Re: AAP/Google in Chronicle of Higher Education

[JBedord@aol.com]

Chuck, thank you for your thoughtful post.  As an adjunct faculty member
teaching online searching at SJSU School of Library and Information
Science, in addition to being an industry analyst, "findability" is indeed
a crucial issue.

>From my viewpoint, the abysmally low usage of traditional scholarly books
is directly related to the lack of indexing of the content in a meaningful
way, as well as complete text indexing. When I give my distance learning
students assignments to find information on topics, I make them explore
the aggregated article databases and the full text databases, using both
structured indexing and full text searching approaches....they are amazed
by the variety of online information available on both free web and
commercial services.

Unfortunately, at this point, finding book content is still stuck in the
print era, and that is problematic for those of us trying to educate our
students on authoritative sources in an electronic environment.

Book publishers need to look at what is happenning with journal
publishers.  This spring I heard speakers from Wiley, Elsevier, and Nature
saying that their traffic from Google now exceeds traffic from PubMed, and
that's a major revenue opportunity.  Indexing and aggregating does cost
money, so there are real advantages to having third parties provide that
service.

We went through the publisher syndrome of "online might cannibalize print"  
fears years ago with journals, and found that online increased the market
for both online AND print, by opening up new revenue channels. The old
days of index only databases went by the wayside, first with abstracted
databases, and then with full text.  Today's scholars and students EXPECT
to be able to search full text, and will simply will not find content
buried in print silos.

It's time for book publishers to get in tune with their readers, who after
all, will drive purchases, either individually or through their
institutions.  (Librarians would love to see usage of books in their
collections increase!)  For more insight on the dynamics of the
environment today, I recommend reading "The Long Tail" in Wired magazine,
October 2004: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html . Why
shouldn't book content become as ubiquitous as video and and music in
reaching new audiences?

Warm regards,
Jean Bedord
Consultant, Senior Analyst
Shore Communications Inc.
email: jbedord@shore.com
Phone: 408.257.9221
Fax: 408.252.8078 http://www.shore.com

In a message dated 6/23/2005 7:52:11 PM Pacific Daylight Time, 
cahamake@email.uncc.edu writes:

Bob, I'm probably as worried as a librarian can be about the future of the
monograph (no matter what format). Book publishers have been extremely
slow in my opinion, to innovate. I WANT books especially scholarly books,
to survive. What they do can't be done in journal articles i.e. the
multiperspective, the careful development of complex concepts, the pulling
together of an extended informed presentation on the author's topic. This
form of entering into public debate and consciousness is not duplicated by
the article.

[SNIP]

So I think these two approaches:

First: better accessibility from existing tools like catalogs, amazon and
other indexes ala the Open URL structure or fixed URL structure--a purely
technical approach linking at the chapter level everywhere a chapter is
mentioned in sales and finding tools. (including indexing and abstracting
sources the commonly include books)

Second: Massive full text indexing, with enough "context" to let
individuals know if they need to go "get" the book wherever that is(in
lieu perhaps of abstracts?)

The constructive approach I would suggest, is to work with google to link
from the google "print" -actually dumb-print-version to the full text
version at publisher or vendor controlled, metered or subscribed site. Is
that happening? If it is I haven't heard about it.

The whole library and vendor and publisher community has had to be engaged
to create Open URL linking. Why not see if google can support some sort of
standard for linking into non-functional books to functional e-book
linking. They are building the master index (that is what they do) with
their scanning, why not use it to link to the "official" copy or copies
that individuals can actually "use"?

So again, I see the scanning as something other than "scanning" but in
this instance it looks to me like indexing. Scanning the whole item to
provide a "free" index for publishers and book readers and users seems to
me in the best interest of everyone concerned. Journal publishers don't
opt out of journal indexes, because they know it enhances their journal
sales. Why wouldn't the same thing be true of whole book indexing?

Chuck Hamaker
Associate University Librarian Collections and Technical Services
Atkins Library
University of North Carolina Charlotte
Charlotte, NC 28223
phone 704 687-2825