Friday, November 25, 2011

9 Reasons Publishers Should Stop Acting Like Libraries Are The Enemy and Start Thanking Them

1. Libraries let people read your books.

I know, I know, you think that if it weren’t for libraries more people would buy your books, I have bad news for you, if it weren’t for libraries people would read less not buy more books. There is no guarantee that the people who read a library copy could, or would, choose to buy your book. Let’s face it no one who is willing spend 4 months on the waiting list for their favorite author is going to buy that hardback copy and probably not the trade paperback or paperback either (have you seen the price of mass market paperbacks lately?). Instead of seeing that library book as money out of your pocket consider it another book sold that wouldn’t have been and more importantly consider it the gateway drug to your author. Millions of people discover their new favorite author through their local library.

2. Libraries introduce people to your books

For children we are a magical place where they can check out 20 or 50 books a week and take them home to read or for parents to read those books. We do story times and other educational and fun programs for children instilling a life long love of reading. This wouldn’t happen anywhere else. Without this introduction to books at an early age you would not have so many adult customers.

As adults its called Readers Advisory. It’s that thing we do when someone comes to us and says they’d like something to read. For the record we do it better than Amazon, because we’re real people who listen and read too, not some formula. Let’s face it you need readers advisory because people ( especially in this economy) aren’t willing to gamble money on a new author.

3. We celebrate books and authors everyday, all year long.

Book clubs, displays and more! We throw these huge parties celebrating your books and your authors at our libraries. We encourage others to read your books, buying multiple copies, and then we sit around talking about them for hours. We create displays to promote your books helping more people discover them. All of this leads to sales.

4. Archives

We keep copies of your older books that the bookstores have sold at discount prices or gotten rid of. We will buy additional copies when the ones we have get old or lost or stolen.

5. Publicity

Yes we’ve already covered readers advisory, book clubs and story times but what about, newsletters, new books, returned books. We also do huge city-wide read-a-longs in our communities, invite authors for readings and signings. With the predicted death of physical bookstores you’re really going to need a place to host those authors signings, especially in the smaller towns.

6. We WANT to buy your books.

In the day and age when you are so worried about piracy, we are offering to pay and we are offering a reasonable method for people to read your books without piracy. We’ve even agreed to your ridiculous anti-piracy methods that make the process cumbersome and frustrating for everyone.

7. We love books too.

Sure not for the same reasons you do, but we want there to be a future for books too.

8. Who else is going to pay those ridiculously high database and journal prices?

Not the general public or the students. The library can barely afford them, you’re raking us over the coals here guys.

9. Library users are your best customers.

Yep, its true. A recent study by Library Journal and Bowker PubTrack Consumer reports

Our data show that over 50% of all library users report purchasing books by an author they were introduced to in the library,” Miller noted. “This debunks the myth that when a library buys a book the publisher loses future sales. Instead, it confirms that the public library does not only incubate and support literacy, as is well understood in our culture, but it is an active partner with the publishing industry in building the book market, not to mention the burgeoning e-book market.

From, Librarian by Day

Penguin and Libraries; Common Ground on Kindle Lending

A new theory on why Penguin has pulled the plug on library lending of their ebooks came out in today’s Publishers’ Lunch. Surprisingly, it’s an issue that the two parties can agree upon.

According to the story, publishers are upset because OverDrive sends library users to Amazon’s site for Kindle downloading, essentially making Amazon the administrator of library lending and thus not “governed by publishers’ contracts with Amazon or OverDrive.”

Libraries, also, have expressed concern about sending users to Amazon. California librarian Sarah Houghton recorded a comment on the subject in October, in which she states, “when you check out a Kindle book from Overdrive, it dumps you out on the Amazon web site, and you conclude the transaction there. The transaction ends with a pitch for you to buy more books.” She also expresses concern about the data that Amazon gleans from library users. This subject was also explored by librarian Bobbi Newman on her blog post, Public Library eBooks on the Amazon Kindle – We Got Screwed.

From, EarlyWord: The Publisher

Monday, November 14, 2011

Libraries face a digital future

Lessons from overseas suggest there is more to digital libraries than e-books

It's a time of radical change for libraries. During the summer they were told by the Museums, Libraries & Archives Council and the Local Government Group to exploit digital technologies to survive the spending cuts. In a report on the government's Future Libraries Programme the two bodies also argued that the latest IT developments present a huge opportunity for libraries to deliver more efficient and effective services.

Allen Weiner, Gartner's research vice president in the US, took a similar line when he shared his thoughts about the role of technology in libraries at the Re-Thinking Libraries event in London this November.

Weiner's boyhood library in north-east Philadelphia was a place to read books and to meet up, in effect a social centre. According to the Future Libraries report, the best libraries are showing they can provide a range of services, from helping people to find a job to being a meeting place for clubs and groups.

Weiner said technology can take this forward and transform libraries into "next generation resource centres" and major places for gathering knowledge. But he warned that they need to be abreast of IT developments: "People are going to bring their technologies to the library, they are not going to wait for you to have those technologies there. They are going to bring them and you need to be aware and take advantage of that."

His view was backed up by the chief executive of ePub Direct in Ireland, Gareth Cuddy, who told delegates: "If you do not provide e-books, then they will download them from somewhere else."

Cuddy appeared confident about the continued growth of e-books, however. He said that Europe is 12-18 months behind the US in the adoption of the technology and that in the US 82% of public libraries now offer e-books.

Anythink libraries in Adams County, Colorado provides one example. As reported by the Guardian's Public Leaders' Network, Anythink is moving toward providing downloadable books, films and music and continues to provide products to support staff, such as handheld devices that allow them to help users find items, take out loans and email them an acknowledgement of return dates.

According to Cuddy 70% of publishers expect that by 2014 more than half their publications will be electronic, and a key challenge for libraries and publishers is for books to be available across a wide range of platforms.

Weiner urged libraries to adopt open standards rather than cater for any one type of reader. "The iPad is the world according to Apple, it is not an open standard," he said. "If you think of the democracy a library represents, it should be built on open standards."

He maintained that cloud computing offers great opportunities for libraries. "For example, Amazon today offers Kindle clouds where the books are not in your Kindle, they are up the cloud… The library cloud could be the place where libraries store all kinds of content, not only books but videos, or content that is created in the library."

He claimed to be a big fan of "hyper-local journalism", which he defined as a group of people within a community getting together and writing about that area. Weiner believes that a library is a perfect place for them to meet, write or start their own blog.

"And could the library help them publish it? Absolutely!" he exclaimed. "If it goes into the cloud it gets fed into search engines and then your library cloud becomes the place that people can access the content in open standards across a whole variety of devices."

Gert Poulsen, deputy librarian at Copenhagen Business School, told the conference that take-up of e-services in Denmark's public libraries is low and academic libraries such as his are expected to have a "good effect". Four years ago the business school adopted a "strategic approach to e-publishing", which focused on creating more physical space by having fewer print materials and more electronic resources.

The library's use of e-journals dates back 10 years, when it subscribed to 4,000 electronic publications. This figure has climbed to 35,000 and last year students and staff carried out1.5m downloads of e-journals, according to Poulsen.

In 2010 Copenhagen Business School's budget for electronic books was €72,000, but this year that leapt to €130,000 and it now spends about 45% of its books budgets on digital publications. To encourage further take-up of e-books, the library has set up a €55,000 fund for students to make purchases.

The Future Libraries report makes the point that an effective service can only be achieved by understanding the needs of users. The Copenhagen library appears not to have tackled this fully, as its digital drive has not been particularly popular. "We know that if students get to choose between print and e-books, they actually prefer the print book," Poulsen admitted. "We are still discussing how to deal with the dilemma."

For example, text books at the business school remain unaffected by the electronic drive because students can't put notes in e-books from the library. "Students prefer to print certain chapters and make notes on the page," he said. "So we have to make e-books more relevant to students."

Other major considerations for the library are whether to purchase publications as an individual institution or as part of a consortium. At the business school, 50% of purchases are part of national agreements and the remainder, which includes most e-books, are purchased as an individual institution.

"Read the contract because some vendors limit the number of downloads… You have to decide which usage model you find acceptable. We have said that we will go for multiple users at one time, not just one," Poulsen said.

Another obstacle to the adoption of digital materials is that inter-library loans are almost impossible without violating copyright. "We have to consider inter-library loans very carefully when setting up deals," he said, adding: "We have a full time contracts manager and she is worth all her salary."

Students and staff at the Copenhagen library are sometimes "confused" about the different formats and models for e-books, but Poulsen and his colleagues are experimenting with different providers to find the best solution. "I hope that in the future the publishers will let the library decide which format they want," he said.

Like the conference speakers, the joint report on the Future Libraries Programme emphasises the importance of public libraries as community focal points, and in meeting the needs of a new generation of library users. The document recommends exploiting digital opportunities, but also admits that the programme does not have all the answers and "is still a work in progress". It concludes that change will only happen if political leadership and professional expertise are "harnessed in the same direction."

Gill Hitchcock, Guardian Professional

Friday, November 11, 2011

Florida Library Makes 34,000 Ebooks Available at International Airport

Travelers at the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport can now download free ebooks from the Broward County Library while they wait to claim their luggage.

The partnership between the library and the airport began during the summer but only recently has begun to attract notice. The airport all together has 36 LCD screens that are reserved for advertisements or public service announcements.

Twelve screens near the baggage claim now also display a QR code that the traveler can scan with a QR code reader app on their smartphone or electronic reading device, and then they can access over 34,000 public domain titles via the library’s OverDrive platform. No library card is required and the titles never expire.

“The library did all the heavy lifting and we just provided them the venue,” said Greg Meyer, the airport’s public information officer. “The airport’s position is that it’s one more customer convenience that we can provide to make the experience better. We have free WiFi and when something comes along like this, where there’s only positive impact for the passengers, why not,” he said.

Meyer said the only caveat was that the airport had to make sure that the service would not take money away from airport concessions.

“We had to be careful not to compete with vendors selling hard bound books,” he said. “The library ensured us that it was older books that would not compete with more current titles being sold,” he said.

Catherine McElrath, the library’s publications specialist manager, approached Meyer about the project.

“Working with the airport was a real pleasure. They were really open to the idea,” McElrath said. “It’s a wonderful way to bring library services to people everywhere,” she said.

There is no charge for displaying the QR code since the airport regards it as a public service announcement.

Stephen Grubb, the library’s e-services manager, said the program is averaging about 20 to 30 downloads a month, but he is expecting that number will grow as people learn about the program.

“People think about books when they think of the library, but they haven’t really made the connection between the library and ebooks yet. This raises their awareness,” he said.

He also said using the QR codes was a quick and easy way to get people to the library’s website and also to appeal to a younger demographic who may not be using the library.

The library is planning to expand the program at the airport and also is working with Broward County Transit to display the QR codes at bus stations and also possibly at Port Everglades, which serves all of south Florida.

“These ebooks are things people could go out and find elsewhere, but what libraries do best is bring information to people, like answering a reference question,” Grubb said. “That’s what we do best and this program is an example of that,” he said.

The library is making a concentrated effort to highlight all its e-services in a program called BCL.WOW, or a library without walls, which will include a mobile app that is scheduled to become available in December.

“We want to broaden the perception of library service,” Grubb said.

Michael Kelley, Digital Shift, November 2011

Thursday, November 10, 2011

11.22.63

By Stephen King

The point of the tale of terror is not, in the end, the specifics of what kills us – the vampires, the elder gods, the serial killers – so much as the inexorable fact that something will. It is a reminder of death, and of an essentially tragic view of the universe in which any consolation, however welcome, is temporary. In this literature of secular apocalypse, the few happy endings are fleeting, and never eternal; like the other literatures of the fantastic, it is at its best when it says these central things so clearly that they tap into the sublime.

It would be easy and wrong to see Stephen King's fierce new novel 11.22.63 as a generic side-step from his home turf into science fiction. This is, after all, a novel about time-travel, about the attempt to create a new and better world by going back and changing one big thing: in this case, the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Part of its fascination has to do with the process whereby you might do this: SF is all about process and horror often is not. However, the process involved is that of understanding people, and specifically a heavily researched Lee Harvey Oswald, not that of time-travel itself. It's just a given that there is a door into 1958, and that you reset it every time you go through it.

So the time-travel is simply a piece of inexplicable magic. King's hero Jake Epping is warned, by an incoherent drunk, that this magic has a price and he will not want to pay it. Jake is introduced to the door by his friend Al, who makes the best hamburgers in town (there is a reason for that). Suddenly, Al has aged years and is dying; he has tried and failed to carry out a mission, and wants Jake to take his place.

They both think that the Kennedy assassination is where everything went wrong for America, and the way to fix it is to live from that day in 1958 to that day in 1963 which gives the book its title, with foreknowledge of what needs to be done. One of the strengths of the book is King's at once nostalgic and honest view of the end of the Eisenhower era. Jake is conscious that it's quite a nice time for him, but that as a straight white man, it would be. King manages to avoid both sentimentalising the past and treating it with massive condecension; his role as the poet of American brand-names serves him well here.

Jake gets a job teaching, and falls in love with a colleague, and knows enough to try to protect her from a possibly murderous ex-husband. In a trial run, he changes the life of brain-damaged former mature pupil Henry by killing the father who smashed his skull; on his return from that trip, Jake learns from a sister whom the father did not kill that able-bodied Henry never came back from Vietnam, from which he learns nothing important. The past is not a computer game and the people you meddle with there are real. Jake falls in love and finds out the hard way just how real, and fragile, they are.

Like wishes, or trying to create life or live forever, changing the past is a way of cheating, of getting past the way that the universe works: WW Jacobs's story "The Monkey's Paw" is King's model here. Jake and Al have good intentions, but those alone are not enough, and for Jake, the consequences are both tragedy and nightmare. Had King written this book, as he once planned, early in his career, that would moralistically be that. Part of the charm of the older, mellower King is that he allows Jake the grace of putting things right and accepting things as they sadly are by endurance. He gives him not a happy ending, but a bittersweet one. Sometimes things as they are turn out not to be quite as bad as they might be.

Roz Kaveney, The Independant

Penny Vincenzi: My life in publishing

Penny Vincenzi has published fifteen books since 1989. All are bestsellers. Her latest novel, The Decision, was just published in Canada. She will be guest editing The Afterword all this week.

If I ever wrote my autobiography, it would be extremely boring; only just one chapter would be quite interesting, indeed exciting and that is the one that tells the story of the foray my husband Paul and I made into the world of publishing on our own, and consequently into the word of high finance.

It was in the early 70s and had won a contract with Boots the Chemist to publish a fashion and beauty magazine; I was an ex fashion and beauty editor at that time, and working in the cosmetic industry and my husband was an adman. Boots were very keen and although they didn’t put any money in, they contracted to distribute it, and to display it in all their stores and that was worth mega bucks. The only problem was we didn’t have any money to put in either…
So we sold our very nice Victorian house, bought a modern box and used the spare change to finance the early stages. Paul, was confident that once the advertising started rolling in, so would the backers. We both gave up the day jobs and he spent all his days in the boardrooms of various investment bankers, doing his presentation about the wonderful opportunity they were being offered in backing us while I sold advertising space, hired a couple of staff and we set up office in the spare bedroom of our house. It all went swimmingly; and as the launch date approached, we had sold forty pages of cosmetic advertising, no small achievement. The presses were about to start rolling, and the TV commercial we had contracted to make to sell the magazine was in the can; only problem was we still had no backers. It was terrifying: and then out of the blue, came a small team who said they would back us and would only require 20% of the equity in the company. We attended lots of meetings, feeling rather grand and high powered reached Heads of Agreement—a sort of interim contract—and pressed the button on the printing process. A very large sum of money had now been spent—but we still didn’t have the cash. We didn’t even admit to one another how scared we were.

And then—five days before launch, our backers suddenly demanded 80% equity and full editorial control. We knew this was impossible and we were being held to ransom; and we refused to sign.

At which point, we could very easily have gone bankrupt—in fact our lawyers took us into their boardroom and told us what to do when the bailiffs came. It was terrifying; we couldn’t sleep, we couldn’t eat. We would lose our house, our car, everything; we were in debt to the tune of several hundred thousand pounds. And it wasn’t just our own future we had gambled with so recklessly, we had two little girls who would be on the street with us. How, we asked ourselves, could we have been so stupid?

The only way was forward; so we dispatched the copies of the magazine to Boots’ warehouse and watched our commercial on the TV. “There goes our future” I said as it flashed across the screen…

Publication day came and went and two days later we went to check out on the magazine in the stores. I sent my husband in while the girls and I did some (very meager) shopping. He came back looking ashen; “it’s not even on display” he said. I sent him back to see the manager; we stood in the middle of the supermarket, frozen with terror.
Then “there’s daddy” said Polly, our older daughter, “he’s crying” I turned round to look—and he was, but he was smiling too.

“They’re all gone” he said, his voice odd and strained; “it’s a sell out.”

Which it was; and not just in that store, but right across the country…

Paul was right and the backers came running; on the Monday morning we had three to choose from.

But I never got over it, the terror and the despair; and I remain terminally cautious to this day.

National Post

Wednesday, November 9, 2011

Toronto’s Kobo acquired by Japanese firm Rakuten for $315-million

Toronto-based e-publishing startup Kobo Inc. has been purchased by Japanese online shopping giant Rakuten Inc. for US$315-million in cash.

Founded in 2009 after being spun out of Indigo Books & Music Ltd. — which remains the largest single shareholder in the company — Kobo has grown to become one of the most successful e-publishing platforms in North America.

According to a joint statement from the two companies, Kobo will continue to maintain its headquarters, management team and employees in Toronto.

“We are very excited about this next step,” said Rakuten chairman and chief executive Hiroshi Mikitani.

“Kobo provides one of the world’s most communal eBook reading experiences with its innovative integration of social media, such as Facebook and Twitter; while Rakuten offers Kobo unparalleled opportunities to extend its reach through some of the world’s largest regional e-commerce companies, including Buy.com in the US, Tradoria in Germany, Rakuten Brazil, Rakuten Taiwan, Lekutian in China, TARAD in Thailand, and Rakuten Belanja Online in Indonesia, and of course, Rakuten Ichiba in Japan.”

Kobo chief executive Michael Serbinis called the two companies a “perfect match” from a business and cultural perspective.

“We share a a common vision of creating a content experience that is both global and social,” he said in a statement.

“Rakuten is already one of the world’s largest e-commerce platforms, while Kobo is the most social eBook service on the market and one of the world’s largest eBook stores with over 2.5 million titles. This transaction will greatly strengthen our position in our current markets and allow us to diversify quickly into other countries and e-commerce categories.”

Kobo and Rakuten expect the deal to close sometime in the first quarter of 2012.

The two companies have scheduled a conference call for 5:15 p.m. ET to discuss the transaction.

Written by Matt Hartley,
Financial Post

CIA’s ‘vengeful librarians’ mine Facebook, Twitter for global intelligence

MCLEAN, VA.—Inside an anonymous industrial park in Virginia, in an unassuming brick building, the CIA is following tweets — up to five million a day.
At the agency’s Open Source Center, a team known affectionately as the “vengeful librarians” also pores over Facebook, newspapers, TV news channels, local radio stations, Internet chat rooms — anything overseas that anyone can access and contribute to openly.
From Arabic to Mandarin, from an angry tweet to a thoughtful blog, the analysts gather the information, often in the native tongue. They cross-reference it with the local newspaper or a clandestinely intercepted phone conversation. From there, they build a picture sought by the highest levels at the White House, giving a real-time peek, for example, at the mood of a region after the Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden or perhaps a prediction of which Mideast nation seems ripe for revolt.
Yes, they saw the uprising in Egypt coming; they just didn’t know exactly when revolution might hit, said the centre’s director, Doug Naquin.
The centre had already “predicted that social media in places like Egypt could be a game-changer and a threat to the regime,” he said in a recent interview with the Associated Press at the centre. CIA officials said it was the first such visit by a reporter the agency has ever granted.
The CIA facility was set up in response to a recommendation by the 9-11 Commission, with its first priority to focus on counterterrorism and counter-proliferation. But its several hundred analysts — the actual number is classified — track a broad range of information, from Chinese Internet access to the mood on the street in Pakistan.
While most are based in Virginia, analysts are also scattered throughout U.S. embassies worldwide to get a step closer to the pulse of their subjects.
The most successful analysts, Naquin said, are something like the heroine of the crime novel The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, a quirky, irreverent computer hacker who “knows how to find stuff other people don’t know exists.”
Those with master’s degrees in library science and multiple languages, especially those who grew up speaking another tongue, “make a powerful open source officer,” Naquin said.
The centre had started focusing on social media after watching the Twitter-sphere rock the Iranian regime during the Green Revolution of 2009, when thousands protested the results of the elections that put President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad back in power. “Farsi was the third-largest presence in social media blogs at the time on the web,” Naquin said.
The centre’s analysis ends up in President Barack Obama’s daily intelligence briefing in one form or another, almost every day.
After bin Laden was killed in Pakistan in May, the CIA followed Twitter to give the White House a snapshot of world public opinion.
Since tweets can’t necessarily be pegged to a geographic location, the analysts broke down reaction by language. The result: the majority of tweets in Urdu, the language of Pakistan, and in Chinese were negative. China is a close ally of Pakistan. Pakistani officials protested the raid as an affront to their nation’s sovereignty, a sore point that continues to complicate U.S.-Pakistan relations.
When the president gave his speech addressing Mideast issues a few weeks after the raid, the tweet response over the next 24 hours came in negative from Turkey, Egypt, Yemen, Algeria, the Persian Gulf and Israel, too, with Arabic and Turkish tweets charging that Obama favoured Israel, and Hebrew tweets denouncing the speech as pro-Arab.
In the next few days, major news media came to the same conclusion, as did analysis by the covert side of U.S. intelligence based on intercepts and human intelligence gathered in the region.
The centre is also in the process of comparing its social media results with the track record of polling organizations, trying to see which produces more accurate results, Naquin said.
“We do what we can to caveat that we may be getting an overrepresentation of the urban elite,” said Naquin, acknowledging that only a small slice of the population in many areas being monitored has access to computers and Internet.
But he points out that access to social media sites via cellphones is growing in regions including Africa, allowing a wider swath of the population to share views online.
Sites such as Facebook and Twitter also have become a key resource for following a fast-moving crisis such as the riots that raged across Bangkok in April and May of last year, the centre’s deputy director said. The Associated Press agreed not to identify him because he sometimes works undercover in foreign countries.
As director, Naquin is identified publicly by the agency although the location of the centre is kept secret to deter attacks, whether physical or electronic.
The deputy director was one of a skeleton crew of 20 U.S. government employees who kept the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok running throughout the riots as protesters surged through the streets, swarming the embassy neighbourhood and trapping U.S. diplomats and Thais alike in their homes.
The army moved in, and traditional media reportage slowed to a trickle as local journalists were either trapped or cowed by government forces.
“But within an hour, it was all surging out on Twitter and Facebook,” the deputy director said. The CIA homed in on 12 to 15 users who tweeted situation reports and cellphone photos of demonstrations.
The CIA staff cross-referenced the tweeters with the limited news reports to figure out who among them was providing reliable information. Tweeters also policed themselves, pointing out when someone else had filed an inaccurate account.
“That helped us narrow down to those dozen we could count on,” the deputy director said.
Ultimately, some two-thirds of the reports coming out of the embassy and being sent back to all branches of government in Washington came from the CIA’s open source analysis throughout the crisis.

Published On Fri Nov 4 2011
Kimberly Dozier Associated Press