Jul

8

Over Niagara in an eBook

Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, eBook, Education, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, Publishing, Search, semantic web, social media, Uncategorized, Workflow | 1 Comment

The ineffable Shatzkin reports (www.idealog.com/blog) this week on an innocent story with dramatic implications. It seems from his calculations from Hachette UK releases that if eBook sales are indeed now 25% of total sales (and 30% for fiction), then over 50% of sales in all are “online” (print and eBook), and for “some genres and authors, close to two-thirds”. Given that 80% of online in any format in the UK is Amazon, the book trade have acquired an intermediary who can, at any point, tilt the table with offers to authors that no other player can match. In short, the rules of the game can now change radically, the inflection point has been reached, and the “over Niagara in a barrel” experience of the music industry is about to be repeated. So let me, amidst the angst and heartbreak, the invocations of Longman in the 1720s or Murray 1 in the 1820s, the competition law actions, the desire to retain territoriality in a global market and all the other things which will inevitably follow, issue a plea for one small concession? When we have thrown out baby, bathwater and all, can we please throw out the ancient, encrusted law of Copyright as well, and then start over?

Its not, of course, that I despise Intellectual Property. Far from it. Intellectual ownership is hugely important and should be respected at all costs. The ability of individuals to ensure that their creativity is recognized and acknowledged is of paramount importance in a society where intellectual creativity has to be honoured and represents the only we have of saving ourselves – from ourselves. Nor do I baulk for a moment at the thought that individual creators, and their licensed intermediaries, should be able to make investments in the processes by which ideas and entertainment and education are released into society, and seek a good return on those investments. In short, the activity of the book trade, and every other IP based industry, could go on as it is for ever and I would not turn a hair. True, Book publishers (I was one for 20 years) have mostly been rascals, untrained for anything but with a nose for the money. Byron had it about right when he asserted to Murray that Barabbas was the first publisher. His faith in this would have been confirmed when his publisher burnt his memoirs to protect the Byron brand. Allen Lane and Jonathan Cape were sublime marketeers and I suspect that the editors who added lustre to the trade, like Max Perkins or Dick Seaver, realised a lot less out of it in terms of capital accumulation. Today it is a business of Super Corporations, and they must come to terms with Amazon in their own and various ways. Small publishing, the work of individuals to culture and develop excellence in unlit places, will flourish as honestly in the low cost start-up environment of the web as it always has elsewhere.

I know that the leadership of the publishing industry globally fear that Copyright is being eroded at every point. Trade associations reach for the adjectives to tell governments how vital it is to protect the existing framework of law. Fair Use must be protected – or rejected – according to where you live in the world. Educational re-use is a string back of exceptions and deceptions which enable publishers, librarians and teachers to persuade themselves that they have got the best of the deal in subclause 3(e) and thereby assured the protection of life on Earth for another generation. Meanwhile, copyright breach is an unpunished, apparently victimless crime, as sinless as speeding, whose conscious abusers claim that they are “liberating knowledge” while 90% of their brethren do not even know or realise what they are doing when streaming a downloaded book. Apparently victimless, but actually the whole system must be lubricated with cash to make it work, and the victims threatened are of course users themselves.

So, why don’t we step back from “Copyright”, desert the word with all those archaic suggestions of unfairness to learners or the poor, cease to talk about “monopoly” rights and thus invite the enmity of every competition lawyer on the planet, and begin in an new place with a new approach matched by a new language. In my own years of lobbying the European Commission, as junior delegate and bag carrier to the great Charles Clark, my Leader produced the new line in argument “The answer to the Machine must lie in the Machine”. How true, but so far we have not produced an answer half worthy of the Machine. Surely, in a machine age, where every network connection of any sort is known to the network, and every one of us is known as a user (and the National Security Agency plus GCHQ know what we use) we cannot be very far away a universal licensing regime? One that existed at several levels, to accommodate one to one, one to many, many to many forms of licensing. The latter may even be a levy on broadband or a network licensing scheme. Then we could move to global licensing organizations with real clout collecting funds which really were worthwhile to those whose Outed content is so vital to the remashing of information and content and data into new service environments. Which is how the internet operates.

But inside the Internet we are still trying to operate the Book Trade as if the Internet did not exist. Something here has to give. At a guess, at this moment, it will not be Amazon.

Jul

1

After The Librarians…?

Filed Under Big Data, Blog, data analytics, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, Search, semantic web, STM, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment

Last week’s blog on growing STM sparked some debate, mostly around the realization that if existing powerful publishers who work in research article publishing drive business development towards the workflow of researchers and towards the implications of data analysis and visualization, then current business models may collapse in time – and much else with them. For many publishers this may be expressed as a struggle to “buy time” – prop up the existing business model while culturing the new one. And a part of that culture change is almost never discussed publicly in STM circles. It is the skills changes that will have to take place as publishers (article and journal vendors) have to move from satisfying the generalized, “Big Deal” based procurement requirements of powerful research librarians, library network tsars and institutional information management to coping with the market of many, the precise needs of a researcher, a project or a department. While I have not been to a library-based meeting in over a decade without someone raising the plight of disintermediated librarians, no one seems worried by the idea that the front part of the publishing pantomime horse is innovating in development terms a sequence of product and market shifts that the sales and marketing back legs have no clue how to sell.

This thought struck particularly forcefully this week when I read an article (http://editorsupdate.elsevier.com/issue-39-june-2013/how-to-handle-digital-content/) posted on the Elsevier website on 26 June. Ten years ago I played a brief part as a judge in a competition called The Article of the Future (AotF) organized by Elsevier’s David Marques. Then our aspiration was simply to make the article a born digital environment, not a digitized print artifact. A decade later that is triumphantly achieved, and now the question is the other way about: the article is something which can only exist digitally, and may never again be satisfactorily “printed”. The value in an article, for Elsevier, can only be revealed inside ScienceDirect. The data cursor and interactive plot viewer that enables you to look at the author’s data points will only be available there. Presentation which puts the article in a central pane with a column of navigation on the left and references and tools on the right will be the way to view an article there. Here Kitware SAS have installed a 3D molecular viewer and 3D archaeological viewer – authors upload the model as a supplementary file, and the service then copes with both ribbons and “balls-and-sticks” modelling. A neuroscience 3D imaging package follows.

Then there are the Executable Papers. Just as f1000 has been insisting that data files must accompany articles where relevant, so Elsevier has been experimenting with the journal “Computers & Graphics”. One of the things an article was always intended to do but never managed on paper was to “achieve the full reproducibility of key scientific findings”. Here is a dream of scholarly communication coming closer. Then add some tools: Elsevier show an interactive (Google) map viewer, a chemical compound viewer, interactive phylogenetic trees, and MATLAB figures. And here at last are simple links to connect articles with data held in data repositories, and alongside them links to a PubChem Compound viewer that they have built jointly with the National Center for Biotechnology and Information. Finally, for authors publishing in this AotF format, why not add some AudioSlides? Here, in a voice file with some slides, you can add introduce the concepts and add your own view, outside of the article itself but attached to it, on why this may be important. If article publishing is researcher marketing, this must be a great advance.

So here we have scholarly communication back in the hands of scholars, in the context of wholly digital networked exchanges. With f1000 now creating a logic for post-publication peer review, we can envisage the complete disappearance of the second and third tier journals, with the high brand top journals selecting their articles as post-initial publication edited versions, reflecting some of the feedback and adding more data and supplementary information. In some fields the data and its modelling and the researcher conclusions will stand alone as citable “papers”. The Big Deal argument collapses, as it already threatens to do, into a discussion on database access, and Open Access (more of a threat to librarians than publishers). While publishers use the added value digital article game as a way of bridging the move into workflow markets, they need to know that this is a temporary bridge: in less than five years what seems futuristic today about the Article of the Future will be part of the desktop toolset of every scientist preparing an article for initial publication in his own repository. The emphasis then, and the business of many who call themselves publishers now, will be on selling those tools, creating the services that integrate content in to the context of the research enquiry, enabling the retention and cross-referencing of knowledge, and tracking the benefits – and costs – of lines of research. The race to the Electronic Lab Manual and its successors was never more apparent.

And in this world where are the Research Librarians? One cannot argue with those who point out that important roles of preservation need to be tackled, or that research teams, departments and individuals will all need support and advice. But if those tasks are information management roles within the research team, supported and funded just like the publication of articles, then the infrastructure of buildings and people and budgets surrounding the word “library” may become an anachronism. Publishers who see this as a major release of resources may be tempted to rejoice. Those in sales and marketing who loved the years of brokering “Big Deals” may cry, for the world that beckons requires them to do what every other digital marketplace has had to do, often with limited success: understand the working lives of ultimate end-user customers with an understanding of how they might save time and trouble in the search for greater productivity, better decision making, and improved compliance with research benchmarks and good practise.

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