Ingram Touts Benefits of POD for Tough Economic Times; Google Books Goes Mobile; AAP Announces Award Winners

-- Library Journal, 2/5/2009 2:14:00 PM

With tough times, layoffs, and reorganizations hitting publishers, print-on-demand (PoD) pioneer and Lightning Source CEO John Ingram sent an open letter to publishers today, suggesting it was time to deeply integrate PoD into their business models. 

“I started Lightning Source with the belief that print on demand was an essential part of the future of publishing,” Ingram writes. “Twelve years later we are living through extraordinary economic times. Our industry is facing enormous challenges. We find ourselves at what I believe to be a tipping point of change for the way in which we publish, print and distribute books.” 

It’s hard to argue with that point—from the Google Book Search settlement to burgeoning ebook collections, the publishing world is undergoing a transformation. Still, print, Ingram suggests, still has its place. Through PoD, publishers can “match supply to demand perfectly,” Ingram asserts, arguing that “[PoD] is no longer an optional novelty, nor is it just about the long-tail or self-publishing, but rather “it is at the heart of a book’s life and the lifeline between a book and the modern consumer...”

Speaking of books and modern consumers, Google today announced a mobile-optimized Book Search interface for the iPhone and for smartphones running its own Android mobile platform. This gives the growing ranks of mobile power users the ability to read Google Book Search’s 1.5 million public domain texts directly on their devices. Users can also choose to include non-public domain texts in their search, though only basic bibliographic entries saying “no mobile preview” will be returned for these results.

The Google Book Search mobile endeavor relies upon the Google’s massive effort in converting page text using Optical Character Recognition, or OCR. Once a page is digitally scanned, the text is then extracted, reformatted, and finally optimized for the mobile device. Of course, as Google admits in the blog post announcing the interface “the extraction of text from page images is a difficult engineering task. Smudges on the physical books' pages, fancy fonts, old fonts, torn pages, etc. can all lead to errors in the extracted text.” 

In cases where the OCR technology has imperfectly reproduced the text on a page, mobile users can click on the text to reveal the actual page image scanned from the book.... 

And in, well, good old-fashioned book news the Association of American Publishers (AAP) this week announced its 2008 the winners of the 2008 American Publishers Awards for Professional and Scholarly Excellence (The PROSE Awards). More than 35 PROSE Awards, including the top prize, the R.R. Hawkins Award, were presented today, February 5, 2009, at a special Awards Luncheon during the AAP PSP Annual Conference.

Congratulations to winner of the 2008 R.R. Hawkins Award, Harvard University Press, for The Race Between Education & Technology by Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz. The R.R. Hawkins Award recognizes exceptional scholarly works in all disciplines of the arts and sciences, and is given for the most outstanding professional, reference, or scholarly work among the year’s award winners. For a complete list of winners, visit the AAP’s award web site.

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