Cork University Press

PLoS, Losing Money, Hikes Author Fees

It seems that open access journal publishing, known as the "gold" version of OA, isn't paved with gold. In an eye-opening analysis in the journal Nature, the Public Library of Science (PLoS), which launched its first open access journals in 2003, is said to be facing a "looming financial crisis." According to Nature, which analyzed the non-profit PLoS's publicly available records on file with the Internal Revenue Service, PLoS ran a deficit of almost $1 million last year, and its total income from fees and advertising currently covers just 35 percent of its costs. While revenue is increasing slightly, spending is increasing at a greater clip, up to $5.5 million over the past three years combined. In response, with its grant funds being steadily depleted, PLoS has announced that it will raise author fees, effective July 1, for its open access journals from $1500 to $2500 for flagship journals PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine; and to $2000 for its community journals PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Genetics, and PLoS Pathogens.

From Library Journal

In a release, officials from the non-profit PLoS said that, with three years of operational experience to draw on, it was "time to adjust this model so that our publication fees reflect more closely the costs of publication." Still, even with the increased fees, Nature reports that PLoS will have to rely on "philanthropy" to survive for the foreseeable future, including its funding from the Sandler and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundations. PLoS director of publishing Mark Patterson downplayed the financial situation, noting that the fledgling publisher is only in its fourth year. Still, more than a few commercial publishers may be saying "I told you so." In the early days of open access publishing, commercial publishers repeatedly suggested that author fees for PLoS, at $1500, and for-profit open access publisher BioMed Central, then $500, were unsustainably low. Last year, BioMed Central increased its author fees, from $525 to as much as $1700. Commercial competitors, meanwhile, including Springer, Blackwell, and most recently Elsevier, have begun offering open-access-like publishing options, for fees closer to $3000.

How Amazon.com ranks bestsellers

WebProNews takes a look at how Amazon.com ranks its bestsellers. "In actuality, the process is somewhat more convoluted than they let on. Only the top 10,000 books are updated every hour and the ranking does not depend upon the actual number of books sold, but rather, on a comparison against the sales figures of the other 9,999 books within that same hour. Simultaneously, a trending calculation is applied to arrive at a computerised sales trajectory."

"Books with rankings between 10,000 and 100,000 are recalculated once a day, rather than once an hour. Current projections, as well as historic sales information play a key role in these calculations. In fact, the predictive nature of the Amazon ranking system is what makes it possible for a newly-released book to outrank an older established title, even though the actual sales figures for the latter far exceed the former."

FromThe Bookseller

French publishing group to sue Google

La Martiniere, which owns publishers Le Seuil in France, Delachaux and Niestle in

Switzerland

and Harry N. Abrams in the

United States

, accuses Google of "counterfeiting and breach of intellectual property rights".

The lawsuit, to be filed in a

Paris

court, targets both Google France and its parent company, the

US

group Google Inc.

Last year, Google launched a project to scan millions of books taken from the collections of several major world libraries.

Users can search and access the full text of books in the public domain, as well as short extracts of copyrighted books.

Google -- which has undertaken to copy every book in the libraries'

collections unless specifically denied permission from its publisher -- has already faced several lawsuits over the scheme.

France

's National Publishers' Union (SNE), which represents 400 publishers, has repeatedly condemned the library project and threatened legal action.

Digital Publishing Is Scrambling the Industry's Rules

When Mark Z. Danielewski's second novel, "Only Revolutions," is published in September, it will include hundreds of margin notes listing moments in history suggested online by fans of his work. Nearly 60 of his contributors have already received galleys of the experimental book, which they're commenting about in a private forum at Mr. Danielewski's Web site, www.onlyrevolutions.com.

Yochai Benkler, a Yale University law professor and author of the new book "The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom" (Yale University Press), has gone even farther: his entire book is available — free — as a download from his Web site. Between 15,000 and 20,000 people have accessed the book electronically, with some of them adding comments and links to the online version.

Mr. Benkler said he saw the project as "simply an experiment of how books might be in the future." That is one of the hottest debates in the book world right now, as publishers, editors and writers grapple with the Web's ability to connect readers and writers more quickly and intimately, new technologies that make it easier to search books electronically and the advent of digital devices that promise to do for books what the iPod has done for music: making them easily downloadable and completely portable.

Scan This Book!

In several dozen nondescript office buildings around the world, thousands of hourly workers bend over table-top scanners and haul dusty books into high-tech scanning booths. They are assembling the universal library page by page.

The dream is an old one: to have in one place all knowledge, past and present. All books, all documents, all conceptual works, in all languages. It is a familiar hope, in part because long ago we briefly built such a library. The great library at Alexandria, constructed around 300 B.C., was designed to hold all the scrolls circulating in the known world. At one time or another, the library held about half a million scrolls, estimated to have been between 30 and 70 percent of all books in existence then. But even before this great library was lost, the moment when all knowledge could be housed in a single building had passed. Since then, the constant expansion of information has overwhelmed our capacity to contain it. For 2,000 years, the universal library, together with other perennial longings like invisibility cloaks, antigravity shoes and paperless offices, has been a mythical dream that kept receding further into the infinite future.

Ultra shortrun digital printing

Ian Bradie, press distribution director of Cambridge University Press, outlined the press's use of ultra shortrun digital printing (USR), which differs slightly from POD in that POD is usually done to fulfill an order while USR is "more speculative, in anticipation of orders," as Bradie put it.

When the press began USR in 1998, it had some 13,500 academic titles. About 8,200 of them sold fewer than 100 copies a year, and 2,000 of those sold fewer than 10. The press published 1,500 new titles a year and discontinued about 1,300. Each year the press received orders worth $2 million for discontinued titles, "orders for books that were marketed and sold, but couldn't be filled."

Now, in the eighth year of USR, the press has some 22,000 titles in print, 7,000 of which are in the USR program. The press has "very few" discontinued titles; most books that used to be discontinued have become good candidates for USR. Cambridge adds about 1,700 titles a year to the program.

From 1998 to 2005, the press earned some $30 million in extra sales from the program; about 250,000 units with a sales value of $7.5 million were printed last year. By a 55-to-45 ratio, hardcovers outnumber paperbacks.

Books with 250-300 copies in annual sales are "eligible" for the program, Bradie said. Sometimes these titles are hardcovers for which a traditional paperback edition won't work or hardcovers whose sales don't financially justify a traditional reprinting. In other cases, in what Bradie called "the Lazarus approach," the press revives "an old paper ISBN." The press excludes books with color plates, extensive half-tones or with more than 700 pages from the USR program, but quality is "always improving" and "we're pushing boundaries." Prices are dictated by page length since the production cost is "solely a function of the number of pages," Bradie said. "We typically break even at seven copies." The process from an "editor's nomination" to "program-ready" usually takes three months.

Stock can be ordered, printed and shipped and received within seven days and is frequently much less than that. The program has a minimum reprint quantity of one.

Bradie emphasized that there are significant "operating challenges" that come with dealing with "hundreds of line items with just a few copies each" in a shipping carton rather than the usual "huge amounts of relatively few titles." Receiving titles is "a nightmare to deal with." The press has adapted to this in part by converting a returns line at its warehouse to receiving. In addition, the press has changed shelving. Books printed in the traditional way are still shelved horizontally in relatively large piles while USR titles are shelved vertically, which allows for more titles per shelf.

"We're still feeling our way," Bradie said. Nevertheless, "We've proven the viability of this. Very substantial new income can be mined at low cost with a healthy and durable bottom line profit. There are lower overheads, lower risk with minimal inventory held, but there are also integration challenges." Oh, and in other good news, returns are just about nonexistent.

From Shelf Awareness

Making Information Pay: POD and Ultra Short Runs

Several speakers at BISG's Making Information Pay seminar last Thursday offered examples of how the growth of the Internet and technological advances in printing have opened markets for deep backlist and titles with small but steady sales--in line with Long Tail theory, discussed here on Friday. As J. Kirby Best, CEO of Lightning Source, the print on demand company owned by Ingram, put it, "Lightning is living the Long Tail now." And rather than cannibalizing the market, POD is expanding the market, he emphasized.

Started in 1997, Lightning has printed more than 27 million books "one at a time." It now has some 350,000 titles in its digital library, 12 printing "lines," 4,200 publishing partners and is manufacturing more than a million books a month. The average print run, Best said, is "1.8 copies." Some 81% of the books have retail prices between $9 and $25.99.

Publishers set the retail price and on a typical $24.95 title, after the 55% wholesale discount and printing cost of about $3.50, $7.73 is remitted to the publisher. "It's cheaper to print with Donnelly," Best acknowledged. "But then on most of these titles, the publisher would miss the sale."

Best estimated that about 720,000 books out of some 1.1 million surveyed "fit our current manufacturing capabilities." Trim size, binding type, page counts and other reasons make some titles bad fits although as technology improves, that changes. Best noted that "Harry Potter and some other titles will always be printed offset."

Traditional publishers, including Perseus, Cambridge, Wiley, HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster, make up 59% of customers, while "author services," including iUniverse, Lulu and PublishAmerica, represent 38% of users. What Best called "content aggregators" make up the other 3%, and "are getting to be quite large."

Lightning's distribution partners in the U.S. include Amazon.com, Baker & Taylor, Barnes & Noble, Holt Jackson, Matthews Medical, NACSCORP and, of course, Ingram. With Ingram, Lightning has developed what it calls the print to order (PTO) program, which solves the longtime problem of wholesaler inventory showing only a copy or two of a POD title in stock without recognizing it as a title capable of being printed quickly. Under the PTO system, Ingram shows the title in inventory in larger quantities and Lightning agrees that if an order comes in before 6 p.m., it will ship it complete to Ingram before 4:30 a.m. "It's been an exciting program, and we can see dramatic results," Best said. In 2005, PTO grew 110%.

Now that a federal appellate court has thrown out the patent suit against Lightning Source and Ingram filed by On Demand Machine Corp., Lightning Source intends to add facilities in the U.S. and abroad "where needed."

From Shelf Awareness

"fully automated" SmartStores

The large Dutch book retailer Boekhandels Groep Nederland (BGN) is opening two "fully automated" SmartStores that use RFID technology to track the books from their shipment out of the Centraal Bookhuis, the major Dutch wholesaler, to the stores and to customers, according to RFID Journal. The first store opens in Almere this week; the second in Maastricht in September.

Among other things, RFID technology (radio frequency identification made wirelessly through transmitting tags in products) can allow products to be scanned much more easily than bar codes printed or stuck on them permit--and, in the brave new world, can even allow for a kind of EZ Pass checkout.

Already the tags allowed the Almere store to be stocked with 45,000 books in three days; without RFID, stocking would have taken two weeks, the bookseller estimated. BGN will be able to take inventory twice a day by wheeling a trolley with a reader on it down the aisles. Information about the location of books will be easily available to customers and employees. The tags will be "killed" at checkout so the books will not be able to be tracked once purchased.

From Shelf Awareness

Microsoft Launches Beta of its Scholarly Search Service

Microsoft this week unveiled a beta version of its competitor to Google Scholar, Windows Live Academic Search, a new Internet search service tailored to finding scholarly material. The new search service is a cooperative effort between Windows Live Search, CrossRef, and more than ten leading publishers. The initial beta release will target the subjects of computer science, electrical engineering and physics, and the company is working with multiple organizations to bring new subjects online in the near future. Like Google Scholar, Windows Live Academic Search will search for results among peer-reviewed content from trusted academic sources, including leading scholarly societies. Collaborators with Microsoft on the service include the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and publishers Elsevier, John Wiley & Sons, the Taylor & Francis Group, Blackwell Publishing, and the Nature Publishing Group. The British Library and OCLC Online Computer Library Center are also collaborating.

HarperCollins picks NewsStand to develop digital warehouse

HarperCollins has selected NewsStand as the exclusive developer of its global digital warehouse. NewsStand will begin digitising HarperCollins' frontlist and backlist immediately. The companies anticipate completing the digitisation of more than 10,000 titles by the end of June 2006.

HarperCollins said the creation of the warehouse would allow it to satisfy current market demands, while also maintaining control of its digital files and intellectual property and protecting the rights of its authors. HC hopes to eventually monetise the digital content.

The move is NewsStand's first venture into the book publishing sector, although it already distributes and markets more than 200 daily newspapers and magazine titles in more than 120 countries.

President and c.e.o. of HarperCollins Worldwide Jane Friedman said: "NewsStand's existing platform for digitisation, hosting and distribution of leading newspapers and magazines around the world makes them a natural partner to get this project up and running quickly. We look forward to working with them to digitise our books and build our digital warehouse."

Kit Webster, NewsStand's president and c.e.o., added: "Digital warehousing on this scale--with this flexibility--is a significant leap forward in the information industry. Our company's experience in managing digital information including content rights control, electronic publication enabled websites and internet distribution has made this large project possible, both in terms of processing and timelines."

From The Bookseller