Books on demand (Espresso in the Square)

The Harvard Crimson reports on a new dimension to the book market in the age of the internet, books printed on demand (and delivered by bicycle:): Store Launches On-Demand Books

"Starting next week, customers at Harvard Book Store will be able to buy in minutes books that once would have taken weeks to find. The service comes courtesy of the Mass. Ave. retailer’s new printing machine, which will make it the first bookseller in the nation with the ability to print 3.6 million titles on demand. The Espresso Book Machine—produced by New York-based firm On Demand Books—has been rolled out to a select few stores to date, but the one at Harvard Book Store will be the first with access to the 2 million public-domain texts digitized by Google, which also announced a deal with On Demand last Thursday. "
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"The Espresso Book Machine will be able to print a 300-page paperback book in four minutes, according to Gain, who added that printed books will be competitively priced and indistinguishable from those sitting on the shelves. Customers will be able to request a book to be printed online or in the store, after which they can either pick it up in-store within minutes or have the book delivered by bicycle either the same or next day. Books can also be shipped to domestic or overseas locations. "

Authors' Registry: Clearinghouse for small payments

How should small fees for copying copyrighted material be collected and distributed? About once a year, I get a communication from The Authors Registry , which works to find authors on whose behalf such fees--presumably collected by the penny in copyshops and libraries--have been collected.

"The Authors Registry is a not-for-profit clearinghouse for payments to authors, receiving royalties from organizations and distributing them to U.S. authors. It was founded in 1995 by a consortium of U.S. authors' organizations: The Authors Guild, The American Society of Journalists & Authors, the Dramatists Guild, and the Association of Authors' Representatives. To date, the Authors Registry has distributed over $8,000,000 to authors in the United States."

They seem to be closely affiliated with the Authors' Licensing & Collecting Society (UK).

"The Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS) represents the interests of all UK writers and aims to ensure writers are fairly compensated for any works that are copied, broadcast or recorded. Writers’ primary rights are protected by contract, but it is the life of the work over the following decades that needs to be monitored and fairly rewarded. It is with secondary rights that copyright has an important role to play in protecting writers and creators from unpaid use and moral abuse of their work. Secondary use ranges from photocopying and repeat broadcast transmission in the UK and overseas to reproduction in journals and repeat use via the internet and digital reproduction."

"Photocopying of books and serials currently accounts for approximately 70% of income. The ALCS together with the Publishers Licensing Society (PLS) has appointed the Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) to act as its agent to license the photocopying right on its behalf and on behalf of its members on a non-exclusive basis. A small number of CLA licences now include the authority for limited scanning. Public Lending Right ALCS administers German, Austrian, Dutch and French Public Lending Right (PLR) for UK authors, and is in the process of entering into agreements with other European countries where PLR is being incorporated in to national legislation. UK PLR is administered by Public Lending Right based in Stockton-upon-Tees and funded by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). "

The collections are quite small; e.g. my recent statement, which seems to originate in the ALCS looks like this:

PHOTOCOPYING - OVERSEAS Miscellaneous CLA Monies - Inside EU 1.02
NON TITLE SPECIFIC Miscellaneous CLA Monies - UK 40.03
PHOTOCOPYING - OVERSEAS Miscellaneous CLA Monies - Outside EU 15.52
SUBVENTION ON ACCOUNT Miscellaneous CLA Photocopying Fees 7.97
PLS Balancing Payment General CLA Photocopying Fees 2007 - 2008 34.56

Update: for those of you who don't normally click to see comments, the comment below by Jon Baron, the eminent Penn psychologist, is well worth reading...

Rental market for textbooks

Here's a story about Chegg.com, which rents textbooks: We Rent Movies, So Why Not Textbooks?

"Yet the Craigslist model didn’t work. When classes ended in the spring, sellers couldn’t find many buyers online and sold their used books to the college store, often for pennies on the dollar. By the time students migrated back to campus in the fall, willing online sellers were few and far between. "
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"With demand for good deals on textbooks running high, Chegg’s success comes in large part from being able to address those inefficiencies. While Chegg primarily rents books, it is also essentially acting as a kind of “market maker,” gathering books from sellers at the end of a semester and renting — or sometimes selling — them to other students at the start of a new one. "

See also http://www.bookrenter.com/, http://www.bookswim.com/, http://www.campusbookrentals.com/...

Why did books replace scrolls? Random access and the market for texts

Why did books replace scrolls?

That is, why did the modern form of the book, the codex, with pages bound together on a spine, replace pages sewn together and rolled up in a scroll? (Today, the term codex is mostly used for old, hand-written books that predate the printing press.)

It isn't that scrolls are no longer produced. Every week in synagogues around the world, as a new portion of the Torah is read , the parchment scroll is advanced, from right to left, until it is time to start the annual cycle again.

But if you want to browse, you don't use the scroll, you look in a book. It's easier to flip back and forth in a book, to compare passages, to read ahead and find out what is coming, to look back and remember what came before, to share with another reader who may be at a different place. In computerese, books (in codex form) are random access devices, while scrolls are sequential access machines.

And, except for the Torah, there basically aren't any more scrolls. Books have completely replaced scrolls, since books are so much easier to use.

Technologies like the printing press also made it cheap to produce texts as books, but if we didn't find books superior, it would still be possible to buy versions of your favorite novels or math texts (or dictionaries!) in scroll form. While a kosher Torah scroll to be used in public prayer in a synagogue is hand written by a scribe, there are printed Torah scrolls for non-ritual use: the technology for attaching single-sided printed pages together in a scroll isn't any obstacle. (Remember how early computer printers used to work on a continuous stream of accordian-folded paper?)

Search, which is easier in books than in scrolls, is even easier in digital texts such as we find online: e.g. here you can search not only the Five Books whose contents make up the Torah scroll, but the entire Hebrew Bible (and here is a link to the weekly portion).

So computers and the internet and the Kindle and other ways to handle texts electronically are just the latest chapters in the ancient, ongoing story of the market for texts.

(I'm not an early adopter myself, but here's a review of the new Kindle from yesterday's Washington Post that makes it sound as if, after maybe a little more progress on the electronic front, trees may soon be able to start sleeping at least a little easier.)

Your grandchildren's houses may not have bookshelves.

Market for poets

The market for poets is of course not the same as the market for poetry, and a recent NY Times article looks at how poets fit into academia, as professors of poetry: Poets, Academia: A Couplet in Conflict.
The article discusses the notion that poets might be expected to be more drunken and seductive than, say, critics. But in other respects, the intersection of poetry and academia is a lot like in many other fields, in which scholars not only do scholarship, but teach.

That being said, the balance between scholarship and teaching, like the balance between discovery and stewardship, and between the ivory tower and the open marketplace, is quite different in different disciplines. But, in each discipline, the various roles that universities play in our society involve finding such balances.

I can't tell how much the non-academic market for poets and poetry has been changed since the endowment in 2003 of the Poetry Foundation (what rhymes with a hundred million dollars?). But here's a 2006 article in the Globe: Poets, Inc., which notes about Poetry magazine that "The magazine's efforts to engage a broader audience seem to be working. When Wiman took over Poetry in October 2003, the magazine's circulation was 11,000. Today it stands at roughly 29,000."

One thing to admire about the poetry biz is that there's a technical term for a bad poet: poetaster (rhymes with "do it faster").

(Contest: what should be the equivalent word for a bad economist? Econo... misser? ...messer?)

Market for textbooks

The Washington Post has a story on the educational software company Aplia, founded by Paul Romer: An Economist, an Academic Puzzle and a Lot of Promise. It makes a number of interesting observations about the design of the textbook market, and how interactive software that gives students immediate feedback, and lets them participate in experimental economics style interactions, complements the traditional textbook and lecture style of instruction.

"Students seemed to like Aplia's engaging and easy-to-use software, as well as the feedback. Professors liked Aplia even more. It allowed them to leverage the grade-grubbing instincts of today's college students to get them to do homework -- but without having to spend countless hours reading and correcting the assignments. They also got reports from Aplia identifying which students were having the most trouble with the material and which concepts were stumping the class as a whole. "
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"By relieving instructors of the considerable burden of reviewing homework assignments, the technology makes it possible for universities to require professors to teach more students, either by increasing class sizes or the number of classes they teach. More important, it frees instructors to spend more time preparing for class, working with individual students and even doing their own research. "

It may also allow publishers to circumvent the secondhand market for textbooks, as the software license can be separated from the book.

HT: Greg Mankiw

Market for childrens' books

Bestsellers in any category are what make publishing profitable. But childrens' books must be very special, because a bestseller can have high sales for a long time, as new generations of the target audience are born. I've always thought that this must be especially true for those books made of thick cardboard, suitable for chewing on as well as reading, since each new reader needs a new copy (chewing cuts down on the used book/hand me down market). But I hadn't guessed just how big the revenue stream is.

Both of my children enjoyed "The Very Hungry Caterpillar," which celebrates its 40th birthday this week: Happy birthday, hungry caterpillar!

" 'The Very Hungry Caterpillar,' who eats his way through the book, leaving a trail of holes behind, has sold 29 million copies and has licensing deals, Newsweek reports, of $50 million annually. With the money, Carle established the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst, Mass.; its exhibits have celebrated works by Dorothy Kunhardt ("Pat the Bunny"), Arnold Lobel ("Frog and Toad") and Maurice Sendak ("Where the Wild Things Are"). "

Rental market for textbooks

From Peter Klein at Organizations and Markets: Students: Consider Renting, not Buying, Your Books

"Chegg is the Netflix of college textbooks. Get your book in the mail, along with a prepaid return address label, don’t write in it too much, and send it back once the semester is over. I took a quick look and the savings appear to be substantial for brand-new books, modest otherwise (because there are robust secondary markets for used textbooks). The newest edition of a book I assigned last semester is $127 new from Amazon, $72 for a one-semester rental from Chegg."

HT Steve Leider

Market for used books

The easy availability of internet shopping for used books hasn't just affected used book stores, it is having an effect on the sale of new books as well, much like internet downloading of music affects sales of recorded music. Here's a story from the NY Times: Bargain Hunting for Books, and Feeling Sheepish About It . It makes the point that people can (and do) now sell relatively new books once they have read them, and that this impacts stores that sell new books, and of course authors, since neither get a share of resales. Increasing the thickness of the used book market increases the 'velocity' of a book, i.e. the rate at which new books change hands. Each copy of a book gets more readers, but each title sells fewer new copies.

"A book search engine like ViaLibri.net can knit together 20,000 booksellers around the world offering tens of millions of nearly new, used or rare books."

"Andy Ross, the former owner of Cody’s, told me that buying books online “was not morally dubious, but it is tragic. It has a lot of unintended consequences for communities.”
Mr. Ross said he realized that Cody’s was doomed when he noticed that in the last year he hadn’t sold a single copy of that old-reliable for undergraduates, Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason.” Students presumably were buying it online. Sales of classics and other backlist titles used to be the financial engine of publishers and bookstores as well, allowing them to take chances on new authors. Clearly that model is breaking. Simon & Schuster, which laid off staffers this month, cited backlist sales as a particularly troubled area. "

Used book stores

One of the markets most changed by the rise of the internet is the market for used books. Back in the day, people visiting Cambridge MA, for example, might put aside some time to browse the used book stores. The idea was that you probably had a mental list of out of print books you were looking for. No more. If you want an out of print book, you can search online and buy it from a distant seller. The NY Times book review has an essay today, Attack of the Megalisters, nostalgic for the old days.

(Hat tip to Muriel Niederle.)