Reality Checks
Andrew Richard Albanese poses ten truths, guesses, and warnings about the future of publishing
By Andrew Richard Albanese -- netConnect, 4/15/2008
At the opening session of the 2008 O’Reilly Media Tools of Change (TOC) conference in New York City, three keynote speakers wasted no time getting to the show’s underlying, uneasy core: Will publishers matter? What a jarring “welcome, and good morning” that must have been for many in attendance.
As the audience sipped coffee and struggled awake, SirsiDynix’s Stephen Abram, Copyright Clearance Center’s (CCC) Bill Burger, and New York University’s (NYU) Doug Rushkoff sketched a dizzying future where phone-based web browsers meant instant access to “living” content—blogs, RSS feeds, interactive web sites with audio and video, chat, voice and IM, personal profiles, and wikis—all created, enabled, and constantly updated with an array of ever-more-powerful tools.
The vision presented that morning—and over the three-day conference—was vibrant, but it also had to be disconcerting. After all, pretty much absent from the opening session was any detailed talk of one thing many in the room still had warehouses, catalogs—and libraries—full of: books. Specifically, just how does the “social currency” of Web 2.0 become real currency for publishers? Exactly what will they sell in this new, interactive, wired world? And, what, for that matter, will libraries buy? Guess that’s why they call it “disruptive” technology.
Mega-bitten
Throughout the conference, presenters spoke of a “maturing” Internet market—an apt description. Ten years ago, in its infancy, the web seemed, well, like an infant—wondrous and harmless. If you didn’t need to use your phone for four hours you could download a picture, read or write some email, or maybe get a dancing Jesus screensaver. Now, fueled by raging wireless broadband, the Internet is a rebellious teen. It thinks it knows everything—and it wants your keys. But let’s not lose our heads. It isn’t like we didn’t see this coming.
Back in 1994, in his landmark Wired essay “The Economy of Ideas,” John Perry Barlow wrote of the “immense, unsolved conundrum” underpinning the web. “If our property can be infinitely reproduced and instantaneously distributed all over the planet without cost, without our knowledge, without its even leaving our possession, how can we protect it?” he asked. “How are we going to get paid for the work we do with our minds? And, if we can’t get paid, what will assure the continued creation and distribution of such work?”
As any librarian will tell you, however, the more vexing problem is that there is more to buy than ever. The web has been a boon for publishing: for Elsevier and Springer, which put the scholarly journal on their backs (and, eventually, some say, under their thumbs), for independent database providers like EBSCO and ProQuest, and for a multitude of small, specialized publishers and niches, like the award-winning Alexander Street Press. Sales of books and articles online are surging, while print-on-demand (POD) is rejuvenating backlists with minimal inventory costs. And now, social networks—everything from Blogger and Facebook to GoodReads and Shelfari—offer the promise of cheap, robust, and infinitely more effective viral marketing.
There are, of course, disruptions. Newspapers and magazines are limping, subscription agents are tenuously seeking new roles, and independent booksellers are an endangered breed. One need only look to the aforementioned scholarly journal market—and the open access movement it has triggered—to get an idea of what to expect as businesses struggle to keep up with both the quickly changing demands of users and the upstarts rising to challenge them.
Reality
For centuries, the economic relationship between libraries and publishers, including the layers of vendors that service that relationship, stoked our cultural output. Now, in one relatively brief moment in history, the relationship is changing. The good news is that despite the dire talk of disruption, the market for published works hasn’t imploded—nor have libraries, as others predicted, become irrelevant.
In fact, together, librarians and publishers are poised to fuel culture to greater heights. To their credit, librarians have been quick to grasp the web’s potential. “Unlike many industries, which are resisting changes forced upon them by the web, the librarians I’ve spoken to are almost all enthusiastic about redefining their jobs to earn a place in a new world,” Wired editor and The Long Tail author Chris Anderson told LJ last year. “Librarians totally get it.”
It’s hard to say exactly where Web 2.0 will take us, but the straight-up, old paradigm of “publishers sell and libraries buy” is no longer a hard-and-fast market rule.
Buyer aware
In this information economy, every dollar libraries spend looms like a vote on the future. Yes, for the near future libraries will continue to buy books, magazines, newspapers, journals, even reference works, and DVDs—and, of course, more and more digital databases. But the more pressing, unspoken question for the future is what won’t they be buying?
If your business forces users to use only specific formats or platforms you define, if you push users through clunky interfaces, arcane registration or authentication practices, or require DRM-laden plug-ins, you can probably consider yourself a candidate for early retirement. If you try to fence off your little corner of the Internet, you’re better off herding cats. One user-generated widget cooked up by a college dropout just might trump the five-year plan you drafted in your boardroom. For some, that awesome power represents opportunity and democratization; to others, mob rule. For all of us, however, it’s reality.
“The past few years have taught us that business models based on controlling consumers or content don’t work,” Google CEO Eric Schmidt famously told the Economist last year. “What’s surprising is that so many companies are still betting against the ’net, trying to solve today’s problems with yesterday’s solutions. Betting against the ’net is foolish because you’re betting against human ingenuity.”
With Schmidt’s words in mind, we took a broad look around and came up with ten reality checks—broad observations about the web, libraries, and publishers, where there is value to be found or added, where there is danger, and, of course, where users are going.
1 Publishing “under control”
Last year, two of the world’s largest publishers launched homegrown proprietary online widgets for their book content: Random House christened Insight, and HarperCollins launched Browse Inside the Book. It’s hard enough to be a good book publisher, why be a tech company, too? In a word: control.
HarperCollins’s Jane Friedman said Browse Inside was an effort to “fulfill consumer and marketplace demands while, first and foremost, protecting our authors’ copyrights.” That’s a thinly veiled swipe at Google, the tech giant publishers are currently suing for copyright infringement over its plan to scan library books and make them discoverable on the web. It’s also a shockingly narrow view of the web’s potential.
Certainly, publishers are right to want their own footprint on the web. Oxford University Press’s Scholarship Online (OSO), essentially an all-inclusive database of its book content, is an example of how that can be done right in-house. There’s no shortage of vendors to help, either. Ebrary, for example, has proven itself a durable, nimble service, with a powerful, easy-to-use platform that integrates digital book content with all digital collections—a key point, librarians say. Ingram’s MyiLibrary and Lightning Source, meanwhile, are surging fulfillment and POD services—virtual warehouses for publishers—that allow publishers to squeeze money forever from their greatest asset: the backlist.
The problem with both Random House and HarperCollins, however, is that they are more interested in driving web users back to physical books than driving a new market. Only now are they “experimenting” with selling chapters online or giving away content—and those experiments seem rigged to fail. Random House, for example, is selling chapters of Chip and Dan Heath’s Made To Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die for $2.99 each—a good choice but a curious price point, given the physical book is available online for under $10. HarperCollins is offering free downloads of some titles—including a new novel by Paulo Coelho—but those editions are only available for one month, and readers can’t download them to their computers or print them.
Limiting online activities to the marketing of physical books avoids any real engagement with the future. “With POD, search engines, emergent communities, we are seeing the formation of new authors, filters, editors, and curators.... [W]e see [traditional publishers] slowly trying to adapt to the shifting expectations and behaviors of people,” Ray Cha, a Fellow at the Institute for the Future of the Book, blogged. “However, in order to maintain relevance, they need to deeply rethink what a publisher is today.”
At the TOC conference in February, Lightspeed consultant James Lichtenberg said that after decades of selling products, book publishers must now think of themselves as service providers. The “legacy model” of authors writing, publishers publishing, and readers buying only what booksellers stocked on their shelves has broken down, he said. Instead, books will become an increasingly “integrated experience” involving not only a manuscript but user comments, social media, links, audio, and video. Value will be “a cocreation” of the publisher responding to the needs and wants defined by their customers.
2 Be upstream—not Updike
At the 2006 BookExpo America gathering, and in a New York Times editorial ominously titled “The End of Authorship,” legendary novelist John Updike railed against digitization like a poet sneering at the demise of iambic pentameter. He implored booksellers to “defend your lonely forts,” because “for some of us books are still intrinsic to our sense of personal identity.” It was typically lovely, inspiring Updike prose. It was also immodest, elitist, and misinformed.
Let’s agree—books are great. But lonely forts are never good places to be, especially once the walls have been breached. In fact, get out while the getting’s good! Embrace the social web, and you’ll see a medium that enables generations of new creators and artists to communicate in unimagined, interactive, and collaborative ways online. As the tools of education and creation open up, from online libraries to cheap laptops, production, and editing software, libraries and publishers must be more upstream—not defending lonely forts. If it helps, just imagine what Updike might have done if he knew how to code. Imagine his MySpace page. Let’s carry the best of Updike’s generation forward, if not his narrow vision.
3 Too much information?
Outsell, Inc., estimated that the U.S. information industry was worth more than $285 billion annually in 2006. Yes, flooding users with information is big business and will only get bigger as more content goes online and becomes increasingly mobile. Yet, as vast as the web is (Google claims to crawl over eight billion pages), as much as 80 percent of it remains hidden from popular search engine results, experts say, usually including some of the best, most trusted, premium sources—locked behind firewalls, paywalls, or complicated, proprietary interfaces. This is the dreaded “deep” or “invisible” web.
Meanwhile, “search engines today are becoming answer engines,” says ResourceShelf’s Gary Price, noting that the average information seeker usually accepts whatever is returned in the top ten results from a commercial search engine. With that in mind, it’s vital that libraries and publishers explore ways to unlock their content and holdings and make them findable on the open web. Even if all the information on the web can’t be accessed freely, it is still important for users to know it’s there—otherwise it remains lost sales, lost knowledge, or lost value for libraries footing the bill but not seeing the usage.
4 Anything but “ebooks”
Is it me, or does the term ebook hearken back to a distant age of slow modems and dial-up, flying toasters, Stephen King’s Ride the Bullet, and the Rocket eBook Reader? Back when ebooks were supposed to take over the world, Google was two Stanford geeks with dreams of catching Alta Vista, and netLibrary had a “campus” in Colorado instead of some cubicles at OCLC. Clearly, things have changed.
At its root, a product called ebook shorts both the book’s potential and the Internet’s central place in our information and entertainment landscape. Worse, it tacitly enables publishers, users, librarians—even authors—to view books online as somehow inherently different. No doubt technology adds value to—and will change—the book. But isn’t it time we embraced a future where it’s commonly accepted that a book, or any part of a book, can be pulled off a shelf, a phone, a personal printer, or a POD machine? That it can be read, searched, browsed, complemented, supplemented, expanded, sliced, diced, and served any way we wish, anywhere, any time? Was it hype that made us think books, a glorious format within which the whole of human culture was recorded for centuries, had to be rebranded to survive the web? Marketing? Whatever it was, by now it must be over. It’s time to start thinking less about branding and more about things like standards and interoperability—if books are on the web and usable, everyone wins.
5 The “iPod moment”?
A recently released survey report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 41 percent of adult Americans have logged onto the Internet away from home or work either with a wireless laptop connection or a handheld device. Like the iPod did for music, handheld devices portend a revolution for the information marketplace—and that means a revolution in which reading happens.
Of course, Amazon.com promised a “revolution” when it unveiled the Kindle last Fall. But with a black-and-white screen, limited functionality, and a shocking $400 price tag, the Kindle is an artifact you can put directly into your special collections. The iPhone/iTouch, which supports books, music, video, email, and phone calls, as well as the full range of the web, is a better if still imperfect option. And if the rumors materialize, one can only imagine what Google—set to pioneer an open source device—might come up with should it decide to throw its hat into the handheld book reader ring (hint: Google’s already got the content and from libraries to boot; see #7).
Librarians and publishers alike would be wise to start thinking about how they’ll serve a handheld future. This fall, freshmen attending Abilene Christian University, TX, will get an iPhone or iPod Touch as part of their education, the first such program in the nation. The university says it has developed as many as 15 web applications to deliver homework alerts, class surveys, quizzes, and directions and to check meal and account balances, among other things. Can library resources be far behind the salad bar?
6 “Wikiality” check
More than an online “reference” work, Wikipedia is a full-blown Web 2.0 cultural phenomenon—2.2 million articles on topics crossing all social strata. Comic Stephen Colbert flippantly referred to “wikiality” as a “reality we can all agree on.” And the way Nicholson Baker lovingly caressed it in his recent New York Review of Books essay, you’d almost forget this is the same man who once traded his life as a novelist to babysit old newspapers. “Fact-encirclingly huge…idiosyncratic, careful, messy, funny, shocking, and full of simmering controversies,” Baker wrote, “it’s free, and it’s fast.” Well, how the hell do you compete with that?
Of course, as Baker acknowledges, it is also a reference book that can “suddenly go nasty on you.” He was referring specifically to instances of intellectual “vandalism” on Wikipedia, but librarians and publishers are less concerned with that good fun and rightly more concerned that Wikipedia’s entries slouch toward a rather lazy academic standard. No doubt, reference has been forever changed by Wikipedia. But so, too, have research habits been changed by the web. In fact, no one should ever think to use a web resource again that lacks a decent pedigree—at least that’s my mantra and one that holds promise for publishers and librarians who must now trade on their authority. Let Wikipedia answer the easy questions. Let users know you’re there for the tough stuff.
7 The end of book scanning
How soon will it be before children in museums look at a book-scanning machine the way we look at crude steam engines or the cotton gin? After all, given the pace of Google’s book-scanning efforts—it recently passed the one million mark at the University of Michigan—it seems that within 20 years the world’s entire output of books could be scanned. Which brings me to a plea: Can we please do this right the first time?
There’s a lot right about what Google is doing: last month, it began an effort to push books available in its Google Book Search program into university library online catalogs—for copyrighted books, a catalog entry will offer searchers a link to a limited preview at Google Book Search, making the book itself available for full-text searching. That kind of discoverability and usability represent an enormous step toward the online universal library that apparently stalks John Updike in his dreams.
But there’s also a lot to be nervous about: for one, there are clearly quality control issues. In addition, books scanned by Google do not surface in other search engines, and the public domain books scanned carry some unnecessary restriction. Google, meanwhile, a private company, is carrying out much of its work under a cloak of trade secrecy. Here’s the thing: given the enormous commitment of resources—from Google and from libraries—does anyone think an effort this large will ever be mobilized again? If we mess this up now, we’re stuck with the results. It’s based on library books, so can’t we treat this more like a public work?
8 The copyright-DRM balance
We have entered an age akin to “selling wine without bottles,” on the Internet, as Barlow described it, but as more and more information is freed from its traditional containers—whether print, film, CDs, tapes, or books—it is often caught in a complex web of copyright and patent law, digital rights management (DRM) technology, odious click-on licenses, and other filters.
“Earlier in our history we had pretty substantial protections to restrict the ability of publishers to control the subsequent use of the material they published. First sale doctrine, for example,” explains Stanford University law professor Lawrence Lessig. “Today there is a systematic effort to move from 'you sell the product, then users use it as they wish’ to 'you license the product, and forever you get to choose how users use the product.’ There was great value in the former system that we are losing in the modern system.”
As NYU’s Rushkoff explains, the success of the web isn’t based so much on the amount of content but people’s desire to interact and share. If we allow the Internet to become a bricked-off marketplace rather than a vibrant social center, we will have squandered one of history’s greatest opportunities. One needs to look no further than the Recording Industry Association of America’s (RIAA) legal blitzkrieg against college students accused of illegal downloads to see how ugly that could be. For our potential to be realized on the web, we must rethink the balance in copyright law.
The public domain is threatened by lengthy copyright extensions; peer-to-peer technology, which offers fascinating applications for libraries and education, is under legal threat, and the vast majority of books on library shelves are orphan works—that is, with no identifiable copyright owner—thus unusable. So far, librarians and publishers have often been at odds—but, isn’t there a common future at stake?
9 Jumping off a cliff
If the Internet tells us a cautionary tale, it’s the story of the recording industry’s suicidal swan dive. After 19-year-old
You probably know the rest—steeled by their delusion about music and technology, RIAA lawyers quickly sued Napster into oblivion. Without an alternative ready to take its place, however, that strategy effectively slammed shut a window of opportunity that will never open again. It would be two years, an eternity in Internet time, before an industry-sanctioned online music service launched—iTunes. While iTunes has been successful, Napster’s estimated 100 million users scattered to other, nascent—harder to trace—file-sharing services.
Since 2001, the recording industry has logged seven straight years of decline. “That’s when we lost the users,” Hilary Rosen, former CEO of RIAA, told Rolling Stone last year, reflecting on Napster.
I often wonder—just who did the record companies think Shawn Fanning was? He was a music lover. He was their best customer.
10 Privacy
Your searches are stored, as is your email address, and what you bought from Fresh Direct and Amazon.com. The government is data-mining and searching without warrants. Smart machines are divining your habits and sending you targeted advertising. I was using my fiancée’s laptop this week when up popped an advertisement for a pregnancy book. Um, honey? Oh, yes, and then there’s the spam.
I’m not a conspiracy guy, but the future of my personal privacy is a concern. I love using social networks, but the bargain there is that in return for entertaining me with all their fun, killer apps (go ahead, challenge me to a game of Scrabulous), they are putting together quite a little dossier.
Privacy is an area of increasing concern on a web that is often portrayed by Dateline NBC as the domain of predators and identity thieves. Librarians and publishers share a common, fierce standard of personal privacy, and this is no doubt something they can and must carry forward to the web. On one hand, it could be good business. But, mostly, our privacy standards are being redefined by the web with virtually no public debate. It’s time for you to kick that up on behalf of your users. If you do, they’ll thank you, trust you—and patronize you.
| Author Information |
| Andrew Richard Albanese is Editor, LJ Academic Newswire |
