b.cognosco

What Not To Do

terrywfrazier@gmail.com — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 05:00:00 GMT

Someone has no doubt spent millions developing this beautiful, and utterly unusable, digital book interface. (hat tip to Ernie.)

Robotic Book Scanner for High-Volume Digital Conversion

terrywfrazier@gmail.com — Wed, 16 Nov 2005 18:08:42 GMT

This is very cool a non-destructive robotic scanner for books. The video of this thing at work is nice. [via Tim Oren]

Bookbots

Maybe not as world shaking as milbots or healthbots, but if you're Google or Amazon, or possessed of a very large dead tree library, you'll want Kirtas Technologies' Bookscan (check out the video). If you've ever had to get legacy printed material into a scanning or OCR system, hands-on or just paying the bills, you'll appreciate it. Gadgets like this as well as the search engines' book indexing projects will slowly break down the "Internet Event Horizon" that's made a lot of information created before the mid-1990s invisible to the net.

Rip-off 101: How Textbook Industry Manipulates Prices

terrywfrazier@gmail.com — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 00:15:08 GMT

A captive audience, naked price manipulation, over-reaching copyright laws, an apathetic education bureaucracy, and a student body that is rapidly losing respect for big corporations who abuse the market have created new tensions for the textbook publishing industry. Right now, publishers have a cushy, protected, contrived environment that they will fight to maintain, but students and consumer advocates are starting to fight back.

Oligopoly Watch author Steve Hannaford recently addressed the state of the textbook industry and the inherent issues of price fixing and consumer abuse now that only a few suppliers remain:

Textbook prices

College students across the US have just been hit with sticker shock. No, not from rises in tuition at private and public universities alike, though that is bad enough. The shock comes at the bookstore, where textbooks in most subjects now cost hundreds of dollars, ratcheted up year after year.

We don't often talk about naked price manipulation by oligopolies on this site, but this is a clear case of a captive audience and a few publishers that have "agreed" silently to raise prices. That's the opinion of Yale law professor Ian Ayres, writing in the New York Times (Just What the Professor Ordered, 9/16/2005). He quotes a government report that states that textbook prices have risen at double the rate of inflation. This the report attributes to the high cost of adding supportive CD and online materials to college texts.

But that same government report, according to Ayres. The real problem is the lack of price competition. A series of mergers has ensured that although there are hundreds of textbooks to choose from, the five largest publishers control 80 percent of the market The competitors don't need a secret meeting; they just look at others' rising prices and adjust them upward in return.

Strong corroborating evidence comes from a recent report by CALPIRG, the California Public Interest Research Group Rip-off 101: How The Current Practices of the Textbook Industry Drive Up The Costs Of College Textbooks (link via Dave Pollard via Stephen Downes) was based on a survey of the most widely assigned textbooks in the fall of 2003 at 10 public colleges and universities in California and Oregon. Student volunteers and staff also interviewed 156 faculty and 521 students about the cost of textbooks and their purchasing practices. Key findings from the survey include:

Student textbook expenditures have risen 24% since the 1996/1997 school year
Textbook expenditures are now equal to almost 20 percent of the average tuition and fees for in-state students at public four-year colleges nationwide
Half of all textbooks now come bundled, or shrink-wrapped with additional instructional materials such as CD-ROMs and workbooks. Students rarely have the option of buying the textbook a la carte or without additional materials
Sixty-five (65) percent of faculty rarely or never use the bundled materials in their courses
Seventy-six (76) percent of faculty report that the new editions they use are justified never to half the time. Forty (40) percent of faculty report that the new editions are rarely to never justified

The inclusion of value-added materials such as CDs and workbooks is identified as a major factor in rising costs. But the study finds no demand for these materials from either students or faculty. Yet publishers continue with claims these materials are necessary to to attract students and be competitive. Again from Oligopoly Watch:

The companies try to justify higher prices, as reported in a Washington Post article (Textbook Prices on the Rise", 9/18/2004):

The $3.4 billion-a-year higher-education publishing industry says that it must keep its material current to win schools' support and that prices are competitive in each market. Industry officials defend new editions churned out by major higher-education publishers Thomson Learning, Pearson Education and McGraw-Hill. They argue that texts must be continually modernized if publishers want to keep the attention of today's college students, who are used to the graphics and interactivity of the Internet.

Though that does not explain why the same companies sell textbooks at lower prices in other countries.

Ayres points out the parallels between the cost of textbooks and those of prescription drugs, where the person "prescribing" has no need to pay for the texts/drugs and may not even be aware of their costs. The consumer, who does pay, is given no choice.

This parallel between the pharmaceutical and textbook publishing industries is important, with a key difference. In medicine there is a massive layer of intermediating healthcare managers that have grown to balance the market power of the pharmaceutical makers. Doctors may not know what your medicine costs, but your insurer does and works to drive that cost down.

No such intermediary exists in education, and the entire burden falls to students, who have no representation in the process. Publishers are completely insulated from the people who have to pay them, creating a perfectly inelastic market where demand is unaffected by price. This sort of artificial environment is a gold mine for publishers, and ripe for consumer abuse and anti-competitive behavior.

The first of the CALPIRG policy recommendations is to inform professors of the cost of textbooks during their selection process, force publishers to disclose full pricing for all products, and require unbundling of value-added extras. Unbelievably, none of this happens today. The publishers create an artificial scarcity of information that allows them to dictate market conditions rather than respond to them. The university bureaucracies offer little resistance, exposing how disconnected they have become from their customers. In the past part of this financial pressure was mitigated by liberal use of photocopies. Professors would order photocopies of small, but key, portions of textbooks for their course paks. But a full frontal assault on copyright and Fair Use by publishers, and intellectual property holders everywhere, all but eliminated this practice.

Abandoned by university leaders, students have taken matters into their own hands and are finding innovative, affordable ways to make their own full-text versions of books. Over at The Student Tablet PC blog there is a wealth of information on setting up your own scanning and OCR process. Everything from what hardware and software to buy to ideas on annotation, file formats, and cataloging. Its not much of a stretch to imagine a substantial black market popping up in scanned, annotated electronic books created by students. Theyve already shown a complete disregard for interests of record labels selling overpriced CDs. It seems unlikely that textbook publishers will get any more respect.

More Consolidation in Printing Industry

terrywfrazier@gmail.com — Thu, 12 May 2005 21:00:07 GMT

Big, big news in the printing industry...

Quebecor World To Sell Commercial Unit

(05/11/2005)Quebecor World announced yesterday that it intends to sell its North American commercial printing division, which operates 10 plants and generates revenues of $250 million.

The company says its financial performance was hampered by the unit. Quebecor World saw its Q1 profits chopped in half, reporting Q1 net income of $16.3 million compared to $35.8 million in Q1 2004.

"We have determined this business [the commercial group] to be non-core and are currently pursuing exclusive negotiations to sell this business and similar facilities in Canada," said Pierre Karl Peladeau, Quebecor World's president and CEO. The company also has started to move its short-run book printing offshore to attract publishers outsourcing work to Asia. Work and assets are moving to four of its plants Latin American.

QW is one of the big four North American printing companies and one of the strongest in magazine and book printing. The fact they could not make any money in commercial print here, and are moving their book work offshore says a lot about the state of this lagging industry, and the intense pressure starting to appear from AsiaPacific.

The Spy That PDF'd Me

terrywfrazier@gmail.com — Mon, 04 Apr 2005 19:30:07 GMT

It was only a matter of time before all the structured, linked, DRM’d functions of the proprietary PDF format were tied back into a low-cost, low-burden, viral tracking mechanism. It seems likely PDFzone author Don Fluckinger is right to suggest this is just the beginning of a movement to make PDFs increasingly invasive. PDF is a great tool when used properly, but look for this to become a real issue and a battle cry for the anti-PDF crowd. Be interesting to see what, if anything, Adobe does with this.

Me? I dunno. I’m not sure I’d buy a PDF that required me to be connected to open it. Rather defeats the purpose, IMO. But it’s likely most sellers won’t disclose that little tidbit before the sale. Found via Privacy Digest. Read the whole thing at PDFzone.

PDF Tracking On the Way
PDF Tracking On the Way. (el)Capitan.Nick writes "PDFzone reports that the company Remote Approach has launched a service to track the movement of PDF documents with its tool Map-Bot. The purpose of this service is to allow PDF publishers the ability to measure their audience, as web publishers can already. Though personal information is not gathered from machines, IP addresses are. PDFs can require users to be connected to the Internet in order to read them, and every person you email the PDF to is subject to the service. As PDFzone's opinion article states, while 'the chances of running into a Remote Approach PDF right now -- and in the near future -- are pretty remote ... the potential for the technology to tarnish PDF's image [of security] is staggering.'" [Slashdot: Your Rights Online]

Google Print Program

terrywfrazier@gmail.com — Thu, 16 Dec 2004 04:41:12 GMT

Yesterday Google announced it has struck a deal with several major university libraries. According to this DMNews article the deal covers scanning and digitizing more than 15 million books and documents from Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan, the University of Oxford and the New York Public Library. Yesterday's Talk of the Nation on NPR featured Michael Keller of Stanford and Brewster Kahle in a great discussion of this development. The library program is part of Google's larger Google Print program, which offers services to major publishers as well as libraries.

In today's WSJ there is an article on Random House looking to begin selling its books online, direct to consumers. This is a big step for publishers and, as the article notes, a step being considered to fight the growing power of the mega-retailers. But if we consider the digitization of books via Google in context with this, it potentially begins to change the way people locate and buy books.

For years I've felt the book retailers were becoming the new libraries -- they have books on display, reading areas, and snack bars to keep readers comfortable. But they rarely carry anything more than 12-18 months old. What if libraries became the new booksellers? Not literally, but libraries will keep books available for years, and if the excerpts are all available online and can be ordered easily via the publisher there is less and less need for the retail store.

I need to think about this more but it seems to me that these two developments are related, and together they are more important than either taken individually.

RSS and the Money Trail (or is that Tail?)

terrywfrazier@gmail.com — Fri, 29 Oct 2004 19:50:46 GMT

The long tail, the money trail, and the continuing rise of RSS as part of the "blog for money" game get a legitimacy boost from Wall St. firm Morgan Stanley.

Morgan Stanley on the Potential of RSS

A group of Morgan Stanley analysts, led by the esteemed Mary Meeker, have released a report on the impact of 'next generation content' (PDF) . The report is focused on RSS, and more specifically how Morgan feels that Yahoo, since their implementation of RSS on 'My Yahoo', is headed towards becoming a sort of Associated Press for digital media. It contemplates potential business models for revenue sharing between Yahoo (or whoever the content aggregator is) and publishers (bloggers in many cases). The report is very well done and I highly recommend reading it, especially if you're a blogger.

One of the main points that the report discusses is monetizing the 'tail of content'. There was a great article about 'the long tail' in last month's Wired magazine that is also a must read. That article gives some great insights on the business models of Amazon, eBay, NetFlix, etc. There's a lot of money to be made in the 'tails'.

(Morgan Stanley link via MaoXian) [via Trader Mike.]

RSS is at the tipping point, and will likely make a rapid transition from early adopter/geek tool to mainstream distribution channel. With that will come all the headaches associated the other mainstream distribution tools -- advertising, business models, complexity, etc. But there is also a lot of opportunity awaiting those who do it right.

But I'm not at all sure that the opportunity is for the traditional mass media channels -- after all, to them RSS is just one more way to push the same stuff out. Most are looking at it as a new way to drive website traffic, sending out teaser copy laced with ads -- not a very appetizing offering to someone like me. But some are taking innovative approaches to delivering special value to their customers. If the big boys can really figure out how to deliver personal value they have a chance. Now I'm off to read the Meeker Report.