Google Book Settlement -- ReDux

I go away for two days in the mountains and come back to find the Google Books Settlement II, a 173 page renegotiated version of the original deal (red-lined). Catch up with Grimmelmann.

I am not sure that I will read the new contract; getting through the first version was quite a strain! Here is one view of why it matters and why it doesnt.

The Google Book Settlement matters because something pretty much like what is envisaged in the Settlement is going to happen. And that is a good thing. Google has 10 million books scanned and databased in their servers. They are revved up and no doubt waiting to go. A large part of the most valuable human knowledge of the twentieth century will be accessible and will be being digitally read in American universities from some time in 2010 (that is a very good thing; a very bad thing is that they will NOT be available in the rest of the world, and the legal technicians have not much clue about how that broader accessibility can happen). Even if the judge were to reject the Settlement, even if the DOJ were to file and insist upon some swingeing limitations to the scope of the agreement, most books will be Googled from now on. 10 million books have already been databased in the way pioneered by the Google Books system, many of them at the express request of their publishers. Some aspects of the Google project have been very controversial, which is why we have a court case and why the legal hostilities may meander on for years yet. The outcome is predictably messy but the change has occurred.

The publishing paradigm has shifted and most books will now be accessible and searchable in various ways via Google (and perhaps, let us hope, via alternative search engines). Five years ago it was by no means obvious that all books would be digitised en masse, in their entirety (even many of the bindings), full text searchable, that they would be page-rendered, that they would be straightforwardly citeable in something like the ways print scholars have cited books for centuries (volume, chapter, page), that they would be readable in much the same way as ordinary web pages, that illustrations and indexes should be in place (though for many of the 20th Century books this will not be the case -- as a direct result of the Settlement orphan illustrations are more orphan than the texts). None of this was settled in 2004.

So there has been a revolutionary shift in the publishing paradigm. But now for the other shoe: I am not confident that the Google 'victory' in the case of the Settlement, will be seen that way in the future. Thomas Kuhn who coined the usage of 'paradigm shift' to explain the way in which with a scientific revolution a period of upheaval with its paradigm shift, then led to a period of 'normal science' when investigations proceeded under the shelter of the new paradigm. I am not sure that Google will now find itself in a period of normal science or calmer waters. Google has made a tremendous step forward, with its vision of the comprehensive digital database of published books, but the suspicion is growing that this is not a terminus. The Googled library/bookshop of all published literature is not a finished product and it is highly probable that it will fairly soon be overtaken by other models and by other paradigm shifting changes in the technology. I have the very strong intuition (it is merely that and I can not prove it) that digital books will soon be used in ways that surprise us greatly and have very little in common with the current operation of the Google Books service. We have barely started on the path of understanding how digital books can be used; and as an early entrant to the field, Google has every chance of finding itself out-innovated. Some Twitter-type of disruptive service will doubtless come along soon to show us how computation really should work with digital editions.

Google will surely be making the incumbent's mistake if they suppose that the Settlement really settles, solves or finalizes the direction that digital book technology should now take. To quote the Scottish sage "I hae me doots".

Chasing the Format

The New York Times has been stealth developing a new format for its daily news. TechCrunch has a summary. The horizontal, grid-like layout is reminiscent of the Google Fast Flip, but I buy the suggestion in the TechCrunch comments that this format is being readied for the putative Apple iTablet computer, aka slate device.

That could well be; and it would make sense for Apple to launch the Tablet with something like the NYT as a core offering in its media-player. However, if the NYT is prepping a special format for the tablet, that is almost certainly a poor long-term move for the New York Times (not much different from its earlier play with Microsoft and the ill-fated Microsoft Reader). When the initial Apple enthusiasm is spent and the tablet has been ingested, the New York Times is left with another variant format to support; or as in the case of 'Microsoft Reader' Times readers, another batch of audience to disappoint. The Tablet needs to work with the New York Times as it is and the Times needs to work with every web capable device that there is. Every gadget capable of running a standard browser.

Newspaper publishers feel inexorably drawn towards customising their offering for each new ultra-fashionable device that comes along, and this is an issue at the core of their current dilemma (or their owners acutely sharpening current financial dilemma). The last time I counted: the Guardian (my favourite newspaper) was trying to optimize its content offering across half a dozen different platforms (from print to audio via web, mobile, video, RSS, PDF and blogosphere); and I am sure there are more coming. Even the web site is now being tweaked for optimum delivery in different web environments. There may soon be Apple iPhone, Kindle, Blackberry, Google Android, and Nokia-tweaked editions of different newspapers in web and digital formats (Pre anyone?) for all the different flavours of device out there. And if you think there will be only one dominant Android form factor you may have another think coming.

Newspaper publishers may think that the costs of these proliferating platforms are not falling to them (the adaptations are being paid for by technology partners, or by advertisers, or by new revenue streams from putative subscribers). Wrong. The cost is falling on the publisher who needs to maintain a very complex editorial and content management infrastructure and the cost is also falling on the brand which is inevitably being fragmented as the familiar format and style of the newspaper is poorly distributed and lost in these variant editions. Big damage to brand through content fragmentation and sub-optimal design. One of the principal advantages of a digital edition as the primary offering for a newspaper to its web subscribers is that it is offering the very same newspaper as to print buyers. That correspondence has to re-inforce the brand and develops a climate of continuity, predictability and reliability between print and web editions.

Why are newspaper publishers chasing these sub-optimal, format-based, solutions so frantically? I suggest that there are two reasons. The first is that the horizontal, hierarchical, RSS-friendly formats such as Google Fast Flip are well suited to the sequential, evolving, 24 hour real time operation of the news room. Better adapted than the page-based format of the traditional broadsheet or tabloid newspapers. My bet is that these horizontal formats, with the accent on left/right movement, will be adopted by news organisations that are not primarily newspapers (Fast Flip is working with article feeds from the BBC and Salon) and that a few newspapers will migrate in this direction.

But most newspapers really need to work with their historic format, a package in which news, editorial, features and photographs are integrated and distributed and which does not absolutely require paper since digital pages also work. Digital newspapers, when they have learnt the strength of the digital package that they can easily become, will adhere to their page-format style, their section-based daily organisation; the inescapable penalty of the daily edition cycle, which imposes deadlines and a rectangular organisation on the news, opinions, stories and illustrations that they contain. The new Apple Tablet/Slate will be good for this whether it is held in portrait or horizontal mode, and the New York Times will be making a mistake it it postrates itself in horizontal mode to make the most of the 11" aluminum casing of the early models.

Bring on the tablet which should be an ideal format for digital editions in all shapes and sizes. If it is any good (and it will be) it will be a wonderful showcase for the New York Times just as it is. Oh yes, for a certainty each edition will need to be 'carefully put to bed' as they used to say on Fleet Street. No more than that. Newspapers will thrive on the web when they know what it is to be a digital newspaper. Remarkably similar in many ways to a print newspaper, but better.

On Reasons for not going Digital

We sometimes think that we have heard them all. The reasons for not having a digital edition of a magazine....

But we are still finding some surprising responses in the market. And I do not mean:

• We will want to do a digital edition when we have sorted out our web site (I mean web sites are never, ever, in that sense 'sorted out').
• We will want to look at this when our publisher is back from her maternity leave
• .... when I have finished next year's budget (a budget which should really have a digital revenues component in it, but will not)
  
• ........ in three months when our mobile strategy team has reported on our options (as though it were not relevant to the mobile strategy team to take a look at a digital platform that runs smoothly on mobile devices)
  

Those are some of the none too convincing explanations for inaction that one hears when talking to publishers. But there are some more powerful reasons that occur to our publishing partners. Sometimes my sales patter gets stopped in its tracks.

• A few years ago, I was trying to persuade the gardening magazine Hortus that they should have a digital edition and that we could easily show them what it would be like if they supplied us with a PDF file. "A what file?" came the response, and it soon dawned on me that Hortus is one of the few magazines that is still entirely printed by hot metal and it would not be a trivially easy matter to spin out a PDF file from their production process. This is the only time that in talking to literally hundreds of magazine publishers that I have encountered a production system which completely eschews the digital. Mind you Hortus is a wonderful quarterly magazine even if somewhat exclusive and I STILL think that a digital edition of it would do rather well. In fact I would really die for an iPhone App for it, but that is another matter, and I am prepared to accept that Hortus does not need to be digital.
• A couple of months ago, the publisher at another up-market, high-style, magazine which shall be nameless (but not for gardeners) told me that his magazine had such wonderful production values in print that they really did not want to tarnish the brand with a digital offering. I am not sure that he used the word 'sully', but he got pretty close. Like the Hortus guy, this chap had me non-plussed on the other end of the phone. Spluttering. How could one persuade him, if he was not willing to undertake a free trial, that this beautiful magazine would for absolutely sure look even more stunning in a digital format? For if you have looked at high-fashion and high-design magazines on really good monitors (even on humble MacBooks) it is hard to deny that they look even better digitally than in print. Added to which, to put the matter at its bluntest: frankly there is a market out there and if you do not sell subscriptions to the 20 year olds and 30 year olds who want to read everything on their laptop and their mobile phone, the market for such magazines will surely shrink.
• I was also spluttering yesterday when the circulation director at one of our biggest magazine publishers told me that he would not want to, would not be allowed to sell digital subscriptions to the magazine through the iPhone App store, because such subscriptions would not count towards the ABC circulation and subscription measures which are the bedrock of the advertising business on which the magazines depend. Since I know that the American parents of this publisher are desperate to build up subscription revenues and since I know that the advertising revenues of almost all the magazines in this stable have been collapsing, I found this reasoning less than stellar. This was a conversation about selling subscriptions to the iTunes audience, not about giving away RSS-style App feeds to the magazine content (which in fact the American parent does do for some of these big name magazines).
  

Mind you, I expect he is right and the last time I looked ABC does not allow Apple certified distribution figures to count in any way towards advertising-related circulation bases. But that really shows us what terrible shape the advertising business is in, and how sublimely irrelevant the ABC methodologies (and the same for BPA statistics) are to the businesses that they purport to serve. I would not put special blame on ABC or BPA for this, but we should be chucking bricks at the movers and shakers in the advertising business. Google and soon Apple will be eating their lunch precisely because the mainstream advertising agencies and publisher networks have not seen how fabulous digital distribution can be for advertisers provided that the technology for measurement and for targeted distribution can be transformed with digital tools. ABC should be 'penalising' magazines for not having measurable digital offerings, not discounting those that do....

Will the App Store make a Good Book Store?

There are a few reasons for thinking that the iPhone's App Store may become the next and best digital book store. These are a few of the reasons that occur to me:

• iTunes is already the most important digital music store and the AppStore is inheriting a lot of the momentum and the kharma of the iTunes e-commerce system
• the iPhone App Store is already a pretty good App Store and seems to be building Apple a possibly dominant position in the race for mobile Apps. Robert Scoble has some perceptive observations on this.
• Apple is rumoured to be building and close to launching a tablet computer, which will share the iPhones touch interface and the e-commerce system that supports the iPhone and the iTouch. The possibly mythical Apple tablet was last seen bounding through the Australian outback looking for media content, but when when this wallabook/kangoozine finally lands it will be a gorgeous display for newspapers and books. So Apple in producing a tablet is trying to make their hardware the best for books (and newspapers, films and albums!).
• Users like reading stuff off their iPhones and when there is a tablet the chances are that they will like that even more.
• The Apple system despite its creaky approval process, and the very weird rules that Apple imposes on its developers, is in some respects (and surprisingly) more open than the Amazon or the Google systems. Amazon for its Kindle and Google (for Google Books, or Google Editions) require that the books they distribute or will sell reside on their servers and in their 'format'. Amazon and Google already know what digital books are. Apple is not so sure. The architectural potential with Apple is more open: any publisher or author or inventor can throw an App with some new software and display potential at the Apple system (paying their small fee) and see if it catches on (Vooks or Enhanced Editions can be experimented with in the Apple media space). Google Editions and Amazon's Kindle have no such open-ness, no inventor-driven potential, and the same goes for Sony and Barnes and Noble.
  

On the other hand, we can find some reasons for not too readily buying into the Apple-flavoured vision of the App Store as bookstore (or even Vookstore or Nookstore).

• I think it was Tim O'Reilly who said that the book as App does not scale well. Which I took to mean that whilst we can envisage having one or two or several Books as Apps on our phone, it is not likely that we can manage libraries this way. That may be correct, but individuals, unlike institutions, merely accumulate libraries. We buy books one at a time and if we buy enough of them within our iPhone ways will be found for managing those collections. I have been impressed by the way in which Apps can be found within the App Store. Even though it seems to be lamentably lacking in shopper-oriented convenience and friendliness. Users have been finding and buying the Exact Editions Apps for the Spectator and Opera magazine, though there has been very little explicit advertising or promotion for them (yet). The offerings within the App store are being found. Traffic is being generated. With a bit of merchandising skill from Apple, it is conceivable that millions of individual book Apps could be found and purchased within the App store by the tens of millions of users who have iTunes accounts. Scaling may not be such a big problem.
• Perhaps a more serious issue with the one book per App model for the Apple Bookstore is that books need to be open and to work with each other in ways which Apps do not. Apps are self-contained applications and do not provide much scope for interoperation and interaction in the ways that digital books really need to do. But is this merely a short-term problem? Apple are developing their mobile developer environment and interoperating Apps are bound to come.

The Appstore/Bookstore could work out rather well. Especially if Apple resists the temptation to over-control the environment. If Steve Jobs really is sitting on the final specification of the iTabloid as he scans the latest field reports from Wooloongabba, Woomera, Bullaroo, Geelong and Gulgong, my advice is that he should ditch the pink, opt for matt black, OK the slightly larger form factor, the bigger memory, better battery (please! a better battery) and sign off. It will not be in my Christmas stocking but I am ready to stand in line in January, or February, or whenever....

Bookserver and the Right Architecture for Books

The pace of change in the books space is hotting up. Two weeks ago Amazon announced that its Kindle will be internationally available. Google last week at Frankfurt announced its Google Editions proposition (or perhaps we should say they re-announced it). In three weeks Google has an appointment with Judge Chin on November 9, to re-present its much discussed Google Books Search Settlement. Techcrunch had a piece on 24 Android phones (some of which are admittedly merely rumoured, but most of which will be touted for reading books). Yesterday Barnes and Noble presented their new Nook, eReader. And the day before yesterday the Internet Archive (with several collaborators) announced its BookServer project.

The BookServer proposition seems to be very much a work in progress. Thinking on the hoof and probably a fair bit of smoke and mirrors (see Peter Brantley's Web of Books presentation and Roy Tennant's blog) . But one aspect of it feels a great deal more right than the Google Books Search proposition in its various forms. The architecture is essentially and deliberately open and multipolar:

As the audience for digital books grows, we can evolve from an environment of single devices connected to single sources into a distributed system where readers can find books from sources across the Web to read on whatever device they have. Publishers are creating digital versions of their popular books, and the library community is creating digital archives of their printed collections. BookServer is an open system to find, buy, or borrow these books, just like we use an open system to find Web sites. (Internet Archive's BookServer page)

This is a good central position around which the Internet Archive can build its coalition. But it would seem that they may end up with some unlikely allies. They are following the path of, and working with, Lexcycle's Stanza (now Amazon owned) in their strategy of orchestrating, coalescing access to formatted ePUB files, and one wonders whether the BookServer backers will fill their obvious lack of full text search through an alliance with Microsoft's Bing. There are indeed some interesting challenges for Microsoft and Amazon as they contemplate whether to address Google's potentially massive lead in proprietary book aggregation by making a more Open alliance with the Internet Archive and other champions of free and open. If the Internet Archive can maintain its footing in a genuinely open and independent position (which includes encouraging Google to spider and search, as well as Bing), it has a good chance of establishing the crucial principles that it articulates. It has a good chance of being more open to innovation than Google.

Google is Going for It

It looks as though Google has decided that it is going to get the Google Books Settlement that it wants (and I suspect that a large part of the American public want it too). Google is just going to push it through as close as it can to the original proposition. There were, after all, two ways of interpreting the decisive and late intervention from the DoJ. According to Michael Cairns it gives a blueprint for how the original Settlement could be renegotiated to pass muster. According to Pamela Samuelson, Google Book Settlement 1.0 is History, it would be astonishing if the Settlement in its current form were to be approved: a new balance and a new settlement is needed which takes account of the deep issues identified in the DoJ brief.

Normally, I would back Professor Samuelson, one of America's most distinguished IT lawyers, against a self-confessed 'know-it-all' mere publishing consultant. But on this occasion I suspect that Cairns has called it right (he may know more about how publishers go about arm wrestling with regulators). The Settlement will be nudged to accommodate the 'objections' raised by the DoJ but it will be broadly as agreed. Here are three tell-tale signs:

1. The timescale for resolution is short. The revised Settlement will be presented to the Judge in on November 9 and he has said that he wants matters to be concluded speedily (within a few months). So Google cannot be planning major changes. No extensive process of consultation and commentary is in view.
2. There was the rather extraordinary New York Times opinion column, A Library to Last Forever, in which Sergey Brin explained the great advantages of the Googe Book Search project, exactly as though it were to be executed as envisaged in the Settlement. He breezily acknowledges that there have been concerns about 'competition' and 'copyright' but effectively dismisses these concerns as misunderstandings (I bet the DoJ lawyers were surprised to see their analysis so airily brushed aside).
3. Google has this week announced its Google Editions project, which is intended to make its books database resource, title by title, available to all readers everywhere in every format of ebook reader. So Google at one step is embracing and enlisting all the ebook platforms which might otherwise be a form of competitive counterbalance to the Google Books Library. I wonder what the DoJ competition experts think of the decisive way in which Google has also pre-announced, long before it is operative, how the discount system is going to work between Google, the publishers and the various retailers envisaged as operating Google Editions? And with Google selling direct as well? And with Google running the search engine for all parties? Is there no potential for anti-trust concerns in all of this?
   

Google Editions has nothing directly to do with the Google Books Settlement. Google has taken off its left shoe and is banging the table: "Forget about orphan books, the books of rights owners are also on our servers with their full agreement and hey we are going to be selling them as well soon, moreover in distribution channels not mentioned at all in the Settlement. Wake up please!" Google could have announced the plan last year; or next year (it is in any case not going to be ready until the first half of next year); or the year after. Google Editions, so far, only appears to be a distribution channel for books sourced from publishers or books in the public domain. As such it is quite independent of the Settlement. Yep Google Editions is orthogonal from Google Editions. Nothing to do with that controversy. But one wonders why Google should announce it now, drawing attention to the fact that Google may, one way and another, become the primary source for books in all digital and electronic formats? Three weeks before they present the revised deal to the judge (presumably with comments from DoJ).

My guess is that Google is pretty confident that the DoJ really do not want to veto the deal (do you want to stop a deal that enables ten million titles to reach the 30 million Americans who are 'print-impaired'?). The judge probably will not want to veto the deal. Not when push comes to shove. So Google had better hang in for the deal to be the way it wants. After all, Google has digitised the 10 million titles. Google has, we presume, clear vision of the way this is going to work. When the deal is agreed, Google not the Federal Government has to deliver the service. Note who is doing the heavy lifting. Note who is paying the lawyers.

Google has a great database system (oxymoron alert), Google has the ability to deliver a fabulous service, Google has been at the forefront and it has sustained its initiative, and if turns out that it has a de facto, and to a degree, a de jure monopoly, once the dust settles that will be challenged. A monopoly of books will be defeated (ultimately by competition as much as by the courts). Google's confidence is justified and is the other face of its boldness in setting the whole scheme going, and if it misapplies its momentum (which it probably will), it will come unstuck.

There is plenty of scope for Google critics: Angela Merkel, Pamela Samuelson, Peter Brantley and Bob Darnton. And we need them. But Google is getting done something which will bear a lot of fruit. So this settlement is going to go through and stopping Google Books Search dead in its tracks is not going to happen. Sure it will be appealed..... all the way (paid for by those of Google's competitors that want to slow the juggernaut down). But more to the point the Google Books Search settlement is not the last innovative step in this march. Time to move forward. Time to compete with Google through innovation, not through writs.

Opera Magazine App now in iTunes App Store

Opera magazine now has its own branded App in iTunes.

The Opera iPhone Application offers access to the latest monthly issue as well as to an archive of back issues stretching back to August 2006. The week-long subscription costs £1.19, or $1.99, or €1.59. Renewing for a month costs £3.99, which compares to a news stand price of £4.99.















I am now hoping that the Opera App will now be reviewed 'operatically' if not 'ecstatically'

Exactly Reviewed Ecstatically?

AppShouter has one of those reviews that tells you the reviewer really enjoyed him/herself.

As a journalism major, I was thrilled, perhaps ecstatic is a better word, for how I felt when I came across this app. Exactly is literally like having a newsstand in the palm of your hand. It is amazing. I can’t put it down!
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The interface is also easy to navigate as it looks a lot like the jukebox feature of iTunes. Stroke left or right to turn pages, double tap the screen to zoom…I could go on, but I am sure you get the picture. Exactly is easy! I’ll also say, that as a journalist, in an industry that is continually pooling resources and charging more and more for content, Exactly is definitely a friend to my pocketbook. I cannot thank it enough.

Thank you Yantezia P for having some fun with the Exactly App.