I was intrigued when I saw an announcement for an ARL-CNI meeting, “Achieving Strategic Change in Research Libraries”, to be held in mid October, because Lord knows this is a good time for strategic change. Yet when I clicked through to the program, I was sorely disappointed. The program is oriented toward library directors talking amongst themselves. In the growing string of strategy meetings and whitepaper collections coming from research library organizations, I see many familiar names. While I find these individuals to be brilliant, thoughtful people, I don’t believe much will come out of their talking amongst each other for another day. Library leadership has been discussing emergent roles for libraries for over a decade.

(N.B.: In libraries, the senior executive usually has the title “University Librarian”, and their immediate junior staff, “Associate University Librarian”; these are abbreviated as UL and AUL respectively.)

The current leadership of many of the leading research libraries belongs to a cohort that has held senior management positions for several decades; they have exceeded, or are near, retirement age. The generation beneath them, the late boomers and the Gen X’ers, have often been unable to fully advance in their careers because of the overhanging cliff edge above them. In libraries, archives, and museums – all organizations with astounding levels of commitment and loyalty – theirs will be a Lost Generation. They are not likely to steer these institutions for any long length of time. Instead, Gen X has led – is leading – a Long March.

Even in conversations with the existing leadership, there is wide acknowledgment that the greatest sea change of vision and perspective among librarians, museum and archive staff, rests primarily among those (more or less) in their 20s, into their early to mid 30s. This generation has completely different expectations for information management, privacy, direct access to data and people, interaction with services, and organizational behavior.

It is perhaps in the expectations for organizational conduct that the need for change is greatest, and most immediately wanting. Libraries are supremely hierarchical organizations, not given to matrix management or effective team based project management. Many young librarians do not have any effective means to make substantive comment on change in their institutions; even when their voices are heard, no engagement is offered.

I have heard ULs say that they are all for new initiatives, but their librarian unions are preventing them from making deep structural change. Well, you know what? Unions don’t want to be the last one to turn out the lights either. Don’t blame labor.

When I tweeted my attendee concerns about the program agenda of the ARL-CNI meeting, @ARLnews responded with:

We strive to ID timely topics & speakers based on the forum theme. We have begun talking about how to recruit new ideas & faces… including the “new library generation” so your input is timely & well taken. Thanks again for taking the time to give us feedback.

That’s not what I am talking about. Revolutionary councils don’t form around the existing leadership. Existing leadership has spent its credibility. The changes they led long ago were bold in their time, but this is a new time, with new dangers, and new people must address them.

Here’s what I would like to see:

It’s time for the youngest generation of librarians to gather amongst themselves to discuss change in libraries. This definitely needs to happen in RL, but it can also happen online. This would be a gathering of people that I would denote as “< A/UL” – in other words, lower than (less than) AUL. Not <= AUL. There should be no directors present, no associate directors present. This is not about them. It is about those who will truly redefine the future of libraries. And there will be libraries in the future. And they will kick ass.

This is also not a Taiga-like recitation of calls for change or 5-year predictions for libraries, delivered by AUL level staff. It is not likely that a “community of AUL’s and AD’s challenging the traditional boundaries in libraries” is somehow going to make change happen. I applaud their manifest: “[w]e must develop cross-functional vision that makes internal organizational structures more flexible, agile, and effective. We must move beyond the borders and transcend the traditional library organization.” Yada yada yada.

That’s not enough. There is tremendous skepticism about Taiga in the rank and file. Let Taiga deal with their shifting boundaries, I want to plow under the farmland and gather with those who are madly tossing seeds for wild grasses on the prairies, provoking the native spirits into spring rains. Strategy is for young people.

As a friend observed to me, “v cool. in add’n to younger library staff, I’d also like to see non-librarian library professionals in lib strategy discussions.” Right on. Because the future is not contained within the neat walls of existing research libraries, but among all libraries, and archives and records keeping museums, attempting to redefine their role and purpose in a digital world. We live in a flattened world.

I am not suggesting that out of new conversations will emerge fully formed a blue print for a new class of library. But what I would suggest is: without energetic conversations, without more awareness of the things already being discussed in the hallways, libraries will have a future too long delayed. And that’s more than a problem for libraries. It’s a problem for everyone. By speaking together, we can break the deadlock and move the mountain. Talking about the world we want will help to build that world.

Right now, the best possible thing that ALA could do to reboot the future is to fund support for these meetings and gatherings, encouraging spontaneous leadership. If they cannot do that, then some other vehicle needs to step in and provide the platform where change can be not merely discussed, but architected. Realistically, I suspect that ARL is not the right institution to do this. William Faulkner said it best in Go Down, Moses: “Them that’s going,” he said, “get in the goddamn wagon. Them that aint, get out of the goddamn way.”

It’s too easy to proclaim the knock down – the traditional call out for the terrain-effacing transformation that is eroding the ground underneath us. Today, there is incredible optimism, energy, and enthusiasm in libraries –- at no other point in history has there been such opportunity to reach people with information using such a variety of tools, across such a range of means.

When mobile phones are held in the hands of farmers in the remotest villages across the planet –- the reach of every single library on this planet is now global. As our responsibility, let’s forge that vision.

I was intrigued by some of the complaints from authors about pricing policies relating to major retailers. I had heard about these issues in various forums, but I had not grappled with them in sufficient detail to grok their consequences. Today, I began to understand how authors – particularly those pursuing self-publishing – are trapped by the struggles around publisher pricing strategies, major online retailers, and distributors.

I was directed to an Amazon program as an example of how an author’s selling options can be coerced. Amazon recently initiated a self-publishing program for ebooks called the Digital Text Platform that permits authors to claim royalty rates of either 35 percent or, within certain strict limits, 70 percent. As they are enacted in the real-world, those limits unfortunately have the consequence of restricting competition in pricing and dampening ebook markets.

Among its other restrictions, the 70 percent royalty rate can be claimed only against U.S. consumer sales, and only when the book is sold within a very narrow band between $2.99 and $9.99 (accessed 25 August 2010). Fine. Well, not fine if the book is sold elsewhere for a lower price – Amazon can set the new ebook price as the lowest price in the marketplace. Here is the relevant text in the Pricing Page (accessed 25 August 2010):

For any Digital Book for which you select the 70% Royalty Option, at all times that the Digital Book is available for sale through the Program, you must adjust the List Price as required to ensure that the List Price does not exceed the lowest of: (a) the lowest suggested retail price or equivalent price for any digital edition of the Digital Book; (b) the lowest price at which you list or offer any digital edition of the Digital Book on any website or other sales channel; (c) 20% below the lowest suggested retail price or equivalent price for any physical edition of the Digital Book; (d) 20% below the lowest price at which you list or offer any physical edition of the Digital Book on any website or other sales channel; and (e) any maximum List Price we provide from time to time in the Program Policies.

That’s a strong statement. For anyone abiding by agency pricing agreements, we’re sitting pretty – the publisher (/author) gets to set the price and that’s that. But there are major ebook vendors that don’t always play by agency – among them, Kobo Books, Barnes & Noble, and Sony. While increasingly they might sign agency contracts, they might not always, particularly against small publishers. Further, any existing distributor contracts have probably one to three years to run before expiration.

If any of these booksellers discounts the price of the author’s book as obtained by a distributor, then Amazon will reset its own for-sale price to that discounted level. As an author, I have no attractive recourse against this:

Our determinations regarding price-matching are final and non-reviewable. If you object to our price-matching determination with regard to one of your books, your sole and exclusive remedy is to switch your Royalty option for future sales of the Digital Book to the 35% Royalty Option … .

This policy has a variety of consequences, most of them negative for the author. (N.B.: Apple is reported to have similar “most favored nation” [pdf] pricing policies, but I have not seen them, and Apple does not have the market share of Amazon).

Under the DTP conditions, if I (in a guise as author) present a book that I have approved to sell at $9.99, and Barnes & Noble discounts it to $7.99, then Amazon will automatically reset its sale price to $7.99 and provide me the 70 percent royalty against that figure (less “Delivery Costs”, as common to all royalty tiers). Of course, Barnes & Noble could then discount the book further, driving down my aggregate income from the book’s sales on each iteration.

I could theoretically attempt to game the system: e.g., I could price my book at $9.99 knowing and expecting that B&N is likely to discount to $7.99, and then expect that pricing at Amazon. However, that places final pricing control in the square dance between B&N and other discounting retailers on one hand, and Amazon on another.

There are more pathological conditions. Should the price be discounted below Amazon’s minimum threshold of $2.99 by another bookseller, my only resource as a self-published author is to be content with a 35 percent royalty rate, cutting my royalty rate in half. That’s a tremendous loss of revenue.

That wouldn’t matter if Amazon was merely one retailer in a competitive market. But it might not be. Recently, the VP for Kindle, Ian Freed, was quoted in C|net as stating that Amazon overwhelmingly dominates the ebook market:

CNET: Well, Apple’s saying it’s got 20 percent market share and I’ve heard Barnes & Noble saying it’s got 20 percent as well, so that would leave you guys with…

Freed: Honestly, something doesn’t add up because we’re pretty sure we’re 70 to 80 percent of the market. So, something, somewhere isn’t quite working right. I encourage you to do some more research. Obviously, from the beginning of Amazon we’ve been very metrics-focused and we don’t typically throw out numbers we don’t firmly believe in.

This level of market dominance, combined with the pricing controls as enforced through the Digital Text Platform, would lead me as an author to do some quick spreadsheet calculations on my sales data and pricing levels. And here’s what they might suggest:

In many cases, it would behoove me to remove my books for sale from all other retailers except for Amazon (and possibly Apple), because, due to price maintenance, I would make more money as an author by only utilizing Amazon (and possibly Apple). The curve crosses far more quickly if I am threatened with dropping below the $2.99 threshold price for the 70 percent royalty rate.

While such a strategy makes short term financial sense for me as an individual author, in the long term it severely restricts my opportunities to reach readers through other outlets, and it makes me dependent upon a single retailer. It is also detrimental for the broader ebook market because it generates a positive feedback loop that deepens Amazon’s share of self-published and low-priced ebooks. For anyone who believes that self-published ebooks will grow as a percentage of book industry sales, there should be concern that Amazon’s pricing policies will weaken retailers that are abandoned by authors seeking to avoid triggering Amazon’s pricing retaliation.

Amazon’s stance might also force other retailers into broader adoption of agency pricing at a time when both Apple and Amazon have come under scrutiny by State Attorney Generals who question the legality of agency pricing.

Amazon’s pricing policies are unfortunate for authors, and ultimately, for readers.

In this particular case, Random House – the publishing company most persistent and notorious for its aggressive pursuit of electronic rights from its backlist authors, responded aggressively by disputing Wylie’s ability to exploit their author’s titles, alleging that Wylie had set himself up as a direct competitor to Random, and by refusing to negotiate with Wylie over any additional titles.

The issues behind this dispute are complex, but at its heart is the fact that e-rights were not clearly negotiated with authors before the digital technology for ebook creation and distribution became more widely disseminated in the 1980s. This is not a surprise: it’s hard for pundits to accurately predict the intercourse of media and technology, just as much as it remains difficult to forecast weather beyond 48 or 72 hours. As a result, the right to publish digital editions, and the royalty rates that would accrue to authors for those publications, are often opaque to the stakeholders and subject to negotiation. Or litigation.

In fact, the landmark legal precedent in this case was a 2002 denial of a preliminary injunction, Random House v. Rosetta Books [pdf], by a judge in the Southern District of New York. The court ruled that Random House was unlikely to succeed on the merits of its allegations. Among other organizations filing supportive briefs was the Authors Guild (AG), an agency that represents a relatively small number of authors; its filing was submitted by an attorney named Michael Boni.

The Authors Guild (AG) reacted to Random House’s threats in the Wylie imbroglio with a chastising note:

To a large extent, publishers have brought this on themselves. This storm has long been gathering. Literary agencies have refused to sign e-rights deals for countless backlist books with traditional publishers, even though they and their clients, no doubt, see real benefits in having a single publisher handle the print and electronic rights to a book. Knowledgeable authors and agents, however, are well aware that e-book royalty rates of 25% of net proceeds are exceedingly low and contrary to the long-standing practice of authors and publishers to, effectively, split evenly the net proceeds of book sales.

Today (August 24 2010), Random House and Wylie announced a deal that marked a victory for the publisher in this most recent skirmish over the rights to digitally exploit backlist titles:

We are pleased to announce that The Wylie Agency and Random House have resolved our differences over the disputed Random House titles which have been included in the Odyssey Editions e-book publishing program. These titles are being removed from that program and taken off-sale. We have agreed that Random House shall be the exclusive e-book publisher of these titles for those territories in which Random House U.S. controls their rights.

As Kassia Krozser has commented, this was a skirmish. There will be others.

— —

Six months after the GBS hearing in the New York court, the world still wonders about the nature of the opinion that Judge Chin must eventually deliver. Most observers are skeptical that the settlement will be approved in its current form; conjecture is actually most heated around the possible endgames that might result from the parties – the Authors Guild; the five publishers from the original publishing suit and their associative organization, the AAP; and Google – being pressed back into active litigation.

The litigation process that brought us to this point started in 2005 with a class action filing by the Authors Guild; the AG’s lead attorney in the complaint was Michael Boni. (The publishers did not participate in a class action until they later procedurally joined the class action settlement proposal with Google.) At the time of its filing, the AG class action drew sharp criticism from not only Google, but many prominent authors as well, who did not believe their own perspectives were represented by the Authors Guild – a concern that would be echoed by many observers in detailed objections in the months ahead. The AG’s class action was then joined by a suit from five individual New York publishers alleging copyright infringement.

Eventually, a proposed class action settlement involving the Authors Guild, the publishers, and Google was entered before the Court. During the painful course of its two and a half year gestation, Google continued to digitize books from partner libraries. The proposed settlement was audaciously broad in scope, and secured opposition even from the U.S. Government’s Department of Justice [pdf] for – among other sins – the proposal’s departure from the motivations of the initial litigation.

One of the keystones of the settlement proposal is lodged in Attachment A (Author-Publisher Procedures), which attempts to clarify the digital rights issues that have brought authors and publishers so often to litigation or its brink. The proposal provides for a default bright line assignment of revenue from the exploitation of works included in the terms of the settlement. As Pamela Samuelson of UC Berkeley notes in a footnote of her filing [pdf] (Fn. 15) before the Court (Supplemental Academic Author Objections to the Google Book Search Settlement, Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google, Inc.):

Appendix A takes advantage of the settlement on other issues as to which Google is the antagonist to bring about a new allocation of copyright ownership, licensing, and reversion rights and procedures that, but for the settlement, could only have been accomplished through legislative action.

This outcome could never have independently arisen without the Google Book Search litigation. As Samuelson notes in the same paragraph:

Had Random House tried to resolve this e-book rights issue by bringing a class action lawsuit on behalf of a class of publishers against a class of authors in order to negotiate a settlement along the lines of Appendix A, the case would have been dismissed because the dispute would have involved both varying contract language and different state laws so that Rule 23 requirements could not have been satisfied.

— —

It is not too much to suggest that the conflict over ebook rights and royalties is one of the most outstanding irritants in the transition to digital publishing. It is an irritant that has drawn the Authors Guild and authors, and the AAP and publishers, into conflict time and time again. These actions have repeatedly involved the same small circle of actors – Paul Aiken, the Executive Director of the Authors Guild; Michael Boni, class action attorney for the Authors Guild; and Richard Sarnoff, the Co-Chairman of Bertelsmann, Inc. (responsible for the acquisition of Random House), the Chairman of the AAP, and widely attributed as an architect and lead negotiator for the GBS settlement.

In some lights, the proposed settlement in the Google Book Search case is really a proposed settlement in the conflict between the Authors Guild and the AAP over the exploitation of digital rights. Google, a bystander to that particular conflict, managed to drop a convenient litigation container for a class action settlement that could be alleged to contain all authors and publishers in a common agreement. The eventual proposal attempts to bring wholly new benefits to the other parties in the suits; benefits that Google might not have even imagined when it first began the Google Print program.

As Pamela Samuelson noted in Footnote 15 in her submission, Paul Aiken testified before Congress on this same point:

One of the reasons this thing [Attachment A] took 30 months to negotiate was that we weren’t just negotiating with Google. It was authors negotiating with publishers, and we rarely see eye to eye. So we had months and months and months of negotiations, trying to work out our differences.

These words echoed those that Paul Aiken had made almost a year previously, at the release of the first instantiation of the settlement in October 2008. As Library Journal noted:

We had a major disagreement with Google, and we still do,” said Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild. “We also don’t see eye-to-eye on with publishers on book contract law,” he added, before calling the settlement the “the biggest book deal” in U.S. publishing history. Aiken said two “guideposts” helped lead his organization through a thicket of issues in the suit. “Authors like their books to be read,” he noted, “and like they like a nice royalty check.”

It’s always nice to work out differences, but Google is arguably the party most likely to benefit out of all proportion to its potential liabilities from this divertissement. In the unlikely event that the settlement is approved, it moves forward on its merry way (subject of course to a lengthy appeals process). More likely, if the settlement is denied, it is difficult to envision a scenario where active litigation will re-commence. As a not necessarily naive bystander to the fundamental conflict between the AG and publishers, Google makes out like a bandit.

In the last five years, Google has amassed a singular and growing compendium of digital books; established a nascent rights registry; digitized historical Copyright Office renewal records; and moved to deepen commercial relations with publishers through its Google Editions service – whose release keeps coincidentally slipping in concert with the withering expectations of a summertime ruling from the SDNY. It is hard to imagine the AAP pursuing their case when Google is a useful potential ally in the publishers’ ongoing ebook pricing struggles with Apple and Amazon, which have themselves drawn scrutiny by State Attorney Generals.

And for the AG, it will have lost a most critical product: a determination of royalty revenue for the digital editions of backlist books that would have taken much of the provocation away for continuing uncertainty and conflict with publishers. With not that much to gain on the flip side.

— —

The firefight between Wylie and Random House, and AG’s strong public interest in its outcome, highlights the fact that the struggle to obtain mutually perceived value in royalty outcomes for backlist titles is very much a matter of the moment. The AG’s engagement on behalf of its clientele in the rights and royalty struggles emerging over the next few years grow ever more at odds with the terms it has attempted to obtain through the proposed settlement.

Those terms – certainly for prominent authors and their estates – are increasingly likely to be improved when aggressively negotiated by authors or their agents, or when titles are re-published digitally through new publishing ventures, such as those established by well-known and highly respected agents – e.g., Andrew Wylie’s Odyssey Books, Richard Curtis’ E-Reads, and Scott Waxman’s Diversion Books. Independent self-publishing firms such as Smashwords promise to bring mid-tier authors of backlist titles equally promising results when they take back titles for themselves.

The participation of the ASJA and the NWU in the Open Book Alliance, which contests the proposed GBS settlement, suggests that not all author agencies believe these issues can best be determined through this particular resolution.

As the summer months march into autumn, a historical engagement of a small circle of actors around the Authors Guild and the AAP may be increasingly misaligned from the interests of their larger, and evolving, constituencies.

As we build new digital book infrastructures, it makes sense to imagine what we can recapitulate by building in freedoms and privacy, and how we might ultimately engineer even better environments than we have had in the past. Below is a list of desirable features, grossly incomplete due to my own inability to imagine alternatives to the world we are leaving behind. Please leave better in comments.

1. Reader privacy is a user controlled option, not a whimsical gift from the bookseller. I should be able to choose how much information is obtained and utilized by a book vendor, either directly on my behalf (e.g., on profile based recommending) or to enrich the experience of other readers (collaborative recommending).
2. I own the books that I buy. Books are not munitions, nor they should they ever be subject to an end user license.
3. A bookseller should never ever be able to remove a book from my account , or otherwise render a book unavailable, without my express permission. Never, never, never, ever. ( The 1984 clause.)
4. Digital first sale. I should be able to associate any other reader account with my own for gifting and lending books, on a book by book basis, and at no additional cost, as long as the recipient agrees. These associations might be ephemeral, e.g. the duration of a loan, or persistent, e.g., my partner and I might choose to link our accounts. (One book, one loan).
5. No DRM on purchased books. Readers should not be restricted in their ability to move their owned books among their devices, nor should any barriers be placed in the way of adding or removing devices to their account.
6. Virtual bookshelves should be portable. Readers should be able to create bookshelves in an open format, such as OPDS, and be able to move them from one book platform to another. Over my reading lifetime, I may acquire books from different vendors, and the network-based associations for these titles should be portable. Book platforms should compete on services.
7. I should be able to “mask” books. I should be able to selectively make private my purchases of books from other users or the vendor’s social systems. For reasons of personal health, sexual preferences, or other privacy matters, I should be able to cloak any otherwise permissible data harvesting for whichever books I choose.
8. Book culling is a right. Readers should be able to permanently remove their purchased books from their bookshelves. Readers can throw or give away books they no longer want to own; it should be possible to delete books from a virtual bookshelf.
9. Accounts should be cloud-resident. Readers should be able to manage multiple authorized accounts from any given device.
10. Books are inviolate. I have a right to expect that the books that I buy will not have been maliciously altered, expurgated, or censored without explicit warning.

Add your suggestions!

I can conceive of library functions being focused in three primary areas:

1. Extending the traditional
2. Data systems support
3. Space and place

1. Extending the traditional.

Libraries are already moving toward functioning as information intensive social centers, permitting and encouraging a wide range of study, research, and interactive capacities. I think there are new iterations of these services looming, discussed below. However, the core function of the library as a print warehouse is clearly being deprecated by the widespread ubiquity of network access which removes the necessity for physical collections beyond a particular form of archival preservation.

Other commentators (including visibly Daniel Greenstein of the University of California) have noted for years that traditional library functions are likely to be significantly reduced as the attractiveness of print book artifacts lessens. Content will be increasingly licensed from external vendors, both library consortial interests (e.g. possibly a role for HathiTrust) and commercial, for-profit (e.g. Elsevier and other large aggregators). Curation may continue to reside in libraries by grace of localized expertise working in close contact with faculty and library peers, but the business functions should be removed to campus or organizational administration.

There is a scarce explored value in reviewing the existing functions of libraries, including ensuring access to the published record (both formally and informally instantiated), through an exploration of digital analogues to print traditions. For example, libraries have been permitted to function within the framework of copyright in the United States through explicit reliance on the First Sale Doctrine. Imagining how First Sale might benefit access to digital works has not been systematically explored. However, while public domain works are fully available in digital form, and newer in-print publications are nearly always available for purchase or licensing in digital form, there is clear danger of sharply restricted access to digitized out-of-print materials.

The Internet Archive, working with other organizations, is committed to exploring digital lending of out of print works through its BookServer Project, which aims to provide access to any book, to any reader, on any device, and in any format. Clarification of the digital rights attendant on such service will likely only be addressed once services have been enacted, and are available for challenge and refinement. However, this is arguably a critical juncture for libraries to commit to ensuring their privileged place in the framework of copyright and information access on behalf of their served communities. As Georgia Harper of the University of Texas said in 2007, “I’ve begun more and more to believe that for some things libraries need to do for the future, they just need to be done without much concern for what the law says today. ”

2. Data systems support.

It has been well spoken that libraries need to become more fully inserted into contemporary faculty and community research patterns. Active collaborations with faculty, often cross-institutional and almost inevitably cross-unit within a single campus, are spreading with a fervor driven by library administrators who believe they have found a possibly unassailable haven to lay claim to their continued survival. However, these are not virgin grounds. These functions are also laid claim to, with some justification, by campus technology departments, which usually possess both greater experience with, and aptitude designing, developing, and deploying technology based information access systems.

Engagements in fraternal collaborations is an exercise in marketing more than in productivity, permitting management to acquire the mantle of success while their staffs struggle to match resources and labor with new endeavors while sustain relinquished existing priorities, which rarely re-align to accommodate the stresses of this new organizational vision. Rather than struggle through organizational muck, it is preferable to euthanize functions that under-perform in both library and IT units. To perceive unmet needs and address pressing ones, universities should collapse the technology, science, humanities, and research support centers that increasingly exist in ample measure across both sides of dividing fences.

From a campus wide perspective, fundamental components of campus library and technology organizations need to be surgically extracted from their current hosts and combined in a new data systems support unit focusing on educational and research needs, mandated to perform the essential systems analysis of serving the core functions of a university with the goal of enhanced information access, handling, and interactivity.

Such a strategy rightfully enervates existing IT and library departments. The need for sufficiently senior strategic executive management rests in the development and guidance of a new and holistic unit focusing on educational and research data systems support, and this should be a Chancellor’s or President’s Cabinet level position. Whether the current status of library management should be preserved is an open question; its organizational relevance to the mission of the university has been lowered.

3. Space and place.

In the near years ahead, with increasing ubiquity of network access via the proliferation of portable devices and other ad hoc network portals, startup initiatives will develop fully immersive environments and tools that not only locate us in a network of information resources but bridge us together in ways that we might find difficult to imagine now. The recent development of immersive real-time conference facilities that enable virtualization of presence points toward a new horizon role for next generation library-IT support centers, enabling them to connect space and place in new ways.

Augmented reality toolkits and applications for mobile devices, such as Layar, already enable casual network users to sandwich linked data layers on top of their perceived environment; a smartphone capable of knowing place (GPS) and position, and “seeing” people, places, and things through its camera eye, is already a platform sufficient for combining and presenting datasets on history, architecture, census, and a wide range of other data. Extension of these toolkits to extended physical spheres (i.e., non-lived environments such as astronomical, geophysical, and molecular level perceptions) is being executed.

The “envelope of perception” generated by user-integrated data presentation layers will inevitably be expanded to encompass holodeck-like virtualization capacities that will enable far flung collaborative groups to investigate and manipulate information through sophisticated data sharing systems that can willfully impose shared reality-dreams on their participants. Being able to “be on the ground” at significant historical events, or investigate alternative historical or future scenarios, will require a skill-set combining computational science with movie and entertainment industry understanding of pyscho-physical response to visual, auditory, and perceptive cues. Similarly, the ability to explore through hand-delivered manipulation changing environmental influences on global urban health via computing capacity that would still be considered super-computing class today is a clear extension of contemporary CAVE simulations.

In this synthesis of information-dense space and place rests a compelling re-architecture of the library, neatly synthesizing its assets in physical space and knowledge engagement. The library as an institution, engendered over the past few millennium to provide gatekeeping to scarce physical resources, is reaching a terminus in its life cycle. Yet its capacities and visions for access to the widest possible collection of information to the widest possible number will be enshrined in new ways. This is a future well worth the designing hands of the new library professionals waiting for an opportunity to latch onto change; imagining futures among the empty shelves, hoping that they will be able to turn on new lights even as the lights in their own old buildings grow dim.

Baltimore, MD (BWI)

I was speaking with a researcher pulling together data on the development of digital books and the IDPF, and I found myself discoursing about the larger organizational responses that publishers are, or are not, invoking in response to revolutionary changes in media. The post is specifically motivated by the observation that some strategies common to other organizational fields under competitive threat are not being widely implemented among large trade publishing firms.

I have a particular interest in this topic; my doctoral research (never culminated in a degree) focused on the adoption of biotechnology – a new way of doing product development, through new forms of science and engineering – by established biopharmaceuticals.

Broadly speaking, a large biopharm company has a limited number of ways to adapt to a R&D environment in which new products can be developed in a fundamentally new way, via genetic engineering versus chemical discovery. It is useful to compare biopharm’s strategic options to those embraced by the NYC based trade publishing industry, which is confronting the explosion of possibilities for new generation publishing and distribution made available by network technologies.

Publishing, in many ways, is arguably more complex a case than biotech because the innovations are more diffused and are associated with widely disparate competencies; it is not merely a case of molecular biology contra chemistry. New forms of engagement with social media; struggles to foresee attractive device engineering strategies; models for mobile consumption; changes in book packaging, particularly toward network based access; migrations from traditional physical to network based design paradigms; new models of remuneration; the challenges of an increasingly flat, complex, and global rights world; and the escalation of traditional factor costs all impose severe constraints on traditional publishing’s ability to rapidly innovate.

Here are some options:

1). Get the religion, and reinvent your company. This is grossly difficult, and arguably not done in biopharm. There are several reasons, and one of them is that older forms of drug discovery and development still have some value, so throwing out the baby is not a good choice. However, more importantly, a very large company is not well positioned to undertake the wrenching changes necessary in strategy reformulation and organizational restructuring to go native; additionally, and equally as importantly, a phoenix company will need to wholly re-structure its world of network ties to external firms: suppliers, customers to some extent, and developers. In biotech, a suddenly critical resource was the strength and extant of ties to fundamental science researchers in molecular and genetic biology, versus chemistry. This is not the kind of network redesign that happens overnight. In fact, because of career advancement patterns, it usually does not happen.

In publishing, I just do not see this happening anywhere. No publisher has looked at the precipice and said, “Yep, that’s not good, we’re heading for a new high ground.” Instead they have valued their existing baby – traditional models of publishing – very highly. In an odd but direct sense, this can be reflected in the AAP’s embrace of the Google Book Search settlement proposal, which is a profoundly conservative method of maintaining the existing book business, off loading some innovation in distribution, but not touching the essence of the product – the book – itself. (It also has some characteristics of an alliance strategy, discussed below). At any rate, I do not believe we are likely to see a large, established publishing company transform itself into a technology focused innovator.

2) Birthing the beast within. In biotech, some large companies tried desperately to create an entrepreneurial atmosphere within their companies, setting up quasi-independent units to undertake biotech style research and drug discovery; encouraging their scientists to form new relationships with university science departments, and allowing them to operate with relative freedom, including the opportunity to establish new alliances with external biotech firms without the traditional review triage.

Success has been slow, at least at the fundamental task at creating a beach-hold from which the new way of doing science and business might establish itself as a rapid and healthy alternative within the established company. Again, there are many reasons for this: a reluctance to surrender resources in environments constrained by external factors and threats; resource envy over the targeting of a select group for streamlined operation and concomitant higher risk innovation; the extraordinary difficulty of establishing communication, much less practice-sharing, with the mother-ship; and the pragmatic likelihood that the individuals placed in such units are already part of professional networks that are “outside” the industry, and are thus more likely to find attractive employment elsewhere.

Some publishing outfits are attempting to implement this strategy. Harper Studio is exemplary; there are a few others. I find Tor’s pan-sci/fi portal site to be a bold step in a future-forward direction, although Tor is specifically focused on user (web) transactions versus more polygamous engagements with data (for example, by developing enhancements that facilitate linked data and integration with off-site network resources).

I frankly cannot afford these much assurance of success, except for very limited purposes. Most of these efforts fail to deliver their original vision for the host organization, even if they are locally successful within their units, for a simple reason: they grossly underestimate the extent of the revolution occurring outside the doors of their house.

3. Allying oneself with transformative companies. This has been a very common strategy for biopharm; it does not invoke painful internal change, and it allows one to suck off some of the benefits of innovation elsewhere. However, it conversely does not reinvent your firm, and it creates resource dependencies that can debilitate over time. Alliances are fragile, and the costs of out-of-firm maintenance can suddenly emerge as a threatening constraint. This strategy generally pulls out the survival curve but does not alter its direction.

Publishing has done some of this, usually with firms that engage in new forms of content distribution, e.g., in mobile platform. This is a conservative approach, and one already established in publishing by historical patterns of off-loading technology development to digital conversion hotels and content repositories. Adequate internal expertise has to be developed to successfully interface with more specialized staff in external firms, but these units, and the individuals within them, can often be “bolted on” to existing firm divisions such as “digital media” or “acquisitions” or “marketing” without massive disruptions. Random’s engagement with gaming firms is a wonderful example of the short term success that can come with this strategy.

As I mentioned previously, in some form, the GBS settlement can be seen as a limited, non-transformative alliance between an innovation purveyor and traditional industrial firms. It is limited to an innovation sector in discovery and distribution, and the most attractive innovation, in data and related integration services, is not shared beyond Google, and indeed not adequately perceived by publishing as a longer term strategic necessity. This characterizes one great shortfall of this approach: it is often narrowly focused on innovative forms that occur on well-marked edges of existing firm processes instead of the hazy, shadowy borders of greater risk and return; alliances focus on incremental versus revolutionary embrace.

4. Acquisition. It is always easier for significant revolutions in production, distribution, and product design to emerge wholly apart from existing industry. The resource inputs are either dramatically different, or distinctly sourced; development processes require different input skills that are more prevalent in unfamiliar professional networks; the organizational field of collaborators, and the type and nature of resource dependencies often resides on an entirely different vector to the established sector. Indeed, a hallmark of transformative eras is that the most market-disruptive firms are often entirely blind to the existing industry, or at least not reliant on its continued existence. Arguably, e.g., craiglist could give a shit if newspapers folded; from their perspective, that is not a location for competitive friction. Facebook might be; Hearst Media is not.

For these reasons, one of the most prevalent strategies of established biopharm firms under threat from biotech is to acquire these competencies, or alternatively make significant equity investments in them; in the case of acquisitions, usually “parking” them to the side of the existing core organizational structure. This protects the innovator’s ecology, and shields the larger organization from disruption, while lowering the risks of external alliance collaboration and resource dependency. Roche (+) Genentech, and the various share-wars that have erupted between those two firms, is an interesting case in point. (Indeed, as Genentech’s fortunes have stabilized, it has thrown increasingly stronger ripostes to Roche’s efforts at incremental consolidation).

This is not happening to any significant degree in trade publishing. That is striking to me. It speaks, potentially, to a greater breadth of transformation in media, compared to drug development. Biopharm and biotech both had to make accommodation to the identical set of ultimate customers, physicians and hospitals; both were reviewed and regulated (albeit in different fashion) by similar government processes, generally by the same agency. One could argue that the transformation confronting most legacy media companies is more encompassing. In fact, instead of these changes becoming more tractable over time, reflecting the same conundrums from music to books, it might be that they are becoming more intractable as the pace of external innovation accelerates.

Harper did not acquire Lexcycle; Amazon did. If I had to conservatively predict an acquirer for Scribd, it would be Google, Amazon or Microsoft, not Random House. That is a particularly telling commentary, and I think it argues for an unhealthy and fulsome separation between traditional publishing and the locus of innovation boiling up on the edges of the traditional publishing industry.

In sum. Revolutions in industry are times of both great creativity and disruption. It is intriguing to witness the development of responsive strategies by existing firms, as they learn to recognize external threats to their business model, emerging from larger social, scientific, economic, and/or political changes. So far, as indicated in this very informal analysis, I would suggest that publishing has only anemically adapted to an altered landscape, and the consequences could be very troubling for existing firms.

[A]t the invitation of the AAP and Google I moderated a panel discussion with John Sargent from Macmillan and Richard Sarnoff from Bertelsmann that had the … goal of illuminating for publishers some of the basics of the proposed settlement of the Google Book Search lawsuits. The session was strictly limited to publishers only … .

Both Sargent and Sarnoff were extensively involved in the negotiations of the Google Book Search settlement, and the interview is revealing for the attitudes of the large trade publishers who negotiated the proposed agreement with Google. The attitudes expressed toward libraries, e.g., while sadly not atypical of NY publishers, are striking to those of us who care about the public services that libraries provide.

Cader’s post on the discussion is long; I’ve merely excerpted portions below, attempting to retain the parts most newsworthy. The report originally appeared in Publisher’s Lunch Deluxe, Michael’s superb subscription based news service for the publishing industry. Although little known outside of publishing, I would encourage anyone following publishing and its transformations to subscribe to the free Lunch, and consider the paid version.

Following are some of the highlights of Cader’s reportage. Clarifications in [...] are Cader’s.

Sargent’s opening statement addressed head-on the question of what will happen if the settlement is not approved by the judge. “We will proceed to have litigation for a long time period, perhaps up to five years, during which Google will continue to scan and libraries will continue” to use files in ways that publishers might not like. “The libraries then get to do what they want to do with the scans” and since the law does not allow obtaining monetary awards from state institutions, “there’s a very real danger those files go the way that files do.” … Google’s Tom Turvey agreed with Sargent’s assessment that scanning (and litigation) would proceed in the absence of an approved agreement.

Among the many advantages of the settlement that Sargent forsees are “an agreement that IP is something to be paid for when it is dispersed” and “a way to control those scans [as they are given back to libraries] that is clearly defined.”

Speaking to concerns about Google’s apparently exclusive franchise over orphan works–whatever body that winds up constituting after books are claimed–Sargent acknowledged that “in a plain fact they have a lot of power over those works,” but “anybody has the right to follow in Google’s footsteps if so desired.” Both men anticipate that the financial incentives will lead to the claiming of many works. “If checks start to go out,” Sargent said, “everybody will be claiming.”

Though foreign publishers have objected to what appears to be sweeping authority from the US over their books, Sargent noted that “the advantage…is that you get protection on your works” that would not exist without the settlement.

…

A concern from abroad has been the lack of international representation on the board of the Book Rights Registry, even though works in foreign language have been estimated in the past to potentially comprise half of all the material in academic libraries. Here Sargent disclosed that “we are looking at a two-tier structure for the registry board” and said “we do expect to satisy the concerns of foreign publishers for representation.” He added that they “realize there are lot of constituents that need a voice,” also including an array of scholarly and educational publishers.

Sarnoff would not speak to the revenue that they estimate would be generated from institutional subscriptions under the settlement agreement. But he noted that “just by the level of concern” over potential pricing it’s clear “the library community feels that this product will be enormously attractive.” On the contrary concern–that pricing might not be competitive and that agreements with parties other than Google might not emerge, Sargent noted, “think of all the players who would like to use some of these books now.”

The screening of videotaped recordings from major TV broadcast news stations on the U.S. government supported Laos incursions by South Vietnam’s Army was compiled and produced by a then little-known initiative housed at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee called the Vanderbilt Television News Archive (VTNA).

VTNA’s story began in 1968, when its founder, Paul Simpson, began the systematic recording of the three major U.S. television networks through their local affiliates. Uninterrupted to the current day, VTNA continues to record, collect, index, and make available national news broadcasts, preserving them in a unique collection available via a lending program to anyone in the country, merely at the cost of duplication or recording onto DVDs.

Within a few years of its founding, VTNA would wind up enmeshed in a skein of litigation and legislation. Yet, VTNA’s valiant efforts to protect public access yields an accidental and instructive example for how positive legislative outcomes can emerge in a fight against attempts to leverage court rulings benefiting private parties, side-stepping Congressional engagement.

At the Internet Archive, we believe there is an opportunity for a similar and critical analogue to emerge out of the proposed class action settlement in the Authors Guild, et al v. Google case placed before the SDNY District Court concerning Google Book Search.

History Lessons

The utility of the VTNA’s recording of TV news — and in the eyes of conservative government representatives and the Nixon White House, capturing the alleged liberal biases of the New York media — was apparent even before the landmark 1971 screening. VTNA attracted several attempts to legislatively enshrine protections for its activities, ultimately inspiring two discrete bills that wound up incorporated into the later 1976 Copyright Act: a mandate for a national broadcast archive and an exemption from liability against infringement for libraries and archives recording broadcast content.

In an important new work on the history of home video, Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright, Lucas Hilderbrand discusses the impact of new technology on interpretations of rights, piracy, and property. Hilderbrand includes an entire chapter on the history of VTNA’s stressful journey along the parallel tracks of litigation and legislation, observing that “Copyright became the means of both challenging and ultimately ensuring public access to television records.” (N.B.: I am working from pre-publication galleys generously provided by the author, and used here with his permission).

Contemplating VTNA’s founding in the late 1960s, Hilderbrand comments: “Thus nearly a decade before fair use (Section 107 of the copyright act) would provide the basis of the Supreme Court’s ruling that off-air recordings for private use must be permitted, off-air videotaping directly shaped legislation of the exemptions for libraries and archives. Although distinct from Section 107, Section 108 can be seen as the logical, institutional extension of fair use.”

In the 1960s and 1970s, CBS News, the most watched, revered, and influential news broadcast in the U.S., kept its own semi-public (restricted access) archive. CBS believed that VTNA was recording and collecting news broadcasts without permission or license. After several attempts to force VTNA to license its own recordings, CBS sued the archive for copyright infringement in 1973, alleging that the archive re-edited and leased its broadcasts to users, appropriating its content.

CBS maintained that a private solution was the best approach for broadcast news access; the situation did not require intrusive legislative action. As late as Congressional hearings in 1975 on the draft revisions to the copyright law, CBS vice president and general counsel Robert Evans testified, “Moreover, the problem addressed by these unusual provisions is not one that requires Congressional action because it is being resolved by private initiative.” Of course, as Hilderbrand notes, the private initiative that CBS advocated was the network’s, not the VTNA’s. Hilderbrand comments further:

Despite CBS’ efforts to establish television news collections through [its own] public archives, Vanderbilt maintained that its operations were essential to democratize user access to the tapes and to maintain the availability of the other networks’ news programs. Despite being a private university, Vanderbilt refused to cloister tapes in the ivory tower and adamantly supported the broadest feasible scenario for public access.

After a few modifications to the proposed copyright legislation before Congress, and a reconciliation in which the Senate accepted several House modifications (including in Sections 107 and 108), President Ford signed the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976 into law on October 19. In early December, CBS requested the dismissal of the lawsuit without prejudice, and the court officially dissolved the case on December 20, 1976.

Google Book Search

Today, in a case with some striking similarities, Google, the AAP, and the AG hope to rewrite copyright through a private, judicially approved agreement. As Marybeth Peters, the U.S. Registrar of Copyright, observed at the Columbia Law conference on the settlement, “The question is: When you have a private agreement, where there are private solutions, that are in the nature of legislative action … is this a good thing?” Ms. Peters also quoted Robert Clarida, then Chair, Committee on Copyright and Literary Property for the NYC Bar as stating, “The settlement in effect provides a privately legislated set of rules governing relations between an entire copyright industry and the world’s largest search engine”.

Orphan works legislation almost passed in the last session of Congress. It could pass in this session. As the Justice Department begins an inquiry into the settlement, we have an opportunity to consider anew the proper wisdom of a legislative cure for a problem that Google originally attempted to address in 2004: providing the greatest possible access to out of print books that are potentially in-copyright. Unfortunately, that initial effort has turned into a radically reshaped proposal: a court-approved monopoly for Google, and a bad deal for authors and publishers.

The complex issues of rights registries, access to orphan works, elaborating fair use in a digital age, and maintaining international compliance should be the province of public discussion. The goals of Vanderbilt’s archive — “the broadest feasible scenario for public access” — must be the primary consideration that drives a public and legislative solution, instead of a privately negotiated settlement for the benefit on a single corporation currently under investigation for antitrust.

At the Columbia conference, Google’s chief counsel for the Book Search project, Alex Macgillivray, loudly noted Google’s staunch support for orphan works legislation. Well, now is the time. Let’s halt the push for a court approved, private settlement that gives Google a monopoly on the largest digital library of books in the world. Instead, let’s launch a considered investigation of what the nation deserves, in a dialogue that is open and inclusive of all the sectors of our country that have a stake in defining the 21st Century of books, and the rights of readers.

Since I have many Google friends, I am inviting them to respond here to these questions from the ALA, which I am reproducing below.

On the topic of equitable access to information, and more specifically pricing, the proposed settlement allows for differential pricing for different categories of institutions for subscriptions, why? The settlement states institutional subscription pricing will be “based on comparable products and services.” Since no other comparable product or service currently exists, how will Google keep from disparities in access to its product if subscription prices are, or become, too expensive? Finally, the Book Rights Registry established by the proposed settlement (and comprised of equal numbers of representatives for the authors and publishers), has been granted the oversight to settle disputes over pricing. What, if any, mechanism would be available to libraries (as primary customers of the product), and individual consumers to dispute pricing?

With respect to patron privacy — what assurances, aside from a verbal commitment, does the library community, library patrons and the public interest have that their privacy rights will be protected? The proposed settlement itself is silent on the topic of patron privacy rights, why? Were the three private entities unable to reach agreement, in their closed deliberations, on a privacy policy?

Finally, with regard to intellectual freedom, the proposed settlement allows Google to omit up to 15% of in-copyright, not commercially available books it has scanned from libraries. What criteria will Google use to determine which books are omitted from the product? Will Google identify the books omitted and provide any explanation as to why? How will Google keep from engaging in censorship as it is conceivable and even likely that both domestic and international pressure will be exerted upon them to censor books?

Hopefully, Google will provide answers to these questions. Of course, there are many more than these.

For example, theoretically, the BRR has the ability to impose ISBNs and other identifiers on orphan works that lack them. ISBNs could be provided in a special grant by EDItEUR for this purpose, with the costs apportioned among rightsholders and consumers.

Some of these data manipulations would be considered useful enhancements, but there also exists the possibility that they could be enacted without adequately broad engagement or consideration of the data flow and management issues among publishers, libraries, and consumers, particularly as they evolve into the future. A related risk is that non-traditional, but potentially higher-return options, might not be endorsed. It makes the necessity for coordinating stakeholders in metadata issues among all of these communities increasingly critical.

There is currently no mechanism in the BRR for community coordination to be imposed. There is mention in the settlement only of an advisory board, but not only has it not been named, it currently has no power of compulsion. I believe there is a default to good-will in this area, but it would be better for conversations among parties to be coordinated openly.

Additionally, these concerns strongly agitate for the continued maintenance and availability of open data for bibliographic and rights data, such as the Internet Archive’s Open Library (OL). Although OL has been poorly accessible through APIs, the necessity of encouraging the unimpeded flow of descriptive data without use restrictions is vital for maximizing the continued evolution of books and publishing, and our understanding of how and what we read. In conjunction with the OL, ensuring the availability of all known rights attributes associated with an object, particularly as a package, will be requisite. These data should be accessible in XML for easy machine consumption, and not provided only through user driven search interfaces.

One of the worries of the settlement is that there are a great many potential new sources of leverage and engagement that could leave even current stakeholders in the agreement uncomfortable with the consequences.

I am most definitely not an expert on dissertations: I’ve always shied as far away as possible from discussions relating to ETD programs. In the context of the settlement, their presence had not really occurred to me. As someone suggested, this is probably just one of hundreds of cases of some consequence that were never explicitly thought about.

So what about dissertations? Are they covered under the settlement? The answer might be “yes” — at least, much of the time. Let’s turn quickly to the “Book” definition in the Settlement, §1.16:

“Book” means a written or printed work that (a) if a “United States work,” as defined in 17 U.S.C. § 101, has been registered with the United States Copyright Office as of the Notice Commencement Date, (b) on or before the Notice Commencement Date, was published or distributed to the public or made available for public access as a set of written or printed sheets of paper bound together in hard copy form under the authorization of the work’s U.S. copyright owner, and (c) as of the Notice Commencement Date, is subject to a Copyright Interest.

The quick consensus from those that I asked is that dissertations are usually considered “publications”, particularly if one assumes that UMI services satisfy the condition of public distribution. Proquest states:

ProQuest UMI Dissertation Publishing has been publishing dissertations and theses since 1938. In that time, we have published over 2 million graduate works from graduate schools around the world. We have over 700 active university publishing partners, and publish more than 70,000 new graduate works each year.

A 2000 CNI taskforce update [PDF] by the Library of Congress, discussing digital deposit of dissertations, observes:

Each year, UMI Dissertations Publishing receives over 40,000 U.S. Ph.D. dissertations and Masters’ theses for publication. As part of its services, UMI provides copyright registration through the U.S. Copyright Office for those authors desiring registration. An average of 17,000 to 20,000 authors take advantage of this service each year, making UMI the largest single contributor of copyright registration applications to the U.S. Copyright Office.

Registration is not necessary to secure copyright, but it does offer certain protections; in the settlement context, it is required to meet the definition of “Book”. Regardless of the initial registration, one would expect that at least those published up until 1963 are Public Domain (with no subsequent renewal of copyright), but they would have to be claimed as such by Google as Public Domain Works (See §3.1 Identification, Digitization and Use of Books. “Google shall identify to the Registry books that it has determined to be Public Domain Books pursuant to the process set forth in Attachment E (Public Domain) and for which Google wants the safe harbor described in Section 3.2(d)(v)(3) (Safe Harbor). For each such book, Google shall provide the supporting reasons and information that Attachment E (Public Domain) requires.”)

Some additional number of these dissertations may simply not be available (they might be withheld from public consultation for a variety of reasons). One would not necessarily know that by looking at thesis documentation, but they would not be part of the settlement presumably.

One also has to wonder if dissertations are “Commercially Available”. Those that are available through print on demand only, might not be so classified. (See §4.7 New Revenue Models. “POD copies of Books distributed by third parties. A Book’s availability through such POD program would not, in and of itself, result in the Book being classified as Commercially Available.”). However, many dissertations are available through the licensed Dissertation Abstracts service, but Google would have no way of knowing a priori which dissertations were available, unless they subscribed to the service.

There are probably many other convolutions, but I must turn to my readers for help and clarification.

Traditionally, the school has partnered with Scholastic, which makes their list available, and a set of books are physically delivered and then sold on site. If titles run short, more are Fedexed during the week in which the book sale is running.

No one wanted to replicate that again this year. Scholastic titles are usually not literary landmarks, and their commercial partners (e.g. Disney) produce overly commercialized tie-ins. The decision had already been made to partner with a Bay Area independent bookstore, but this brought up interestingly complicated logistics.

Obviously, the bookstore would have to select – curate – a set of books that would be offered to the kids across the school’s grades (K-8, in our case). How would the books get there? What if some titles ran short? Who would return the unsold? Control the inventory? Run the actual merchandising during the week? Amass the wish-lists by the school teachers so they could benefit from parental donations? Entice volunteers to staff the booths for 4 whole days? It seemed crazy.

So we began to try to re-invent it. Why not simply have display copies available on-site for people to browse? The bookstore (Hicklebee’s in San Jose) already supports rudimentary wishlists. Why not create an online ordering form? Let the kids browse the titles, generate lists of their preferred books, and then allow parents to order against the list per each family’s budget? The revenue would be collected by the bookstore, and the books could be sourced and shipped direct to the School, or alternatively collected at the bookstore and driven up to the School, for local distribution.

For this to work, the bookstore would have to support a custom ordering page against a set of chosen titles, with orders aggregated and then released to a fulfillment agent at the conclusion of the weeklong booksale. It shouldn’t be that difficult … is it? In general, the more finely granular selling of books is something that we should be trying to support by not just Amazon, or Google, but independent bookstores. Hicklebee’s is a member of IndieBound — do they provide support for this kind of merchandising?

Somewhere in this is a vision for how we “break-apart” the bookstore. For as long as it is desirable to sell paper books, we need to figure out how to take advantage of networks and the far deeper reach that point of presence can mean in a web 2.0 world. Local customization of a bookstore to a school — that should be easy.

The Random House Group has launched its first list of ‘enhanced’ ebooks. ‘Book and Beyond’ is aimed at extending the content past the text that was in the print work and truly exploding the spine. Readers can now enjoy additional content such as videos, games, quizzes, photos, author interviews, interactive graphics and the option to listen to or read the text at the start of each chapter.

This made me think about my 7 year old daughter, who is learning to ride a bike. We had started last year, in the summer and Fall, but held off during the rainy winter. She had been doing alright, slowly acquiring a sense of balance, momentum, speed, and space. It needed more work.

With my own switch of employment to the Internet Archive, I recently purchased a folding bike so I could take BART into the city, and then bike around the Marina to the Presidio. That’s the plan, anyway. But it also gave me an excuse to go out again with my daughter to our local public school playground, so I could teach her new and important skills like how to start off on her bike, by herself.

It was truly as if the world had made a complete circuit. The balance was there, with more assertiveness, and all of a sudden, on our first ride this summer, it so obviously all came together for her. Definitely not perfect, but it’s undeniably there. And yea, she learned to push off. Now comes the hard part: learning all about city traffic and street signs. I’ll be taking my time on those lessons.

So when my friend Mike Shatzkin recently noted that the EPUB format wasn’t low-touch because it did not reflow around charts and illustrations well — I thought about how people learn to ride bikes. Mike said:

Epub can “reflow” text, making adjustments for screen size. But there is no way to do for that for illustrations or many charts or graphs without human intervention (for a long while, at least.) Even if you could program so that art would automatically resize for the screen size, you wouldn’t know whether the art would look any good or be legible in the different size. A human would have to look and be sure.

This comment made me realize the huge gulf in how I see the book world, and how publishing sees the book world. Because we’ll be writing differently. And we already are. We won’t be writing for paper, we’ll be writing for interactions.

And with that change, is coming a whole change in infrastructure that supports communication: duplication, distribution, performance. Our understanding of digital rights.

My friend Joe Esposito, in email, was quick to note that in fact this is already happening to a huge degree in STM publishing. The premise is that links and datasets are live; analyses are replicated in-page; molecules are spun; and perhaps in the near future through devices such as the iPhone and Android, even the atomic repulsion is sensed. The skein of linked data is being knit, article by article, text by text, data by data, feeling by feeling, and the presumption of where and on what device the work is encountered is ebbing transparently into the background, an inconsequence of design.

Today, authoring multimedia fictional or non-technical non-fiction treatises is craft work, but the tools are not simply growing, they are being woven together as well, building a new infrastructure for creativity that will, in turn, re-write our understanding of books — of sharing information. As I sit in a hotel room and write this, my blogging software supports automatic inclusion of media; it’s not hard … and yet my ability to endorse, to enable, my software’s tenacious grasp at other information on the web, seeking my permission for its inclusion here, implicitly or explicitly, will soon be part of my menu bar as well. The world gets smaller; communication is more social, more ubiquitous.

Writing the new book is something we won’t be thinking about soon. It won’t be craft, forcing us to knit together mixed media. It will be transmedia. It will be a skill, like using a phone. Like riding a bike.

Not everyone will have that skill, but most will. Not everyone will have access to the tools, but many will. And that will be the way of it. And I think that will be the way of it, very soon.