It may depend on which point you wish to make, however. I happen to agree with the idea that the brands of trade publishers have little meaning to consumers, despite the handful of exceptions (such as Penguin, Dover, and branded reference works such as Frommer’s, the For Dummies series, and Merriam-Webster). And I am all for aggregations. But RH may be looking beyond this. This is because on the Web, aggregation can take place in real time, and what appears to be a would-be stand-alone destination site may really be a starting point for syndication, not to mention an important element of an intellectual property strategy.

To begin with the easy point: the RH Web site is a natural outcome of the proposed legal settlement between various publishers and Google. That settlement marks a significant change in the publishing landscape, from a time when the key split was between works under copyright and works in the public domain, to the settlement terms, where the split is between what is in print and what is out of print. By building an extensive POD site, RH is now asserting that more and more of its titles are in print, thus keeping them under RH’s direct control and away from Google’s agreed-upon right to exploit titles that are out of print. So score one for RH in terms of intellectual property: What was out of print is now in print, and the POD Web site is proof positive.

Once RH asserts its rights, it can then exploit them. One way of doing this is to create a Web site that is search-engine friendly, which will drive traffic to the RH site. But the traffic need not come to the RH home page; the links can be deep inside the site, on the granular level of individual titles (or keywords associated with individual titles). This is real-time aggregation: the Google search-engine results page is the new B&N, the new Amazon, an aggregation created dynamically every time somebody does a search. In the ecology of the Web, a publisher’s own site is simply a loose assembly of parts, each of which is indexable by Google–thus findable and potentially leading to purchases, whether on the RH site or at the site of any other designated storefront. Offline, few publishers’ brands mean much of anything; online, only one brand matters, and that is Google. All the rest of the Web is a basket of keywords, woven together by the act of search.

If all that matters is keywords and the individual products they support, why not build a Web site for each book? Not a bad idea, costs aside, but this raises the question of climbing high in search-engine rankings. Now, the algorithms of search engines can change at any time, but at this time a collection of pieces (books, book descriptions, articles, etc.) has a higher ranking on search engines than would an individual item. The individual book, that is, benefits from the combined search rank of the rest of the site. This is seen clearly with Wikipedia. Test it. Go to Google and search on an obscure item. You will find a link high in the rankings for Wikipedia. You may be the only person who has ever searched Wikipedia for that item, but still the link to Wikipedia is usually among the top four or five on Google. This is because search ranking is cumulative: your search for an obscure item is raised up by the billions of Wikipedia searches on such popular terms as “Obama,” “Britney Spears,” and “George Bush.”

We should not assume that RH does not know how search engines work. RH’s Web site will give a higher ranking to all its books simply by putting them in one place and playing to Google’s current search algorithms. The RH brand may have little meaning to consumers, but it will develop a huge significance for Google. It’s simply wrong to think that the RH Web site is built for people: it’s built for search engines, who then direct people to the ranked sites.

Another reason for a publisher to have its own site is simply to assert control of the information about its products. For all the merits of reader reviews, comments, and the like, few marketers of any product like to have others determine what is said about their products. The RH site gives RH an opportunity to create metadata (including abstracts, summaries, reviews, etc.) about each book, content that may then be syndicated across the Web even if no one ever reads it on RH’s own site. If a particular title is available from Amazon as well as RH, Amazon may choose to use the RH metadata to sell books at its own (that is, Amazon’s) site. This is true of any venue for books, which benefits from free access to the information RH has developed. In this scenario, the RH site is not a Web destination but a toolkit for other sites–not an aggregation in the conventional sense but a repository for others to draw on.

Having taken great pains to assert that the RH brand means little or nothing to consumers–but that having a RH-branded site is valuable regardless–it’s probably worth asking if RH may be undertaking a long-term effort to give meaning to its brand. It couldn’t do this in bricks and mortar; it couldn’t do this when it sold one book at a time. But online, many things change. RH may begin to market subscriptions to certain categories–The Mystery Subscription or The American Politics Subscription. In effect, RH may be taking the earliest steps toward a new kind of consumer publishing, one in which publishers’ brands will matter. Offline, this was impossible; online, anything is possible.

Fundamentally, it’s time to stop thinking of the Web as a universe parallel to bricks and mortar. Offline, there are stores; online, there are evolving dynamic relationships. Offline, aggregation is critical; online, aggregation takes place in real time and sweeps up virtual objects wherever an IP address can be found. Offline, B2B brands matter little to consumers; online, such brands can cleverly insinuate themselves into the value chain. We should not assume that the people at RH are stupid, despite the fact that they are, ugh, book publishers.

     Let’s take a look at audiobooks. For the book publishing industry, audiobooks are one of the few areas of genuine growth. Let me qualify my terms. By “book publishing” I mean consumer or trade books in the developed world and the U.S. in particular. By “growth” I mean industry growth, not the success of a particular title or format or even of any individual publisher. The book industry thus defined is mature, but the audiobooks segment is only in its adolescence. Audiobooks are growing because they reach a new market:  people who want to read books but can’t because for any of several reasons they cannot use their eyes. Among these reasons: visual impairment; a desire to “read” while driving a car; a desire to “read” while working out in the gym, walking the dog, or jogging–any number of reasons when the eye must give way to the ear.

     It is thus unfortunate that digital technology may serve to diminish sales of audiobooks in some channels, though I think that digital audio is likely to help build the market overall (think of audiobooks on wireless phones). In the library sales channel, however, digital audio may cannibalize some sales. This is because the combination of audiobooks on digital compact disks and the iPod will drive up usage of audiobooks in libraries, putting downward pressure on demand for purchases in retail outlets (including online bookstores).

     Some background. The audiobook industry developed very differently in the trade and institutional market. Trade sales have largely been of abridged titles published by the very same publishers that publish the corresponding print books; library sales are more likely to be for unabridged titles, and in libraries a new group of publishers, led by Recorded Books, Inc., has sprung up. I would add, though I have no hard evidence of this, that trade sales seem slightly tilted toward younger (though not youthful) listeners, and those listeners include a higher proportion of men than institutional listeners (more likely older and female). All this is changing now, however, as the characteristics of the two channels are converging. The convergence is significant in that the two channels, which were formerly complementary, are increasingly rivalrous.

     A peculiarity of audiobooks is that the analogue format (books on tape) is still very strong, though analogue media has virtually disappeared for music (partly offset by resurgent sales of LPs among passionate music buffs). Tape works well for audiobooks because tape creates a good bookmark. Try it and you will see. I listen to audiobooks on tape, on CD, and on an iPod and have found that tape is still the most convenient (CDs are at the bottom).

     So step into your time machine and enter a public library 4-5 years ago, where you seek the audiobook section. There you have a selection of unabridged books on tape, with a trifling number of CDs. You decide to check out a title, take it home, and begin to listen. If you listen an hour or two everyday, you might finish a book in two weeks. I suspect most listeners take longer. When they are done, they return the tape to the library, check out another, and repeat the process.

     Of course, the library may not have a desired tape on the shelf. With every instance of circulation taking two weeks or more, from time to time the patron cannot find what he or she wants and turns instead to a local bookstore or perhaps to Amazon. More recently some patrons turned to Audible for downloads. The library, in other words, is not a comprehensive source of supply in part because the time it takes to listen to an audiobook restricts the utility for other patrons of the library’s inventory.

     With digital CDs, abetted by an iPod, the library’s inventory is likely to experience higher utilization. Consider this example. A patron goes to the library and checks out one, two, or more audiobooks on CD. Arriving home, the patron rips the CDs to a computer and synchs with an iPod. The next day the CDs are returned to the library, where other patrons in due course check them out–and the cycle repeats. The inventory utilization drops from two weeks or more to as little as less than one day. The need to shop at the local bookstore or online has been diminished a bit. Thus libraries carrying digital media potentially compete with other sales channels and cannibalize some sales.

     If this became widespread, it could not stand. In time publishers’ compensation for audiobooks in libraries will likely parallel that for videos at Blockbuster and Netflix, with payment to publishers being linked to the frequency of rentals. (Seth Gershel made this point to me concerning audiobooks several years ago.) Or other marketing schemes can be concocted, probably including switching the firm sale of a tape or CD to a library to a subscription-based model–anything, that is, that restrains sales cannibalization.

     Another implication of the change to digital CDs in libraries is that more trade publishers will want to control library sales directly, the better to manage the cannibalization issue. There are signs that this is already happening. Trade publishers will also be more aggressive about acquiring the rights to unabridged audio, rights that at this time are sometimes retained by literary agents, who then forge a license directly with a library audio publisher. The growing competition between trade and library sales for audiobooks will thus spawn a consolidation of rights ownership under a single brand manager–that is, the originating publisher of the book.

     This is not to say that publishers should not publish audiobooks; it is not to say that audio should not be in digital form; and it certainly does not mean that publishers should forsake libraries. What it does mean is that the digital edge cuts both ways, and that publishers have to think strategically, with an eye toward the longer-term implications of new tactics. The time to introduce Blockbuster-like pricing is not after the horse has been stolen from the barn but before the barn gets built.

     The moral of this tale is that profitable strategy is neither digital nor analogue; it is not about whether information should be free or paid; it is not about what is cool; and in its winning form by definition it cannot be what everyone else is doing. Profitable strategy is about identifying new markets and creating new value. Digital audiobooks can lead to a winning strategy, but without a thoughtful strategy, digital media giveth and digital media taketh away.

The Beatles’ economic fortunes exploded when Brian Epstein took over the band’s management. Although Epstein’s history is no secret, it is perhaps underappreciated that he came to the Beatles from his role as the manager of his family’s record store. Records: he sold records, physical instantiations of copyrighted material, which were sold one by one. It was the orientation of the record salesman that Epstein brought to the Beatles. Everything that he directed them to do was intended to promote the sale of records.

It was to sell more records that Epstein booked the Beatles on exhausting tours, first in Great Britain, later around the world. The tale of the Beatles’ years with Epstein, wonderfully described in Bob Spitz’s biography The Beatles, is the tale of the whirlwind, of hotel rooms, security guards, and waiting limousines. For the Ed Sullivan Show, which catapulted the Beatles to a new level of fame in the U.S., Epstein accepted a small sum of money in exchange for premier billing–all to sell records. Spitz reports that it is doubtful that the Beatles ever made any money on the sale of Beatles paraphernalia (lunch boxes, wigs, dolls, etc.). Although this clearly was not Epstein’s design, the manager’s attention was elsewhere: how to promote his clients to sell records.

A peculiar fate befell the Beatles, however, in that they, like a very small number of other musicians, found it impossible to continue the touring to promote their records. Touring became dangerous and, playing in huge stadiums to screaming teenage girls, artistically unrewarding. The Beatles thus left the road, risking their business model, as the essential relationship between live performance and the sale of records was broken.

Famously, the Beatles responded by inventing a “live” audience: the first thing we hear on “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” is the sound of the invented audience. The imaginary audience did not contribute to the Beatles’ economy, however. That economy continued to be based on the sale of records. It was the Beatles’ good fortune that their fame was such that they no longer had to go on the road to promote the sale of their intellectual property. Perhaps it was just as well: when asked about the relative benefits of a live performance over a recording, John Lennon remarked, “Well, I’m a record man myself.”

The Beatles, in other words, were very much recording artists. And they knew it and played with this aspect of their identity by calling attention to the recording medium. Thus, for example, the song “Revolution” was recorded twice at two different speeds, calling attention to another kind of revolution: not only the political revolution of the song’s lyrics but the revolutions per minute of a record (45 rpm for the faster version released as a single, 33 1/3 rpm for the slower version that appeared on The White Album). And there was a third revolution as well, “Revolution #9,” whose repetition of the song title sounds like a broken record. The broken record motif later reappeared in “I Want You,” which ends after much repetition with the sound of a phonograph stylus being removed from a record. Or there is the scratchy sound of an old record at the beginning of “Honey Pie” and any number of other references to records and media. People who have only recently come to the Beatles in the age of digital downloads and the iPod may not pick up on the recording metaphor that is woven through the Beatles’ career.

If the Beatles represent one end of the spectrum of business models for music (all efforts support the sale of the recording), on the other end is the Grateful Dead, whose business strategy invited free copying in order to sell tickets to concerts and branded paraphernalia. Former Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow has posited that the Dead business model will ultimately prevail for all artists. This may or may not be true, but Barlow does not explain how this would have worked for the Beatles, who were simply too popular to venture before a live audience. The Beatles were recording artists, the Dead brand marketers.

It would be wrong to assert that creative individuals such as the Beatles would never have developed into artists in the absence of a copyright regime. But it would also be wrong to say that the absence of a copyright regime would not have made a difference. What that difference might have been, we will not know, until another group as talented as the Beatles appears, operating in an “information wants to be free” environment. We are still waiting.

Recently, the University of Pittsburgh Press has announced that it is working to make its entire back catalog available online, free of charge, through Pitt’s University Library System (ULS). New titles will be added to UPP Digital Editions, part of ULS’s D-Scribe program, after the books have been in print for two years.

The reason this is extraordinary is that it violates the basic economic principle of book publishing, namely, you lose money on frontlist and make money (sometimes) on the backlist. Pittsburgh’s program will over time (it won’t happen overnight) erode backlist sales, reduce the Press’s income, and thus make it more difficult for the Press to underwrite new books. (I don’t know the specifics of the Press’s financial situation, but if it is like most other university presses, part of its operations are subsidized by its parent institution. Having said that, revenue from book sales, especially of the backlist, is surely part of its overall economic picture.)

Backlist sales are the bedrock of book publishing economics, and they are tied to an important corollary: Good books backlist, bad books disappear. (Yes, the term “backlist” is a verb as well as a noun. Publishers are not always the most zealous guardians of the language.) It may be that Pittsburgh is not concerned about the erosion of backlist sales because they don’t have any. If so, then what appears on the surface to be an open access initiative may in fact be the outcome of undistinguished editorial judgment.

There is a fundamental difference between book sales and the subscription sales of academic journals. Most revenue for journals are for current issues. Thus many journal publishers now make their backlists or backfiles, as they are called, open access after six months or one year; sometimes this form of open access is mandated by funding agencies. The revenue loss to such journal publishers is likely to be negligible. The economics of book publishing and journal publishing are precisely the reverse of one another. It would make more sense for a book publisher to post new books for free online for six months and then charge for them thereafter. (The ratio of frontlist to backlist sales varies by publisher, subject category, author, and publishing segment.)

This is not to say that open access cannot be used to help to sell books. One of the real innovators in this regard is a contributor to the Publishing Frontier blog, Michael Jensen of National Academies Press. NAP has done extensive testing of the relationship between open access material and the sale of books, whether in print or digital form. Shrewd publishers can and should learn from NAP. I advise all my clients to test various forms of open access as a form of product sampling. Unfortunately, there is no evidence that Pittsburgh has put into place the various marketing techniques that have enabled NAP to experiment with open access and still manage its operation responsibly.

The AAUP uses the word “innovation” in its story about Pittsburgh. Wrong word, I believe. Somewhat paradoxically, the Press’s initiative is a bet that digital media don’t matter. I believe the opposite, that digital media matter very much and that the flirtation with hybrid models that marry print to electronics is a useful but transitory phase; in the end (I won’t predict when that will be) all publishing will be digital. Pittsburgh is counting on print and electronics occupying parallel universes forever, where one medium does not effect the other (except, perhaps, positively, but this is wishful thinking). This is myopia, not innovation.

The University of Pittsburgh Press has started down the slippery slope. While it may receive some support from its parent now, over time that support will grow until all the costs for the Press must be covered by the parent. The parent may then decide, as many universities have already determined, that the support for the Press is too great. Support gets cut back, the number of books published then drops, and scholars everywhere lament the fact that there are fewer and fewer outlets for their work. No one should be surprised when commercial publishers increase their presence in academic publishing, picking off the most profitable programs. This is not a way to build a university press, nor is it a harbinger of a bright future for scholarly communications. Open access is not an innovation but one aspect of a complex marketing program. I wish the University of Pittsburgh Press had such a program in place.

CC+ is a protocol providing a simple way for users to get rights beyond the rights granted by a CC license. For example, a work’s Creative Commons license might offer noncommercial rights. With CC+, the license can also provide a link by which a user might secure rights beyond noncommercial rights — most obviously commercial rights, but also additional permissions or services such as warranty, permission to use without attribution, or even access to performance or physical media.

This is a radical proposition, though it was implicit in CC from the beginning.

Why radical? Because CC is often (and mistakenly) thought to be part of the “information wants to be free” culture, but it actually is more of an administrative service, one that makes it easier to clear copyright permissions. Many (perhaps most, perhaps all) users of CC notices put their works onto the Internet with what is in effect a prenegotiated copyright permission: You can use this material provided that you cite the author, don’t benefit economically from reuse, and don’t distort it through improper editing (CC has several different licenses, of course). This is great, and I am all for it. It saves buckets of time and money, as anyone who has ever had to clear copyright permissions knows. (My first, and most tedious, job in publishing was as the rights and permissions editor at Rutgers University Press.)

Prenegotiated licenses have other benefits, however. It’s sometimes nice to know what something costs without having to request permission; and for the holders of copyrights, it can be useful and administratively inexpensive to announce these costs and the authorized uses.

The CC addendum essentially brings proprietary content into the world of Web 2.0. The holder of a copyright can publish the rules of engagement, and prospective users and reusers of copyrighted material can, with a single mouse-click, get the authorization to rip, slice, dice, augment, diminish, mash up, and whatever, provided the particular use is authorized (and, in some instances, properly paid for). Information does not have to be free to do a mash-up; it simply has to be available for use in a convenient form, which could include the exchange of money. Hence the value of the new CC addendum: It creates the contractual framework to make the flow of information easier.

There are two important issues here. The first is what I would call the libertarian (lowercase “l”) dimension: Who owns the intellectual property in the first place? While many commentators focus on users’ rights, producers have rights, too, though they are sometimes enforced in ham-handed ways by overzealous trade associations. If a producer grants users the right to reuse copyrighted material, and the users agree with the terms, what’s not to like? The second is economic: By providing a means for the creators of copyrighted material to authorize and benefit from the reuse of material, more capital will be invested in the creation of material, and when it comes to intellectual output, more is always better.

It’s wonderful to see that Creative Commons is at last becoming creative. We should expect to see a number of follow-on developments, such as a series of templates for commercial uses and fees (e.g., how to use characters in fan fiction). In time we are likely to see a book published under the title How to Profit from Creative Commons. And it will be published with a CC addendum.

Living with me, her first reaction was to get books from Project Gutenberg. We found one of Danton’s famous speeches, translated into English, in a book of speeches, as well as several other useful books about the French Revolution that included nice sections on Danton. When she mentioned this to her teacher, he insisted that there must be recent work on this subject and that she should find it. Our local library and her school library have quite limited collections, but she did eventually identify a couple of recent books that the local library supposedly had, only one of which was available.

One final piece of background is that my daughter, who loves to read, does so fairly slowly and it is very difficult for her to skim printed text. Working with etexts is much easier for her since she can use search functions to help her spot what she needs. Trying to find useful pieces of information in a large, paper book is always an exercise in frustration for her.

What really struck me is the contrast between how easy it was to find public domain etexts and how difficult it was to find, using local public resources, relevant modern material in paper form and that modern, citable, content (books) simply wasn’t available in electronic form. Or rather, it might be available if we were willing to pay for an entire book, but that seemed like overkill for a homework assignment so we didn’t pursue that path. I suppose what we really wanted was the equivalent of the local public library, but for electronic texts. She had no desire or need to “own” the book and I didn’t want to buy one or more books (although I would have been willing to spend a few dollars to “rent” access for a time).

 Despite knowing all the reasons why setting up the ebook equivalent of the local library is hard, it just seems like a shame to me that modern analyses of Danton in electronic form either don’t exist, weren’t easily found, or are out of our reach.

It’s really time we put some science into science publishing.

There is a lot that is right (meaning well-argued, credible, and substantiated) about OA, but here is a partial list of what is not. For starters, there is the repeated insistence that librarians are stupid. The form this assertion takes is to argue that librarians will continue to pay for something that they can get for free. Yes, you heard that right. A professional librarian, working for a research university, is responsible for purchasing academic journals. Now let us imagine that some of those journals are available at no cost to that library or any other, but the librarian, knowing full well that there is no longer a need to pay for the publications, continues to write checks to the publishers. How did we reach this preposterous conclusion? Because we note that the “evidence” (Orwell would love this) doesn’t show any cancellations of journals that currently have at least a partial OA policy. What is ignored here is the simple fact that it is too soon to say. OA is a new thing, it is rarely implemented across the board for any publication, and the services that provide it are not always deemed to be reliable (e.g., experimental institutional repositories), at least not yet. Apparently the point of this argument is to lull publishers into a false sense of security (“Make your publications OA and nothing bad will happen”), so it is not only librarians who are deemed to be stupid but publishers as well.

It’s not enough that librarians are stupid, but with similar logic it has been concluded that authors are mostly law-abiding. (Who would have thought otherwise?) This nutty argument is harder to untangle. It’s a demonstrable fact that most authors of research publications have not shown much interest in OA. This could change, but it hasn’t to date. (And, I hasten to add, that “most” is not the same thing as “all.”) There is clear evidence here: Many researchers work at institutions that provide free OA repository services (DSpace is the best known, Digital Commons is the most used), but only a fraction of the institutions’ output has been deposited into these repositories. One way to change that would be–surprise!–to have the senior administration of these institutions mandate that faculty deposit papers with OA services. Thus in a survey conducted by Alma Swan et al, it was found that 81% of researchers say that they would comply with mandates. Now, what does this prove exactly? More than 81% of Americans comply for the most part with the U.S. Tax Code, but that is hardly indicative of support for the current administration or the way tax monies are spent. What it does reveal is a healthy respect for the punitive powers of The Man. In OA circles, however, a forecast compliance with a mandate is viewed as the equivalent of democratic support.

A more complicated item, and one that is more susceptible to reasoned argument, is what is called the Open Access Advantage. No, this is not a frequent flier program but the notion that authors who work in OA formats are more likely to be cited than authors who work in proprietary or “toll-access” media. Superficially, this may appear to make sense; after all, if everyone can read an OA article, surely it has a better chance of getting cited than an article that has more limited distribution by virtue of the constraints imposed by subscription barriers. On the other hand, an article in the toll-access Lancet is much more likely to be cited than an article deposited in a no-name repository, with only Google keyword searching enabling the poor, already overburdened reader. Once again we find Alma Swan behind this.

The problem with the alleged Open Access Advantage is, first, it entirely ignores the overall marketing context of any particular work. The fact is that some OA venues are brilliantly marketed; I would point to the Public Library of Science in particular. But marketing is not a constant; it varies journal by journal, issue by issue, and article by article. Swan’s analysis does not take these variables into account.

More fundamentally, though, we have here the common but huge mistake of many people who have not been thinking about the dynamics of the Internet for a long time, and that is the unstated belief in “once and for all computing.” This paradigm–once and for all–assumes that the Internet has arrived, that its current state pretty much resembles its future state. (A corollary to this error is the assumption that we control the network, when in fact, for better or worse, the network is largely and increasingly independent, with its own properties, almost an emergent life form.) Better to think of the current stage of the Internet (switching metaphors) as the second inning of a nine-inning ballgame. Before this game is over, entirely new and as-yet undreamed-of ways to call attention to content on the Internet will arise, and whatever advantage OA may hold today (in some circumstances for some articles) will be handed off to other publishing forms–which may, in time, hand them back to OA. The wheel goes ’round; where it stops, nobody knows.

Advocates of toll-access or traditional publishing should take no comfort from this. While many of the arguments for OA are offered in bad faith or with the best of intentions but the worst of reasoning, there is one stubborn fact about the Internet and OA, and that is that it is very, very easy for someone to connect to the Internet and upload content. OA is thus at a minimum an inevitable and unstoppable phenomenon. The justifications for it may be doubtful, but the fact of it is indisputable.

I was somewhat startled, however, to stumble upon this comment in support of SCOAP3, which appeared on the popular liblicense listserv:

Of course SCOAP3 would also benefit non-contributing institutions and the general public.

As a member of the general public, I want to thank the people and institutions behind SCOAP3 for working to make research articles in high energy physics available to me. I look forward to similar initiatives from the brain surgeons and rocket scientists.