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.

What do you look at online? Speaking for myself, my surfing day is divided between the two wings of Internet content, almost in a parody of CNN’s old Crossfire show: sites such as that of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal (on the Right), but also sites such as Slashdot.org and Publishing 2.0 (on the Left). Still and all, these choices seem too stark, out of touch with the reality of how content gets created and brought to our attention. Unlike computers, the world of content (and the society that creates it) is not binary. The choice between UGC and editorial publishing is not a real one.

One would be hard pressed to find a traditional publishing form that is not experimenting in some way with the tools of what has become known as Web 2.0. Many old-line newspapers now sport an expanded stable of columnists, but they are called bloggers and appear online exclusively. Returning to The New York Times, I was surprised to see myself now waiting as eagerly for new posts by blogger Stanley Fish as I have long waited for the columns of Thomas Friedman, Paul Krugman, and David Brooks. Stories now routinely come with a “comments” section, which typically undergoes a wee bit of moderation to weed out commercial messages, pornography, and overly exuberant spirits. Traditional book publishers now post sections, and in some instances the entire text, of their publications online to stimulate book purchases; not unusually, these product samples are accompanied by user comments. As Bob Stein of the Institute for the Future of the Book likes to point out, content inevitably will be embedded in a conversation, for which the online medium has clear advantages over print. The original publication may often be an instance of editorial publishing, but the commentary is likely to be UGC. The binary split is disappearing; just about everything now is a hybrid.

Over on the UGC side, there are a great number of techniques to refine the raw output of the solitary user. Online communities vote on the merits of a particular post almost as though content were running for office. To get a comment to the top of the pile at Digg is a challenge. It helps to have been around a bit and to know how the game is played. On Wikipedia every new contribution goes through a series of checks, which attempt to weed out fraud, self-interest, simple knuckleheadedness, and pranks. It is probably no longer enough to say that content may be user-generated; increasingly it is community-refined.

Of particular interest to me is what I will call “membership publishing,” an umbrella term for the phenomenon of “provostial publishing,” which serves as the title of this post. We can imagine a club or community that seeks to qualify its members. Not everyone gets into the Rotary Club or the Boy Scouts; very few have a chance to become members of elite institutions such as Amherst or Cornell. A membership community has a gatekeeping committee and attempts to ensure that all who are invited to join are distinguished representatives. In the academic community (the publishing segment that most interests me) the iconic gatekeeper is the provost, among whose many tasks is the appointment of faculty. While there are always some who will challenge a provost’s decisions, the merits of the faculty speak for the institution as a whole. Insofar as the faculty serves as authors, their publications represent the provost’s choices.

With the growth of institutional repositories, which aim to collect the output of research faculty, a new model of publishing is emerging. It would be wrong to think of the output of research faculty in the same way that we think of the comments on Digg or even in Wikipedia. Anyone can contribute to Digg, but very, very few can place a document into the repository at MIT. Research faculty are experts; some of the contributors to Wikipedia may be experts as well, but there is no gatekeeper, no provost, to vouch for them. So this is UGC, but it is expert UGC.

What it is not, except in special instances, is an aspect of editorial publishing. Faculty may deposit preprints, working papers, conference presentations, whatever into an institutional repository, but it is entirely possible that no editor has reviewed the material first. (There are also instances where the faculty deposits papers after they have gone through traditional peer review by a journal or book publisher, so-called Gold Open Access publishing.) If the faculty is a community of experts, their output is likely to be superior to that of anyone with an opinion and a keyboard. On the other hand, if the faculty deposits material that has not gone through traditional editorial procedures, then their work has not had the benefit of those procedures–assuming, of course, that one values the work of editors and peer review, as most members of the academic community do.

Provostial publishing, then, is publishing where a gatekeeper, in this case the provost, chooses the authors but does not choose the works. Traditional editorial publishing is where an editor chooses the work. In UGC the choice of the author is made by the author him or herself–but this is not much of a choice, as we all believe our own thoughts are worth something. The more important choice for UGC is one of venue: Do I post this to my Facebook friends? to Digg? to Slashdot? to my blog?

We are likely to see a huge surge in provostial publishing in the years ahead. Part of this is simply a function of the growth in research: all that research will yield outputs. Another part is the increase in the number and sophistication of institutional repositories and also the policies that govern them, which in some instances include mandates (by the provost’s office, of course) for faculty to deposit papers. More and more publications will bear the brand not of traditional publishers (Elsevier, Wiley, Random House) but of parent institutions (Harvard, Princeton, the University of Chicago). These brands will come to compete in new ways in the marketplace, likely crowding out brands of lesser distinction.

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~sergey/booklist.html

And thought: Stanford, Sergey…. and clicked on it. And yes, it’s a 1998 looong list of “Sergey Brin’s favorite books,” from his Stanford days. His 1998 Web page is accessible from that page, where it becomes clear this long list is something he used for “Extracting Patterns and Relations from the World Wide Web,” given at the WebDB Workshop at “EDBT ’98.” His home page is a charming little thing, fresh with the newness of the Web.

And so now, I link to it here. Not like Sergey needs links — but it is an example of the “search net” phenomenon. Because I was using four terms and a phrase, my specificity enabled serendipitious discovery, of a substantive chunk of content.
This is worth thinking about by publishers, because increasingly, searchers/researchers are using strategies like I did, to make sense of the density of the underbrush of the abundant Web. If that’s the case, and if encouraging “stumbling upon” our books is a good thing, then it behooves us to make our content indexable, one way or another.

At the National Academies Press site, we include, on the first page of every chapter (the books are presented page-by-page) , the full unformatted text of the first 10 and last 10 pages of that chapter. We include key phrases extracted from the chapter. And by doing this, we provide a huge, juicy target for search engines to slurp up.

Consequently, if someone’s putting in three, four, or five terms into Google or MSN or wherever, and those terms happen to be in our chapter, then we’ll show up in the search results, and get that wee bit of traffic. And a wee bit of opportunity to sell that book to someone who might be interested in it (note: only 0.24% of visitors currently buy anything from our site).

But those terms would almost certainly not all be in the book’s metadata, or in the publisher’s catalog blurb, or in the table of contents. It’s only openly indexable content that will provide a big enough pool of possibilities to match ever-more-esoteric and -specific search strategies: ‘net casting of a paragraph or a document, selectable groups of terms, phrase-pair searches, etc.

I’m still convinced that for small-market publications in particular — the kinds of books that are generally hard to justify significant promotion of — openly indexable content is a precondition for survival, in terms of long-tail backlist success in the scholarly environment. People find something, link to it, and thus promote it for free, for us, in the venues that care about that publication.

This theme pertains a bit to my comment on Joe’s Baby and Bathwater post, on the University of Pittsburgh Press’s digital library experiment, though alas, I don’t think that UPP’s library provides any indexable content. Even rough OCR would help, and I hope it’s part of their plan, eventually.

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.