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Part 2 The June 7 th Economist has an article entitled Unbound about Book publishing in America. It highlights Amazon's impact on the industry through POD (Print on Demand) and the Kindle. There were a few key points that are worth noting: Unlike digital music or video, digital books require consumers to change their consumption habits. Textbooks is a growing category and it is helping to reduce costs by eliminating all the frictional expenses that occur along the value chain. The Economist points out that this could have a huge impact for Springer & Elsevier in terms of the $2.3 B college textbook-resale market. If the books are only available electronically, they become very hard to resell to the old college bookstore. POD is now cheaper than standard print for runs of fewer than 1200 copies according to Steve DeForge of Ames On-Demand. The last paragraph says it all and ties in with my last post: Publishing has only two indispensable participants : authors and read...

Standing in between someone and the information they need... is a sure way to lose a job. Jeff Jarvis, in his excellent blog Buzzmachine recently commented on the Justice Department’s antitrust settlement with the National Association of Realtors. He rails against the market inefficiency created as realtors monopolized listings. He goes on to point out that 6% commissions are a thing of the past as internet brokers will now be able to compete on a level playing field. It brings to mind a comment that a b-school professor made to me years ago "Never stand between someone who needs information and the information itself as you'll soon find yourself out of a job". So far I can only think of examples that by and large support this theory. For example, when financial data became more ubiquitous, the role of stock brokers changed drastically. The same is true for travel agents thanks to websites like Expedia, kayak.com and travelocity. However, it is important to note t...

NOYS BOYS and other Acronyms I've always been interested in language and acronyms in particular have intrigued me. Acronyms are quite prevalent in technical fields and often have the impact of creating a "language" that is only known to members of a particular community. When I worked for legal and tax publisher Commerce Clearing House, they published an internal directory of all the three and four letter acronmyms in use so sales, editorial, technology and fulfillment could all be on the same page, so to speak. A few recent sightings got me thinking about these constructions. For example, I received a vacation response from someone at Google, the subject line had OOO (Out Of Office). I also read some reviews of the swag bag at the All Things Digital Conference and learned that SWAG = Stuff We All Get. With a 7 year old in the house, we've come up with our own lexicon for everday words and happenings. Here are a few of my favorites: RB = Roast Beef BOYS = Both On...

Social Networking for the St. Elmos’ Fire Crowd My 25th prep school reunion was this weekend at Choate in Wallingford, CT. Being a glutton for punishment I agreed to be one of the reunion chairs for the event reasoning that since I plan a lot of events for SIIA, there should be some skill overlap. Luckily there was. We made extensive use of email to help in the recruiting efforts and used blogs , Photobucket , Skype and FaceBook to supplement. Unlike the information industry crowd, there has not been as much acceptance out in the general populace yet. We got about 25 classmates to join Facebook and through that process found out that some of my classmates are in the info industry! I’m hoping that a lot of the photos taken will make it up to Facebook or Photobucket to help lay the groundwork for our 30th reunion. Our approach stands in sharp contrast to the graduating 6th formers (seniors) that I got to meet a few weeks ago. Every one of them is on FaceBook now and as one student...

CCC on May Day Copyright Clearance Center , an SIIA member, recently held a one day conference on Copyright. Once there I saw the schedule and got a little worried – they had schedule four ninety minute panel discussions on the topic. I’m thinking that is way too long and people will be nodding off. SIIA runs lots of conferences and we’ve moved to much shorter sessions , never venturing beyond 60 minutes. To my surprise and delight – they were all terrific. CCC matched the right speakers with the right audience. The people in attendance, including Keith Kupferschmid and Ken Wasch from SIIA live and breath the topic and were quite passionate about their opinions. They touched on copyright in print, music and video. The highlight for me was hearing recording artist Suzanne Vega talk about her experience with the global remixing of “Tom’s Diner”. This tune was remixed by a variety of artists. Once they reached some level of popularity they’d contact her or her legal team for perm...

NY Times Incline or Decline? I recently attended Incisive Media’s ePublishing Innovation Forum in London. It is put on by the same team that bring the industry the iconic London Online conference. They put on a good conference with some really great speakers. Vin Crosbie, a media consultant presented some information about the decline in newspapers, specifically citing the decline in readership at the New York Times. The question I raised was how looking at only one metric is misleading. Sure, people are not consuming as many dead trees as they used to. Where I live in CT I can only receive the Times for home delivery on the weekends. However, I receive the excellent DealBook newsletter every morning, plus emails containing the top news headlines every day. On the home pages I maintain there are links to NYT headlines as well as a variety of RSS feeds from the auto sections, food sections and from freakonomics. (I also download a crossword from time to time). The implications...

Anagram I was in London last week for the ePublishing Innovation Forum and flew over on Virgin Atlantic. As you may know, Virgin Atlantic has those wonderful personal video screens that allow you to watch whatever you want along with the ability to pause, rewind and fast forward. While flying over I caught the first 50 minutes of a UK show called Torchwood . It is kind of like X Files on steroids. Alas, we were landing at Heathrow and I missed the ending. Upon arrival I checked out the BBC website to see if I could watch it but they did not make it easy. However, I found out that the episodes can be purchased on iTunes in the states. I also learned that the show can be viewed on a BBC channel here in the US which I don't subscribe to. What the heck does this have to do with content, you may ask? Well, I think it is an interesting parallel to a B2B business model where some of the content is given away for free (1 episode), then I have the option to buy by the drink for $1.99...

My First Directory The other day I was riding my bike and spotted a Schlitz beer can on the side of the road. Not really a remarkable occurrence except that it flashed me back about 30 years to when I used to collect beer cans. Schlitz was known for having cans in a variety of sizes from about 7 oz. to 24 oz. Those cans looked pretty cool on my shelves back then. As my friends and I sourced these cans from road sides or cajoled our parents to buy them we learned about a book called the Beer Can Collector's Bible. It was published by Jack Martells in 1976 and it served as a directory to help us organize our collections. Aside from a dictionary, thesaurus or encylopedia, this was the first bit of reference material I owned that was not for some scholarly pursuit. The biggest frustration, however, was that the publication lacked any information on price or value of the cans. It's amazing to think about how the market for collectibles and other items has changed with the advent ...

UGC for Lawyers The New York Times ran an article on Sunday in the Novelties section entitled Lawyers Open Their File Cabinets for a Web Resource. The company that was profiled is called JD Supra.com and they have built a service that "offers free access to a constantly expanding database of legal documents". Contributions include filings, decisions, forms and articles that are contributed by groups as varied as the Electronic Frontier Foundation to Morrison & Foerster. This site assists researchers, members of the press and lawyers from smaller firms by providing a source for quality legal product. And, as with many user generated content schemes, offers the authors a wider audience to share their knowledge and grow their business and reputation. JD Supra also benefits by charging contributors $240 per year if they want to add links in their profiles to their e-mail addresses, Web sites and blogs. The site will also carry advertisements according to the article. I...

SIIA Executive FaceTime Interview with Y.S. Chi of Elsevier Last week Hal Espo, President of Contextual Connections interviwed Y.S. about a variety of topics. One of the most interesting for me was on the future of print. Y.S. pointed out that they realize that print is no longer the staring point for al research and that they are having to adjust their products accordingly. It's not a surprise if you stop to think about it but it points out the danger and short sightedness of the simple maxims like "Print is dead". Sure, some print is dead but it really depends on how well you segment your market. For Elsevier it may be an age based segmentation based on roles/positions that will help them determine when print will die or migrate.