Technology Review asked for my thoughts on Kindle. Here they are, slightly emended.

No one can doubt that digitization and the Internet together with various factors intrinsic to the publishing industry will radically transform the distribution of books: books can now be transmitted like e-mail directly from writer to reader eliminating nearly the entire traditional supply chain along with much of its cost and infrastructure. Publishers of the future will function much as agents do today, depending upon free lance editors and publicists, and serving their authors as business managers.

Research materials, technical data and the contents of dictionaries, encyclopedias, atlases, manuals, journals and so on, which are often obsolete upon publication need no longer be printed and bound but transmitted on demand to users screens either for a fee per use, by subscription, or free. This process is already far advanced.

But for books that embody the ancient and ongoing dialog that constitutes our civilization and without which we would not know who we are or where we came from or where we may be going, the format of printed and bound sheets is optimal and irreplaceable. I am not a Luddite. I have been responsible for major and disruptive innovations in our industry beginning with the introduction of trade paperbacks fifty years ago. My Readers Catalog in the mid eighties anticipated on line bookselling and I saw the revolutionary implications of digitization soon thereafter. But the market for hand held readers will, in my opinion, be marginal, serving mostly recreational readers and by no means all of them. The inference that because content can now be transmitted electronically books will necessarily be read on electronic screens overlooks such factors as cost,convenience, reliability and human nature as well as the peculiar nature of books. My philosophical friends used to say “for example is not a proof,” but the failure of such devices so far to find a compelling market may suggest more than that the market for them is still unripe because publishers have not released their full digital catalogs. Had the market for e-readers responded as the market for the iPod has, publishers, for all their notorious caution, would by now have responded accordingly.

In Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Lemuel Gulliver visits the airborne island of Laputa, inhabited by so called projectors - what we today would call inventors. The projectors were growing quantities of cucumbers on the plausible but incorrect assumption that because cucumbers absorb heat and energy from the sun they can replace traditional sources of heat and light: biofuels 300 years avant la lettre. Gulliver also wonders why Laputan coats fit so badly until he visits a tailor and finds himself being fitted by quadrant and compass.

The new kindle from Amazon, like its several failed predecessors are Laputan biofuel technology and tailoring. Take for example Kindle’s price of $400: the first book downloaded will cost the reader $410, assuming ten dollars per download. The first twenty books purchased will cost $30 each and the first forty, say a year’s supply, will cost $20 each, by which time the device will probably have failed, been lost, or replaced by a newer, perhaps cheaper model. But if the next version sells for about$160 the price of the new Sony model, amortization will remain an issue. Or consider function. The designers of handheld readers aim to approximate as nearly as possible the characteristics of a physical book -including I am told pages that actually feel like paper and in the case of the new Sony device a leather-like cover. But why bother when the physical book already embodies these characteristic to perfection?

The practical solution to the presentation of digital content is not a handheld reader posing as as a book but an actual library quality paperback that has been printed, bound and trimmed automatically, at low cost in a matter of minutes at point of delivery by a machine like an ATM designed for that purpose. In the interest of full disclosure and not as a solicitation, test versions of this machine sponsored by On Demand Books of which I am a founder, are currently making books in several locations in the US and abroad. A commercial version will be ready later this year.

SCOAP3 -

Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics at UC Berkeley, February 29, 2008. Converting an entire discipline — high energy physics — to open access. Live Blogging.

Rick Luce, Emory Univ.:

Open access has been seen as a solution to the pricing crisis. But over the course of a decade, it has not made much real progress.

Physics and libraries lead information delivery.

1989 - TBL + CERN = web
1991 - XXX@lanl > arXiv pre-prints (i.e., not formally published)
1999 - Open Archives Initiative (OAI)
2003 - Berlin Declaration on Open Access (OA)
2007 - CERN: SCOAP3

Salvatore Mele, CERN

SCOAP3 model.

HEP: what is the world made of? Experimental HEP builds the largest scientific instruments ever, to reach energy densities close to the big bang. (20 percent of literature). Theoretical HEP predicts and interprets the observed phenomenon (half the community but 80 percent of the literature).

Large Hadron Collider, at CERN, about to go online. 27 km circumference, 10,000 workers involved, US$10bn, maintained at -271.25C temperature. 100 million sensors, taking 40 million pictures a second (think about your 8MP camera).

Definition of open access: grant anybody, anywhere and anytime access to the peer-reviewed results of (publicly funded) research … and contain costs.

HEP and Open access: synergy. HEP is decades ahead in thinking open access - for over 40 years, mountains of paper preprint were shipped all over the world. Cost CERN: $1.5M a year. HEP launched arXiv in 1991, the archetypal open archive. Also established the first open access peer reviewed electronic journals.

HEP is a small connected, community (<20,000), publishes a small number of articles (<10,000), in a small number of journals (<10). Reader and author communities overlap. Open access is second nature: posting on arXiv before even submitting to a journal is common practice. No mandate, no debate, no advocacy — author-driven. Author-formatted post-peer-review routinely uploaded. Open access has strong support from LHC communities.

In August 2007, ICFA (Int’l Committee for Future Accelerators) “encourages all concerned parties from all world regions to actively get involved in the scoap3 initiative to assure its success.” In January 2008, HEP Advisory Panel of the U.S. DoE “strongly supports this initiative contingent to its sustainability.”

Journals are on the way to losing — or have lost — a century-old role as vehicles of scholarly communication.

Nonetheless, evaluation of institutes and young researchers is based on high-quality peer-review; they act as keepers of the records. The HEP community needs high quality journals, as our interface with “officialdom.” Implicitly, the HEP community supports this role by purchasing subscriptions, as it continues to read only at arXiv. Subscription prices ultimately make the model unsustainable. As an “all-arXiv” discipline, HEP is at high risk to see its journals canceled by large research libraries (which is already happening).

In the scientific discipline of HEP, 83 percent of articles are published in 6 leading journals. Four publishers publish 87 percent. 57 percent of articles from not for profit publishers.  And yet: full text downloads per user range from 0.6 to 0.1 per year in the core HEP-focussed journals. Physicists do not read HEP journals; they read arXiv.

Eventually all of scholarship will be in this position, reading from open access and community portals.

SCOAP3: A practical approach to publish OA about 50000 articles, produced by a community of 20,000 scientists. SCOAP3 is a consortium that sponsors HEP publications and makes them OA by re-directing subscription money.

Today: funding bodies, through libraries, buy journal subscriptions to support peer-review service and to allow their patrons to read articles. Tomorrow: Funding bodies and libraries contribute to the SCOAP3 consortium that pays centrally for peer-review services. Articles are free to read for everyone.

Six journals cover over 80 percent of central HEP literature. Five core journals carry a majority of HEP content — aim to convert them entirely to open access:  Phys Rev D, J of HEP, Phys Ltrs B and Nuclear Phys B, Euro Phys J C. Those journals that are only a percentage of HEP, are converted on the basis of that percentage to OA, reducing the subscription price accordingly. SWAG of the HEP open access price tag: $15M / year.

How to put everything together: This must be easy, compared to LHC Atlas detector (only one of the detectors at LHC!): 40 funding agencies, $600M excluding staff, with over 1000 contracts. LHC is the largest collaboration that science has ever seen; in contrast, SCOAP3 is peanuts.

SCOAP3 exact yearly cost to be known after a tender is sent to publishers. SCOAP3 financing to be distributed according to a “fair share” model based on the distribution of HEP articles per country, accounting for co-authorship. Make a 10 percent allowance for developing countries that might not be able to contribute to the scheme at the beginning. The model is only viable if every country is on board.

So far, over half of the total necessary has already been pledged or committed as of the end of February 2008 (and moving quickly). Germany, Italy, France, CERN, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Austria, Slovak Rep., Hungary, Romania, Greece, and 15 U.S. institutions.

The U.S. is the largest contributor to HEP authorship. 24.3 percent of HEP articles are affiliated with US institutes. This translates to a total potential SCOAP3 contribution of about $4 Million. Can be supported through re-direction of subscriptions of DoE laboratory libraries; from individual libraries; and from library consortia. U.S. pledges already received from University of California, Caltech, most DoE labs, Johns Hopkins, SLAC.

Once a sizeable fraction of the budget is pledged, SCOAP3 can issue a tender to publishers. Publishers then answer the tender with agreement or provision of proposed contractual agreement. (Journal license packages would be unbundled, and long-term license payments would be reimbursed to libraries.) SCOAP3 next establishes the consortium, decides on governance, adjudicates contracts and commits funds. Contracts with publishers are then signed and funds are transferred to SCOAP3.

The Inside Higher Education link that Peter Brantley recently sent to a list, regarding the open-access Museum Anthropology Review, reminded me of some distinctions I like to make, when given the opportunity, about the culture of journals vs. the cultures of books. It pertains to the drivers of the different products, and the people who populate the two different cultures, within scholarly publishing.

Time past long past, in the mid-90s, I held the lucky position of being the first electronic publisher at a major university press, holding the unlucky responsibility of bridging the divide between the digitizing journals division, and the not-yet-digital books division.

While not as extreme as Snow’s “two cultures” of sciences and humanities, the distinctions between the two cultures of books and journals became clear, as I learned the two enterprises. (Sometime later I’ll address the distinctions between library culture vs. publisher culture, and between technologist culture vs. library vs. publisher culture).

What I learned, in short, and necessarily bluntly:

Journals are about throughput. Books are about craftsmanship.

This is not to demean either publishing variant — they both serve key scholarly needs. But in much of the discussions on these topics, too often “open access” is thought to mean the same thing for every kind of document. Non-publishers in particular often presume that the same rules apply to encyclopedias as apply to monographs, as apply to journal articles. But in publishing, at least, it’s not the case.

Every book is unique. At that time they were each treated uniquely: in editorial treatment, in type and cover design, in marketing plan, in discount schedule, in presumed audience. Each book was a child, nurtured in its embryonic and infant stages, eventually dressed up really nicely as a toddler, and sent out into the world once grown-up.

The acquiring editor had a vested parental interest in ensuring that this special, wonderful thing would get the life it deserved. He or she pressured the Marketing department for appropriate promotion. She or he pressured Production to make sure it was designed appropriately for the content. It was a unique, special, rich, complex, discipline-affecting work of staggering value, at least within a tiny slice of academia. The editors were proud to have acquired it. They wanted to reach the people who would be moved by it. As a consequence, each book was a polished gem.

Journals, however, were all about throughput, driven by the schedule of subscription: every quarter, or every month, the articles were bullied out of editors, who bullied their writers and their reviewers for material. And the articles came through the pipe.

Each article needed to be fit into the specific journal’s style, look, and feel, and turned into something that could be distributed to subscribers and libraries. There are no “acquiring editors” on most small-market, scholarly journals. Each article is one of ten, or twenty, in the issue. It’s not an act of craft — it’s an act of meta-craft. Each article is a small part of what will, overall, improve or sustain the value of the journal.

These two cultures may explain why, at least to my mind, journals were among the first to “go digital.” It made eminent sense: it’s easier to “digitize” the throughput process than the nurturance process.

Journals were already template-based (essentially, CSS-ready). Journals publishers were already greatly focused on automating processes. Economies of scale could make journals production and throughput much more efficient. It also meant that the throughput process could be undertaken by libraries, using smart software (as seen by how many libraries are becoming “journals publishers”).

But I’m not so sure that template-based automated publishing makes sense for book-length scholarly monographs, and other book-length works. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons that e-book standards have been so slow to catch on, in the book publishing industry.

We book publishers each think that we know what is right for “our kind of publication” — each of which is unique, special, and unmatched. We want what is right, in terms of marketing, and promotion, and audience, and significance, for that special child.

Is that so wrong? I don’t think so — in fact, I think it’s a powerful strength we don’t want to lose, as we march toward digital universality.

But it’s also a powerful constraint.

Libraries, who are also about throughput (and organization) of products, are an ideal partner for journals production. I’m not so sanguine about libraries being ideal partners for production of the “special.” They didn’t evolve that way, nor are they optimally staffed for the sort of specific promotion, marketing, and outreach required for each unique book-length publication.

How publishers make things “open access” depends on technical infrastructure, and publication content types, and available skill sets and online savvy. But it also depends on the nature of the product.

That every book-length monograph deserves special treatment is open for debate; that some of them do, is beyond discussion. How our academic culture makes that happen — how the funding, the staffing, the nurturance is enacted — may depend on how we understand the processes and purposes of publishing.

There’s a wonderful piece at Mobile Opportunity that analyzes the slow demise of the hand-tuned mobile application for dedicated stacks.  The punch is in the last paragraph, and there are analogues here between mobile carriers and all other last-gen sectors that market and provide information - publishers, libraries, newspapers.

In the mobile world, what have we done? We created a series of elegant technology platforms optimized just for mobile computing. We figured out how to extend battery life, start up the system instantly, conserve precious wireless bandwidth, synchronize to computers all over the planet, and optimize the display of data on a tiny screen.

But we never figured out how to help developers make money. In fact, we paired our elegant platforms with a developer business model so deeply broken that it would take many years, and enormous political battles throughout the industry, to fix it — if it can ever be fixed at all.

Meanwhile, there is now an alternative platform for mobile developers. It’s horribly flawed technically, not at all optimized for mobile usage, and in fact was designed for a completely different form of computing. It would be hard to create a computing architecture more inappropriate for use over a cellular data network. But it has a business model that sweeps away all of the barriers in the mobile market. Mobile developers are starting to switch to it, a trickle that is soon going to grow. And this time I think the flash flood will last.

If you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m talking about the Web. I think Web applications are going to destroy most native app development for mobiles. Not because the Web is a better technology for mobile, but because it has a better business model.

Think about it: If you’re creating a website, you don’t have to get permission from a carrier. You don’t have to get anything certified by anyone. You don’t have to beg for placement on the deck, and you don’t have to pay half your revenue to a reseller. In fact, the operator, handset vendor, and OS vendor probably won’t even be aware that you exist. It’ll just be you and the user, communicating directly.

Through an announcement from the I-School at UC Berkeley, I was alerted to an essay in the online magazine Bidoun. The essay, by Binyavanga Wainaina, forces one to rethink and reconsider how technology might be truly transformative by placing the emphasis on how people actually live their lives, leveraging how information is already used and shared. It is easy to redesign in one’s mind how people interact with society, but that is too often in its culmination a failing of respect and understanding.

The essay is on the One Laptop Per Child initiative.

You can buy a mobile phone for thirty dollars in Nairobi. There is a nationwide network. But more importantly, there is a nationwide industry of small suppliers that has sprung up to service that network and those phones. Handymen can fix the most broken of casings; streetside entrepreneurs offer you the use of their phone for a few shillings; tens of thousands of tiny booths sell airtime. A guy called Njoroge has a business in Nairobi’s industrial area called “Lord of the Ringtones.” They digitalize and sell ringtones, 220,000 of them a month. Cellphones are the biggest business in Kenya.

And they are transforming culture, even as they spawn new markets. In Nairobi, a student paper caters to kids from across the city’s high schools; submissions are sent in by text message, with articles written in textesewords broken into their smallest possible lucid components. Every few months or so, rumors circulate, breaking some code or other and giving free airtime or texts. Some people have learned to communicate for free with their regular clients or family by coding their ringing: one ring, I am on my way; two rings, I have picked up the kids; three rings, I love you.
…

If you walk into any African market, you see chaos. Things tend not to cross over from the formal side of an African city to the informal side. The two speak very different languages. Often, the formal side, out of its good nature or its panicked guilt, out of a feeling that the giant world of the urban poor is too pathetic to tolerate, pins its hopes and dreams on some revolutionary product. Biogas. A windup radio. A magic laptop. These pure products are meant to solve everything.

They almost always fail, but they satisfy the giver. To the recipients, the things have no context, no relationship to their ideas of themselves or their possibilities. … Whereas a pure product presents itself as a complete solution; a product built to serve the needs of the needy assumes the needy have measured themselves exactly as the product has measured them.
…

There are few useful “development models” for genuinely selfstarting people. I am sure the One Laptop per Child initiative will bring glory to its architects. The IMF will smile. Mr Negroponte will win a prize or two or ten. There will be key successes in Rwanda; in a village in Cambodia; in a small, groundbreaking initiative in Palestine, where Israeli children and Palestinian children will come together to play minesweeper. There will be many laptops in small, perfect, NGO-funded schools for AIDS orphans in Nairobi, and many earnest expatriates working in Sudan will swear by them.

Beautiful piece, on Bob Edwards Weekend, on Pete Seeger, one of my heroes.

He tells the story of Woody Guthrie’s writing This Land is Your Land. I paraphrase:

“A few teachers started singing it, and it just got sung. It was never sold, it was never distributed, it was never played on the radio, it just passed from person to person, across the country. And pretty soon, it had always been around.”

It’s the power of stickiness, in that song’s perfection and simplicity; it’s a slow-viral story of quality passing not by links at the speed of digg, but by voices, and I found it sweet.

Quality finds its audience, one way or another.

Michael Cader was kind enough to alert me to a Forbes story about Nike http://www.forbes.com/sportsbusiness/forbes/2008/0211/082.html

This demonstrates another aspect of a theme I think is the dominant reality of how media is changing, from the 20th century’s “horizontal and format specific” to the 21st century’s “vertical and format agnostic.”

The post explains that Nike used to be organized by type of product (shoes, apparel…) and now is reorganizing by the consumer activity (tennis, running, skateboarding.)

Aside from the inherent logic here for Nike — when you’ve sold somebody tennis sneakers, you are more likely to next sell them tennis shorts, not running or basketball shoes — there’s another important message for publishers as all the world moves from horizontal (what Nike used to be) to vertical.

As they were positioned before, any publisher would find it hard to provide Nike with good content for their web efforts. (How much — and what — do people want to read about “shoes”, or “shorts”?) As they become logically vertical in respect to their audience, they also inherently organize their audience so that they can easily present content to people who will want to see it. And that enables a more logical interaction between Nike and any content creator. As retailers and manufacturers reposition themselves into logical verticals, they become a much better fit for content, and that is good for publishers.

Publishers will shift from horizontal to vertical organization because their own horizontal channels are atrophying, but they will also find growing markets as their content is organized the way the world really is. And that’s vertical.