Brenna McLaughlin
Electronic and Strategic Initiatives Director, AAUP
Much like e-catalogs, electronic galleys and review copies have been one of the great promises of electronic publishing. Printing and shipping review and exam copies can represent a large cost in a small marketing budget—even more when reaching an international market. But like most e-promises, digital galleys have taken a hard road to fulfillment, caught between the tricky questions of file security and the stubborn reality of reviewers’ habits.
In 2008, NetGalley, a subsidiary of Firebrand Technologies, was launched to help smooth this road, providing a digital galley platform that would serve the interests of both professional readers and publishers. NetGalley offers speedy transmission of secure, searchable, full-color digital galleys and multi-media press kits as well as options to read galleys on desktops or e-readers such as Kindle and Nook. Publishers can also view real-time reporting on who is reading a title. The applicability of such a service beyond pre-publication review was quickly obvious, particularly in the areas of course adoption and international rights sales.
This June, AAUP was pleased to announce a new discount program for our members, offered in partnership with NetGalley, for their innovative e-galley service. All AAUP members are now eligible for a 10% discount off of the monthly subscription rate, regardless of their level of participation. NetGalley allows publishers to share galleys and digital press kits with their own reader contacts, as well as with new communities of professional readers through the NetGalley reader membership. Professional readers can register and use the site for free.
AAUP member Island Press has been using the NetGalley services since early 2009, attracted by both the economic and environmental savings that might be realized through e-galleys. Jaime Jennings, publicity manager at Island, shared some insight into their experiences. The Press never has more than 20 new trade (or trade-crossover with professional and academic markets) titles offered in NetGalley. If a title has significant course adoption potential, they will keep it in the system for a longer time.
For course adoption, as with traditional reviewers, Jennings reports that there are some hurdles to surmount with readers. Some professors balk at downloading the Adobe Digital Editions software, and many readers simply still prefer the hard copy. Island is using a number of strategies to work through this reluctance, primarily by pushing the digital galley as an initial step in the review decision. A professor might be pleased to view a pre-publication digital galley and make a more informed request for a print exam copy down the line. For review outlets, Island has found that more are now willing to use the digital galley to the point of deciding whether to assign the title for review and only at that stage requesting a hard copy be sent. Online reviewers, Jennings notes, have been naturally more accepting of the files.
Jennings stresses that the Press has needed to be open to experimenting with the platform and NetGalley features to make the most of the service. Island has found the widget feature—the widget can be copied directly into emails for publishers to invite their contacts to view a title—to be easy to use and of increasing value. They have recently worked closely with the NetGalley team on a title with a complicated 4-color layout and a significant international market—where a print galley would have been ruinously expensive to produce and ship.
There have been unexpected rewards as well. Jennings has listed all Island titles in the “public” NetGalley catalog, so they are discoverable by all readers who have registered with the service. (All requests for digital galleys are sent to the Press for approval.) For a small press, Jennings says, this has been a boon in reaching new audiences, particularly booksellers and small academic and public library buyers who might not have been on the Press’s sales radar before this. Jennings is always looking at which file restrictions, additional marketing material, or title profile will make the most of the service—tweaking and experimenting along the way.
AAUP-NetGalley Discount Program: http://www.aaupnet.org/programs/epub/netgalley.html
David Sewell, Editorial and Technical Manager, ROTUNDA, University of Virginia Press
Kenneth Reed, Digital Production Specialist, The University of North Carolina Press
Any university press considering an XML-based workflow for monographs (whether from start to finish or as an archival format) has likely discovered that the first question may also be the knottiest: what kind of XML? Or to put it in more technically accurate terms, which XML language? The answer is far from obvious. The book markup language developed by the Association of American Publishers as long ago as the 1980s (originally in the ancestor of XML, SGML) is an international standard—ISO 12083—but to our knowledge it has been adopted by no university press other than California, and even then it required extensive modification. DocBook is well established as an authoring and archival language for books and serves publishers like O’Reilly as a natural format for “one source, many output” workflows, but it is highly optimized for technical documentation and lacks native markup elements for many structural features common in humanities and social science texts. (The University of Michigan Press has adopted it for production of some of their monograph titles, however.) EPUB/XHTML is perfectly suited to its purpose of encoding books for presentation on a wide variety of mobile devices, but its relatively impoverished set of structural and semantic tags may limit its value as an archival format for scholarly works.
An alternative increasingly being investigated is the markup language developed by the Text Encoding Initiative, or TEI, designed for the ambitious goal of creating machine-readable versions of texts in virtually any genre, from any historical period, and in any natural language. Following organizational work in the late 1980s, the first version of the TEI Guidelines was released in 1990, and was quickly adopted as the markup standard for a wide array of projects housed within university libraries and research departments engaged in digitizing books, manuscripts, drama, correspondence, and even mixed collections of text and images. Today there are literally thousands of texts encoded in TEI and in many cases published via the Web, often accompanied by a variety of full-text and data search tools (see http://www.tei-c.org/Activities/Projects/ for a list of over 100 such sites). The TEI Guidelines are actively maintained and developed by the TEI Consortium, with an international group of directors and editors from a variety of scholarly and professional backgrounds.
Clearly TEI-XML can be used to produce archival machine-readable versions of published books; existing off-the-shelf tools can be used to convert those files to HTML, PDF, and EPUB, although achieving results satisfactory to a professional publisher will usually require more or less customization. But is TEI-XML a viable answer to the XML workflow question? Can a publisher develop in-house procedures for converting existing books to an archival TEI format, or find a vendor capable of doing so? Alternatively, is it feasible to insert TEI-XML into the authoring workflow, so that it becomes the underlying source of both print and digital versions of a book? Over the past year or so, members of both the TEI and the university press communities have been meeting online and in person to address such questions.
The TEI Guidelines in their current form (version “P5”) are incredibly rich and comprehensive (over 1,400 pages in PDF form!), so approaching them can be quite daunting. The TEI Special Interest Groups (SIGs) were created to allow individuals to share ideas and develop much more focused uses of TEI. For the most part, these SIGs have been based in the academy, and centered on humanities scholarship, but they are open to anyone. The Scholarly Publishing SIG was created in June 2009 in order to explore the use of TEI in original scholarly publication. One of the aims of this SIG is to make TEI an attractive choice when deciding upon which XML language to use. XML is a costly investment: there will be a lot of time and resources devoted to its implementation. The university press community needs to collaborate on this front, and this SIG would serve as the starting point for progress. It will enable presses interested in using TEI to share developments with peer institutions as well as with the wider TEI community.
It is quite common to hear that TEI is a standard that is not implemented in any standard way. The SIG maintains a Wiki page that has a section on recommended practices. This document is still in its inception, but the purpose will be to create, through a collaborative process, a set of encoding guidelines that presses can use, either in XML-first or XML-last workflows. These guidelines could be used for in-house composition, or they could be supplied to encoding vendors for conversion after print publication. If enough presses adopt these guidelines, they could be used to set up common encoding practices and offer advantages when approaching vendors for XML encoding work, in much the same way that TEI Tite is being developed. These guidelines may lead to a specific customization of TEI for publishing, across books and journals.
The SIG will also focus on the XML workflow itself, and the tools required for such a workflow. There exists already a roundtrip transformation from Microsoft Word to TEI that could be improved upon through real-world use cases. Similarly, there are transformations for TEI to HTML and to EPUB. These need to be investigated and refined as well.
Another benefit that could be derived from a collaborative effort among university presses is the creation of a set of quality control rules using the rule-based validation language Schematron. Having well-formed and valid XML is only the first step—the XML needs to be checked with the same care and attention given to the print version. Having high-quality XML for use as the archival format for our content is vital. Presses need to be assured of this quality when they use the XML version to generate other formats, such as HTML or EPUB—or even for later editions in print. Creating a set of rules that every press can use to test their content would greatly aid in this effort.
A symposium was held at the Digital Humanities Observatory in Dublin on 28 April 2010 (see http://dho.ie/node/673) in order to discuss the growing interest in the use of TEI in scholarly publishing. The TEI community discussed their possible emerging role in scholarly communication and publishing. While the symposium ended with the question very much open, it was clear that coordination of work through the SIG was required. The TEI community has yet to decide whether they should focus their energies on tool development in this area, or on a specific customization of TEI for publishing, or even if they should engage in the publishing process directly. The university press community should take this moment to work together with the TEI community in order to make the transition to digital publishing.
In April 2010, AAUP hosted its first Web seminar, “XML Workflow Case Study: The University of Michigan Press.” The seminar was organized by members of the AAUP Professional Development Committee and moderated by Kristin Harpster Lawrence (Wayne State). Presenter Karen Hill took attendees through Michigan’s implementation of an XML workflow, from the decision to undertake the shift to its effect on different press departments. There were approximately 70 registered seats for the workshop, with many registrations including groups of participants.
View the presentation slides here: http://www.aaupnet.org/programs/seminars/xml2010.html
Brenna McLaughlin
Electronic and Strategic Initiatives Director, AAUP
In recent years, the idea of e-catalogs has taken hold in the publishing industry. The reasons for this are many, and start from the observation that more book communications— involving buyers, readers, reviewers, authors—are in the digital space, and catalogs should be, too. Moreover, digital technology should be able to provide the most accurate and up-to-date sales metadata to all users. As marketing and sales managers face tightening budgets, cutting down on the expense and waste of printed and mailed seasonal catalogs is also a major goal.
But print catalogs are a universal ‘technology,’ and independent bookstores were particularly concerned that e-catalog formats and features would proliferate, spreading more confusion than convenience. Then Ann Arbor-based Above the Treeline launched Edelweiss, an open, multi-publisher standard e-catalog service, in May 2009, with the endorsement of the American Booksellers Association. Major trade publishers such as HarperCollins and Random House were quick to add their catalogs to the system. Several university presses, beginning with Cambridge and Columbia, and followed by NYU, Fordham, and Georgetown, also signed up.
In January 2010, AAUP was pleased to announce an agreement with Above the Treeline to offer the Edelweiss service to AAUP members at a significant discount. Along with a special first-year incentive to upload backlist titles for free, the new benefit program has already attracted more than 40 member publishers to Treeline-hosted web demonstrations of the Edelweiss service.
Many of the initial Edelweiss tools were designed with independent booksellers in mind. Bookstores who use Above the Treeline’s POS (point of sale) and inventory data streams can incorporate that information into the catalogs they view on Edelweiss, examining sales of comparable titles, and streamlining their ordering. Sales reps can mark-up publisher e-catalogs with notes for particular booksellers, and highlight specific titles and local connections.
As the service grows, Treeline is constantly developing new tools for other book industry communities. With the AAUP program attracting more scholarly publisher users, Treeline is looking to develop features specific to academic book marketing, particularly course adoption tools. The existing ability to create customized subject catalogs for particular contacts has great appeal for academic and regional publishers, and the possibility of handling exam-copy requests through the service was a matter for discussion at a September 2009 meeting between Treeline and AAUP members. To serve publicity needs, Edelweiss will launch a partnership with NetGalley in the spring. Being able to provide e-galleys for reviewers complements the existing “Buzz” feature, which tracks the appearance of book titles and authors’ names in blog and Twitter feeds.
Two AAUP members, Fordham University Press and Georgetown University Press, shared some of their early experience with using Edelweiss. While cutting the print catalog was a major goal for both presses, neither Georgetown Marketing & Sales Director Gina Lindquist or Fordham Director Fredric Nachbaur foresee a time when they will not also produce a print seasonal catalog. Nachbaur points out that the print catalog is used as more than simply a sales tool for a list of titles, but is also a key promotional piece for the press on campus and at academic meetings.
Fordham and Georgetown publish similarly sized lists, averaging approximately 20-30 titles per season. While larger colleagues such as Cambridge have been selective in loading titles with specific trade potential into Edelweiss and leaving out more specialized monographs, Fordham and Georgetown have both chosen to upload the entire catalog for the Fall 2009 and Spring 2010 seasons. Fordham is considering creating a regional catalog on the platform with both front and backlist titles.
A motivating factor for Fordham in using the service is that the press is part of the Columbia University Press Sales group, along with NYU Press. As Columbia was an Edelweiss early adopter, Fordham’s sales representatives were already in the field using the system. In contrast, Lindquist reports that Georgetown’s main goal right now is to convince the press’s regional commissioned sales reps of the value and capabilities of the e-catalogs.
She is pleased with the possibilities of the Edelweiss platform and the extra tools it offers reps, such as customizing catalogs for individual accounts. “You’re never selling the whole list” at an independent book store, Lindquist notes, so the “tailoring is really great.” She admires the support and training that Treeline offers reps and buyers getting used to the system, but believes that success will ultimately rely on the system reaching a critical mass of publishers, rep groups, and buyers using it. The new AAUP program gives her optimism that the moment of reaching that mass may be closer than ever.
Readers can check out all the catalogs on Edelweiss for free, registering here: http://edelweiss.abovethetreeline.com/
AAUP members can learn more about the discount benefit program here: http://aaupnet.org/programs/epub/edelweiss.html or contact Brenna McLaughlin at bmclaughlin@aaupnet.org to inquire about future web demos.
Brenna McLaughlin
Electronic and Strategic Initiatives Director, AAUP
Half a million. That is the number of additional records per year major book wholesalers Baker & Taylor and Ingram estimate they are processing in these days of digitization format proliferation: half a million records on top of the approximately 200,000 new books each year1. That is a lot of metadata, and it is more important than ever at every step of the book supply chain. Book metadata often needs to contain much more than title, author, ISBN, and price to make the leap from warehouse to reader—or database to device. Tables of contents, cover images, detailed subject headings, reading level, available formats, and reviews: all help consumers, retailers, and librarians discover and procure new (and old but relevant) books. The trick, for everyone in the book world, is creating and sharing accurate metadata for all of those millions of records.
The burgeoning challenge of book metadata was the subject of a recent symposium and white paper sponsored by OCLC Online Computer Library Center. In March 2009, they gathered experts and interested parties from the publishing, library, and standards worlds in Dublin, OH, to discuss common problems and potential solutions. Judy Luther was at that time completing research for the paper “Streamlining Book Metadata Workflow,” commissioned by OCLC and the National information Standards Organization (NISO).
While clearly an “interested party” rather than an expert, I was invited to speak to the group about the general experience of university presses dealing with metadata. Of course, in a community that ranges from presses publishing less than 20 to more than 2000 titles per year, and where the term “metadata” has not yet been fully adopted to describe bibliographic and marketing information, a general picture is not so easily taken. Before trotting off to Dublin, I spoke with several members, including Johns Hopkins University Press, a member with large book and journal publishing programs, and two presses who fall near the AAUP average: Cornell University Press, producing up to 140 new titles per year, and the University of Georgia Press, publisher of about 80 new titles per year. Not unexpectedly, the processes of metadata creation and management differed considerably. Johns Hopkins’ in-house database has an ONIX component and pushes data to both the press web site and trading partners (via either ONIX or spreadsheet). Both Cornell and Georgia were at the time researching ONIX solutions, including off-the-shelf software and service providers such as NetRead or Firebrand, and were providing data via spreadsheets or online interfaces to key sales channels.
Despite their differences, all three presses mentioned the same difficulty with providing ONIX. “The standard just isn’t standard enough,” I said to the OCLC audience. That choice of phrasing raised some eyebrows (and maybe a few hackles), but we cleared up the vocabulary. There are so many flavors of ONIX being requested from publishers—almost every channel has its own requirements as to which ONIX elements and tag variations are preferred (if they even accept ONIX). For example, while the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) recommends best practices, and will certify the quality of publishers’ ONIX feeds on 30 core elements, Barnes & Noble requires tailored compliance on half-again as many data elements to be classified as a top-grade ONIX supplier2.
But these retail-chain ONIX issues were only one small part of what was discussed in Dublin. The real crux of the symposium was the misalignment between the standards that have grown up separately in the library and publishing communities. MARC records (Machine Readable Cataloging) serve libraries’ needs from ordering to online catalogs. In many cases, librarians require at least basic MARC records in advance of purchase, and more and more expect MARC records to be provided with purchased titles (particularly with e-book collections). Even subject classification schemes differ between these two sides of our community. From the publishers’ end, BISAC codes are heavily weighted to trade books and were designed to help with store placement rather than broad consumer discoverability. Library of Congress (LC) subject headings are highly detailed, but provide much greater authority control.
Though these classifications and standards were designed to serve different needs, each side of the market has an even greater need for the metadata created on the other. The authority-controlled subject and author data from LC and MARC records can only help digital discovery and sales of publishers’ works. The book marketing information provided through ONIX to the retail supply chain is now just as important for library patrons, and in the growing adoption of purchase-on-request policies, library collections specialists. Crosswalks between MARC and ONIX for Books will be needed to combine this data into effective and sharable information flows. OCLC is particularly interested in that concept, and recently undertook a pilot project to experiment with ingesting publishers’ ONIX records, matching and enhancing the data with existing WorldCat records, and feeding back optimized metadata. That project has led to a new suite of metadata services for publishers. A second symposium, to move not just the conversation, but also the possible, forward, is planned for next year. Broadening representation, and easing metadata reuse and collaboration will be goals for the next meeting.
In the meantime, standards continue to change and evolve to serve the book communities’ needs. In April of 2009, ONIX for Books 3.0 was released, and is not backwards compatible with previous versions. The ISTC or International Standard Text Code, is being promulgated as “a global identification system for textual works”—that is, to identify a text rather than a product or format, as the ISBN is used. Progress is being made on the International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI) to help in the correct identification of authors, a task that is required not just for better discovery but also in royalties and rights systems (such as the proposed Book Rights Registry from the Google settlement). In July 2009, CrossRef announced it had registered 1.7 million DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers) for book chapters and references. While the complexity of metadata standards is growing, so too are the support systems for producing and sharing accurate metadata. In the coming months, AAUP is planning to survey its membership about shared problems and needs in this area.
Resources:
OCLC Publisher and Librarian Symposium Reports
Metadata White Paper: Streamlining Book Metadata Workflow
BISG Product Metadata Information and Best Practices
ONIX
Earlier this summer, AAUP was very pleased to announce a new membership benefit under an agreement with iPublishCentral, a self-service e-content platform from Impelsys. Member presses have a long commitment to serving the needs of scholars across every field of study. As scholars move to online practices as heterogeneous as their disciplines, AAUP is pursuing new benefit programs that will ease the process of experimenting with and adopting the right e-publishing solutions for scholarly presses.
The iPublishCentral services range from book-marketing widgets to direct e-book sales to consumers. These flexible service menus offer a broad range of ways for content to be discovered by and delivered to readers. The new AAUP-Impelsys program provides discounted monthly iPublishCentral fees to our members. In addition to the negotiated discount scale, Impelsys is offering AAUP members a special inaugural deal: waived fees for the first 12 months of contracts signed by June 2010.
The MIT Press, a cutting-edge adopter of several electronic publishing solutions, chose iPublishCentral to power their direct-to-consumer e-books store. E-books at the MIT Press currently offers approximately 450 titles from all of the Press’s publication fields and categories (trade, monographs, illustrated, and text.) Gita Manaktala, MIT’s Editorial Director, reports that they have seen a broad range of interest across all of these fields and categories.
MIT uses iPublishPortal to sell both perpetual access and time-limited e-books—a “rental” model the Press has just recently rolled out. MIT launched the e-books store in March 2009 with an intended audience of individual consumers. The biggest surprise, Manaktala says, has been the interest from libraries in purchasing single-title e-books through the site. Increasing reliance on patron requests to drive e-book acquisitions could be a factor in this library market, where turning to the press directly may be faster and easier than sourcing the title through aggregators.
MIT Press continues to work on the site’s features, layouts, and e-book offerings, and has yet to undertake a major marketing push for their e-book store. Throughout the process of building and tinkering with the new site, Manaktala says Impelsys has been “really responsive and good to work with. Their team is sophisticated and helpful, and interested in making this a success.”
In July and August, Impelsys hosted four webinars to introduce their services and the new AAUP benefit program to member publishers. More than 20 AAUP members attended these online sessions and have been favorably impressed with what they have seen. The iPublishWidget capability allows for branded, dynamic marketing across web sites, social networks, and blogs. iPublishView-Inside, with fully-searchable text and publisher controls on browsing, is an additional tool for providing what numerous e-publishing experiments have shown in recent years: online content that breeds both interest and sales. Sameer Shariff, CEO of Impelsys. believes that this is a particularly important tool for scholarly publishers to reach readers across the globe: “Increasingly discriminating readers will access sample pages and make quick, convenient purchases from anywhere in the world, further strengthening the financial position of university presses.”
Web demos can be arranged for any AAUP member that is curious about these services. Impelsys will also be attending the Frankfurt Book fair, where interested presses can arrange a direct meeting. Use the online registration form or contact Ray Alba to set up a Frankfurt meeting or with other questions about Impelsys services. AAUP members can learn more about the AAUP-Impelsys program and pricing scale through the members web site [password required]. Impelsys also offers an online “Learning Center” for press staff to delve deeper into the functionality available.
To talk about AAUP’s current e-publishing programs with Impelsys and Tizra, or suggest new program ideas, members are invited to contact Brenna McLaughlin at bmclaughlin@aaupnet.org.
Tools of Change 2009 and Other Interesting Meetings
Brenna McLaughlin
Electronic and Strategic Initiative Director, AAUP
In February, I attended the third O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing conference (TOC) at the Times Square Marriott Marquis in New York. I found myself thinking that the ecstatic vision of a changed human relationship with “content” is growing stale apace, even as e-publishing platforms, models, and devices become a more workable reality.
As the economic picture seemed to get bleaker each day, it was mildly surprising how few of the sessions made reference to how the changing financial climate may affect not only publishers’ ability to retool, but readers’ desire to pay for gadgets and access. To be fair, this conference (like some others we’re familiar with!) suffers from an embarrassment of interesting session topics scheduled concurrently, so I hope that I simply missed the speakers who addressed the economic downturn. And once again the buzz of interest in the hallways and breaks and the information about new platforms and working models shared freely by the attendees more than balanced out the occasional empty blast of rhetoric.
As I wandered from session to session with a (paper) notebook and a cranky PDA that refused to log on to the conference WiFi, my fellow attendees demonstrated the power of one “tool of change” as they twittered up a storm. While drinking in the tips and stories from one set of panelists, anyone with a connected laptop, netbook, or the ubiquitous iPhone freely eavesdropped on the other sessions. In one respect, this was fantastic—you didn’t have to miss much. In another, it easily led to what one such equipped colleague ruefully termed “session envy” as I shamelessly peered over her shoulder to get a look at what was going on down the hall. (Interestingly, in May a paper analyzing the effect active twittering has on academic conference attendees was released.)
Fortunately, it is still possible to virtually attend many of the sessions, and at more than 140 often-cryptic characters at a time, too. The TOC 2009 web site makes available videos of many of the sessions, presentation files, and access to lively and continuing discussions via the conference blog, Twitter, and Facebook page. Go to http://www.toccon.com/toc2009 for an immersion into the events and ideas of the conference. If that’s not enough, the 2010 TOC is scheduled for February 22-24 in New York City.
One of the videos available is of Bob Stein’s talk “A Book is a Place…” Stein, founder of the Institute for the Future of the Book, spoke of his concept of a book as a place to meet and discuss and learn; it’s a concept that the Institute’s projects—CommentPress, Sophie, and the networked books they’ve supported—have all been reaching for. The day before the Tools of Change Conference began, Stein hosted a small meeting of mostly scholarly publishing representatives and the CEO of GiantChair, a Paris-based digital distribution platform. The group, including folks from NYU, MIT, Duke, the Michigan Office of Scholarly Publishing, and California amongst others, brainstormed about the role of publishers and possibilities of collaboration both upstream and down in a digital book environment.
It was clear that the usual suspects will continue to dog university press and other scholarly e-initiatives: sorting out rights and the dirty question of financial support. But it was also clear that local realities could lead to successful ventures for university presses. Harvard shared a bit of their experience launching the Journal of Legal Analysis, an open-access, peer-reviewed journal of law scholarship supported by and developed from the university’s law school. California indicated that they had seen—and filled—a need by developing a suite of publication services available to units across the California system, UCPubS. Both of these initiatives are fairly new, and each press is waiting to judge its effects, but they are hopeful signs of the innovation and cooperation possible amongst the scholarly communications community.
Meredith Benjamin
Communications Coordinator, AAUP
The Minnesota Archive Editions program will bring back into print virtually every book published in the University of Minnesota Press’s history. This ambitious project had a three-fold source of inspiration, says press director Doug Armato. The first was a notification from Google about the high number of searches they were identifying for out-of-print books linked to the press. “This wasn’t a question we were asking,” said Armato, but the tip-off from Google got the wheels turning in the heads of Minnesota staff members.
Minnesota’s internal digital assets team “had on our minds that there was more to the backlist than you would have figured.” During BookExpo America 2007, a representative from BookSurge approached the press to talk about the company’s work with Amazon, and about their interests in putting out-of-print university press books back online. This idea was intriguing to the press, as staff had been thinking about whether digitization and access to older titles should be entirely the province of libraries and programs like Google Book Search, or whether it was the press’s responsibility to get involved as well.
The third piece of the puzzle was the massive new database that Minnesota had recently created, for which they had begun extensive research on their backlist and the documentation of what rights they currently had. With demonstrated proof of interest in their out-of-print titles, an offer from commercial partners to help put them back into print, and a database of their own which would facilitate doing so, everything came together. And thus was born Minnesota Archive Editions.
The rights database had originally been researched and maintained by regular press staff, but with the official arrival of the Minnesota Archive Editions, the increased demands of research necessitated additional assistance. The press found a student who Armato praised as “perfectly suited to this kind of project,” and whom the press was able to keep on staff after his graduation.
As Minnesota was examining their out-of-print books from the past decade, they realized that with today’s market and technologies, many of the titles probably would not have been put out-of-print. It became evident that creating any sort of definitive criteria for what titles should or should not go out of print was extremely difficult with so many shifting factors involved. The Archive Editions program eliminated the need for this sort of dividing line, as it gave the press the opportunity to put back into print virtually every book it had published since its inception in 1925.
While many presses today may have some sort of print-on-demand capabilities or arrangements, Armato believes it is the “universality” of the Archive Editions program that sets it apart from more traditional POD. Generally speaking, print -on-demand programs “are only forward looking” and in Armato’s mind, create what he views as an “artificial boundary,” in that these programs are usually options for books currently being published and those that will be published in the future.
Minnesota’s relationships with its commercial partners in this venture – Google, Amazon/BookSurge, and BookMobile – are what Armato called “true partnerships.” Amazon/BookSurge covered the capital costs associated with the digitization of the books, which will be recouped as books are sold. The books have been digitized in a print-ready PDF format. As these titles were out-of-print, and Minnesota had opted-out of Google’s library scanning initiative, they had not been previously digitized by Google. Minnesota is now submitting the PDFs provided by Amazon for inclusion in Google Book Search, where “buy” links will be included to the press’s website and Amazon. The titles available through the Archive Editions initiative are produced in limited quantities according to customer demand and can be ordered through Amazon and through the Chicago Distribution Center, which will forward orders to BookMobile for printing and fulfillment. Armato added, “Eventually, we’d like to move those books to e-book distributors as well, but that will take an extra conversion (to “Universal PDF”).”
While there have been occasional copyright issues concerning images in the Archive Editions, Armato explained that for the most part, the fact that the press hasn’t “changed the medium…in reality these are still books,” has eliminated many of the image copyright issues that arise “when you start to create truly digital projects.”
Explaining the appeal of the program, Armato expressed his feeling that “for the most part at this point, people still want to read physical books…this really covers all the bases…people can discover the titles online and still get a physical book.” Facilitating this online discovery, books in the program will be full-text searchable through both Amazon’s Search Inside the Book program and Google’s Book Search. He emphasized that the idea behind the program was something the press had been thinking about for a long time as part of its stated mission “to disseminate through book publication work of exceptional scholarly quality and originality.”
Only two months after its official launch in late November 2008, the press has already seen quantifiable gains from the program. While Armato noted that the press is still watching to see how the program fares in the long run, they are extremely pleased with the early results. Beyond the scholarly advantage of continuing access to these titles, the press has seen steady monthly revenue from the program, and it is now their most profitable channel of digital distribution. Further proving that formerly out-of-print books may generate significant interest, Armato indicated that the press was beginning to get course adoptions for some previously out-of-print books.
With the success of this program, and the relatively small financial cost to the press, Armato predicted that similar programs will soon be instituted at other university presses. He cited the recent announcement of the University of North Carolina Press’s Enduring Editions Program as an example of a similar venture. With the current state of the economy forcing university presses to take a hard look at their budgets, this sort of program may offer an attractive option for presses looking to increase the availability of their backlist, while reaping a profit through a minimal initial investment.
Meredith Benjamin
Communications Coordinator, AAUP
Thomas Jefferson designed the iconic Rotunda building as the academic center of his newly founded University of Virginia, “demonstrating [his] belief that a university should have as its focus a collection of academic achievements1.” Appropriately, the electronic imprint of the University of Virginia Press takes its name from the campus landmark and fills that same role for the university in today’s digital age. Rotunda has been a stable flagship in the ever-changing realm of electronic publishing since its inception in 2001.
The original grant proposal to the Mellon Foundation for the Electronic Imprint, conceived by Nancy Essig, the former director of the press, and John Unsworth, the founder of the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, called for publication of born-digital scholarship. Mark Saunders, Manager of the Electronic Imprint, explained that suitable born-digital projects were scarce at the time. In response, the press’s new director, Penny Kaiserlian, along with a team of senior managers, decided to add digital editions of existing print publications to the imprint’s list, focusing on the press’s strength in critical and documentary editions.
By the start of 2009, Rotunda had published six projects in the 19th-Century Literature and Culture collection and four in the American Founding Era collection, with three more in active development. Two of the 19th-century projects, comparative textual editions of Herman Melville’s Typee and Emily Dickinson’s Correspondences, were in fact born-digital, and benefited from Rotunda’s extensive experience and expanding capabilities. The imprint is also “exploring a new collection in architecture with our colleagues at the Society for Architectural Historians.”
Kaiserlian has described the American Founding Era project as Rotunda’s “most ambitious collection yet.2” This collection brings together documentary editions of the primary and secondary materials that constitute The Papers of George Washington, The Dolley Madison Digital Edition, and The Adams Papers, all in digital format. Forthcoming digital editions include The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution, The Papers of James Madison, and the Papers of Alexander Hamilton. Beyond this invaluable content, however, the project is notable for the broad scope of its collaborations with other university presses and historical societies and the extent of its interoperable capabilities.
Early on, the staff at the Imprint made a pivotal decision to develop a more costly platform based on emerging standards for XML rather than focus on PDF delivery as most publishers were doing. This has proved a major boon to Rotunda’s electronic publishing projects, as it has allowed maximum “functionality, flexibility, and scalability.” The staff took advantage of the “significant expertise in textual markup [that] already existed in various digital centers at the University of Virginia.” The staff felt that the nature of the content in the document editions necessitated “that we code at as deep a level as possible.” To achieve this end, the editorial and technical staff chose to go with the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) standard, which has been developed by an international collective. David Sewell, leader of Rotunda’s staff on XML coding, now sits on the TEI Board of Directors.
Collaboration is an integral aspect of the American Founding Era project. In November 2008, Rotunda announced the release of a newly consolidated Founding Era platform, which makes the various documentary editions fully interoperable. Such a project would have been impossible without the cooperation and collaboration of the various project editors and sponsoring institutions and presses, as the various collections of papers are housed and edited at a variety of institutions. The Rotunda staff was responsible for the platform and the XML coding behind it, and drew up standards for conversion of the print volumes in conjunction with the documentary editors. Saunders described the varieties of expertise provided by some of the other participants:
In the case of the Adams Papers, conversion of the print volumes was managed by the staff of the Massachusetts Historical Society. The editors of the Washington Papers worked for many hours to disambiguate index entries to create a cumulative index for their 52-volume project, among other contributions of time and knowledge. The editors of the Jefferson Papers performed display proofreading on the converted files, and the staff of Princeton University Press contributed publishing expertise in rights, permissions, and marketing.
This many-layered collaboration resulted in a platform that allows users to navigate across editions in various ways. Saunders explained that the platform retains the ability for users to “see the documents as they are arranged in the print volumes” while enhancing the experience by also facilitating the ability of users to “search, navigate chronologically, and access the intellectual investment reflected in the indexes.”
The Dolley Madison Digital Edition, Rotunda’s first publication, is the only born-digital edition in the American Founding Era collection. Forthcoming volumes in the collection will be available in print first, to be followed in twelve to twenty-four months by inclusion in the digital edition. The Electronic Imprint’s institution of an XML workflow is enhancing the viability and ease of these dual editions. Commenting on the recent subventions awarded by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC ), Saunders explained that while these were traditional publication subventions for the print volumes, the XML workflow allows forthcoming editions to “be published in print and digital formats using the same underlying edited files, so in effect the continuing investment of the NHPRC in these editions will now pay off in new ways.”
Rotunda’s Founding Era project has been cited by AAUP as an important example of publisher-added value in debates on various models of open access (see AAUP’s Letter of Support for the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act). Saunders said that Virginia has been closely following the debates over various forms of open access “for most of Rotunda’s existence.” In February 2008, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on an issue of open access directly impacting Rotunda and its publications: “The Founding Fathers’ Papers: Ensuring Public Access to our National Treasures.”
In April 2008, Allen Weinstein, then Archivist of the United States, released a report to Congress at the request of the Committees on Appropriations entitled “The Founders Online: Open Access to the Papers of America’s Founding Era.” Appropriately, Thomas Jefferson’s ink and pencil drawing of the South Elevation of the Rotunda is featured on the cover of the report. Weinstein details the ongoing efforts to produce documentary editions of these historical papers that have been in progress for years, or even decades, at various universities, university presses, and historical societies. He outlines two possible responses to the government’s call for online access to the papers: in the first, the government would scan the completed volumes as they become available, but “the volumes would not be electronically marked or indexed, making them difficult to search, and such an effort by a Federal agency would provide an inferior duplication of online publication efforts already taking place outside of Government.” The second option, recognizing the valuable work done by organizations currently involved in the process, Rotunda primary among them, suggests that the government provide support for these efforts including “engag[ing] a sole service provider to undertake transcription and document encoding for all Founding Fathers papers that have not yet been edited.” The staff at Rotunda has appreciated the report’s respect for the work of the project editors and the attention to finding an access model that is sustainable for the university press publishers of the print editions. They expect to resume these discussions with the arrival of a new Archivist and a new Congress.
University presses today are testing a variety of funding models as they attempt to find a balance between providing access to research and information and the necessity of covering operating costs. Saunders says of Rotunda’s business model, “Our interface has always promoted free discovery of our content, but our perpetual access business model has remained largely constant during the debates surrounding the Archivist’s report. At the document level, we remain a fee-based site.” This perpetual access model makes access to Rotunda’s publications available for varying fees, determined by a university’s Carnegie classification, with rates also available for other research institutions, high schools, and unaffiliated individuals. All users are able to browse the contents and conduct searches of the full text, although log-in is required to obtain access to the full contents.
Rotunda’s primary funding has until this point come from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the President’s Office of the University of Virginia, but Saunders explained that its ultimate mandate is to be self-sustaining. As described earlier, Rotunda’s projects are often indirectly supported by entities like the NHPRC, which has provided subventions for the documentary print editions. After the current grants expire, Rotunda’s sustaining revenue is expected to come from sale of its products and from grants for development of future individual projects. In an entrepreneurial move, Rotunda has also started Oculus, “which offers consulting services to other publishers and to digital projects that are in development,” also with the support of the Mellon Foundation.
Rotunda is well poised to continue in its role of presenting the academic achievements that are at the center of a university, both to the academic community, and with the American Founding Era project, to the nation at large.
1 “The Rotunda: History,” The University of Virginia, http://www.virginia.edu/uvatours/rotunda/rotundaHistory.html.
2Penny Kaiserlian, “University of Virginia Press,” in “University Presses 2008: Snapshots in Time,” compiled by Rebecca Ann Bartlett, Journal of Scholarly Publishing 40 (Oct. 2008): 26-28.
Brenna McLaughlin
Electronic & Strategic Initiatives Director, AAUP
On June 26, a mid-sized conference room in Montreal was home to a standing room only crowd. At least one too many invitations (perhaps my own!) had been cadged to a private presentation and discussion of a new e-publishing service. Tizra Publisher is a new publisher-branded online sales and distribution platform for electronic books and other document-based content. Perhaps that doesn’t sound terribly unique these days, but the Tizra software makes it very simple for non-technical staff to create online content collections, to set pricing, and to control the look and feel of the site itself. A Tizra-hosted publisher site needs only searchable, bookmarked PDFs, which many publishers create now as a part of the regular production process, to produce a secure and smooth reader experience. The interest in what Tizra demonstrated was palpable.
Of course, resources are always at stake when trying out a new e-publishing platform or sales model—not just money, but time and staff resources. University presses and their fellow not-for-profit scholarly publishers in the AAUP membership are particularly sensitive to return on investment (or, at least, return OF investment) in these days of experiment and hope. One of the most appealing aspects of Tizra’s pitch has been their own sensitivity to these concerns.
Since June, the company has worked in various ways to minimize the risks to such publishers in using Tizra Publisher. Their tiered pricing structure focuses on providing a pricing plan that fits the needs of presses from small to large. Even better, AAUP has been able to negotiate a 20% discount off of the monthly fees for our members. (Tizra’s terms entail a basic monthly service fee, as well as a modest transaction fee on sales through their hosted sites.) The Association will receive a percentage of the transaction fees earned by Tizra through sites signed-up through this AAUP discount program.
In addition to the direct financial benefit of the AAUP discount, the Tizra administrative control panel is both self-service and fairly intuitive, in hopes of decreasing the amount of time needed for learning and managing the site’s functions. Importantly, the site doesn’t require IT set-up or file conversion. One of the most interesting aspects of the product, however, is the flexibility of the sales model. Publishers can sell access to discrete book titles, individual chapters, or whole collections of content. Pricing can be set for individuals, institutions, or specific customer groups. And if a price point or collection offer isn’t succeeding, a publisher can try out a new one in a matter of minutes.
The system works by breaking each PDF up into individual pages that will be embedded in the HTML web page though which users access content. This increases security of content online, and decreases the download lag of high-quality PDF material, while appearing seamless to the end user. Searchable PDFs are indexed for both the internal Tizra search-engine and for sites such as Google. More than half of current traffic to Tizra-hosted content comes from Google searches, so findability is key. Currently Tizra’s product supports the sale of online access to content, with the ability to include links back to the press site to purchase print books, or to integrate with a publisher’s own shopping cart to sell print-and-online packages. Making the sales of downloadable PDFs possible is part of the company’s near-term plans, and they have discussed the possibility of partnering with a POD vendor to make that an option for publisher clients as well.
The MIT Press was already working with Tizra at the time of the June meeting. Their Tizra-hosted site, CISnet, was officially launched in early September. MIT chose to make available a specific collection, their computer and information sciences titles. Access to the complete collection can be purchased for a 5-day trial, a one-month or a one-year subscription. The site now includes more than 150 books, with more being added. The press cited the minimized upfront costs and delays as the largest benefit of working with Tizra. Throughout October, AAUP and Tizra have held weekly webinars to introduce a wider range of AAUP member presses to the capabilities of Tizra Publisher. As of the last week in October, the company began offering free online sign-up for publishers wishing to try out Tizra Publisher. While the free sites include Google Ads and have limited content allowances and branding and design tools, they are an excellent opportunity for risk-free experimenting and training. Throughout November, the webinar schedule will be split to accommodate the publishers who have begun to use the free sites and who have hands-on questions, and those who did not attend the initial October webinar introduction.
AAUP members who are interested in more information about Tizra Publisher, AAUP pricing, or the webinars should contact Brenna McLaughlin.
By Brenna McLaughlin
Electronic & Strategic Initiatives Director, AAUP
The first O’Reilly Tools of Change (TOC) Conference, held in June 2007, generated a huge buzz in the book publishing industry. Focused on the emergence of new publishing models from innovative technologies, the TOC conference brought together the visionaries of tech and of publishing. Manolis Kelaidis’s (Royal College of Art) demonstration of his synthesis of analog and digital—a paper book printed with conductive ink and bound with circuitry to allow for hyperlinked text—was certainly the high-water mark of excitement and energy.
In February 2008, O’Reilly hosted a second TOC Conference, one that generated far less buzz. One thing that became clear is that the publishing industry is moving on from visionary statements to the decidedly less sexy and more productive work of integrating new technologies and models into the cycle of scholarly communications. To some degree, not all the panels had yet caught up to this spirit of how-to (rather than what-if, how-cool, and try-me!), although there was interesting information to be gleaned from every panel.
Presentation slides from many sessions can be downloaded via the TOC web site (http://en.oreilly.com/toc2008/public/schedule/proceedings). Panels included an overview of the DRM mistakes of the music industry and discussion of how the publishing world might avoid the same; several looks at new digital marketing and distribution strategies, such as widgets and content designed for mobile devices; and examinations of how blogs and books are being integrated across authoring, reviewing, and marketing spheres.
One interesting tension was between the continued pressure to deliver free digital content (Tim O’Reilly’s keynote, “Free is More Complicated Than You Think”), and the suggested strategy of producing high-value, high-priced digital content (Scott Gray, O’Reilly School of Technology, “Adding Enough Value to Digital Content to Actually Make Money”). Obviously, the balance that can and will be struck between these two poles of digital content delivery will be different for various publishing sectors and content groups—it will be no news flash to AAUP members that infotainment and scholarly communications will always have different drivers. It is clear that how to best serve the authors and readers in each sector is still the most pressing challenge for publishers, one that will not be solved by the emergence of any one single technology or model.
Related upcoming conferences include the STM Book 2.02 Seminar (“Now it Gets Real: Making, Selling, Distributing, Discovering and Using E-Books”) and, for the eyes-on-the-horizon vision to the hands-on-the-day-to-day ideas, the AAUP Annual Meeting (“Preserving the Future”).
By Shaun Manning
Communications Coordinator, AAUP
Now entering its second year, the Caravan Project (http://www.caravanbooks.org/) has refined its methods and goals to help scholarly publishers deliver books in non-standard formats. Developed by Peter Osnos as a way to navigate the emerging digital culture, Caravan has made 62 titles from eleven presses available as downloadable ebooks and audio books, and also created large-print editions through print-on-demand. Recently, Caravan was awarded a $25,000 grant by the National Association of College Stores (NACS), which will allow for increased exposure in university bookstores.
Osnos describes Caravan as a “system of research and development” aimed at increasing serious non-fiction publishers’ options for producing and distributing content. AAUP members participating in the Caravan Project include Beacon Press, University of California Press, University of North Carolina Press, Yale University Press, and more. “Caravan is an effort to enable publishers to do books in all the ways that technology now permits and to support distribution of those books through all the available channels.” The goals, Osnos said, are twofold: “We want to help publishers to know how to do electronic books, and distributors to know how to sell them.” He acknowledged that while many university presses operate their own digital initiatives, Caravan provides the option of offering multiple electronic formats, including PDF, Microsoft Reader, and audio files that can play on any portable music player. Though the POD aspect of Caravan may seem out of place—a physical product in an otherwise digital operation—the experiment is paying off. Recently, one vendor ordered three hundred copies of a large print book through Caravan’s print-on-demand service, an order that might not have been possible to fill through traditional publishing systems.
With Caravan established as a service for university presses and other scholarly publishers, it is perhaps not surprising that it was awarded a grant from the National Association of College Stores (NAS) to promote its products in the academic environment. The groundwork for the grant was set when Osnos gave a presentation on Caravan at an NACS convention, and the association saw the potential benefits of this publishing program for its members. The NACS grant will allow college stores to sell Caravan’s digital products, thereby giving the stores a model on which to base other sales of digital content in the future.
The distribution piece of the Caravan Project has already undergone notable changes since its inception, based on early results. Caravan has moved toward a more comprehensive system of digital distribution by taking advantage of recently-launched initiatives from Ingram’s Digital Ventures, booksense.com, and Overdrive’s Content Reserves, which offers e-books and audio books to libraries and can be adapted for use at retail stores. “The most effective way we can sell these books, once we’ve created them, is through the growing universe of digital delivery systems,” Osnos said. In addition to taking advantage of these larger-scale distribution systems for booksellers, a partnership with Emusic.com, one of the largest vendors of digital music, will soon make Caravan titles available for download at the site’s recently-launched audio books section.
As patterns of user preference emerged, there were also some changes in the available formats. Caravan had been offering its audio books on CDs in addition to the downloadable mp3s. But Osnos said that audio books on CD were less popular than digital files. “What we’ve found is, for people who do want the CD, we can distribute an audio book as a download and allow the listener to create one CD, and that way you don’t have to ship a CD.” The digital rights management (DRM) code of the audio book digital files allows customers to produce a single disc for personal use.
According to Osnos, the possibilities created by Caravan represent a substantial shift in publishing, as new technologies will allow publishers to operate on a more “made to order” system. If books are printed on demand, or serially available in digital formats, the problem of excess inventory will be greatly reduced. The flexibility of digital media also allows Caravan to make participating publishers’ books available by chapter or section, an option that will prove useful to students and researchers. Though some of this may have been possible in the recent past, only in the last few years has research been available that has indicated the most effective methods of producing and distributing digital content. In addition, consumer interest in e-books is currently in an upward swing with the advent of Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s E-Reader devices, and the popularity of audio books has soared with the ubiquitous use of mp3 players such as the Apple’s ipod. “In time digital books will become increasingly significant sources of revenue, as the public become more familiar with digital formats,” Osnos said.
Because Caravan is not itself a publisher or vendor, it does not set or suggest prices for the digital and POD books created through the initiative. But Osnos hopes that as publishers gain greater familiarity with these formats this will lead to audio and e-books bearing prices that are competitive with the standard editions. Currently, he noted, audio books can be fifty percent more expensive than a new release hardcover.
The Caravan Project is set to conclude in mid-2009, at which time the findings of the program’s research will be published in a final report, possibly as a multi-platform book. But the life of Caravan will continue in the implementation of its research into digital publishing and distribution systems. “By all means, we hope and expect publishers to use what we’ve all learned in their own multi-platform programs,” Osnos said.
A Report from Digital Publishing Forums
by Brenna McLaughlin
Unbound: Advancing Book Publishing in a Digital World
What felt at times like a motivational fête for the publishing industry was hosted by Google this January in one of America’s temples to book culture, the New York Public Library. Publishers were addressed by web-savvy authors and gurus such as Chris Anderson (The Long Tail) and Cory Doctorow (Boing Boing) as well as innovative publishers such as Tim O’Reilly and Michael Holdsworth (formerly of Cambridge University Press).
One of the ideas that recurred throughout the day was that trade and scholarly/professional publishing are perhaps two different businesses—”entertainment vs. information —that would diverge even further in the digital world. Interestingly, the authors who presented were mostly trade (fiction and nonfiction) writers, whereas most publishers presented from the scholarly, professional, and education sectors.
The authors provided fascinating case studies of how they and their publishers had put the web and networked communities to work for their books. Several of the authors admitted that they had little concern for any sales revenue that might be lost by free online dissemination of their published book. The speaking and consulting fees they can command are only going to be enhanced by a higher public profile. Several publishers presented valuable details on how large-scale digitization projects and business models, rather than individualized web-based marketing plans, had enhanced sales.
HarperCollins Senior Vice President Carolyn Pittis spoke about their “Digital Warehouse,” whose functions are conceived as comparable to a bricks-and-mortar warehouse: the storage, management, and distribution of content. On top of their digital warehouse, HarperCollins has developed its own “Search Inside” functionality and recently introduced a widget for syndicating searchable book content to users’ web sites. Holdsworth provided a glimpse of how improvements to digital channels—from print-on-demand (POD) programs to Google Book Search—have increased sales of what Cambridge University Press had once called the “Comet’s Tail,” the books that sell less than 50 copies a year. One eye-catching statistic involved more than 1000 POD-available titles that sold not a single copy in 2005, but represented more than $1 million in sales in 2006—sales that would have been lost if those titles had gone out of print in the interim.
Most presenters seemed to agree that giving some kind of content away for free was a no-brainer for selling more content in various formats. What that meant to different folks—be it entire digital copies of a book under loose Creative Commons licenses, free sample chapters, free audio downloads or other ‘extras,’ or free search accessibility and text browsing—was not explicitly debated. The underlying consensus was, unsurprisingly, that publishers by this point need to be digitizing their content and should be able to control that content, but that indexing and search should be widely available through not just Google and Amazon, but through other search engines, libraries, and so on.
Google produced a short video of highlights from the event, which you can view here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsCkAeZaxi8
STM Book 2.01: The e-Book Journey: Current Paths and Future Roads
The STM (International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers) e-book seminar was billed as appropriate for any segment of scholarly publishing—including the humanities and social sciences. The day provided a thorough overview of where e-books now stand in the publishing industry, and the road ahead as perceived by both publishers and librarians.
To get us to today’s leading edge of electronic book publishing, James Gray of the Ingram Digital Group spoke about the massive advances in print-on-demand (POD) technologies and applications by traditional and non-traditional publishers. As well, he indicated the experiments that Lightening Source has been undertaking in producing books in a wide array of POD formats such as large print and other language editions. Such advances in POD capability continue to transform the book production and distribution systems. Michael Holdsworth presented here, as well, focusing on the role that Google, Amazon, and Microsoft LiveSearch may play in the e-book market.
Preparing the book production workflow to take greatest advantage of new technologies and content channels was addressed by Helen Bailey, VP & Pub Director for Content Management at John Wiley & Sons. Bailey spoke about how Wiley has transformed their workflow to create XML digital content that can serve the many new (and potential future) publishing and distribution channels. While post-press XML coding had the initial appeal of speed, Bailey saw that in the long run it would not serve their business needs. From a print-focused process, Wiley is now moving steadily to a digital-first workflow.
By far some of the most interesting information presented was market research on how libraries use and what they want from e-books. Elsevier (Science Direct) shared data from their pilot e-book project, which experimented with various subscription and sales models. A science librarian, while recognizing that a print book would always be needed for the library’s core collection, looked forward to a day when they would be able to collect e-books broadly. From his perspective, this would be feasible when publishers made e-book versions available with no time lag, with greater functionality (more than just a copy of the print book), with flexibility of use, and when e-books can be integrated into the catalogue (through MARC records).
Linda Bennett, of Gold Leaf Consulting, had earlier confirmed many of these recommendations. Bennett recently conducted a survey of librarians on use of e-books and opinions of publishers’ business models. Some of the problems that librarians see with current e-book options are rigid usage restrictions, the wide variety of platforms, the lack of MARC records, lack of searchability, and price. After reviewing several publishers’ e-book models, Bennett noted that librarians were split on preferred models themselves. Fifty percent of surveyed librarians preferred to directly purchase content, and fifty percent preferred a license arrangement. An AAUP member got top marks in that survey—the librarians interviewed appreciated the Oxford Scholarship Online model, and, perhaps just as importantly, recognized the brand with approval.
For more detailed information, several presentations from this seminar are available online: http://www.stm-assoc.org/presentations/2007-presentations-book-201london/
As another useful reference on this topic, Springer has publicly released a study of their e-books’ usage in libraries: http://www.springer.com/ebooks
Digital Asset Distribution for Book Publishers: An Emerging Infrastructure
One of the newest acronyms in electronic publishing is DAD, for digital asset distribution—a new name for the electronic storage and distribution infrastructure that’s been developing in the industry over recent years. Klopotek brought together presenters from a number of DADs, including codeMantra, BiblioVault, Value Chain, HarperCollins, and Ingram Digital Ventures, to give publishers a crash course on DAD.
Each DAD representative took 15 minutes to present their services and opinions about what publishers could and should expect from a digital asset distribution partner. The vendors ranged from LibreDigital, a book-focused division of NewsStand, which manages electronic newspaper content for media companies around the globe; HarperCollins, which is now offering their digital warehousing services (described at the Books Unbound seminar, see above) to other publishers; to the familiar nonprofit BiblioVault, which is evolving into a full-service DAD.
Many presenters also had general advice for publishers, regardless of what service provider one might choose. Kate Davies of BiblioVault reminded the audience that working with a DAD can’t mean walking away from digital content distribution tasks entirely—strategic publishing decisions remain with the publisher. Choosing a vendor you can build a relationship with is vital. LibreDigital’s Craig Miller’s mantra was “convert once, publish many”—publishers should aim for a solution which ensures that content need be digitized only once for all of the many new content distribution channels available.
The day was extremely informative, presenting a wide array of options to consider as publishers search for the right—scalable, flexible yet stable—infrastructure for new electronic publishing models. Most usefully, however, the presentations from each DAD are now freely available online for publishers’ review. A white paper on the topic, prepared by Kloptek for Mike Shatzkin of Idea Logical and Mark Bide of Rightscom is also available for purchase.
Presentations and white paper are available here: http://www.klopotek.de/en52235.htm