A few weeks ago there appeared in my mail a review copy of a wonderful little book, Nicholas in Trouble, by Renee Goscinny and Jean Jacques Sempe (a New Yorker cover artist). It is published by Phaedon (978-0-7148-4813-6).  It caught my attention immediately with a tastefully stamped cloth cover, without jacket, featuring a foil-stamped and embossed vignette in color of a little school boy, quaintly illustrated, with a smile of inner anticipation, on his way somewhere with a briefcase in hand and searchlight pointing the way.

Before I proceed I must urge upon you to go to what is one of the most ingenious, entertaining and—if you or your children start playing one of the games—potentially absorbing web sites I have seen  (http://www.phaidon.com/nicholas).

Since reviewing books is not my assignment for ForeWord, I rarely get review copies, and when I do, I generally send a cordial thank you note and direct the originator to our editorial offices in Traverse City, Michigan, some 780 miles from my home-office in the Hudson Valley, which is 40 miles south of Albany, NY.

As you may have surmised from my opening paragraph literary merit is not what first caught my eye—but bookmaking did—and that led me inside to read through a series of charming and cleverly line-illustrated stories about a French schoolboy who is known as the “Dennis-the-Menace of France,” and whose “adventures and travails of a cheeky and charming little French boy,” were first told over forty years ago. This volume is the fifth and final book of the series translated into English by Anthea Bell.

Visiting the imaginative and interactive web site, complete with animation, get acquainted click-throughs to all the characters, interactive games, downloads, a blog and contact opportunities, also reminded me of how the reach of a book—whether fiction or non-fiction—has been broadened from the limits of our own imaginations and from a dialog between reader and author to  come alive in multiple media, formats and customized applications.

The applications and the potentials are almost dizzying in their siren calls and challenges as well as in their practical and entertaining benefits. I saw this in full force at the three day O’Reilly Web 2.0 conference at the Javitz Center in September. More than 6,500 people—many from abroad—showed up at this event which is primarily focused on the technologies and supply chain of web services, but has also expanded into marketing tracks that should be of great interest to book publishers who are still cautiously exploring the digital universe as more than a marketing tool—but also as a content extension.

Tim O’Reilly, founder and president of O’Reilly Media, is a far-sighted thinker and intellectual innovator, who has developed and advanced the concepts and applications of Web 2.0 which he defines as using the Internet as a platform, information businesses using software as a service, harnessing collective intelligence and user-generated content. It is worth a trip to his web site (http://tim.oreilly.com/) to read his 2005 Web 2.0 article and his 2006 Open Business interview.

There is probably no media industry equal to book publishing that rests on foundations more resistant by their nature to what is taking place in the market place of ideas, communication, information and entertainment. The whole idea of user-generated content runs counter the concept of packaged intellectual property. Yet, we are moving rapidly towards interactive forms of publishing and repurposing original content.

The strong Creative Commons movement (creativecommons.org) and the foundational support for Google’s Book Search project by major library systems provide some of the evidence of challenges to the rigid barriers to accessing intellectual property. The recent benchmark agreement between Google and the AAP and Authors Guild points the way to striking a balance between compensation for intellectual effort and broadening access and application of intellectual property.

While no one is ready to admit they are making any significant money on e-book publishing (outside of the reference and journal market), the success of e-ink and its application in the Kindle and Sony readers and the emergence of the e-Book as a basic format along side the hard bound and paperback editions of books is putting more and more content out there in forms that can be re-purposed into anthologies, mashups, downloads, demand printing drivers for the Expresso Machine’s on site book production utility—and all the customized customer driven applications that will flow from these formats and media

Ultimately, however, all of these new forms of the “book” will simply amplify the reading experience and blend it more seamlessly with interactive and multiple media experiences

The web site for Nicholas in Trouble is a reminder that the distinctive charm and story-telling that an author and illustrator bring to a work are at base what makes all else possible—and the Phaedon web site is only a slice of what is possible in our new Web 2.0 world.

Publishers Weekly’s Editor-in-Chief, Sarah Nelson, came up with a new twist on turning a sow’s ear into a silk purse in her commentary this week. She addressed the bogus book-banning list attributed to Governor Sarah Palin that was circulating hot and heavy on the net a few weeks ago. Her well-intended comments qualify for the cup-half-full, or rose colored-glasses award, masking too easily the ear that a sits on the well-fed sow resting in the shadows.

So, I want to shine a light on that sow’s ear. But before doing so, I want to acknowledge a few things about Publishers Weekly and its editor that I feel bear saying in a ForeWord magazine blog. Despite the fact that PW has purloined (purposely or accidentally) our trade mark “Foreword,” for the front section of their magazine, I have been and remain an admirer and regular subscriber to the magazine—not just for its literary side, but also for its reports on industry business news—and for a sense of where our industry establishment (its major publishing houses) is leading us and for the trends that fuel their publishing programs.

Let me say also that Sarah Nelson has built up a lot of good points with me as I’ve traveled the industry circuit and heard her on panels and in keynotes and in workshops. On occasion when she brushes up against politics or gossip, I may part company, but she comes at issues on our business with common sense, a good heart, and informed experience. She has presided over what I feel is a tremendously improved editorial product at PW, and is managing their operation with a steady hand in a time of great financial uncertainty—both for trade magazines generally, and for PW’s corporate support in particular.

PW has been, forever it seems, the reliable source for industry news, and the periodical of record for mainstream trade publishing. One expects as a matter of course that it would be in the forefront in the defense of first amendment rights and in opposition to censorship in all of its forms. The initial appearance of the so-called banned–books list, supported by the confirmed fact that as Mayor of Wasilla, Palin asked the librarian about their policies for removing books (“a perfectly acceptable question for a new mayor to ask,” Nelson observes), was rich fuel for the flames of ridicule and contempt being heaped on Governor Palin in the national political arena.

Inasmuch as a we can all acknowledge that the library and publishing industries, perhaps somewhat less than the entertainment industry, are predominantly self-identified as politically liberal, the allegation supported the prevailing stereotypes of conservatives  held by many liberals as intolerant and ignorant provincials or religious zealots. Everyone embracing those stereotypes eagerly seized upon this news as further evidence that Pailn would be a threat to our liberties.

So, I thought it was an act of justice on Sarah Nelson’s part to use her platform to point out that “there is no evidence that Palin tried to remove books from the library...while Palin stands for many things about which my feelings range from unease to stout disapproval, one thing I cannot accuse her of is being a book banner.” Nelson then goes on to suggest the kinds of “phony lists” a Palin-basher might have concocted that would at least have been well grounded in Palin’s belief system, such as support for gun rights and opposition to abortion.

Nelson surmises that book-banning was chosen because on the former issues Americans are fairly split, whereas on opposition to censorship we are all united. So, turning a rosy-hued spin on it (with which I can agree) she found in it something “in a roundabout slightly twisted way, pretty positive. To wit: books matter...they matter enough for us to solicit and debate our potential leaders’ attitudes towards them.”

One can turn a similar eye on all such ill-intended and mean-spirited bogus “facts”. For example, allegations that the Islamic heritage that forms a part of Obama’s family tree render his Christian affiliation suspect, could serve the salutary purpose “in a slightly twisted way” of encouraging a national conversation about the commonalities of spiritual benevolence shared by Christianity and Islam.

My point is that I think the truly positive benefit that could come out of these examples of bigotry in action would be a national conversation on how Americans have come to see pluralism of belief – in this case Christian fundamentalism vs Christian humanism—as mortal threats to each other. So much so, that remarkable women such as Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin—women who have hit the glass ceiling and found a way through the cracks—can be vilified and dehumanized so that whatever they say or do is spun into a disrespectful caricature.

In that environment any heartfelt tear shed by either of them is suspect, and any allegation that fits the mold is celebrated as further proof of the caricature.

Yes, it is reassuring “in a twisted way” that in choosing to circulate a bogus list of allegedly banned books, the miscreant also illuminated the value we place on books. It would have been more reassuring to me “in a hopeful way” if it prompted a national conversation on why we are so ready to believe the worst about “the other.”

Posted by: Eugene Schwartz, Editor-at-Large

Award winning philanthropist and businessman Eric Greenberg is the independent publisher and co-author with accomplished editor and writer Karl Weber, of  Generation We: How Millennial Youth Are Taking Over America and Changing the World (Pachatusan, 9780982093108, November). He expects to be on the way to a million or a million and a half free downloads with its launch on www.gen-we.com this past Monday. Printed copies of the four color illustrated, 256 page book will be available in October

The book is the outcome of Greenberg’s concern with the “abuse and erosion” of our American system, “—the concept of freedom under law and a flexible, balanced government responsive to the will of the people as formulated by our founders and delineated in the Constitution they wrote over two centuries ago.”

To reverse this abuse and erosion, he believes, is a mission for today’s generation of emerging leaders —the Millennials (people born between 1978 and 2000.). Muhammad Yunus, Founder of Grameen Bank and Co-Winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize, recently validated this premise, when he said “I share the hope expressed by Greenberg and Weber that this new generation will help re-orient our planet and conquer the problems of poverty, war, and pollution that currently plague it."

“The We Generation” is a compelling public affairs and futures study, lends distinction to independent publishing, and delivers a powerful personal manifesto.

The Making of the Book

In preparation, Greenberg had read the writings of, and met with “many of the world’s leading experts on the major problems of our time, from our reliance on fossil fuels and our burgeoning burden of debt, to the deepening crises affecting the environment, health care, and education.” He met Karl Weber, who joined him as a collaborator in the research and writing of the book.

Greenberg engaged Gerstein/Agne Strategic Communications to conduct a comprehensive research study into the values and attitudes of the Millenials. It included a survey of 2,000 individuals aged 18 to 29, as well as series of 12 focus groups. Its cost—one to one and a half million dollars. The results of the study, details and transcripts of the focus groups are all available for free access on www.gen-we.com.

What they found in the main is that “the worldview of the Millennial generation is shaped by two overriding dynamics that set this generation apart from those that have come before them. The first is a commitment to the common good over individual gain, an ethos that reaches across traditional divisions such as race, ideology, and partisanship. The Millennials are not a ‘Generation Me’ but rather a ‘Generation We.’ ”

The second dynamic that fundamentally shapes the Millennials’ worldview “is a comprehensive rejection of the country’s current leadership and dominant institutions. Whether it is Congress and the federal government, major corporations, or organized religion, these young Americans believe the large institutions that dominate so much of our modern society have comprehensively failed, placing narrow self-interests ahead of the welfare of the country as a whole.”

According to the survey, Millennials by percentages ranging from 73-76% highlight a series of social and political issues they believe are being neglected:  “America’s dependence on fossil fuels like coal, natural gas, and oil  . . . America’s dependence on foreign oil . . .declining quality and rising inequality in America’s public education system  . . .the rising cost of health care and growing number of uninsured… Lack of long-term job and retirement security . .  . Increase in obesity and chronic disease  . . .rapid shift of the U.S. economy from manufacturing to services”

While by a margin of almost two to one, Millennials say “they are less likely than previous generations to believe that government has a positive role to play. . . The scale at which Millennials want to tackle problems suggests a potentially large role for government. ”

Greenberg and Weber analyze the various issues and Millennial attitudes in detail. These observations and the survey results are the meat on the bone in this book and should serve as a wakeup call for every reader.

They then propose an agenda for the future.”History shows that every generation has a mission.  Some rise to the challenge nobly as the Greatest Generation rose to the challenge posed by the Great Depression and the rise of fascism . . .  Others muddle through, as the Silent Generation of the 1950s  . . .. For the Baby Boomers, the verdict seems to be mixed . . . as evidenced by a wealthy nation plagued by a sense of moral and spiritual emptiness.”

So it is the Millennials to whom the authors assign the cleanup. “We believe that Generation We, together with their supporters from other generations, can and will band together to create the greatest political force in the history of our nation. 

“The first step in the restoration of their birthright and the revival of the American dream: Project FREE, to technologically innovate the next generation of energy.  . . .  We must immediately implement an Apollo- or Manhattan-like project to invent new sources of non-fossil fuel energy free from carbon emissions, based on hydrogen, fusion, or other means.”

This isn’t just another blue sky energy program. It fits into a larger concept of what society is all about and how to get there. The authors show how the program will relate not only to national security, job creation, economic growth, and environmental sustainability but also to the societal transformation proposed.

While government action in the form of some central agency with a strong leader and budget will be needed, the ingredients for the social and political movement are in place in the form of the “real time society” network of the internet, Greenberg feels.

I am reminded of the dream that “If you build the field, the people will come,” to paraphrase the movie . I think this book can be that field.

Posted by: Eugene Schwartz, Editor-at-Large

“Generation We,” is not your typical independent publishing story. Yet it is emblematic of how independent publishing can provide a platform that will reach an instant audience in the narrowest or widest range.

It was just a week ago that industry futurist and consultant Mike Shatzkin broadcast a posting to his friends and colleagues announcing this remarkable forthcoming publishing achievement. It was only a month earlier that he was engaged by Greenberg to bring together the ingredients requisite to publication: a production supervisor (Brian O’Leary of Magellan Media) a printer (Quebecor), a publicist (Max Pulsinelli of Maximum Impact) and, with the help of Rich Freese, former CEO of PGW, .a distributor (BookMasters/Atlas in Ashland, Ohio).

Nor is it that Greenberg is your naive innocent operating on a shoestring. He already knew that going with a conventional publisher would mean giving up the production and marketing controls that were so important to his reasons for doing the book in the first place. Having poured over a million dollars into the research that led to the book, what he didn’t anticipate were the logistical intricacies that could impede a quick and effective launch—especially one that wants to be in the market before election day. Hence, Shatzkin.

Bringing the book out now was important because Greenberg chose independent publishing  as a platform from which he expects to accomplish nothing less than the mobilization of a new generation of 95 million Millennials in the cause of the social and political transformation of American politics. Catching the crest of the wave of election campaign interest will help his message become part of the national conversation.

The Personal Odyssey

How did this come about? After all, according to his Barnes and Noble.com bio, “Greenberg has founded and established many businesses in his entrepreneurial career including wind farms in partnership with Native American tribes in the Great Plains; Acumen Sciences and the Acumen Journal of Life Sciences; Scient, a consulting firm focused on eBusiness and emerging technology; and Viant, an internet systems integrator. An award-winning philanthropist, he was named by Worth Magazine as one of the 10 Most Generous Americans Under 45”

Greenberg writes in the book’s introduction, “Through hard work, applied intelligence, and good timing, I was able to prosper. By the turn of the century, I was a paper billionaire at 35 years of age...Although I was lucky enough to have  a stable relationship with my wife, everything else around me devolved into a pit of misfortune, conflict, and poor health. 

“I was miserable. By 2004, I weighed 275 pounds, was dependent on prescription medication, depressed, and sometimes selfish and thoughtless. The world was giving me a valuable lesson: Life is not about things and what you do for yourself.  I was imploding from my ambition-driven ego. My life was unsustainable...I closed my business and stopped working.”  

So it came to pass that an Emeryvlle, CA based business man, had his personal epiphany while in the Amazon jungle in 2006 during a two year process of self-renewal and rediscovery.

He returned determined to do something about the state of crisis he felt was undermining the foundations of American society. This story of personal transformation is a back story interesting and inspiring in its own right.

In addition to launching his Millennial generation project, Greenberg has applied his talents to a socially responsible enterprise as President and Chief Executive Officer of Beautifull, Inc. (Beautifull.com), “a prepared, fresh food company focused on providing tasty, healthy, and real food for retail and home delivery.”

As I listened to Greenberg in our interview and as I later read more of the book, I realized that Greenberg was looking for the “big idea”—a line of attack that would break out of the mold of the conventional with the prospect of leading to serious change. He wanted to find the fertile soil for new ideas, seed it, and enable a new crop of actors to grow and take over.

Once a Reagan Republican (for which he doesn’t apologize in the book), but now in a new place for social and political transformation, Greenberg remains an idealist, but is not a utopian. He is not advocating the overthrow of the system. “If we ever are going to fix the problems we have today we have to do it with political action,” he says, and it needs to be done within the system and within the two parties if possible.

He writes, “This book is for our future.  The most powerful force that can make our future better than our past is the youth binding together on the outcome, resolve, and political will to achieve it, no matter how they may differ on details of implementation. I’m not a member of Generation We, and I don’t aspire to lead it.  My great hope in writing this book is that it will inspire a handful of  great leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., or Mahatma Gandhi to emerge and lead their peers.”

At its heart, the purpose of this effort, he told me is “to ignite a passion for the greater good.”

The name of his publishing house, Pachatusan, by the way, is taken from a holy mountain in Peru, which can mean, “he who sustains the world.”

Posted by: Eugene Schwartz, Editor-at-Large

The subject of copyright enforcement came up as I was listening to a panel of newspaper journalists discussing multi-media journalism on C-Span the other day. They were worrying about what would happen when various aggregators around the world start lifting their original news features wholesale without credit or compensation.

The discussion struck me as revealing how much more vulnerable to re-use, misuse and abuse intellectual content of any kind has become in the cyberspace world. And also how much of a commodity content has become.

In the "old days" you had to do some heavy lifting—even if it meant nothing more than picking up the book or photo or illustration and taking it to a copy machine, calibrating the machine so that you got a decent image, making sure it had paper, collecting the output and then having your way with it, whatever that would be.

Before the internet, and especially before desk top publishing, you pretty much had to work with physical copies of things, benignly borrowed (or taken) words and images on paper (or some kind of "substrate" as the term of art would be) for some immediate use. This imposed a variety of practical barriers that kept the leakage of rights to a minimum and concentrated its more substantial flow in the hands of professional thieves.

All of that has changed—and with the low cost and ubiquity of scanners, with cell phone cameras that can capture a Dali or a Rockwell, not to mention your hard-won framed shot of the Chinese Great Wall, and circulate it digitally for mash-ups and re-uses—gate-keeping the rights of images is like keeping a safe deposit box in a room with an open window.

Nonetheless, the publishing industry still relies on copyright law as the foundation of its economic viability. As all who read ForeWord well know, publishers have struggled to cope with establishing rights in an electronic world, and authors and agents have been pushing back while warily going with the flow (See Model Trade Book Contract and Guide, Including Electronic Rights Clauses, a valuable 64 page booklet published by the Authors Guild, Inc., www.authorsguild.org).

All of this leads to a book I'd like to recommend to any of you who are interested in the subject, and especially if you deal with pictures as well as intellectual property and copyright in general: Permissions, A Survival Guide. Blunt Talk about Art as Intellectual Property, by Susan M. Bielstein (0-226-04638-9. University of Chicago Press, 2006).

The author is the executive editor for art, architecture, classical studies and film at the University of Chicago Press. Let me disabuse you of any concern that as a consequence of her position, this short and engagingly written work is simply a compilation of the prescriptive by-ways of legal minutiae.

To the contrary, Bielstein has transformed the process of acquiring and dispensing rights into a challenging exercise of wit, ingenuity and perseverance—governed by both precise definitions on the one hand and improvisation on the other. She launches her work with history, overview and example before getting to process.

Early on she frames all that follows in image permissions: the distinction between copyright permission (for content not yet in the public domain—not as readily determined as one might think if the content is another's version) and use permission (getting and/or paying for a reproduction of any otherwise public domain subject, jealously guarded by the museum that owns it).

With these two variables, the search for permission can be as convoluted as the three variables of the mechanical, performance and authorship rights in the music business (not to mention transcriptions and versions).

After a brief excursion into the history and definition of copyright, and how it has struggled to keep up with media technologies of the times, Bielstein establishes that "the proprietary interests of copyright and free speech are not mutually exclusive. Both rights are granted by the constitution."

Nonetheless, she observes, the way some people conceive of copyright is as "a kind of giant First Amendment duty-free zone. And on the face of it copyright is not about free anything. In the United States, at least, copyright is about commerce and spurs to free enterprise." She supports this in a chapter that provides an overview of copyright conventions and concepts globally and historically.

We are then taken to the roots of today's dilemma in defining and seeking rights to visual works, "The day that Marcel Duchamp arranged for a porcelain urinal to be delivered to the 1917 Independents exhibition in New York City was the day that a number of closely held beliefs about art began to shift...the object didn’t even have to originate with the artist who claimed it. The thing was art if the artist said it was."

So, much of the book is concerned with the question she then raises, "Today, what are we to make of art that is virtual, not actual...or driven by social participation?" Bielstein defines the issues with numerous real life examples, and closes her work with practical advice about where to find public domain resources, free resources and how to go after images that require permission.

She provides sidebars on artist's moral rights and copyrighting architecture (and pictures of architecture), and on rights to images of ephemeral performances. She discusses the pros and cons of the sovereignty of the author and of fair use, including how and when scanning images of two-dimensional originals may fall into fair use.

The work is sprinkled throughout with illustrations of visual works and their permissions trails. For many, rights are easily acquired. But for others, not so simple. One example is a famous Brassai photo of Picasso's dog, Kazback, taken in Picasso's studio. The credit reads "(c) Estate Brassai-RMN (c) Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo credit: Reunion des Mussées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY." In order to reproduce the photograph in the book, Bielstein had to pay copyright fees to the Brassai Estate, the Picasso Administration and a use fee to RMS for the transparency.

The practical value of this work is that it draws on the author's experience and she takes you through the details of everything from choosing the size and format of digital files that you may be ordering to how to negotiate on price with museums. There is also a useful bibliography and a short list of image banks and artist's rights organizations.
 
The real meat on the bone of this work, however, is the author's blending of anecdotal experience, procedural advice and a critical effort to point the way out of the box that electronic reproduction and increasing layers of rights control are putting the users of creative assets – adding thickets of procedural obstacles and barriers of cost that lead either to shrinking use and availability or increasing use without permission.

She discusses the benefits and limitations of "flexible copyright" (copyright in advance with conditions) in the Creative Commons. She quotes Laurence Lessig from his book Free Culture that "there is no check on silly rules" on the internet because rights are enforced by code and by rote "not by a human but by a machine". She looks with favor on the practice introduced by Amazon that makes available used (aftermarket) books alongside of new works. She suggests that a similar central catalog allowing keyword search of both public domain as well as images requiring license would benefit both users and licensors.
 
Whatever the solutions, the problem is real and Bielstein lays out the dilemma. On the one hand, she writes, "Today in the new millennium...librarians at some of the major research institutions across America are on a rumble, rolling out a version of fair use in a push to make any and all intellectual property available without charge to what could turn out to be a potentially unlimited number of users."
 
On the other, she notes, the traditional freedom of exchange of a published work that passed from hand to hand "is challenged in the new coded environment, where every use of a work can now be monitored, counted and controlled, where a downloaded copy cannot be borrowed or transferred, edited or excerpted and certainly not resold."

I have always thought of words and sounds and images as arrows shot into the air as in the poem, and " they fall we know not where". But soon they become a part of the fabric of conversation, of thought and of the common language and culture. The artist by the act of publication and sale has begun the process of making his or her original work part of the common intellectual property of humankind.
 
Bielstein sees that as a "fragile ecology," and so gives voice to the soul of what we are all about. She provides much food for thought on the way to dealing with the dilemma of intellectual property in our time. This is a book that should be in every publishing professional's library.

Posted by: Eugene Schwartz, Editor-at-Large

Foreword Magazine is celebrating their 10th anniversity and they asked me to write something on the changes I have seen in the past 10 years or so.

Many years ago I attended my first BookExpo conference in Miami. On subsequent visits ever since, the rows upon rows of independent publisher booths have both awed and discouraged me. I have frequently said to friends and colleagues that as a reality check anyone considering establishing a publishing company should attend a BookExpo before committing dollar one. For many (myself included), there is a romantic notion attached to publishing which isn’t entirely undeserved; however, a trip through the aisles will prove that the unique idea you thought you had for the ideal publishing house or list is represented multiple times perhaps even in the same aisle.

At Bowker I saw a relentless procession of new publishers adding their information to Books In Print. Each year we saw approximately 10,000 new applications for ISBN numbers and these applications were fairly constant between the mid-1990’s and 2002. At the turn of the century, the numbers of new applications began to grow inexorably and is most likely well over 12,000 by now. The growth in self-publishing and the democratization of the publishing process is to 'blame.'

In 2005, (if I recollect correctly from my Bowker years) 18 publishers produced almost 40,000 titles and 13,000 publishers produced 77,000 titles. (Including all titles the number published in 2005 was 180,000 give or take). On average, each of the 13,000 publishers published less than 10 titles per year. While these numbers reflect one year (2005) the data was proportionate to the entire Books In Print database of 5mm titles and 165,000 publishers. To emphasize the breadth of suppliers, I have heard Barnes & Noble say they order at least one title from 45,000 publishers in any given year.

All new publishers and existing independent publishers publish in every niche imaginable with lists ranging from one title to several thousand. Each publisher knows their market is intensely competitive and that titles will never be successful unless they are supported by an intensive focus on marketing and promotion. Naturally, some do this better than others.

There are significant challenges that small and medium publishers must overcome; getting their titles noticed is the greatest. At Sourcebooks, the company has adapted traditional advertising and marketing principles and applied them to the book industry. The results are instructive (and impressive). At the core of their business model is the understanding that each new title is a ‘product’ which requires a specific marketing and promotion plan. (Marketing’s four ‘p’s: product, promotion, price and place). At Sourcebooks, the difficult questions regarding how the title will be marketed and promoted are asked at the adoption stage rather than applied by rote as the book is being printed. Sourcebooks is a proven example that publishing can be done successfully by approaching the business less as an avocation and more as a market driven business. In order to be successful, more small and medium sized publishers will need to adopt similar programs to support their publishing efforts.

Other challenges abound. For example, we may begin to see the self-publishing model begin to impact the available pool of authors. Many authors may come to realize they can produce and promote their own title(s) and make more money rather than work with a traditional publisher. It has long been the case that the success of any title was dependent on the level of self-promotion provided by the author: As manufacturing and editing become commoditized, the author may wonder what a publisher’s value add will be if the titles’ success resides entirely on their promotional abilities. More authors may decide to do it themselves.

All businesses evolve and publishing is no exception; I see more and more independent publishers begin to adopt better financial controls, better marketing and promotion and make more astute title selections. While some significant challenges have occurred over the past 20 years—publisher consolidation, retailer consolidation, a reduction of independent bookstores—there have also been some impressive positive improvements. Opportunities represented by more effective use of technology, digital distribution and online advertising should all be experimented with, embraced and adapted to the publishing model. I also believe we will see more small and independent publishers seek out and work with some of the self-publishing companies (AuthorHouse, Lulu) where each supports the other’s business model. There remain opportunities in the independent publisher market.

Posted by: Michael Cairns

The annual one day conference on May 14 of the International Digital Book Forum (IDPF), provided evidence that the latest innovations and experiments in e-book publishing, marketing and distribution have permanence in the market and in the support of new technologies. They are here to stay and on the way.

Steve Potash, CEO of Overdrive and President of IDPF, opened this year's session as he has every year, with a confident forecast that industry efforts to develop an open and common eBook platform standard would pay off for everyone. This year, he was able to announce the successful release of the standards last year, and the introduction of the common XML file extension of ".epub" for reflowable books and publications.

These standards for digitally "packaging" and providing meta data and tagging content, have been accompanied by breakthroughs in publishing strategies, digital search, browsing tools (look inside, widgets), and most critically, portable reader technology.

The Sony Reader, Amazon Kindle and iRex Iliad have replaced backlighting, and use the reflective e-Ink screen that simulates the page turning and reading experience on paper, while providing the search, bookmarking, highlighting, and variable type size features of digital technology. Moreover, e-Ink only uses power when the page is changed, and not when the new page has come to rest. And the most user-friendly bump to the market—soon to be copied by other devices—is the Kindle function that provides a one click effortless wireless download of any book out of its browsable catalog.

The Google book search program—with more than one million books on line and growing, and Windows Alive's archive—are providing point and click opportunities for readers to go from their browse to the publisher to order the book—in print or in electronic version. Not to mention Amazon's ahead of the pack point and click, Barnes and Noble, Powell's, Borders,, et al.

Publishers are beginning to innovate in their e-Book offerings. Witness Harlequin's launch of two short subject romance series (Spice) and Random House's free give away of an e-Book (Suze Orman) that stimulated a new spike in print sales. Service providers such as Overdrive, Ingram Digital (including MyiLibrary and Vital Source) and Libre Digital, are providing publishers with large-scale digital e-Book and audio archiving, distribution and re-purposing services to broaden consumer choices.

Quietly working in the trenches, the all volunteer IDPF standards committee headed by eBook veteran Garth Conboy, President of eBook Technologies, designed and put through a meticulous process of review and release in the past three years for the three container and platform standards now being adopted by publishers and device manufacturers. They laid the groundwork for interoperability of e-books in this promising new marketplace. (If you are into technology, go to http://idpf.org/specs.htm for a summary description as well as for detail on the OCF (Open Container Format), OPS (Open Publishing Structure) and OPS (Open Packaging Format) standards).

This means that the publisher will need to produce only one format (xml based), from which various applications can be converted and distributed. To the extent that device distributors accommodate the platform standards, and publishers relax their content protection barriers—the reader will be able to make one purchase and use their e-book in multiple ways in an after-market environment.

Of course this will raise a new set of identification and numbering problems. Most publishers now provide a separate ISBN for each ebook plantform for the same title (mobipocket, windows, Sony, iRex, Kindle). By publishing one open eBook formatted .epub version, the publisher can get by with one isbn and will no longer need to track the various other platform versions serviced by their distributors. So, it will fall to the distributors to create distinguishing product numbers in order, in turn, to account for their different offerings, (There is no escape!).

The continued ubiquity of the book as a reading device has distracted our attention from the breakthrough in electronic readers and books for the general public. Slow in coming, authors, publishers, distributors and retailers have remained complaisant—worried more about the decline in book readers than the uptick in electronic readers.

Well, the electronic reader—in both senses of the word—has leapfrogged out of the early adopter stage into a growing mainstream of device-equipped business travelers, immersive readers, college students, professional field workers and audio book/multimedia users (both Kindle and Sony have audio capability).

After writing about e-Book developments for the past ten years, I have acquired my first readers: a Sony and a Kindle, and I am getting used to using them. For my most recent five day trip to Chicago, I down-loaded on my Kindle in about a minute, for $9.95, Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals, which took up no more space than a 5x7 notebook and rested in my palms with the comfort of a trade paperback

I still like to go to bed with a printed book – especially a paperback—that I can grab, flex, and earmark—my current victim is The Kite Runner—but on a flight and in a hotel room where I don’t have to take up space with the bulk of a printed book, I have to confess, I've been hooked.

Posted by: Eugene Schwartz, Editor-at-Large

To know is to have power. Or, in a more muscular way, knowledge is power.

This old maxim, that I first learned in my high school Castillian Spanish class many moons ago, comes to mind as the world of words and pictures and intellectual property is being roiled about by the explosion of digitally based media and instant communication through wireless and the internet.

Do we really understand what it is "to know"? Does it make any difference what is true or not true? And if it does, is there some standard by which we can reach that conclusion? And, even if we are never certain that we know the truth, do we believe that it is knowable?

This is heavy duty philosophy on the one hand – but is also a very simple and practical question whose answer governs how we approach everything we do. It is certainly at the heart of how we see our mission as publishers – of what each of us chooses to publish and why.

Generations of human beings today are being introduced to information and ideas with the expectation that they will be instantly available and instantly validated by virtue of the number of unique visitors, eyeballs, hits, user reviews or comments that accumulate around a citation or a work on Google, Yahoo, You-Tube, Slate, Drudge Report, Huffington Post, Move On, Wikipedia, or you name it.

If enough people line up behind an idea or a fact, that becomes the metaphysical truth of the moment. If enough people desire to have unrestricted access to words or music or images, the wisdom of crowds will view barriers to access as elitism or Berlin walls to be scaled.

If Wikipedia says it is so, even if with a warning that more editing is needed, the information becomes the fact for the day – suitable for a term paper or inclusion in an essay or opinion piece.

These facts and truths of the day carry the enormous power of knowledge into the market place of human behavior and social action. Instant communities coalesce around  what later may turn out to be a misquote, a mis-attribution, a misplaced decimal point, an incomplete or out of context citation, a plagiarism or a made-up observation.

Gone are the days when one had to reason their way through an argument, support it with documented attributions, relate it to universal truths already known or hypotheses previously investigated. Buzz words, slogans, talking points and conventional wisdom pass comfortably among us as the stuff of conversation and dialogue. Ad hominem attacks against the messenger serve to invalidate or quash discussion of the message.

On the other side of the coin on the knowledge issue, Chris Anderson (of The Long Tail) has figured out that to offer content free can be a gateway to drawing eyeballs like flies to pop-up ads pre-targeted to qualified prospects. Cheering him on, the wisdom of crowds says that content should be free in the first place.

Global search disseminates knowledge to the widest audience – now a metaphor for the library of the universe. Because it has brought together at virtually no cost markets as small as one, not to mention markets of millions, and has empowered us with instant access to new knowledge, the wisdom of crowds says it is fair use to copy anything for search and from search regardless of the creator's wishes.

Rachel Donaido writing in the Sunday Times Book review on April 27 observes that "everyone has a story – and everyone wants to tell it." Hence, according Bowker, she reports, "a whopping 400,000 books were published or distributed in the United States in 2007, up from 300,000 in 2006."

This huge addition to the global archive of information and ideas is staggering in its dimensions. Book reviewers, librarians, booksellers and researchers despair at the challenge to seek out those titles worthy of referencing and spending time with.

So what does all this mean? We still have a collective memory (first-hand or passed along) of the analog era of the printed word when a publisher's imprint meant that some entrepreneur had put their assets at risk to bring out books they though were worthwhile.  

Relying on a marketplace to validate their judgements, this was a form of self-screening quality control. Editors, reviewers, librarians and researchers vetted manuscripts and fact-checked each other in a process that could take many months to  many years. There is the feeling that this process yielded up more literary merit, screened out the unfounded and properly labeled the opinionated.

Well, those of us who have been paying attention, know that it was also a process that excluded the unnoticed, unseen and unappreciated, and edited out the unpleasant or undesirable – with little transparency that needed to withstand the wisdom of crowds. In the realm of education and opinion it nurtured as much mythology as it did what we consider the truth of the matter.

What I come to in this brief musing on knowledge and power is to observe that because the power of knowledge drives all human judgement, understanding what we call knowledge and how we arrive at it is paramount to our survival as a species that needs to master its circumstance if it is not to be overcome by it.

Because we are all of us subject to error and mis-judgement, it is better to have many ways in which our findings and opinions can be challenged, as well as many ways by means of which people can bring their versions of things into the arena for examination.

Placing the dissemination of knowledge in the hands of  professionally trained and credentialed gatekeepers who earned their position by education, training and marketplace forces has the benefit of enabling us to rely on easily identifiable authority to validate the information and ideas we depend on.  But it also true that while these gatekeepers could more easily control what found its way into the market, they were also highly visible and it was possible to check out their sources and validate them.

The wisdom of crowds replaces these well-identified knowledge sources with a vast uncertainty as to the source of that wisdom – but because it is so much more diverse and readily challenged, untruths are more readily exposed and quickly become subject to challenge by those same crowds – and more new truths find their way into the marketplace.

The problem and the challenge as I see it is not 400,000 new books a year of uncertain credibility or the subjective wisdom of crowds passing judgement. It is that we are in a marketplace of ideas and information in which the challenges of absolute dogmas,  fundamentalism, and made up realities are not being met by an equally persuasive reliance on reason and philosophy as a means of arriving at truth and judgment and by a willingness to advocate for the importance of reasoned judgment arrived at independently,

The value of crowds is not to determine the truth, but to challenge its advocates to make their case without needing a crowd to validate it. Without advocates there is nothing for the crowd to challenge – so it creates its own truth by its sheer numbers and the lack of, or suspension of independent thought by individuals among its numbers.

Knowledge, to my way of thinking, comes about because of independent thought and reasoning. It is a cognitive function which, when applied is enormously powerful because it activates our creative and purposive faculties. And those faculties brought to bear in the coalescing of crowds now possible in cyberspace es muy poderoso - is very powerful indeed, if I have that right.

Posted by: Eugene Schwartz, Editor-at-Large