Axel Springer Plans to Rewrite 30 Years of Online Revenue Evidence
December 9, 2009
Want a memorable passage to tattoo on your tummy? Now I think only the hip traditional journalists and publishers will embrace the needle. Here is the segment from the Gray Lady’s “Publisher Lays Out Plan to Save Newspapers”:
What kind of content would come at a cost? Any “noncommodity journalism,” Mr. Keese said, citing pictures of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy cavorting poolside with models at his villa in Sardinia — published this year by the Spanish daily El País — as an example. “How much would people pay for that? Surely €5,” he said.
The phrase “non commodity” is not applicable to online information. I would suggest “must have” content. Furthermore, motes of info trivia won’t generate much money. What makes money online is aggregation, scale, and data that answer even the most poorly formed query.
Axel will burn rubber trying to make progress. I think the springs will break under the pressure. Note: the Guardian, recycled the New York Times’s story here. That’s what bloggers do. Don’t tell Mr. Murdoch. He believes in “real” journalism. Fox-y business mogul.
Stephen Arnold, December 9, 2009
Oyez, oyez, the goose wrote this for nothing. I am not sure what US government agency is providing oversight for free articles about big companies about to enroll in the school of hard knocks. Maybe the National Science Foundation?
Libreka: Belgium Builds a Google Killer for the Europeans
December 8, 2009
I am not sure if this headline is accurate, but that’s what I wrote in my notes after I saw a demo of Libreka. This is not a new service. Ars Technica wrote about it in October 2007. You may find this write up useful: “German Publishers Challenge Google Book Search with Libreka.” The article said:
The new program, called Libreka, has attracted plenty of German publishers who like its “opt-in” approach. Publishers who don’t want to make snippets or sample pages of their works available have that option, unlike with Google, which shows tiny snippets of text even from copyrighted works. Those who want to offer sample pages and make their books searchable can do that too.
I saw a document on Wikileaks that suggested that the Libreka service was not scoring hat tricks at the cash register. You can find that document here.
Libreka has hit my radar a number of times. I have in my files a copy of presentation given a year ago. You can find the document online here. The Libreka business model is quite ambitious, maybe too ambitious:
The document asserts:
- 100,000+ books fully searchable online
- 30m+ book pages online
- 11,000+ E-Books for sale
- 1,200 participating publishers
- 600 participating booksellers.
According to my source in London last week, Libreka is software built by Bureau Marcel van Dijk. You can run queries on the system. Notice that it has a number of Google Books features. The service offers a “wish list”, which allows me to “reserve a book”. I am not sure I will use this feature. User query terms are highlighted in the page displays. I set up a user account, and then I was able to run a query and display a number of pages. I installed the Adobe Digital Editions software. (Once I ran a couple of queries, I uninstalled this software. Yuck. Adobe.) The system also supports PDF “flavors”. (Yuck. Adobe.) My estimate is that the pages displayed are dictated by the publisher participating in the program. If you read German, there’s an FAQ at http://www.libreka.de/help#faq. If you are a Google Translate fan, the Google system cannot parse this particular url, so you will be on your own or you will need to find a German reading friend to assist you.
Too little, too late in my opinion.
Stephen Arnold, December 8, 2009
Oyez, oyez, Library of Congress. I wish to disclose that I am writing this article for free and in English. My German is rusty but I figured out enough to conclude that German booksellers are pushing the wrong way in the digital data flows.
Kindle Craziness
December 7, 2009
For some interesting MBA logic, read “Kindle Fantasies Are Running Wild — But, For Now, Amazon Is Losing Its Shirt.” I am not too keen on Amazon or the Kindle. Amazon’s financial reports are not too informative, and the data about its cloud services are expressed in mythical Amazon units. Spare me. The Kindle is annoying in its various incarnations. Among the reasons is the dorky snap on cover that can break the device and the when-pigs-fly search system that often launches itself when packing the gizmo away when the pilot tells me to turn off electronic devices. I have learned to live with the gray on dark gray screen and the clumsy keyboard, the experimental browser, and odd buttons. Kindle 1 had buttons that were too easy to push. Kindle 2 have buttons that are tough to use when reading on the elliptical exercise machine. The big Kindle is an invitation to breakage. PDFs and graphics generally are miserable experiences.
The article cited above sidesteps my points and goes into a more murky area; namely, the finances of Amazon’s selling eBooks. The key passage in the write up in my opinion was:
Publishers should be able to sell e-books to distributors like Amazon at $5 and still maintain the profit margins they enjoyed on print book sales. In turn, distributors like Amazon should be able to sell e-books at the current $9-$10 price and still enjoy a healthy profit. The bad news for authors is that their royalties will decrease since they are based off of retail sales price.
I think that books of any type are going to be a financial challenge whether in print, online, or on a device like the Kindle. In case you have not noticed, books are not the way folks under 20 get their info. I don’t see the demographic bulges that are bursting with video, Web, and tweet consumers suddenly jumping on the book bandwagon. There are 320 million or so people in the US and most book readers are concentrated above 42nd Street, in university burgs like Charlottesville, Virginia, Washington, DC, and a half dozen other major cities.
The numbers presented in the write up appear rational, but the thinking that gives rise to this type of analysis is oddly disconnected from the reality of the publishing business. Can traditional publishing survive with a shrinking pool of book readers? Check out the argument in Carnival Culture: The Trashing of Taste in America. That 1992 future is now here. When a blockbuster fails to materialize for book publishers, the decline will be sure and steady. In fact, that’s what is happening right now in publishing. When Google provides good enough options to get nuggets of information, the revenue bleeding will be slow and the open wound will lead to financial Streptococcus pneumoniae. Prognosis: no marathons for the victim. Publishing outfits may just wheeze along.
Don’t expect gizmos and price wars to change the descent. Just take a look at your kids. Reading a book? Not likely for the majority of families I assert.
Stephen Arnold, December 8, 2009
Oyez, oyez, I want to disclose to the Department of the Army that books are not what they once were. If you know someone in the Army responsible for recruit training, run your book argument by that non commissioned officer and let me know what you hear. By the way, this is a free blog. You will have to pay the author of the cited article to get their reasoning for financial bonanzas.
Maggwire: A Remarkable Reinvention of a 1980s Database
December 7, 2009
I saw a reference to the “iTunes of magazines.” I took a few minutes to track down this reference. I located what may be the ur-reference, an interview with Ryan Klenovich and Steve DeWald, two former investment bankers with Deutsche Bank. You can find the full text of the interview in which this phrase appears in Mr. Magazine’s Web log article “Magazine Innovation in Practice: Maggwire, the iTunes for magazines?” Several points in the interview made it into my paper notebook via a goose quill pen. For more insights about this “iTunes for magazines”, read the article and watch the video.
- “We’re trying to become an online destination for reading magazines, similar to YouTube where users associate YouTube as the online destination for viewing videos.”
- “Initially, the excitement is going to come from the added traffic.”
- “You can call us the Google of magazines, where we crawl the web for these great magazine articles, the users go on there to read and rate the articles, and the idea is that the best ones will come to the top.”
- “The ideality is to create this marketplace using one ID.”
- “Like I said, we’re not going to replace print, what we’re trying to do is compliment the print magazine.”
- “Another thing that we have thought about is, after we do reach a certain critical mass, we believe people will be willing to pay a nominal subscription for our service especially as the publishers continue to expand their offerings and partner up with us and our site will just get better and better and better.”
- “I think now we’re really in an interesting phase where you have these e-ink devices and iTablets coming out so the hardware will be there, so you need some kind of central destination to back that up.”
Interesting premise.
Stephen Arnold, December 7, 2009
Oyez, oyez. A freebie. I wonder to whom I report this fact. Perhaps to the iTunes of the US government, the National Archives, maybe?
The Google Gong Rings for ProQuest and Dissertation Content
December 7, 2009
A MOVIE CAMERA BUSINESS TRIES TO ADAPT
In June 1986, I was sold along with the electronic publishing assets of the Courier Journal & Louisville Times Co. to Bell+Howell. B+H owned a new media company, which in the late 1980s did business as University Microfilms with the acronym UMI. At that time, the company’s product line up spanned a number of media. At one end of the spectrum was the original business based on creating microfilm replicas of documents. These microfilms were sold to libraries. Generations of students used technology perfected during World War II for their access to information not in a library’s collection. At the other end were the electronic products from the Courier Journal: ABI/INFORM, Pharmaceutical News Index, and Business Dateline (the first full text local business news database with corrections made when the source updated the story’s facts).
Now this is an efficient research tool for today’s student. Source: http://www.archivalsuppliers.com/images/Picture%20284.jpg
When I was a student, I did research with microfilm. It was okay but it took a long time to get the reels, get them set up, and reviewed. Getting a hard copy of a document was a hassle. Some of the prints turned black and became unreadable quickly. I once dropped a reel and watched in horror as it unspooled, picked up dirt, and was unusable. I had to pay the library for a replacement. I think in the 1960s, a single reel cost me about $45 which was more than I made in my part time job. I loathed the stuff.
At the recent Online Information 2009 event in London, my colleague Ulla de Stricker was the keynoter for the “Publishers Delivering Value” track on December 3., 2009. In her talk – which she mentioned the Google move into dissertations. Her reference inspired me to write this opinion piece. You can get iinformation about her at DeStricker.com. One of her example was the fact that Stanford University students may now submit their dissertations to Google while it is optional to submit them to ProQuest.
So I wandered over to the exhibit hall to visit with ProQuest, all the while reminiscing about my past experience with that company – known as UMI at the time.
MICROFILM: HARD TO USE, EASY TO DAMAGE AND MISFILE
When I was working on my PhD, I remember my fellow students talking about the costs of getting their dissertations “published” and then included in the Dissertation Abstracts index. I never had this problem because I took a job with the nuclear unit of Halliburton, never bothering to submit my dissertation once I got a real job.
A microfilm readers. Source: http://www.ucar.edu/library/collections/archive/media/photographs/481_1976_microfilm_lg.jpg
The whole system was a money making machine. When a library burned down, backfiles could be acquired when physical copies were not available. When a university got a grant for a new field of study, a collection of journals could be purchased from UMI on microfilm. Bang. Instant academic reference material. I don’t recall how much content the “old” UMI moved to microfilm. My recollection is that there were books, journals, newspaper, and, of course, dissertations. With all this film, I understood why B+H had paid tens of millions for the Courier Journal’s electronic publishing expertise. Buying expertise and using it are two different things, in my opinion.
MECHANICAL PRODUCTION WRONG FOR DIGITAL PRODUCTS
The production process for creating a microfilm was quite complicated and involved specialized cameras, film, and chemicals. The image I have of the UMI facility in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the first time I visited was a modern day castle surrounded by a moat. The castle was a large, one-story building surrounded by a settling pond. The chemicals from the film processing were pumped into the moat in order to separate certain high value residue from other chemicals. UMI processed so much film that the residue silver from the photographic process warranted this recycling effort.
Dinosaurs struggle with the concept of an apocalypse. Adapt or get grilled I suppose.
UMI had a silver mine in its monopoly on certain types of content. My recollection of UMI was that its core product was getting universities to require or maybe strongly recommend that doctoral dissertations had to be “published” by UMI. The microfilm copies of the dissertations were sold back to the doctoral students and to libraries interested in having a compact, relatively easy way to store volumes on a mind boggling range of topics. I did a project that required me to use a microfilm copy of something called the Elisaeis by a wild and crazy religious poet named William Alabaster, and several dissertations written about that nearly forgotten literary work. I also did a project for the Vatican and worked through microfilms of sermons from the middle ages in Latin. Now that was fun! Pretty sporty content to. Nothing like a hot omelie.
News Corp and Its MySpace Case
December 5, 2009
I have not recovered from my wonderful Delta flights from Louisville to London. In fact, the goose’s wings are tired. I was not in the mood for commenting about stories and issues that caught my attention. Then I noticed a headline from a newspaper under the control of the outfit that used to run Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum. (No joke.) The headline was “The Rise and Fall of MySpace.” The idea is that News Corp bought MySpace.com when its perceived value was high: money, promise, and users. Now, under the firm hand of the hegemons at News Corp. the perceived value of MySpace.com is less money, little promise, and fewer users. Yep, these traditional media companies have figured out how to manage digital properties. There was one statement in the write up that merited the goose’s attention; to wit:
Murdoch himself was responsible for dealing the company the first in a series of blows. On a 2007 News Corp earnings call, a punchy Murdoch told analysts that Fox Interactive Media would generate $1bn in revenues for the 2008 fiscal year (up from about $550m in 2007). With MySpace representing almost all of Fox Interactive’s revenues, the implication was clear: Murdoch thought MySpace’s meteoric rise would continue. There was only one problem: the MySpace management team had no idea Murdoch had set them a new target until he opened his mouth. “It came out of thin air,” says a former MySpace executive. At a stroke, the site’s free-wheeling, entrepreneurial days were over: it had to perform exactly as expected – or else.
Read the FT’s article for more of this quasi-“we know what News Corp did wrong” view of a fellow traditional media company’s handling of a digital property.
Several observations:
- The write up makes clear that at one point in time, folks perceived News Corp’s heavyweight champion of business as “punchy”. Wow. Punchy as in punch drunk or as in too much fruit juice and vodka? Ambiguous but metaphorically rich.
- News Corp’s ability to manage programmers is interesting. Hopefully there will be a non fiction book from one of the “Sergey and Larry eat pizza” type writers. I want more of this insightful business writing.
- Any plan to save traditional media hatched by News Corp may have some MySpace.com DNA. Genes of greatness perhaps?
I thoroughly enjoy old media reporting on the foibles and follies of other old media company.
Stephen Arnold, December 5, 2009
Hark ye heralds of ethical blogging, this is a freebie. I think I will report this fact to the National Capital Planning Commission.
The Digital Gutenberg Cranks Out a Dictionary
December 5, 2009
I find it interesting that the Google is moving more quickly into content publishing. A recent example appears in “Google Quietly Rolls Out Dictionary”. Now Google has had a dictionary for years, but it was limited to defining nerdy words and phrases. The most recent incarnation of the automated service includes some interesting features:
…looking up a word on the Dictionary website provides a list of definitions pulled from a variety of academically authoritative sources (oh, and Wikipedia). It has a few cool features. You can mark words with the star button and come back to them later, see a list of recent searches and switch to translator resources or dictionaries for other languages.
The part of the write up that surprised me was this statement: “Dictionary companies have expected Google would saunter into their realm any day.” No kidding. I think it is encouraging that dictionary publishers have anticipated Google’s move. Google works dictionary magic with software. Some traditional dictionary companies use humans. Which approach has the financial advantage? I wonder what traditional dictionary publishers are doing to challenge the Google.
Stephen Arnold, December 5, 2009
I wish to disclose that I was not paid to point out that Google is a digital Gutenberg, powered by tireless, smart software. I think I have to report this to the Government Printing Office. Yep, for sure.
Thomson Reuters Girds for a Tough 2010
December 5, 2009
The news in the Wall Street Journal today (December 3, 2009) reminded me of the headlines from mid 2008. More than a year ago the headlines were like this one “Thomson Reuters Confirms Hundreds of Job Cuts”. Today’s headline was “Thomson Reuters to Cut Law Unit Jobs.” My hunch is that the addition of legal content to Google Scholar will put significant pressure on Westlaw and other for-fee legal publishers. Job cuts may help… temporarily. The longer term may require more severe actions; for example, shifting from the legacy approach to legal information to a more software centric approach. In a footrace, will Google win or will Thomson Reuters? Place your bets with your retirement fund.
Stephen Arnold, December 5, 2009
I must disclose to the Department of Justice that I was not paid to point out that free legal information may be a big problem for a for fee legal information service.
Google Tosses Another Olive Branch
December 3, 2009
In my research, Google typically offers a pretty good deal and if people take advantage of that deal, fine. If not, the Google moves forward. The challenge in my opinion is to figure out if what Google offers is a good deal. Viewed from Google’s perspective, the benefits (one assumes) are obvious. Viewed from the outsiders’ perspective, the deal may be a bad one or just not recognized as a deal. Google does not have a master of ceremony, to ask, “Door Number 1?”
“Google Offers Publishers Limit on Free News Access” (this is an ephemeral Yahoo link so it may go dead without warning, gentle reader) may be a deal or it may not. I can’t say. The idea is that the Google will provide a control panel so a news outfit can jiggle some settings. Sure, this sounds trivial, and it is. But the news outfit has to know how to find the control panel, take the time to jiggle some settings, and then remember that the jiggling constitutes some willful interaction with the Google.
Let’s think about this.
First, the Google is * trying * to accommodate news outfits who ignored Google for 11 years and now want to use if not control the Google playground equipment. That’s fine. A bit late and somewhat unusual in the knock down, drag out American business world. But Google, if the story cited is accurate, is taking a step.
Second, the deal requires that the news outfits know that a deal is offered. Google does not connect the dots as we point out in the six part video series “How to Make Money with Google”. Googlers connect dots without thought. Googlers assume that when it offers a deal, others can exert sufficient mental energy to see dots and connect them. I recall the risks of using the word “assume”. (Ass-of-you-and-me, according to my grade school teacher in Brazil.)
Third, “control” has lots of implications. These may not be a big deal today but down the road “control” may gather some meaning as Google drives its Hummer forward.
Will news outfits play “Deal or No Deal” or will publishers take Door Number 3? Stay tuned.
Stephen Arnold, December 3, 2009
Oyez, oyez, Government Printing Office. I was not paid to write this fine essay with its references to Monty Hall and Milorad Mandi? Manda, host of the Serbian version of Deal or No Deal.
Google Books in Limbo: The Beat Goes On
November 29, 2009
I detect a note of glee in Alex Pham’s “Google’s Book-Scanning Deal Is Not Sealed Yet.” Google keeps on scanning, and the publishing world keeps on fighting a rear guard action with too few troops and no supply line. Nevertheless, the Los Angeles Times writes:
Critics have argued that Congress, not a private lawsuit in federal court, is the appropriate venue to settle the conflict because its outcome could alter the rights of many people who may not be aware of the case. So even if Chin grants final approval, the settlement could remain mired in courts. Among those who have said they would appeal is Scott E. Gant, a class-action attorney with Boies, Schiller & Flexner. Gant filed a personal objection to the settlement in his role as an author of a book titled “We’re All Journalists Now: The Transformation of the Press and Reshaping of the Law in the Internet Age.” “I am gravely concerned about the rights of the absent class members who are either unaware or do not understand the implications of this settlement,” Gant said. “It could be several years,” he added, “before we will see final resolution.”
And what will change? In my opinion, not too much. Google keeps on scanning and processing. Who is going to do the job? Any national libraries? Thomson Reuters? Reed Elsevier? A consortium of publishers? Too late in my view.
Stephen Arnold, November 29, 2009
I wish to disclose to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department that I was not paid to write this opinion.
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