RE: AAP/Google in Chronicle of Higher Education

["Bolick, Bob" <Bob_Bolick@mcgraw-hill.com>]

Gentlemen --

At MH, we've been working in a similar vein in the textbook domain (Primis
custom publishing online), AccessScience (medical reference and texts),
AccessScience (encyclopedia of science and technology), and, more
recently, the Digital Engineering Library, where we have assigned DOIs to
chapters of a large selection of our engineering handbooks.

Many of the same books going into the DEL are also covered by our
arrangement with Google in the Google Print program.

So as indicated before, as publishers, we are not merely cheering on
innovation, we are participating in it.  And as indicated before, in
pursuing that digital world, we want to see all stakeholders benefit in an
environment and approach that respect folks' rights.

And Chuck, I agree 100% with your concern about the value (and fate) of
academic books and monographs.  Their market is not getting any easier,
and book publishers, authors, universities, and libraries need to continue
to put their shoulders behind approaches such as Toby's, that of the
National Academy of Sciences, and that of Columbia's history monographs
project.  Google's search technology, DOIs, OpenURLs, semantic search are
just some of the tools in the bag of tricks available to us.

For a good read on the situation, I recommend John B. Thompson's recent
book "Books in the Digital Age" (Polity).  Now I wonder if that is
available, discoverable, and searchable in a digital form?  ;-)

Cheers,
BobB

Robert Bolick
Vice President
Global Business Planning
McGraw-Hill Education
2 Penn Plaza, 25th Floor, New York, NY 10121
(O) 212.904.5934    (M) 646.431.8121
IM: bobb@nexus.eppg.com
IM: b6b2y@aol.com
Internet ID: http://dx.doi.org/10.1570/b01b01b

-----Original Message-----
From: Toby.GREEN@oecd.org [mailto:Toby.GREEN@oecd.org] 
Sent: Friday, June 24, 2005 8:44 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: RE: AAP/Google in Chronicle of Higher Education


Thanks for your posting. I've just returned from SSP in Boston exceedingly
depressed and disappointed by the book publishing community represented
there. I had hoped to learn some new tricks to help us improve our e-books
offer - but instead found myself preaching and teaching disbelieving book
publishers about what we've been doing since 2000. Much of what we are
doing is along the lines of what you advocate, in particular a move to
chapter-based publishing. At OECD we publish around 150 books annually. In
January 2001 we launched an e-library containing all our books published
since 1998. To begin with they were only available as a single PDF file.
In 2003 we started to break some of the books into chapters, as well as
offer the complete file. Our aim was to enable the various discovery tools
find an individual chapter - just as they find individual articles in
journals. In fact, we are using an e-journal platform to publish our
e-books because we couldn't find an affordab! le and flexible e-book
platform to do the job. And why did we take this step? Because we didn't
want our books to be drowned out by e-journal articles!

The results are impressive. In 2000 we had around a core set of 250
libraries worldwide buying >60% of our books. Today we have 550 libraries
worldwide with online access to 100% our books - an impressive growth in
reach and accessibility. Around 200 of these libraries still choose to buy
a print collection. Downloads of our books started slowly, I think because
users didn't expect to find books online so weren't looking for them. We
also didn't have a persistent linking system in place making it hard for
librarians to link from their OPACs. In 2003 this changed, we launched our
(persistent) EasyLinks and downloads took off. Last year we delivered more
e-books (or e-chapters) than we did printed books for the first time.
Usage levels are on a par with our e-journals, so you are quite correct -
if book content is delivered in an e-journal-like way usage does increase.

This positive message is one I'm trying to get across to specialist book
publishers - but they seem to find it difficult to accept that an
e-journal model works very well indeed for scholarly monographs. Our
business model is just like e-journals: i.e. multiple-simultaneous access;
no DRM (we deliver standard PDF files); IP access; remote access; walk-in
usage; licence to include excerpts in course packs; e-ILLm - in short, a
licence to use our content as much and as frequently as possible! [For any
book publisher reading this, you may be interested to know that our print
sales between 2001 - 2004 declined at a similar rate to the previous
three-year period but, following a change to the way we promote our books
(and having had some better titles!) they have increased a little since
Nov 2004! Clearly, delivering standard, unprotected PDF files is not
destroying demand for print.]

We've learned that e-books can't be handled exactly like e-journals, but
the discovery principles are the same. We are trying to improve our
systems so that the various discovery systems (Google, Google Scholar,
Scopus, etc) will find our content easily, and the introduction of an
OpenURL system due in 2006 will be another step to making access easier
still. I agree with you that efforts need to be made to improve indexing
systems - but importantly I think they need to be compatible with
e-journal indexing systems because in our experience readers couldn't care
if the content they need comes from a book or a journal.

Books are not easy to break into chapters. We've tried to find ways to
automate our production process so we can break them into chapters easily.
The problem is rooted in a book's structure - lots have a hierarchical
organisation (Part/Section/Chapter) so at what level(s) should they be
broken? So far we've failed to find an automatic process and continue to
break them manually at the end of the production process. We've had to
persuade our authors to provide abstracts for each chapter (or part or
section), something we thought would be difficult, but actually came
readily. We've had to work on the chapter titles so they make sense when
seen out of context with the book in search engine results. Some short
books don't lend themselves to be broken up, so we leave these complete.

Despite doing all this, and providing our EasyLinks, we're discovering
that many librarians are not making the links to their OPACs. We're
planning to introduce downloadable MARC 21 records in 2006 to make this
task easier for librarians, but it doesn't seem to be a standard reflex
for some cataloguers to make the link - I'm sure this will change over
time.

Another oddity we've learned is this. Ask a librarian what they want and
they'll say they want the ability to pick and choose book-by-book. This
presents a huge challenge for publishers since it really means that some
intermediary will have to offer this service (just as in the print world).
This takes control of the way the books are presented and marketed out of
the hands of publishers (and because we couldn't find an intermediary who
could provide the service we wanted, we did our own thing). Yet, as you
will have understood from our sales figures, a great many librarians have
acted differently and subscribed to all our books. The bulk subscription
model sounds a lot like a books 'big deal', but the benefits seem
attractive to a lot of librarians. We are now moving to offer our books
via the e-books vendors to meet the needs of librarians who don't want all
our books - but I think there's room for both the big books deal as well.
Perhaps librarians need to start thinking ! more carefully about this
model if they really want to work with publishers - without it, you'll
have to work with intermediaries.

The intellectual property question is one that puzzles me. I understand
that problems may exist when Google scans books from libraries since the
copyright owner is not involved. But, if it leads to greater chances of
discovery I think publishers will learn to appreciate the benefits. The
trouble is that it will take time for the benefits to become apparent and
in the meantime everything may get bogged down with lawyers. As for Google
Print, where publishers and Google are working together, here we might be
able to see if greater discovery leads to greater usage (and sales). My
feeling is that for most higher-priced monographs greater sales isn't
really what will happen. Why? Because most Google users are in a hurry and
want access now - if they can't get it they'll move on. Also, and more
significantly, most readers of scholarly monographs have little or no
purchasing power - so connecting from Google Print to online bookshops is
not the ideal situation, the link, as you sug! gest, should also be to
library systems via Open URLs (just like Google Scholar links to
e-journals). But that's of little use unless librarians are making the
connections to e-books and if e-books remain poorly presented by the
aggregators.

Our next steps will be to enable reference linking from our books (via
CrossRef et al - which will also mean other e-publishers will be able to
link into our e-books when they are cited!); to further extend our
StatLink service (whereby we offer links to Excel files that underly the
charts and graphs in our books; to improve our indexing and search
service; to continue to push our metadata out to other channels to improve
discoverability; to launch an RSS service.

I just wish some more book publishers would join us in doing all this,
it's fun and it works!

Toby Green
Head of Dissemination and Marketing
OECD Publishing
Public Affairs and Communications Directorate http://www.oecd.org/Bookshop 
http://www.SourceOECD.org  - our award-winning e-library http://www.oecd.org/OECDdirect  - our new title alerting service