Is the ISBN Still Necessary?

Archive for Electronic Reading

Is the ISBN Still Necessary?

August 14, 2009 Bookselling, Distribution, Electronic Reading, The Future of Publishing 3 comments

My inner distribution nerd was thrilled to discover (via José Afonso Furtado) Michael Carins’ recent reflections on the death of the international standard book number, or ISBN, over on his blog PersonaNondata. The argument goes something like this. Over the last several years there has been a noticeable movement away from the ISBN, particularly in the case of e-books. Leading the way has been Amazon.com, which refuses to assign ISBNs to any of the Kindle books it sells. With book digitization there has also tended to follow dis-aggregation, or the chopping up of books into smaller, component parts that can be sold separately. How do you assign a single ISBN to what’s fast becoming an exploding whole?

Cairns clearly knows his stuff. As a former President of Bowker, he was chin-deep in the trenches of the recent effort to rework the ISBN for the 21st century. The result was the shift from a 10-digit to a 13-digit standard, which went into effect on January 1, 2007. My question is this: is the ISBN still necessary?

Anyone who’s read The Late Age of Print will know that I do not ask this question lightly. I devote the better part of Chapter 3 to the ISBN’s history, and to tell you the truth, in the process of doing the research I developed something of a crush on this smart little product code. Personally I’d be sad to see it go. But as an historian of technology it seems clear that the ISBN has just about exhausted its usefulness.

It’s important to bear in mind what computing and online communications looked like when the ISBN was first conceived, back in the late 1960s. Processing power was paltry by today’s standards. Broadband was barely an inkling of an idea. The ISBN was developed within the context of these technological constraints, as a concise and thus highly efficient way in which to convey extremely detailed information about the language, publisher, title, and edition of any given book.

Today computers are capable of processing much more complex data strings, which need not be limited to numerals or the occasional letter X. Furthermore, broadband has resulted in much faster electronic communications and consequently obviates the need to “keep it simple” and to the point (Twitter notwithstanding). In other words, the constraints under which the ISBN was created hardly apply today.

The ISBN was designed not only to facilitate “back-office” communications about books. It was also designed to facilitate their distribution. And in this respect Amazon’s move away from the ISBN with its Kindle editions is telling. Time and again the company has shown that it, and only it, wants to control the distribution of Kindle books. Indeed they are digitally rights managed so as to forestall their circulation beyond anyone besides the reader/customer/end-user/licensee (I’m not entirely sure what to call this person anymore). Amazon is moving us away from an era of more or less unfettered book circulation, and its slow abandonment of the ISBN is a manifestation of this.

It’s also worth remembering that the ISBN grew up at a time when the book industry showed perhaps its sharpest division of labor. There were authors, agents publishers, typesetters, printers, binders, distributors, booksellers, and certainly a whole host others all working in concert in disparate places on a single product. Now consider Amazon. With Kindle the company effectively becomes an extension of the publisher, typesetter, printer, and binder, all while acting as book distributor and seller. If Amazon has its way then we are likely to see a further breakdown in the book industry’s division of labor. What’s the point of an industry Esperanto when centralization is fast becoming the order of the day?

Incidentally, this is precisely why the answer to my question, “Is the ISBN still necessary?” is still a “yes,” despite all that I have had to say about historical contexts and the like. The ISBN was more than just a product code. It was an accomplishment — a testament to an industry’s ability to achieve unity despite the pressures of competition, corporatization, and globalization. Disturbingly, the waning of the ISBN signals the opposite trend: the growing hegemony of a single player who holds disproportionate sway over the industry as a whole.

—with thanks to p.

Bezos Apologizes

July 24, 2009 Electronic Reading, Quick Takes No comments

Just a quick follow-up on the whole Amazon/1984 incident, about which you can read more by checking out my post, below. Yesterday Amazon.com Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos apologized for the series of unfortunate events on the Kindle Community Forum, which is hosted on the company website. The statement reads:

This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle. Our “solution” to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we’ve received. We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission.

With deep apology to our customers,

Jeff Bezos
Founder & CEO
Amazon.com

Thanks and kudos for the stand-up move. And here’s hoping that Amazon never, ever repeats the mistake.

Oh Brave New World…

July 14, 2009 Electronic Reading No comments

Courtesy of José Afonso Furtado’s Twitter feed comes a blog post by PersonaNonData (PND) called, “Book Insurance.” Don’t let the snoozer of a title turn you off. It’s an offbeat but nonetheless thought-provoking piece on the future of electronic reading. And it’s a future in which you better make sure your coverage is up to scratch.

PND opens by noting the book industry’s accelerating journey down the path of digital rights management (DRM) — this despite the recording industry’s growing realization that locking down content may not be the best long term survival plan. She or he then goes on to discuss a significant problem stemming from publishing’s recent turn to DRM. The latter not only forestalls illicit file-sharing, but it also “places limits on interoperability.”

So while I may have legally purchased Toni Morrison’s Beloved for my Amazon Kindle, there’s no hope of my ever reading it on whatever e-reader I may have purchased in the past or may one day purchase in the future — short of my hacking the e-book, of course, which is illegal under 1998’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

PND poses a novel solution to the problem of interoperability. She/he suggests creating an ancillary or derivative market for e-book insurance. That way you can pay to cover yourself and your library should you ever decide that it’s time to switch e-reading platforms, or in the event that the model you’ve purchased gets discontinued.

It’s as brilliant an idea as it is chilling.

It’s enough that the marginal costs of producing e-books are next to nothing. But now imagine adding on, say, a few cents per title — maybe more, as you can never anticipate just how deep the greed runs — to make sure that your content remains accessible to you in perpetuity. Essentially you’d be paying for the privilege of retaining access to what is already yours. Sadly, I suspect that many and perhaps most e-book readers would accept this type of arrangement, since micro-payments are astonishingly easy to swallow. What’s a few pennies here or there?

The costs of the physical hardware notwithstanding, the benefit of e-books is that they are cheap (at least in theory). But that’s now. You can be sure that down the road, the business-savvy book industry or perhaps some outside entrepreneur will figure out some creative way to gouge e-book prices — book insurance or otherwise.

Update — Kindle & the Future of Journalism

July 3, 2009 Electronic Reading, Quick Takes No comments

Just a quick follow-up to my post from earlier in the week, “Kindle and the Future of Print Journalism.” There I proposed that Amazon.com should sell its Kindle e-reader at a loss, with the understanding that the loss could be recouped through a revenue-sharing agreement with those newspapers publishers who choose to distribute their content electronically through Amazon. Well, it turns out that something like this arrangement already exists — only the revenue sharing isn’t designed to drive down Kindle’s hefty price tag.

The video embedded below contains Congressional testimony by James Moroney, Publisher and CEO of the Dallas Morning News.

Moroney states:

The Kindle, which I think is a marvelous device, the best deal Amazon will give the Dallas Morning News-and we’ve negotiated this up to the last two weeks-they want 70 percent of the subscriptions revenue. I get 30 percent, they get 70 percent. On top of that they have said we get the right to republish your intellectual property to any portable device. Now is that a business model that is going to work for newspapers?

Evidently this information has been circulating for some time now, although I only learned of it recently, in Malcolm Gladwell’s insightful review and critique of Chris Anderson’s new book, Free! The Future of a Radical Price.

Anyway, so much for the idea of making Kindle more accessible by bringing the cost down. Until that happens, the device will remain an elite source for daily news — which I take to be contrary to the democratic impulse driving journalism in the United States.

Kindle & the Future of Print Journalism

June 30, 2009 Electronic Reading, The Future of Publishing 4 comments

As someone who writes about the future of printed books, I’m often asked to weigh in on the future of another popular printed medium — newspapers. Up until now I’ve only broached the matter offhandedly, but this month’s Mother Jones prompted me to consider the matter more seriously.

It happened after a friend of mine alerted me to MJ’s “Exhibit” spread called, “Black and White and Dead All Over.” According to the piece, about 20% of newspaper journalists have lost their jobs in just the last eight years. And from January to May 2009, “100 newspapers shut down and 9,000 newspaper jobs were lost.”

Usually I’m skeptical whenever I hear about a medium’s impending death. It’s pretty clear from the spread, however, that newspapers are suffering terribly right now. This is due in no small part to proliferating digital communications technologies, combined with news agencies’ growing reliance on untrained grassroots “iJournalism.”

The irony is that newspaper publishers also see digital technologies as a savior. New York Times publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr., for one, believes that Amazon.com’s new Kindle DX e-reader will “enhance our ability to reach millions of readers” — especially those for whom the printed version of the paper is unavailable. No surprise, Amazon is marketing the device heavily for its news reading capabilities, having partnered with the Times and other major U.S. papers.

Before I get to the crux of the issue, some disclosures are in order. I come from something of a newspaper family. My late sister Anne was an editorial writer for the St. Petersburg Times, FL, and before that she was a reporter and editorial writer for the Time Herald-Record in Middletown, NY. Way back when she was editor-in-chief of her college newspaper at Binghamton University, Pipe Dream. I freelanced with the Record as a photojournalist in 1993 and interned with the paper in 1994. I also worked on my college newspaper, The New Hampshire, throughout my undergraduate studies. I even seriously contemplated becoming a professional photojournalist before deciding to pursue a career as a university professor.

In other words, I’m a friend of newspapers — and by that I mean, of printed newspapers. But I’m also part of the problem in that I now I do most of my news reading online. I cannot remember the last time that I actually paid for daily news.

The prospect of the newspaper’s replacement with costly digital e-reading devices, such as Kindle, seems a poor future for me indeed. I say this not because I fetishize ink and paper. As I make clear throughout The Late Age of Print, I positively do not. Instead, I worry about the economic and political effects of a business model in which stand-alone e-readers become a — or maybe even the — primary delivery vehicle for daily news.

The Kindle DX costs $489. It’s smaller, less feature-laden sibling costs $359. Either price seems to me to pose a huge barrier to entry when it comes to acquiring one’s daily news. Add to that the cost of one or more digital newspaper subscriptions — you cannot buy an individual day’s paper via Amazon — and you’ve dropped the better part of a grand inside of a year.

Beyond the reporting, what made printed newspapers great was their price. Most cost under a dollar a day when I was growing up in the 1970s and 80s, and many even hovered around 50 cents. In my grandparents’ day you could pick most papers up for around a nickel. Daily news was cheap — indeed, democratically so. Nearly everyone could afford to partake of the affairs of the day, and many did so regularly.

But if Kindle becomes a primary platform for daily news, then the newspaper industry will have all but abandoned this longstanding democratic ethos. What’s the point of a fourth estate if only the economically advantaged are the ones reading the news?

So here’s a radical proposal for Amazon and the newspaper companies to consider. If your survival plan involves a switch-over to digital e-readers like Kindle, then lower your prices! Significantly reduce the economic barriers to entry and create an economy of scale. Perhaps the e-reader even could be sold at a loss, with the understanding that a portion of all newspaper subscription revenue would be paid back to the hardware manufacturer.

The point is, you don’t save journalism by making it more exclusive.

Smellavision

June 11, 2009 Electronic Reading, Humor No comments

It’s finally happened, at long last: scent has been brought to the world of audiovisual media. But it’s not television or movies leading the way. It’s books — or rather, e-books.

Here’s the lowdown. DuroSport Electronics, which, as far as I can tell, is a legitimate if little-known manufacturer of e-gadgets, has decided to branch out into somatic technologies — in this case, aerosol sprays that provide printed book-like atmosphere for your e-books. The company’s new product, Smell of Books, comes in five different aromas to please the sniffer of even the most discerning of bibliophiles: Classic Musty, Eau You Have Cats, New Book Smell, Scent of Sensibility, and (I’m still trying to get my head around this one) Crunchy Bacon. Maybe the latter is for people who keep cookbooks in their kitchens while playing lose and fast with the pork fat.

Anyway, Medialoper is quite down on Smell of Books, noting, for example, that New Book Smell is really just new car smell repackaged and repurposed. DuroSport evidently has issued a recall — assuming Smell of Books is an honest to goodness product.

Indeed I keep asking myself, is this for real? Smell of Books has just enough plausibility to be believable, given how bibliophiles (and by that I mean of the print-on-paper variety) wax on and on about the scents they associate with book reading. Yet, it’s also sufficiently doubt-inducing to raise my suspicions. I mean, “Eau You Have Cats?” Honestly? And why charge $29.99 a can for New Book Smell, but only $9.99 for Classic Musty? Something doesn’t quite add up.

Is canned aroma for e-books just an elaborate hoax? If not, is there actually a market for this stuff? Either way, I’m not buying it.

Remains of the Day

June 4, 2009 Electronic Reading, The Future of Publishing 4 comments

If you’ve read The Late Age of Print, then you’ll know that I’m not a technological reactionary. In my arsenal of gadgets you’ll find a much-loved iPod Touch, a less-loved Kindle 1.0, a mobile phone that I regularly use, and more. A friend of mine claims that I’m a gadget-head. Usually I beg to differ, but having just inventoried my electronic wares, I’m beginning to think that he may be on to something.

Here’s the thing, though: I also love books — and my that I mean, printed books. While I’d hardly consider myself to be a book fetishist (i.e., I’m not a devotee of Nicholas A. Basbanes), I’m a bibliophile in about the same way that I’m a gadget-head, that is, by default. Over the years I’ve accumulated a sizable library, mostly in my capacity as an academic; I love to read; and I annotate my books prodigiously, creating personalized indexes so that I can return easily to the passages I’ve underlined. Maybe one day I’ll scan and post one of these indexes here, so that you can see just how intensely I read.

Because I seem to be pulled in two different directions technologically speaking, I was immediately drawn to this week’s (June 8 & 15) cover of the New Yorker, pictured above. Its setting is a post-apocalyptic New York City. An alien has touched down and sits amid the ruins, surrounded by what appears to be e-waste. Discarded CDs, mobile phones, and computer keyboards abound. Also strewn amid the litter are devices that look suspiciously like Amazon Kindles. Our genial-looking alien relaxes with a tattered but still mostly intact printed book.

The New Yorker cover is a brilliant commentary on the particular bibliographic moment in which we are currently living. It seems as though electronic reading was the conversation at last week’s BookExpo America. The prevalence of that conversation tells us just how short-sighted — and indeed profit-obsessed — the book industry is becoming. The central problem with e-reading, beyond the temptation to overly-secure digital content, is that of endurance. Too many e-reading devices and too many digital formats result in too much of one thing: technological obsolescence.

If you don’t believe me, check out Chapter 1 of The Late Age of Print, where I discuss an early e-book experiment called Agrippa (A Book of the Dead). You can find the text of the Agrippa story online, but unless you’re a collector of legacy technologies you pretty much cannot read it in its original form. It was encoded on a 3 1/2-inch floppy diskette (remember those?) that is incompatible with today’s hardware and operating systems.

The partisans of e-reading may well retort that printed books, like their electronic kin, also deteriorate. Paper can become brittle and, well, there’s a reason why the word “bookworm” exists in the English language. All true. But here I’m persuaded both by my own experience and by Nicholson Baker’s wonderful book, Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper (Random House, 2001). Baker shows us how even just a modicum of care can help print-on-paper books to endure for centuries. The “slow fires” that the proponents of micro-media first advanced and that the denizens of e-books now expound are pretty much smoke and mirrors.

For e-reading to succeed, there will need to be something even more fundamental than built-in dictionaries, wireless content delivery, and other such bells and whistles. What will be needed above all — and what the printed book so well embodies — is a stable platform. Indeed, when was the last time one of your printed books was “upgraded” out of existence?

Good Morning, Amazon…

June 1, 2009 Bookselling, Electronic Reading No comments

First it was the cola wars. Now, it’s the e-book wars.

At this past weekend’s book industry trade show, BookExpo America, Google announced that it will begin selling digital book content in the near future. According to this article in today’s New York Times, the search engine giant has the backing of major players in the publishing field.

The move should come as a wake-up call for Amazon.com, which, since the introduction of Kindle in late 2007, has dominated the retail e-book market. Many questions remain, however, about whether Google’s latest foray into the book world ultimately will pan out.

Why it Will Work
First, there’s Google, whose power, prevalence, and brand recognition shouldn’t be underestimated. But the success of its latest e-book initiative will stem from more than just the company’s shear Google-ness. It will result from its growing recognition of itself as not merely a search engine company but indeed as a platform for online businesses. This is, incidentally, exactly what Amazon.com has been doing of late — refashioning itself, a la Google, from a retailer to a business incubator; and in this respect it’s playing catch-up to Google.

Second, there’s the Kindle factor. Google’s plan is to release digital editions of books which, though secure (read: DRM), will not be native to any particular e-reading device. This is good news for those of us who’ve been less impressed with Kindle than we we ought to be; this is especially so where images are concerned. Plus, it’s great news for readers who, in a time of economic downturn, are discomfited by the prospect of shelling out hundreds of dollars for the privilege of accessing and reading digital content via Kindle.

Third, did I mention Google? Besides the technology, one of the major problems that has beset e-books thus far has been distribution. Amazon has successfully addressed the issue by providing readers with a reliable, centralized hub from which to download e-titles. There aren’t many companies out there who could compete with Amazon along these lines, but Google is surely one of them. It’s already become a nodal point for people to access e-book content via Book Search and Google Library. Becoming a nodal point for distribution of e-content shouldn’t take a great deal more than a hop, skip, and a jump.

Why it Won’t Work
Book publishers are greedy and do not understand how to sell their products in and to a digital world. As the New York Times today reported, Google intends to allow its partner publishers to set their own e-book prices. If recent history tells us anything, it tells us that the publishers likely will charge something close to print-on-paper prices for content whose material support has already in essence been outsourced to consumers (e.g., in the form of computers, netbooks, and other mobile e-readers). This is unacceptable and will only hinder e-book adoption.

Relatedly, there’s the Amazon factor. The company has insisted that, where possible, Kindle e-book titles should be kept low. Most bestsellers cost around $9.99, and although there are many Kindle books that cost more, Amazon should be commended for pressuring publishers to keep their e-book prices down. If Amazon can continue to do so, purchasing a Kindle with the prospect of having access to cheaper e-book content won’t seem as off-putting as having to buy e-titles from Google at or near ridiculous print-on-paper prices.

Finally, there’s the question of form. Will Google’s e-book content largely reproduce what would otherwise be available on paper? If so, then Google e-books won’t have as much uptake as they otherwise could — that is, if they broke with what Gary Hall calls a “papercentric” model of electronic content. Indeed, if the publishers want to charge near-paper prices for the e-books they sell/distribute via Google, then readers will expect additional types of features to make up for what is, essentially, lost value.

Bottom Line
Only time will tell what will become of Google’s latest venuture into e-books. I see a great many downsides that would really spell disaster for an anxious contingent of publishers who have convinced themselves, as they do about every eight years or so, that e-books will “save” their industry. More optimistically, it is my hope that Google will spur Amazon.com to move more quickly on developing cheaper, better Kindles and related e-reading systems that are even more user-friendly.

Download The Late Age of Print

April 15, 2009 Electronic Reading 2 comments

One of the defining attributes of the late age of print is the erosion of old publishing certainties. Among them is the notion that the free circulation of book content leads inevitably to lost sales. Another is the belief that strong, proprietary systems are the best way for publishers and authors to secure value in their intellectual properties. Maybe it’s too soon to let go of these notions completely. It’s fast becoming clear, however, that they cannot be taken for granted any longer.

There are two ways of responding to the erosion of old certainties like these. One way is to dig in your heels, hoping to keep familiar ground from shifting under your feet. The other is to allow the erosion to expose opportunities that may have been buried underfoot all along. With the latter you risk coming up empty, but with the former you risk something worse — inertia.

I’m pleased to report that my publisher, Columbia University Press, isn’t one of those digging in its heels. It’s taken the bold step of releasing The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control not only as a copyrighted, bound physical volume, but also as a Creative Commons-licensed electronic book. You can download the e-edition by following the “download” link of the navigation bar, above, or by clicking here. The file is a “zipped” .pdf of the complete contents of Late Age, minus one image, for which I was (ironically) unable to secure electronic publishing rights.

I thank Columbia University Press for releasing my book electronically under a Creative Commons license. In doing so, it’s embraced the extraordinary spirit of openness that is beginning to flourish in the late age of print. Mine is the first book the Press has decided to release in this way. Here’s hoping that many more will follow.

The "Not Enough Pirates" Hypothesis

February 13, 2009 Electronic Reading 2 comments

Yesterday I ran across this intriguing post on The Guardian Technology Blog, about e-books and book piracy. There, author Bobbie Johnson advances a provocative, and perhaps counter-intuitive, claim. E-books have yet to really take off, he argues, because printed books haven’t been subjected to a level of online piracy sufficient to inculcate a digital disposition in book readers. The analogy Johnson draws is to the music industry, where peer-to-peer file sharing helped to promote a system in which music would no longer be tied to a specific — and specifically analog — medium.

I don’t dispute Johnson’s assertion about digital music. But on the matter of e-books and printed book piracy, I must respectfully disagree. As I demonstrate in my book The Late Age of Print, especially in the chapters on e-books and Harry Potter, printed books have been going digital and coursing through file-trading circuits for years now. Probably the biggest racket is in printed student textbooks, which, because of their egregious (captive audience) price, have ended up on any number of fly-by-night bit-torrent sites, such as Textbook Torrents, Rapidshare Textbooks, and others. Here’s a link to good article from The Chronicle of Higher Edcuation about the former — now defunct — site, if you want to know more.

Popular printed books like Harry Potter also have been photographed or scanned and posted online. This is exactly what happened when the final installment of the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, was released in July 2007. Images of pages began appearing on file-trading sites like Photobucket and The Pirate Bay even before the book was officially released!

And then there’s the thorny matter of academic course packs. It used to be that educators would create anthologies consisting of photocopied book chapters and journal articles — all copyrighted materials — for their classes. Usually the course packs would be created and sold by local copy shops. Following the landmark 1991 Kinko’s decision, most of these shops sought permission to do so through the Copyright Clearance Center, which pays royalties to copyright holders. But in an age of cheap, ubiquitous scanners, Adobe Acrobat, and password-protected course sites (usually hosted by academic libraries), the traditional course pack has become all but obsolete. Today, educators assert the exception to the 1976 Copyright Act that stipulates the “fair use” of copyrighted materials for one-time classroom use. Significantly, very few of these items are “born digital,” even if they may ultimately end up that way.

There’s an even broader argument to be made here, namely, that e-books arise precisely (although not simply) in response to publishers’ longstanding fears about the promiscuity of printed books and their content. Way back in the 1930s, the publishing industry contracted with public relations doyen Edward L. Bernays to come up with a pejorative word for people who, by trading books with one another, supposedly deprived authors of their royalties. (The term, “book sneak,” never really caught on.) Then then there was the whole freak-out over photocopiers in the 1970s, which led to the creation of the Copyright Clearance Center and, shortly thereafter, to a host of lawsuits against copy shops.

There are many other examples like this that I could point to, but the question ultimately is this: given the mobility of printed books and their content, is it any surprise that book publishers would be interested in pursuing a technology — digitally rights-managed e-books — that would allow them to micromanage the whereabouts of book content?

So why haven’t e-books become even more popular than they already are? The answer isn’t, “not enough printed book piracy.” In fact, it’s exactly the opposite.

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Archive for Electronic Reading