Category Archives: Publishing

Going Green with GreenSlips – how law publishers can save trees and save money

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So I took this week’s Sports Illustrated to the gym this morning to read with my cardio workout, and found that I identified closely with the story about high school guard Roberto Nelson who received “more than 2,000 recruiting letters from 56 colleges.”  According to the story, “You’ve Got (Too Much) Mail,” by George Dohrmann, SI determined that Roberto only opened 18% of his letters and packages.  The SI analysis determined that “college basketball recruiting pitches eat up the equivalent of 1,526 trees a year.”

I related to this story not because I was heavily recruited for my point guard prowess, but because I, too, get a ton of mail which goes straight from my inbox to my recycling box and only a tiny percentage gets opened first.  I’m talking about publishers’ catalogs.  What a huge waste of paper and postage. 

We librarians have great tools for finding and buying new books.  My absolute favorite is William S. Hein & Co.’s Electronic GreenSlips and I would encourage all book publishers to get their new and forthcoming titles listed there.   There are many other good tools but I’m finding a new kid on the block is very helpful too:  The Law_Book twitter feed - we’ve been picking a lot from there lately.

As the SI story notes:

Noting the environmental cost compared to the number of letters Nelson opened, Gleason asked the obvious question: “If recruits don’t open the letters, why keep sending them? Why waste all that money and paper?”

Some schools might soon ask themselves the same thing. In May, Michigan and Ohio State jointly announced that they would cease printing media guides. Bygones from the pre-Internet age . . .

I ask the same thing about publishers’ catalogs, especially the thick ones listing every title in print, most of which we already own.  In my opinion these bygones should be bygone.   What with all the money they will save, I’m sure law book publishers can offer us better prices on their books — that will get more of my business.

Buyer’s E-Morse: ‘Owning’ Digital Books

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From today’s Wall Street Journal:

The Wall Street Journal, Thursday, July 23, 2009, p. A11

CURRENTS

Buyer’s E-Morse: ‘Owning’ Digital Books

Purchasing Electronic Tomes Online Gives Readers Fewer Legal Rights to Share and Resell Than Hard-Copy Customers Enjoy

By Geoffrey A. Fowler

. . .

Sharing e-books puts libraries in a particular pickle. The Seattle Public Library has purchased 30,000 e-books and digital-audio books for its patrons to borrow. But those e-books don’t reside anywhere at the library. Instead, it has a continuing license to them provided by a company. In exchange for maintenance fees and a full purchase price for each e-book, Overdrive Inc. runs lending systems for Seattle and 9,000 other libraries.

When a patron wants to check out an e-book, Overdrive allows them to download a copy with software that causes the file to become unreadable after a due date — after which another patron can check out that “copy.”

. . .

But there are strings attached: Overdrive’s books can be read on computer screens and on Sony’s Reader device, yet aren’t compatible with Amazon’s Kindle — . . .
And should Overdrive ever go out of business — or should something happen to its centralized collection — the Seattle library’s huge e-book collection could theoretically disappear . . .

Google Books in the News

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European Union to scrutinize Google Books settlement; Congress may hold hearing

“The European Union said today that it would scrutinize Google’s settlement with authors and publishers and hold a hearing Sept. 7 to determine whether there would be any adverse impact on the European book market. “What’s currently planned is a fact-finding exercise by the [European] Commission — not an investigation — and we’re looking forward to taking part,” said Jennie Johnson, a Google spokeswoman. Under scrutiny will be Google’s agreement, reached last year with the Authors Guild and the American Association of Publishers, to make out-of-print books searchable online.”

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/07/european-union-to-scrutinize-google-books-settlement.html

 

University of Wisconsin-Madison and University of Texas expand Google Books agreements

“In May, the University of Michigan announced an expanded agreement with Google that will take advantage of our settlement agreement to make millions of works from its library collection accessible to readers, researchers, and book lovers across the United States. Today, two more longstanding library partners–the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Texas–have also expanded their partnerships with Google. That means that if the agreement is approved by the court, anyone in the US will be able to find, preview and buy online access to books from these two libraries as well.”

http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2009/07/university-of-wisconsin-madison-and.html

 

Google Library Project Settlement: What It Means for Publishers

SPONSORED BY: Google, The Association of American Publishers, and Publishers Weekly 

EVENT DATE: Wednesday, July 29, 2 pm ET Time – 60 minutes 

“In a webinar first, the leaders involved with the crafting of the Google Library Project Settlement will share with the publishing industry the benefits of the agreement for publishers and authors. If approved by the Court in October, the agreement will create one of the most far-reaching intellectual, cultural, and commercial platforms for access to digital books for the reading public, while granting publishers unprecedented opportunities and protections. Presented in collaboration with Google, The Association of American Publishers, and Publishers Weekly, the web session is a must-attend event for publishers everywhere.”

https://event.on24.com/eventRegistration/EventLobbyServlet?target=registration.jsp&eventid=156420&sessionid=1&key=7EF08275BD027B4FA08C48D022C8087D&sourcepage=register

 

Copyfraud: Poisoning the public domain

“The public domain is the greatest resource in human history: eventually all knowledge will become part of it. Its riches serve all mankind, but it faces a new threat. Vast libraries of public domain works are being plundered by claims of “copyright”. It’s called copyfraud – and we’ll discover how large corporations like Google, Yahoo, and Amazon have structured their businesses to assist it and profit from it.”

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/26/copyfraud/

 

Give Your Input On the Google Book Search Settlement

“Publishers Weekly would like your input on the Google Book Search Settlement (from PW) and they are conducting a survey designed to gather a broad view of how the Settlement is being viewed.. . . . If you’re interested, take a few minutes to answer this brief, targeted questionnaire to help gauge industry opinion on whether the settlement should be approved, modified or rejected. Note that you do not have to have standing in the suit to participate in the survey. Please click on this link when you are ready to take the survey.”

http://lisnews.org/give_your_input_google_book_search_settlement

 


 
Source:  The always excellent Intersect Alert.
The Intersect Alert is a newsletter of the Government Relations Committee, San Francisco Bay Region Chapter, Special Libraries Association

http://units.sla.org/chapter/csfo/csfo.html

Why won’t Amazon let us share eBooks?

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Larry Magid in his “Digital Crossroads” column in today’s San Jose Mercury News (p. c3) asks “Why won’t Amazon let us share eBooks?” and he reports on a couple of library efforts to circulate books via the Kindle.

I’m bothered that Kindle books can’t be loaned out or sold, but that is a solvable problem. The Northern California Digital Library (http://ncdl.lib.overdrive.com) has solved the lending problem for books that can be read on PCs and Macs, or audio books that can be listened to on computers or iPods.

. . .

As far as I know there’s no way to lend a Kindle book, although Brigham Young University experimented with lending out Kindle book readers with books on them. Unfortunately, BYU suspended the program until it hears from Amazon as to whether that’s OK. “Being a library, we will follow the rules and until the rules are clear we will wait,” university spokesman Rogen Layden told the Chronicle of Higher Education.

The University of Nebraska at Omaha has nine Kindles that it loans out to patrons. For awhile, there were funds to purchase books for patrons but the money ran out. Patrons can still borrow Kindles, but if the title they want isn’t on it, they’re out of luck.

. . .

It seems to me that libraries should be able to buy licenses for Kindle books and loan those out to patrons to read on borrowed Kindles or their own devices. . . .

. . .

 

E-books and Cannibals

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Slate.com has an article about the on-going negotiations between book publishers and vendors of e-books (Amazon in particular).  The sticking point?  E-books that cost much less than their hard copy counterparts.

“Authors and book agents also fret that low e-book prices will “cannibalize” hardcover sales, which will “undercut the sales and royalty potential of the printed hardcover,” as one agent puts it. One publisher of a hotly anticipated book is delaying the e-book by six or more months because he fears cannibalization.”

In “Does the Book Industry Want To Get Napstered?” Jack Shafer likens this fight to what occurred in the music industry in years past and comments on the likelihood of a rise in online book pirates.

Update to Rudovsky v. West Publishing Corp.

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Here is an update to a case commented upon earlier here and here.

Law Professors Clear Hurdle in Suit Against West Publishing
Shannon P. Duffy
The Legal Intelligencer
June 10, 2009

A federal judge has refused to dismiss a defamation suit brought by two law professors who claim that West Publishing harmed their reputations when it falsely identified them as the authors of a poorly researched treatise update.

 

The June 4, 2009 Memorandum can be found here.

Google News May Add Wikipedia as a Source

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Really?

According to ReadWriteWeb:

“Some users are being shown links to Wikipedia articles about current events clustered in the lists of sources on Google News, Google confirmed today. Those collaboratively written and edited pages will now sit side by side with professional news reporting.”

Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb definitely takes an optimistic spin on the development:

“People used to say you couldn’t trust anything written on Wikipedia, but they used to say that about the whole Internet. While professional news organizations have professional editors and fact checkers, Wikipedia has far more eyes to mobilize in fact checking.”

The five W’s of journalism will now be six? (Who, what, where, when, why and Wikipedia)

The Mediated Book

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“The Mediated Book”

U of Chicago Law & Economics, Olin Working Paper No. 463

RANDAL C. PICKER, University of Chicago – Law School

Text in hand, we have read books by candlelight, oil lamp and Edison’s incandescent bulb, maybe even the occasional CFL. But even as light itself has changed, the book has remained constant. Until now. With the rise of Google Book Search and ebook readers like Amazon’s Kindle, we have entered the era of the mediated book. We will still browse and read books, but we will do so through a screen.

This is more than just a change in medium. Digital texts are inherently on-demand works, that is, works that can be produced at the instant that a consumer wishes to interact with the text. Physical books historically have been printed in batched runs in advance of demand. This fact of production matters relatively little for the texts themselves, as we typically want books to be fixed, reliable artifacts.

This changes matters for how we finance books. On-demand texts can be financed through advertising. Printing in advance means that embedded advertising has little chance of being relevant at the point of reading. Mediated texts can be updated instantly with new, continuously timely advertising. That advertising also can be personalized for individual readers as the interaction between the mediating device and the reader will create a rich information stream to enhance the relevance of this advertising. That process of course will raise standard privacy issues.

The short history of 20th Century advertising expenditures in the United States is characterized by two facts. First, overall expenditures as a percentage of GDP are relatively constant over time, bouncing around over the last sixty years between 1.5% and 2.5%. The emergence of new advertising platforms – say radio in 1927; broadcast TV in 1949; cable TV in 1980; and the Internet in 1997 – hasn?t altered that essential fact. The emergence of another new platform – advertising-supported books – isn’t likely to expand overall advertising expenditures much if at all. Second, print?s advertising market share has declined steadily, from roughly 55% of advertising dollars in 1935 to a little under 21% in 2007.

Mediated content accounts for a large chunk of that decline. Now books and of course print more generally will be mediated too. And we will get a nice test. Does the decline in the role of print as seen in advertising dollars reflect the decline of words relative to images and sounds? Or is this a story not of content but of technology, in which a mediated platform is a better advertising platform? The rise of the new mediated books will change how we finance books and will change our understanding of the relative roles of content and technology in driving advertising.

 

Source:  LSN Cyberspace Law Vol. 14 No. 32,  05/26/2009

Helium Pricing

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Helium is lighter than air, so a balloon filled with it will obviously keep floating upwards.  Not that it’s a publishing industry strategy, but if you look at the Consumer Price Index as the air, the cost of legal publications is a helium balloon by comparison.

The American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) just released its latest edition of the Price Index for Legal Publications (PDF – requires AALL membership).  The index — actually indexes, there are several publication categories, with an index for each — measures price changes since 2005, the baseline year.  One caveat to the indexes: a few categories, such as Reporters, index only 1 to 3 titles.  This makes little sense in my opinion. You wouldn’t follow IBM’s stock price and call it an “index” that represents the market.  Most categories have a sample of 30 or more titles, though, and here are some of the standout numbers in those categories:

  • Serials (including periodicals) prices have gone up 30.9% since 2005.
  • Academic periodicals (i.e. journals) alone have gone up 34.6%.
  • State and federal codes are up 16%.
  • Supplemental treatises (those kept up to date by pocket parts, supplements, revised volumes, or replacement pages) have gone up 37.7% since 2005.
  • 2007, for whatever reasons, was a particularly inflationary year.  Many of the legal publication categories had double-digit increases, and several went up over 20% in that year alone.

Meanwhile, the Consumer Price Index (CPI) has looked like this since 2005:

year CPI % change
2005 195.3
2006 201.6 3.2
2007 207.3 2.8
2008 215.3 3.8

(Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics)

The CPI increase is even more mellow when you remove food and energy, two of the more volatile factors, from the equation:

CPI – All items less food and energy
year CPI % change
2005 200.9
2006 205.9 2.5
2007 210.7 2.3
2008 215.56 2.3

(Source: BLS)

It’s hard to see how these increases are going to be sustainable, especially when seen against a more standard measure of inflation in the CPI.  If legal publication prices were indeed like helium balloons, they’d be closing in on the altitude where they’d burst.

Long titles of Chinese statutes

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The International Energy Agency book “Cleaner Coal in China” has posted its annexes online. Annex III includes a list of Chinese  statutes related to renewable energy and environmental law. The Annex provides the full title of each statute in English and Chinese, in addition to information on the date of passage, entry into force, and the government organ that issued the law.  Because uniform translations of statutes are uncommon, having the dates and the decree numbers of the government bodies helps locate the full-text in English or Chinese of these laws in databases, such as LexisNexis China Law Database, IsinoLaw, LawInfoChina and Westlaw China. Let’s hope that all publications will provide such complete and useful bibliographic references to Chinese legislation.

Cleaner Coal in China http://www.iea.org/w/bookshop/add.aspx?id=355

Book Annexes: http://www.iea.org/Textbase/nppdf/free/2009/Coal_china2009_annexes.pdf