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Network Gatekeepers on Digg

2011-03-15T11:41:00.000-07:00

One of the biggest outstanding questions regarding the conceptualization of social network content sharers as network gatekeepers is how to identify those network gatekeepers who will be most beneficial to marketers of academic monographs. This question is easiest to answer in the context of Digg.com. Because a front page story on Digg.com can result in an increase of at least 12 to 15 thousand visitors to the site of the news outlet that produced the story, Digg.com buttons have become ubiquitous in online news and social networking environments. Since developing a custom widget that ranks the top five most dug stories on its website, Time Magazine’s online version has seen its presence on the Digg.com homepage increase more than twofold and its Digg-driven clicks increase from 500,000 to 1.3 million. The site has caused similar traffic increases for Newsweek.com and Wired.com.

On the site, a small number of users is responsible for the vast majority of content that makes it to the front page, often with little or no consideration for what that content actually is. Many of the social bookmarking specialists I have interviewed reported that very rarely do they critically or analytically read the content that other specialists ask them to “digg.” Rather, they adhere to bonds formed through networking, not content sharing. Most users invite requests for diggs by displaying their email addresses and geographical whereabouts on their profiles for all other users to see. They then become mutual and habitual “diggers.” Many of the Digg users I interviewed only agreed to the interview if I dugg their content in return.

While the hierarchical structure that results from this networking makes Digg of little value as a forum for political activism and engagement, it can be very valuable for social media marketers who manage Digg accounts for their companies. Marketers should reach out to and network with the small number of influential Digg users can become influential themselves, increasing page views for their company’s websites. They should go beyond the affordances of the site itself and network with other users through email and whatever other contact information they make available on their profiles. The transitory audiences of academic monographs could be more easily targeted on Digg using this method. Below are descriptions of two network gatekeepers on Digg.com that can be very attractive to social media marketers in general and the digital marketing efforts of university presses in particular.

Nathan (pseudonym) is a search engine optimization and social bookmarking specialist in Kansas City, Missouri who has been using Digg “all day, every day” for the past four and a half years. While he said the Digg front page used to be more communal and a good way to get publicity for front page stories, lately it has been “inexperienced spammers just posting random shenanigans trying to do offsite search engine optimization for their junk.” However, because they have revived many of the previously discontinued features, Nathan generally likes the new version of Digg. After sifting through informational, technological, humorous and resource blogs, he posts stories related to the 4,000 U.S. colleges he works with as well as humorous and technological stories to promote his own blog. Top five lists, stories about innovative technologies and, lately, those making fun of Digg typically receive the most feedback. Because the Digg front page often features those users with the most followers or contacts rather than the “best news,” he consider Diggs a credible news source only “in a sense.” When referring to the best news, he means stories about global catastrophes with far-reaching implications, such as the recent B.P. oil spill which he said was on the front page of Digg for months. He does not use Digg much for personal use, but when he does, it is mostly for entertainment.

Andy (pseudonym) is a social media entrepreneur in Auckland, New Zealand. He operates a website about weight loss and muscle building and uses Digg to drive traffic to his website. He has only recently become an active Digg user, but praises the site’s power to drive traffic and create status and trust among users. He mainly uses Digg to promote his own website and to accumulate an “army of people” who will “get your content to the top.” He said that users build trust with other users by following the links they provide and digging them if they deserve a good rating. He typically gives good ratings to anything “interesting, weird, breaking news, funny or educationally-benefiting.” When asked if he considers Digg a credible news source, he said that the site is most effective at spreading news quickly, and that the credibility of the site lies in the original sources of the articles. Unlike some of the other Digg users who were interviewed, Andy critically reads the articles his friends submit, only digging them after validating their original sources. He mostly submits his own blog posts and other informative, interesting information that will most likely receive good feedback. He said that although he has not submitted a large enough sample to accurately test, what seems to get the most feedback and attention on Digg are rumors, controversies and “stories relating to moronic gadgets.” He attributes the success of these types of stories to their immediacy. He believes that although some people enjoy reading and promoting stories, most have selfish motives, uploading stories even if they are “crap.”

In my next post, I will theorize about the applicability of these concepts to the marketing of academic monographs and lay the groundwork for a comprehensive social media marketing strategy for the Penn State University Press.

Identifying Network Gatekeepers

2011-01-26T20:05:00.000-08:00

In previous posts, I had written about the importance of identifying and targeting network gatekeepers on social networks to maximize their marketing capabilities. But questions of how exactly to do this, and do it efficiently and cost-effectively, are not easily answerable. To start answering them, I have conducted extensive interviews, which I will chronicle over the next two weeks, in an attempt to develop a technique for identifying the most prominent gatekeepers within a social network and, eventually, to design a holistic social media marketing strategy for academic monographs based on these principles. Because the strategies of news sharing and forwarding are particularly applicable to marketing the academic monograph (for examples, see previous posts), one fruitful venue to start the search is Digg.com.

Although this collaborative news portal allows for users to do their own gatekeeping by “looking through the lens of the community,” the site advertises itself as being free of editorial influence. However, users are rewarded for good gatekeeping when their submissions are promoted to the front page. While the site claims to be free of editorial authority, its most successful users are essentially its best editors. James is one of those editors.

James (pseudonym) is a social media professional in Pakistan. He created his Digg account three years ago, but has been very active on the site for the past two to three years. He is on Digg throughout the day, and likes the site because it allows him to follow what people are liking around the globe, including his friends in the United States, Australia, Singapore and India. Because his friends are digging interesting and hot news about many different topics, he can see websites that he might otherwise not have seen or known about and, since it is impossible for James alone to be up to date on the latest trends in the rapidly evolving technology field, Digg provides a means of staying up to date. Also, by networking with other users, James is able to channel traffic from Digg to his own blog and website. He uploads technology-related stories to Digg every day. He believes that the latest and most current stories from the most famous blogs such as CNN and Mashable will be dugg the most by the Digg community of users. He trusts Digg for breaking and political news as well, not because most of the news sources are credible and reputable, but because his friends usually upload stories from these sites. However, he only looks at what his friends have dugg if he himself does not have time to look through the news feeds from CNN and Mashable. He can tell if a topic is trending by the number of diggs it has in a given time period, but if he himself is not familiar with a trending topic, he will investigate the topic himself before digging. Also, if he has personal experience with or an emotional connection to a story or topic, he will give it a link back. His occupational and personal uses of Digg differ in that, at work, he displays and adds his own news to the community, but at home, he uses it strictly for entertainment.

According to James, the only prerequisites for serving as a network gatekeeper are broad interests that do not alienate any one group of followers within that network. As a result, James shares things that interest him and hopes that because they interest him, they will inspire his friends and followers as well. This mindset is characteristic of many network gatekeepers, and has particular potential for the transitory audiences of the Penn State Press. While traditional marketing strategies generally assume that being a member of a reputable and respected group will increase the credibility of a source, merely passing along information from a reputable source can increase the brand of a network gatekeeper to even greater levels than the original source, regardless of their knowledge of a given subject. For the Penn State Press, this means that it can precisely reach its target audience by engaging network gatekeepers like James.

To Jump or Not to Jump on the Bandwagon?

2010-12-21T10:52:00.000-08:00

When creating and operating social network pages, many media organizations strive to do little more than accumulate as many followers and friends as possible. Because it is, at least in large part, dependent on the bandwagon theory, this strategy is not a bad one.

The bandwagon theory posits that news or products that are read or recommended by a large number of people are considered more credible or worth buying. But, while it has considerable experimental confirmation, the theory does not apply to the process of building the large numbers of followers and friends it explains.

My research on network gatekeeping has revealed that, much like in traditional media, there exist small numbers of gatekeepers within social networks that do the most dissemination of social news, raising questions about the intra-media robustness of the bandwagon theory and its implications for social media marketing.

Many of the Facebook, Twitter and Digg users I’ve interviewed think of news sharing in social media as a game, where whoever accumulates the most followers wins in much the same way many media organizations do. However, these network gatekeepers also believe that the content produced and disseminated by these organizations is itself in need of gatekeeping. If the most active social network content sharers on the site then seek each other out for cooperation, as on Digg, the apparent communality of such sites could be little more than a discussion among and manipulation by network gatekeepers, the opposite situation that many users cite as their motivation for using social media, and a contradiction with implications for social media marketing.

Rather than engaging in a race for the greatest number of followers, media organizations should take advantage of this hierarchical arrangement on social networks by specifically targeting their most active and influential network gatekeepers. Also, rather than spending money to win them over, they should save by capitalizing on their likely irreversible lack of confidence in the traditional media. Future posts will address just how to identify network gatekeepers and carry out this plan.

The Ambiguity of Online Sourcing

2010-11-19T07:31:00.000-08:00

One of the most productive venues for studying the effects of social media are online news interfaces. A fundamental shift caused by social media has been the changing nature of information sources, and a less ambiguous understanding of online sourcing will make for more effective social media marketing. For instance, when the Penn State Press attempts to market a monograph on Facebook and it is shared by another Facebook user, the Press, the author of the monograph, and the Facebook user who shared the link can all be considered psychologically relevant sources, although not necessarily in that order. Surprisingly, the little research done on online sourcing would predict that the Facebook user who shared the link, not the Press or the monograph’s author, would be considered the most credible source of that information. Although this research was done in the context of online news, it is reasonable to believe the results would carry over across contexts. However, the question of how exactly to apply this information is just as ambiguous as online sourcing itself.

The concepts derived from the socialization of online news are very applicable to the marketing of academic monographs, so an example of the importance of sourcing would be a good first step. Major newspapers such as the New York Times and Washington Post have recently integrated social networking applications on their interfaces that allow news consumers to track the news their Facebook friends are consuming. Based on who or what is considered the source of the news on these applications, the papers can become either more social or much less credible. For example, The Washington Post, one of the most credible and recognizable American newspapers, has its masthead in the upper left-hand side of its online interface. On the right side is a Facebook Network News application which allows users to view either the most popular stories of the day accompanied by the number of people who have shared them or a summary of their Facebook friends’ news-viewing activity. By logging into Washingtonpost.com using Facebook Connect, users can share, like and comment on content, as well as see all the content their friends have shared, liked or commented on. Also, users can read content recommended by their network, see what Washington Post content is most popular across Facebook, and create a profile page showing the content with which their Facebook friends have interacted.

The Centre Daily Times does a similar thing, except instead of allowing users to become their own gatekeepers, the site invites users to become a fan of the newspaper on Facebook. Where the Washington Post, a more reputable national newspaper, allows users to do their own gatekeeping by liking and sharing stories themselves, The Centre Daily Times essentially requests that users become fans of the editorial staff of the paper. These two similar Facebook applications represent two very distinct and ambiguous conceptualizations of source. Most university presses allow individuals to follow the press on Twitter or become fans on Facebook, but few mimic the Washington Post by allowing individuals to develop profiles and network with one another based solely on their consumption of the press’ product. Granted, the audiences of the Penn State Press are extremely transient, it is highly unlikely that fans of one book will be fans of any other, and no research has experimentally confirmed the superiority of the Post’s approach. But, because the Penn State press is affiliated with a particular university and state, it could have a sufficient base readership highly motivated to display its knowledge on a wide range of subjects and, in the true sense of social media, virally transmit that knowledge. While unpredictable, the result may just be valuable and consistent exposure for the Penn State Press.

Humanizing Social Media Marketing

2010-11-10T18:01:00.000-08:00

In my interviews with news sharers on social networking and bookmarking sites, almost all of them reported juxtaposing frivolous, humorous and lighthearted items news with more newsworthy, political and breaking news items. Nearly every user who reported this juxtaposition said that they do it because it humanizes their news sharing. Predictably, these users also reported wanting to seem as human as possible when sharing news and, although it is essentially what they’re doing, not as if they were regurgitating pre-packaged news. This need for humanization has not gone unnoticed, even by Google. When Google News was launched in 2002, every page boasted that “This page was generated entirely by computer algorithms without human editors. No humans were harmed or even used in the creation of this page.” Eight years later, the algorithmic gatekeeper issued the following statement: “At Google, we run anywhere from 50 to 200 experiments at any given time on our websites all over the world. Right now, we are running a very small experiment in Google News called Editors’ Picks. For this limited test, we’re allowing a small set of publishers to promote their original news articles through the Editors’ Picks section.” Although on a “limited” and “very small” scale, the company has recognized the paradoxical importance of individuality on social networks, a concept especially applicable to the marketing of academic monographs.

In the context of social media marketing, there has been a debate in the academic literature over whether it is better for companies to simply post ads on social networks or create profiles and interact closely with users. Most of the practice, for logistical reasons, has leaned toward posting ads. There is also considerable ambiguity over what exactly constitutes interacting with readers or consumers. Most media companies, newspapers, magazines and university presses simply post alerts about stories or issues and allow followers of the site to talk amongst themselves. This is interacting with, but not engaging an audience. It may be years down the road before companies commit to paying someone specifically to engage with readers on social networks but, with newspapers such as the New York Times hiring journalists to do no more than read through reader comments, it’s not incomprehensible. It may even be a sound marketing strategy.

The Triviality of Facebook

2010-10-19T20:00:00.000-07:00

Pennsylvania Communication Association 71st Annual ConventionWithin a given group of friends on a social network such as Facebook, there exist several “gatekeepers” who share news with their friends. In the traditional model of gatekeeping, editors and journalists (gatekeepers) decide what raw content makes it to the readers (the gated) but, on the Web, the two roles are interchangeable. Also, when a regular Facebook user shares a news story or forwards a notice about a new release from the Penn State Press, that user is, at least psychologically, considered just as much a source of that content as its actual originator. What does this mean for the Press’ ability to market its books using social networks? Several things.

First, in my opinion, the biggest challenge that faces social network marketing, especially for university presses, is also one of the most prevalent themes that has emerged from this research, the juxtaposition of the frivolous and newsworthy. I have interviewed several prominent news sharers on Facebook who purposely post and share humorous and entertaining items along with their important and newsworthy ones, including one user who employs his Facebook as a forum for both news sharing and comedy routines. Research has yet to show if this juxtaposition devalues or trivializes the news that is shared, but it doesn’t occur only at the individual level.

Although a book’s theme may have far-reaching and important implications, when the Penn State Press attempts to publicize an academic monograph on Facebook, I believe the social network’s users subconsciously juxtapose this content with their friends’ party plans and dinner invitations – simply because it’s all on Facebook. This trend hasn’t been empirically confirmed, but to avoid or minimize trivialization effects, the Press should use the structural elements of Facebook to its advantage. The University of Michigan Press does this effectively with its album of upcoming titles. By embracing Facebook and capitalizing on its capabilities as a social network rather than shying away from potential tabloidization, university presses can maintain their credibility while simultaneously developing an audience that, in many cases, already exists.

To Tweet or Not to Tweet?

2010-09-27T18:15:00.000-07:00

The proliferation and popularity of social networks such as Twitter are, at least in part, due to their users’ desire to know a little about a lot of things. Interestingly, this motivation is often the opposite of the goals of academic monographs, which probe deeply into focused, acute aspects of larger phenomena. But why?

Recent research from the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Germany has shown that Twitter users, even those with virtually no knowledge of a given subject, can most quickly increase their following and influence by tweeting detailed and insightful comments about a single event or subject. This is essentially the goal of an academic monograph, except completed with many fewer characters, and could be either a positive development or frightening proposition if put into practice. First, it indicates that anyone, regardless of his or her knowledge of a subject, can become an authority by simply concentrating on that one subject. On the other hand, it may also be fortuitous that a regular, previously unknown user can become an authority virtually overnight. Because the products and markets of university presses are constantly shifting - they cannot tweet extensively about a single monograph or journal at the expense of the others - publishers such as the Penn State Press may have difficulty putting this research into practice.

However, they may not have to in order to maximize their reach on social networks. My thesis research focuses on the dynamics of gatekeeping within collaborative networks, and although not complete, it preliminarily indicates that many smaller networks of friends and followers exist within Facebook or Twitter, and each of these smaller networks consists of even smaller networks, each organized around a given topic or subject. Also, each network has its own structural hierarchy.

If this is true, the Penn State Press would only need to become an authority within each network, which develops around each book the press publishes. Although exploratory, answers to these types of questions can help to maximize the marketing potential of social networks as their dynamics become clearer.

The Marketing Power of Social Networks

2010-09-12T18:33:00.000-07:00

In my short, but invariably interesting experience as an intern and student, I’ve learned that as others’ expectations of my work decline, so do my own. And in the absence of a better transition (they don’t expect much in grad school), expectations that users have of a given medium can have a similar impact, and in some cases determinative effect, on those media’s potential as marketing tools.

Despite the (almost) incomprehensible mobilizing potential of social media, social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter have not caught on for seemingly anything other than colloquial, fragmentary and senseless gossip, or at least as much as 140 characters will allow. Although the academic literature on social networking sites and collaborative web portals would use many more words, 140 of which may be recognizable, it essentially would predict that because most Facebook users do not expect to engage in an academic conversation on the same medium on which they gossip with their friends, it is difficult to mobilize an audience behind an academic product on a social network.

While the enormity of the Web allows for even the most specialized user or author to find an audience, finding that information can be daunting, especially for first-time or inexperienced users. Even more daunting can be sorting through a mass of information about the same thing, and more daunting still, deciding which of that information is worth reading. The PSU Press faces a unique challenge in harnessing the power of social media to market what is quintessentially a traditional medium, the book.

It must not only market books written by both academics and community members to both academic and community audiences, but also identify and target the niche audience for each book. Social networks seem made for this type of targeted marketing but, unfortunately, those who are reachable on Facebook aren’t likely to be interested in academic publishing, and those interested in academic publishing aren’t likely to satiate their intellectual curiosity through likes, comments and pokes. But why?

Social networks, collaborative online news portals and blogs, like the one I’m writing and you’re reading, and are so popular because they provide us with a bit of individuality in an infinitesimal vacuum. But is that not the job of books? And publishers? Bending these two media is not impossible, it just takes some getting used to, which is my job as an intern this semester. If we succeed, we could strategically mobilize social networks around each book the press publishes, becoming one of the first university publishers to truly harness the marketing potential of new media. And if we fail, well, what did you expect? I’m just an intern.

Peer Review and Public Forums—or—Putting the Public Back into Publications

2010-08-24T05:31:00.000-07:00

The New York Times just ran a story about an experiment the journal Shakespeare Quarterly just tried that allowed a group of experts to comment online on four articles submitted for publication. It seems most of those involved think the experiment improved the articles, all of which were eventually accepted for publication in the journal. This experiment could help develop a new way to vet scholarship (and to replace the ever shrinking post-publication review process, at least for monographs). The critical question (or perhaps obstacle) is will publications that use this method be taken seriously by tenure committees. The other issue only briefly touched on by the article is will this process offer the frequently in-depth analysis and critique that peer review has traditionally offered, or will it instead devolve into the kind of brief and petty sniping often found in the comment sections of blogs or newspapers. If we can figure out this piece, perhaps a more open and accessible ecosystem of scholarly communication can finally be achieved.

John Buck, Teacher

2010-08-19T11:42:00.000-07:00

Yesterday morning I lost a friend who didn’t really care much for what I do. He knew me from an earlier life where I ran a bookstore. When I had that job he was absolutely fascinated by my work. But when I closed that bookstore and I went to work for a publisher, he seemed disinterested in my new occupation.

It’s not that he wasn’t interested in books. On the contrary, I’ve met few people who loved books quite like he did, particularly literature, large chunks of which he would often commit to memory. No, it wasn’t the book part of my current job he didn’t care for, it was what we publish, and why—tenure books. He couldn’t be less interested in the process that my current job supports. It wasn’t that he had anything against research, (or the job security tenure offers) but it wasn’t his path. Instead he chose to teach. And at that he excelled.

My friend’s name is John Buck and he taught. He taught like few others. I know this not because I ever attended one of his classes, but because every Friday for almost ten years, John held his office hours in our bookstore. There I would watch him scan the shelves for bits of books he’d show his students to illustrate a point, or to show the painting the poem alluded to, or the line in the play that the poet re-worked. He read out loud, in a strong and articulate voice, practically singing the words—caressing consonants and with vibrato vowels. He didn’t recite, he performed literature, and his love of language was infectious. He turned struggling students into motivated listeners and thinkers, and he showed them how life and energy could spring from paper and ink.

John was not only generous with his students; he was also generous toward his booksellers, and not just by buying books. We loved having John at the store, but he didn't assume his mere presence was enough. He never came empty-handed on a Friday; instead he’d bring us all pastries, or fine cheeses, occasionally a cake, or sometimes even a six-pack. He claimed it was his rent. But it wasn’t necessary. The pleasure really was ours. He personified the love of literature and reminded us weekly why it was we struggled to keep that bookstore open.

For over thirty years John taught. And while I never registered for one of his classes, I hope I was a good student. I learned a lot from you, my friend. Now cracks a noble heart. I'm thinking today of the time you shouted at the radio on the morning we heard of the death of Andre Dubus, "Goddamn you, Death! You are an asshole."

You can read more about Professor John Buck in this profile of him published almost 20 years ago, back when I first met him.

Don't say it like that, Buck!

2010-08-03T19:32:00.000-07:00

Jane Austen's Fight Club

2010-07-26T08:01:00.000-07:00

The first rule of Fight Club is that one never mentions Fight Club.

Study like a scholar, Scholar!

2010-07-15T14:35:00.000-07:00

I'm on a cart...

Who's Driving This Bus?

2010-06-23T10:09:00.000-07:00

I finally heard the thing I never thought I’d ever hear from a university librarian.

“I’m afraid I’m going to have to stop buying your books.”

But why? Did you even look at them? They’re so pretty. And the authors are so smart. They’re really well edited and we vetted them and everything. Why?

Now, before I go any further, I should give that librarian’s statement a little context. Where was it said? It was said at the American Association of University Presses conference that just ended on Sunday. Who said it? Well actually two people said it, though perhaps not both in those exact words. The people who said it were Michael Levine-Clark, Collections Librarian at University of Denver, and Stephen Bosch, Materials Budget, Procurement, and Licensing Librarian of the University of Arizona Library. They said it at the Patron Driven Access panel arranged by Becky Clark, Marketing Director at Johns Hopkins University Press. They said it when showing us that according to their usage statistics, about one third to one half of what they’ve bought from university presses has been unused in the five years since it was purchased. Denver’s study noted that the total cost of all unused books was almost $19,000,000 in the last ten years when one adds cataloging and shelving costs. They said it while noting the loss of the jobs of many of their colleagues at Harvard and Stanford, in California, Illinois, Kansas, and North Carolina. They said it reluctantly. They told us they could no longer afford to be keepers of the scholarly record. They told us they would instead turn to their patrons for buying decisions. They told us that from now on, use would dictate purchases. They told us they’d be embracing Patron Driven Acquisitions. And they’re not alone.

It occurs to me that I’m assuming you know what Patron Driven Access means. In case you don’t let me take a shot at describing it.

Patron Driven Access (sometimes referred to as Demand Driven Access) is a model where a library opens an account, let’s say for $100,000, with an ebook platform. That ebook vendor then loads its collection, or perhaps the parts that would be most appropriate for that library, into that library’s catalog. So let’s say you’re a patron of that library. You’d search through the catalog and maybe eventually you come across a book you’d like to look at. It’s available as an ebook so you fire-up Adobe Reader or a variant, and have a look at that ebook. Now depending on your vendor, if you look at more than five pages, or for more than five minutes, then your library buys a copy of that ebook. But if you read less than that? Bye sugar, no hard feelings, it just didn’t work out. There are a bunch of built-in brakes, like the opportunity for a human selector to choose to pay a rental fee, rather than buying. And to the publisher’s benefit, if two concurrent users are viewing more than five pages, or for five minutes, then either two rental fees are charged, or two copies are bought.

Okay, cool. What does that mean? Money saved? Probably. Needs of the students and faculty met? Well, it depends. Perhaps, as long as they don’t study anything heavily dependent on third-party content, like art, or contemporary poetry, or film, or television. If that’s what you study, you’ll need to get used to only using books, at least until some fair use issues are resolved. But until then, you’re kind of out of luck. If you’re an art history student at a university like Colorado or Arizona that is converting to a Patron Driven Access program, and like many students, you’ve waited until the day before the paper’s due—you’re out of luck as far as books go. Physical books are a part of many of the Patron Driven Access models, and a choice for both the patron and the selector. But it’s not like transporter rooms are real. If a book is chosen, it must be shipped. And one business day may be possible, but it probably won’t be a default. Sure, POD and Espresso machines may be able to address this issue. But the book has to be available that way. And okay, I’ll be the one to say it, an Espresso edition isn’t fit for the stacks. If they use Espresso editions, librarians would be better off letting the patron keep it, at least until On Demand fixes the coatings they use on their covers.

What these librarians, and the vendors who serve them, have stumbled on to is a model that ends purchasing on speculation. In the past, university libraries bought books based on algorithms created by a process that could very accurately identify which books were the most appropriate for the specific collections they were developing. If your art history department had a lot of scholars studying 15th century illuminated manuscripts, approval programs accurately identified which books would most benefit such a collection. Not just the books specifically about 15th century illuminated manuscripts, but books about the 15th century, books about illumination, books about manuscript production practices of the 14th century—Any book that would generally inform that specific field of study. And while these splendid libraries built themselves around a very precise understanding of the possible needs of their faculty and students, it overcompensated, frequently erring on the side of serendipity. There are also plenty of human selectors involved—librarians who are constantly reading about and engaging in the subjects in their collections, and filling in the gaps that the algorithms inevitably create. These two methods created stacks of books that allowed for the comprehensive yet focused browsing of the subjects that the students and faculty most often investigated. This process created a collection of the ideas and resources students and faculty would benefit from potential access to.

But that’s changing. Actually, I’m beginning to wonder if the idea of the library isn’t what’s really changing. Because what this model ultimately does is change what the library does. It stops being a place of discovery, it assumes that will happen elsewhere, like Google. And it makes a library more specifically a place that serves needs. A place that arranges access. There’s nothing really wrong with that. There’s a ruthless efficiency to the pattern of acquisitions that the patron driven access model provides. Ebooks can usually provide instant access, so nothing is seemingly lost. But will that actually be the case?

Let’s get back to that issue of the needs of the faculty and students, and let’s set our gaze on that faculty. What this Patron Driven Access model means to university presses is that our future is likely to include two things—higher prices and fewer titles. Think about it. Any model that marches toward cutting book purchases in half can’t help but increase the price of each title that does make it to publication (primarily because fewer copies will sell) while simultaneously reducing the total number of titles that are actually published. As any real publisher will tell you, the costs aren’t really in the paper and ink. The costs are invested in the content. Patron Driven Access will make things more efficient, but it doesn’t truly address issues like hyperabundance, or the death of serendipity, or maybe even more importantly how a faculty member gets tenure or promotion. Because if university presses publish fewer titles, the book as the bar for tenure, at least in the humanities, is no longer sustainable. Unless we actually want less tenure.

While I was at that AAUP meeting this weekend that I mentioned above, it occurred to me that there was one party missing in this discussion. University presses were there, of course, and so too were quite a few librarians, but there weren’t any faculty members. And while the concept of Patron Driven Access is new to university presses, and we’re only beginning to understand the implications, neither the model nor its implications on their future careers is known by faculty. It occurred to me that these librarians needed to be talking to not only our AAUP but also the other one, the American Association of University Professors. Or maybe it would be more effective to educate the disciplinary societies, like the MLA, or the CAA, about what this is likely to mean to their members. They need to know that this new landscape will mean their content will stop being published if it contains third-party content. And they need to know that the opportunities to publish are about to be significantly reduced.

One of the plenary sessions reviewed a report that tackled the sticky subject of economic models for scholarly publishing. And while I thought they did a good job in reviewing current experiments in access, like our own Romance Studies series, they really only focused on issues of access we in the university press community were working on. But it occurred to me that perhaps that report was ignoring the other side of the coin, the access models that are imposed on us. If Patron Driven Access becomes widely adopted, what does that mean to sustainability? What does it mean to all of the different parts of the institution: the library, the press, the students, the faculty? The open access experiments we’ve all been participating in almost invariably need to be subsidized, not just with the sales aspect of the content in the experiments, but also with the sales of the rest of the list, and also with just plain old subsidy funds. But if all sales decrease, how does that affect these experiments?

One final observation I’d like to make about that meeting involves a very smart guy who was ridiculed for saying something that while uncomfortable to hear, was probably more on target than those who ridiculed him currently understand. The very smart guy is Joe Esposito, who in his discussion of the evolution of scholarly publishing noted two things that were almost universally poo-pooed. He said that librarians would become less important to what we do, and that subscriptions would gain in popularity as a model for content access. Those who criticized him noted that librarians hated the subscription model and that all previous attempts to offer it had not really succeeded. Before writing this off, however, let’s consider the role that Patron Driven Access may play in Joe’s assessment. First, if patron use is driving purchases or rentals, then by definition the librarian becomes less important in the sale of a book. And if the rental aspect of that equation becomes the norm, isn’t that only slightly different than a subscription to content? The key factor missing in both is ownership. Like I noted above, I think one of the casualties that these budget-tightening times will create is the part of the mission where libraries serve as an archive of the scholarly record. I suspect many libraries are about to surrender that if Patron Driven Access becomes the norm. They will play a critical role in the access to that record, but they may stop building that archive for their individual institutions. That, I suspect, will get outsourced to the cloud. And I can’t really blame them. I don’t see the value a library offers as an archive as something digital natives understand. They don’t seem to have the same need or desire to build personal libraries as the previous generation did, and I’m beginning to think that taking seriously the need for a collection, either personal or institutional, is diminishing. Perhaps this is a by-product of the hyperabundance of content. But I suspect it’s actually more of a result of the existence of Google and its many spin-offs.

I'll blow your mind, show you how to find...

2010-05-31T05:56:00.000-07:00

The students and faculty of University of Washington's iSchool provide their own version of Gaga's Telephone.

Catalog

Don't forget the databases....

What if we went with pink and blue?

2010-05-25T11:30:00.000-07:00

This really has nothing to do with books but I have to share it...

What if we left the design of the stop sign up to marketers and their market research?

Welcome to the beautiful garden of virtual delights; pay no attention to those walls around you…

2010-05-13T13:38:00.000-07:00

I got an iPad a couple of weeks ago, ostensibly to explore what iBooks bring to the table in this brave new world of digital content. And as is generally true with all things Apple, primarily what it brings is delight. I’ve had it sitting on my desk this last week and no one who’s come into my office has been able to resist it. My kids love it, my wife thinks it’s adorable, and even the cat finds the Pocket Pond app mesmerizing, what with its beautiful fish and the occasional dragonfly floating about. She actually shook her paw after touching it, apparently thinking she had actually dipped it into the water so skillfully rendered by the programmers of the app.

Now don’t get me wrong, I too think this is a marvelous little device. But I have a couple of issues with it, or perhaps with the message Apple is sending with its release. The iPad brings to mind Neo’s dilemma; do I take the blue pill or the red pill? Do I immerse myself in this delightful garden, ignoring the fact that even with the beautiful virtual Koi in the pond, and my movies, music, books, and TV, I’m still in a locked room? Or do I reject the device, as some have advocated, because its adoption is, in essence, a surrender of sorts?

Some might argue that the walled garden serves both the gardener and the master of the estate. You can’t really predict what will grow in the garden if just any old seed is allowed to blow in. And if you open the doors to the hoi polloi, lord knows what they might do to those delicate blossoms. But is it possible that this control can go too far? Those walls create a lot of shade. Are we limiting the plants we can grow to only those that don’t need a lot of sunlight? And before I’ve beaten this metaphor into a juicy, green, chlorophylled pulp, I’ve got to wonder—if I’m the master of the estate, why can’t I choose what grows in the garden? Why is that up to the gardener? Doesn’t he work for me?

When I’m able to break free from the tyranny of delight and I set down my iPad, I like to ponder just what the purpose of the iPad is. I have a theory—It’s a conditioning device. Its true function is to re-teach me how to pay for content.

Now, is that a bad thing? No, not really. For the last almost twenty years, those of us who work in content creation and distribution have watched in horror as the perceived value of our work slowly approached zero. First they came for the musicians, and as I played no instruments, I didn’t speak up. Then they came for the newspapers, then television, movies, and now they’re at my door. They, of course, are the pirates. And with the pirates comes the pirate ethos: Information wants to be free. Restricting access is tantamount to robbing individuals of their own culture. And for the most part, I agree. Especially in the world of scholarship, it seems there’s little point in producing scholarship if it isn’t shared. But I have a hard time believing that if we abandon copyright altogether, the quality of what we create won’t be affected. In fact, I’m positive that important things that we do, like peer review and copyediting, can’t exist if everyone goes pirate. Sure, we could end tenure, cost-shift the expense for those services from the consumer back to the producer, and make the cost of the production of scholarship a burden for the scholar producing it, rather than the scholar using it. But does that really make sense? Is that fair, and more importantly, does it encourage the advancement of scholarship or does it create an impediment?

All that said, I still wonder if I should I celebrate this turn of events, this beautiful Pavlovian bell that rewards its user with delight every time you put .99 cents into it? Or should I be concerned that the iTunes system that “saved” the music industry and could potentially “save” print publishing has a cost beyond the apps and the content it sells? I suppose that’s dependent on those costs. So let’s take a look at them.

I see two “costs” here that concern me: control and price. Getting back to that deadly edition of the mushroom identification guide I wrote about last time, the file I was asked to proof was a .prc file. This .prc file is basically the Kindle format, but without DRM. I looked at it on my Kindle and it worked great. Checked it out on the desktop versions of Kindle for Mac and Kindle for PC and again, flawless. Then I wanted to check it out on my iPad, but I hit that wall. Here I had a file with content I owned, absolutely legally mine, but I couldn’t use it on my iPad. I asked a few hacker friends if they knew of any way to legally get this file onto my iPad. No, can’t be done, not legally. The only legal way I can look at this file on my iPad is to pay for it. It appears not only didn’t I have control over the device; in the bargain I also lost control of my own content.

Another control issue I’m concerned about has to do with some of Apple’s recent forays into censorship. They censored the word sperm (as in sperm whale) out of the description of Moby Dick, and have recently asked some fashion magazines to re-edit their iPad editions to remove any images of women’s nipples. It makes me wonder if they’ll allow us to offer our book on Caravaggio with this cover.

Now, the other part of this equation that concerns me is price. Many in publishing have been hailing Steve Jobs as a white knight. His brave stand on the $14.99 price point defeated the evil Amazonians and their wretched $9.99 pricing. But how long will either of those price points stand? A marketing colleague of mine here at the press dabbles in app development and he pointed out to me that at the current rate of sale, his first app will pay for the $99 iPhone Development Program fee required to sell the app on iTunes in about 100 years. And his app isn’t some obscure tool only of use to high-level programmers; it’s an educational app for teaching toddlers about color. He pointed out that he’s been watching the trajectory on pricing and what he’s observed is that as more apps become available pricing has been heading downward. Apps that could get $5.99 only a few months ago can only actually sell when priced at .99 these days. The reason? The end of scarcity. Now, I know apps aren’t books, but I think what he’s identified is an attribute of the long tail that’s seldom considered.—The longer the tail, the lower the price needs to be at the end of that tail to actually make a sale, especially after the first year. Only a year ago his app would have been competing with 35,000 other apps for your interest. Today it competes with about 200,000. Will this also be true of books? Apple has about 60,000 ebook titles, Amazon just passed 500,000, and when Google opens its bookstore in June it could potentially have millions of titles. What might that do to pricing? And more importantly, what might it do to the efforts of non-profit publishers to remain sustainable?

My final concern about the iPad and iBooks has to do with how Apple treats its content partners. Amazon made it pretty simple for a publisher like ours to get our digital content into the Kindle program. At least so far, Apple seems pretty indifferent. Sure, I can get our books on the platform, but only through the use of a third-party distributor. I had a similar experience when the library here asked if we could help getting some music they owned sold on iTunes and Amazon as mp3s. Doing it on Amazon was a snap. The folks at Apple have ignored multiple requests to offer the music on their platform. The implied response has been to use an aggregator (who also receives a cut). So far they’re doing the same thing with books. They are literally only inviting a handful of university presses to sell directly through them. The rest of us are being referred to an aggregator. So even if Apple is selling at a higher price, what difference does that make if I have to surrender most of that additional revenue to the distributor?

So what do I think of the device? Well like I said, it’s delightful. But when I stop using the device and consider what it means for the future of scholarly publishing, the delight is replaced by a slew of concerns, and the hedges and roses melt away, revealing the walls I could be voluntarily committing myself to. If this is truly the future of electronic content, university presses have a whole new set of problems to worry about.

When ebooks KILL!

2010-05-04T12:59:00.000-07:00

So we’ve got a bunch of books in the Kindle program, but there was one particular book I submitted that I was eager to look at on a Kindle. We do a field guide on the wild mushrooms of Pennsylvania and of all the books we submitted to the Kindle program, this was one of two that had illustrations, and it was the only one with color illustrations. Usually illustrated books are excluded from our ebook program because of third party rights (see link to Marc Aronson’s piece below for why that occurs) but there are two recently published illustrated books that we do have complete digital rights for. One is titled Deer Wars and the other is this mushroom field guide.

So, I get the email from Amazon that this title has finally been converted and has gone on sale, and I eagerly download a copy. I open it on the Kindle and… it looks pretty good. The images aren’t in color of course, but all in all it isn’t terrible. So I’m flipping though, flipping through and I look at one of the illustrations and it says— Morel, Morchella esculenta, p. 39. Now first, that reference, page 39? Kindles don’t have pages, they have locations. So all of the referencing done in a complex text kind of becomes worthless. Your index is worthless, references to illustrated sections, or (as is the case here) references from an illustration to the descriptive text, are also rendered useless. Usually the only thing actually linked in most modern ebooks is the Table of Contents.

Now, I worked with the author of our mushroom guide in developing this book, and even before that I knew a little something about foraging in the wild. And I’ve harvested my own Morels (here’s one I found this weekend) and while I wouldn’t claim to know every subspecies of Morel, I was pretty sure that the picture wasn’t in fact a Morel. If it was, it was one funky species I had never come across before.

So I went and grabbed my physical copy of the guide and flipped to the Spring Mushroom illustrations section to see if this was a Morel, and to my horror I discovered that flowable text also means flowable captions. Here’s the page from the book.

There are three mushrooms on this page; The Fairy Ring, the Collybia Jelly, and the Morel. Now in the Kindle version each image is presented as it’s own location. It’s own, isolated, non-referenced or linked, little image. When Amazon converted this title from the printer file, there weren’t any anchors to the captions. There isn’t a need for that on a printed page. The caption is below the image, the two elements and where they belong on the page are included in the PDF. But in a digital version, if the caption isn’t anchored to the image, it could refer to practically anything. Here’s a photo of how it rendered on the Kindle.

See what happened. For some reason the images which in the physical book were captioned below the image, were now captioned above the image. The smaller image of the Jelly mushroom had a little extra room on its “location” so it reflowed the caption for the Morel right below it. The result is that a wild mushroom that isn’t actually edible is being referenced as one of the most delicious mushrooms in North America.

As soon as I realized what had happened I shot a quick email to Amazon asking that they immediately remove the Kindle edition, which they did. They had it down before dinner. They promised that their Quality Assurance team would have a look at the file and let me know if they thought the file was fixable. I just got it back from them and it looks like they’re able to anchor the images to their captions. I checked it on Kindle for Mac and it looks great. But before I risk any more lives I wanted to check it on other Kindle friendly devices, but I’ve just run into another problem. More on that “problem” next time...

Excuses

2010-04-05T10:36:00.000-07:00

I've been meaning to blog, really I have. But then I was out sick and there's all the administrative stuff that needs to be done, and we're super busy right now, and...

Look, I promise to write something soon, but in the meantime, here are a couple of pieces that you need to know about.

Clay Shirky has another great piece, this time on the infrastructure content providers use, and if that's all really necessary. He says, heck no. I'm less sure but I still find his arguments pretty interesting. The Collapse of Complex Business Models

The other piece is from a guy who mostly writes history books for young adults. Marc Aronson has a great op ed in the New York Times contemplating the potential of ebooks and one of the major obstacles in meeting that potential—third party permissions. The End of History (Books).

This is the end...

2010-03-16T11:12:00.000-07:00

The UK branch of Dorling Kindersley produced this video for their recent sales conference, but it was so popular among publishing professionals that they decided to share it on YouTube. It's very clever, and challenges some assumptions made about digital natives.

The Math of ebooks.

2010-03-01T10:23:00.000-08:00

The New York Times ran an illuminating piece yesterday by Motoko Rich about some of the average costs involved in publishing and what might realistically expected as a sustainable price for ebooks. The story is really about trade publishing so the costs that are used don't equally apply to the kind of publishing university presses do (peer review would be a cost we have that trade publishing doesn't, for example) but the story is still useful at hopefully educating the general public about what the floor for ebook prices might actually be and why. And it makes the important point that for all the potential savings of ebooks to be fully realized, publishers would need to stop printing ANY books. Is that something we as a culture really want to do?

This is a test product. Nothing will be sent to you.

2010-02-08T17:53:00.000-08:00

I assume this is what it says on the tin, but I'm not going to order one to confirm it. Because I can see why it would be there. They need to test their database just like anyone else. What cracks me up about this Amazon listing is the fact that it's available in a collectable edition, though without the dust jacket, for $9.95.

Wait, maybe it's a Kindle edition.

This Is a Test Product and Nothing Will Be Sent to You

by Nothing

also available

Collectable-Like New

and perhaps my favorite part, The Product Reviews

Update: Well it seems Amazon has for some reason taken this test product page down, so unfortunately all of the above links are no longer working.

In its place, let me point out this Ryobi 16-Volt Drill with 26-Piece Bit Set that looks suspiciously like a pink corduroy jacket.

Brother Anthony Explains it All for You.

2010-02-01T06:22:00.000-08:00

So. . . how was your weekend?

Mine was spent glued to my computer watching two behemoths battle. Bloggers first noticed Friday night and then the New York Times reported that Amazon took down all of Macmillan's buy buttons from their site. The books were still listed, but they could only be obtained from third parties, not from Amazon. They also removed Macmillan sample chapters from everybody's Kindles and removed Macmillan titles from everyone's wish lists. Why?

Here's what I think happened.

Let's publish a book. We'll call it The Happy Ugly Dog, or THUD for short. We figure it costs us x to make, including editing, design, composition, printing, paper; and then we figure we're most likely to sell y copies of it. Take x divide by y and that is our unit cost. Now take x, your book costs, and add a bunch of other non-book factors like overhead, employee benefits, taxes, and a little something for the shareholders, and divide by y again. There's your average wholesaler/retailer price. To that add your average wholesaler/retailer discount, and there you have your retail price. For THUD, let's say that's $25.

We publish THUD and offer it as a Kindle edition. We tell Amazon it will cost them $15 (that average wholesaler/retailer price) per copy, for either the physical or the Kindle edition (40% is a standard bookselling retailer discount, although Amazon is likely to be getting much better than that because of their volume). At first Amazon says fine, but we're selling it at $9.99 and we'll eat the $5 we lose on every sale. We want to dominate this market so it's an investment in market share. But they can't afford that forever. So after a while Amazon tells us that as of, let's say late March (or April if you want it with 3G), we're going to need to bring the Kindle price of our publications down so they're closer to the $9.99 price. Preferably lower. Now as the publishers of THUD, we know that that may be bringing us too close to that unit cost. So we tell Amazon, no, but what we're willing to do is wait until we've sold y at $15 (or $14.99 at the iBookstore) and then we'll sell it on your site for $9.99. That would be the "windowing" John Sargent referred to in his letter. Amazon saw the disadvantage that would put them at in competing with the iBookstore so they went nuclear. They flexed some muscle, just like they did with POD. They know they can't compete on functionality with Apple so they want to compete on price. But they can't and shouldn't dictate to the publishers of THUD or Macmillan what costs are. Yes, lower prices benefit consumers, but there is a limit.

Now, it's important to note here that most of our books sold as Kindle editions are really an expansion of our market. These aren't typically being bought instead of a physical book because the primary customer for our physical books is libraries. Librarians aren't going to buy a Kindle edition of our book instead of a physical edition. But for the publisher of THUD or Macmillan, their primary customers are probably going to get one or the other. Their Kindle sales do cannibalize their print sales. They have an interest in not undercutting the revenue generated by their print sales with their Kindle sales.

One of my roles here at the press is I'm usually responsible for negotiating the terms for the platforms or sales channels that sell those ebooks. We sell most of our Kindle editions at a pretty low price, and there's a rationale for that that you can read about here. But one of the most annoying things I find with some of the platforms is the section of the agreement on pricing which usually states that I will not sell an ebook on another platform for a lower price. Sometimes I’m able to negotiate this out of a contract. If I can’t, I usually won’t submit our content to that platform or sales channel.

The reason I’m dead set against this is because I believe ebooks should be priced based on functionality. As I said, I sell our Kindle editions for a pretty low price. Reason being it’s a great deal for the publisher (DRM by default, locked sales channel, reduces used market for physical books, and there’s no such thing as a used market for the Kindle edition, and they can not be shared) but a terrible proposition for the consumer (see above). I also find it a clumsy device with terrible navigation and a pathetic network connection.

The iPad editions should cost more. Much better device, much faster network, ePub file format (though it should be noted that DRM can be applied to an ePub file), and because of that ePub file format, potentially device agnostic. We’ll see. If the iBookstore becomes or remains a locked sales channel then I’ll probably price closer to our Kindle editions but if their model accommodates sharing, it will and should cost a bit more.

Finally, one of the issues I’d like to see more closely addressed is ebook design. You really can’t and shouldn’t just use your print files for ebooks, but that’s pretty much what happens with a majority of ebooks. Printer PDF or ePub files are tweaked to the specifications of the ebook vendor and then submitted. Ebooks should instead be designed with much more care, and with extensive tagging for notes, indexes, bibliographies (maybe linked to WorldCat) and glossaries, even links to the Web. We’ve only begun to see some of the functionality ebooks could provide, but to add that value we’re going to need to be willing to pay for it. Publishers shouldn’t just copy and paste their print publishing program onto their ebook program, but as long as ebooks cost $9.99 or less there’s not enough revenue for much of an alternative. If we want to see better ebooks, we’ll need to pay more. If you just want to read writing and don't care about something that has been prepared for maximum comprehension and/or enjoyment, consider reading only blogs. If you prefer a value added experience, be willing to pay for the work of the person who added the value, and for the infrastructure that makes it possible.

For the Love of Culture

2010-01-29T03:41:00.000-08:00

Lawrence Lessing has an amazing essay in this week's New Republic. In it he points out that while the Google Book Settlement seems like a fantastic way to make millions of books universally available in a digital format (though with a price tag) ultimately it would put books into the same category as many documentary films are today,—inaccessible.

"Documentary films could have been created the way books were, with writers using clips the way historians use quotations (that is, with no permission at all). And likewise, books could have been created differently: with each quotation licensed by the original author, with the promise to use the quote only according to the terms of a license. All books could thus be today as documentary films are today--inaccessible. Or all documentary films today could be as almost all books are today--accessible."

He then imagines a world after the approval of the Google Book Settlement and considers the cultural implications of the Book Rights Registry...

"And what this means, or so I fear, is that we are about to transform books into documentary films. The legal structure that we now contemplate for the accessing of books is even more complex than the legal structure that we have in place for the accessing of films. Or more simply still: we are about to make every access to our culture a legally regulated event, rich in its demand for lawyers and licenses, certain to burden even relatively popular work. Or again: we are about to make a catastrophic cultural mistake."

I might argue that this is already happening, at least with the use of illustrations in books. An unacceptable number of our art books that have gone out of print because of the exploding cost of extending permissions to a second printing, or a paperback edition. Our book about the poetics of Maurice Sendak is out of print precisely for this reason. We're actually hoping to bring it back into print later this year, but it was only the direct intersession of Mr. Sendak himself that's making it possible. He apparently loves the book. But what if he didn't? What if it was critical in a way he didn't like? Should it then remain out of print, sentenced to obscurity because of the complexity and cost of permissions? What might it further mean if not only did we need to overcome the cost of permissioning illustrations but also the use of quotations? And what does it mean to scholarship if only positive critiques can be disseminated?

Fortunately, Lessig offers alternatives to this unintended consequence of current copyright law, and to the expansion of that problem that the Google Book Settlement might cause, but frankly I doubt there's the political will necessary to affect the changes he's outlined, and I think Lessig recognizes this. He also doesn't address the problem we're dealing with now concerning the use of third party material in scholarship, so I will. Make all non-profit scholarly use fair use. See, it's that simple. Still, his essay is absolutely worth reading and thinking about. It's a well thought out solution to many of our current copyright conundrums, and it provides a wonderful explanation of why the approval of the Google Book Settlement might really be only in Google's best interest, and not in the interest of readers, libraries, or even publishers like us.

Reading Lists

2010-01-08T06:43:00.001-08:00

I've felt a bit overwhelmed of late with all of the great reading I've been finding about digital books. I thought I'd compile a quick list to highlight some of my favorite pieces.

Teleread's Dan D'Agostino has a great piece about the masses of unread digital volumes that academic libraries have been collecting.

The Scholarly Kitchen's Joe Esposito has a fine post about book social networks and their possible role in marketing and promoting literary discussions (and I've sometimes wondered about their potential use in the peer review process).

I also really enjoyed David Crotty's piece at that same blog on the lack of transparency Amazon has provided on Kindle sales. He sheds some light on the possible meaning of the convoluted statistics Amazon has offered in lieu of real numbers.

And finally, Inside Higher Ed has an interesting piece from the American Historical Association about what Historians think about Google Book. It seems it is an invaluable tool, as long as the kind of history you do doesn't need accurate dates or locations.

Prescription Drugs = Textbooks

2010-01-04T09:52:00.000-08:00

Boing Boing guest blogger Andrea James has found a great metaphor for what's wrong with textbook prices and has written an interesting piece there about why her metaphor is appropriate and what might be done about it.

Carl Pyrdum, one of the professors that Andrea thinks is unduly influenced by publishers, responds to the piece and points out why it's not such a black and white issue.

Both are well worth the look.

Buy where you shop!

2009-12-22T06:19:00.000-08:00

Tim O'Reilly has a new blog post which offers some excellent advice on where to buy things. Partially an update of a piece he wrote in 2003, the post starts by criticizing the use of new apps like ShopSavvy which allows you to scan a barcode in a store and then to find the cheapest outlet online for that product. Tim wisely points out that the lowest price isn't always in your best interest. About the original post he writes:

The piece struck a chord with booksellers. Many laminated it and hung it by the shelves in their stores. But it didn't make much difference. The store owner who inspired the piece did end up shuttering the business.

Maybe it's all for the best, part of the creative destruction of capitalism. But as a consumer, it's wise to realize the long-term implications of your choices. Shop at the big box store for the better price, and lose the small local store that was so convenient; browse the shelves or racks in a brick and mortar store, then buy online? How long do you think you'll be able to do that?

My advice remains the same as it was in 2003: Buy where you shop. If you discover a product online, buy it there. But if you discover it in a store, buy it there. Don't save a few dollars now, and lose the opportunity to shop at a local merchant in the future.

Food for thought on these last few days of holiday shopping.

Slower Than an Anesthetized Slug in Winter

2009-12-10T09:18:00.000-08:00

David Pogue trashes the new Barnes & Noble Nook in the Times today. Too bad. I foolishly believed the marketing copy for the product and was really looking forward to trying one out. Of course I also almost bought a Blackberry Storm last year, so maybe it's me. Apparently it takes this new ebook reader three seconds to turn a page. Perhaps B&Ns marketing department could turn that into a feature. Maybe they could call it "a built-in comprehension break."

Invisible Airplanes

2009-12-03T09:18:00.000-08:00

I think it was George Carlin who once did a bit about the Pentagon spending billions on an invisible airplane project where he noted that since the airplane was invisible, the bureaucrats in charge of the purse strings could be shown an empty hanger and then receive a bill for the 2 billion dollars and would have no way to verify they got their money’s worth from the plane’s manufacturer.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot these days in the age of Internet ads and digital books. One of the reasons I’m thinking about it today is because of an interesting little project I took on for the library. The library here owns the rights to all of the Fred Waring radio recordings and they asked us if we could help them market them. So as a test case, I put one collection of Christmas recordings on Amazon and they’re being offered there as mp3s. The page to buy that music just went up at the end of November and I was delighted to see that it received a review already. The reviewer loved being able to listen to this music from her youth again, and gave the collection a very enthusiastic thumbs up. I should be delighted by this, right? Well I am, sort of. What bothers me about it is the reviewer’s review is tagged as a Verified Amazon Purchase. But when I go to Amazon’s vendor reporting page and look at the title I find that it has sold zero copies. How can this be?

Now I’m sure there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation, perhaps a technical glitch, for why that sale hasn’t been reported. But my concern is actually much larger than just a couple of mp3 files. What I find most interesting is how much this new digital marketplace really depends on non-verifiable reporting. If I sell a physical book, I ship a thing to a place. There is all that paperwork involved, leaving a useful trail, and then there’s the thing itself. But when I sell a virtual book, how do I know it? I get a report from the retailer, but is it in any way verifiable? Same’s true for Internet advertising. I’m trusting the Web site on its reporting of impressions, clickthroughs, even the price as in the case of Google AdWord’s generalized second-price auction. But how do I know there were other bidders on the words “Psalter of Saint Louis”, and enough of them to raise the price of my clickthroughs by a nickel? And how do I know that ad was actually on that Web site for 10,000 visitors? I really don’t. But I also don’t see how I have any choice in the matter. Sure, I could limit my advertising to only print, or I could chose to only sell physical books, but in the current environment, we wouldn’t stay in business much longer if we did that.

I suppose I have to trust these companies, but I sure wish I didn’t. Or, in the words of an ex-president (who you won’t hear me quote very often), I wish I could at least “trust but verify.”

Where Books Come to Life

2009-11-29T06:20:00.000-08:00

A fantastic little video from New Zealand promoting reading.

Local Bookstores, Social Hubs, and Mutualization

2009-11-20T06:20:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-19T08:30:00.001-08:00

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

2009-11-13T12:07:00.000-08:00

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?

2009-11-09T07:00:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-04T09:25:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-04T06:07:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-02T10:36:00.001-08:00

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"

2009-10-29T06:27:00.000-07:00

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? Of course we have a marketing plan for your book.

2009-10-17T06:05:00.000-07:00

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...

2009-10-16T09:59:00.000-07:00

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!!

2009-10-16T05:49:00.001-07:00

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

2009-10-15T05:57:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-14T12:48:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-06T07:18:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-28T12:17:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-19T11:50:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-17T10:45:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-11T08:12:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-07T08:51:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-30T06:59:00.000-07:00

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.

Of the National Portrait Gallery (UK) & Wikipedia & Image Use

2009-07-17T10:01:00.000-07:00

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/arts_and_culture/8151989.stm

Of historians and writing and books

2009-07-17T06:15:00.000-07:00

http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2009/07/2009071701c.htm

Local Indie Bookstore Saves Planet!

2009-07-16T10:09:00.000-07:00

A wonderful little film about some of the ecological advantages of buying from your local independent bookstore. Hats off to the folks at The Regulator Bookshop who put this together. Nicely done!

Michael Jensen is scared, very scared...

2009-07-07T11:11:00.000-07:00

And he wants you to be scared too.

Michael was kind enough to speak at a workshop I organized at this year's AAUP meeting and later, at that same meeting, he gave this hair-raising assessment as to why we all need to embrace Open Access immediately.

Not for the faint of heart...

Part 1

Part 2

Text of the presentation can be found here.

Cooking Without Cilantro

2009-06-30T09:08:00.000-07:00

How do you make Thai Green Curry with Prawns if you have no coconut milk, no hot peppers, no cilantro--and no prawns? "You have to be creative," says Mary Wilson. Mary has put together a new cookbook called Cooking Without Cilantro: Getting Creative with the Basics, which will be published by Penn State Press next spring. It’s filled with today’s recipes, including dishes from around the world, but with no exotic ingredients that couldn’t be found in any normal kitchen. Mary’s prawn curry, for instance, is made with cocktail shrimp, condensed milk, and lots and lots of black pepper.

Mary says she loves old cookbooks. “I can read them like novels,” she says. "You feel like you’re sitting in your grandmother’s kitchen while she cooks up the most wonderful simple meal. Modern cookbooks just don’t have that flavor.”

Mary’s book tries to recapture that flavor. The same simple ingredients, the same simple directions, but up-to-date, totally modern dishes. "I like to imagine it’s 1910 and I’m showing up at the church picnic with my blue corn quesadillas. Won’t the other ladies be surprised!”

Here are a few of the ingredients and instructions you’ll find in Mary’s book:

clabbered milk (“It takes some getting used to, but now I want to put it in just about everything”)
butter the size of a walnut
Wonder Yeast (“you can probably use regular yeast”)
enough flour to roll
1 goblet white wine ("sounds medieval!"
bake a delicate pie crust
bake quickly
bake in a moderate oven
make like teacakes
cook until it threads

Don’t call Mary old-fashioned, though. "The new ingredients we have today are wonderful, but the traditional ingredients are wonderful too. It’s like the difference between books and computers. They can copy all the books onto computers, but when the computers stop working, we’d better hope the books are still around. So this cookbook is my gift to the next generation." The Press will also be issuing her book in a Kindle edition.

Mary does have one confession to make—she didn’t actually test all the recipes in her book. "Some of them looked so good on the page, I knew I could only make them worse. Besides, there are so many terrific cooks out there who’ll find a way to make those dishes even better than I could imagine."

And now that we’ve tantalized you enough, here’s one of Mary’s favorite recipes. "Imagine it’s the middle of January," she says. “It’s the darkest, coldest night of the year. No central heating, no electric lights, not even a radio. Just everyone gathered around the fireplace feeling sorry for themselves. That’s the time to bring these out!"

CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIE-DOUGH COOKIES
1 cup butter
1 1/2 cups sugar
1 teaspoon Bourbon vanilla
2 eggs
2 to 2 1/2 cups flour
1 teaspoon soda
salt to taste
3/4 pound sweet chocolate, broken
Take a fourth part of the dough, divide into small pieces, cover, and place on the back porch until frozen hard. Then bring it inside, mix quickly into remainder of dough, and bake immediately in a hot oven.

"My grandmother probably would have called them 'Half-Baked Cookies'!” laughs Mary. "But I bet she would have asked for seconds!"

What I said at the AAUP

2009-06-23T13:09:00.000-07:00

At the AAUP meeting last week, I participated in a preconference panel discussion on using electronic media (blogging, Facebook, Twitter) to to market university press books. It was an opportunity to say a few words about what we're trying to accomplish with this blog. For the benefit of everyone who didn't have the chance to hear it--which I believe includes most of the people in the room at the time--here's what I said. We hope to be posting a bit more about our experience at the meeting in the next few days.

The Penn State Press blog isn’t about advertising our books. Other press blogs start with that; they announce new titles as they come out, they give news about their authors, they might even use their books as the occasion to write about topical events. There are some exceptional ones that amount to a sort of journal of public affairs, centered around the press’s books. But we seldom do any of that; you’d have to go through quite a few pages of our blog to find any mention of a book we’ve published (though we were sure to say something about it when Bill Clinton had apparently been reading our biography of Joseph Priestley, the inventor of soda water; it turned out he’d gotten the title wrong, and it was some other press’s book). We’re not trying to catch the attention of that huge untapped audience out there eager for the latest about musical medieval nuns or feminist interpretations of Benedict Spinoza. The audience we would like to reach is the librarians who order our books; the university administrators who oversee our funding; the fellow publishers who share our pain—people who know, or ought to know, what we’re up to. We want to promote our press, not just our product; to let people know what sort of publisher we are, what sort of people we are, what we’re up to in our little corner of the publishing world, in our little corner of a cow pasture in the shadow of the largest sports stadium in the whole United States (on winter afternoons, that last part is literally true). We want our blog to be a place where we can address issues important to us—whether “us” means our industry, our company, or ourselves. So instead of having our marketing department be responsible for the blog, we’ve tried to open it up to people from different areas of the Press. Ellie or Patrick in acquisitions might post about the Espresso instant bookmaking machine or the best sticky notes of the past year; Tony in marketing might post about the closing of a favorite bookstore in Ann Arbor, or the Amazon Kindle (we can’t stop him from posting about the Kindle, actually); Heather, our publicity manager, might post about seeing Pete Rose signing books at Caesar’s Palace (89 bucks each); or one of our editorial assistants might post a link to whatever it is that young book people are interesting themselves in in the twenty-first century. And then there’s me.

I’m a manuscript editor. I’m concerned, as far as my job goes, with how our books are written, with the authors who write them, with the Press staff who acquire them, and with those who carry out the obscure processes that turn them into physical commodities (or electronic ones). I’m even acquainted with those, like Tony, who go and hawk them on the street. But I am not concerned—again, as far as my job goes—with most of the issues being so earnestly discussed at the sessions of this meeting—with Google and open access, library and press cooperation, digitalization, short runs and bottom lines, and tailoring acquisitions to the mission of my campus. Naturally I’m fascinated by these things—I’d be a fool not to be, given that my livelihood ultimately depends on them—but they have very little to do with my daily working life. If I’m going to send dispatches to the world from my world, I’ll have to talk about exasperating manuscripts, befuddled authors, missing permissions, overcommitted freelancers, and stacks of proofs that need to be read through in the next two days because we couldn’t afford a proofreader. But, for the most part, I can’t do that. It would be talking out of school. No one outside the press needs to hear, for example, which author has been causing us the most distress lately—least of all the author himself, who might happen to read the blog. Fortunately, as I told my parents when I was eight, it’s easier to talk about something if you can just make it up. And that’s what I do. Here are a few of the topics I’ve covered in the last year or so.

I’ve written about the annual Penn State Press spring cleaning bonfire at which a difficult author is burned in effigy. Unfortunately, that tradition died out some years ago.

I’ve told the story of my conversation with an author who insisted that series style or no series style, there was no need to refer to the game played by the shepherdesses in a Watteau painting as “field hockey”; just “hockey” would do. “No one was playing hockey at Fontainebleau in 1715,” he informed me. “You can trust me on that.” And that’s why his book is the only one of our field hockey titles in which the term “field hockey” never appears.

I’ve explained to our readers that the designers of our books are some of the most skillful and creative people around, and that if, for example, the pages seem to have been inserted into the binding backwards and upside-down, or there are gaps and repeats in the page numbering, or the title on the cover isn’t the same as the title inside, or the author photo looks like a Cairn terrier smoking a meerschaum, there’s no need to jump to conclusions and assume we don’t know what we’re doing. They need to remember that we’re working hard to give them value that they won’t get from an ordinary trade publisher.

I’ve posted a dispatch from the author of Down and Dirty: A Practical Guide to Traditional and Home Laundering about her signing in a local bookstore. I only wish that there really were local bookstores that sold our books. I’ve thanked our vendors for their very thoughtful gifts last holiday season, including the Old-Time Print Shoppe for the famous writer trucker hats. I brought my Samuel Beckett hat to Philadelphia with me, but I left it in my room.

And I’ve posted some true stuff too—my review of the Kindle, and a natural history of the coconut crab, which is a kind of toddler-sized, shell-less hermit crab that survives on coconuts it cadges from soft-hearted tourists. But really, it’s all true.

So that’s what I’ve been up to, and what we’ve been up to. I can’t speak to its soundness as a marketing strategy; you’ll have to ask Tony about that. I can say that it’s enjoyable having a forum like this—enjoyable for me, for our other posters, and, I hope, for our readers. But it’s not easy sometimes to keep it going. Most of us, most of the time, are too occupied doing what we do to describe what we do. And though Tony assures me that we do draw a fair amount of traffic, it does occasionally feel like a one-sided conversation. But if we can maintain our side of the conversation, our hope is that it can become more and more a real conversation, and our blog can be about not only our quirky little selves, but the quirky little world that all of us in this room are a part of.

Sandy Thatcher's retirement party

2009-06-15T19:44:00.000-07:00

We threw Sandy a retirement party this evening. It went pretty well. I think he was pleased to see all his friends and colleagues celebrate his career and was typically eloquent reflecting about his work at the press.

Here's what I said at the party:

Upon reflecting on the history of the press, it will henceforth be quite impossible to think about the Press without the influence and ethics of Sandy Thatcher. Sandy has made sure that his place in the history of the press is remembered and one of the ways he did it was by writing that history himself. If you haven’t seen it, please see me after the dinner and I can get you a free copy. If you’d like a free case of the book, don’t forget to ask about our $10 rebate program. We’ll even throw in a copy of Rainbow Bridge to sweeten the deal.

In thinking recently about the many contributions to the press that Sandy has made, I find myself meditating on a different title, though, A Tale of Two Cities.

No, nothing in the novel itself, nor because a typical email from the account of sgt3 can often seem Dickensian in length. Instead the two cities I’m thinking about are Generosity and Curiosity.

One of the most notable things about Sandy is how generous he is with his time and his experience; I know for me it made a significant difference. When I came to the press I knew next to nothing about how a book was produced. Sandy was one of the few members of the staff to take the time and offer explanations. Of course often those explanations came with supplemental readings. Just this last week he was kind enough to spend over a half hour with our interns offering extremely valuable career advice and referrals. Though frankly the only reason it was only a half hour was because neither of them asked him to elaborate on his years at Princeton. They might still be in his office if they had.

The other city, curiosity, is something Sandy seems to have in endless supply. It’s elemental, something we all should remember from kindergarden, but it's something that is missing from far too many workplaces, and that is the simple dictum, if you don’t know, ask. Well, that and its cousin, “I don’t know. Let’s find out.” I’ve seldom worked with someone quite as smart as Sandy, but “I don’t know” is not something he’s ever shied from saying. And he seldom only says I don’t know. If it’s about publishing he also has a pretty good idea where or how to find the answer. So not only did he create an environment where it was okay to say, you didn’t know, he also dabbled a bit in what our colleagues at the library refer to as information literacy. I for one, am very grateful.

In closing I want to say thank you. And my thanks aren’t limited to the multitude of things you’ve done for me specifically. For what you’ve done for the university press community, for what you’ve done for copyright reform, for what you’ve done for scholarship, and for what you’ve done for the promotion of why theses seemingly arcane topics are actually quite important, thank you. You will be very much missed at the end of University Drive.

Sandy ended the night by beating the drum to that different beat he often marched to. It should be noted that the band hired to perform brought an electronic drum kit. While, like books, the electronic version didn't come to him instantly, eventually he not only adapted, he excelled.

Eulogy

2009-06-10T07:09:00.000-07:00

Before I came here to the press I worked in a variety of bookstores that included both chains and indies. My career as a retail bookseller ended in 2000 when I decided to close the store I ran and had a stake in. That store was called Svoboda’s Scholarly Books after my friend and business partner Michael Svoboda, who founded the store back in the Eighties. I joined the staff just after the store expanded to about a 2,500 square foot store, carrying over 10,000 titles and over 25,000 books. That was in 1991. By 1995 things started heading downhill. I’d like to think that it wasn’t because that was about when I took over the day-to-day operation of the store, but instead it occurred because of what I’ve come to refer to as of the consolidation of the book industry and the book distribution system particularly. Not only did our little college town get it’s first Barnes and Noble big box about then, B&N also won the contract to takeover all the bookstores throughout the entire Penn State system. 1995 was also the year that a little Web site called Amazon.com shipped its first book. Bookselling hasn’t been the same since.

I reflect on what happened to our little store today because I read in Shelf Awareness that one of the best bookstores in the country has announced that they too must finally close. Karl Porht announced today that he’ll be closing Shaman Drum in Ann Arbor Michigan at the end of the month. I visited the store back in 2005 and discovered that, as a few of our Svoboda’s customers told us, that store was similar to ours. It was also then that I began to realize what a compliment that was. Not only did it specialize in university press titles as we did, it also created and enriched a community of writers and thinkers in ways only an environment filled with books and the people who loved them ever could. Now I’m not saying that those kinds of places don’t occur online—places like LibraryThing, or Shelfari, or even Amazon, certainly cultivate communities of readers and book people—but what they don’t have is a sense of place or any reflection of the needs of a local community.

In Ann Arbor, Shaman Drum was that place. It reflected and nourished a community of scholars and writers better than almost any other bookstore I’ve ever visited. Of course Ann Arbor is also the place where the Borders brothers first opened their first store back in the Seventies. That store evolved into Borders Group, the second largest American bookstore chain next to Barnes & Noble. For years, Shaman Drum survived in spite of the fact that they were just down the block from Borders' flagship store, a building more than 10 times their size. The key to how Shaman Drum did that was curation. Curate can mean two things; as a noun it refers to a pastor or Shepard, and as a verb it refers to the act of collecting. The word’s Latin root, curatus, is usually defined as one who is charged with the care of souls. Shaman Drum did all of that. In carrying the particular titles it did, in serving the community it the many ways it did, in hosting and encouraging the conversations and activism it did, it cared for its community. It did it by nourishing the special relationship between books and people and the place they lived. I am very sorry to see it go, but more specifically, I’m very sorry for the people in Ann Arbor for their loss. These are dark days in the book business, and on June 30th in Ann Arbor Michigan, in the middle of State Street, when the lights go out at that particular store, reading and writing in Ann Arbor will change forever.

More on Old Rufus

2009-06-08T12:11:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago I wrote about the annual spring cleaning bonfire at Penn State Press, at which a difficult author, “Old Rufus,” was burned in effigy. (That tradition seems to have died out before the Second World War, unfortunately.) I’ve since discovered that there was in fact an author named Rufus, and that stories of his tyranny lived on for decades. Rufus J. Turnbull (1857–1922) was a professor of civil engineering at Penn State, and the author of Sunshine on the Monongahela, and Other Travel Sketches, published by the Press in 1911. I’ve read it (we have a copy in our archives), and found it a great help when I wanted to get to sleep. That’s partly because there’s only so much I want to know about bridges, but partly because it has a genuine soothing charm. You’d never suspect that the writer of those sunny sketches was the same man the Press came to know and fear. I’m indebted for the following to an article about Turnbull in the 1957 Penn State Yearbook, La Vie, and to the archives of the Daily Collegian and the Centre Daily Times.

From delivery of manuscript to final publication and after, he sent the Press several telegrams a day, often contradictory, frequently abusive.

He accused his copyeditor of deliberately rewriting his book to make him look like a fool. He had modeled his prose, he said, on Jeremy Taylor and Joseph Addison, and anything else wasn’t English.

He had a long list of preferred spellings, some of which he’d apparently made up out of his own head. But of course only an illiterate would ever spell those words otherwise.

He marked his proofs with a complicated system of colored inks. And he demanded that he be sent second proofs, but instead of returning them, he returned instead a heavily revised copy of first proofs.

He chased the editor down College Avenue with a buggy whip. He claimed he was provoked; the editor had a different account.

He despised the cover design, and insisted that all copies of his book be withdrawn and re-bound with a new design. When the director of the Press explained that that would be impossible, and besides, Turnbull had already approved the cover before it was printed, Turnbull threatened to take a buggy whip to him, too.

He complained that the Press wasn’t doing its utmost to sell his book, and accused it (rather obscurely) of insulting the memory of his late wife.

There are many, many more stories about Turnbull, involving his students, his fellow professors, the university administration, his barber, a train conductor on the Bellefonte Central, and on and on. But that should give some idea of the man. I’m glad to say that they don’t seem to make authors like that anymore; all of ours now at Penn State Press are the most patient, sweet, and obliging souls you can imagine. But it’s fun to read sometimes--from a safe distance--about the monsters who used to walk the earth in professorial tweed.

I’ve suggested to Patrick, our incoming director, that we reprint Sunshine on the Monongahela as part of our Metalmark series. It could be a centennial edition! I don’t suppose Old Rufus would be pleased--nothing could ever please that man--but he should be gratified. As he burns in hell.

Some Belated Thank Yous

2009-05-18T07:41:00.000-07:00

Our vendors gave us some very creative gifts last holiday season, and I’m afraid we haven’t gotten around to thanking them all. We don’t want them to think we’re not grateful—not only for the gifts, of course, but for the pleasure of working with such capable, obliging, and professional folks. So let me try to make it up to them now by thanking them here.

XXX Composition, for the shower caps. Kathleen especially says thank you; now the leak in the roof above her cubicle doesn't bother her anymore.

The Old-Time Print Shoppe, for the famous writer trucker hats. I’m wearing my Samuel Beckett hat right now.

Rose-Moody Graphics and Design, for the gag gift assortment. We were all fighting over who would get the whoopee cushion, the exploding cigarettes, and the ice cube with a bug in it. I wanted the electric-shock stapler, but Sandy Thatcher pulled rank.

Bindex, for the giant flyswatter. How did you know?

Lionheart Printery, for the fridge magnets. Now I don’t lose track of those little scraps of paper that are always flying around—I just stick them on the fridge! Nice thinking, guys.

The Book Folks, for the bikini wax certificates. You bad boys.

Purebread Publishing, for the replica World War II hand grenade. We’re assuming it’s a replica, anyway.

And if there's anyone I haven't named, it's not because we're not appreciative. We've just been a little distracted.

Am I loving publishing today?

2009-05-14T14:02:00.000-07:00

Spring Cleaning

2009-05-11T08:32:00.000-07:00

I’ve recently been looking through a little volume called Forty Years on the Press Gang: My Life as a Galley Slave. It’s the memoirs of Bob Delancey, who started at the Penn State Press in the 1920s as a printer’s devil and retired as Assistant Chief Proofreader in 1967, when the book was printed in a small private edition for his colleagues at the Press. Bob seems to have been a delightful man, and he’s full of anecdotes, some of them hilarious, some hair-raising. His book is a reminder that the rapid changes causing us so much trepidation now are not a new phenomenon; Bob was a witness to one transformation after another, and the publishing world when he entered it seems almost unrecognizable now, though there are quite a few intriguing similarities.

I was particularly struck by his description of the annual Spring Cleanup Day, when all the waste paper and other combustibles that had accumulated over the past year would be piled in an enormous heap in a field behind the Press offices and burned at sundown, to the great delight of the assembled staff. That was the climax of a long day, which began with a thorough cleaning in which everyone took part. In the afternoon, when the place had been sorted and scoured and scrubbed, the staff would sit at the picnic tables outside for a chicken dinner. The homemade liquor--applejack and bathtub gin--would make its mysterious appearance (it was well known, but by custom never mentioned, that the printers reserved a corner of the shop for purposes of distillation). Then the banjos and ukuleles would come out, and the gentlemen of the Press would salute the ladies with “My Blue Heaven,” “Russian Lullabye,” and “For the Glory of Old State.” Then would come the election of the king of the festivities. Known as Old Rufus, for reasons lost to us now, he represented every tyrannical author who had ever blustered, wheedled, dithered, and dallied his way through the making of his book. While the bonfire was being ignited behind him, Old Rufus’s proxy would stand on a a chair shouting out “Where are my second proofs?” and “Double columns! Justified!” and “Stet! Stet everything!” while the crowd laughed and jeered. One young woman, Bob says, a copy editor, would taunt him with words that it was surprising she even knew, much less allowed herself to say; evidently she had been saving them up over the course of the year, just for the occasion. When the fire had reached full roar, two burly interns would pull Old Rufus from his chair and heave him--or actually, Bob is careful to reassure us, an effigy of him--into the flames. Then it was back to the picnic tables for some ice cream and canned peaches. It must have been quite a day.

We still have an annual spring cleaning--there’s one coming up soon, in fact--but it’s grown somewhat tamer since Bob's time. We’re going to have sandwiches brought in, and then we might go bowling. There are no plans that I know of to burn an effigy, but maybe we can go out back and take a cigarette lighter to some F & G’s.

Kindle 2

2009-04-23T13:05:00.000-07:00

So now that the #amazonfail brouhaha has died down a bit, let’s turn our attention to another of Amazon’s recent news grabbing efforts—the Kindle 2.

My first impression of this device was it should have been the Kindle 1, because in comparing the two it becomes so much more obvious where the shortcomings of the first Kindle were. The Kindle 2 is a device as Apple might have designed it—sleek, slim, and pretty. Besides the cleaner design, the other major new feature of the device is the text-to-speech function. Now, the Kindle will read to you. Here’s what it sounds like reading the series statement for our regional series.

Here’s the text it’s reading:

A Keystone Book
A Keystone Book is so designated to distinguish it from the typical scholarly monograph that a university press publishes. It is a book intended to serve the citizens of Pennsylvania by educating them and others, in an entertaining way, about aspects of the history, culture, society, and environment of the state as part of the Middle Atlantic region.

While I might not enjoy such a feature as a matter of practice, it’s nice to have, and very useful for folks with vision problems. I can’t say I agree with many of the critics of the feature in the publishing world who feel that the feature is an infringement of derivative work rights. What the Kindle 2 offers doesn’t seem to me to be in the same ball park as what a good book on tape (or mp3) offers. And the ability to provide it to those who need it should be at least an option. Amazon has decided not to fight publishers over this, however, and will turn the feature off for publishers requesting it. It’s interesting though that Amazon seems to be only turning off the feature on files where the publisher has specifically asked them. They haven’t asked us if we want the feature and on our books the feature is still available.

But the really eye-opening Kindle news concerns the Kindle platform, not the device. What really changed my mind about the potential for the platform came from the agreement between Amazon and Apple to put Kindle content on the iPhone. That changes everything. Suddenly the platform isn’t tethered to a single proprietary device. Though for clarity’s sake it should be noted that it’s now tethered to two proprietary devices. But the key point is it’s no longer a monopoly. It shows that Amazon realizes that for the platform to compete with whatever Google is planning post-settlement, it needs more customers than just those with a Kindle reader. And their willingness to put that content on iPhones seems to signify their enlightenment. I imagine that once there is more competition for platforms (Google Books Post-settlement), the Kindle platform is very likely to open up even further.

So with that in mind, I began to reassess how we were selling Kindle editions, particularly how we were pricing them. I think we’re charging too much.

Here's my rationale-

1.) It's not the same customer. For quite some time publishers have been pricing their ebooks at or near the price of the physical book. The rationale was that the ebook cannibalized the market for the physical book so the cost still needed to be recovered. I don't think it is the same customer, at least not for the kind of book we publish. Libraries and scholars buy most of our physical books, and it seems highly unlikely to me that they will buy ebooks instead of physical books solely because of the price. Instead I think our content will find a wider audience of general readers who want to read deep but only if the price isn't a barrier. I think this fear from publishers may be one of the things artificially suppressing the ebook market and I think the longer that occurs, the more likely we become the next music label. i.e. out of business with angry, law-breaking customers. It should also be noted that to use the Kindle file, you have to buy the Kindle or an iPhone first. I'm guessing there aren't too many customers out there thinking, I should buy a $360 device to save $50 on that Penn State Press monograph.

2.) Costs are lower, so too should be the price. The customer knows it and so do we. We happen to have a better understanding of where those costs are, but if you buy the first premise, (it's not the same customer) it shouldn't matter. These Kindle customers would represent a market expansion so let's meet them on their playing field. That playing field was built by iTunes and the iPod.

3.) It doesn't do what your physical book does. You can't lend it or resell it, it can't be shared on two different Kindles in the same house unless they share their credit card at Amazon. Hell, on the iPhone you can't even search the text. The death of the backlist, which is really what's hurting publishing the most right now, isn't the result of the digitization of books or piracy, it's a result of the centralizing of the used book market on the Internet. The Kindle's distribution model has the potential to eliminate a lot of used copies competing for a publisher's copy of the book brand new. Shouldn't we encourage this?

4.) My biggest concern about the future of the publishing industry is pirates. The easiest way to compete with free is to offer a reasonable alternative. A $4.99 Kindle edition seems to be analogous to the .99 ACC file iTunes first sold. As Steve Jobs once pointed out, the .99 was worth it just for the time you saved finding the file to pirate and then adding the metadata yourself. I think the same could be said of books. It takes a lot longer to digitize a book than it does to rip a CD. If I can de-incentivize that with a reasonable price point, why not. Maybe the best way to avoid piracy is competing with it.

The long tail rule that *everyone* forgets is that for the long tail to be profitable, it needs to be priced according to the customer's expectations. If you don't do that, there's no point in making the content available.

So I have since lowered all of our Kindle editions (about 100 books, though some haven’t been processed by Amazon yet) to $4.99. Amazon has since discounted that by a buck so now, if you have a Kindle or an iPhone, you can have one of our Kindle editions for $3.99. If you don’t have a Kindle, use this link to order one and help to support your favorite university press. And when you receive it, use it to read this fantastic essay by Steven Johnson on how the Kindle is likely to change not only where we read and what we read, but also how we will write and publish.

And yes, that is the same Steven Johnson whose recent book a reporter (and maybe President Clinton) confused with our book on Joseph Priestley.

Fear Your Empty Soul

2009-04-17T06:58:00.001-07:00

Powell's Responds to Amazon's Mistep

2009-04-15T04:24:00.000-07:00

#powellswin deal!
At Powell's, all books are created equal. We hold this truth to be self-evident. Whether any given title is deserving of a wide readership, we leave that decision to you, our customers.

In the spirit of such freedoms that perhaps we too often take for granted, today we're offering friends a special, winning deal.

Just enter the code "#powellswin" by 11:59 pm (Pacific) on Thursday, April 16, 2009, and you'll save 20% on your order of $20 or more.

Coupon valid online only, not in our stores. This discount cannot be combined with other offers. Offer not valid on eGift Cards. Limit one coupon per customer.

Let the battle of the hashtags begin!

Amazon’s Queer Problem

2009-04-14T12:19:00.000-07:00

So it’s really sad that on the morning we hear the news of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's passing, we also hear about the fallout stemming from Amazon’s ~~policy change~~, glitch causing the de-ranking of over 50,000 titles with gay and lesbian content. Now on Amazon, a search for the term “Homosexuality" results in A Parent's Guide to Preventing Homosexuality as the first listing and books with positive gay and lesbian themes relegated to link to a separate Homosexuality subject page.

The initial reports from bloggers who noticed this change noted the receipt of emails coming from Amazon’s customer service department asserting the de-ranking of the titles was a result of a change in policy about gay and lesbian content and its perceived "adult" nature. But they’ve since distanced themselves from that explanation and have been claiming instead that it's the result of a mysterious technological glitch of French origins.

Either way, it’s really disappointing. If they have the ability to make queer books invisible with a single mistake, they have designed their site poorly and need a better way to address such potential problems more quickly. If they decided to change policy, they seriously misread their customers and should be ashamed of their bigotry.

All that said, I kind of feel sorry for them. They’ve gotten themselves into one of the stickiest dilemmas in bookselling. How you merchandize LGBT titles is a very controversial matter. Carrying a queer section at all can mean some customers won’t shop in your store. What you might stock in such a section is also likely to be controversial on both sides of the debate. The final problem comes in who you choose to sell those books to.

Back when I had a bookstore, we had a pretty well stocked Gay and Lesbian/Gender Studies section, partly because we felt we had a responsibility to do so as there wasn't another store in a 100 mile radius that was willing to carry anything remotely queer. But my biggest customer service problem from that section came one day when a family was in the store and one of the kids, a young boy about nine years of age, started reading the comic book “Dykes to Watch Out For”. If you’re not familiar with the comic it’s generally about the lives and loves of a fictional group of lesbians, some of whom also ran an independent bookstore. The comic is not only funny and smart, it is also very politically astute. The author is Alison Bechdel, who actually grew up in this area and wrote an award winning autobiographic graphic novel about the experience. When ever she came home for the holidays she'd come in and sign all her books for us.

So this problem I had with her comic book, well it kind of went like this.

The kid is reading the book while his parents are browsing. They’re in the store for about an hour. The parents are beginning to wrap things up and announce to the kid that it’s time to go.

“Can I get a book?”

“Sure, what do you want?”

He shows them the book, they flip through it, give it a cursory glance. “Okay, here’s some money, take it to the register and pay for it.” I watched all of this. So when this nine-year-old boy came to my register with money for a book, I didn’t feel I even had a dilemma to consider. I knew there was some brief nudity in the book, and even a few lesbian sexual situations, but nothing graphic or even near what I think your average local citizen would consider pornography. And I just watched his father look at the book and give him money to pay for it. But I think I instinctively knew I would be sorry for selling the kid the book.

About an hour later the father storms back into the store and starts yelling at me at the top of his lungs. How dare I sell his kid this book. Did I know it had lesbians in it? Did I know it had nudity?

Where does the bookseller’s responsibility to the freedom of ideas end and his need to keep his customers happy begin, and what do we do when those are competing interests? This situation wasn’t exactly like what is going on over at Amazon, but it does make me sympathetic to their dilemma. What did I do? I refunded the money for the book and then did nothing else. I didn’t hide the books, move the books, or place the books in a brown paper wrapper. I pointed out to the customer that his son did show him the book and that he gave his son money to buy it. I also pointed out that it wasn’t my job to censer his kid and if he gave his kid money to buy a book, I wasn’t going to second-guess him. He loudly noted again that the book had drawings of nude women in it and his son was only nine. I pointed to the notebooks of Michelangelo to the right of the counter and noted that so did that book, but again I wouldn’t stop his kid from buying it. It should be noted here that Alison Bechdel is much better at capturing the female form than Michelangelo, and for some reason Michelangelo’s significantly better at the male figure, but I did not primarily consider their draftsmanship preferences when deciding to stock their books.

So I guess I hope Amazon does the right thing here. To me that would be to replace all sales rankings and to include pro-queer titles in their natural search results. I’m willing to chalk this up to a communications mistake, but I hope Amazon learns from it and corrects their error or errors. This bookselling stuff isn’t all that cut and dry. “The Right Thing” isn’t always obvious. But when you’ve made a mistake, fix it, and try to be honest about it. We really don’t want to hate you, Amazon. We can’t afford it. So fix this so we can all move on. And apologize one more time, specifically. Put Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick back on the shelf where she belongs; don’t hide her in a closet in the back of the store just because someone complained about the preferences of the people in her books.

This needs to be addressed immediately. We have business to do and books to buy. And if they can't or don't fix it, we all may find their relevance on the bookselling landscape quickly disappearing, not unlike those queer books did off of their search result pages.

6 Publishing Revolutions from Our Neighbors Up North

2009-04-06T08:56:00.000-07:00

Michael Tamblyn, the CEO of BookNet Canada, offers some brilliant analysis on what's wrong with publishing, and why the environment is ripe for revolution. He's right about almost everything and his initiatives are spot on. Miss this at your own risk.

Of Love and Acquisitions

2009-04-06T07:45:00.000-07:00

Rachel Toor's column in this week's Chronicle of Higher Education, "Interpreting Editorese" is worth a look. She knows from whence she speaks.

Sharing 2

2009-04-03T11:45:00.000-07:00

Another instance where the politics and practicality of sharing came up recently was with bread. I make bread. Usually a couple of loaves a week. And as I’ve watched the world sink into Recession Redux, I’ve decided to try and do something about it on my own terms. I would, I naively, smugly, and self-righteous concluded, bake our way out of this crisis. I doubled my weekly bread recipe with the intention of taking the two extra loaves to the local food pantry, and they would hopefully share it with someone less fortunate. But they don’t want my bread. Yes, they need food, and the need right now is great, but for public heath reasons they won’t take anything homemade. This is true of the local soup kitchens too as they’ve all just been reprimanded by the local health code inspectors and warned against serving anything they haven’t prepared themselves. I’ve now found myself in the rather odd position of choosing between leaving loaves of bread on the porches of strangers, or to simply abandon my plan to knead our way through this crisis. I considered the baking bandit scenario, leaving bread on unsuspecting porches, but would anyone really eat a loaf that mysteriously just appeared out by the front door? And why do I have to become a carbohydrate commando in the first place? Why can’t I just share on my own terms?

On the complete opposite side of the sharing issue is the sharing that occurs involuntarily—Those who take without asking. Recently for the press, this has manifested itself in pirated versions of our books showing up on p2ps and document-sharing Web sites.

I was sitting at an editorial committee meeting the other day when one of the board members noted that he found one of the books he published with a university press on a Web site called Scribd. Scribd is sort of a YouTube for books. I had my laptop with me at the meeting, and as not every manuscript being debated at an ECM can keep my attention, and as few if any of these debates require the opinion of the marketing and sales guy, I decided to check it out. Sure enough, there was his book. Now I was already aware of this site, and had already been monitoring it for our content, but before that day, I hadn’t found any. Normally what I would do would be to look for the title or author of the handful or so of our bestselling books that are frequently used as undergraduate texts. My reasoning being those would be the titles that were most likely to be pirated first, as there was a strong economic incentive to do so. And in trying just titles and authors, again I came up empty, but on a hunch, I decided to use just one very unique word from one of our titles and… oh crap… there it was. The book is the sole English translation of an essential Tibetan Buddhist text. The title is The Holy Teaching of Vimalakirti (can you spot the unique word?) and the translation is by Robert Thurman, whom I’ve written about before. The only reason I didn’t find it earlier is because the posting contained inaccurate metadata. This book is used in almost every intro to Tibetan Buddhism class taught in the U.S. today, but it, along with most of our better-selling books used in college courses, had recently been sliding in sales. We’ve been attributing most of those drops in sales to the proliferation of e-reserves (typically not compensated). And while in principle I’d like to encourage the use of our content for educational purposes, I don’t think our parent institution cares that our drop in revenues is actually a direct result of the proliferation of content for uncompensated educational use. Especially in times like these, what they really care about is whether or not we’re a sustainable enterprise. This unauthorized sharing has made that more difficult. Should the dissemination of scholarship be an enterprise or a service? I think that’s where the beliefs of the administration differ from the beliefs of most of the faculty and the students. This new economy is really going to put that question to the test.

And I can’t even be mad at the guy who scanned, OCRed, and posted this text, though I doubt he realizes the repercussions of his act. He’s posted other texts on Eastern philosophy and I’m sure he sees his action as a way of disseminating these ideas. But clearly he’s not thinking this through. On this particular text, he’s not only stealing work from a Buddhist monk, Dr. Thurman, the author, he’s actually stealing the royalty from The Institute for Advanced Studies of World Religions, whom Dr. Thurman choose to donate the royalties to. And he’s also stealing from us. The repercussions from losing that revenue will have consequences on the work of both institutions. We’ll publish less scholarship, and the Institute will have fewer resources to support the work of their scholars. Here’s a description of what they do: “The IASWR provides research facilities and information services to individuals, institutions, and organizations interested or engaged in the academic study and social role of world religions. Undertakes the collection, organization, and preservation of religious materials. Administers research fellowships in selected Asian and comparative religious studies. Facilitates contacts among persons and organizations engaged in those fields; fosters translation and publication of Asian religious texts and studies.” I’m guessing the person sharing this text on Scribd would actually support this.

This reminds me of what Clay Shirky identified in this piece about the death of newspapers—What do we do when our fans love us to death, quite literally. When they share you into bankruptcy.

So as schools consider the benefits of institutional repositories and open access, I hope they’ll also think about their presses. I hope they’ll prepare for the possible transformation of university press publishing from being an enterprise to being a service. In many ways, I think they’re beginning to. The fact that we’re no longer a branch of our university’s research arm and are now a branch of the library shows they are thinking about it. Of course we publish research, but we’re about dissemination, we’re about sharing. We are skilled in providing things like accurate metadata and readable texts. And at some point it stops becoming efficient to measure relevant scholarship in the number of sales, and it begins to make more sense to measure it in the number of links. There is value to be added to those IRs that can make the content in them more accessible and understandable. I hope administrators think about that value as they consider policy changes, and I hope that they remember they already have people skilled in providing it. People who would be happy to share that expertise and who would prefer that their enterprise and their livelihoods weren’t threatened by their fans loving them to death. There's no need to sue those fans who share without our permission. It seems our fans have the same impulse we do. Perhaps rather than suing them, we could break bread with them instead.

American Bookselling, March 2009

2009-03-28T19:22:00.000-07:00

Kathleen and I went on the road on Friday and visited three bookstores—D. Dashem in Lock Haven, Otto's Bookstore in Williamsport, and Borders Books at the Lycoming Mall, just outside of Williamsport. These three stores represent the market inclusive of indies in central PA. There is a used store in State College that carries a few new books, but other than that, State College is pretty much a chain town. B&N owns the campus store, the store at the stadium, and anywhere else on any PSU campus that you can get books. They also have a big box out at our mall. Downtown we do have a textbook store owned by alum, but their stock of non-texts is pretty limited to sports related topics. There's also a Nebraska store that sells texts, but no real indie bookstore in town that sells more in books than coffee, texts, sweatshirts, or used. To observe the indie market we needed to head north.

Our visit to Dashem was really to establish the account. We didn't ask them if we could talk to them on the record so all we have from that visit is some pans of their shelves that they were gracious enough to allow. Once we got to Otto's in Wiliamsport we sat down with Betsy Rider, the public face of Otto's and a very eloquent voice in American bookselling. About 30 minutes of this video is Betsy discussing bookselling today.

We end with some footage we took at what was once a serious threat to Otto's, a Borders Books in the area that was only a few years old, but which now is a significantly lesser concern.

So here, is our field trip into the heart of American bookselling.

American Bookselling, March 2009 from Penn State Press on Vimeo.

Additional links:

Otto's Bookstore in Williamsport

Paz seminar on opening a bookstore

The indie we were going to use to send Bill Clinton our books on Joseph Priestley is closing

New York Times on the canceled Powell's expansion

Borders' current problems as covered by the Detroit Free Press

Jeff Bezos goes to work at a distribution center

Room for Debate, and an endorsement disappears into thin air

2009-03-20T06:02:00.000-07:00

Two of our authors were asked by the New York Times to contribute to their Room for Debate blog on the topic of the influence of money in N.C.A.A. sports, particularly basketball. link

Allen Sack, author of Counterfeit Amateurs: An Athlete's Journey Through the Sixties to the Age of Academic Capitalism and William C. Dowling, author of Confessions of a Spoilsport: My Life and Hard Times Fighting Sports Corruption at an Old Eastern University both weigh in on a very lively debate.

In other news, remember that story about Clinton endorsing our book...

"Last week at the Association of American Publishers annual meeting (Shelf Awareness, March 12, 2009), former president Bill Clinton spoke passionately about several books he had recently read. For one of these books, however, the passing (albeit glowing) reference to its title was not only brief but also misleading. In this reporter's attempt to identify "a biography of Joseph Priestley," which Clinton rather puzzlingly had called Into Thin Air, the most likely title seemed to be Robert Schofield's The Enlightenment of Joseph Priestley, published by Pennsylvania State University Press. Wrong. As author Steven Johnson gently pointed out in an e-mail, word had come to him that Clinton has been touting his book The Invention of Air (published by Riverhead Books) on the speech circuit--a happy situation to be sure--but under the title of the ill-fated Everest expedition chronicled by Jon Krakauer. Thanks to Johnson not only for pointing out the error but also for graciously praising Schofield's work. Now can we get someone to correct Bill?"--Cynthia Clark

From Wednesday's Shelf Awareness.

sigh...

That March basketball thing.

2009-03-18T13:33:00.000-07:00

Yes, it’s that time of year when countless hours are spent hand-wringing, writing, erasing, re-writing, posturing, formulating, with deadline looming. Nah, I’m not talking about completing your yearly self-reflective-what have I accomplished this year-review, although it might be as bad. I’m referring to the Big Dance, March Madness, field of 64, Sweet Sixteen, Final Four, NCAA tourney brackets, baby! C’mon, admit it, you’re guilty. (We, of course, here at PSP don’t participate in such nonsense…at least not for money. We bet solely for bragging rights.)

Maybe university presses could have a bracket for their books, one for each new season. No blood, no foul.

And, by the way, our own Nittany Lions were snubbed.

Sharing, part 1

2009-03-12T07:20:00.000-07:00

My boss just friended me on facebook. I actually like my boss and I’d like to think we’re friends, but how much do I really want to share with him? For example, my wife taunts me. And it’s okay, it's how we relate. She can be pretty witty and I’m a sucker for a clever remark, so as long as it’s funny, I really don’t mind. But it had better be funny. And I too have been known for the occasional acerbic reply, so there is no meanness intended. It’s more like verbal fencing. Sort of a 21st century Nick and Nora Charles, though in no way thin. But until recently the fact that we communicate with each other this way has been relatively unknown, or perhaps more accurately, known only by relatives and a few close friends. That is, until facebook. Well, that and this blog post. I've been thinking a lot about sharing recently and I think my next few posts will explore that topic. What does sharing mean for a publisher and/or a business? What does it mean to people and their relationships?

I’ve had a facebook account for years, though I’ve only begun to really use it this year. In the past, the account was there to check on intern applicants, and because we’ve occasionally bought ads on facebook, I’d use it to check on those. But recently quite a few folks have been pestering me to become more active, so I have. We’ve even started both a page and a group for the press. And as we all become friends and fans of each other, it occurs to me that in many ways, a social network like this only serves to further erode the now flimsy division between our public selves and our private selves. And even our work lives and our home lives. Now, more folks than I initially realized know that my wife taunts me. And I’m not sure how I feel about that. Most of them don’t know her and aren’t familiar with the nature of our relationship. We might just seem like jerks. Maybe we should use those smiley things.

I’m not panicked about it, but it wasn’t intended. And when one shares information like that, it can be tricky to know really whom you’re sharing it with and whom you might be sharing it with in the future. They’re not all “friends”, some are colleagues, some are acquaintances, and some are people I just really admire, though I may not necessarily know them all that well. And now some are my boss. But I do wonder if I want all those people to know about how my wife and I communicate. And are my options limited to either opt in or opt out? How do I share with more control over whom I’m sharing with? This question has been popping up with quite a bit of frequency of late. How do I share on my terms? When we socially network online what are we doing to our social relationships off line? Seems I'm not the only one who's noticed this. The Times had a pretty interesting article about it over the weekend. Of course if you were my friend, I already shared this with you on facebook.

A couple of other thoughts about sharing before I wrap this up. I added a new feature to the Web site. On every page you'll find a little button that says share this page. It's a neat little Web service called AddThis that allows folks to easily link to that page on places like facebook or digg, or add it to their bookmarks, or email it to someone. I figure it will help folks reference our books more easily.

The last thing I wanted to share was a bit of news from the Association of American Publishers conference that took place yesterday in New York. The two invited speakers both said something I'd like to share. David Drummand, Senior VP for corporate development and chief legal officer at Google was one of those speakers and according to Publishers Lunch, he made some revealing statements about Google's plans to sell books, and their rather disappointing take on fair use litigation.

In his Q&A Drummond evaded any particularly meaningful revelations. He did admit that "from the Google perspective, we had to resist the temptation to want to push a legal point to its conclusion" and they were "probably a little bit ambivalent about not going for the win" in the cases brought by publishers and the Authors Guild. "It would have been nice to see fair use vindicated in court this way," he said, but in the end it was "much more important...to do something important for the world."

Here I've been assuming that the clarification of fair use would be important to the world but I guess he means important in Google's world. There it might just be more important to clarify if you've opted in or out to your cut of licensing money. The story goes on to report...

Among the interesting topics on which Drummond did not have particularly illuminating answers were the prospects for reaching agreements with publishers in other parts of the world on orphan works and the estimated size of the market for the electronic collection of books Google will market after the settlement is approved ("I think it should be substantial"). Queried about whether Google will be a direct competitor with Amazon within three years for the sale of book content online, Drummond maintained that "a lot of this will be driven by publishers in terms of what you would like us to do." Direct selling isn't foremost in their plans, as Drummond noted, "I don't know that we want to open this platform and sell.... Entering it just for the sake of entering is not really our plan," particularly since "linking to Amazon is a perfectly good user experience."

Is this true? Google is notorious for not sharing. The fact that he remained cautious about almost every other topic, but then said direct selling isn't in their plans leaves me wondering. Is there a deal with Amazon already in the works?

One other story I want to share, and I'd like to share it from the mountain tops if I could. Bill Clinton reads Penn State Press books. He was the other speaker at the AAP conference and he said so. From this morning's Shelf Awareness...

"He predicted that because so many 21st century problems need to be addressed--various forms of inequality, political instability, global warming--there will be an increased demand for "how" books. That is, books that detail how to get things done and how to turn good intentions into positive actions to improve people's lives. "Facts are not enough," Clinton continued. People need ideas from books and from reading history. He cited The Enlightenment of Joseph Priestley by Robert Schofield, a biography of the man who discovered oxygen and the symbiosis between plants and animals, as a work that might provide inspiration toward solving contemporary problems involving carbon dioxide. ...Clinton portrayed himself as deeply involved with books. He claimed that he has been stuck with organizing the many books owned by his family in Washington, D.C., Chappaqua, N.Y., and even in Chelsea's apartment. He added that he's trying single-handedly to sustain Second Story Book Shop in Chappaqua."--Cynthia Clark

Cool. He could have endorsed the current New York Times bestselling biography of the same scientist titled The Invention of Air by Stephen Johnson, but he chose our diligent work of scholarship instead. We're sending him the second volume of that splendid biography, but as Heather Smith, our publicity manager noted, he'd probably never get it if we sent it to his office so we'll be sending it to Second Story Book Shop and ask them to give it to him. Share the favor, as it were.

Comparing the Kindle to the Sony Reader

2009-02-26T10:25:00.000-08:00

Comparing the Sony Reader to the Kindle from Penn State Press on Vimeo.

Is Jeff laughing with us or for us?

2009-02-24T07:23:00.000-08:00

Jeff Bezos appeared on The Daily Show last night to launch the Kindle 2. I'm guessing it didn't go how he had hoped.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Jeff Bezos

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things With Demetri Martin

Funny Political News
Joke of the Day

Highlights from the show:

Jon—"Free shipping for only $79 a year? That's not free. That's $79 a year."

Jeff—"You can read with one hand, which is very handy."

Jon—"Wait, why is it so much?...Give me $200 and I'll tape some *!#$ing paper to it."

By the way, in the interview Bezos claims publishers can put books on it without DRM. We have several dozen books in the program and I'm pretty sure we weren't given that option, ever. In fact, the whole distribution model of the device requires the file stay with the Kindle and its use is restricted to that user's account. The files can't be moved to another device, or lent out without also lending the user's Kindle. I'm not sure how, even if we had the option, there could ever be a Kindle book that didn't have DRM. And DRM free Kindle books would actually hurt Bezos as, if users could share their files, they wouldn't need to buy them from Amazon

Space Academy Update

2009-02-23T12:01:00.000-08:00

This is a long post, so you might not notice what EHG posted just below. Please check it out.

Pirated versions of Penn State books, along with books from other university presses, have been showing up online lately. It’s tempting to be flattered, as if we have fans out there who are so desperate to read the latest from the Press that they’ll go to any means to get it, like the Bruce Springsteen fans who downloaded his recent album a few days before it was officially released. Maybe we're ungrateful, but we’re not flattered. Bruce’s fans--the true ones--went out and bought the album when it came out. It’s doubtful that the illegal downloaders of our books will be so scrupulous.

In the meantime, I’ve been contemplating a little pirating of my own--legally, of course. Some of the first books I ever read, the Tom Corbett, Space Cadet novels (not to be confused with Tom Corbett, Attorney General*), are in the public domain, the publisher, Grosset and Dunlap, having neglected to renew the copyright. So if I wanted to put out Stand by for Mars!, The Revolt on Venus, and the rest under my own imprint--Mojo Editions--Grosset and Dunlap would just have to ball up their little hands and cry, because there’s nothing they could do about it. That’s not really what I have in mind, though. Using the texts as posted by the Gutenberg Project, which has most of the books online, I’ve been rewriting Stand by for Mars! as told by Roger Manning, the sarcastic bad boy of Tom’s three-man crew of cadets. Roger, not curly-headed Tom, is the true hero. The constraints of juvenile fiction held him back before; he could be petulant, unscrupulous, bullying, and lecherous, but in the end he always had to come around to the ideals of teamwork and fair play. Now it’s time for him to step forward and speak for himself. I’ll give you a little sample below.

It’s been many, many years since I stopped rereading the novels every six months or so (that was my rule in those days; any less and I’d remember too much). Since then, of course, I’ve forgotten nearly everything except a few odd details—a game of soccer with a mercury-filled ball; a desperate march through a scorching desert (on Mars!); the unfamiliar word “beacon,” which sounded like “bacon.” Lately, from the fan sites, I’ve learned that Tom and the boys were a minor phenomenon in the early fifties, with a TV show, a radio show, and a comic strip. That the books, published under a pseudonym, may have been written by Richard Jessup, who later hit the big time with The Cincinnati Kid (made into a movie with Steve McQueen). That the stylish illustrations (included on Gutenberg) are by Louis Glanzman, a very prominent commercial artist from the forties to the nineties; he’s still alive, in fact, and has a Web site: . And in my current rereading I’ve been noticing a lot that escaped me when I was eight, such as the intriguing lesson in political philosophy in The Revolt on Venus. A group of planters on Venus (like Africa, without natives but with dinosaurs) is plotting to secede from the Solar Alliance. Major Lou Connel of the Solar Guard explains to the boys why that’s bad: “If Venus did break away, Mercury might follow, then Mars--the whole system would fall apart--break up into independent states. And when that happens, there’s trouble--customs barriers, jealousies, individual armies and navies, and then, ultimately, a space war.” The reasoning is still a little opaque to me, but then I never took poli sci at the Space Academy.

Now here’s the sample I promised. It’s arrival day for the new cadets.

“Stand to, you rocket wash!”

A harsh, bull-throated roar thundered over the platform of the Space Academy monorail station, and suddenly the chatter and laughing of more than a hundred boys was stilled. They tumbled out of the cars and froze to attention. A squat, heavily built man, his fists jammed into his hips, stared down from the main exit ramp, his squinty eyes flicking over the silent clusters of sweating adolescents. Then he slowly sauntered down the ramp with what he doubtless thought of as a catlike tread, his thick legs squeezed into the scarlet tights of the enlisted Solar Guard.

“Form up! Column of fours!”

The boys milled around like lost ants; none of them had a clue what a column of fours was. I made myself comfortable against a pillar while they sorted it out.

“Four rows, you pitiful Earthworms!”

When they’d made something that looked like rows, I took a place in the last one and watched him go through his routine. He was good--not quite up to what you’ve seen a hundred times in the low-budget stereos, but good enough for this crowd. First he held his pose, clenching his teeth to bring out the seams in his face. This is what a real spaceman looks like. This is what a lifetime of solar radiation does to your good looks. Or two hours a day under a sun lamp. Then he got a humorous little glint in his eyes at the sight of their idea of a military pose. They were a mixed bunch--the boys from the Martian deserts in their flowing robes that showed off their hairless legs (they mature slowly on Mars); the boys from the Venusian jungles in their lederhosen and knee socks, mighty dinosaur hunters who’d never been any closer to a T. rex than the Venusport Zoo; the city boys from Earth in their stylish plaid jackets and white buck shoes. All different, but all the same. They all wanted to be little space cadets, and then great big officers in the Solar Guard.

If that makes you want to read the original, you can find it, as I said, at Project Gutenberg: And if it makes you want to read the rest of mine, I’m taking subscriptions.

__________________________________

* Our attorney general in Pennsylvania is indeed Tom Corbett. I’ll leave the political comment to Tony, so I won’t say whether Attorney General Corbett qualifies as a space cadet.

Off to LA for the CAA

2009-02-22T08:30:00.001-08:00

The Posties

2009-02-16T10:15:00.000-08:00

It's time for The Posties Awards (known affectionately as the Post Toasties to some of us), which honor the Best Penn State Press Sticky Notes of the Past Year

In the category of Best Sticky Note from an Author, the award goes to.....drum roll...et voilà (complete with accent grave):

In the category of Best Sticky Note from an Editorial Assistant, the award goes to....Found Some Strange Things!

Further nominations accepted.

Jeff Bezos and his new Kindle, Kindle 2

2009-02-11T09:50:00.000-08:00

Now with even more Kindle!

From our reader mail bag...

2009-02-03T05:48:00.000-08:00

Just got this sent to the Web site...

"Hi,

I enjoyed reading Set Up Running.

There are two errors I found:

1) p. 193 The grade crossing whistle is 2 longs, a short and a long.

2) p. 367 What is defined as an "angle cock" is really a "bleed valve". Angle cocks are valves at each end of a railroad car to flow, or stop, the train brake air. A bleed valve is used to release the air, and hence the air brakes, on a car (not coupled to a locomotive) when it has been sitting but the air pressure is still charged. If the cars is moved with the air brakes charged, the wheels will usually slide because the air brakes are on. This can cause flat spots on wheels. Bleed valves are found on the sides of a car.

This does not detract from a great book.
Thanks,
(Name withheld)"

The only thing I've found even close to the fanaticism of folks obsessed with choo-choos is the fanaticism of people obsessed with the Civil War. Both groups also buy a bunch of books to feed their obsession, fortunately for me, though I'm guessing their families aren't as thrilled about it.

On a side note, you would not believe some of the pictures that turned up when searching Google for an image to illustrate this post.

Better Times Ahead?

2009-02-02T11:20:00.000-08:00

Sometimes, when I see words or phrases that are a little too small or far away for me to make out distinctly, I find myself reading things that may or may not actually be there. I'm sure this happens to everyone occasionally, and explains why even experienced proofreaders don't always notice that public really ought to have an l in it, or that there's nothing casual about a causal connection. But I've seen some strange things over the years. Once I saw an ad on a bus shelter for a TV show called Hanged by a Committee. Closer up, it turned out to be Touched by an Angel. At that point in my life, the first seemed much more plausible. Yesterday, though, I saw a sign advertising "Bunnies for Sale." It was really only a "Business for Sale," another victim of our times. But if even I can see bunnies, I can't be the only one. Maybe we'll all be seeing bunnies soon; maybe the future will be bunnies for everyone. It can happen. Just take off your glasses.

Tough times in the Book World

2009-01-29T09:32:00.000-08:00

The New York Times today ~~gloats~~ reports that The Washington Post's Book World will cease publication on February 15th. This will leave The New York Times with the only separate book review section published by an American newspaper. link

From the article:

"As it happens, Book World never garnered much advertising from publishers, who generally spend very little on newspaper ads. Publishers now focus their marketing dollars on cooperative agreements with chain bookstores, which guarantee that certain books will receive prominent display at the front of stores."

So, yeah, if you didn't know that the publishers of those books at the front of your favorite chain paid to be there, you do now. And the "It's your own fault" tone of the NYT article is somewhat justified. We in publishing did create an environment that rewarded frivolous marketing spending for merchandising over the critical evaluation of the quality of our work, as had been previously determined through the review process. So, I suppose it's not a surprise that those chained and co-oped roosters finally came home.

Still, it's a very sad day indeed. One of the best reviews we every received for one of our books came from none other than Jonathan Yardley, the Pulitzer Prize winning critic for The Post. Of our book titled Down the Susquehanna to the Chesapeake he said, "This is university press publishing at its absolute best". I was so proud that I had it put on a t-shirt for every member of the staff.

In other news, I've been meaning to post on the awesome piece Robert Darnton wrote for the New York Review of Books on public policy implications of the Google Book Settlement. If you have not read it you absolutely must. link

Last night my mom forwarded me a powerpoint slide show featuring some of the FSA/OWI photographs from the last depression. That reminded me that a few years back we published a book on the Pennsylvania photographs from that historic project and I went and found my copy and spent the evening looking at them again. We've got a small gallery of some of the photos on our site. That image to the left is one of them. The caption reads "Sick child. Aliquippa, January 1941. John Vachon." link

And finally, in times like these we really count on our friends to get us through. And to hedge our bets we've created a Facebook page and group for the press. If you use Facebook, visit our page and become a friend. Or if you prefer, become a fan of our group. I'm not sure what we'll do with these networks, but I'm hard pressed to see any harm in collecting friends and fans.

My John Updike Story

2009-01-27T22:43:00.000-08:00

A few years ago, when I was at Ohio University Press, I was the copyeditor for a little book called Updike in Cincinnati. It was a transcription of everything that Updike said in front of a microphone during his two days at the Cincinnati Short Story Festival in 2001—the stories he read, what he said about them, panel discussions about his work, his answers to questions from the audience. A detailed record, in other words, of a successful writer in his professional capacity (aside from that business of putting words on paper, of course). To make the picture as complete as possible, a lengthy introduction told what was on the front page of the Cincinnati Enquirer the day Updike arrived (a race riot in Over-the-Rhine); what time his plane got in (3:20); what he was wearing (tweed blazer and khakis); what he bought when he popped into the drugstore (Nyquil); what he had for dinner (moderately priced fish, with a piece of gauze-wrapped lemon that he made a funny joke about); and so on.

It seemed a strange idea for a book (I should add that it wasn't Updike’s idea, but the editor’s, though Updike agreed to it). As much as I would have enjoyed seeing Updike in person (and I’m sorry I never got the chance), I couldn’t quite see the appeal of reading about the experience. But as the editor, James Schiff, pointed out in the introduction, in the nineteenth century the visits of famous writers were wildly popular events, and reports of the talks they gave, including full transcriptions, would appear in the newspapers everywhere they went. It was good enough for Dickens or Twain, so why not John Updike? Whatever your answer is to that question, Updike was, of course, a charming, spontaneously eloquent man, and it turned out to be quite interesting to read what he had to say about Couples or “A&P” or the New Yorker or Nicholson Baker or Ted Williams or his appearance on The Simpsons.

His spontaneous eloquence was aided somewhat by the fact that he and Schiff cleaned up the transcriptions a bit. That's the part where I came in. I didn't dare tamper with the master's words. But there was one place where he slipped; he was making some elaborate point about how the words we use affect how we see the world, and he used a German word as an example. The wrong German word. I composed an apologetic query for Schiff, asking if perhaps Mr. Updike had perhaps meant not xxxx, but xxxx, perhaps. Schiff relayed that to Updike, who not only substituted the right word but rewrote the paragraph, improving it greatly. He didn't thank me, unless Schiff forgot to tell me. But he owes me one.

This is sounding like a plug for the book, so I might as well give the link for the Ohio Web page for it:

http://www.ohioswallow.com/book/Updike+in+Cincinnati

If you do end up getting it, could you let me know where the passage with the German word is? I can’t find it, and I’m starting to wonder if I made that story up, to make myself look good at John Updike’s expense. Pathetic, isn't it? I really ought to have more respect.

A Rose by any other price...

2009-01-27T13:03:00.000-08:00

We received word this morning that Brandeis has decided to close its art museum and sell off its collection. Ouch. The LA Times alludes to a Madoff connection.

We also learned this morning that Sara Nelson, the editor-in-chief at Publisher's Weekly, has been laid off.

In other bad book news, John Updike has died. Though I suppose how bad depends on how much you liked his books.

But not all the news is bleak. If you create Web sites to promote books, seems the Times thinks you have a bright future.

And if you're Wiley, you might just be embarrassed by your riches. Their latest report to shareholders noted they increased revenues by 36%.

As The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics points out, they must be doing something right. And by right I mean economically, not necessarily ethically.

Movie Day

2009-01-19T10:47:00.000-08:00

Today, because we have no lesson plan worked out ahead of time, and because the film strip projector is broken, we'll be having a movie day.

First, The The Impotence of Proofreading.

Next, a short film featuring Boring Books.

And finally, to explain the origin of those boring books, How to Design a Book Cover.

Oh, so that's how it's done...

2009-01-12T19:16:00.000-08:00

The folks at MacMillan Digital have thoughtfully produced this handy little educational film on just how books are born.

From the Typewriter to the Bookstore: A Publishing Story

The Kindle, One More Time

2009-01-11T21:25:00.000-08:00

I heard it from Tony after that last post. “It’s fun to look down from your ivory tower and sneer at the rest of the world, isn’t it” he said.

“What ivory tower?” I said. “I work in an unheated warehouse next to a cow pasture.”

“Well, I’ve got news for you,” he said. “The future is here. And this is what it looks like.” He held out a Kindle.

“The future looks like an Etch A Sketch?” I said.

“You can laugh now,” said Tony. “But whether you like it or not, history is on the Kindle’s side. The Kindle will bury you!”

In the end, Tony persuaded me to spend a weekend in the future—that is, to take the Kindle home and see if we could learn to get along. I didn’t mention the review I wrote of the Kindle on Amazon last year, or he might not have lent it to me. My review was headed, “One more reason to dread the future,” and it read, “I hope I never see one of these awful things. I’d buy one just to drop it out of a building. Ned Ludd, where are you when we need you?” One out of 89 people found my review helpful, and it was gone from Amazon within a few hours. I have to admire your vigilance, Amazon.

Tony will be relieved to know that I didn’t drop the thing out of my ivory tower. We got along fine, actually, the Kindle and I. But I still don’t get it. There’s almost nothing the Kindle does that a laptop doesn’t do far better. Its only advantage is its size, but there it loses out to an iPhone or a Blackberry, which will also do many of the same things, and quite a few others besides. (Why doesn’t the Kindle have GPS? Doesn’t Amazon realize how many readers lost in the latest New York Times best seller might suddenly wonder where in the world they are?) There are situations, of course, where neither a laptop nor a PDA will do. If you’re in an airplane restroom, for instance, and you want to download Jonathan Lethem’s new novel—not when you get back to your seat, but right this minute. Then the Kindle is exactly what you need, and the $359 will seem more than worth it.

The Kindle is also being presented as an alternative to the printed book. But it isn’t, really. It’s true that eBooks are starting to take a significant share of the book market, and may, sooner than later, make Gutenberg's creation a specialty item, like vinyl records. And of course the Kindle is riding, or hopes to ride, that revolution. But it’s not really much like a book at all, except in the very general sense of being a device for placing words in front of the eyes. Its electronic capabilities—the browsing, the storage, the purchasing—are things that no one would remotely associate with a printed book. And simply for the experience of reading words on a page, the Kindle doesn’t remotely compare. The cheapest mass-market paperback is better on the eyes than the Kindle’s index card-sized screen with its single utilitarian font. The Kindle is whatever it is, and maybe it’s going to help destroy the book as we know it, but it’s not a book.

Amazon is working on some experimental features to expand the Kindle experience. They’re enhancing its Web-browsing capabilities, for instance, and you can now play mp3 files on it (apparently Sony’s eBook reader was way ahead of them on that). They also have something called NowNow, which lets you ask the Kindle any question you like. “Real people” will research the question for you and send you the answer within ten minutes. I asked, “What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” They did have an answer to that, and well within the ten minutes: “We have discontinued the experimental Kindle NowNow service. We thank you for your interest, please continue to send us feedback on other experimental features and ideas by sending your thoughts to kindle-feedback@amazon.com.” I was given four options to rate that answer, and I chose “Great - answered my question and then some.” Which, in a way, it did.

So here’s the Kindle back, Tony. Thanks. If that’s as bad as the future gets, I think we’ll all be fine.

Now here I am checking out the Kindle.

Showing it to the cat. (He's not my cat--I'm housesitting.)

The cat with his claw stuck in my face. (His name is Leo. He didn't do it on purpose.)

That Kindle® thingy again

2009-01-08T19:11:00.000-08:00

So I'm on YouTube looking for videos of rabid raccoons, and up pops Tony talking about the Kindle. What the hell?

Thanks for trying out the Kindle® for us, Tony. I'm not quite sure why I hate it so much. I'm actually kind of intrigued by the idea of an electronic reader, and I'm sure I'll buy one someday. But something about the Kindle® gives me hives. Maybe it's because Amazon's advertising makes it so clear that I’m not the customer they have in mind:

Revolutionary electronic-paper display provides a sharp, high-resolution screen that looks and reads like real paper. Unlike, say, real paper.

Simple to use: no computer, no cables, no syncing. I don’t have a lot of books that require syncing.

Wireless connectivity enables you to shop the Kindle Store directly from your Kindle—whether you’re in the back of a taxi, at the airport, or in bed. It is a shame how my sleeping time cuts into my book-shopping time.

Buy a book and it is auto-delivered wirelessly in less than one minute. Slow down. I haven’t even gotten out of bed yet.

More than 200,000 books available, including more than 100 of 112 current New York Times® Best Sellers. I think I read a current New York Times® Best Seller once. I didn't mean to.

New York Times® Best Sellers and New Releases $9.99, unless marked otherwise. If you wait ten or fifteen years, you can probably find the paperback used for $6.

Free book samples. Download and read first chapters for free before you decide to buy. The first page is usually enough. Or the title.

Top U.S. newspapers including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post; top magazines including TIME, Atlantic Monthly, and Forbes—all auto-delivered wirelessly. Does that mean I’d have to read them? The Times and the Post are available free on the Internet, by the way. As are the foreign newspapers in the next item.

Top international newspapers from France, Germany, and Ireland; Le Monde, Frankfurter Allgemeine, and The Irish Times—all auto-delivered wirelessly. Yes, it would be good to catch up on the hurling scores.

More than 1000 top blogs from the worlds of business, technology, sports, entertainment, and politics, including BoingBoing, Slashdot, TechCrunch, ESPN's Bill Simmons, The Onion, Michelle Malkin, and The Huffington Post—all updated wirelessly throughout the day. If that doesn’t include this one, I’m not buying.

Lighter and thinner than a typical paperback; weighs only 10.3 ounces. I like my paperbacks a little zaftig, but that’s just me.

Holds over 200 titles. I'm thinking of moving to a desert island next year. This will be just the thing.

Long battery life. Leave wireless on and recharge approximately every other day. There had better be electric outlets on my desert island, though.

Turn wireless off and read for a week or more before recharging. Fully recharges in 2 hours. I don’t like the way this has switched to the imperative. What if I don’t want to read for a week before recharging?

Unlike WiFi, Kindle utilizes the same high-speed data network (EVDO) as advanced cell phones—so you never have to locate a hotspot. Thank God for that, because I’m terrible at locating hotspots. People are always asking me on the street where they can find a good hotspot, and I have to pretend I’m not from here.

No monthly wireless bills, service plans, or commitments—we take care of the wireless delivery so you can simply click, buy, and read. Just point and grunt, and we supply the banana.

Includes free wireless access to the planet's most exhaustive and up-to-date encyclopedia—Wikipedia.org. Now we’re talking. Those Wikipedia bills are killing me.

Email your Word documents and pictures (.JPG, .GIF, .BMP, .PNG) to Kindle for easy on-the-go viewing. Do I have to view them on the go? Can’t I sit down first?

Included in the box: Kindle wireless reader, Book cover, Power adapter, USB 2.0 cable. Can you throw in a single reason why I should pay $359 for this thing?

And we're back...

2009-01-06T08:43:00.000-08:00

One of the nice perks that comes with working for a university is the nice long vacations. There wasn't much of that in the bookstore world.

First, a couple of recommendations. The Stuff You Should Know podcast is a lot of fun. I listened to almost every single one over the last couple of weeks and I'm eager to hear more. I also enjoyed this very amusing blur of the economic crisis with the publishing crisis proposing yet another bailout that just appeared in the New York Times.

While gone for the holidays I got myself a smart phone and borrowed an Amazon Kindle. So I've been surfing the internet on my phone and reading books on my ... Kindle thingy. Below is a video demo and review of the Kindle from a publishing perspective.

Part I

Part II

More x-mas errata

2008-12-22T18:39:00.000-08:00

It was a long night at the big box bakery. I was tired and the kits didn't come with instructions. It's not my fault. Some words become other words upside down.

Mine might not be as merry, but they're much more satisfying.

We'd like to correct the following errors in this evening's libretto...

2008-12-22T10:07:00.000-08:00

Blatantly stolen from Matthew Baldwin's brilliant blog, Defective Yeti.

Christmas Carol Errata

Little Drummer Boy
As infants rarely exhibit social response behavior until the sixth week of life, it is unlikely that Jesus was truly smiling at the little drummer boy. We now believe that the son of man was experiencing gas.

Frosty the Snowman
Due to trends in global climate change, Frosty's vow to "be back again some day" can no longer be guaranteed.

Angels We Have Heard on High
Note that this song only provides a partial list of things heard on high. Others include the Phish "Junta" album and the incessant crinkle of a Funyuns bag.

What Child Is This?
The child has been determined to be Jake Keenan of Great Falls, Montana. If someone could let his folks know that he's here, that would be great.

Christmas is Coming
Since 1997 the donation amount suggested by this song has been adjusted annually for inflation. Given the recent economic meltdown however, this year the old man will again be accepting pennies and ha'pennies.

Silent Night
Just to clarify, the directive to "sleep in heavenly peace" was intended for the holy infant only. It is well-known that the parents of a newborn can expect no sleep whatsoever for a minimum of seven months, especially when people keep showing up at all hours of the night bearing myrrh.

Feliz Navidad
Please disregard all previous errata for this song. Apparently it is in Spanish.

Let It Snow
This song may erroneously lead the listener to believe that snow is a enjoyable and desired meteorological phenomenon. In fact, it is a huge fucking pain in the ass. We regret the error.

A Post-Borders World?

2008-12-19T15:36:00.000-08:00

Lit Soup has a great piece on what the book landscape might look like in a post-Borders world. Link

I never thought it would happen to me

2008-12-18T14:24:00.000-08:00

I never thought it would happen to me. I stood trying to look casual, nonchalant, and as unconcerned as an IRS agent. Despite my age, she knew. She knew it was my first time. I knew it too, and couldn’t believe it was here, now, within my fingertips. Her flashing emerald eyes, hair the color of fire, and a comehither look that Ray Charles could have seen were making this whole transaction deliciously awkward. I’m sure she read my schoolboy thoughts, but she only lowered her flawless chin slightly and then looked up again, perfect lips pursed. “May I help you?” I licked my lips, and my fingers nervously handed her the cash and a request for my first ever book printed by an Espresso Machine. “I . . . uh, I’ve never done this before,” I stammered. “Oh!” she said a little more loudly than I would have liked, “Huckleberry Finn. That’s in the public domain. According to U.S. copyright law, since that was published before 1923, we, or anyone else, can print that without violating anyone’s rights or paying anyone any royalty.” “Nice,” I said, while inside wishing I were dead. “Here’s a coupon for a free cup of coffee. You can wait over there.” She gestured toward a table near a group of pimply teenagers listening to iPods or iPhones or some other technological marvel. I’d rather die. A coffee bar. I watched myself redden in the reflective glare of the glass behind the cashier as I slinked toward the coffee, silly coupon in hand. I could have washed my face just using my dripping palms, my face was on fire, a sour taste angered the back of my throat. What was happening to me? I––I had prized the codex, the illuminated manuscript. I belonged to a letterpress club outside Boston for crying-out-loud, I was the lover of black, Moroccan-leather covered boards with gold foil lettering a half-inch high. Sweet mother of Fred Goudy, what had I done! I edged toward the coffee bar. The barista had dark, sultry eyes the color of slate––with little flecks of gold, emerald, and a splash of agate and another semiprecious gem whose name I don’t recall––and full, pouty lips. Her eyes seemed to go right through me. I never thought it would happen to me. My unsteady voice seemed to crack, “I’ll have a tall, double-latté mocha-pumpkin decaf with nutmeg and cinnamon.” Holy God. What is happening to me?! “And, I have a coupon,” I added. The tall teenager seemed to be laughing at me.

Space-Age Aesthetics

2008-12-15T17:10:00.000-08:00

When I try to tell people about something exciting I've found on the Internet, I always feel like the friend of mine who tried to be helpful to a stranger in New Haven once. A pickup truck was coming slowly down the street with one wheel down to the rim and the rubber shredded and smoking. As it passed, my friend raised her hands to her mouth and called to the driver, loudly and distinctly so he could hear her over the shrieking of metal on pavement, "Your tire is flat!" In other words, I'm afraid I'm not telling them anything they don't know already. Nevertheless, here's something exciting I've found on the Internet. It's a site called Wordle (http://www.wordle.net). Designed by Jonathan Feinberg, a software engineer at IBM Research, wordle is, in Feinberg's words, "a toy for generating 'word clouds' from text that you provide." It is, in fact, a tool for creating concrete poetry. The program arranges your text more or less randomly--you can set certain parameters and choose colors--with the words sized according to frequency. Some samples should make it clear what I mean. Here's the description of one of the Press's featured titles on our Web site, Space-Age Aesthetics, by Stephen Petersen, turned, very appropriately for the subject of the book, into a word cloud. (As enthusiastic as I am about the technology, I still have some issues with it; I couldn't get the pictures to appear hear, and the links aren't even clickable. But I promise it's worth going to the trouble of cutting and pasting them into your browser.)

http://www.wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/389076/Space-Age_Aesthetics

And here's the first paragraph of a classic noir novel, Down There, by the Philadelphia writer David Goodis (Truffaut's film Shoot the Piano Player was based on it):

http://www.wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/389113/Down_There

And finally, here's the nursery rhyme "There Was a Crooked Man":

http://www.wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/389202/Crooked

The gallery has thousands of these creations, with hundreds more being added every hour. And many of them are quite wonderful. Now that's art for the masses.

Feinberg, by the way, according to his site, is also a rock-and-roll drummer (like our own Sandy Thatcher). He's played with acts you might actually have heard of, like They Might Be Giants and Lisa Loeb. It's a small world. Or maybe a really big one; with the Internet, I can't tell anymore.