Google have announced an API to their Book Search service. Some explanation and a demonstration of how this can be used at the Librarything. Publishers may be uneasy about the way this tips the information flow about books in the direction of Mountain View (Eoin already is). Amazon and the major publishers must be thinking about the implications of this: will all commercial transactions go with a Google information flow?
The API could be either a step in … Keep Reading
It is sometimes quite difficult to understand the core competence of the business that you run. I was musing about this following a conversation with a book publisher who has been looking at our system and likes it. He thinks that it handles his books well, that we appear to be easy to implement, easy to use, little investment is required and we appear to fit in with the strategic direction of the company he is running. He also appreciates … Keep Reading
At the recent Tools of Change conference I met up with Peter Brantley, the Executive Director for the Digital Library Federation. We had a very brief conversation about Orphan Copyrights and I suggested to Peter that he produce some thoughts on the subject for the Exact Editions blog. He has produced some specific and intriguing suggestions in an essay which should attract discussion. Since his essay is in part a call-for-action which may involve lots of parties — the … Keep Reading
We expect to do business 24X7. So customers buy magazine subscriptions at all hours, and it is fun to look at our shop in the morning to see how many Americans, Japanese and Australian customers have done business overnight; but I did not expect that we would be selling institutional licenses at the weekend. Our institutional customers can sign up on-line and complete the purchase by informing us of their IP range.
This last couple of days we sold … Keep Reading
Although it is reasonably obvious that digital magazines are much less damaging to the environment than printed consumer magazines (Chris Anderson has a weirdly contrary view), it is quite hard to do serious measurement of the ecological cost of digital publishing. Steve Souders has done some analysis of web sites with Yslow in an attempt to put some cash/calory value on the inefficiencies of the Wikipedia home page. This is highly conjectural and guesstimatory but probably important. O’Reilly are … Keep Reading
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