 Monday, September 30, 2002
Gale Launches E-Books with OCLC's netLibrary
"Gale Group a business unit of Thomson Corp., has launched an e-book program that will make a large collection of its reference material available to online library patrons through netLibrary. Any library with a netLibrary account can access the Gale e-books. At press time no list of titles was available, but the company plans to offer 30 to 50 of them sometime this fall with hundreds more scheduled for the future. Initial titles will include single-volume and multivolume reference works, some from the Macmillan and Scribner lines. Prices for e-book versions of the Gale collection will increase the prices of the print versions....
According to [Allen] Paschal, none of the titles under development already has a Web or CD-ROM version available. Searching features on Gale e-books will generally apply the standard formatting used by netLibrary, with some customization for the series, but not for individual titles. Basically, as Paschal and Barnes describe it, users will have the access points they would have from using the print source—tables of contents, browsable layouts, back-of-the-book indexes, etc.—plus the free-text searching capabilities of Adobe Acrobat Reader’s PDF resource." [Infotoday Newsbreaks, via Library Stuff]
This sounds well and good, and normally it would bring a cheer from me, however the kicker later in the press release shows why this is NOT the step forward it appears to be. (Emphasis below is mine.)
"The netLibrary connection is not exclusive, however, and Paschal indicated that Gale is still looking at other options, which may include ebrary, or even direct sales to end-users.
Gale e-books will be sold as individual units or in bundles with print titles. Although final prices are not yet set, Barnes indicated that libraries purchasing only the e-book version would generally pay around 10-percent more than the price for the print, while purchasers of both print and e-book versions could expect to pay 150 percent of the print-only price. He admitted to having heard librarian complaints about higher charges for electronic versions, but assured me that the costs of hosting, maintaining, and supporting electronic products ran higher than printing, binding, and shipping costs.
Gammon said that she knew librarians found the higher pricing 'counter-intuitive.' She too attributed the difference to what it cost to 'maintain, build, and service archives, market products, design training materials, and supply customer support,' not to mention the technological innovation required to improve future functionality."
Yeah, and CDs will be cheaper someday, too.
If this is true, then what end user do they will pay more for an ebook? The ebook industry is in worse shape than even I thought if this is true. They're truly years away from a viable market if the resources behind OCLC can't make it work for less than the price of print.
Addendum: Dorothea pushes back, as I'd hoped she would, with her own thoughts about why ebooks cost more.
PointServers.org
"A new computing platform is emerging, in your car, cafe, office, wallet....
It is a platform to integrate the new diversity of devices at hand.
It is wireless and it will appear in millions of places.
It is the next wave in computing.
PointServers.org is the principal information source for the point server trend, describing the technologies, markets, and players in this space. " [via The Bluetooth Weblog]
A new term to add to my lexicon. There are some truly interesting products listed in the Commentary (even though it hasn't been updated lately), but it's blog-like look is betrayed by the lack of permalinks and an RSS feed. Not that every site has to be a blog but realistically, I won't track it if it's not in my aggregator, which is too bad because there are ideas here that dovetail nicely with recent forays into RFID in libraryland.
Mr. Hollywood Lives in Washington
"Hollywood may be the entertainment capital of the world, but the real song and dance is being played out in Washington.
That's the real seat of power for the entertainment industry, which constantly tries to convince the nation's representatives to push through a continuing array of draconian, anti-consumer proposals, seemingly aimed at turning supposedly valued customers into content-absorbing zombies under their media masters' total control....
The latest salvo fired from this entertainment-industrial complex is a proposal (not yet introduced as formal legislation) from U.S. Representatives Billy Tauzin (R-Louisiana) and John D. Dingell (D-Michigan).
Their draft bill would mandate the termination of all analog TV broadcasting by the end of 2006 and require the use of a "broadcast flag" to provide the industry with absolute control over copying of programs.
It would also order the elimination of analog outputs -- part of what the industry calls the dreaded 'analog hole' -- on TV-related consumer equipment, thereby rendering devices such as conventional analog VCRs incapable of recording any broadcast programming.
The original draft of this plan specified an exemption for news and public affairs shows that would allow consumers to always record such programs (presumably on their expensive new protection-compliant digital recorders).
But there were immediate complaints declaring such an exception too generous to consumers.
The Tauzin/Dingell proposal would make it impossible for millions of conventional analog televisions, VCRs and other analog-input video equipment to receive or record TV broadcasts." [Wired News]
Emphasis above is mine because I want to point out two things. First, all televised content will be affected by this proposed legislation, including local cable access programming, PBS, and C-SPAN. Of course, 2007 sounds so far away, who knows what kinds of televisions we'll be using by then, but that should really be our choice, not a legal mandate. Most of us have a TV in the house that's been with us since college, it was a wedding present, whatever. Now think of all of your current TVs and VCRs becoming obselete in one sweeping vote (okay, two sweeping votes) in Congress.
My second point is that at the beginning of the debate, someone sane pointed out that there are taxpayer funded and other types of essential programming that should be considered exceptions. Someone else disagreed with this and removed the language from the first draft. If you think that the same thing won't happen with other types of digital content (MP3s, MP4s, ebooks, etc.), then pay careful attention to what is happening with digital television.
Given the opportunity, publishers and media companies will gladly cut libraries out of the loop. They won't outright say it and they won't grin in public. An "unintended consequence" brought on by those mean and evil pirates, they'll say. We really didn't think it would come to this, they'll say. There's nothing we can do about it because it's the law, they'll say.
And unfortunately, by that time they'll probably be right.
The RSS conversion
"John Gruber is going through the RSS conversion. First, you start using a news aggregator that you like, then you feel dumb for not providing an RSS feed for your Web site, and then you kind of stop reading all those sites that don't have RSS feeds. There are some sites that don't support RSS that I still follow, but the truth is that I read them sporadically at best, regardless of how good they are. That's still a better situation than when I didn't use a news aggregator at all and I simply stopped reading all personal sites for weeks at a time because I didn't make time to stroll through my bookmark list to see who was writing what." [rc3.org]
If you haven't tried an aggregator, pass go and collect $200 now. It's amazing to watch others go through the same light bulb moments I did!
Side note to libraries: note the shift in how these on the bleeding edge folks are reading web sites. It's time to start thinking about how to get YOUR news into THEIR aggregators.
Side note to John: Perceive Designs is syndicating Zeldman for us.
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