Are publishers "pervy for paper" and other twisted thoughts about Google's "UnBound," January 18, 2007 at the New York Public Library

The suggestion that it may be OK for us to be "pervy for paper," remaining unduly wedded to the destruction of trees in an age of almost infinite electronic storage capacity and instantaneous internet availability, came from Cory Doctorow, one of the stellar collection of speakers at the "UnBound" conference last Thursday. Initiated and sponsored by Google, and subtitled "Advancing Book Publishing in a Digital World" this day-long event drew a crowd of almost 300 book people to the NYPL's Celeste Barton auditorium. Whatever the commercial or legal motivations of Google in wooing New York's publishing community, the experience itself was unique and valuable. Few in the publishing community have the deep pockets necessary for such an in-demand cast of speakers as Doctorow, Seth Godin (marketeer and author of best-selling business books), Chris Anderson (Editor of Wired), and Tim O'Reilly (visionary Founder of O'Reilly Media), and there are fewer still events where publishers from trade giants like Random House and Pearson would mingle on an equal footing with scholarly publishers large and, like me, very small.

The message that we have moved beyond the "death of the book" debate to a more nuanced understanding of the complementary role of paper and electronic media was echoed by a number of speakers. "The world we are building is one of print and online where one stimulates the other," said David Worlock, an early pioneer in electronic publishing and now Chairman of Electronic Publishing Services (EPS). While reference works and specialized data sources had found electronic delivery a natural environment, the physical book had proved itself as the logical format in which to read 100,000 words of narrative. Cory Doctorow spoke of the "deep emotional attachment to the codex" readers felt, reminding the listeners that "long form narrative has completely different rhythms" from recipe collections or self-help manuals. E-books were, in the main, "useless expressions in trying to bridge format and delivery" (Worlock again) and the primary way in which the devices which had already been bought by early adopters would probably be used were for listening to audio books (a market already growing explosively in the age of the MP3 player).

So what about publishers, the other presumed victims of "death of the book" evangelists? A trembling crowd cringed as Seth Godin warned that this was the time of judgment. By our actions in the next few years, publishers as planetary bodies could either move toward the center of the solar system or become, like Pluto, "downgraded." Angela D'Agostino, Vice-President of Bowker, presented a well selected group of statistical slides that reinforced this message in less emotional ways: the four-fold growth in ISBN registrations logged by Bowker in the last 10 years (62,039 in 1995 to 225,000 in 2005) was driven by a huge expansion in the number of publishers, from around 6,000 in 1995 to 11,000 in 2005. Of these, Ms. D'Agostino noted, 90% were self-publishers taking advantage of services like iUniverse and Lulu.com that used Print-on-Demand and wholesaler-power to bypass the traditional houses.

One consequence of the new channels which online publishing services offered was that the "latent demand for diversity" could be expressed, according to Chris Anderson, Wired's Editor-in-Chief and exponent of the "long tail" hypothesis. He backed up the powerful visuals of his 80:20 distribution curve with some figures: of 41,139 distinct ISBNs registered in 2004 by Neilsen Bookscan for new hardcover publications/release, 26,330 had sold fewer than 99 copies (i.e., 63% of the total sample). 94% of the total sold less than 5,000 copies, with the "average book" selling 500 copies a year. In other words, a market previously distorted by physical distribution bottlenecks and now revealed through "the infinite shelfspace of the internet" was falling into the near universal "long tail" pattern, observed in nature and society.

Whether it is true or not, it was clear that most of the trade publishers in the room guessed that most of their books constituted that top 20% accounting for 80% of the sales. Leave the "long tail" for self-publishers and the academic specialists! As the author panel (featuring J. A. Konrath (Lt. Jack Daniels mysteries), Stephen J. Dubner (half of Freakonomics), and Josh Kilmer-Purcell (top-selling memoirist and drag queen) showed, even the most telegenic and hard-working authors were obsessed by having a "proper" publisher and valued the branding and service that brought. In short, just like academic publishers, most trade authors are in the business for personal prestige and the power of the brand as a certification of quality remains undimmed for both authors and their readers.

In the only comments that suggested even implicit criticism of Google, a couple of speakers reflected on the dangers which amalgamations (even "mash-ups") of content posed to publishing brands. Rather than entrusting digitization to Google Book Search, "we should be creating our own repositories . . . so we have faces," said Tim O'Reilly, referring to C.S. Lewis's moral tale. As Carolyn Pittis, VP of Global Marketing Strategy and Operations at Harper Collins, repeated as she demonstrated the company's impressively complex digital workflow, "monetization of digital content requires content control."

None of this would be cheap. Christoph Chesher of Taylor & Francis, revealing some of the practical experience that STM publishers now have of digital book manufacture and sales, reminded the room that e-books were still almost as costly to produce as the paper product. Saving on printing, paper, and binding costs still removes only 10% from the retail price of a print book, while eliminating physical warehousing and shipping saves another 10%. A major additional cost remained the need to spread bets on the sustainability of different digital book formats; Open E-Book, Adobe Reader, MOBI et al. Tax in Europe on digital books vs. 0% VAT in the UK on print threw other spanners in the works. Sales remained relatively disappointing, although the success of short-term rental experiments (renting 1 day of access for 10% of the full price) showed how students preferred to use academic books online.

"JSTOR and Atypon Agreement to develop Custom Content Delivery Platform." So what does this mean for the ancient world?

The announcement on Friday, January 19, 2007 that JSTOR is planning to migrate its wonderful archive of scholarly content to the Atypon platform is probably good news for the scholarly world in general, and humanities and social sciences in particular. Although I haven't heard many complaints at all, on any topic, from JSTOR users, the ones I have heard have been about technical glitches in the operating system. The Atypon Premium service has been so well-trialed by large publishers like Blackwell (Synergy) and University of California Press (Caliber) that most of the kinks in the display of "regular" books and journals must have been ironed out by now.

Even though Atypon will probably remain in the background, the agreement must be good for their reputation and name recognition among librarians especially. JSTOR's pioneering work on electronic archiving shows that they recognize the importance of sustainability, and the mere fact of their selection of the Atypon platform is a clear recognition that their commercial partner will probably be around for a while.

While the immediate benefits to my employer, ASCSA, are not clear, there is some exciting potential here. Firstly, the current and recent issues of our quarterly journal, Hesperia, (i.e., those outside the JSTOR 3 year moving wall), are hosted on Atypon Link which last year was migrated to the same software platform as Atypon Premium. If both the journal's recent issues and its archive sit on the same base, surely there must be room for integration of some sort between the two. Seamless searching, and a common username and password for individual subscribers, have long been one of our hopes. The engineering that Atypon needed to do to link Anthrosource current issues with their JSTOR forbears sounded as if it was beyond our limited financial grasp. Perhaps the new agreement moves these dreams a little bit closer.

Secondly, perhaps a more flexible publishing platform will help JSTOR meet one of the next exciting challenges for its future; the display of "non-regular" written materials--like handwritten archives, databases, or unusually shaped books. A number of the early publications by the American School of Classical Studies, for example, were in large formats. Printed in Germany until the outbreak of World War II, several of the first reports on the School's excavations at Corinth (started in 1896) were elephant folios in which, peculiarly, text was printed to scale with the large architectural drawings that justified such extra expenditure (resulting, for example, in a hard to display, 36 pt, preface to Bert Hodge Hill's publication of the Fountain of Peirene). Since launching the volumes published in the Athenian Agora series in December 2006, JSTOR's next challenge on behalf of ASCSA is to digitize and display the Corinth series. While I do not know for certain if the Atypon system will make their job any easier, as JSTOR's staff wrestle with how to display these giant books to the standards of integrity they are famous for, I hope that it does.

As I have written elsewhere, the scholarly opportunities that the appearance of the two great series, Agora and Corinth, side by side on the same platform will offer looks sure to provide one of the most powerful proofs of why JSTOR is such a wonderful thing. As the ACLS's recently finalized report on the prospect of a "cyberinfrastructure" for the humanities (mirroring the NSF concept of one for the sciences) makes clear, one of the major barriers facing the development of electronic publishing in subjects like archaeology is the unwillingness of humanities scholars to share their data or otherwise collaborate. The problem of scholars who excavated or "were assigned"bodies of archaeological material to publish earlier in the century, but never produced is one that will be familiar to archaeologists in many countries. However, the lack of communication between sites that have published huge amounts (like Olympia and Delos, or Eleusis and Samothrace) is equally frustrating.

There are often good reasons for such a lack of communication. For example, Olympia has traditionally been excavated mainly by German archaeologists, and Delos by the French. Language and national pride gets in the way. However, even when two projects are run by the same institution, staffed by archaeologists who share a common language and culture, and came from the same graduate schools, academic tribes and "ways of doing things" develop. In the past it often seems to have been a matter of course that "Corinthians" (scholars working on Corinth) and "Athenians" never talked to each other, and spent some effort in devising different ways of doing things and even different names for pottery types.

It is the opportunities to explore across such territorial barriers that makes the potential appearance of the Athenian Agora and Corinth volumes on a common platform so dedicated to cross-searching tremendously exciting. Sure, the JSTOR search will always be fairly fuzzy. And, in the end, we will always be looking at fairly flat page images and fairly dirty OCR. But JSTOR is so well-used, so easy, and so well-liked that it will not be long before serendipitous discoveries of unexpected connections across paper volumes that were previously shelved in different locations in the physical library should surely provoke a renewed interest in contact between the two ancient cities.

After all, even if they have been studied in relative isolation, Corinth and the Agora were intimately linked in antiquity. As we know from the development of pottery styles, the craftspeople of ancient Athens and Corinth kept very careful eyes on what the latest trends in the other great city were. When JSTOR offers Corinth and Agora volumes side by side, facilitated by the mighty Atypon software platform, the scholar crafting their next article or student writing their overdue term paper can follow the Eleusinian highway, skim around the mountains, and check out the "competition" too. And all that done without the two day walk through hot and lawless country!

The Changing Relationship between Authors and Publishers

[This is the text of a talk I gave at the Society for Scholarly Publishing Top Management Round Table, held in Philadelphia on September 7, 2006. It seemed to be well-received, and speakers throughout the rest of the day referred back to the (not original) concept that the functions of Registration, Certification, Dissemination, and Archiving are key distinguishing features of the act of scholarly publishing.]

When thinking about how to introduce this session on “the changing relationship between authors and their publishers,” my first instinct was to turn to an expert, the television psychologist Dr. Phil McGraw, author of Relationship Rescue and other useful manuals. While Dr. Phil’s famous aphorisms like “you’re only lonely if you’re not there for you” may not seem to be directly relevant to this session, the language and emotional intensity of the self-help genre seems familiar. It reminds one of the heated discussions of “what authors want” that librarians, publishers, and information researchers are currently engaged in, with each group of “relationship experts” claiming preferential access to a true understanding. As David Nicholas and his colleagues at University College London write in the July 2006 issue of Learned Publishing, “scholarly communication is an area of astonishing angst, with librarians and publishers fiercely battling it out for territory that has come up for grabs as the result of the digital revolution. If you read the relevant listservs you would think people’s lives were on the line.”

Trying to understand what authors want now and what they will want in the future is clearly important. Not only do our authors provide the content that we publish or otherwise share through new venues like institutional repositories and pre-print servers, but also in most cases they act as its chief consumers. That makes for a complex relationship and, although the analogy between the discussion of “what authors want?” and day-time advice shows can easily be carried too far, I would like to continue in Dr. Phil-mode for a few minutes, and suggest a few sound-bites about ‘relationships’ which seem to me to be relevant to this session.

My first observation is that “All relationships are not the same”
or “Economists are from Mars, Classicists are from Venus.”

As all publishers know, it is difficult and dangerous to generalize about what authors want. And recent surveys reinforce the suggestion that the attitudes of authors to publishers, and their motivations for publishing, vary widely depending on age, nationality, position on the tenure ladder, and many other variables.

One particularly interesting factor shaping the behavior of academic authors is the subject area they work in. The 2005 CIBER study of the attitudes of 5,513 senior journal authors (reported widely in the literature, and available from the University College London website) reveals some broad disciplinary differences at statistically highly significant levels. One part of the study compared authors in three broad areas: arts and humanities; biochemistry, genetics and molecular biology; and economics, business and management. Although the findings are not particularly new, they are methodologically sound. I want to share some of the questions asked and answers given:

• “Speed of publication is very important. Do you agree?” Author attitudes to the importance of speed of publication were very different between the disciplinary groups. The humanists seemed to care little about speedy publication, and economists cared much less than the biochemists for whom speed seemed to be of the essence.
• “Citations are a good way to measure the value of research. Do you agree?” Humanists did not agree, putting much less faith in the importance of citations for measuring the value of research than either of the other two groups. The biochemists placed marginally more faith in citation counts than economists.
• “How dependent are you on various information sources?” The humanists were much more dependent on visiting the library for their research, but hardly ever went to a publisher’s website to obtain information. Biochemists rarely went to a library but were very dependent on publisher sites. Economists were somewhere in between.

That there would be such differences between divergent communities of practice may seem obvious, but the temptation to generalize, make big decisions, and even legislate, from studies of “the glamorous disciplines” like economics or biochemistry without considering the needs and behavior of authors in the arts and humanities, for example, is problematic. As David Nicholas and Ian Rowlands write in the July Learned Publishing article, “subject discipline proves to be an extremely influential variable in the course of this report. This strongly suggests that any ‘one size fits all’ solution imposed across the whole sector is at best likely to be counter-productive.” I hope the three panelists (an economist, a geneticist, and a classicist) will reflect more on this issue.

The second point I want to make is that “Relationships don’t exist in a vacuum” or “It’s not just the two of us.”

However carefully they are measured, the behavior and attitudes of today’s scholars are not necessarily a good guide to what the next generation of authors will want. Not only will the blogging, social networking teenagers of today have a very different relationship to technology, but the mechanisms that drive researcher motivations are being deliberately manipulated as we speak. Scholarship does not exist in a vacuum, and the dramatic policy initiatives now being taken in areas like infrastructure development and tenure review are deliberately aimed at changing author behavior.

One example of this trend is in the area of data sharing; in encouraging researchers to make the raw experimental material behind published conclusions available for re-analysis. As the recent Elsevier Core Trends survey makes clear, 75% of the 6,344 researchers who responded wanted to access other scholars’ data. However, only 52% of them were willing to share their own. This is a classic case of author-reader asymmetry, or Dr. Jekyll and Dr. Hyde, as Michael Mabe has referred to it in a classic 2002 article.

The problem of authors hording data is specifically mentioned in version 7.1 of the National Science Foundation's Cyberinfrastucture report which was published on July 20th with today's next speaker, Chris Greer, as one of the main authors. This document states that “NSF’s data policies will be redesigned to overcome existing sociological and cultural barriers to data sharing and access.”

The movement is not confined to the sciences. Also in final draft, Our Cultural Commonwealth: The Report of the ACLS Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for Humanities and the Social Sciences similarly describes “the conservative culture of scholarship” and singles out the lack of collaborative work on shared data as one of the main challenges facing arts disciplines.

This is a classic case of carrot and stick. On the one hand, the availability of a cyberinfrastructure within which scholars can conduct new levels of computation on large bodies of data will gradually promote a culture of sharing as exciting results show the benefits of such behavior. At the same time, it is clear that future funding from agencies like NSF and NEH will include the requirement of a data management plan, and that scholars who do not share data will be penalized. I hope that Chris Greer will talk more about the role of funding agencies in transforming what authors want.

Every good relationship guru seems to have a bullet-pointed recipe for success. Dr. Phil offers “seven steps to relationship rescue,” so despite my warnings against treating every relationship the same, I want to conclude this introduction by suggesting that there really may be “four secrets for relationship success.” These are the four functions that surveys constantly tell us authors want their publishing partners to serve, whether they are stepping out with a 300-year-old print journal, or gallivanting around with a youthful institutional repository. These four functions are registration, certification, dissemination, and archiving. Let me comment briefly on each.

• “Registration” refers to the desire of authors to claim a discovery as their own and record that it was made by them on a certain date.

• “Certification” implies that authors want to get their research (and by implication themselves) quality stamped in a publishing venue of known quantity and recognized brand. This is a function often discussed in the context of peer review, but I would also suggest that editing, which many publishers still spend a lot of time on, also plays an important role in signaling quality.

• “Dissemination” involves authors letting their peers know what they have done. In some literature the word “awareness” is sometime substituted for “dissemination” but such a passive term does not seem to be to reflect the time and money publishers spend on proactive promotion; things like conference displays. It also should be said that, in authors’ minds, such “dissemination” is not aimed at a wide audience, but involves “narrowcasting” to a close community of like-minded researchers.

• Finally, “archiving” is an important function authors require of publishers, in order that a record of their research is left to posterity. That also involves version-control and a final form of publication that can be cited and always rediscovered.

These four, RCDA, are the Really Crucial Determinants of Advancement that allow scholars to accumulate prestige and enable them to further their careers. While factors like low cost for users, the potential for mixed media, or extra electronic functionality may be “order winners,” tempting authors to share their information through new venues, survey after survey reveal that RCDA are the order qualifiers. And when we hear about an interesting new program, like the Princeton Stanford Working Papers in the Classics repository, we need to ask whether it fulfills the four functions before we can truly classify it as a publishing venue—an issue that I know Brent Shaw (who will speak later in this panel) and his colleagues are wrestling with themselves.

What do authors want now, and what will they want in the future? What value do publishers add, and what new competencies do they need? Is the author-publisher relationship really in need of Relationship Rescue or is it still strong and healthy? As Dr. Phil says, “don’t substitute my opinion for your judgement.” I look forward to the debate.

The UK Heritage Publishing Sector: A Critical Analysis

[The following is the Executive Summary for an abbreviated version of a report I have just finished revising. It is based on the research I did for my MBA dissertation submitted to Oxford Brookes University at the end of 2005. My topic was initially a marketing one, but the more I talked with the publishers working in the UK cultural heritage sector, the more interested I became in the organizational culture aspects of the "publishing field" they were working in. I think the opportunities and challenges these publishing professionals were encountering may be familiar to many people working in non-profit learned societies and institutional publishers.]

This report looks at how ten UK heritage organizations go about their publishing activities. It investigates the ways in which publishing managers attempt to understand, segment and target the market for their titles. Income generation by public bodies has been under intense public scrutiny in recent years, but the importance of the publishing function, and its place in these organizations, has not been adequately explored. A lack of management understanding has led, in some cases, to marginalization.

The primary data in this report consists of semi-structured interviews with publishing managers at national museums and galleries in the UK, as well as at the British Library, The National Archives, The National Trust and English Heritage. The methodological approach taken is described, and results are presented.

The author suggests that these heritage publishers have a unique opportunity to design innovative and successful products by measuring and targeting visitors through their on-site and online shops. However, he also argues that publishing managers’ ability to do so is too often limited by a range of cultural and structural barriers erected by parent institutions.

In conclusion, the author recommends that heritage publishers:

• Ensure that their publishing aims are explicit, that they are aligned with the overall mission of the parent organizations, and that appropriate (and not merely economic) measures are in place to judge success or failure at achieving them.
• Develop a core competence in understanding and targeting visitors, whether they visit online or in person. The opportunity to directly access a large number of potential consumers is a unique one, and while the interests of other stakeholders must be acknowledged, their importance should be secondary.
• Recognize the barriers to communication within and between organizations, and develop strategies to overcome these.

[The original MBA dissertation is archived in the Oxford Brookes University Business School library.]