Category Archives: the future

Innovating from betwixt and between

Peter Brantley -- April 29th, 2012
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As a relative outsider to publishing, I am still often surprised by how difficult business transformation can be for some organizations. I am a member of the Project Muse Advisory Board, and I’ve just emerged from their board and publisher meetings. Project Muse is a journals publishing platform; it aggregates journals in digital form and sells content packages to university and college libraries, research centers, and similar organizations. Muse is also making a significant entry into the higher education ebook market by providing access to publishers’ lists. Our meeting was energetic, and focused at a conceptual level on the challenges of delivering new types of services while transitioning away from more traditional aspects of journal publishing.

What was striking for me was not my anticipated discussion of content management systems that supported a wide range of data queries, might be more semantically aware, and capable of supporting a wide range of interactive media; indeed, these are today’s currency of the realm. Rather, it was the more basic conundrum of being caught between different kinds of customers: publisher suppliers, who are also customers, in a sense; and institutions, who buy their product.

The core conundrum for Project Muse, as with all platform providers, is that they can easily come into conflict with the priorities of the university presses and scholarly societies that provide them with content. For example, one opportunity discussed widely today in academia is creating “push to publish” services that are much closer to the user, often utilizing approachable tools such as WordPress; these services would be at home in library publishing units. If an existing platform provider tried to deploy such a lightweight and configurable publishing system, it could siphon audience away from constituent publishers. In fact, most new services that leverage internet technology and network-scale data sharing and computation end up being ones under consideration as well by university presses and scholarly societies.

The underlying issue is that the suite of possible new publishing services is within reach of multiple levels of the publishing field: university presses could make a go at putting broad net-scale services like PLoS One out of business just as easily as Muse or JSTOR, which operate at a higher level of aggregation. If a small press or society is willing to go through the significant tumult of re-inventing itself, it can reach the global community of scholars just as easily as Elsevier.

What that made me realize is that if you designed a publishing enterprise to support scholarly communication de novo, aggregating content from a range of sources but also developing direct publishing and reader/writer services, you could do it with very different constraints than Muse, JSTOR, and other platform providers have to grapple with. A new entrant, not unlike the Public Library of Science, could actually turn its back on existing publishing practice and design a direct-to-faculty or direct-to-discipline infrastructure that was wholly divorced from existing players.

That kind of disruption hasn’t happened much yet outside of science, technology, and medicine, but it is likely that it will, unless existing platforms quickly manage to figure out ways of innovating themselves into a new content environment while bringing their publishing contributors and constituents along with them, benefitting from the same new services platforms are designing for a broader audience. There may even be some unique advantages in sustaining those relationships, if they can be successfully leveraged.

The coming change in how we publish the humanities and social sciences, and in fact, what we can publish, could be even more transformative than the re-invention of STM. Building a new digital humanities infrastructure will mean interacting with visual interpretations of historical sites, hearing ancient or less common modern languages in linguistic treatises, and grappling with philosophical quandaries in a gaming environment with virtual goods. Ultimately this may reshape how faculty think about doing their research, as well as how it is communicated.

Serving a public that knows how to copy: orphan works and mass digitization

Peter Brantley -- April 14th, 2012
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Marxchivist, Indigent Orphans

Flickr, CC-BY, @Marxchivist


The UC Berkeley Center for Law and Technology (BCLT) is among the most eminent study centers for intellectual property (IP) law. Coordinated by Professor Pamela Samuelson, this last week it pulled together approximately 200 highly accomplished and well-spoken legal scholars, practitioners and librarians in a small conference on orphan works, “Orphan Works and Mass Digitization.”

Obstacles and opportunities.

The conference started with a series of talks on the dysfunctions of current copyright law, with its propensity to generate orphans. The overall consensus, most succinctly aired by Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive, is that the the problem is so pervasive and the barriers to a comprehensive resolution so high — while networked communications make sharing ever more straightforward — that institutions are increasingly prone to adopt a “Damn the torpedoes” approach. For these panelists, the prospect of new legislation attempting to facilitate use of material with dim rights status is often scarier than the status quo given political deadlock; further, uncertainty over the use of these materials is endemic but the risk is fairly low, in part because libraries, archives, and museums (LAMs) are respectful and conservative. At the same time, the cultural value is often tremendous.
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Gnashing of Teeth: Publishers vs Readers

Peter Brantley -- March 11th, 2012
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Seldom has news of litigation against publishers demonstrated such differences in opinions. But as the Department of Justice signals that it may file suit in a case alleging that the largest U.S. publishers and Apple combined to set high prices for books, the shrill cries from publishers suggesting that “the end of retail competition for books is nigh” remain largely deaf to the myriad benefits for customers. If agency pricing is struck down, readers may once again see reasonable book prices from online retailers that years ago acknowledged that digital music and videos have a very different value than their traditional analogues. Continue reading →

Back doors to transformation

Peter Brantley -- January 30th, 2012
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This weekend I had the pleasure of participating in a Mellon Foundation-funded meeting discussing the future of open peer review for scholarly materials. Peer review is the process by which journal articles and books are evaluated by one’s colleagues in advance of publication in order to improve their quality, or in some cases, recommend their rejection. Peer review concerns itself with questions of originality, clarity, and overall contribution to the literature. The practice arose in conjunction with publishing, and as peer review evolves, we begin to see new – and potentially profound – impacts on scholarly presses.

In contrast to older models of peer review in which submissions are reviewed by one’s colleagues in a “single blind” fashion in which the author does not know the identity of the reviewers, open peer review takes place more or less openly on the web. This has a number of potential benefits, including timeliness; lessened risk of favoritism or backstabbing; and increased quality of comments, knowing they will be aired publicly. Open peer review is not an absolute; portions of the process might be initially closed and then opened up, or the reverse. Anonymity might be preserved at certain moments, but prohibited in others. The reviewing community might be global, or restricted to members of a specific community.

In our discussions, one of the things we kept stumbling over most was the relationship between open peer review, and open access. The distinction is significant: open peer review concerns itself with how the scholarly community evaluates itself online, more or less openly, whereas “open access” presumes that scholarly publications are openly available within at least the boundaries of academic institutions, and perhaps the broader public. But open peer review inherently means that the text under consideration is public to a greater extent than ever before, along with the comments that any number of reviewers might have of it. If this richer fabric is available online for anyone to see, what is then left to publish by a press? To put it another way, open peer review opens a back door to new forms of publishing.

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When borrowing isn’t free

Peter Brantley -- December 26th, 2011
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In our current understanding of how public libraries operate, one of the things that most people take for granted is that lending is free, although the library obviously has to purchase the books to begin with. The “First Sale Doctrine” in copyright law permits the library to circulate a print book until it literally falls apart without requiring additional compensation for the publisher or author. With e-books, however, the landscape has changed. In a recent New York Times article, Maja Thomas, SVP of Digital at Hachette USA, was quoted as saying that “selling one copy that could be lent out an infinite number of times with no friction,”  was not a “sustainable model.”

But free e-book lending is not the only way to go for libraries. Libraries could charge for borrowed items, and even make distinctions for top-selling titles.  Such a system, where local public libraries charge users to borrow e-books, perhaps working with a common library hosting platform or a central agency comparable to the e-book rental models that I’ve previously discussed, would both offer access to patrons and provide the kind of friction Thomas suggests publishers need (with the noted exception that publishers would not be compensated on a recurring basis with a portion of the rental fees). And now, from Down Under in New Zealand comes word of just such an experiment.

Wheeler’s is a private company developing an e-book platform that enables libraries to charge for e-book lending. And, another critical feature, it also offers support for the outright purchase of e-book titles from book distributors, versus licensing. In addition to clarifying the legal status of e-books in a library collection, “purchasing” the e-book also permits libraries to be more flexible with their funding, in comparison to paying recurring license fees. Further, the ability to charge patrons for e-book rentals generates friction in lending, and helps to compensate libraries for the costs of ebook purchasing.

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The new power of “open”

Peter Brantley -- December 18th, 2011
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I should be holiday shopping, but instead I have been thinking about something called linked open data. It’s not an entirely insane use of my time, as I have to consider a day-long session at ALA Midwinter in Dallas, “Libraries, Linked Data, and the Semantic Web” in which I am supposed to declaim meaningfully alongside colleagues who know quite a bit more about this than I do.

Fortunately, linked open data, or “LOD”, is a relatively simple concept. It refers to the practice of presenting, or “publishing” data held in a database or information repository in a normalized and structured way. This is often done in a formal syntax known as Resource Description Framework (RDF), but it need not be. For a basic example, consider the book “Thinking, fast and slow” by Daniel Kahneman. A linked data approach to this title would produce statements representing bibliographic information as relationships: “Title is ‘Thinking, fast and slow’”, and “Author is ‘Daniel Kahneman’”. If this data was represented in RDF, it would look something like this output from Open Library. (Open Library will produce RDF for any title in its catalog; you can play with similar entries to your heart’s content).

One essential component of linked data approaches is making sure that you publish hooks with which to identify the thing you are talking about, that other people can use as a reference. For books, fortunately, publishers and libraries have had these for decades: they are usually ISBNs, or alternatively, some sort of library catalog identifier. At Open Library, we have unique identifiers both for works and their unique “manifestations”, which are the editions of any given book: for example, you can see our pointer to the first edition of Kahneman’s work using the identifier: OL24896701M.

The cool thing about linked data for libraries and publishers is what happens when people associate new information with books, particularly where they can map relationships with other data using connectors such as ISBNs or some other identifier. There’s not much value in simply recording catalog entries for books in RDF and leaving them to sit in glorified, geeky XML syntax more suitable for computers than humans. The key to the power of linked data is the “O” in “LOD”: Open. When linked data statements about books are open, other people can knit together skeins of associations between books that were not possible before. Continue reading →

At close of day: the library alternative

Peter Brantley -- December 5th, 2011
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Whatever the consequences of Amazon’s entry into e-book lending, the acceleration of erosion of support for existing library lending programs has mobilized leading public library organizations. While many of us are willing to consider very seriously the proposition that libraries might not provide access to contemporary digital books in the future as a necessity, we nonetheless have no desire to go gentle into that good night.

Whether at the level of DPLA or at more modest community focused libraries, there’s broad recognition that scale empowers rich services, and that greater content aggregation compels use. Widely distributed plots of wild flowers do not have the same appeal as a glorious jungle of possibilities. The consequences for a viable future library e-book lending service are becoming more clear, and the outlines more apparent. Continue reading →

National libraries: old and new, or just old?

Peter Brantley -- November 17th, 2011
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At the National Digital Public Library meetings at Los Angeles public library this week, we’ve completed the first full day of programming, which will be followed with a wrap-up of next steps, Friday morning. Already though, one of the first major points of decision is apparent. Simply, it’s whether the library will be only an online repository of older, digitized things, or also a library of new things.

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Non-fiction, Cinema, and Libraries

Peter Brantley -- October 11th, 2011
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The release of Amazon’s Kindle Fire has ignited a great deal of discussion about the emergence of a mass market in enhanced e-books. In The Atlantic, Peter Osnos described the appeal of the enhanced version of Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy, writing: “Until now, enhanced e-books have really been the domain of iPads. But with Amazon’s announcement last week of the Kindle Fire, a seven-inch touchscreen tablet at a price that is substantially less than half the iPad, the competition between these major companies will quickly add millions of consumers to the potential audience and drive the pricing for devices and the content on them in the months ahead … . ”

A notable aspect of these newer enhanced books, which provide audio and video content as a central and integral component of the storytelling, not as an afterthought, is that they demonstrate production quality that matches or exceeds  the best of what academic scholarly initiatives have heretofore delivered, such as the path-breaking ACLS Humanities E-Book program. As large trade publishers add transmedia, gaming, and film/video departments to their rosters, the number and quality of commercial enhanced e-book offerings will expand quickly.

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