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Roy

First let me explain how this typically works. A librarian either approaches a publisher with a book idea or the publisher asks someone to take on a book project. That person then solicits contributions from people they know and/or the wide blue yonder; i.e., mailing lists. The editor gets librarians to commit to submitting a chapter, hounds them to get it in when they fail to meet the deadline, (presumably) edits the contributions, normalizes the format among the contributions, and in many cases provides the index as well as any number of other book production tasks. For this work they usually garner 10-15% of net sales.

The contributors? They get nothing. One of the few times I can remember this was not the case was when I insisted the publisher pay my chapter contributors something. And yes, it came out of my percentage. Why, you might ask, do contributors write for free? Mostly for the line on the resume. Most chapter contributors are academic librarians who must publish to advance. If you’re not doing it for the line on the resume then you’re just a flat out saint.

Meanwhile, the publishers take the bulk of the profit, having performed very little of the work. They add the title to their catalog and do their usual publicity efforts, which are often more pro forma than imaginative, and if you’re lucky they will sell enough to be worth the time to edit it in the first place. That’s if you’re lucky.

Oh, and don’t get me started about payment. It can be at least a year after the book comes out before you see your first royalty check — probably more like 18 months. This is because publishers have become very good at playing the float. They take in the money, only report to you on profits quarterly (at most) and often only twice a year, and on a time lag that would be considered outrageous in any other field. By the time they actually pay out royalties they’ve had the money sitting in a bank gathering interest for a significant length of time.

So if you ask me to contribute a chapter to a book and you’re working with a traditional publisher the answer is likely going to be “no”. If you’re self-publishing it, or even providing it for free as I did with my last edited collection, then I’ll consider it.

But today they have announced a user interface component to their toolkit that brings full-featured search and navigation capabilities to XC. Based on the Drupal content management system, it offers such features as faceted browsing, display of search words in context, relevancy ranking, and more.

According to the announcement, the system includes the ability to retrieve live circulation status from an integrated library system, although it isn’t immediately clear if it is able to interact with systems other than Voyager (Rochester’s ILS). Such communication likely uses their NCIP implementation, but vendors can vary dramatically on their support of this rambling standard.

At first glance, this looks like yet another credible entry into the growing array of “next-gen” user interfaces to our catalog systems such as VUFind and Blacklight. However, it remains qualitatively different than systems that integrate not just catalog and repository content but also journal article databases, such as Summon and WorldCat Local.

The final determination we came to after all of this discussion was that choosing content for the iPad was pretty much the same as developing any library collection.

• There needs to be a goal. How does providing this service fit with your mission and what would you like to see happen as a result of purchasing and providing access to this material?
• There needs to be a plan. Selection criteria. Plans for keeping the collection current and updated.
• Policy needs to be in place. Who can access this material and how? How will you defend the selection of the materials via collection development policy?

I found this discussion, and their conclusions, both reassuring and surprising — reassuring that our strategies for collection development could translate to this brave new world and surprising that they did. On the other hand, I can’t help feeling that patron use of an iPad in a library will create new issues that will require new modes of management. I don’t know what those are yet, but I feel fairly certain they exist — or will soon. Thoughts?

Picture courtesy Ben Atkin, Creative Commons License Attribution 2.0 Generic.

Traditional publishing may not be in freefall yet, but it’s standing on the edge, just one big shove away.

That shove is now being applied. It had started being applied by early entrants in the self-publishing realm, such as Lulu.com. But the player with enough muscle to actually move entrenched traditional publishers off the cliff has only relatively recently entered the fray — Amazon. Amazon is going to eat the lunch of traditional publishing for one simple reason — pure economics.

Sure, they have a variety of forays into publishing that I could discuss, including Seth Godin’s much-hyped, but still likely to have an impact, Domino Project. I’m sure I don’t need to point out the signficance of the name. No, what I wish to point out is something much more mundane and, well, crass. It’s simply this: if you publish with a traditional publisher you will be lucky to get a 15% royalty. With Amazon’s Kindle Direct publishing option royalty rates start at 35% and can be as high as 70%. Now I’m no math wiz, but that’s an eye-popping difference.

If you’re an author, just how badly do you want Harper Collins to publish your book? Would you give up 55 percentage points of royalty for the privilege? Yeah, I thought so.

Meanwhile, the implications for libraries seem almost as stark. Whatever you thought you knew about collection development has gone out the window. Don’t expect Amazon to churn out a catalog of new titles — at least not in paper form. And good luck with your approval plan. As authors break in a big way for the big payout that ebooks are now potentially providing and as e-readers approach the price point of free, we’re in a completely new world. It would be best if we get used to the idea — and soon.

As noted in TechWorld, Adobe is offering their Flash software development kit Flex, to the Apache Foundation to manage as a project independent of Adobe (it has been open source since 2008). Note that this does not signal that Adobe is dropping Flash like a hot rock, but it does signal a direction away from Flash to HTML 5 and CSS3:

While the company pledged its continued support for Flex — along with its underlying Flash technology — Adobe also suggested that Web application developers in the future would be using HTML5 rather than Flash…

Observers have speculated that Adobe’s retreat from the mobile Flash platform represents the first step in deemphasizing Flash in favor of HTML5. Jack Gold, of analyst firm J.Gold Associates LLC., noted that Adobe faced a daunting task in maintaining Flash across an ever-increasing number of different platforms, as more non-Windows devices enter the marketplace. HTML5, in contrast, can work across all mobile browsers that support the standard, and will require no specific adjustments for each underlying hardware platform.

So yeah, I guess Steve Jobs was right. But it’s also really nice to see how Adobe has acknowledged that HTML5 provides a better technological path forward while also not abandoning the Flash community overnight. Offering up the Flex SDK to the Apache Foundation is a classy move, even if it potentially has the self-serving aspect of freeing up Adobe staff from the increasingly onerous job of keeping it up-to-date on a plethora of platforms. The alternative would have been to end-of-life it, which in some ways may have been easier but also more damaging to the community at large. Way to go, Adobe, you’ve demonstrated the best way to surrender in a technology war.

I understand that those who work in Information Technology departments have their own side of the story, but it occurred to me that I could think of some advice to give her and others like her who find themselves feeling this way. Below is what I told her.

• The first answer is likely always “no”. There is a reason for this. IT staff are busy, so if they say no and you actually go away you didn’t need it that badly to begin with. It is used as a gating mechanism. You have to decide whether you are going to accept that answer or not (see below).
• Pick your battles. Some hills are worth dying on and others not so much. Figure out which case you have in front of you and act accordingly. A clue — if your users will not notice any difference if you get what you want, then drop it.
• Do your homework. In some cases, when IT staff say “no” it is because they believe something to be true. However, you can often find evidence to back up your case so you can persuade them differently.
• Foster good relations. You should work at having good relations with anyone you depend on to get your job done. This can mean taking the time to find out about their challenges and frustrations. This will also better inform you as to why they may be refusing to do what you ask.
• Ask nicely. Asking nicely doesn’t just mean saying “please” although that isn’t a bad start. By asking nicely I mean asking in ways that foster a good resolution for all parties. For example, if you’re feeling the crunch of not having enough public computers, maybe instead of simply asking for more you can engage IT staff in determining the appropriate solution. Maybe they would prefer a different technology solution entirely — such as going to a server and thin clients.
• Show appreciation. Likely there are times when the IT department does something you like. Make sure they know it.
• When it really matters, don’t take “no” for an answer. When the change you seek will have a demonstrable impact on your end-users then you need to go to the mat. But if you have acted as I outline above for a considerable time preceding this event, you should be successful. IT staff are not stupid, they just have their own priorities that stem from their particular set of responsibilities. So if you make it clear to them that what you’re asking them to do is very important to you — and more importantly your mission and the people you serve — then a way can likely be found.

So that’s my advice, please share yours as a comment.

So yes, I’ve become a media maniac, but mostly because I can. The price point has descended and so have the technical barriers. I don’t live in a city and yet I’ve had broadband access for over a decade (I was an early adopter of DSL). Therefore bandwidth has not been an issue, but it has only been since I got the iPad that I truly succumbed to digital streaming media.

What do I love about it? Let me count the ways:

1. The form factor rocks. I can’t begin to describe how many times I have picked up the iPad and walked into the kitchen to a) check on dinner, b) get a glass of water, or c) just about anything else. Since the device is so darn portable, you can take it anywhere — and you do.
2. I can watch older shows straight through. Don’t you hate it when you’re left hanging on a story cliff and you must wait an entire week for the resolution? Well, kiss that goodbye for your older shows, where you can blaze through all the episodes that ever existed in one go, should you have more time on your hands than is strictly legal or moral.
3. Watching a show doesn’t tie up anything else. I don’t have to use my computer to watch a show — I can watch a show on my iPad while I’m doing something else on my computer. This alone is huge. You can do the same thing with your laptop and a TV, but that means you have to be where the TV is. Now I can be where my computer is — or anywhere, for that matter.
4. Watching a show doesn’t impact anyone else. Unlike a blaring TV, after you attach headphones or earbuds to your iPad, you’re not bothering anyone else. You could be meditating for all they know.

Lest you think I’ve been reduced to a drooling media-sucking idiot, I should point out that I’ve probably never been more productive. It’s because this style of media consumption leaves me free to accomplish other things while so doing, which means I can keep my wife’s campaign database updated, or answer my email, or do any of a broad range of tasks while also checking out the next episode of Starhunter or Once Upon a Time.

Yes, I admit it, I’ve become a media fool. But I also kick tail and take names while doing it. Welcome to the 21st Century.

In a nutshell, the author of the post (Bret Victor) was pointing out how beggarly this vision was. All it did was extrapolate out from where we are now — and not very far, either. This future world is offers mostly finger-swiping on flatscreens. Sure, you could swipe things from one device to another, like from a phone to a flat panel display on a wall, but that’s no big innovation. This, he posits, is nothing more than pictures under glass.

Meanwhile, as Victor took some pains pointing out, human hands are capable of much, much more than finger-swiping. The repertoire of hand manipulations include: power grip, precision grip, hook grip, and scissor grip. None of these are used in current interfaces. Where, he implicitly asks, is true innovation?

I feel the same way about libraries. Even in this “digital revolution” we remain mired in how we did things in the past — we’re just trying to do them slightly different online. True imagination — not simply extrapolating out the present — is rare. We would do well to seek it out, foster it, pay attention to it, and attempt it ourselves.

I immediately thought, “Oh, he was clearly reading a print book” since if he had it on an e-reader Hodgman wouldn’t have been able to glance over and see what he was reading. And then I thought “What a shame, we will increasingly be unable to notice what others are reading.”

Reading is going underground at the speed of e-reader adoption. No longer will people be able to proudly sport the latest intellectual best-seller on the subway, or impress one’s boss by having the flavor-of-the-month business advice tome placed carefully on one’s desk. Well, I guess you can still do that as long as print books are still available, but if you have an e-reading device your boss might begin to think she is being played.

I can’t help wondering if we will invent new ways to flaunt our reading habits, or whether instead this new-found privacy will enable us to stop posturing in public and simply read the trashy novels many of us secretly wish we could but were too embarrassed to take onto the street? You decide, and let me know in the comments.