RE: Steven Johnson on E-Books

[<Toby.GREEN@oecd.org>]

We've been publishing e-books since 1998 and ran an experiment 
offering individual chapters in 2001-2, only to find no-one 
wanted to buy them. However, I think that was too soon for the 
market. Today, we disseminate many more e-books than we do print 
and our income from e-books is much larger than for print. 
However, we don't sell our books via Kindle or any other 
stand-alone reading device - at least not yet - because our 
readers are not at the end of that particular supply chain (at 
least, not yet). I really like the story of the impulse purchase 
of Zadie Smith's novel and I have a Kindle-owning colleague in 
the US who has also bought a book within a minute or so of 
reading a review in the Economist. Clearly the speed with which 
it is possible to get hold of a book is impressive and will lead 
to impulse purchases (just as browsing in a bookstore does).

Will this lead to chapter-purchasing? It may, especially for 
books which are compilations of chapters rather than stories with 
a beginning, middle and end. The challenge will be to add 
metadata at the level of each discrete part of a book. This is 
something we've been doing for the past five years or so, but 
it's more difficult than it seems because breaking a book into 
discrete bits that make sense is not always obvious. Sometimes we 
decide we can't break the book up because that would render each 
part useless. We are also separating out charts, tables and 
graphs - giving each their own metadata so they can be discovered 
and downloaded independently of the chapter. Aside from changing 
our processes, we've also had to ask authors to change the way 
they prepare their books: we now need bibliographies for each 
chapter and abstracts too. I know that other publishers are doing 
the same.

Will we offer these individual pieces for sale independently? I 
don't know - but we certainly haven't ruled it out. Do we have 
the necessary e-commerce systems in place? Yes, but right now it 
would require direct purchasing via our website - which may work 
for some individuals, but I don't imagine institutions will be 
very interested in buying direct from gazillions of individual 
publishers' websites. I guess, if the market is there for this 
kind of service, iTunes and/or Amazon will be jostling with 
Ingram, Swets et al to be the intermediary.

A word on semantic mark up. I'm very jealous of publishers in 
biology or chemistry where the text contains terms presented in 
an internationally agreed, standardized, language (names of bugs, 
chemical formulae). This is relatively easy to mark up 
semantically. But how do you mark up a book where the language 
shifts from year to year? Two years ago it was handicapped 
people, then it was people with disabilities, now its people with 
disadvantages. Is it the credit crunch or the financial crisis? I 
think it will be a while before mark-up is possible at the level 
of paragraphs, let alone chapters.

Finally, will the Kindle (or its 'klones') be the killer ap or 
will it be the iPhone? How soon before netbooks and laptops 
integrate Kindle-like features? Of course, it's none of them (or 
all of them) because it's not the device that matters, it's the 
supply chain. The 'aha' moment came because the supply chain is 
now much shorter - a matter of a minute between thinking about 
purchasing a book (or component) and getting it on a screen to 
read. That's the killer ap.

Toby Green
Head of Publishing
Public Affairs & Communications Directorate
OECD
toby.green@oecd.org
www.oecd.org
www.oecd.org/publishing


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
On Behalf Of richards1000@comcast.net
Sent: 22 April, 2009 4:33 AM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Steven Johnson on E-Books

Listmembers may be interest in Steven Johnson's engaging article 
in the April 20 Wall Street Journal, "How the E-Book Will Change 
the Way We Read and Write," 
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123980920727621353.html . Johnson 
predicts that the Amazon e-reader and Google's vast digital 
library, combined with machine-readable markup and a standard 
citation system that provides pinpoint citations to the paragraph 
or even sentence level, will lead to social tagging of subparts 
of millions of e-books.  Google's search system and Amazon's 
ranking algorithms would then foster discovery and ranking of 
those subparts.  Moreover, the handheld appears to enable easy 
impulse buying of digital texts.  According to Johnson, all of 
these factors should cause a huge increase in the sale of 
subparts of electronic books.

While it's clear that scholarly journal publishers are already 
effectively selling online on demand at the article level, I'm 
not sure whether scholarly monograph publishers or vendors are 
yet prepared for online sales on demand at the chapter, 
subchapter, or paragraph level.  I'd be interested to hear from 
scholarly monograph publishers and vendors whether Johnson's 
scenario seems likely, and, if so, how far along scholarly 
monograph publishers and vendors are at implementing the semantic 
markup, citation standards, and e-commerce components to 
facilitate such a system of on-demand digital subpart sales.

Johnson's article seems to underscore the value for knowledge 
dissemination and e-commerce of an open, machine-readable e-book 
citation format that can function as a unique identifier for each 
book subpart.

Robert C. Richards, Jr., J.D.*, M.S.L.I.S., M.A.
Law Librarian & Legal Information Consultant
Philadelphia, PA
richards1000@comcast.net