necessary: sex, alien abduction, Oprah, Tom Cruise, Lindsay Lohan, Pat Robertson, Dick Cheney, Mark of the Beast, Armageddon, free money, Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt. Sex. Oprah.

Bookmark this post:

Posted by Laura Dawson , August 23, 05, 8:41 PM , comments(0) , permalink ,

The Dynamo and the Virgin

Category: Copyright Law

The big Reuters wire story being routed around on outsourcing these days is that China's really, really trying to position itself as the next India, and that it is hampered by the English problem and the intellectual property problem. (Those damnable Chinese pirates!)

I was reading the various iterations of this story and thinking about Henry Adams's reaction to the Paris Exposition in 1900 - where, as a medieval historian steeped in the mysteries of gorgeous cathedrals inspired by Virgin Mary, he is confronted with the shock of the dynamo, which bodes the harnessing of energy not fully understood even by the most sophisticated scientists of the day.

And he describes his shock as having "my historical neck broken by the sudden irruption of forces totally new."

I think that is part of what we are experiencing in business - particularly a business so steeped in gentlemanly tradition (despite the reality that publishing really NEVER was that way, it certainly remains bound to the myth) - when we are confronted with outsourcing. Because it's not simply a matter of shipping work to another country to be done more cheaply. The very issue of sending work abroad has implications beyond the immediate payoff.

There's the 24-hour workday - where one's productivity is suddenly doubled (or more) by a doppelganger (or three or four) in other parts of the world, and the focus becomes how much work can be squeezed into a certain period. There's the continued segmentation and specialization of work itself - fewer generalists who see the big picture, in other words. There's the dilution of the American economy and the dilution of the American brand of worker - very, very difficult to get one's head around. The dilution of "work hard and you will be rewarded", where working hard is synonymous with virtue - that Puritan sense....As we more closely encounter different cultures, particularly ones so radically different such as Asian ones - well, in radical confrontations with the Other, we are forced into a confrontation with the Self.

And I really think that the world of business is not terribly cut out for that. So it's going to be a bumpy ride while we have our historical necks broken. But not only have we learned to live with the dynamo - now we can't live without it, and without technologies a hundred times more advanced. Ultimately, yes, the world gets smaller (flatter, as Thomas Friedman says), but there will come a point where we can't envision living any other way.

And Chinese pirates will be a thing of the past.

Bookmark this post:

Posted by Laura Dawson , August 17, 05, 9:18 AM , comments(0) , permalink ,

Making Sense of Google

Category: Publishing , Copyright Law , Google

What Google's Doing: Making deals with libraries (so far, Harvard, Stanford, and University of Michigan) to scan the entire contents of their stacks - copyrighted and public domain alike. When a user searches on Google, the result that comes up for copyrighted material is a squib of text, a bibliographic listing, and links to purchase the book. But in order to do that much (and to feed the search engine) Google has to scan the text of the entire book and hold that text in its database to search against.

Why the AAP Objects: Because it means that Google is holding the entire texts of copyrighted books in a database that could potentially leak; because it means that Google is soliciting ads based on copyrighted material and not compensating percentages of that ad revenue to the copyright holders (authors, publishers, etc.).

What Happens Next: Well, right now the AAP and Google are talking and not telling us anything. It's an interesting debate, though - whereas publishers used to control copyrights, now in some cases libraries are also serving as a gateway. What happens if Harvard gives Google permission to scan the text of a Wiley book that Wiley has not consented to share with Google? Does Wiley then threaten not to sell its books to Harvard?

I see this as being very similar to the used-books phenomenon - publishers want to get paid for the life of a book as long as it's viable. They want a percentage of the sale of used books; they want a percentage of the revenue generated by a huge search engine like Google. It's useful to look at the music industry for indications as to where this is going - the iPod proves that the Napster horse has left the barn, and similarly it's just a question of what terms the publishers will work out with Google and with libraries that Google's doing business with. In other words, this latest fracas isn't exactly a showstopper; it's more like a pothole.

Bookmark this post:

Posted by Laura Dawson , August 15, 05, 5:47 PM , comments(0) , permalink ,

Some Vitriol With Your Morning Coffee?

Category: Metadata

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.

Bookmark this post:

Posted by Laura Dawson , August 14, 05, 10:35 AM , comments(0) , permalink ,

Benign Girl

Category: Copyright Law

My youngest daughter came back from a birthday party yesterday with the requisite goody bag filled with party favors manufactured in China.

Among the toys was a little plastic cell phone. The packaging was all in pink (as was the phone itself). Bulleted on the side of the package were the selling points:

*BATTERY!
*OPERATED!
*CREATIVE!
*VARIOUS MUSIC!

The instructions were also on the package: "Beautiful girl, press any button!"

At the top, a (completely unlicensed, utterly pirated) image of Barbie. In the Barbie-esque pink font to the left, were the words "Benign Girl".

There's a role model for ya. Truth in translation.

This morning I had a call with the CEO of B2K, the BPO-outsourcing company covered (in great depth) by Thomas Friedman in The World is Flat. They are located in Bangalore. What do they do...well, actually, a more appropriate question is what DON'T they do. They do tech support, customer care, software development, business analysis, and they have a virtual executive assistant team as well.

Shortly after that call ended, one of my clients called me and was discussing some product development for a particular product line that's been suffering from some neglect lately. He told me that he wasn't really happy with the IT infrastructure for this product.

I said, "How do you feel about India?"

He said, "I love India. They work cheap and they speak English."

Asia is a market much too huge to be ignored. It'd be nice if the images weren't pirated and the translations were better - Benign Girl really isn't going to play so well over here in the long run, probably because it's too truthful - and it'd be nice if we had a better understanding of what the market is for our services there. But that's just a matter of time. The genie's out of the bottle. Now it's time to see what it can do.

Bookmark this post:

Posted by Laura Dawson , August 8, 05, 11:10 AM , comments(0) , permalink ,

Some questions

Category: Metadata , E-commerce

1. Why isn't Bowker leaping into GDSN? Mass merchants are craving book data in their GS1 data pools. Bowker's perfectly positioned to do this. The question really IS on everybody's mind- it asks itself at every industry meeting I go to.

2. Why don't publishers do simultaneous translations of their bestsellers, to eliminate piracy and to broaden their markets? If the UN can do it, why can't Scholastic?

In other news...well, it's August. BISG committees are meeting throughout the summer rather than taking their traditional break - a sign of how the industry is marching away from its patrician days. When I joined Doubleday in 1987, there was still drinking at lunch, and during "summer hours" you really were expected to go to the Hamptons on the weekends and play softball with the Paris Review crowd. Now there's not even drinking at dinner, and the Hamptons have been overtaken by arrivistes.

You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube (I know I keep saying this, but it bears repeating like a mantra). But it makes a fine sneaker-polish. The industry's a different beast these days. E-commerce, cross-channel selling, EDI, databases and search technology, the global market - once we graduated into a world of zeros and ones, we left the dusty world of cigarettes and martinis and summer hours far, far behind.

Bookmark this post:

Posted by Laura Dawson , August 2, 05, 8:25 AM , comments(0) , permalink ,

Oh Lachlan where art thou

Category: Publishing , Copyright Law

Ah, the troubled lives of billionaires - squabbling over inheritances, acquiring Russian news companies...And what of the New York Post now?

More to the point, what of HarperCollins? Nobody's saying. If anybody has any insight, .

Meanwhile...Chinese pirates continue to sell out their countries economic development for short-term gains by raping and pillaging Harry Potter. Nobody's saying that they shouldn't have Harry Potter - books (and movies and music) like that should probably be released in as many languages as possible as soon as humanly possible. In other words, the pirates don't HAVE to be out there first with their translations - it's only because publishers are neglecting their constituencies by not providing them with books in their own languages.

More reasons why publishers are behind the curve here in terms of content delivery. It's not enough to deliver it - if you don't deliver it quickly and in the format the marketplace wants, someone else will. Piracy (particularly in places like China) exists because there's a market for it. And that market is an opportunity, not a problem.

Bookmark this post:

Posted by Laura Dawson , August 1, 05, 8:29 AM , comments(0) , permalink ,

FRONT PAGE

Email:

Username:

Password: