Online Dictionaries Threaten Paper Ones

In the past four years, sales of English-language usage guides and dictionaries have plummeted by 40%, while other reference books, including maps, atlases and encyclopedias, have also shown a significant decline, according to research by Book Marketing Limited. Some publishers have even predicted that dictionary sales could cease completely.

Swets's New Search

DRM is not copyright; copyright is not DRM

Valenti gone - DMCA to follow?

And now we enter...

Overdrive to distribute Alligator

Libraries in OverDrive's network will soon have access to music from Albert Collins, Buddy Guy, Johnny Winter, and other top blues artists available through the Alligator Records label. The collection will add a large, quality list of blues music titles to OverDrive's digital library of more than 100,000 video, music, eBook, and audio book titles-- the only collected works that library patrons can browse, download and view, or listen to all on a single system.

EU to the rescue

The group recommended that digital copies of orphan works—for whom no copyright holder can be identified—be made available for noncommercial purposes after a thorough search for copyright holders is completed, according to a European Commission press release.

For materials that are out of print but still under copyright, the group proposed that libraries be granted a license that bestows nonexclusive and nontransferable rights to digitize and make their holdings available to users on a closed network of other European libraries, museums, and archives.

Amazon confirmed yesterday that it was looking closely at the MP3 market. It is expected that its service, which could launch as early as next month, will differ from its rival by selling music without anti-piracy measures.

Back in the Bubble?

Kindl-ing

Children in Wales think they can't afford libraries

POD still growth area

LibraryThing at CIL

In keeping with our policy on thingISBN, our "related editions" widget will be free—allowing any library in the country to "FRBRize their catalog" without paying LibraryThing or anyone else a dime.** The paid widgets will include book recommendations, tag-based browsing, ratings, reviews and so forth. We'll only be releasing two or three at CIL, but the rest will come out over the next few months.

BBC America Audiobooks to buy Audio Partners

MySpace to the Rescue

The response to the posting was immediate, and overwhelmingly positive. Not only were sales Friday and throughout the weekend the highest Bubon and Christophersen had seen since Christmas, but 30 new members paid $25 each to join the store’s club, which entitles them to a 10% discount and a subscription to the store’s e-newsletter. Other nonprofit groups have contacted the store in the past few days, offering to host fundraisers. And the store’s Internet sales have "gone through the roof," said Bubon, to the extent that one employee has been assigned just to fill Internet orders.

Virginia Tech thoughts

Publishers, Chinese Pirates, and a Cartoon Newsletter

Polaris rolls out with 3.3

[A] “did you mean?” functionality (using an open source dictionary), relevancy ranking (using tag weighting), and faceted search capabilities (similar to what Endeca offers) for helping users to narrow and refine searches. It also uses AJAX technology to eliminate pop-up windows.  

Big Picture Thanks

Bloomsbury to look inside

will make the feature available for booksellers to use on their own websites. The "Look Inside" feature will be available on all Bloomsbury websites, including Bloomsbury USA, Walker & Company, A&C Black and Berlin Verlag.

Speaking of distribution....

Speaking of Hachette...

Chronicle Books has signed a distribution deal with the Hachette Book Group set to take effect January 1, 2008 . Currently Chronicle is distributed by GENCO Distribution Systems in Reno, but Tom Fernald, v-p of operations and finance for the San Francisco-based publisher, said it wanted a distributor with more services and experience in the book world.

Time Warner shrinking even more

To be sure, a complete exit is the least likely course to be adopted, people involved in the debate say. More likely is that Time Warner will decide to gradually reduce its 84% stake in Time Warner Cable Inc., possibly through acquisitions, while still maintaining a significant interest.

Some within Time Warner wonder whether the company wouldn't be better off if it were to get out of cable and double down on the Web -- where it already owns AOL -- by buying another major Internet company, just as News Corp. acquired MySpace and Google Inc. bought YouTube.

We're free now!

The Big Picture

Fran Toolan's Boston Marathon

Digital books

Wikipedia "broken"

I’m afraid that Mr Johnson does not realise the many problems afflicting Wikipedia, from serious management problems, to an often dysfunctional community, to frequently unreliable content, and to a whole series of scandals. While Wikipedia is still quite useful and an amazing phenomenon, I have come to the view that it is also broken beyond repair.

"Webscabs" undercutting "Copy(far)righters"?

[Hendrix] referred to such writers as "webscabs," and accused them of "rotting our organization from within." He got more specific: "Webscabs claim they're just posting their books for free in an attempt to market and publicize them, but to my mind they're undercutting those of us who aren't giving it away for free and are trying to get publishers to pay a better wage for our hard work."

"I'm willing to bet a nice chunk of change that there isn't a single person he would point to that he can prove is undercutting themselves, other writers or the genre directly by using the online medium for promotion," Scalzi concluded. "I, on the other hand, can very easily show you an entire group of people and entities who are using freely-available work online to build the genre."

London

Publishers Portal - more news

We are trying to serve a new market: e-book sites. Setting up an e-book site requires only modest resources  - no inventory, no fulfillment. The buyer pays on-line via credit card.

In most cases when a sale is made the buyer is linked to the e-book creator for fulfillment. A number of sites are offering only Lightning Source books. Lightning handles delivery, real time. In effect the sites are agents for Lightning Source.

A Library Closes, A Bookstore Gets Less Business

"When they closed, we lost one of our best customers," Budmayr [the B&N store manager] said. "I'd say we're the first to want them to open right back up. There's not a lot of margin on books. When you buy bulk quantities you can do better locally than paying a publisher to do the shipping."

"I think people who can afford it, will buy new books and trade them," Stoddart [manager of an independent bookstore nearby] said. "The people who can't are out of luck."

She cited one client who calculated what he would pay in taxes if the proposed library levy on the May 15 ballot were to pass.

"He had figured out how much his taxes would increase," Stoddart said. "He told me: 'For that money, I would rather buy what I want to buy and then trade them in.' "

Publisher Services In a Digital World

The vast majority of publishers in the UK and US are small and do not have the depth of experience or financial capacity to support their own back office functions which is why 'publisher service' programs by larger publishers and companies like NBS and PGW exist. Similar issues will exist in the digital world and perhaps the financial aspects and the knowledge gap will be even more stark as processes and applications become more technology driven. Regrettably, as digital distribution becomes a basic service it will simply be out of the reach of the less sophisticated publisher. And this is where Harpercollins, Random House and others will step in to offer a range of digital services to support this market.

Google and publishers

If you mean, are book publishers as we know them doomed? Then the answer is "probably yes." But it isn't Google's connecting everything together that's doing it. If people still want books, all this promotion of discovery will obviously help. But if they want nuggets of information, it won't. Obviously, a big part of the market that book publishers have owned for 200 years want the nuggets, not a narrative. They're going, going, gone. The skills of a "publisher" -- developing content and connecting it to markets -- will have to be applied in different ways.

Dude, not to put to fine a point on it, but the last I checked, you had an office on the Berkeley campus, and Moffitt [Berkeley's library] has two copies, neither of which are checked out. The call no. is HM131 .P382 1986; tell 'em I sent you. :)

BBC Audiobooks jumping across the pond

[T]he Beeb has been providing audiobooks to American libraries for a while now, but the release of a "BBC Audio" edition of Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist this month marks their entrance into the U.S. trade market, with distribution provided by Perseus.

Kurt Vonnegut no longer with us

Free content - AGAIN

Teleread blog

Publishers Portal teams up with PW

Microsoft and DRM

Library economics

Books we love

Hallelujah

Technical difficulties

NetLibrary offers Subject Sets

B&N: Stock troubles of its own

Barnes & Noble Inc. said an internal investigation found pervasive backdating and misdating of stock options, along with incorrect entries in board minutes, but attributed the bulk of the problems to a "widespread misconception" on the part of senior management that the practices were proper.

A person familiar with Mr. Rosen's statements to the independent investigators confirmed the accuracy of the company's release. He said Mr. Rosen thought the use of hindsight to select advantageous grant dates was "OK." "He was looking at it as a corporate-law issue, not an accounting issue." 

Ebooks: Flop or Forerunner?

To me the real punch line of this article is that almost every listed flop has subsequently given rise to major technology successes. DAT tape paved the way for CDs, Newton for PDAs/smartphones, even the PC Jr. arguably was a forerunner, at least conceptually, of the very successful iMac. The paperless office hasn't exactly come to pass, but I sure get a lot less inter-office mail, and I print way less than I used to.

A large-scale digital publishing market is inevitable and it's starting to happen. Yes devices need to get better: they are. Yes, we need format standardization: it's happening.

Borders Backpedals

Some investors are pushing for a merger with Borders' closest rival, Barnes & Noble Inc. Market expectations for such a deal were fed last year when hedge fund Pershing Square Capital Management, run by activist investor William Ackman, took big positions in both companies. Pershing owns a 12% stake in Borders, according to an April 4 filing. Barnes & Noble executives have dismissed rumors of a deal.

Google Books and Libraries

• Libraries have been digitizing their holdings long before Google came on the scene.
• The massive scope of Google Book Search requires libraries to create new partnerships to make use of all this digital content.
• Most of the libraries in the project are scanning only public-domain works until the copyright issues get sorted out.

CueCats!!

ILS Vendor Report

No Goliath stood unchallenged. The Davids of the industry continued to prosper by carving out niches underserved by the larger companies and capitalizing on the growing interest in open source software alternatives. Following many years of near evangelistic rhetoric, 2006 was the year that open source ILS products finally gained a measurable presence.

xSBN

Angela Bole promoted to Associate Director, BISG

The Big Picture - Issue 2 is out!

• The Download: my monthly column - this time on the resurging relevance of libraries
• This Issue's Acronym: ISTC – International Standard Text Code
• Intel on companies (Borders, Waterstone’s, Holtzbrinck’s, Wolters Kluwer), products (VTLS Virtua ILS, Blogs on Demand, Content on Demand), and people (Muze)

Bar Codes - New York Times

House hunters, driving past a for-sale sign, stop and point their cellphone at the sign. With a click, their cellphone screen displays the asking price, the number of bedrooms and baths and lots of other details about the house.

Teleread on EMI

Consumers hate DRM, and all the legislation and “education” prorgrams in the world won’t change that. While I’d vastly prefer gentle DRM over the Draconian variety, the best solution is none. I’ll spend much more on e-books if I can own them for real.

The Big Picture

Delaware libraries are the place to be

Delawareans made close to 4 million visits to the state's public libraries in 2005 -- up from about 2.8 million in 2000, according to statistics compiled by the Delaware Division of Libraries.

Awareness that Shelf Awareness is Pulling Your Leg

ISBN-13 to the 10th Power is coming! Prepare for the ultimate: a book identifier with so many digits that every book ever printed will have its own unique ISBN. The Book Industry Study Group invites booksellers, librarians, publishers, wholesalers and anyone having trouble sleeping at night to read more about the transition to ISBN-13 to the 10th Power at www.goodgodnotmorenumbers.org.

EMI to sell songs without DRM

EMI temporarily shelved plans to drop DRM after various iTunes competitors declined to guarantee significant "risk insurance" payments designed to offset potential losses from the move. It is unclear whether Apple has guaranteed any such fee.

Mountains & Plains presentation