Will Amazon sell $2.5 billion worth of e-books in 2012? Steve Weinstein, Vice President and Senior Research Analyst Interactive Commerce & Media at Pacific Crest, thinks it possible.
Read more about it at "Amazon E-Book Sales to Hit $2.5 Billion in 2012; Will Add $330 Million to Op Income: Analyst."
Blackwell will install Espresso Book Machines in its chain of bookstores, which will allow about a million books to the printed on demand at these locations.
Read more about it at "Blackwell Brews Up Espresso" and The EBM: FAQ.
David J. Solomon has made a 19-page abridged version of his book Developing Open Access Journals: A Practical Guide freely available.
MagCloud is an HP Labs beta research project that lets individuals publish print full-color magazines at no cost. A user-determined markup determines magazine profit. MagCloud handles all of the logistical aspects of magazine publishing, such as subscription management and distribution. As a beta, there are some limitations to this service.
The Encyclopaedia Britannica has announced that it will allow online contributions from scholars and readers. All contributions will be vetted before becoming public.
Here's an excerpt from the announcement:
The Britannica Online site will become the hub of a new online community that will welcome and engage thousands of scholars and experts with whom we already have relationships. . . .
To elicit their participation in our new online community of scholars, we will provide our contributors with a reward system and a rich online home that will enable them to promote themselves, their work, and their services; allow them to showcase and publish their various works-in-progress in front of the Britannica audience; and help them find and interact with colleagues around the world. In this way our online community of scholars not only will be able to interact with our editors and content in a more effective manner; they will also be able to share directly with Britannica’s visitors content that they may have created outside Encyclopaedia Britannica and will allow those visitors to suggest changes and additions to that content. . . .
Readers and users will also be invited into an online community where they can work and publish at Britannica’s site under their own names. Interested users will be able to prepare articles, essays, and multimedia presentations on subjects in which they’re interested. Britannica will help them with research and publishing tools and by allowing them to easily use text and non-text material from Encyclopaedia Britannica in their work. We will publish the final products on our site for the benefit of all readers, with all due attribution and credit to the people who created them. The authors will have the option of collaborating with others on their work, but each author will retain control of his or her own work. . . .
Two things we believe distinguish this effort from other projects of online collaboration are (1) the active involvement of the expert contributors with whom we already have relationships; and (2) the fact that all contributions to Encyclopaedia Britannica’s core content will continue to be checked and vetted by our expert editorial staff before they’re published.
Read more about it at "Encyclopaedia Britannica Goes—Gasp!—Wiki."
STM, the Federation of European Publishers, and 23 other organizations have signed a "Memorandum of Understanding on Diligent Search Guidelines for Orphan Works." The text of the document does not appear to be available; however, the press release seems to reference the 2006 "STM Position: The Use of Orphan Works."
Here's an excerpt from the press release:
The Memorandum is an outcome of extensive discussions of the High Level Expert Group on Digital libraries set up by Commissioner Reding as part of the EU i2010 initiatives. It covers a broad range of copyright sectors, including the text sector, and has incorporated the previous STM work on orphan works (REF).
The memorandum is one of several outcomes agreed by all participants in the Copyright SubGroup of the High Level Expert Group and reflects the leadership of its Chair Tarja Koskinen-Olsson, Honorary President of IFRRO and the input of its members, especially Anne Bergman-Tahon of the Federation of European Publishers.
The Strategic Content Alliance has released Sustainability and Revenue Models for Online Academic Resources: An Ithaka Report.
Here's an excerpt from the announcement:
This paper was commissioned by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) is the first step in a three-stage process aimed at gaining a more systematic understanding of the mechanisms for pursuing sustainability in not-for-profit projects. It focuses on what we call 'online academic resources' (OARs), which are projects whose primary aim is to make content and scholarly discourse available on the web for research, collaboration, and teaching. This includes scholarly journals and monographs as well as a vast array of new formats that are emerging to disseminate scholarship, such as preprint servers and wikis. It also includes digital collections of primary source materials, datasets, and audio-visual materials that universities, libraries, museums, archives and other cultural and educational institutions are putting online.
This work is being done as part of the planning work for the Strategic Content Alliance (SCA), so it emphasises the development and maintenance of digital content useful in the networked world. In this first stage, we have conducted an initial assessment of the relevant literature focused on not-for-profit sustainability, and have compared the processes pursued in the not-for-profit and education sectors with those pursued by commercial organisations, specifically in the newspaper industry. The primary goal of this initial report is to determine to what extent it would make sense to conduct a more in-depth study of the issues surrounding sustainability.
Here's a selection of recent news articles and Weblog postings about the Georgia State copyright infringement lawsuit. See my prior postings for further information about the suit ("Georgia State Copyright Infringement Suit Coverage and Commentary" and "Georgia State Sued by Three Publishers for Alleged Digital Copyright Infringement in E-Reserves, Course Management, and Other Systems").
"Academic Publishers Sue US Uni over Digital Course Material"
It is an estimate that electronic course packs now constitute half of all syllabus reading at American colleges and universities. . . . Cambridge University Press, for example charges 17 cents a page for each student for electronic use, and generally grants permission for use of as much as 20 percent of a book.
"Copyright Suit Tests How Much Is Too Much"
Indeed, the complaint notes that the three plaintiffs have published more than 100 books and monographs authored by GSU professors. That GSU is a nonprofit institution shouldn't have any bearing on how much unauthorized copying it can do, Smith [Frank Smith, Cambridge University Press] says.
"We're a nonprofit," he points out. "I assume they wouldn't want their classes flooded with students who weren't paying tuition, but you could say there's no extra cost to filling another desk. I'm sure they would resist that, and I could see why."
The educational area is one where courts have traditionally afforded a greater degree of leeway in fair use and even the plaintiff's lawyer has to admit that he can't find a law or binding precedent stating how much digital copying would be "not too much." It seems likely that if the case ever makes it as far as a decision that decision would be appealed. My personal opinion is that they'll work out a settlement before it gets that far—neither side wants to see a precedent set that would go against them. Plus there's a core reality that academic publishers and educational institutions exist in a kind of death-grip dependency that would harm both if it was violently broken.
"Publishing Group Hires Qorvis for Lawsuit Messaging"
The Association of American Publishers hired Qorvis to handle messaging for three academic publishers' copyright lawsuit against Georgia State University.
So, . . . what's left if you really, really, really believe that educators ought to be able to use whatever they need to and want to use in their classrooms without worrying about what it costs or whether it's fair use?
Consumer resistance, or OA.
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