What the iPad Told Me

Category: Metadata , Bookselling

So. The Unicorn has arrived and everyone is busily playing. Apart from all the pros and cons – which are really noisy – what this means is that we have yet another way to search for and access books.

Anyone who doubts that most readers are searching for their next good book online is not paying attention. Review publications are shuttering. The Sunday book review section in your local paper – seen it lately? if I’m wrong, but I believe the New York Times Book Review is pretty much the only big consumer review still published on paper. (Except for industry-specific publications like Publishers Weekly and Kirkus, which – as we know – are going through struggles of their own.) And of course all of these have websites and license their reviews to e-commerce engines.

So how do people find out about good books?

If they’re interested in trade books – fiction, genre books – they probably go to Amazon or B&N.com. They read the customer reviews. They also go to blogs – Dear Author, Smart Bitches.

If they’re interested in specific subjects – cooking, history, biography – they probably Google what they’re interested in (“Indian cooking”), and link out from those search results.

Online discovery has become the new book review.

Which poses a new set of challenges to publishers. How do you get your books to come up first in a search? How do you reach the right bloggers and get effective reviews out there? To many publishers who are grappling with this, it all looks like a crapshoot. And several small publishers I know have simply thrown up their hands rather than tried to understand the way readers are now looking for books (and consuming them).

Search is not easy to understand. Most of us type something into the Google box, and expect that what comes up will be appropriate, correct, the best resources out there on the subject. Librarians will tell you that this is a fallacy – there are plenty of things Google doesn’t pick up. Just because a searcher doesn’t find it, doesn’t mean it’s not there.

Much of that “findability” (and I know I beat this drum a lot, but it still, apparently, needs beating) has to do with a book’s metadata. Not simply title and author, but the BISAC codes, the description, the table of contents – anything that describes what the book is about. If a publisher is not paying attention to metadata, it will be much harder for readers to find that publisher’s books.

Another aspect of “findability” is how many times that book is mentioned on the web. Which means…bloggers. As a publisher, you want your books to be reviewed as often as possible on the web. So a crucial strategy for any publicity department is to create a roster of bloggers and get them review copies (many prefer these to be digital).

There are some fantastic tools out there for publishers trying to pinpoint bloggers – NetGalley is a great one. And a brand-new effort (by Brett Sandusky of Kaplan and Rebecca the Book Lady) just launched yesterday: an anonymous survey of bloggers which will cycle back to publishers and help them strategize their publicity approaches.

Regardless of the iPad’s hype, it is the latest of many horses to leave the barn (trains to leave station, cats to jump out of bag, genies to come out of bottle). Consumption is increasingly digital. Discovery is almost wholly digital. Publishers need to recognize this, understand it, and figure out how to make it work for them.

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Posted by Laura Dawson , April 7, 10, 8:19 PM , comments(2) , permalink ,

Metadata! More Important Than Ever!

Category: Metadata , E-commerce

My passion for metadata isn’t a big secret – since my days at Muze and B&N.com, I’ve witnessed firsthand how good metadata helps people find the books they are looking for, and how bad metadata prevents people from finding what they want.

Why is this relevant now?

Well, CES showed us that there is a great interest in ebook readers – 23 of them debuted there, and an entire “Ebook Zone” was created. Apple is negotiating with publishers to sell content (books, magazines, newspapers) on its soon-to-appear tablet. With all these digitized books, search becomes more crucial than ever – web search is the ONLY way people are going to purchase these digital products.

Discovery/review services like NetGalley – as well as all the ecommerce sites – are heavily reliant on metadata not just for listing titles, but also for search algorithms themselves. (You’d think that would go without saying, but it doesn’t.)

Whether it’s “semantic” search or a more traditional browsing hierarchy, search technologies rest on metadata. Tags, definitions, clarifications (“when we say ‘porcelain’ we mean fine china, not toilets”) are all necessary to guide users to the information they want.

This metadata may not come in the form of the traditional ONIX feed. If a book file is marked up in XML (whether via InDesign or anything else), the title, author, BISAC and LC subject codes, price, publisher, and copyright date can all be easily derived from that book file – because those data points are defined in the file (usually in the front matter) with tags.

But just as with ONIX, what’s inside those tags has to be correct. This has a better shot at happening if the search engine is pulling from the book itself (the author name, for example, is not likely to be misspelled in the actual book).

In recently-released recommendations to the publishing industry, BIC has stated: "Publishers must retain responsibility, wherever possible and appropriate, for the metadata of the products they publish, in all formats, print and digital." Another company, Giant Chair has built its entire business around hosting a metadata platform for publishers: “When equipped with the appropriate tools, publishers are naturally the most qualified and motivated source for metadata creation and enrichment.”

Which makes sense!

Except in the real world it doesn’t quite play out that way. In my career, I’ve seen lots of publisher-generated metadata. There’s a reason why NetRead, Eloquence, and other data-scrubbing services exist. There’s a reason why Ingram, Bowker, and Baker & Taylor have departments of data editors who normalize and standardize that data. There’s a reason why librarians spend countless hours re-cataloguing titles for WorldCat. There’s a reason why BISG launched its Product Data Certification Program.

And that reason is: while publishers make the books, they continue not to pay sufficient attention to the accuracy of their data. While publishers are the definitive source of who the author is, what the list price is, what the book is about…they are not recording a lot of that information accurately. Because if they were, Fran Toolan and Greg Aden would have to find new things to do. Richard Stark would suddenly find himself with weeks and weeks of free time. Thousands of library cataloguers would be out of work. Ingram, Bowker, and B&T databases would be redundant. PDCP would not be necessary.

But good metadata IS publishers’ responsibility, fundamentally. They can outsource that responsibility, but ultimately it does all come back to the publishers. As our digital landscape explodes – as web search becomes not just one way but THE way readers find what’s next on their reading lists – metadata only becomes more important. If your sales are dipping, it’s entirely possible that readers can’t find your books. Take a look at your data. The solution is probably there.

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Posted by Laura Dawson , January 21, 10, 8:46 PM , comments(1) , permalink ,

ISBNs and ebooks: Part 7624

Category: Metadata , E-commerce , Digital Publishing , Bookselling

Yesterday the AAP's Digital Working Group hosted a meeting where Phil Madans of Hachette, Angela Bole of BISG, and I talked about ISBNs and identifying digital content. This came on the heels of Mark Bide's webinar for BISG yesterday on the same subject.

We broke the topic down into three discrete parts: ISBNs and ebooks, ISBNs and chapters, and ISBNs and "chunks". I stopped the presentation after each slide so we could discuss each part before moving on to the next one. And some interesting findings emerged.

Metadata

The primary objection (even more than cost - but of course these were larger publishers who can buy identifiers in bulk at a discount) to assigning an ISBN to each format of ebook is having to track the metadata on each record. Databases begin to bloat with products that are identical except for format, and managing the metadata becomes both repetitive and confusing.

Furthermore, it became apparent that publishers are not particularly using ISBNs to track royalties and sales - they are using SEVERAL fields, and the ISBN is not even necessarily the most important among them. So the ISBN International Agency's argument that the ISBN is an essential tool for tracking these things falls by the wayside.

We talked a bit about the prospect of third parties assigning ISBNs to different ebook formats - most publishers seem to just want to produce an EPUB file, assign an ISBN to that one, and then send it "into the wild" (as Bide says) for conversion and distribution. The distributors and retailers are primarily book-related and their databases are generally keyed off an ISBN, so those third parties would have to assign ISBNs to whatever formats they are distributing and selling. But the publishers at this meeting did not seem particularly worried about that prospect.

One publisher also stressed that by supporting more than one format, they're contributing to format proliferation and they would prefer very much not to do that.

However, the downside to allowing third parties to assign ISBNs to digital products on an as-needed basis becomes problematic when there are changes to the metadata. If a pub date shifts, if a price goes up, if there are corrections to author names, additions to synopses and reviews - any time you have to edit the metadata on a title, if you've got third parties with their OWN editions of that title, you can't be sure the edited/corrected metadata will reach those editions.

ISBNs and Chapters

Even less popular than the one-ISBN-per-format model is the one-ISBN-per-chapter idea. This expands the metadata bloat exponentially. At present, most publishers who are offering chapters for sale are doing so from their own websites, so ISBNs are not such an issue. However, once retailers begin offering individual chapters of books, the industry will face the same problems it does with different ebook formats. Multiplied by however many chapters are in a given book.

In addition to identification of chapters for the purposes of trading with third parties, there is the issue of tracking royalties. With textbook authors, this is problematic - many authors contribute to textbooks, and determining who wrote which chapters can be daunting. It was generally agreed that without significant market demand, identifying chapters for the purposes of trade is not a high priority.

ISBNs and "Chunks"

First there was the objection to the term "chunks". Which I agree with! It's nasty. But Anna Wintour said the same thing about the word "blog"...and look where that got her! It seems "chunk" is the term we're stuck with, and I am heartily sorry about that.

Second, everyone at the meeting pretty much agreed that this is a vastly esoteric subject and not likely to become a pressing issue anytime soon. Even Amazon does not sell sub-chapter-level content. Licensing content to third parties (such as websites) will likely mean putting together discrete digital assets into various packages, but there seems to be no trade reason right now for ISBNs to be attached to those packages. This may change as the market changes.

We ended with a "watch this space" message, and are now putting together a survey which looks at some of the assumptions behind past ISBN-use recommendations.

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Posted by Laura Dawson , September 17, 09, 1:26 PM , comments(0) , permalink ,

BISG/BIC White Paper on identifiers

Category: Publishing , Metadata , E-commerce , Digital Publishing , Bookselling , Libraries , Digital Libraries

BISG/BIC has commissioned Michael Holdsworth, formerly managing director of Cambridge University Press, to write a white paper on identifying digital content. It's out, available, posted:

The Identification of Digital Book Content is intended to stimulate debate in the book industry about how digital book content should be identified and to encourage further work on the development and implementation of identification standards and best practices for such content.

I've read the paper - it's really good and should indeed spark a lot of discussion. We'll be covering it in Identifier Committee meetings at BISAC - those who are interested should go to the BISG website and sign up for that committee. We'll be sending around a new meeting time soon (having it after the BISAC General meetings hasn't been too inspiring, frankly).

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Posted by Laura Dawson , January 9, 08, 11:18 AM , comments(0) , permalink ,

More Muzing

Category: Metadata , E-commerce , Company News

Don Henderson left me a comment yesterday (my comments indicator isn't working properly for some reason, so it looks like there are 0 comments for that post, when in fact if you click on "comments" you'll see his post). He very justly corrects me - it's LEE Ho who's the VP of marketing over at Muze...JEFF Ho works in marketing at McGraw-Hill and I got them confused.

At any rate, Don goes on to say "There are plenty of Muze personnel left". Indeed! But my question is...how much experience do they have in the particular market Muze addresses? How much institutional knowledge is left when so many of the folks who have been with the company for years have now left? What's to prevent Muze from making the same mistakes over and over again when that institutional knowledge is no longer there?

Since I left in November 2006, the company has been gutted. I'm sure many wonderful people have come in to replace those who have left or been laid off, but that kind of turnover has a profound effect on a place. It's not a question of moving bodies and minds around - when turnover is that high, there's a sacrifice in the organic growth and cohesion of a company. And I wonder if Muze can make up for that.

Muze has amazed me before. It began in 1990 (or thereabouts) in a warehouse in Williamsburg. I came on board in 1995, at the tail end of the warehouse phase - wires and cables draped from ceiling to floor; running the copy machine too long would blow a fuse that would take out the entire video department; it was a bizarre combination of old and new that was right out of a Terry Gilliam movie. In that environment, we played and learned and developed amazing applications. Moving to Soho in 1996, the Skunkworks mindset continued. It was a place of extraordinary inventiveness.

And yet...it wasn't sustainable. Through massive mismanagement, Muze lost several dozen people, many of whom flocked to Barnes & Noble.com. (I was one of them - I went in 1998.) The mismanagement continued - we'd hear things about one disasterous CEO after another. When I returned in 2006, it seemed that things had stabilized...but this was deceptive, obviously.

No one running the company has ever known quite what to do with it. It is such a promising enterprise - and it attracts extremely gifted people - but every single CEO it's had has wanted to turn it into something it isn't. This last round...turning it into a company that distributes actual content instead of simply catalog metadata and sound samples...was particularly ill-thought-out. Acquiring the Loudeye assets was a mistake. It diverted the company from its core business. Muze, I think, is not a company to be transformed. It's a company that needs to make the best of what it's got - and it's got quite a lot.

I'm interested in what Peter Krause and Paul Parreira at Tactic Company are going to do - I believe they have taken the best in what Muze has to offer (editorial and data creation) and are making a business of it.

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Posted by Laura Dawson , December 13, 07, 9:27 AM , comments(0) , permalink ,

How Can They Have A Layoff If There's No One Left At The Company?

Category: Metadata , E-commerce , Company News , Digital Publishing

Just in time for Christmas, Muze has laid off an undisclosed number of staffers from its Seattle office. John Cook of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer apparently got a tip that 75% of the Seattle contingent was let go, but the new VP of marketing, Jeff Ho, disputes this:

"It is not that big of a cut," said Ho, who declined to disclose the number of employees at the company....Ho said the company is "right sizing" the digital media delivery group, which is based in Seattle.

Ho added (rather ominously) that in terms of severance packages, the laid-off employees were "taken care of". When Muze laid me off (at Thanksgiving of last year), I was taken care of, too - with a whole two weeks' severance.

Predicting that Muze strips the company of its assets and sells them off, and folds like a Japanese fan.

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Posted by Laura Dawson , December 12, 07, 10:26 AM , comments(1) , permalink ,

More Muzers

Category: Metadata , E-commerce , Company News

In an attempt to counter the torrent of departing Muze personnel, two executives have been added to the team in New York: Joslyn Lane, Managing Editor of Media Information (replacing Paul Parreira and Peter Krause), and Lee Ho, VP of Marketing (replacing someone whose name I forget because he wasn't there long enough for it to stick).

Meanwhile, Mike Pegan, former director of sales for Muze, is now back at AMG.

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Posted by Laura Dawson , November 28, 07, 9:53 AM , comments(0) , permalink ,

Harvard Coop: ISBNs are our intellectual property

Category: Metadata , Bookselling

In what must be one of the most incredible arguments in the world of book data, the Harvard Coop has been punting students out of its store for jotting down ISBNs and pricing information (in an attempt to do an online search to see if they can find the books cheaper elsewhere) - on the premise that the ISBNs are the bookstore's intellectual property and the students are thus violating copyright law by taking them down.

Here's the real deal, in case anyone is wondering:

If an ISBN is anyone's property, it's the publisher's property. The publisher bought and paid for the ISBN. The Coop is way out of line on this one. What those students are doing is completely legal. The only way the Coop could justifiably kick students out of the store is if they have a policy stating that comparison shopping is not permitted in the store.

This situation, however, adds fuel to the textbook-pricing-is-out-of-control fire - and furthers our own argument that digital textbooks are pretty much the only way costs are going to come down on textbooks, and that libraries will be playing an increasing role in textbook distribution just as they do with scholarly journal distribution. For more on this, see the latest issue of The Big Picture, or download our white paper, "What Publishers Should Know About Libraries."

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Posted by Laura Dawson , September 27, 07, 8:54 AM , comments(0) , permalink ,

IDPF approves Open Publication Structure 2.0

Category: Metadata , Digital Publishing

The members of the IDPF have approved the Open Publication Standard v. 2.0, according to Publishers Weekly:

The IDPF adoption of OPS 2.0 along with the ".epub" file format that goes with it (the OPS 2.0 standard uses the .epub file extension for reflowable text) means that publishers can now create one digital book file instead of the 6 to10 formats previously required....The new standard also means interoperability for ebooks with consumers now being able to read non-DRM digital books on any software or device that uses the .epub standard.

Woo-hoo! So now you can download MobiPocket ebooks to read on your Sony Reader, right?

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Posted by Laura Dawson , September 13, 07, 8:22 AM , comments(0) , permalink ,

The Big Picture - nterview with Steve Potash, CEO Overdrive-Digital Library Reserve

Category: Metadata , E-commerce , Bookselling , Libraries , Digital Libraries , The Big Picture

In this issue of The Big Picture:

THE DOWNLOAD: - by industry consultant Laura Dawson
INTERVIEW: - Steve Potash – CEO of Overdrive-Digital Library Reserve
TIA - THIS ISSUE'S ACRONYM - EAN
INTEL: COMPANIES - Overdrive teams up with Navy General Library
INTEL: PRODUCTS - Google Custom Search Business Edition launched
INTEL: PEOPLE - Former Muzers join MyStrands
THE JOB EXCHANGE - Visit the new LJNDawson.com on-site job board!

From The Download:
"I recently did a consulting gig for an e-commerce website whose database was about 10 years old. Essentially, we scrapped the old database and built a new one – which involved some very careful, step-by-step cleansing of their metadata before plugging it into the new structure. Titles, author names, subject classifications – all had to be gone over with a fine-tooth comb in an Excel spreadsheet.

Not the sexiest gig in the world, and I believe the lead developer (and he’ll confirm this for me, I’m sure) was bored out of his mind with that process. But immediately upon pumping the cleaned data to the website, customers wrote in to say they could find products more easily. (I was shocked, frankly, that customers would take the time to do this – you’re supposed to be able to find things; that customers don’t take this for granted while shopping online just tells me how bad search is these days.)

Finding products more easily, of course, leads to better sales results. If you can find it, you can buy it..."

Click here to access our newsletter archives and read the August 8, 2007 issue in full.

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Posted by Laura Dawson , August 8, 07, 7:00 AM , comments(0) , permalink ,

Capturing HP7 Reading Activity Online

Category: Metadata , Libraries

Hard to know how to even classify this post. LibraryThing has done a chart that's really hysterical - Tim's gathered the news-messages stats on Harry Potter for the month of July. There's a spike around the time the HP5 movie came out, and then a HUGE spike just prior to publication of HP7. Then for a day and a half there's a dramatic DROP in posts...while people were reading the book...followed by a really enormous spike again once they were finished and had to talk about it:

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Posted by Laura Dawson , July 25, 07, 9:59 AM , comments(0) , permalink ,

XML in Publishing

Category: Metadata , E-commerce , Digital Publishing

Francis Cave and Alex Brown are running an XML in Publishing workshop which looks pretty fascinating. According to Alex's post on the Griffin-Brown blog, the course covers

the basic principles of mark-up languages
the roles XML can play in publishing
what it is like to work with XML data.

The course is being offered on 9/25 at the Publishing Training Centre at Book House. (More or less the UK equivalent of the NYU Center for Publishing.) You can find out more here.

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Posted by Laura Dawson , July 25, 07, 9:33 AM , comments(0) , permalink ,

The Big Picture - Interview with Cliff Guren, Microsoft Live Search Books

Category: Metadata , Digital Publishing , Bookselling , Digital Libraries , Microsoft , The Big Picture

In this issue of The Big Picture:

THE DOWNLOAD: - by industry consultant Laura Dawson
INTERVIEW: - Cliff Guren - Director of Publisher Evangelism, Microsoft Live Search Books
TIA - THIS ISSUE'S ACRONYM - BIC/EDItEUR
INTEL: COMPANIES - MediaBay dissolves, liquidates
INTEL: PRODUCTS - The inevitable Harry Potter hubub
INTEL: PEOPLE - BISG out of office indefinitely
THE JOB EXCHANGE - Visit the new LJNDawson.com on-site job board!

From The Download:
"I was talking to a young man recently who works in IT at a major publishing house. He has just started grad school, and was kind of in shock at what libraries had to offer. “Whatever it is that we can think of for our books,” he said, “they’ve probably already invented it.”

I don’t know that I would quite go that far, but it is true that libraries have done a lot more with search and categorization of content than publishers are aware of. And as publishers enter this age of Google and Live Search, of widgets, of social networking – as publishers look at what technology can do to help potential readers discover their books – they probably could stand to look at what libraries have already done so they don’t re-invent the wheel..."

Click here to access our newsletter archives and read the July 24, 2007 issue in full.

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Posted by Laura Dawson , July 24, 07, 7:33 AM , comments(0) , permalink ,

Digital Standards

Category: Publishing , Google , Metadata , E-commerce , Digital Publishing , Bookselling , Industry Events , Libraries , Digital Libraries , Microsoft

Yesterday's meeting of the Digital Standards subcommittee of BISAC was actually less fractious and more consensual than I'd anticipated. (For starters, Google and Microsoft were on the same page regarding formats - neither is particularly interested in proprietary formats, but are looking to differentiate their services with their own search capabilities once files are delivered to them.)

The committee is chaired by Kent Freeman, of Ingram Digital Group, who's found himself in a Michael Corleone-esque position regarding BISAC: "Every time I try to get out, they keep pulling me back in!" Attendees ranged from Google/Microsoft to publishers (Random, Wiley), to service providers (Quality Solutions, FYI, Bowker, yrs truly) to distributors (Ingram). Peter Brantley of the Digital Library Federation also attended (by phone), as did Nick Bogaty of IDPF.

Essentially, Chris Hart of Random House discussed the issues he'd brought to AAP regarding digital distribution, and with his help the committee was able to divide issues into those around "discoverability" vs those around the actual content itself. Kent decided to keep us focused on discoverability and search at first, and gradually lead in to the sticky issues surrounding content delivery between trading partners.

Google presented its Book Crawl specification, which was really interesting but only in the beta-est of betas right now. All in all a terrific and informative meeting. You can join up here.

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Posted by Laura Dawson , July 13, 07, 9:35 AM , comments(0) , permalink ,

Google Book Search Gets Accessible

Category: Google , Metadata , Company News

Google Book Search announced last week that it has added a dimension to its public domain material that allows it to be accessed by disabled readers. Some of this functionality was developed by T. V. Raman, a Google technologist who cannot see. So that's pretty cool. It's good to see Google's taking disabilities into account in their search function.

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Posted by Laura Dawson , July 9, 07, 10:05 AM , comments(0) , permalink ,

Charts! We have charts!

Category: Publishing , Metadata , Bookselling

In addition to the aforementioned white paper, I've also created two charts that will be useful particularly to independent publishers, but I wanted to mention them here because others might find them useful as well.

The first, "The ISBN Trail", traces the ISBN throughout the book supply chain. It gives a clear picture of why the ISBN is important, what it's used for, and why it's crucial that it not be re-used - why an ISBN needs to be unique for each book you're selling. So if you're having trouble educating people inside your organization, this chart may prove quite useful to you. Very expense-able at $9.95.

Likewise, the "Metadata" chart follows a book's metadata throughout the supply chain as well. It's different from the ISBN chart because so much more goes into metadata - reviews, cover images, tables of contents, etc. - and this chart tracks the points at which these things are added to the overall metadata package, who adds them, where the potential breakdown points occur, and why your listings look like they do on Amazon, B&N, Alibris, etc. Again, very expense-able at $9.95.

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Posted by Laura Dawson , July 5, 07, 9:14 AM , comments(0) , permalink ,

ABEbooks looking for a catalog manager

Category: Metadata , E-commerce , Bookselling

From the HR Department at ABEbooks:

Catalog Manager – AbeBooks.com

Did you ever think of books as high-tech?

Are you exceptionally analytical and creative, and ready to help grow AbeBooks’ existing and new business initiatives? Are you visionary and entrepreneurial, able to identify and determine strategy to drive new growth opportunities? Do you have great interpersonal and communication skills, and can you drive initiatives through by building consensus?

AbeBooks is looking for a unique person who can step in immediately and provide product direction and business leadership to drive results for our Catalog and related products. If you are able to independently manage multiple projects and deliver high-quality results, then you are the person for us.

Candidates must have a demonstrated track record of successfully leading cross-functional teams to launch quality products. They must be comfortable within a fast-paced, innovative environment and have worked with various functional teams within a company as well as external companies and vendors.

RESPONSIBILITIES:

Products:

Fulfill the primary mandate of growing and maintaining the catalog and it’s content as a product of AbeBooks.
Defining the product strategy for our Catalog Product Line and become the “Catalog Evangelist”, creating and managing a Catalog Roadmap.
Developing product specific business cases, recommendations and requirements
Prioritizing product requirements and making trade-offs within the product development process
Tracking performance metrics of current products and services
Working within the Product Management Group to ensure the success of catalog related products that are owned by other Product Managers.
Leading a wide variety of projects, including new product analysis and development, profit and loss forecasting, industry analysis and building alliances
Owning the product throughout the execution cycle, including gathering product requirements, defining product vision, creating design concepts, and working closely with engineering to implement and iterate

Data:

Manage and organize the acquisition, importing and updating of catalog data from various sources both external and internal
Defining and then monitoring levels of quality for the data
Tracking catalog data metrics

Corporate Relationships:

Engaging with partners, such as Fillz, Bookfinder and LibraryThing as well as other external entities to drive product plans and requirements.

Industry Standards:

Researching and keeping abreast of industry standards regarding cataloging (e.g. Book Industry Study Group (BISG), ISBN, OCLC, ONIX, et. al.)

QUALIFICATIONS:
The successful candidate will have

at least 3 years of experience in product management, preferably in a software or web site company.
Experience in managing cross-functional technical projects and the ability to interface with technical teams and influence their decision-making are also requirements.
Highly organized, excellent interpersonal skills and an affinity for technology
Demonstrable experience in identifying new business opportunities and in developing and implementing plans that capitalize on these opportunities
All candidates must have a BA or BS; an MBA is highly desired; a degree in a CS field is a huge plus.
Proficiency in Excel and PowerPoint; the ability to write SQL queries is an asset.

Please direct all resumes to or fax to Attention: Human Resources, 250- 475-6014. We appreciate your interest in AbeBooks!

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Posted by Laura Dawson , June 20, 07, 12:23 PM , comments(0) , permalink ,

ISBN rumors

Category: Publishing , Metadata , E-commerce , Bookselling

A large publisher recently tried to get a block of ISBNs for upcoming publications - and was told by the US ISBN Agency that they were no longer releasing blocks larger than 1000. Some confusion ensued, and it seemed like a good time to clarify what's been going on over at US ISBN.

Because of the proliferation of digital content that requires an ISBN to be sold, and because of the changes wrought by ISBN-13, US ISBN has been monitoring the distribution of ISBNs very closely.

While larger publishers who have been in the business for a long time should have no trouble getting their traditionally large blocks of ISBNs, newcomers to the industry are being guided more carefully to make sure they are using their ISBNs properly. Part of this guidance appears to be releasing only 1000 ISBNs at a time to these publishers, to make sure that the industry data pool isn't flooded with incorrect data.

Those who have questions regarding ISBNs in the US should go to the ISBN Agency website.

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Posted by Laura Dawson , June 20, 07, 10:37 AM , comments(0) , permalink ,

Muze launches Open Media Exchange

Category: Metadata , E-commerce , Company News

Muze announced this morning that it has launched something called Open Media Exchange. According to the press release:

The Open Media Exchange™ is designed to provide an open, collaborative, standards-based framework and delivery platform for the creation, marketing, and distribution of digital media. Built as an extension of Muze's market-tested MediaDNA™ Digital Media Platform version 2.5, OMX™ enables unprecedented collaboration between content owners, retailers, mobile providers and other stakeholders in the industry by centralizing processing, and sharing common infrastructure, applications, and databases. This collaboration eliminates duplicate investment, accelerates time-to-market, and provides consumers with more choice and flexibility.

It will also wash your socks and put your kids to bed.

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Posted by Laura Dawson , June 20, 07, 9:41 AM , comments(0) , permalink ,

979s to be in circulation by early 2008

Category: Publishing , Metadata , E-commerce , Bookselling

ISBNs prefixed with 979 will be in circulation by the 2nd quarter of 2008, says the Book Industry Study Group in their latest press release. What does this mean, exactly?

Books published now have a 13-digit ISBN that begins with 978. These are convertable to 10-digit ISBNs, which have been in circulation from the 1970s until recently. For more information on why the book industry went from 10-digit ISBNs to 13-digit ISBNs, look here.

The release of ISBNs prefixed with 979 means that these numbers are not backward-compatible - you can't convert a 979 ISBN to a 10-digit number.

This means that by 2nd quarter of 2008, all book-industry systems MUST be able to accommodate 13-digit ISBNs. MUST means "you have to, or you can't transact with distributors, publishers, booksellers, or anybody else in the industry".

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Posted by Laura Dawson , June 8, 07, 9:33 AM , comments(0) , permalink ,

The Big Picture

Category: Publishing , Metadata , Bookselling , The Big Picture

In this issue of The Big Picture:

THE DOWNLOAD: - by Laura Dawson
TIA - THIS ISSUE'S ACRONYM - DOI – Digital Object Identifier
INTEL: COMPANIES - Library of Congress and Bibliotheca Alexandrina form World Digital Library
INTEL: PRODUCTS - BBC expands distribution of audiobooks via Perseus
INTEL: PEOPLE - Fran Toolan raises funds for Dana-Farber Cancer Institute at Boston Marathon
THE JOB EXCHANGE - Listing the hottest jobs in the sector

"Maybe it’s the Sudafed, but this morning I woke up thinking about identifiers.

I’m consulting to a company that distributes e-audio books, and onsite we’ve been talking a lot about how useful ISBNs are. I’m also chairing the BISAC Identifiers Committee, where we engage in rambunctious conversations about what the best identifier is for this product and that – conversations that get more rambunctious with the introduction of digital products for sale. And over the last week or so, all of these discussions coalesced for me into some cogent thought (or, at least, I hope it’s cogent).

As more and more book content is available to consumers, the question of how to identify it becomes more important. And here’s why: so long as a company is offering digital products for sale on its own website, identifiers are only important insofar as that company can track sales. But when that company begins exchanging information with other companies – sending out data feeds for distribution on other websites – it’s crucial that the products get identified in ways everyone can understand..."

Click here to access our newsletter archives and read the April 17, 2007 issue in full.

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Posted by Laura Dawson , April 17, 07, 6:33 AM , comments(0) , permalink ,

xSBN

Category: Publishing , Metadata , Bookselling

It seems that the problem of what to do post-ISBN-13 in some markets hasn't entirely been solved.

The school textbook sector sells into statewide adoption programs and school districts - many of which are not inclined to change their database systems to accommodate a new number. (I have heard of some districts that are still operating on a 9-digit identifier.)

A kerfuffle arose yesterday on the ISBN-13 Task Force bulletin board (part of the BISAC Committees), which is being absorbed into the Identifiers Committee. Several textbook publishers are continuing to use a 10-digit identifier in addition to the ISBN-13 to accommodate these school markets. This in itself is not worth much of a stir...but it turns out one publisher was about to call this 10-digit identifier "NSBN" - meaning "Non-Standard Book Number".

Many might remember the eSBN of a few years ago - a company created a registry for electronic product identifiers. ISBN International contacted this company about the use of "SBN" and how it would confuse the book industry - and the company promptly renamed their identifier a "numly number". (You can read more about that here.)

Any identifier with the term "SBN" in its name is bound to confuse those who trade regularly in ISBNs. Library of Congress will begin cataloging that number - and that data will trickle out into the regular stream of trade and find its way into ONIX feeds. Which may seem desirable on one level, but on another level, without some kind of education, people won't know how (and when, and when not) to use your number.

This is one of the conundrums being taken up by the Identifiers Committee at BISAC. Those who are interested in issues like these can contact the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) and get information on how to join the conversation.

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Posted by Laura Dawson , April 5, 07, 7:39 AM , comments(0) , permalink ,

The Big Picture Launches Tomorrow

Category: Publishing , Copyright Law , Metadata , E-commerce , Company News , Digital Publishing , Industry Events , Libraries , Digital Libraries , DRM

Tomorrow's the official launch of The Big Picture, our newsletter about technology in publishing, bookselling and libraries.

Jim Lichtenberg of Lightspeed LLC has a guest column about the whole Google/Microsoft/AAP/Viacom mishigas - making sense out of it for all of us in the book industry.
We introduce TIA - This Issue's Acronym - with an explanation of FRBR: what it is, what it's supposed to do, and who uses it.
We've got industry gossip - the latest scoop on your trading partners, their products, and their people.

Hot, hot, hot, people! Subscribe here.

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Posted by Laura Dawson , March 19, 07, 8:59 AM , comments(0) , permalink ,

More on the Frankfurt Book Fair

Category: Publishing , Copyright Law , Metadata , E-commerce , Digital Publishing , Bookselling , Industry Events

via the October bulletin released by the Book Industry Study Group (BISG).

The report estimated the event to have hosted nearly 300,000 visitors and more than 7,000 exhibitors from 100 countries, with nearly 200 delegates who came from around the world specifically to hear details of supply chain initiatives at the 28th annual International Supply Chain Specialists Meeting.

Newly introduced at the event by Mark Bide of UK based Rightscom was ACAP (Automated Content Access Protocol), "an initiative that aims to standardize the way license terms are communicated between publishers and search engines such as Google and Yahoo. Sponsored by the International Publishers Association, the European Publishers Council and the World Association of Newspapers, ACAP will launch a 12-month pilot project in November that will involve a number of major publishers and at least one search engine."

According to the BISG bulletin, all presentations from the book fair will be available at EDItEUR in the near future.

Already available are a number of presentations from the International Supply Chain Specialists Meeting including:
*The future of e-commerce: tales of long tails
presented by Rightscom

*Forging a new supply chain in Sweden
presented by Seelig

*Distributing digital content
presented by Ingram Digital Ventures

*The Globalization of Supply Chain Systems
presented by Pearson Plc

*Exploiting the potential of RFID in bookstores
presented by Centraal Boekhuis

*Integrating online business processes
presented by Klopotek AG

*Repurposing content in the digital age
presented by HarperCollins Publishers

*Learning from the journals supply chain
presented by Ringgold, Ramon Schrama, Swets Information Services

*Access to e-commerce for the smaller business
presented by Nielsen BookData

*The US Christian Retail Market: a new paradigm in collaborative data collection & analysis
presented by R.R. Bowker

*Global standards for a digital world
presented by EDItEUR

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Posted by Laura Dawson , October 12, 06, 7:12 AM , comments(0) , permalink ,

Upcoming: InfoCommerce 2006 Conference

Category: Publishing , Metadata , E-commerce , Digital Publishing , Industry Events

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.

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Posted by Laura Dawson , August 2, 06, 7:57 AM , comments(0) , permalink ,

Google Blogs Book Search

Category: Google , Metadata

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...

Copyright law is supposed to ensure that authors and publishers have an incentive to create new work, not stop people from finding out that the work exists. By helping people find books, we believe we can increase the incentive to publish them. After all, if a book isn't discovered, it won't be bought."

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Posted by Laura Dawson , May 17, 06, 7:13 AM , comments(0) , permalink ,

Post NISO conference

Category: Metadata , Industry Events

Just back from a conference in Bethesda at the National Library of Medicine on identifiers.

The central problems being addressed were: What makes a good identifier, how are identifiers embedded in working systems, and what technical/service infrastructure is necessary to build effective systems around good identifiers? (All of these questions were asked to determine what role NISO should have in developing identifier standards.)

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.

We discussed different types of identifiers, which Stuart labeled as "opaque", "sequentially semantic", and "encoded semantics" - and what the effectiveness of each is. An opaque ID is one that has no intrinsic meaning; a sequentially semantic ID is one which has meaning only in relation to others like it; an encoded semantic ID is one where you can look at the ID and determine attributes from the structure of the ID. An ISBN is an encoded semantic ID - publisher prefix, check digit, country code, ID of the actual product. Another word for an encoded semantic ID became (in shorthand) a "hackable" identifier - once you de-code or reverse-engineer it, you can find other products of the same sort. We discussed the positive and negative qualities of each of these types of IDs, and naturally concluded that you'd need different types for different functions and that even a "hackable" identifier was not necessarily a bad thing. (Which is largely the type of conclusion we came to about everything, it being a NISO conference.)

Another interesting notion we discussed a little - and which I'd like to see more discussion on - is the idea of identifiers as world views. What one leaves out, in defining what one is identifying, is as important as what one puts in. When you say an ISBN is an identifier for a book, what specifically about that book are you identifying? The hegemony that identifiers necessarily impose is an interesting one (a little more philosophical and political than practical, but still fun to think about).

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Posted by Laura Dawson , March 16, 06, 3:00 PM , comments(1) , permalink ,

It must be February

Category: Copyright Law , Metadata , E-commerce

The Chinese are buying things online, the fair use debate continues....Nothing new under the sun here....

The divine brings to our attention a new site, Book Catcher, which offers free PR for writers and publishers....What I can't figure out is who these folks are, where they came from, and how they support their site. If you have any info, let me know about it....

In metadata news, while Joho the Blog is peppered with comments about his Italian vacation, David Weinberger does refer us to an interesting idea here. The idea that keywords can be aggregated and almost naturally organized into taxonomies is something I've been working on for nearly a year. While a lovely hypothesis, particularly when multiple users are involved (folksonomies, wikkisonomies), it certainly isn't perfect. But I do think that a bottom-up approach is much more organic and the results do come out better. What makes me nervous is the participation of too many people in creating a taxonomy that is meaningful - eventually you run the risk of category-bleed and...as David says, "Everything is miscellaneous."

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Posted by Laura Dawson , February 21, 06, 9:08 AM , comments(0) , permalink ,

Information Wants to Be Paid for By Advertising

Category: Google , Metadata

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.

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Posted by Laura Dawson , February 1, 06, 1:46 PM , comments(0) , permalink ,

Sales up!

Category: Metadata , E-commerce

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....

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Posted by Laura Dawson , January 23, 06, 4:19 PM , comments(0) , permalink ,

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