NISO Standards Bearer Blog

I grew up in Rochester, NY, which is home to Kodak, the iconic film company founded by George Eastman.  Much like Detroit is a car town renowned for Ford, GM and Chrysler, Rochester was known for its film industry.  Nearly everyone I knew had some tie to Kodak and most of my friends fathers were engineers of some sort at the many plants around town.  At its peak, Kodak employed more than 145,000 people in 1988.  It is now down to less than 30,000.  The last time I was home, I was shocked by parking lots, which the sites of were massive manufacturing plants when I was growing up.  Many of buildings of one industrial park were actually imploded in 2007. It was a stark indication of just how much Kodak had changed and how far they had fallen.   

Kodak announced earlier this week that it would be ceasing production of Kodachrome film.  Kodachrome had long been recognized for its true-tone color quality and preservation quality.  It was great slide film and among the first mass-market color films available.  It was even memorialized in a famous Paul Simon song.  Unfortunately, like all great film products, its days have been numbered for over a decade.  Now, if you’re one of the few who still shoot with Kodachrome, there’s only one facility, based in Kansas that processes the film.  Unfortunately, despite its quality and history, that won’t save it from the dustbin of chemistry and manufacturing. 

Kodak was a company built on 19th century technology–chemicals on plastic that captured images. It was old-world manufacturing on a massive scale.  It was also a company that clung onto its cash-cow core business well past the time when it was tenable, focused on its rivalry with other, mainly Japanese filmmakers.  It did not see–or probably more likely didn’t choose to focus on–the seismic shift in its core business to digital media.  This is despite the fact that it was a Kodak Engineer, Steven Sasson, who created the first digital camera in 1975 AT Kodak.  Although Kodak released a digital SLR camera in 1991 (in partnership with Nikon and as a Nikon branded product), at $13,000 it was hardly for the average consumer.  It would take more than a quarter century after Sasson’s original prototype before Kodak released its first mass-market digital camera in 2001.  Just after Kodak peaked in the late 80s and early 90s and begin dueling with Fuji for control of the film market, the rest of the consumer electronic market had begun to move on.   

Today, Kodak receives some 70% of its revenue from digital activities.  It holds the top share of the digital camera market, with nearly a quarter of the market.  Had it moved more quickly, in all liklihood it could have held a much larger share.  After all, “Kodak moments” used to be a common phrase for one that should be captured on film.  While the company spoke of capturing the moment, it was really focused on what they thought to be their business, chemicals. The real problem was people didn’t care about chemicals, they cared about the moment.  How best to capture the moment and how do so quickly and cheaply was what consumers cared about.  Very quickly, as processors sped up, as storage costs dropped, image sensors improved and all of this technology became a great deal cheaper, the old model of chemicals on plastic was displaced.  

The lessons of Kodak and its slow reaction to the changes in its industry should be a warning sign to those whose businesses is being impacted by the switch to digital media.  Focusing only on preservation of your cash-cow business could be detrimental to your long-term success and survival.  The academic journals publishing industry moved quickly to embrace online distribution.  However, in many respects there are still ties to print and many publishers still rely on the 19th-20th century revenue streams of the print-based economy.  The e-book world is much more tied to print models and distribution.  For example, the Kindle is in so many ways a technological derivative of print.  Much of the experience of reading an e-book on the Kindle is based on the experience of reading print. Even more than the technical experience of reading, the business models and approaches to distributing content is completely tied to the print sales streams.    There are so many new approaches that have not even been considered or tried.  Don’t be surprised if you are not paying attention, the entire market could shift under your business’s feet.

The Pew Internet & American Life Project has issued the third report on The Future of the Internet. There are a lot of interesting opinions contained in the report and it is worth reviewing. In particular:

* - More than 3/4 agreed that the mobile phone will be the main connection tool for accessing the internet.

* - Nearly 2/3 of interviewed experts disagree that copyright protection will be addressed technologically.

Of particular interest for our community is the section on copyright and IP. Included in the report are some interesting perspectives on the future control of IP. The responses cover the gamut of approaches to existent approaches to the issues of licensing, control and user-generated content. I was slightly disappointed that there didn’t seem to be any truly innovative approaches to this very large problem.

The OLE Project will be hosting a free webinar on December 9th discussing the Evergreen project. run by the Georgia Public Library Service.  Earlier this fall, at the NISO Collaborative Resource Sharing seminar, two of the presenters in this webinar, Julie Walker and Elizabeth McKinney, spoke about the Evergreen project.  Their presentation is available here.  

There is also an article in the forthcoming issue of ISQ on the OLE Project.  The issue will be available online soon.  

More information is on the OLE website. 

From the site:  

December 9, 2008

5:00 pm to 6:00 pm

John Little will host a webcast discussion with the principle developers and drivers of the Evergreen Project. The Webcast will be open to the first 100 participants, recorded for playback, and made available on the Oleproject.org site. To Register for the Webcast: Register Now

Participants include:

• John Little, ILS Support Section Head, Duke University

• Julie Walker, Deputy State Librarian, Georgia Public Library Service

• Tim Daniels, Assistant State Librarian

• Elizabeth McKinney, PINES Program Director

• Chris Sharp, PINES System Administrator

AP reported today that Harvard’s endowment took a significant hit in the past four months, loosing more than 20% of its value, or roughly $8 billion.  They are also expecting a further 10% drop by next June.  Many organizations with endowment funds will likely show similar drops.  This will  create many challenges for institutions and organizations that rely heavily on these funds.  Probably, there will also be cutbacks in philanthropic grant funding as well.  Tighten your belts everyone.

Life magazine, which ceased as an ongoing publication in April of 2007, has partnered with Google to digitize and post the magazine’s vast photo archive.  Most of the collection has never been seen publicly and amounts to a huge swath of America’s visual history since the 1860s.   The release of the collection was announced on the Google Blog.  The first part of the collection is now online, with the remaining 80% being digitized over the next “few months”.  Of course, this does not mean that all images in Life will be online, only those that were produced by the staff photographers (i.e., where Life holds the copyright), not the famous freelancers.

I can find no where any mention of money exchanged either from Google for the rights or for a revenue stream to support the ongoing work, although one can purchase prints of the images.  From a post on this from paidcontent.org:

  Time Inc.’s hopes, Life president Andy Blau explains: “We did this deal for really one reason, to drive traffic to Life.com. We wanted to make these images available to the greater public … everything else from that is really secondary.”  

While exploring the collection, I also noticed Google’s Image Labler, a game to tag images.  The goal of the game is to get points by matching your tags with those of another random player, when you both see the same images.  The game was launched in September of 2006. While I spent about 5 minutes using it, what is truly scary is the number of points raked up by the “all time leaders”. As of today, “Yew Half Maille” had collected 31,463,230. Considering that I collected about 4,000 points in my 5 minutes, how much time are people spending doing this?

Late last week, one of the largest music labels announced that its sales of digital files exceeded the revenue generated by CDs.  As reported in the New York Times, Altantic Records saw 51% of its sales generated by digital sales.  This was significantly more than Atlantic’s parent company, Warner Music Group, which reported only 27% of its total sales from digital distribution. 

It should come as no surprise that digital music is quickly replacing physical media.  One need only think of the weight and mess of thousands of CDs, versus a nearly unlimited amount on an iPod or streaming on demand.  The question is when will other media follow?  Some magazines are slowly getting rid of print in favor of online.  It will be some time before display technology exceeds the user experience of print on paper.  In some ways scholarly journal publishing is already headed down this path.  The rest of publishing is slower to adapt.  However, several tipping points will likely be reached fairly soon. 

* - Display technology needs to improve, so that the user experience is comparable to print

* - Standardization around some from of reader, or at least a common file format working on different devices

* - A Napster-like social movement among the broader tech-savvy early adopters (not regarding free distribution, necessarily) which pushes e-books and the like to digital.

* - A breadth and depth of available content to make the purchase of the reader worthwhile.

* - Mass production of readers so that they are no longer $300+  

* - Preservation strategies need to be improved 

Many of these issues are consensus based and awaiting either standards or adoption of existing standards. 

This week in Time magazine there was an interesting article “How Many Blogs Does the World Need?”by Michael Kinsley. The crux of the article is something that I’ve touched on in a couple of recent posts: How do people separate the quality content from the diatribes, the meaningful from the inappropriate, and the groundbreaking from the debunked?

There may have been an explosion in the amount of content, which Kinsley is decrying, however I don’t think that is the problem. Kinsley was among the leaders of moving to online, having helped to put Slate on the map, which makes his article all the stranger. His voice is but only one in recent weeks complaining of the profusion of blogs and voices contributing to the public square. A similar article was published in Wired last month - again by another successful online writer at Valleywag. Limiting the voices or contributions from any number of authors (quality or not) shouldn’t be the answer. Providing structures by which people can find appropriate content, along with assessment measures and tools that reader can use to determine which content is appropriate for themselves is the critical need in our community.

Journals (in the scholarly world) had longed played this role of vetting and editing content and people could be moderately assured that the content in a particular journal would meet some general standards of quality and content. In a disambiguated world, this isn’t the case. How can you tell one article on the web, or in Science Direct, or in PLOS One is any better or more appropriate to your interests before investing the time and energy to read it? This will be one of the biggest challenges in the coming years will be to find a replacement for the journal in our open-web-world.

The AP is reporting today that Random House, the largest US-based trade publisher will be freezing pension benefits for current employees and eliminating them for new hires.  Like many organizations, Random House will maintain a defined contribution plan.  In part, this is continuation of an ongoing trend in business away from pension plans to more manageable (for the companies) 401K style plans.  However, the fact that belt tightening is taking place across the industry in indicative of larger pull back in the publishing market.

From the article:

[A spokesman] said talk of cutting pension had been going on for years, although changes at Random House have been expected since Markus Dohle replaced Peter Olson in May as chairman of the publisher’s worldwide operations. “Mr. Dohle’s planning and discussions about the company’s future has been and continue to be very interactive at all levels of the company worldwide,” Applebaum said

Also today, Barnes and Noble reported disappointing same store sales. Sales are down 4.4% to $1.12 billion, while same-store sales fell 7.4% from last year.”

From the article:

Three weeks ago, Chairman Leonard Riggio told employees through an internal memo that the bookseller was “bracing for a terrible holiday season,” and that he expected “the trend to continue well into 2009, and perhaps beyond.”

Riggio wrote, however, that the retailer expects to finish comfortably in the black for the year and doesn’t have any bank debt.

Thursday, Chief Executive Steve Riggio said there was “a significant drop off in customer traffic and consumer spending” in the latest quarter. He added that the company is “taking measures to reduce expenses for the balance of this year and next.” He didn’t elaborate.

Jonathan Band, a DC-based intellectual property lawyer, has produced an excellent distillation of the Google Library/Publisher/Author’s Guild settlement.  For those who are interested but not committed to reading the full 141 pages and 15 attachments, Jonathan’s summary is readable and a much more manageable 21 pages.  Thanks and congratulations to Jonathan for a great summary.

Another magazine announced today that they will cease publication of a print edition. In an interview with the website PaidContent.org, the CEO of Ziff Davis Jason Young, announced that PC Magazine will cease distribution of their print edition in January.

PC Magazine is just one of several mass-market publications that are moving to online only distribution. Earlier this week, Reuters reported that a judge has approved the reorganization of Ziff Davis, which is currently under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. There was some speculation about the future of Ziff Davis’ assets.

From the story:

The last issue will be dated January 2009; the closure will claim the jobs of about seven employees, all from the print production side. None of the editorial employees, who are now writing for the online sites anyway, will be affected.

Only a few weeks ago, the Christian Science Monitor announced that it would be ending print distribution. The costs of producing and distributing paper has always been a significant expense for publishers and in a period of decreasing advertising revenues, lower circulation, and higher production costs, we can expect that more publications will head in this direction.

Within the scholarly world, in particular, I expect that the economics will drive print distribution to print-on-demand for those who want to pay extra, but overall print journals will quickly become a thing of the past. I know a lot of people have projected this for a long time. ARL produced an interesting report written by Rick Johnson last fall on this topic, but it appears we’re nearing the tipping point Rick described in that report.

This transition makes all the more critical the ongoing work on preservation, authenticity, reuse, and rights particularly as they relate to the differences between print and online distribution.