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"“It was the biggest upheaval in film exhibition since synchronized sound. Between 2010 and 2012, the world’s film industries forever changed the way movies were shown.”
This is the opening sentence of Pandora’s Digital Box: Films, Files, and the Future of Movies. Written in lively and accessible language, it tells the story of how the recent revolution in film projection came about. It also situates the digital change in the history of American film distribution and moviegoing."
"The infinite bookshelf is already a problem for us. To add to the fun, once we enter the world of ebooks, nothing ever goes out of print. So works going back many years or decades are presented with equal priority to the latest new titles.
Upshot: we badly need better curation. Amazon and their competitors could present the results of author searches pre-sorted by time since publication and by language and by series. But that's barely a start.
Genre, in the ebook space, is a ball and chain. It stops you reaching new audiences who might like your work."
"After I recommended that the major publishers drop mandatory DRM from their ebook products, I realized that my essay had elided a bunch of steps in my thinking, and needed to reconsider some points. Then I realized that it's not a simple, straightforward argument to make. Consequently, I ended up writing another essay, although I've tried to summarize my conclusions below. "
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1. The rapid current pace of change in the electronic publishing sector is driven by the consumer electronics and internet industry. It's impossible to make long term publishing plans (3-10 years) without understanding these other industries and the priorities of their players. It is important to note that the CE industry relies on selling consumers new gadgets every 1-3 years. And it is through their gadgets that readers experience the books we sell them. Where is the CE industry taking us?
2. Dropping DRM across all of Macmillans products will not have immediate, global, positive effects on revenue in the same way that introducing the agency model did ...
3. However, relaxing the requirement for DRM across some of Macmillans brands will have very positive public relations consequences among certain customer demographics, notably genre readers who buy large numbers of books (and who, while a minority in absolute numbers, are a disproportionate source of support for the midlist).
4. Longer term, removing the requirement for DRM will lower the barrier to entry in ebook retail, allowing smaller retailers (such as Powells) to compete effectively with the current major incumbents. This will encourage diversity in the retail sector, force the current incumbents to interoperate with other supply sources (or face an exodus of consumers), and undermine the tendency towards oligopoly. This will, in the long term, undermine the leverage the large vendors currently have in negotiating discount terms with publishers while improving the state of midlist sales.
"We're going to get some insight into this question over the next decade or so as e-readers - in the form of both devices and apps - spread and become even cheaper. As Caroline Winter of Bloomberg Businessweek reports, in two of the most prosperous Western countries - the U.S. and Germany - the adoption of electronic books has so far taken very different routes."
"DRM on ebooks is dead. (Or if not dead, it's on death row awaiting a date with the executioner.)
It doesn't matter whether Macmillan wins the price-fixing lawsuit bought by the Department of Justice. The point is, the big six publishers' Plan B for fighting the emerging Amazon monopsony has failed (insofar as it has been painted as a price-fixing ring, whether or not it was one in fact). This means that they need a Plan C. And the only viable Plan C, for breaking Amazon's death-grip on the consumers, is to break DRM. "
More concerns about publishing, e-books, licensing, ownership, etc.
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Only a small number of ebook vendors (actually, Springer is the only one I know of) allow for any sort of ILL, which means that the more our book collections go digital, the less we will be able to loan to other libraries or borrow from other libraries. That libraries are going in this direction without considering the impact on ILL are really shooting ourselves, our patrons, our profession, in the foot. Just try to imagine your library without interlibrary loan. I know I can’t.
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Look, I get it. We’re in a tough spot. We’re trying to do more with less. We’re trying to justify continued funding in the face of the fact that such a small proportion of what we buy gets used NOW. But I’m not sure that moving a large portion of our acquisitions budget to patron-driven acquisitions is a responsible decision in the long-run. I do think putting some of a library’s collection budget towards patron-driven acquisitions is an excellent idea and that’s what we’re experimenting with this semester with Ebook Library. But I still feel in my bones that it would do a disservice to the long-term health of the collection to rely solely on the taste of today’s patrons. To me, cooperative collection development is a model for sustainable collection-building that makes much more sense.
Detailed discussion of the HarperCollins proposal to limit e-book library checkouts to 26.
The eScholarship Editions collection includes almost 2000 books from academic presses on a range of topics, including art, science, history, music, religion, and fiction.
Access to the entire collection of electronic books is open to all University of California faculty, staff, and students, while over 500 of the titles are available to the public. Print versions of many of the electronic books can be purchased directly from the publishers.
The national e-books observatory project is about exploring impacts, observing behaviours and developing new models to stimulate the e-books market, and to do all this in a managed environment.
Conference on Information and Knowledge Management -
Proceeding of the 2008 ACM workshop on Research advances in large digital book repositories
The theme for this issue may be rethinking books and rethinking reading—which means it’s time to discuss ebooks and ebook readers. Not just ebooks and ebook readers, but it’s fair to say that the first ebook readers with sales in the hundreds of thousands have kindled (sorry) lots of discussion about the connections among device, format, text and reader.
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