Museums Wonder About the Web

Since part of the mission of museum publishing is to produce great, big, beautiful books, June’s D.C.–based National Museum Publishing Seminar, “Print and the Digital Network,” offered anachronisms and anomalies galore. Most of the seminar’s sponsors are high-end European and Far Eastern printers like Mondadori and CS Graphics. They declared that the illustrated, printed exhibition catalogue will be around for a long time.

Nevertheless, the museum publishing business has been greatly affected by advances in web technology. Museum-owned material that was once rarely viewed by the public is now accessible via the web. Therein lie many problems. Since the founding of the National Endowment for the Arts in the early 1960s, which meant government dollars for the arts and led to the “invention” of the blockbuster exhibition, print publications have literally grown exponentially. With advances in printing and the decline of the costs of color reproduction, documenting and cataloging of museums’ own collections has become a mega printing industry, with books getting larger and larger (and heavier and heavier). The seminar focused on how to move print to the web (in books, marketing, and sales); how to get visitors to museums’ websites—and then to the museums themselves; and how to facilitate digital workflows and web design.

A project originated and partially funded by the Getty Foundation, the Getty Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative, allows participating museums (ten at last count) to build a highly developed scholarly infrastructure and searchable database sample materials (a Rauschenberg painting at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; an out-of-print book on 17th-century Dutch painting at the National Gallery of Art).

As e-reading devices become more sophisticated (the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is already optimizing its web pages for the iPad), questions arise surrounding the conversion of materials. Should there be a POD component? How to clear rights and reproductions for electronic uses when works are not part of a museum’s permanent collection? And then there’s the single greatest rights hurdle—artworks by a living artist, including film and performance art. In addition, curatorial involvement and the role of the museum director in the publishing process remain a constant issue.

The Met’s ten-year-old Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History (TOAH), presented by founding project manager Teresa Lai, represents how huge these projects can be. The Met has a collection of 2 million objects, but so far curators have selected only 6,500 to appear in the TOAH, along with 900 separate thematic essays. The TOAH is a major resource, receiving over 11 million hits a year and 150,000 cut-and-pastes each week, but it is not currently connected to the Met’s content management update system (though it will be in a few months) and most visitors find it via Google or Wikipedia, not directly from the Met’s website.

Michael Edson, Director of Web and New Media Strategy at the Smithsonian, quoted a web consultant who warned, “You’ve got about three years before you become a room full of stuff on the mall” if you don’t do something to open up your museum to the new. It is possible for TOAH to become interactive, though the system is currently closed. But as a two-way conversation means giving up curatorial authority, the curators must be in agreement. At many levels, we are not there yet.

Cloud computing and web security were briefly touched on, along with the costs of digitizing material and the prospect of changing digital standards. The Library of Congress’s Director of Publications, Ralph Eubanks, explained that due to these changing standards, the LOC had to rescan a large number of images for downloading, use in books and brochures etc. The LOC does not store all of its material in the cloud, because it does not consider the security sufficient.

The New York Times’s Virginia Heffernan and Modern Art Notes blogger Tyler Green urged their audience to stop “lurking” and interact and participate, “make an intervention and make a contribution” to grasp the spirit of the internet. Museums must actively engage in drawing the public to their websites, and should also make a greater push to syndicate their content on websites like Yahoo!, Green said. Think a daily Twitter feed, “why this work of art is important today” in no more than 140 characters. And don’t underestimate the audience for art. When writing for the web, “don’t dumb down, just realize who the audience is and say what needs to be said in precisely the number of words required,” recommended Mike Spiegel, a freelance creative director who recently gave the National Geographic website its first redesign in twelve years.

How Many Scientists Does It Take…?

PT thanks marketing consultant and science enthusiast Rich Kelley for this piece.

Considering the star power of the participating scientist/authors—Brian Greene, Stephen Hawking, Marvin Minsky, Oliver Sacks, among many others—what was perhaps most surprising about the 2010 World Science Festival was how few opportunities attendees had to purchase books by the minds they came clamoring to hear. Now in its third year, the festival once again demonstrated the public’s near insatiable appetite for science. With its budget nearing $5 million, WSF presented more than 40 events at 17 venues around the city over five days in early June. Many of the events cost $25, but 25 of them sold out and the “unofficial” estimate is that 170,000 science enthusiasts of all ages attended.

WSF is the nonprofit brainchild of bestselling author and physicist Brian Greene and his wife, TV producer Tracy Day, and aims to explore “the unfolding of the greatest and grandest of all mystery stories as our species seeks to grasp itself, the world, and the larger universe.” While the number of new sponsors and partners increases every year, the only media companies participating this year were Scientific American, New Scientist, The Week, and ABC News. Where were the publishers and booksellers? Even Bantam Dell’s announcement of Hawking’s new book, The Grand Design, missed the festival, but the book’s pub date isn’t until September.

However, some scientist-authors were not shy about promoting their work. In one spirited exchange during “The Limits of Understanding” panel, AI expert Marvin Minsky seemingly grew exasperated with philosopher/novelist Rebecca Goldstein over why science cannot explain consciousness. “There are 26 different meanings for the word ‘consciousness.’ See chapter 4 of The Emotion Machine. We need to treat each meaning as a separate problem to solve.”

WSF makes a point of celebrating science’s long-standing, if not always reciprocal, relationship to art. As physicist Lawrence Krauss put it: “Artists are inspired by physics even when they get it wrong.”

The most difficult aspect of the WSF was choosing what to see. On Thursday, for instance, attendees had to choose between sessions on scientific innovation (“Modern MacGyvers”), science and art, the human genome, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, the science of sound, black holes or brutality and the brain. The first event to sell out every year is Nobelist William Phillips’s Saturday afternoon science talk, this year called “Einstein, Time, and the Explorer’s Clock.” Phillips related clock making to the calculation of longitude to why you need four satellites for a GPS system. Discussing how we might slow down cesium in an atomic clock led to live demonstrations of what liquid nitrogen does to flowers, rubber balls, balloons, and even marble stairs. Young scientists scrambled to catch the prize frozen balloons Phillips flung into the audience.

Only slightly less popular was “Astronaut Diary,” where astronaut Tracy Caldwell Dyson spoke to children live from the International Space Station about life in space. Space Station astronauts Leland Melvin and Sandra Magnus were at the Kimmel Center live to answer dozens of questions, including the most asked one: how do you go to the bathroom in space? (Answer: air suction replaces gravity and astronauts use video cameras during training so they can learn perfect positioning.)

On the last day of the festival, booths ringed Washington Square Park offering science-related merchandise and activities aimed at “children of all ages.” Authors of science-related children’s books filled most of the schedule at “Author’s Alley” on the eighth floor of the Kimmel Center, where talks and book signings occurred. The NYU Bookstore’s selection of titles here was the only festival-related venue for book buying.

July 2010 Roundup

PEOPLE

Jonathan Karp is now settled in as EVP and Publisher of the Simon & Schuster trade imprint. Karp, who succeeds David Rosenthal, came from Twelve, an imprint of the Hachette Book Group that he founded in 2005. A new Publisher for Twelve is actively being recruited.

Isabel Swift, who was Editor Emeritus at Harlequin, has launched her own media and communications company, Swift Global Media, and will consult on literary projects and programs. She may be reached at isabel [at] swiftglobalmedia [dot] com.

Suzanne Murphy has started at Disney Publishing Worldwide as VP Publisher, reporting to Jeanne Mosure. She had been VP, Publisher of Trade Publishing and Marketing at Scholastic. Coincidentally, Ellie Berger, Scholastic’s President of Trade Publishing, announced that Miriam Farbey has been hired to the newly created position of Global Publisher, Nonfiction, for the Trade Publishing division. Meanwhile, Cecily Kaiser, who was Editorial Director in the trade division for Cartwheel and Little Scholastic, joins Abrams in the new role of Publishing Director of books for kids under five. Read More »

Take a New Book Publishing Survey

If you’re a book publishing professional, you can take the Gilbane Group’s new survey:

http://gilbane.com/blog/2010/04/now_live_the_gilbane_groups_web-based_blueprint_survey_for_book_publishing_professionals.html

The survey “seeks to gain detailed information about what is really happening among the full spectrum of book publishers related to ebook and digital publishing efforts, and will identify the “pain points” and barriers encountered by book publishers when it comes to their developing or expanding digital publishing programs.  Issues such as royalties, digital format choices, and distribution difficulties are addressed.” Everyone who takes the survey will receive a copy of the results.

Now in Hardcover: The Series in 2010

Take a look at BookScan’s bestselling juvenile titles for the week ending April 25: an astounding 73% were titles from one of several series.

But these are not your Baby-Sitters’ Club of yesteryear: “Harry Potter turned the whole paperback series notion on its head,” says Megan Tingley, SVP, Publisher, Little Brown Books for Young Readers. “The strategy used to be predicated on the idea that these were the kinds of books people wanted to read once, read quickly and move on. Harry Potter and Twilight created a market for hardcover series with more complex, substantive storylines where readers could live in the world a bit longer. I think people came to want something different out of their reading experience, and it became more about depth than speed.”

The perception of what a book is has changed, agrees Susan Katz, President and Publisher of HarperCollins Children’s Books. “The same way kids watch a movie they love many times, they read the books they love over and over, and I don’t know if that was the case with [series like the Baby-Sitters Club].”

“Series were and still are a great way to market a property and to engage readers,” says Dan Weiss, Publisher-at-Large at St. Martin’s. However, he says, today “the main impulse is to try to make the books as distinct as possible because they need to stay on the shelves longer. We’re publishing in more expensive formats and the monthly cycle we did back then is no longer driving it, so the books have to be a little ‘bigger.’” Here’s the new face of series publishing. Read More »

People Roundup, May 2010

Crown Publishing Group President and Publisher Maya Mavjee announces big changes: Diane Salvatore, VP, Publisher of Broadway Books; Senior Editor Lorraine Glennon; and VP, Executive Director, Publicity Katie Wainright are leaving the company. Shaye Areheart steps down as Publisher of her eponymous imprint, Shaye Areheart Books (which will be discontinued), but will stay on as Editor-at-Large at Crown. David Drake has been promoted to SVP, Executive Director, Publicity. Meanwhile, Philip Patrick, VP and Publisher of Three Rivers Press, becomes VP, Digital and Marketing Strategy, Publisher, Crown Group Digital, relinquishing his Three Rivers duties. Tina Pohlman, who was Senior Editor at Spiegel & Grau, moves to become VP, Publisher, Three Rivers. Read More »

Who Owns Creativity?

At yesterday’s panel discussion, “Who Owns Creativity? Copyright and Our Culture in a Digital Age,” hosted by CUNY’s Macaulay Honors College, panelists were more united in their opinions than the audience of students, media professionals, and self-proclaimed copyright geeks. (Click here to download a podcast of the discussion.)

Bill Goldstein, Book Reviewer for Weekend Today in New York and founding editor of the books website for nytimes.com, moderated the discussion. Panelists Michael Oreskes, Managing Editor of Associated Press; Josh Greenberg, NYPL Director of Digital Strategy and Scholarship; Brian Napack, President of Macmillan; and Virginia Rutledge, lawyer and art historian explained and, at times, defended, their respective industries.

In some ways, Josh Greenberg explained, librarians are stewards of intellectual property, giving them a role in the “care and feeding” of a library’s contents, but not one in defending them.

Napack, who has taken public stands on piracy on behalf of the book industry, was unapologetic about the publisher’s interests: “We have no moral right—it’s a business. We make money off the buying and selling of IP.” He made a clear distinction between piracy and, for instance, the reselling of used books: “The used book business—I can’t stand it as a publisher, but I have no moral problem with it.” On the topic of recouping monies through advertising, he claimed that Macmillan has received a total of $10,000 in advertising fees over its three years with Google, despite millions of searches.

Oreskes and Rutledge argued about Shepard Fairey’s use of AP photographer Mannie Garcia’s iconic Obama picture, for which AP is now suing the artist over “fair use.” Rutledge claimed that modern art would not exist today under current expectations of IP, while Oreskes (who could not be too specific given the pending litigation) argued that the case isn’t a good example of what constitutes fair use. Oreskes also said—and other panelists agreed—that “most of the panic in the world right now is about business models, not about intellectual property.”

Rutledge reminded the audience that recent problems surrounding copyright have arisen because “the internet is global” while intellectual property law is applied locally—but that even enforcing what laws do exist in countries like China and India would not be enough.

When it was time for questions, a couple of students in the audience expressed hope that the iPad will be a savior for publishers, citing the success of iTunes, which has made it easier to buy music than illegally download it—and has exposed audiences to new artists. But Napack said that the music industry has shrunk by half and that the big artists get bigger, while little ones find it harder than ever to rise to the top. Midlist authors have similar difficulty breaking out. Napack said that blatant piracy (not things like mashups) is responsible for the biggest problems: “It’s the clear cases that are causing economic stress for our authors.”

When it was time for questions, a couple of students in the audience expressed hope that the iPad will be a savior for publishers, citing the success of iTunes, which has made it easier to buy music than illegally download it—and has exposed audiences to new artists. But Napack said that the music industry has shrunk by half and that the big artists get bigger, while little ones find it harder than ever to rise to the top. Midlist authors have a similarly hard time breaking out. Napack said that blatant piracy (not things like mashups) is responsible for the  biggest problems: “It’s the clear cases that are causing economic stress for our authors.”

Making Search Convert: Search Engine Strategies 2010

Thanks to marketing consultant Rich Kelley for this piece.

“Ever-evolving engines” was the theme of this year’s Search Engine Strategies conference in March in New York—but finding the tactic that gets the best results was much more on the minds of the 5,000 attendees.

“Traditional direct mail generates conversions of two to three percent,” noted bestselling author Bryan Eisenberg of WiderFunnel in a typical packed session. “But why be satisfied with that when people are searching for your product online with an intent to purchase?” The best online retailers show what’s possible. In December, Amazon.com had a 25.1% conversion rate—and that ranked fourth. Online grocery store Schwan’s was #1 with 45.9%, followed by Harry and David at 30%, and coffee maker company Keurig at 28.8%. What’s their secret? Eisenberg offered no less than “21 Tips from Top-Converting Web Sites” (a presentation that is available online at MarketMotive). One of his key points: Marketers must be in control of every aspect of the customer experience. All forms should continue the “scent” of the site: its colors, graphics, and voice. The average shopping cart abandonment rate among online retailers is around 70%—in many cases because their registration forms were designed by what Eisenberg calls “bpus” (business prevention units). Read More »

Free Speech? Not So Much

It’s often said that social media is no substitute for face-to-face interaction. But Twitter, Facebook, and other electronic modes of communication, along with the decline of bricks-and-mortar bookstores and the bad economy, have changed the ways authors communicate with readers, and have shaken up the roles of speakers’ bureaus since we last wrote about them in 2006.

That year, HarperCollins had just become the first publisher to launch its own in-house operation. Today, all the major houses have bureaus, but the question is whether to outsource them or keep them in-house. When Simon & Schuster opened its speakers bureau in 2008, it partnered with Greater Talent Network; Hachette Book Group followed suit in 2009. On the other hand, Penguin Speakers Bureau, launched in 2006, and Macmillan Speakers, launched in 2009, are both in-house. The Random House Speakers Bureau was launched in 2006 as the in-house Knopf Speakers Bureau and was rolled out company-wide in 2009 at Markus Dohle’s initiative. Each division (Knopf Doubleday, RHPG, Crown, and Children’s) has a separate director who is a voting member of the bureau. The in-house bureaus are generally separate from publicity departments, with the main difference being that publicity departments handle unpaid events.

Jamie Brickhouse, VP, Director of the HarperCollins Speakers Bureau, draws a crucial distinction between in-house and outsourced bureaus: “Book sales are one of the main reasons HCSB was created. As we point out to our author speakers, unlike outside speakers bureaus, book sales are crucial to what we do. We do it a few different ways, depending on the particular event: find a local bookseller to sell books at the event; have the event venue buy books from a bookseller and sell the books themselves at the event; have the event venue buy the books from a bookseller and give books to attendees; or have the event venue purchase from our Special Markets department and sell or give away the books.” The HCSB also works with publicity to augment book tours by booking paid engagements at reduced fees in markets not on the scheduled book tour. “We did this recently with Gregory Maguire, Wally Lamb, and Adriana Trigiani,” Brickhouse says. Read More »

Multimedia and E-Book Rights: Found Money or Legal Gamble?

As authors venture further into inking separate e-book or multimedia deals with publishers like Open Road, the threat of lawsuits from their print publishers looms. The legal tug-of-war has only just begun with the 2001 judgment in the Random House v. Rosetta Books case, said speakers at the “Rethinking Author Contracts for the Digital World” panel during last month’s Publishing Business Conference in New York.

Despite non-compete clauses in many author contracts, said Sara Pearl, VP and Director of Business Affairs at Trident Media Group, courts tend to favor the authors.

“The courts don’t like to cut off how someone makes their living,” she said.

Nevertheless, Pearl is concerned that authors are often not indemnified by their e-book publishers, leaving the authors with the legal exposure at a time when multimedia rights ownership is still hotly contested.

“It’s clearly up in the air,” Pearl said. “It shouldn’t be up to the author to bear the risk.”

The Random House v. Rosetta Books case set a major legal precedent when the New York Federal Court refused to grant Random House a preliminary injunction against Rosetta, an e-book publisher that was trying to publish electronic versions of Random backlist titles like Styron’s Sophie’s Choice and Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions.

According to U.S. District Judge Sidney H. Stein, “In [Random House’s] case, the ‘new use’ – electronic digital signals sent over the internet – is a separate medium from the original use – printed words on paper.” The court pointed out that Random House included separate language in its contracts for other forms of printed books such as large print, book club editions, and Braille editions, indicating that Random House did not believe that its contracts automatically granted the company the rights to all possible forms of its books.

But Random House struck back this December when CEO Markus Dohle sent a letter to agents asserting that it holds e-book rights to all of its titles. In the letter, Dohle calls the 2001 judgment and other challenges to its claims “misunderstandings” and points to Random House’s noncompetition clause as further proof that authors are prevented from “granting publishing rights to third parties that would compromise the rights for which Random House has bargained.”

Judge Stein’s ruling itself takes pains to limit its scope. The judgment was merely a “neutral” interpretation of contract law in Random House’s case, he noted in the decision.

“This is neither a victory for technophiles nor a defeat for Luddites,” he wrote, leaving the door wide open for new interpretations of other publishers’ claims.

John Silbersack, an Executive VP at Trident, admitted at the panel that Amazon’s practice of selling e-books and print books next to each other on its website gives publishers possible legal ground to stand on.

“We’re talking about developing products that are going side by side” with print books, Silbersack said. “It’s a little hard to argue that you’re not in the same space.”

For agents, backlist titles are an attractive option because newer contracts often include the sale of ebook rights. “When you get to the frontlist, you cannot sell a book without selling ebook rights,” Pearl said. “The hot new thing is multimedia rights.” The new mobile or iPhone content is only restricted to 20-25% verbatim from the author’s work – the rest is “bells and whistles,” she said.

But publishers are also eager to capitalize on backlist titles; Silbersack said that agents are encountering pushback when they try to obtain termination notices for out-of-print books, something that he said his agency is “aggressive” about.

An author’s sale of his multimedia rights is not yet a major revenue source, serving instead as a form of publicity.

“It’s more of a forward-looking thing, a marketing thing,” Silbersack said. “They can make use of these features to reach beyond the book reading world.”

Though little money is currently changing hands in these deals, it’s obvious that both agents and publishers are anticipating an industry-wide shakeout over these new platforms and are jittery about losing their stakes.

“I don’t think that anyone can argue . . . that this is a battle that needs to be fought right now from a monetary perspective,” Silbersack said. “However, it’s a battle that needs to be fought to discuss what the points of tension are. Trident is beginning to test these waters.”

Pearl agreed that despite the hassle and the possible legal ramifications for authors selling multimedia rights, the panelists were enthusiastic about pursuing multimedia deals.

“I think you can’t fight it,” Pearl said. “Most of this is found money. Authors can control how the content is used, and they make a little bit of money. Right now, nobody’s doing anything with [the rights]. Net, it’s not a bad thing.”

Other legal issues discussed at the panel, and at other conferences last month, stemmed from Macmillan and Amazon’s agency model vs. trade model tug-of-war, which Silbersack said would be the next big legal issue for publishers, and the familiar struggle over fair use that Google Books is currently involved in. At the OnCopyright Conference, also held last month in New York, Google’s Senior Copyright Counsel Bill Patry said the best approach to fair rights issues concerning the Internet was self-policing through privately sourced licensing agreements. Patry cited as an example the CHORUSS music copyright licensing service, which allows schools to pay a set licensing fee for unlimited use of a music catalogue within the schools. He recommended that trade groups stop lobbying so fervently for copyright as an “economic right” and instead seek actuarial solutions from the Copyright Clearance Center or ASCAP. Relying on changes in the law will lead nowhere, said Patry, as technology moves faster than our legal system ever could.