“Americans shoot first, ask questions later,” said the moderator of one panel discussion on the Google settlement held at this week’s Frankfurt Book Fair, reflecting widespread sentiment among non-US-based publishers and agents. “You Americans are all asleep,” noted one agent to me. “Why are you allowing this takeover of the publishing industry by a .com technology company?” Despite its industry-changing goal of creating the first and comprehensive global online library/bookstore out of the 10 million books it has scanned so far, Google had no on-the-floor presence at Frankfurt, the largest book fair in the world and the meeting point for the industry every October. (As of this date, Google has also not taken space at the London Book Fair for April 2010; in earlier years, it had taken out large stand space.) As one publisher put it, “Google is the shark swimming above our heads this year.” The Google settlement, supported by both Google and the AAP (Association of American Publishers), is currently being adjudicated in the USA; the US Department of Justice urges the court to reject the settlement in its current form. Many anticipate that this suit may result in a major challenge to existing copyright and moral rights legislation, ultimately redefining the digital realities of intellectual property.

A LinkedIn blogger asked: Is the book publishing business model so broken that we need patrons to subsidize our work? ( see http://is.gd/BNkV )

Patronage is one way to do it, but, as with advertising in books, if you follow the money, you may well find that the lucre influences the content, and compromises objectivity. Democracy depends on a strong free press. So while successful new business models will need to depart from the traditional reader-paid model, perhaps a winning strategy will involve codification of the idea interchange around content, resulting in a system involving floating value, where readers either pay or get paid, depending on metrics such as the value of their contribution to the content through comments or other additions, access to selected reader’s bibliometrics (their recorded thoughtpath through content clusters or libraries), their endorsement of any given author or content, or, conversely, their insistence on avoiding all of the above “reading out loud” features and remaining anonymous (and thus paying rather than getting paid for accessing content). IMHO, what we strive for here as we build the new publishing system is a meritocracy of mind, not more commercialization of ideas. For this to work, I think we seek a new pedagogical interface, need to look beyond the prevalent interpretation of content value deriving from the dissemination (and attendant protection) of *copies* of things, into a more organic type of difference engine where ideas morph and change, and occasionally and at will manifest themselves in tangible “books.” Our value chain pulls us outside of the world of tangible products now, folks! We are amphibians, flopping on the beach of a great and rich new continent of global idea interchange, which is facilitated by the Internet. And the global Internet, for the moment at least, remains Free and Open. Most of its architects and founders are still verticals, walking among us, dedicated to keeping it Free and Open, from a technological point of view. What are we publishers going to do about it?

Recently on LinkedIn, a publisher posed the question: What can we learn from Amazon’ s foray further into book publishing http://is.gd/Aawt and their attempt to allow bloggers to monetize their blogs by publishing them on Kindle http://is.gd/zOoF ?

To which I responded:

Amazon is in a great position to become a publisher now, situated as they are, upstream from the publishers whose books they’ve been selling at a loss all these years. There’s profit and power in that upstream position, and their losses appear to be turning into a major win for them in capturing the mindshare of today’s readers.

Amazon knows what books are selling, and to whom, and they do not share that customer information with their publishers, or now, with their authors. (Just like they do not share any sales figures for their proprietary Kindle.) They not only know who is reading what, but, through the gifting program, they also know what the reading patterns of a purchaser’s friends and relatives are. So easy to ship using the one click program!

And now with the Kindle, they know not only what is being read, but how people read, how much, how long, in what order. Capturing the bibliometrics of how a blog or newspaper is read, following the thoughtpath of the reader as he reads all of article A, then skips to blog B–they see what is of interest and value to each kindlekiddie. You get the picture.

So, unlike most other publishers on our planet, Amazon can pitch new content they publish directly at potential readers. As publishers, they drastically mitigate their risk of taking on a self-published author by giving all authors access to market when they post their self-published books for sale on Amazon. Statistics, bibliometrics, and in the case of self-published authors, prior success in the marketplace will tell Amazon which authors to publish. Gone the discerning acquisitions editor discovering, nurturing talent or genius, informing his publisher which books ought to be published because they contribute to our society’s understanding of itself.

This new move of Amazon’s into actually publishing books may prove very disruptive indeed to the acquisitions-editorial-production side of the traditional publishing business we know and love, that distinctly human process which has carried forth our recorded culture these last 500 years, in much the same way that on the retailing side, Amazon has contributed to the rapid demise of the independent bookstore through its cut-rate pricing strategies against which terrestrial businesses just can’t compete.

Wipe out the competition, then harvest the mindshare of the bookbuying public. Oh brave new world that has such people in it! And we will really know when we are home in this new digital universe of ours when publishers devise a new business model expanding the traditional reader-pay model to incorporate a reader-paid model, kind of like what Amazon is doing with this blog program of theirs. Not only the luddites hold their books close to their chests.

Laura

I found this fascinating quote today:

I’ve given a few talks on why these new tools are failing to catch on — here’s an early one given at a publishers meeting, and a later one given to an audience of scientists.  The short answer, if you don’t want to read my lengthy posts, is that very few, if any of the new online scholarly tools give benefits that outweigh the costs in time and effort.  Web 2.0 is all about huge timesinks, and so far, the tools aren’t justifying the effort they require.  Our readers are busy people — I’ve never met a single successful scientist with extra time on his hands.  They don’t want to spend huge chunks of their week filtering information or chatting online with strangers. I am at heart a technophile, and I love playing with these new tools, and I’ll let you know when I find useful ones like GoPubMed, and I’ll poke holes in others, like online reference managers.David Crotty under, The Scholarly Kitchen

…And what this says to me is that, while the epublishing tools are growing in breadth and complexity faster than any single human can monitor, for now, they are not really necessary to our work.  The current generation of scientists and thinkers, all of us relative newcomers to the Web, is spoiled by rich and ready access to a fertile thought environment that spans the tangible and the virtual, the old and the new — living, breathing colleagues, printed literature, terrestrial lab/classroom spaces, plus the new web tools. No wonder those new web tools seem superfluous! But if and when any of the first three categories of communication become unavailable to us for whatever reason–colleagues retiring, libraries closing, publishers going out of business, political upheavals making travel unreasonable — then web tools may become indispensable, may supplant our familiar terrestrial forms of communication, and then we will likely see rapid adoption of said tools, or other forms of species adaptation.

You should read the whole article.