Local Bookstores, Social Hubs, and Mutualization

The always fascinating Clay Shirky has a great piece on his blog about some of the fallacies involved in the ABA's call for the justice department to investigate the Amazon/Wal-mart price war. He makes some excellent points, like this one:

A third group, though, is making the ‘access to literature’ argument without much real commitment to its truth or falsehood, because they aren’t actually worried about access to literature, they are worried about bookstores in and of themselves. This is a form of Burkean conservatism, in which the value built up over centuries in the existence of bookstores should be preserved, even though their previous function as the principal link between writers and readers is being displaced.

Shriky goes on to say that what these folks are fighting for is indeed worth support, but he questions the logic of doing it using the chicken little rhetoric often employed in this debate. He notes that accessibility to literature isn't anywhere near endangered, and that access to books, thanks to the digital age, and specifically digital retailing, is greater than ever before. But he also notes that "a place with books" is really what needs to be the focus, and not necessarily a healthy brick and mortar independent retail economy. He proposes that book places restructure themselves into something more like non-profits and co-operatives that don't require getting most of their operating expenses covered by their book sales. He proposes something more like an NPR model, staffing with community volunteers, and selling memberships.

Great ideas, but they didn't work. At least not for me. The bookstore I was a part of did have volunteers, it took donations, and it was given "investment" money from community members who had little expectation of ever seeing that money again, let alone a return on that investment. But all of that wasn't enough.

It strikes me though, that even though our store closed, the community still had that "book place." And it's not the chains I'm thinking of here, though while we have a couple in our town, the environment in those places is very different. No, instead I'm thinking about the two libraries in town; the local library and the University's library. Those places feel much more like a community bookstore than any online or chain book-browsing experience. The significant difference between indies and libraries is you can't go to a library to get a book for keeps. But I suspect that will change. There are two things that I think have the greatest potential to fuel that change. Those two things are Google and the Espresso Book Machine with Espressnet. If the Google settlement is ever resolved, Google will put at least one dedicated terminal in every library in America and those terminals will have full access to all those books Google has scanned. If that same library had an Espresso Book Machine, any of those books could then be printed for a patron. And while I realize that filthy commerce isn't typical in a library, I have to wonder, why not? Why shouldn't libraries sell books along with lending them?

Technically many libraries already do this with books removed from their shelves when the content gets dated, or when multiple copies are no longer needed, or even with books donated by patrons. But why not sell new books? Why not sell any and every book? Why not offer a book on loan next to a book for keeps? Why not? Those "book places" Shirky and I want to preserve are already here, they just haven't expanded their mission yet to include this new service—A book that doesn't have to be returned.

National Book Awards

Congratulations to our colleagues at University of California Press for winning this year's National Book Award for poetry with their publication Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy by Keith Waldrop.

The New York Times notes that this year's winner of the non-fiction award commented about an erroneous assumption being made by many that in publishing's digital future, so few of those who currently work for publishers will be needed anymore.

Mr. Stiles, whom the judges praised for his “deep and imaginative research,” took a swipe at the recent move toward electronic books as he thanked a wide range of supporters, including editorial assistants, copy editors and marketing staffers, at his publishing house, Alfred A. Knopf.

“The advent of the e-book is fooling people into thinking that none of these people are necessary anymore,” Mr. Stiles said. “If they cease to exist, the books will only be worth the paper they are not printed on.”

Mr. Stiles wrote The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt
if you want to return the compliment with a purchase.

The Book You're Looking For

There’s a story in this morning’s Chronicle of Higher Ed about something of a revolt up at Syracuse over removing books off of library shelves and putting them into storage. According to James W. Watts, chairman of the Religion department at Syracuse, recent library renovations to create more computer and work space have necessitated plans for moving more than 100,000 books to a storage facility some 250 miles away from the library. Calling the library their “central laboratory”, students and faculty attended a meeting at the University Senate to work out possible alternatives to such a move.

This reminds me of the decision made recently by the Cushing Academy up in Massachusetts to entirely eliminate their library, replacing the stacks with a “learning center” decked out with three large flat screen televisions and a coffee shop.

In the rush to digitize our libraries, I think the folks at Syracuse have identified something they think they’ll need that isn’t replicated in a digital world. To put it simply, they want a place with books. But why? Why is that necessary when the content of those books can change media relatively easily and become significantly more portable and searchable?

I wonder if the reason for that is related to something that occurred to me about Facebook this week. Facebook is a great place to keep tabs on friends and family, and even to reconnect with old friends and acquaintances. But what it’s not good for is meeting new friends. There’s no discovery. Rediscovery, yes, but no discovery. I think that’s what the folks up at Syracuse have identified as what was at stake. Perhaps the analogy is flawed as the Internet is awesome at helping us find almost anything about almost anything. But places with books do that too, and in a significantly different and important way.

One of the surprising findings from the 1999 U.S. Department of Education’s Early Childhood Longitudinal Study was an apparent correlation between the number of books in a child’s home and that child’s success in school. Even when the parent's education level, and family income were controlled for, the number of books was the best predictor for success. As a person who’s worked in bookstores for a good portion of his life, I’ve got to say that I think there’s something to that. An environment rich in books tends to inspire thought and conversation. And a thoughtfully organized and curated collection of books also has the added benefit of creating an environment ripe for serendipitous discovery. Not just the book you’re looking for, but the book to the right of it on the shelf, and perhaps the book to the left. And that book three shelves down. These were not the books you were looking for but they turned out to be books you needed. Sure these experiences can be closely replicated in a virtual environment, Amazon can tell you what other people bought like the book you’re looking for, and Google can tell you the most popular books containing the key words and phrases you’re investigating, but how good are those algorithms at producing serendipity? How good are those sites at inspiring conversations about the ideas those books explore?

As an avid collector of books, I’d like to think I’m sympathetic to the challenges the Syracuse librarians are addressing with this proposed move. I’ve got two stacks of books next to the desk in my home office, both about three feet high. They’re there because I’m out of room on our shelves, just as the renovations at the Syracuse Library has caused them to run out of shelf space. But I hope they can figure out a way to make room for more computers without compromising that place and what makes it so unique. I hope that what ever it is that makes our kids smarter just by being near them isn’t sacrificed to the ubiquitous god of search. I hope we remember that finding isn’t the same as discovering, and that virtual places are significantly different than real ones.

But Who Stands Up for the Readers?

Barbara Fister of the ACRLog has a brilliant piece in the recent Library Journal about how libraries are essentially advocates for readers. In thinking about how to best serve their patrons, she wonders if libraries are really effectively advocating for the reader by offering free access to a seemingly infinite amount of paid content. In thinking about that responsibility to readers she wonders if they might actually better serve their constituency by developing opportunities for changing how content is produced and distributed. One of her conclusions about how university libraries might change their approach is so spot on that I need to reproduce it here.

Does this mean taking money from acquisitions budgets and redirecting it to allied non-profit publishing? Yes, that's what I'm saying. And yes, that would mean massive realignment, both for libraries and university presses.

But libraries and non-profit scholarly publishers do many of the same things—we select, curate, and make high quality information available to readers and researchers. There have to be ways to do these things more effectively and efficiently together.

I think she's right. Here at Penn State we've taken a first step in exploring some of those possibilities with our Office of Digital Scholarly Publishing. Perhaps eventually, our experiment can help other university libraries understand that maybe the best way for them to reform content access is to create and disseminate content themselves.

Instant Scholarship

University of Chicago has created the Virtual Academic. It can write impenetrable and jargon-laden sentences for you while you wait!

A License in Need of an Editor

The Register reports this morning that the new International Kindle is going to have some trouble launching in Norway. The Norwegian government thinks the language in the user agreement isn't all that clear. Apparently they have some crazy law there that requires such agreements be understandable. They've told them they can't launch until they change it. Take that, Amazon! They also have a mandated minimum five year warranty requirement that the Kindle's one year warranty doesn't meet. Oh, those silly Norwegians. Don't they realize that the Kindle in its current form isn't even going to be relevant in five years?

Price Wars and Innocent Bystanders

There's a great piece in the New Yorker about price wars and how they've historically tended to reek havoc on the industries where they have broken out. This time however, as the article points out, it's much more likely that the bestseller price war currently being fought by Amazon and Wal-mart will hurt those not even participating in the battle, rather than scathing the massive armies doing the actual fighting.

I am so "street"

Walking into an Apple store in bustling Manhasset, NY, last Saturday, I could not help being impressed. The jolting colors of the staff’s t-shirts, the vast, unwalled room with sixteen-foot floor-to-ceiling glass on each end begged anyone walking through the doors to visit every table and touch every gorgeous iMac®, Nano®, or Touch®. Silent, floating, fifty-two-inch plasma screens locked on passersby like Uncle Sam’s finger and further confirmed that I’d entered the world of haute-techno. Even though I heard no annoying music, like you’d hear at A&F, the place had a pulse, a beat. In this world the young, savvy, and cool don’t walk but glide, lovingly touching iMac edges, caressing sleek keyboards along the way; they are confident possessors of gnosis, these Mac devotees.

The staff was amazingly helpful. As soon as we­­––my girlfriend was kind enough to tell me about the store––walked in we had no trouble finding a staff person eager to assist us. “May I help you?” a knowledgeable young man asked.

“Yes,” I said, “I have a broken iPod and I’d like to see about repairing it.”

I quickly added, “I realize you may need to send it out for repair, and it could take weeks, but I just want to get it fixed.”

At that I pulled out my 40gb iPod, which I figure was about six years old. From the look on the guy’s face you would have thought I pulled out a prosthetic limb. Stepping back, he nearly shielded his eyes. He was stunned. Horrified. Amused.

“Hey,” he called over to a fellow-staffer, “you ever seen one of these?” Another incredulous look, and I felt like I was drawing a crowd of the young Gnostics. I was the only one in the 50''x 175''x 16' room not gliding. Next to the wafer-thin Nano® my iPod looked like a volume of Modern American Tort Law. Definitely not cool. Old.

My defensive nature kicked in, “Hey, man (I threw in “man” to sound hip), Apple made this, not me!”

“So, first things first,” he said, ignoring my blame-Apple ploy, “do you have an appointment?”

“Well, no, I don’t,” I replied somewhat confused. I was wanting to get my iPod fixed not have my spleen removed.

“No problem,” he said. “Let’s see if we can get you one.” A quick check and, “Can you come back around 4:00?”

Sure. I could come back. Kill four or five hours eating Sichuan beef, drinking Kirin draft, and shopping at bargain basement stores on Long Island. That should be no problem.

When 4:00 rolled around and we returned, bad traffic and all, I could have sworn some of the same customers were still there, still gliding. As for the Apple folks––“geniuses” they called themselves––turned out they did not remove my spleen, but they were interested in removing my money. To save face, since learning that repairing my iron would cost only about $25.00 less than buying a new 8gb Nano®, I capitulated. I could also take a 10% discount for turning in my antique iPod. I sprang for the slick, orange one and a clear plastic “skin.” I rose on my toes slightly when I used the cool word for “cover.” I am so “street.”

A marketing plan? Oh course we have a marketing plan for your book.

Ellis Weiner in the Shouts & Murmurs section of the New Yorker writes a brilliant send up of modern book marketing. Her gibberish social network marketing buzzword blather is almost Absurdist poetry.

"We use CopyBuoy via Hoster Broaster, because it streams really easily into a Plaxo/LinkedIn yak-fest meld. When you register, click “Endless,” and under “Contacts” just list everyone you’ve ever met. It would be great if you could post at least six hundred words every day until further notice."

A small change in the fine print...

Apple just made a slight adjustment to their App Store policy that would allow monetization of content beyond the sale of an App itself. Many folks see this as a signal that the long rumored Apple Tablet is likely going to have significant ebook functionality. If you're still considering a Kindle you might just want to wait a little bit longer. This report at Wired explains why.

Snow Day!!

This is what it looks like outside today, October 16, 2009. 3-4 inches of wet, heavy snow that is supposed to continue on through Saturday. Gotta' love central PA in the fall!

Of book making and bicycles

Jeff Mayersohn, who with his wife, Linda Seamonson recently bought the Harvard Bookstore, has got a great little piece in the Huffington Post about the insanity of the publishing industry, and why, now of all times, he chose to buy that store. His thinking about how to approach the current crisis in inventory management, and the problems associated with shipping books are spot on. Well worth the read.

I can't think of anything more contrarian these days than buying a bookstore, but I think if you approach it like Jeff and Linda are, you've got a better chance of surviving Kindles and consolidation than most.

(Thanks, Brian!)

Borrowing your bits

The Times has a great article about the slow but enthusiastic adoption of digital lending at libraries. link

The Inherent Risks in Our Digital Future

The New York Times published two articles recently about some of the dilemmas associated with our move to ebooks.

The first, by the brilliant scholar Lewis Hyde, explored why there was serious cause for concern with the proposed Google Book Settlement. He argues that the settlement’s treatment of orphaned works and the resulting monopoly it would give Google over that content would subvert the intent of copyright as prescribed by America’s founders. He makes a darn good case.

The second article by Randall Stross takes a look at RapidShare, which he calls the Napster of books. RapidShare is indeed becoming a serious problem for publishers. A week after Dan Brown’s new book, The Lost Symbol was published, 166 instances of pirated digital versions were found on the Web. Of those, 102 were hosted by RapidShare. I have found a few digital versions of our books on the site myself. Though I must confess, I’m not quite sure what the appropriate response is to that discovery.

While digitizing a book isn’t easy, stripping an ebook of its DRM isn’t much of a challenge. I worry that the best defense against pirating may be to only offer physical versions of our books, but that wouldn’t really be in line with our mission, would it? I only hope university administrators are taking note of these challenges and are thinking as hard as I am about what university presses in particular need to do address our mission, particularly in light of diminishing library budgets, a shrinking course adoption market, and an economy that burdens both markets and budgets. Perhaps the time to reconsider whether university press publishing should even be selling its product at all is closer than ever.

Book Fail

I stumbled on a quirky little site called Bookfail.com that collects odd and humorous books for international mocking and, well to sell some advertising apparently. Naturally I wondered if I would find any university press titles on the site and it didn't take long to find this one published by Vanderbilt University Press.

I don't know, I think the title is kind of clever.

Scholarship in 17 syllables

Thank you for the chance
to read your recent version
You sure have revised!

Perhaps another
more appropriate venue.
Consider Twitter.

Dissertation Haiku

A Cartoon-ish Depiction

I just finished reading the New York Times piece on the controversy involving Yale University Press's decision not to include the Danish cartoon images of the Prophet Muhammad in their forthcoming book about the uproar that occurred when those cartoons first appeared in Danish papers back in 2005.

While a lifelong defender of freedom of speech, I don't think the decision is all that cut and dry and I sympathize with their dilemma. As the director of the Press pointed out, some 200 people have already died in the violence that resulted from the publication of the images. “When it came between that and blood on my hands, there was no question” John Donatich, the director of Yale University Press, told the New York Times. But I must say that I am very disappointed that they then chose to eliminate all of the depictions of the Prophet Muhammad that the book was going to contain, including the work of Botticelli, Blake, Rodin and Dalí. I have more trouble understanding that. I also think it was probably a foolish move to require the author sign a confidentiality agreement to be allowed to read the report the press commissioned from various scholars and diplomats on whether to include the images or not. These weren't reader's reports. They were security opinions and the only conceivable reason the Press might have required the author to sign the agreement was to control the spin the controversy was taking. It has had the opposite effect and seems to instead make the Press look a bit paranoid.

But my favorite quote in the story comes from the Reza Aslan, a well known and respected religion scholar and the author of No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam, who withdrew his endorsement for the book and noted in the Times:“This is an academic book for an academic audience by an academic press. There is no chance of this book having a global audience." Ouch. He might have been right about that if he were referring to your ordinary university press publishing your ordinary monograph. But as we're talking about Yale here, I don't think that's quite accurate. And perhaps because Yale has such an international reach, maybe they also have a greater responsibility, not just to their staff, but also to scholarship.

Cheap Thrills

National Public Radio has started a new series of pieces about vacations on the cheap. It reminds me of a book we published a few years ago about some of the wonderful little museums of Pennsylvania and it occurs to me that that book might currenlty make a fantastic resource for some inexpensive, yet fun-filled vacations for a whole new group of citizen’s of the commonwealth, especially in these tough economic times. It worked for me, though technically, it was before the book was published.

The book is titled The Best Places You’ve Never Seen and it’s a delightful little guide to some of the more eclectic small museums here in the Keystone state. It’s also the source of some of my own personal favorite memories of the days I spent courting my wife. Before the book was published we realized that while the author had provided some pictures for the book, the book could probably benefit from a few more, so several members of the press decided we’d go to some of the museums included in the book and snap a few pictures of our own to augment those provided by the author.

Kate, my wife, (but back then just my girlfriend) agreed to take a vacation with me into the Pennsylvania Wilds to hit a few of the museums that would be included in the book. On the trip we visited the Eldred World War II Museum, the Ole Bull Museum and the adjacent State Park, Tom Mix’s Birthplace and Museum, and the Zippo Case Museum. The museums themselves were a hoot, especially the Ole Bull Museum and it’s eccentric curator and occupant, Ole’s grandniece Inez, but the real fun was the week we spent camping on the trip. We couldn’t afford hotels and the press certainly wasn’t in a position to pay for anything so we did it as cheaply as possible. Since that first camping trip, we sort of made it a habit to do a lot of camping. We camp at least four or five times a year and now we bring our young daughters camping with us. Our older daughter, now five, spent her first night in a tent at three months old. We’re planning our next camping trip for the upcoming Labor Day weekend.

It seems the point of the NPR stories, and the book, and this here blog post, is that fun doesn’t really have a price tag. Fun is made by people and places. It doesn’t take reservations or plane tickets— it takes the right attitude and probably the right company. I’m grateful that a book we once published helped me discover that, and on the way, it also helped me find a mate who taught me just how cheap fun could really be.

(on the left is a picture of some vintage Zippo-themed silk neckties we found at a thrift store just down the block from the Zippo factory in Bradford, PA. Cost—twenty-five cents a piece)

A vs. B

David Pogue has a great piece in today's New York Times that compares Barnes & Nobles e-book program with that of Amazon's. He points out that while on the surface, the B&N program looks better, the details reveal that the Kindle still rules the e-book market.

Book vs. Kindle Smackdown

The folks at Green Apple Books have been running an amusing little Web video series comparing Amazon's Kindle to actual books. Three are on YouTube so far but they're promising 10 all together.