Amazon versus Hatchette, round 3 or 4

Wow. The gloves are off! It was reported a while ago that the trade press Hachette was negotiating with Amazon on pricing. This happens each year as contracts come up for renewal. But this year is being different. According to some observers, Amazon is pressing harder for more profitability (due to shareholder pressures?). And also according to some observers, the Hachette negotiation is becoming something of a test case for other publishers. The chief executive of the company, Michael Pietsch is something of a hero to literary editors, having been the guy who out-bid everybody (by a huge amount) for David Foster Wallace's novel, eventually titled Infinite Jest. Pietsch spent years mid-wifing Wallace through the final re-writes and cutting process to produce what is considered a modern classic, published by Little, Brown a subsidiary of Hachette. Pietsch is an editor-hero, and apparently a good executive, now to the parent company. Other industry insiders are watching the negotiations intensely:

“In a sense, Michael Pietsch is like ‘Horatius at the Bridge,’ ” says the literary agent and former Amazon executive Laurence J. Kirshbaum, referring to the soldier of legend who single-handedly saved ancient Rome by fighting off an invading army. “He is carrying the rest of the industry on his back.”

(from NY Times article June 2, 2014, linked above)

But after several efforts on both sides, things are breaking down big time. On Sunday, August 10, 2014, 900 authors banded together as Authors United, signing a open letter, and taking out a full page ad in the New York Times. Authors United is the brainchild of author Douglas Preston. But many authors have signed, and a number of high profile authors helped pay for the Times ad. The letter complains that Hachette authors are being squeezed in the battle between Amazon and Hachette in the following ways:

--Boycotting Hachette authors, by refusing to accept pre-orders on Hachette authors' books and eBooks, claiming they are "unavailable."

--Refusing to discount the prices of many of Hachette authors' books.

--Slowing the delivery of thousands of Hachette authors' books to Amazon customers, indicating that delivery will take as long as several weeks on most titles.

--Suggesting on some Hachette authors' pages that readers might prefer a book from a non-Hachette author instead.

The list of signatories includes many authors who are NOT Hachette authors. They just feel the practices are unfair to authors and to the consumers as well. Read the complete letter which calls on Amazon to resolve its differences with Hachette without further hurting authors or blocking or delaying shipments and sales to customers. (Over the weekend, it became known that Amazon was engaging in the same blocking/delaying tactics with another producer/publisher in negotiations with the sales giant: Disney. Might be an interesting fight, and one with a little more equal weight.)

The New York Times ad from Authors United was a little more in-your-face than the letter. The ad included the e-mail address for Jeff Bezos, the chief executive of Amazon. It reproduced the open letter, but the inclusion of Bezos' e-mail address implicitly encouraged readers to contact the man with readers' opinions on the matter.

Amazon has responded. They created a counter organization, Readers United with a web page attempting to present the history of publishing's antagonism to the introduction of the paperback book. Unfortunately for Amazon, they did a sloppy job of research, and quote George Orwell, of all people, trying to implicate him as one of those opposed to paperbacks, and trying to show that he was promoting collusion of the publishers to suppress publication of paperback books. (I think they are trying to remind folks that Hachette is among the publishers called to task by the Justice Department recently for colluding with Apple to increase pricing of e-books on the Kindle.) The web page also gives readers the e-mail address for Hachette CEO Michael Pietsch (who actually had nothing to do with the Authors United ad, as far as I know), and offers a number of rather aggressive suggestions for e-mails to him:

We have noted your illegal collusion. Please stop working so hard to overcharge for ebooks. They can and should be less expensive.
Lowering e-book prices will help — not hurt — the reading culture, just like paperbacks did.
Stop using your authors as leverage and accept one of Amazon's offers to take them out of the middle.
Especially if you're an author yourself: Remind them that authors are not united on this issue.

As to the quote from George Orwell, though Amazon's Readers' United page asserts that he advocated suppressing paperbacks, that simply misunderstands what he wrote:

When Orwell wrote that line, he was celebrating paperbacks published by Penguin, not urging suppression or collusion. Here is what the writer actually said in The New English Weekly on March 5, 1936: “The Penguin Books are splendid value for sixpence, so splendid that if the other publishers had any sense they would combine against them and suppress them.”

Orwell then went on to undermine Amazon’s argument for cheap e-books. “It is, of course, a great mistake to imagine that cheap books are good for the book trade,” he wrote, saying that the opposite was true.

“The cheaper books become,” he wrote, “the less money is spent on books.”

Instead of buying two expensive books, he said, the consumer will buy three cheap books and then use the rest of the money to go to the movies. “This is an advantage from the reader’s point of view and doesn’t hurt trade as a whole, but for the publisher, the compositor, the author and the bookseller, it is a disaster,” Orwell wrote.

(from NY Times article of 8/11/14.)

But the Orwell mis-quote has boomeranged on Amazon in the Internet world. To mis-quote and mis-represent a hero of TRUTH, mis-using his words for your own commercial purposes is a pretty bad move in the cyberworld, I think. It's especially ironic coming from the company that brought you the 99 cent 1984... and then took it away again. Actually, Orwell's original essay is pretty darned apposite. He was balancing the interests of readers, who are naturally pleased to get cheaper books (I know I am -- sorry), against the interests of authors, and all those who work in publishing, who are getting (despite what Amazon asserts), a SMALLER PIE, when books cost less. People really don't spend the same amount or MORE on books when they cost less. They buy the same number of books they were going to get in the first place, and pocket the money they saved, to buy something else. This is very nice for Jeff Bezos and Amazon, who have spread their marketing into LOTS of new areas. Amazon sells nearly everything on earth now. So they really do have a bigger pie. But for authors, and publishers, compositors, type designers, etc. -- all those folks who in print or digital worlds still are needed to produce books --- cheaper books translate to a smaller pie. No matter how Amazon wants to cut it.

There are a few voices out there supporting Amazon. Hugh Howey, Damien Walters. It's quite true that there is a balance point in the market where if you charge too much for e-books, or make them too hard to get, you will lose your market, which is the point of some of these folks. People will not pay above $9.99 or so for most trade e-books, apparently. Don't know why. But despite the fact that you save on printing and paper, and delivery, there are still sunk costs to an e-book. The author's time and the compositor still has to lay out the book in an attractive way. Anybody who has tried to read an e-book from Project Gutenberg will quickly see the difference in a nice modern lay-out compared to the less effective layouts from the books at Gutenberg that are out of copyright!

The image decorating this post is bare knuckle boxers from the 1820's - evidently a collectible print. See http://www.lordprice.co.uk/SPBX1038.html for the original site.

ReadCube offers New Per-Article Access for Expensive Journals

There is an article in the business section of today's Boston Globe about a new start up called Labtiva, and the product is ReadCube Access. Started by two graduate students at Harvard, the service currently provides access to the Nature journal suite of titles. So far, University of Utah is the only partner, but they are rolling it out in the chemistry department this fall to test it.

There is some concern among the administrators at Utah, according to the article, about the pricing of the program and how it may eat up library budgets. The arrangement is like ITunes, in that DRM will allow the individual subscriber only to access the individual article. The article cannot be printed and cannot be shared with others. Articles can be accessed on a limited time basis for $6 or less (depending on the journal), or purchased for $11 or less, depending on the journal. Rick Anderson, interim dean of University of Utah's J. Willard Marriott Library is quoted,

Our journal collection is very, very lean, ... If we opened something like this up across the campus, you’d be taking a very big risk that your entire materials budget would get blown out in a month, ...

Anderson goes on to analyze a potential danger, not only to university budgets, but to the publishing industry in the model. He also compares the model to ITunes, and draws a parallel to the music industry's experiments with music delivery and DRM. Currently, libraries must purchase an entire journal's worth of articles to obtain the single article that is exciting the research community. That will change with the ReadCube Access model, which would address that market inefficiency. But it would drastically change the financial picture for publishers, who will face the same market upheaval currently shaking the music industry.

There is also a brief mention of the Open Access movement, though it is dismissed as a fringe movement. (Directory of Open Access Journals)

Scholars' Journal Boycott: Open Access Rebellion

On January 21, Cambridge University mathematician Timothy Gowers posted on a blog, griping about the publisher Elsevier (and others). He did a very nice job listing the problems that librarians have complained about as consumer issues:

1. It charges very high prices — so far above the average that it seems quite extraordinary that they can get away with it.

2. One method that they have for getting away with it is a practice known as “bundling”, where instead of giving libraries the choice of which journals they want to subscribe to, they offer them the choice between a large collection of journals (chosen by them) or nothing at all. So if some Elsevier journals in the “bundle” are indispensable to a library, that library is forced to subscribe at very high subscription rates to a large number of journals, across all the sciences, many of which they do not want. (The journal Chaos, Solitons and Fractals is a notorious example of a journal that is regarded as a joke by many mathematicians, but which libraries all round the world must nevertheless subscribe to.) Given that libraries have limited budgets, this often means that they cannot subscribe to journals that they would much rather subscribe to, so it is not just libraries that are harmed, but other publishers, which is of course part of the motivation for the scheme.

3. If libraries attempt to negotiate better deals, Elsevier is ruthless about cutting off access to all their journals.

4. Elsevier supports many of the measures, such as the Research Works Act (112 HR 3699), that attempt to stop the move to open access. They also supported SOPA (112 HR 3261) and PIPA (112 S 968) and lobbied strongly for them.

I could carry on, but I’ll leave it there.

Professor Gowers notes that scholars can fight back by refusing to continue editing for, publishing in or doing peer reviews for such journals. He notes that he has stopped doing these things in Elsevier journals and encourages others to do so. I notice that his post has received 31 comments to date, and 83 people have used Google to +1 it, 614 people have shared it on Facebook, and 778 have tweeted it on Twitter, so this is a very hot post.

Gowers wondered if there might be a website where mathematicians who want to boycott Elsevier journals could sign their names electronically. Within a day or two, The Cost of Knowledge appeared, providing just such a website. Scholars from a wide variety of fields (law is not listed, but is subsumed under "social sciences") have signed, and are listed in alphabetical order. Science, math and humanities are all represented. The impressive part is that the protesters pledging to forgo publishing in journals such as The Lancet and Cell, include not just "made" scholars, but tenure track junior scholars, who are truly putting a great deal on the line by joining the protest. As of right now (Feb. 8, 3 PM ) there are 4,713 signatories total on The Cost of Knowledge.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has noted the protest and notes that Elsevier has felt enough pressure to make a statement in response. Librarians who look at the article will not be surprised by any of the justifications from the Elsevier spokeswoman: The steep price increases of the 1980's are a thing of the past and are coloring the perceptions of the problem now. Elsevier claims that it invests a lot in metadata tagging that adds value and links articles together, making research more efficient(and that would not be available if the scholars published their own materials -- UNLESS they worked with librarians!).

The company's support of the Research Works Act is driven by its investment in those products, [the spokeswoman] added: "It's not a disavowal of the National Institutes of Health or of open access. We are just trying to avoid inflexible regulations." The company was the first and largest contributor to PubMed Central, the NIH repository of free, full-text articles,....

Mr. Gowers, ... told The Chronicle that researchers can now evaluate and review one another's papers on open Web sites. "That would be far cheaper than anything a commercial publisher could hope to offer, and just as effective," he noted.

Nor does the Elsevier infrastructure impress younger scholars like Mr. Abrahams. "It could disappear tomorrow, and I'd never notice that it's gone," he said.

If I were Elsevier, and other, similar journal publishers, I think I would be worrying a bit.

Writing for Impact

I have a student this semester, who wants to write an article, not because he's on a journal staff, or because he is getting credit for a directed study with me. He wrote a research guide last semester on a topic that was near to his heart, and he wants to follow it up. He's doing it on his own time. I don't know if a law student has any hope of getting a journal article published in this situation.... It seems like a pretty long shot to put something like that in any law review, even our own school law journals, but especially going outside. Student-edited journals have big gates that do look at who you are, and where you are from. This has long been a frustration to law professors at 2nd, 3rd and 4th tier law schools who run into these same barriers trying to publish their scholarship. The students don't have a lot of experience judging scholarship, so they often use who and where as proxies for quality when they choose articles to publish.

Well. That's one big reason I have long shied away from publishing in law reviews. I have always chosen to send my stuff to professionally edited or peer-reviewed journals. I think I get a much better review, and I also have a much better chance of getting published, no matter where I have chosen to work.

So, I am trying to persuade this student that perhaps there is publishing beyond law reviews. That perhaps he will have a better chance of getting a well-written article published in a journal beyond the law journal universe. Law students (and I was this way, I think, when I was in law school), believe that there is no intelligent life outside of law school. This makes it extra ironic that other university faculty and PhD students often look down their noses at the law school publication system that sets up our ground-level students as the gatekeepers of our scholarship!

In service of my argument, I am trying to introduce this fellow to the concept of "journal impact factor" which is a measure based on average citation rates of the articles in the journal. So, for instance, a frequently cited journal like Nature would have a higher journal impact factor than a less frequently cited journal. It does not mean that individual articles in each issue have been cited particularly, but that, on average, articles in this journal, are cited more often. Journals advertise their impact factors to potential authors, interestingly. "Publish with us! Our impact factor is higher." As if it were going to guarantee more citations for the article you publish with them. And perhaps it does deliver more eyeballs, and potentially more citations... but nobody knows. Journal impact factor is a sort of blunt instrument measure, especially to those of us in law, who have luxuriated in the fine detail of Shepards and KeyCite citators, which not only tell us how many citations something has, but how they are being treated, and often what is being discussed. Still, journal impact factor is more information on the publication level than is available about law reviews at the publication level.

Now, there is an interesting new addition to impact measurements. Altmetrics is not designed to take the place of e of journal impact factor. It is designed to complement it, to add nuance to it and reach beyond it to publication in social media like blogs, Facebook and Twitter. I think it will be a very interesting new feature. The Chronicle of Higher Education has an interesting article about Altmetrics. There is a varied group of academics working on the idea, but among them is the group at altmetrics.org which has published a manifesto. This includes academics in library science, computer science, somebody from the UK's Science and Technology Facilities Council, and somebody from Wikimedia Foundation, which is related to Wikipedia.

This is obviously going to have more immediate impact in the sciences, where open source publishing already has a toehold (PLOS, for instance is really moving forward with Altmetrics already, apparently). But we in law librarianship are working on open source publishing in our own backyards. And now I have my own personal project. I hope I can persuade this student to try publishing somewhere other than his round peg law review default. Because his square peg article is not going to be a very good fit, I fear!

Congratulations to the University of Michigan Law Librarians

It is always gratifying to see the librarians highlighted in a law school alumni publication. Over the weekend, I read a laudatory article in the Spring 2011 Law Quadrangle: Notes from Michigan Law. The article, entitled "Whither the Law Librarian," will not be news to any law librarian. It portrays four dual-degree librarians who work at the University of Michigan Law Library as "helping to advance digital research rather than hinder it." The librarians interviewed point out that being a librarian has always been about managing information--finding it and using it--and for this reason, format is simply not that important. The article concludes with the often-repeated statement that "technology has flooded researchers with so much information that, now more than ever, they need a guide to help them navigate the chaos." This is probably true, but I wonder if students today actually believe it.

The piece includes a nice one-page spread featuring Jerry Dupont, a 1967 alumnus of Michigan Law, and the Haiti Legal Patrimony Project, which was undertaken by LLMC in the wake of last year's devastation. Haiti's libraries were not spared, and the country risked the loss of its legal heritage. The Law Quadrangle describes Dupont's efforts to collect over 700 books and documents in "a huge bibliographic project." Items were identified and located in libraries around the world, and are now being scanned to create "a massive digital record ... that combines the strengths of the various collections" from which it came. Margaret Leary, Director of the Michigan Law Library, which provided about ten per cent of the materials being digitized, has the last word about the Haiti Project: "This project is an excellent example of the way collection development policies result in the whole being much greater than any one library."

Information Overload -- possible ways forward

The Boston Globe had an article today, "Information Overload, the early years," by Ann Blair. I have to say I began to read it with some reluctance. We have all seen a number of articles along similar lines, where they go back in history and pull up fascinating quotes that prove that Erasmus was disheartened by the sudden plethora of books, and thought it was all just too much. This article does exactly that, of course, showing that when the printing press emerged, yes indeedy, people began to feel swamped in books. Ms. Blair also provides the stunning statistics about how much data is being produced each year, along with quotes from Nicholas Carr worrying (as I do, in fact) that we are changing the way we read.

But the article goes beyond the usual run of the mill descriptions of how they felt the same kind of overload we do. Blair does a wonderful job of noticing that after the first shock of the outpouring of publishing, that various players began devising methods to deal with the wash of data. This is fascinating and gives us actual helpful pointers about how to cope now. I did not know, for instance, that this was the moment when bibliographies, indexes and tables of contents really developed and blossomed. Reference books of all types began to be invented under the pressure of "too many books to read." Collections of quotations, called "florilegia" originally came out. Then selecting, collecting and digesting all kinds of information emerged. I did not realize that this was when note-taking became a skill, or that it had to be taught. And I was fascinated to learn that the roots of library card catalogs are here, at this point in history:

Compilers cut and pasted, very literally, with scissors and glue, from manuscript notes they had already taken — or, even more efficiently, by exploiting a new, cheap source of printed information: older editions of books. These slips were cut from a full page and soon glued onto a new sheet, but in the mid-17th century for the first time one scholar advocated using the slips themselves as an information-storage system. Crucial to this method was a specially designed piece of furniture: a note closet comprising slats studded with hooks on which the slips could be stored and labeled. Probably only a handful of such closets were built, but the slip — and the idea of the filing system — had a long career ahead. In the 18th century the political theorist Montesquieu took notes on the backs of playing cards, which were blank in those days. His younger contemporary Carl Linnaeus made his own slips for recording the characteristics of plants, from which he created a taxonomic system that we still use today. The slips, ordered and sorted, would eventually inspire both the index card and the library card catalog.

There were also some failed experiments. There was a sort of "family tree" design of hierarchies and brackets to show the contents and their relationships. There were various efforts to use squiggles and indentations and other signals to show the subcategories of topics before the indented alphabetical indexes and outline-format tables of contents that we see today. This is important to understand. None of the forms we use today were pre-determined, and there had to be experiments to discover what would work the best. There had to be trial and error to find the best methods of dealing with that original information overload, from Johann Gutenberg's printing press. And that means we can and must do the same thing now. In fact, it is happening already, in ways I am not sure we can recognize yet. But it is happening all the same. We are already beginning to cope and adjust. Improved search engines, better search techniques, more ruthless culling of results. I suppose the "cloud tags" are another example of a technique of dealing with labeling.

Librarians' skills are more useful than ever in sorting information. I suspect we will have useful things to offer in the development of these new tools and techniques.

The image is of the library at the University of Leyden from the Globe article and is credited to Getty Archives. The caption in the print edition said the image was from 1610. I hope the image is clear enough for you to see the books chained to the shelves, and the reading racks below the shelf. There are 2 women visiting the library as well as two dogs, which I hope was not an equivalent visit. The books are shelved by topic, with, if you can read the labels along the top of the shelves, "Iuris Consultis," "Medici," "Historici," and other topics listed. Wonderful image with globes having adorable little individual covers, and set up high on shelf tops when not in use. You can see the readers stood at the shelves to read the books, resting their foot on a foot rail, to rest their backs. The table is not for sitting to read, but to set the globes on for measuring distance.

GPO-Access Replacement Launching, and Authentication of Law

GPO-Access has had a great run as the portal for the Government Printing Office. It is still up through the end of this calendar year. But the replacement site is already up and running and it looks great. Introducing...... (drumroll, please).......

www.fdsys.gov

It has a full home page. But it works well. There is a banner at the top with a small menu, which frankly all seem to lead back to the old GPO-Access website. There is an old FAQ section, which can be helpful if you have documents questions, and you can put in new documents questions with the same section, and check your existing queries as well.

But if you skip that top banner, and look at the main portion of the page, there are three panels, or columns. The left and right columns are narrower and the center is much broader. The left column offers again to take the reader back to GPO-Access, and divides the readers into Customers, Vendors and Libraries. Then there is a blue box of Quick Links to the most popular (one guesses) URLs:

* US Government Bookstore

* Ben's Guide to Government for Kids (a useful site!)

* FDLP Desktop (for the Federal Depository Libraries)

* Catalog of U.S, Government Publications

* Digitization Registry

(The choices remind the reader that 1) The GPO is the government's bookseller; 2) The Federal Depository Library Program is alive and is run through this site; 3) the GPO is charged with digitizing much of what it has been printing for centuries, and the users will want to know what is now available electronically.)

The right hand narrow column features a changing list of "Latest Resources." Today everything listed are congressional bills and debate transcripts about Wall Street reform and health care reform. But it gives the citation, title and a hot link to pick up the full text of the document. It also offers the entire text of the CFR (Code of Federal Regulations), the Federal Register issues, the Budget for fiscal year 2011, the Economic Report of the President for 2010, and more. Except for your time and disc space, these appear to be free downloads. The large files, such as titles of the CFR can be zipped, or can be delivered in XML, with each file size noted.

The center panel has the main news:

The migration of information from GPO Access into FDsys will be complete in 2010. The migration is occurring on a collection-by-collection basis.

There is a lengthy list of the various titles and the dates for which each is carried. The list is changing day by day, as the migration continues.

The top of the center panel has a search bar, where you can enter a basic search. There is, however, an advanced search function where you can specify the type of material to be searched, up to five search criteria can be laid on the query. There is an excellent Help section, which I believe is the same as from GPO-Access, though I may be wrong. It is a very powerful search engine for frequent users who master the syntax and understand the various tools offered, such as SuDoc numbers and referenced citations, but even the keyword search and simple search seem to work pretty well. There is also an option from the original search bar to Retrieve by Citation, which works easily because the system provides a set of boxes for the user to enter the citation, so you don't have to guess at the correct format. Even more exciting, when I pulled up a CFR citation for 2010, I got a digital version that was "Certified by the Superintendent of Documents [pkisupport@gposupport.gov] United States Government Printing Office, certificate issued by GeoTrust CA for Adobe." This was in a medium blue bar across the top of the screen, with an image of a pen at the right side of the bar. This is exciting, the beginning of Digital Authentication of laws online.

Another Sign of the Times

It is likely that the next edition of the venerable Oxford English Dictionary (OED), will not be published in print. No date is scheduled for the release of the third edition, which is only about one quarter finished, but it will probably take a decade or more. The future of the OED is discussed in this article, and is also the subject of an article in The Sunday Times, which is a fee-based site and available only to subscribers. I was interested to learn that the OED "now gets 2 million hits a month from subscribers." It is a bargain compared to many other online reference works--only $295 per year.

Reference works seem uniquely well suited to online publication. Few people read them all the way through, and even more important is the ability to update them quickly and easily. Waiting a decade or more for a new edition of any dictionary, even the OED, just seems unacceptable today. Currently, the online second edition of the OED is updated every three months, but there is no reason updates could not be made more regularly than that. Nigel Portwood, chief executive of Oxford University Press, feels that the market for print dictionaries is "just disappearing. It is falling away by tens of percent a year."