What’s New at Open Book Systems

Some online publishers searching for alternative business models to the traditional one, where the readers pay for content, arrive at the sponsorship and advertising models, where private interests pay the publisher to make content available for free. This is in return for some benefit to the sponsor, which may involve a sponsor logo or pop-up integrated with the content, or an unobtrusive URL at the bottom of a page. There is no definite recipe.

The practice raises two issues immediately: the privacy of users, and the objectivity of the sponsored content. On the latter issue, in this month’s Condé Nast Portfolio Jeff VanDam writes an article called “Pharma’s Fees: How the big drugmakers tend to your doctor”, in which he lists seven of the international pharmaceutical giants and traces approximately $9 million they’ve spent supporting doctors’ research. He points out one example that illustrates the problem of objectivity in sponsored publishing. GlaxoSmithKline (makers of Paxil and Zantac) paid $150,752 to pediatric allergist Todd Mahr, who participated in a clinical trial for their anti-asthma drug, Advair Diskus. He subsequently “coauthored a 2006 paper that recommended Advair-style inhalers; footnotes in the paper refer readers to GSK’s website.”

Whether actual or perceived, the potential influence a paying sponsor has over the content it endorses challenges the essential advantage traditional publishers have over their Web-based colleagues: their reputation for authenticity established over years, the “brand” or covenant they have with their readers to publish the truth. Many readers take for granted that, prior to publication, “brand name” publishers put content that bears their imprimatur through an authenticating process that includes selection, peer review, editing, fact checking, permissions acquisition, and proofreading. The sponsorship model threatens to weaken this covenant with the readers.

My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep; the more I give to thee,

The more I have, for both are infinite.

—Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

Back when books were things, it was easier to measure success or failure based on quantifiable metrics like print runs, sales, years in print, citations. Paper books are finite, present as mass; they take up shelf space. If I loan you my copy of Romeo and Juliet, I’m left empty-handed. Just as if you pay me to siphon the gas out of my tank and put it into yours, you drive and I stand still. That’s the economy of scarcity. Publishers are still struggling to impose on their e-books these outdated business models from the age of print, and finding that friction results.

Readers don’t appreciate it when their e-reader screens go dark in midsentence because the read-ometer stopped running; librarians suffering from shrinking wartime budgets resent paying for “a copy” of an e-book (which is really quite ethereal in nature and not a copy at all) and then being required to treat it like a finite artifact and loan it out one at a time, rather than offering network access to all readers.

When mass transmutes into the infinite, when books become e-books, the age of abundance arrives and the rules change. New roles for publisher, author, and reader are evolving, and new tools are required to establish and convey the value of ideas and information. What used to be freely exchanged—like knowledge—one now pays consultants for. What used to be sold—like a copy of a book—is free. We need to develop new value paradigms to accommodate the creation and evolution of knowledge in and between humans, perhaps adapting our old business models from books (per-copy), entertainment (performance), and school (tuition)—but perhaps the Internet-based value exchange is in fact something startlingly new.

Meantime, while there is so much struggle in the publishing business about commoditizing current-copyright content for sale, how to do it, what to charge whom for how much, a tidal wave of unprecedented proportions swells beneath and may soon force publishers to recognize that neither they nor their business models may ultimately prevail in the Internet-based publishing domain. The online newcomers to publishing do “get it,” but large and impressive as it is, Google Print is but one company scanning in books and making them findable through its proprietary technology.

The catalyst for change can be found in the organizations that capitalize on the free, open, and distributed architecture of the Internet itself, like the Open Content Alliance and Europe’s books2ebooks, which, day after day, are scanning in the millions upon millions of books from libraries all over the world, and making them freely available. They are making available to us the books that form our collective recorded world culture since the time of the first book. Searchable. Alterable. Taggable. Query-able. Recombine-able. This is the new abundance, and what are we to make of it?

Considering Amazon’s new “front door,” its e-reader Kindle, as a stocking stuffer, I think about the $400 price tag and ask “What is it?” and “Is it worth it?” and “Why does it matter?” In fact, it is not just another proprietary e-reader. And unlike the BlackBerry, it is not a handheld device trying to be all things to all people, a cellphone that’s also a web browser, address book, doc reader, record player, with a keyboard so small your fingers get stuck. The Kindle appears to be an extremely slick cash register at the front end of the ubiquitous online content retailer, Amazon. A cash register its users pay to own, and then pay to use.

The e-books themselves are relatively cheap for this device, at $9.99. But when considering the “cost” of individual e-books, aren’t we really focusing on the wrong thing, the list price of an “object”? Publishers and booksellers have this holdover habit of sticking a price onto what in the online world is a completely artificial “commodity”—access and display of a screenful of letters powered by zeroes and ones. In fact, the only covers or pages or boundaries around online books are those deliberately built into them by their developers so that we retro humans will feel that we are dealing with something familiar, so we won’t be afraid.

This price-per-book business model can’t last; it’s an artifact from an earlier age when reading meant holding a thing—a book!—in your lap while decoding its meaning, thinking, memorizing (remember Fahrenheit 451), internalizing. Paying a “list price” begs the point of what’s really for sale here. It’s a distraction that really doesn’t matter in the least.

What’s for sale is us—our attention, our associative thought paths as we navigate around Amazon. It’s all recorded, from first lighting the fire and flipping the Kindle “on” switch, to pressing the “buy” button. At Amazon, I might even be able to buy my own words back again, if I am lucky enough to have my blog listed as one of the otherwise free Internet resources available through this device—for as low as $.99 per month.

The reason Amazon can afford to deep-discount not only its real books, but also its e-books, is that it is holding for itself and its shareholders, presumably for its own commercial exploitation, the priceless value unique to this global online medium of ours, the recorded behavior of its millions of customers worldwide. Us. You and me. Our searches. Our log files (those many clicks behind the patented “one click” that makes shopping so easy). Our searches, profiles, ship-to-and-bill-to buying histories. Upstream from this data, recording what used to be private information kept in people’s heads, not their handhelds, Amazon with its seductive new Kindle “front door” sits in a very powerful position indeed.

Just as Amazon is positioning its new $400 e-reader as a tempting stocking stuffer, news arrives about a drop in the U.S. literacy rate. The Boston Globe reports this morning that U.S. fourth graders are losing ground in literacy, for the first time lagging behind Russia, Hong Kong, and Singapore, according to an international study recently completed at Boston College. Apparently the children are not alone.  We spoke to a New York City book publicist yesterday, seeking services for an author. She declined, noting that these days, her firm doesn’t do much with “text-intensive” adult books. “Most people are reluctant readers,” she noted, and thus her firm is concentrating on graphic novels, “by far the fastest-growing market in publishing today—it’s just huge.” These are picture books for adults, a kind of comic book on a larger and higher quality scale.  Publishers Weekly reported that sales for this type of book “hit $330 million in 2006, a 12% increase over revised sales figures for 2005.”  Just for the sake of juxtaposition, look at a New York City newspaper from a hundred years ago—at that time there were many independent newspapers to choose from, published every morning, afternoon, and evening—and you’ll find wall-to-wall prose on just about every oversized page, with graphics being the exception rather than the rule, serving avid rather than reluctant readers.