I think most of the E-Ink ebook readers in the market are doomed to failure. They don’t do enough, and what they do, they do poorly. The world gave up on monochrome screens some ten to fifteen years ago; even the New Yorker and the Wall Street Journal started printing color pages about then. E-Ink displays are kind of like dancing bears — it’s not great dancing, but it’s remarkable that it dances at all. Amazon’s Kindle is an interesting exception, because it’s not really about reading. It has several features which distinguish it:

• An always-on no-subscription-fee Sprint EVDO connection. This means that it’s always connected (or at least tries to be that way), and that connection is part of the sale price, not something extra to sign up for. No WiFi hotspots to hunt for, pay for, and sign on to. How much is Amazon paying for this? I’m told that access to Sprint’s EVDO network for unlimited data transfers is on the order of $50/month — surely Amazon has negotiated a deal here…
• But still — how do they pay for that EVDO? Perhaps with the fact that the Kindle serves as an always-connected consumer-carried sell-me-something terminal for Amazon. Think of this: the consumer carries around with them a sales terminal which only connects to your store, and makes buying something very very easy. What’s more, it’s big enough that it preempts any other retailer’s similar store-in-your-pocket. They sell one big flat-screen TV and they’ve recovered the cost of the Kindle. Do they give a cut to the EVDO provider?
• Amazon has moved agressively into the book market, both with paper books and then with ebooks, buying both Mobipocket and Audible.com, the big seller in the spoken book market. And any of these can be purchased from the Kindle (and then “read” on the Kindle). Book purchases are not an important factor for Amazon here, but the fact that it’s a book reader is. This gives the consumer an excuse to carry it around, a critical factor for success as a impulse-purchase terminal.
• The Kindle has an “experimental” web browser, email support, a keyboard so that you can type into it. In fact, it’s sort of like a butterflied laptop with a bad screen — looks a lot like those old Alan Kay DynaBook mock-ups. So Amazon is pushing into the “Internet tablet” space; this isn’t really just an ebook reader. The apps are not great, and the keyboard is pretty stiff, but at least they are there.

In short, I think the Kindle may have a future, despite its technical shortcomings, because it directly supports Amazon’s very agressive selling (books and otherwise) business plan. I expect the Kindle to evolve as technology does, perhaps a bright color OLED screen, possibly with a touch surface, coming eventually. This seems to be an example of a perceptive and forward-looking business strategy, perhaps somewhat hampered by relative inexperience in consumer product design.

Note the similarities to the iPhone: always on, point-of-sale terminal for iTunes music and movies, agressive moves into the music and movies businesses, Internet tablet apps. Different design points, to be sure; Apple had to go with bright color to sell movies, and “it’s a phone” is the excuse for the consumer to carry it. I wonder if the bright color screen, plus the woeful state of current battery technology, dictated a pocket-sized phone rather than a larger tablet — would a big screen wear out a small battery too quickly? MacBook Air and iPhone 3G reviews suggest as much. Or was the “phone” necessary as the excuse for the consumer to carry it?

The competition isn’t exactly head-to-head here; one can’t buy soap or basketballs from Apple (yet). However, as a point-of-sale terminal, the iPhone has a number of differences from the Kindle, most of which seem to be advantages:

• Both products have high-dot-pitch screens (163 dpi for the iPhone, 167 dpi for the Kindle), which gives a crisp sharp detail to the edges of text. However, the Kindle screen is limited to 8 (4?) shades of gray, and relatively slow to update (to save on battery life), while the iPhone appears to be 32-bit color, and updates quickly enough to play movies and games. In addition, the iPhone screen includes a backlight, so it can be read in the dark without additional lighting. Perhaps most importantly for a retail device, the iPhone can display mouthwatering full-color alpha-blended photos of products for sale, while the Kindle has to settle for that 2- or 3-bit grayscale. The iPhone’s screen is a fair bit smaller, 320×480 (3.5 inch diagonal) versus 600×800 (6 inch diagonal) for the Kindle.
• The “excuse” of buying a phone, rather than buying a dedicated ebook reader, is much more palatable for many many people. As I explained elsewhere, a dedicated ebook reader competes with much cheaper and more durable book technology, while buying a cell phone has become a standard practice for many people, and is subsidized by the phone companies. What’s more, Apple has reversed the income flow for connectivity that Amazon must be paying; the consumer pays Apple (indirectly through the phone company) for connectivity, rather than the other way around! Beautifully done, Apple.
• The iPhone fits in a pocket; for most pockets, the Kindle doesn’t.
• The iPhone is designed as a communication device; the Kindle isn’t. This seems to me to be a huge advantage for the iPhone; human beings are natural communicators, and they flock to anything that gives them cheaper/better/different ways of talking with each other.
• A consumer can “watch TV” on the iPhone (which should speak for itself).
• The iTunes App Store opens up the iPhone to other uses, and to other retailers. Fictionwise has already released an app to sell books in eReader format from their bookstore. Stanza connects a reader to a huge free backlist of out-of-copyright (or open source) books, stories, and articles. A variety of free applications connect readers to news stories and RSS feeds, and the full-color standards-compliant Web browser is there for other sites. You can even shop Amazon from your iPhone. Where’s the Kindle equivalent of this?
• What’s more, the App Store creates an incentive for developers to imagine and then create new uses for the iPhone. This makes it more useful to consumers, thereby increasing sales. Nice market penetration strategy. Apple keeps 30% of the sales price for their efforts, and sends the other 70% off to the developer.
• The iPhone handles HTML, PDF, Word, and Powerpoint formats. The Kindle supports HTML, PDF, and Word through its mail-us-your-document conversion service, which installs the document in Amazon’s proprietary AZF format, but this is a problem — corporate clients would like to be able to convert their reports and presentations in-house, or better yet not convert at all. The iPhone now supports that mode of operation. Neither device has a good strategy for managing collections of documents or syncing documents.
• The Kindle has a hardware keyboard; the iPhone doesn’t. This seems an advantage for the Kindle.
• The Kindle supports an SD memory card; the iPhone doesn’t. The iPhone has a camera (which supports communication); the Kindle doesn’t.

(Looking at these differences, I’m very tempted to assign Myers-Briggs personality profiles to each device. But I’ll leave that up to our readers; what do you think the personality of each is? :-).

Overall, I’d say that the iPhone 2.0 firmware release, and the iTunes App Store, has raised the bar a good deal in this competition for the pocket of the consumer. I expect to see a competitive release from Amazon in the near future, but I wonder how they’ll compensate for the shortcomings of the E-Ink screen?

But the iPhone might be kind of different. Buying a book to read on the iPhone isn’t about buying the iPhone. The reader already has the iPhone, and they bought it for a different purpose. So paying $5 for a book to read on the iPhone would be much more reasonable to the consumer. Sure, you’ve got all the same fragility concerns, but now it’s about your phone, not your ebook reader. The direct competition of the $300 reader with the $5 paperback isn’t there; it’s more of an oblique competition.

I dug out this article by Anna Louise Genoese to see if a $5 book on the iPhone could compete. And it turns out to be an interesting price point.

Of that $5, Apple will keep $1.50, and give $3.50 to the “publisher”. Compare that with a paperback: For a typical $6.99 paperback, the publisher might get about 60% of the cover price for the book from “direct outlets” (Barnes & Noble, Borders), or about $4.19, but only 40% from “indirect outlets” (airports, gift stands at hotels, grocery stores, Walmart), say $2.80. Actually a little bit less for the direct, because of something called “coop” (for co-operational advertising), say $4.15. And the indirect is the lion’s share, say 2/3. So the revenue to the publisher for that $6.99 book might average $3.25 per copy, or less. Before returns.

The cost structure is a bit different, too. In a typical print-book mass-market paperback deal, a starting author might get royalties of 8-10% of the cover price (perhaps a bit more if the editor misjudges the advance, and the book doesn’t sell well). Suppose the author got 10% of the $5, or $.50, from the $3.50 that Apple will send to the publisher. That would leave $3.00 per book, to handle editing, art, promotion, “printing” (conversion to an iPhone format), etc. With a paperback, the publisher might have to spend $.40 - $.60 per book for printing, paper, binding, and associated costs. With an iPhone book, that cost might shrink to $0.05. So in the paperback case, the publisher would have $3.25 - $0.70 royalty - $0.50 PPB (printing, paper, binding) - $0.40 art, promotion, etc. for a not-so-grand total of $1.65, and in the iPhone case the publisher would have $3.50 - $0.50 royalty - $0.05 PPB - $0.40 = $2.55 from a $5 book.

So by selling books as $5 iPhone books instead of $7 paperbacks, the publisher makes $0.90 per book. And, of course, if the publisher charged $6.99 for the iPhone book, the numbers would be $4.89 received from Apple - $0.70 royalty - $0.05 PPB - $0.40 art, promotion, etc = $3.74, or a profit of $2.09 over the paper book.

But now suppose the author decides to self-publish the book at $5.00 on the iPhone App Store. Suddenly that $3.50 is going directly to the author, who we’ll assume has spent some money on a book-”printing” program that takes their (proofread, edited) manuscript and turns it into an iPhone app. Suppose this still translates into a $0.05 “PPB” cost for the author (x 8000 copies sold would be something like $400 to cover the cost of the program). Suppose, too, that the author has much higher costs for the equivalent cover art, promotion, etc., say 5X higher, for a cost of $2.00 instead of the publisher’s $0.40. The author still makes $1.45 per book, instead of $0.70. More than a two-fold increase in profits from self-publishing.

The iPhone App Store might be very, very interesting…

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.

I’ve spent the last few days in New York, and had the pleasure of meeting with various interesting folks. About which more anon, separately.

Many of the conversations revolved around digital books and the future of publishing — what form will books take? Would they be downloadable objects, or eventually migrate to a fully networked book? The consensus was that ultimately the book would live on the cloud, and as network access becomes ubiquitous, the implicit assumption that more and more of the content a reader will “license” or acquire will not be something that he has any direct physical ownership of, either in bits or paper. Maybe those options will cost extra; maybe they won’t be available. We will read our books on iPhones and Androids, via iBooks and Google Book Search; on Kindle v2 and the Amazon Book Shop.

This may have a profound impact on interpretations of the Fair Use privilege; generally licenses obviate the ability to assert Fair Use because non public domain network assets are usually governed in their use by contract. If, for example, Google Books settles with publishers in the AAP and AG suits, the ability to reclaim Fair Use will become sadly pivotal.

One of the other interesting casualties of this transition will be the existing book identifier schemes. Already, publishers are making a single EPUB digital book package, and then leaving the proliferation of more discrete ebook reader formats to intermediaries, distributors and wholesalers. Ingram will make the XYZ, Amazon will make the Kindle format, etc. The publisher is only responsible for one file, the .epub package.

This was a design goal of the IDPF, of which I am a board member. It relieves some of the work for publishers. What was entirely expected was that this leaves the publisher making one electronic product; what was not thought about as much was that this leaves the publisher with one ISBN for the digital book.

We are rapidly jerking forwards into a near term future where ISBNs will be assigned for derivative digital book products by intermediaries, not publishers. As an astute colleague observed in New York, the ISBN becomes a product SKU.

There are many disadvantages in this; one is that it will become increasingly difficult to find the “book” in the tangled weave of various digital instantiations. Perhaps no longer will we be able to ask how many copies did EduPunk 2020 sell.

And even this problem may be transitory. For as books move to the cloud, from digital bundles to network assets, we will not be counting “things sold” but link hits; not things shipped, but pages accessed. As some forward thinking publishers like O’Reilly have already demonstrated, the bookshelf will be not only virtual, but increasingly transitory in composition.

Whether we will be able to successfully rethink our conception of identifiers is a problem that lays beyond us just far enough that we are even uncertain what the contours may be.

I am a great admirer of Krugman, but I don’t think this column on publishing is as astute as his comments on, say, health care and Social Security.

What Krugman doesn’t reflect on is “the trouble with free.” That trouble is precisely what John Perry Barlow (who apparently gave the idea to Esther Dyson) saw from the other end of the telescope: that rather than selling copyrighted works, many authors and artists will use their work to promote other things. The classic example is tickets to Grateful Dead concerts. My concern is that not all content should be promotional. It will affect the nature, and the integrity, of the content.

Let’s be clear that I am not saying that all free content is corrupt, nor am I opposed to free content strategies, nor, for that matter, do I have any real gripes with advertising, promotion, or market capitalism. I do, however, like to know what a person’s agenda is.

A trip years ago to Epcot Center was chilling: an entire park dedicated to promote the images of corporations and governments. Thus the China pavilion included a video noting (ahem) that China extended from Manchuria to . . . Tibet. Well, I guess that’s the price you pay for going to the China pavilion: you hear the Chinese version of the history of Tibet.

For some content, the mechanisms of the marketplace can support editorial integrity. This is the principle behind Consumer Reports. For this category of content, the contract is, You pay for content on its own terms, not because you are being nudged to purchase something else. There is a virtue to this, though this implied contract does not apply to all publications.

Thus, the trouble with free: content that is free is free of everything except the agenda of the sponsor. In the world of politics, we call this propaganda.

]]> http://pubfrontier.com/2008/06/08/the-trouble-with-free/feed/ http://pubfrontier.com/2008/05/25/provostial-publishing/ http://pubfrontier.com/2008/05/25/provostial-publishing/#comments Mon, 26 May 2008 04:11:10 +0000 Joseph J. Esposito http://pubfrontier.com/?p=39 On one side we have user-generated content (UGC), exemplified by Wikipedia; on the other we have traditional publishing, which is characterized by an editor or series of editors (acquiring editor, developmental editor, copy editor, production editor), who review submitted material and make judgments as to its shape, argument, and suitability for publication. UGC is on the rise and is now a distinguishing aspect of the consumer Internet, with such busy sites as FaceBook, MySpace, Digg, YouTube, and many others benefiting from it. Traditional publishing, on the other hand (perhaps we should call it “editorial publishing”), has been having a harder time in the digital age. The New York Times gets scooped by a blogger somewhere, Encyclopaedia Britannica gets corrected by a band of anonymous enthusiasts, and network television is increasingly dependent on YouTube for promotional support.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.