Document Publishing and Distribution

In350: week 12: Nov. 12,2001 Judith A. Molka-Danielsen

”Terminal decrepitude”

Publishing in the 1920s: Millay, Edna St. Vincent. A Few Figs From Thistles. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1922. (1919)

Recuerdo

    WE were very tired, we were very merry—     We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.     It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable—     But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table,     We lay on a hill-top underneath the moon;     And the whistles kept blowing, and the dawn came soon.

    We were very tired, we were very merry—     We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry;     And you ate an apple, and I ate a pear,     From a dozen of each we had bought somewhere;     And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold,     And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold.

    We were very tired, we were very merry,     We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.     We hailed "Good morrow, mother!" to a shawl-covered head,     And bought a morning paper, which neither of us read;     And she wept, "God bless you!" for the apples and pears,     And we gave her all our money but our subway fares.

From Poet Icons to Pop IconsMillay was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize (1923) for poetry, she once published a book of sonnets that sold 35,000 copies in two weeks (and this was during the Depression). In 1928, her royalty income was the equivalent of $200,000 in today's dollars. …but it’s not just printed text anymore…

Madonna was seen by 9 million people on Nov. 26, 1999, estimated number of viewers who logged on to Microsoft Network sites in the United States, Europe and Asia to watch a 30-minute concert by Madonna.

•at London’s Brixton Academy only 2,000 tickets sold in house, no TV broadcast

•broadcast Webcast by NaviSite, the first time this size event was delivered at up to 700 kbps, “near-DVD-quality.”

Whither goes book publishing?

Book publishing as currently practised is in trouble.

Decline of independent book sellers, rise of big chains (global markets)Digital technologies – every book an e-book. Books as cultural artifacts. ATM-like kiosk, order book, printed in minutes.

”Terminal decrepitude” is the phrase of Jason Epstein, former editorial director of Random House, previously with Doubleday since 1950.

Whither goes book publishing?

Global MarketsChanging DemandsChanging TechnologyChanging Procedures

A Changing Industry

Historically: Publishing houses took modest profits and relied on the firms backlist- books that sold steady year after year. New releases feed the backlist, not immediate sales.

Decline: Americans move to suburbs, bookstores open in malls (high rent space), require fast turnover of stock, emphasis on bestsellers, impulse buys, promos on ”Oprah”. Then the Digital revolution…

The Digital Revolution…Electronic bookstores (Amazon.com) create ”price-cutting” competition. Marginal profits do not offset warehouse and customer service costs.The next logical step is to remove these costs…Only send e-books? But there are several directions:

Hand held devices for reading e-books will grow: palm-tops, mobile phones, e-book readers,…E-ink – improved readability in the technologyPrint-on-demand technology: will lower the printing costs for publishers, allow small scale publishing, self-publishing. But, the demand for paper copies will never disappear.

Standards for shared multimedia already exist. (XML, PDF, MP3).

The e-book readersE-book readers: eBook-Gemstar.com - official NuvoMedia site for Rocket eBook reader: news, software updates, special offers for eBook users. Gemstar-TV Guide International acquired and merged NuvoMedia and SoftBook Press.Microsoft and Adobe e-book readers are the biggest inhibitors of the dedicated e-book device market right now. Both companies offer free e-book reader software downloads that can be installed on PCs, laptops, and handheld devices. Competition also comes from Franklin Electronic Publishers, which after delays began selling its eBookMan March-01. Unlike Gemstar's e-book-only device, eBookMan serves as an e-book reader, personal digital assistant, and MP3 or digital music player.

The e-book title formats

The formatsPDFAdobe Acrobat (hard to read on-screen)

RB Rocket e-book

LIT Microsoft Reader

PRC Palm

Questions:What reader devices will win?Why are competing e-book formats a problem for the industry, for the consumer? What happened to XML?

Open E-book Initiative

Open eBook InitiativeThe Open eBook Authoring Group specification OEB 1.0 for eBook file and format structure on 09.21.99. It allows publishers to create one electronic format of their work and have it be readable by a large variety of reading devices. Features/requirements:

• It requires all conforming reading systems to support at least XML, CSS, JPEG and PNG files. An OEB Publication can contain other kinds of files (e.g., a QuickTime movie), but must, for each of these files, also provide a "fallback" version in one of the required file formats (e.g., a JPEG). This ensures that all OEB Publications can be displayed on all reading systems - even if they contain "extras" that are only viewable on some reading systems. • A PDF file, like any other non-Open-eBook-format file, may be embedded in an Open eBook publication, as long as that publication contains an alternate representation of the content to be used by reading systems that lack PDF support. Open eBook reading systems are not required to support PDF, nor any other non-Open-eBook file format. We anticipate the commercial release by many parties of tools to facilitate the conversion of content from other file formats, including PDF, to Open eBook documents and publications.

CopyrightsE-book formats can be broken. Some have been able to break the Microsoft Reader (two-device copy limit) format and the Adobe Acrobat format. What can be done to protect copyrights?

Pressures to prosecute under the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (businesses that try to do business with the US must consider this.) See what happened with Napster and filters.

Libraries that loan e-books can require user registration and place in loan versions of books expire time limits on the e-versions and include code to charge .25 cents per page for print outs from the e-book. Some e-book stores also sell cheap versions of the e-book with timeouts.

Traditional Publishers with e-books

Random House; AtRandom.com ,Winter 2001 

 Time Warner; iPublish , Fall 2000   

Simon & Schuster , Spring 2000  

Barnes & Noble.com, Barnes & Noble Digital , Spring 2001 

Print on DemandThe technology involves complex laser printing systems and electronically formatted text which the printers can read. Publishers hope this method will allow them to more effectively print smaller numbers of a book and still make a profit. Currently is very expensive. New York Times reported that Lightning Source, Inc., provider of ebook fulfillment, charges publishers over $4.00 per book, which is a higher cost per unit than that of small print run.

General QuestionsWhat are the limitations for Print-on-Demand (POD) technology to be accepted by publishers?What are the problems with POD and the quality of the product?Considering POD and large numbers of titles being printed as e-books. What issues do the consumers face when trying to search for published materials to meet their needs and interests? How can the book sellers help consumers find books and increase profits?

Tasks of the book publisher

Selecting a manuscriptEditingPromotingAttending to the authorReviewing proposals of booksPrinting, warehousing, shipping

Publishing and Distribution of Academic Electronic Journals

We focus on Academic Electronic Journals because these traditionally:

Have a peer review acceptance procedure and therefore are of higher value to the academic community.Are published in small numbers, purchased mostly by university libraries.

Reference for the following discussion is in the article: The future of Electronic Journals by Hal Varian. A case study on The Cost of Publishing an Electronic Journal may also be discussed in class.

The Case of Academic JournalsMotivation for Electronic Publishing of Journals:

•Internet offers lower cost of reproduction and distribution than print. •The scholarly community has high connectivity to the Internet.

Points on the business of publishing: •Researchers are judged by their publications (ie. job position, salary, tenure). •Citations prove that someone reads the articles written. •Top journals have a very high rejection rate (12% accepted). •Journals are input into academic research, therefore researchers want to work places that have access to a big collection of journals.

The Publishing Process

The process of Manuscript Handling: 1.Author sends 3 paper copies to the main office. 2.The editor assigns each manuscript to a co-editor based on the co-editors expertise (and has clerical help). 3.The co-editor assigns manuscript to two or more reviewers and (also has a clerical worker to assist). 4.Reviewers get back to co-editor and she decides if the article is worth publishing. 5.Author revises accepted article (based on content and form). 6.Article is sent to referees for further review. 7.Most often, article is accepted and sent to the main office. 8.It is copyedited, typeset, and proof read sheets are sent to the author for final check. 9.The article is sent to the production office: printed, bound, mailed.

Production CostsThe Production Costs of Academic Journals

•First Copy costs of Academic Articles are between $2000 and $4000 per article. •Marginal cost of printing and mailing one issue is $3. Few subscribers to printed versions. Libraries want access to electronic versions.

Here is an example. •4 issues/year with 10 articles/issue = 40 articles/year. •3000 x 40 = 120000 = fixed cost •$12 printing and mailing (4) issues per year = variable cost. •12 x 600 (subscribers) = 7200 (realised variable cost) •127200 = total cost for example = 120000 + 7200 •127200/600 = $212 = break even price for the journal for one year subscriptions.

•Many journals are priced much higher. ie. $600 per year. •If the variable cost of printing and mailing were removed you would only save $12 on the journal price. ($200 instead). •Lesson: Fixed Costs dominate the cost of production. •Other costs: archiving (storage cost of a single issue of a journal to a library is $25 to $40.) Cost per use ratio (most articles are not even read).

Re-engineering the production of Journals

Production costs by using electronic manuscript handling should drop 50% from paper handling. ($1000 per article).

•labor costs reduced (less clerical staff needed). •postage, mailing, and photocopying of manuscripts is not needed. •copy editing and conversion to a uniform style could be relaxed or automated.

•typesetting cost $15-25 per page. •markup cost on 20 page article is about $500 •Instead use desktop publishing and structured markup languages (ie. SGML) to move to electronic submission using a journal supplied document type definition (DTD).

Distribution and Storage CostsElectronic distribution save costs in review stage and delivery stage.

Shelf-space savings to libraries - on the order of $35 per volume. (Substitute costs are running a web server, creating CDs with journal publications, updating the media for recent acceptable storage and format standards, electronic archiving costs.) But, Service improves:

•Monitor: It is easier to monitor who reads the articles (how many, links to other pages, citations on other pages, hits on the article page).

•Searching: It is easier to search for topics.

•Supporting Materials: Journal publishers can also store supporting materials (ie. simulations, analyses, reviews,responses, data sets).

A new model for an electronic review process

1.Authors submit electronically manuscripts for review (one paragraph abstract, five page summary, 20-30 page paper). 2.Submitted paper is read by 2-3 editorial board members.

•They may only read the 5 page summary. •They rate how interesting the paper is on a scale of 1-to-5. •Scale is a common curve, so only 10% can get a top score.

3.All papers are accepted. But the author decides to publish it or not. The paper will have the rating (editorial score) that it was given. 4.Subscribers can read any paper that is on-line. They can also score the paper (anonymously or not). 5.All evaluations are online. They become social recommenders. 6.Authors can submit works with links to other on-line works.

Implications of using an electronic review model for academic journals

•The author says evaluation of interest can be separate from the evaluation of correctness (there is no copyediting mentioned here). But I think the readers (subscribers) might find it difficult to distinguish correctness or determine it from the editorial scores (which are based on interest) or on the subscribers recommendations (which may also be based on interest and overlook correctness of the parts. Also, subscribers must know who are good evaluators.) •The author points out the benefit that readers contribute to evaluations. •Interesting articles are read and become threads (linked) to future work. •Because more materials will be on-line, authors might want to be judged by their to 5 articles, instead of all their articles.

Conclusions: Whither goes book publishing?

Global MarketsChanging DemandsChanging TechnologyChanging Procedures

Note: You should be able to discuss the changes in all of these areas.