您正在查看 "Dissertation Reference" 分类下的文章 2010-11-16 17:26 2009-01-16 19:48 Digital Publishing Is Scrambling the Industry's Rules
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/05/books/05digi.html
By MOTOKO RICH
Published: June 5, 2006
Correction Appended
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.
Not surprisingly, writers have greeted these measures with a mixture of enthusiasm and dread. The dread was perhaps most eloquently crystallized last month in Washington at BookExpo, the publishing industry's annual convention, when the novelist John Updike forcefully decried a digital future composed of free downloads of books and the mixing and matching of "snippets" of text, calling it a "grisly scenario."
Hovering above the discussion of all these technologies is the fear that the publishing industry could be subject to the same upheaval that has plagued the music industry, where digitalization has started to displace the traditional artistic and economic model of the record album with 99-cent song downloads and personalized playlists. Total album sales are down 19 percent since 2001, while CD sales have dropped 16 percent during the same period, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Sales of single digital music tracks have jumped more than 1,700 percent in just two years.
What writers think about technological developments in the literary world has a lot to do with where they are sitting at the moment. As a researcher and scholar, Anne Fadiman, author of "The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down" and "Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader," thinks a digital library of all books would be a "godsend" during research, allowing her to "sniff out all the paragraphs" on a given topic. But, she said: "That's not reading. For reading, you have to read a book in its entirety and I think there's no substitute for the look and feel and smell of a real book — the magic of the paper and thread and glue."
Others have a much less fixed notion of books. Lisa Scottoline, the author of 13 thrillers, the most recent of which, "Dirty Blonde," spent four weeks on the New York Times hardcover fiction best-seller list earlier this spring, offers the first chapter or two of each book on her Web site; and her publisher, HarperCollins, hands out "samplers" of a few chapters of her titles in bookstores. Any of these formats are fine with her, she says. Whether its "paper, pulp, gold rimmed or digitized, I don't think you can take away from the best stories," she said.
Liberating books from their physical contexts could make it easier for them to blend into one another, a concept heralded by Kevin Kelly in an article in The New York Times Magazine last month. "Once text is digital, books seep out of their bindings and weave themselves together," wrote Mr. Kelly in an article that was derided by Mr. Updike in his BookExpo polemic. "The collective intelligence of a library allows us to see things we can't see in a single, isolated book."
"Does that mean 'Anna Karenina' goes hand in hand with my niece's blog of her trip to Las Vegas?" asked Jane Hamilton, author of "The Book of Ruth" and a forthcoming novel, "When Madeline Was Young." "It sounds absolutely deadly." Reading books as isolated works is precisely what she wants to do, she said. "When I read someone like Willa Cather, I feel like I'm in the presence of the divine," Ms. Hamilton said. "I don't want her mixed up with anybody else. And I certainly don't want to go to her Web site."
For unknown authors struggling to capture the attention of busy readers, however, the Web offers an unprecedented way to catapult out of obscurity. Glenn Greenwald, a lawyer who started a political blog, "Unclaimed Territory," just eight months ago, was recruited by a foundation financed by Working Assets, a credit card issuer and telecommunications company, to write a book this spring. Mr. Greenwald promoted the result, called "How Would a Patriot Act? Defending American Values From a President Run Amok," on his own blog and his publisher e-mailed digital galleys to seven other influential bloggers, who helped to send it to the No. 1 spot on Amazon.com before it was even published. This Sunday it will hit No. 11 on the New York Times nonfiction paperback best-seller list. "I think people who are sort of on the outside of the institutions and new voices entering will be a lot more excited about this technology," Mr. Greenwald said. "That's one of the effects that technology always has. It democratizes things and brings in new readers and new authors."
For many authors, the question of how technology will shape book publishing inevitably leads to the question of how writers will be paid. Currently, publishers pay authors an advance against royalties, which are conventionally earned at the rate of 15 percent of the cover price of each copy sold.
But the Internet makes it a lot easier to spread work free. "I've had pieces put up on Web sites legally and otherwise that get hundreds of thousands of hits, and believe me I sit around thinking 'Boy, if I got a dollar every time that somebody posted an op-ed that I wrote, I'd be a very happy writer,' " said Daniel Mendelsohn, author of the forthcoming book "The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million," a memoir about his hunt to discover what happened to relatives who were killed in the Holocaust.
Mr. Mendelsohn said he understood that technological shakeups take time to play out, and that he can't bemoan every lost penny. "But as an author who creates texts that people consume, I want my authorship to be recognized and I want to get compensated," he said.
Mr. Benkler, the Yale professor and author, argues that people will continue to pay for books if the price is low enough. "Even in music, price can compete with free," Mr. Benkler said. "The service has to be sufficiently better and the moral culture needs to be one where, as an act of respect, when the price is reasonable, you pay. Its not clear to me why, if people are willing to pay 99 cents for a song they won't be willing to pay $3 for a book."
He argues that without the costs of paper and physical book production, publishers could afford to give authors a higher cut of the sale price as royalties.
In the context of history, the changes that today's technology will impose on literary society may not be as earth-shattering as some may think. In fact, books themselves are a relatively new construct, inheritors of a longstanding oral storytelling culture. Mass-produced books are an even newer phenomenon, enabled by the invention of the printing press that likely put legions of calligraphers and bookbinders out of business.
That history gives great comfort to writers like Vikram Chandra, whose 1,000-page novel, "Sacred Games," will be published in January. Mr. Chandra, a former computer programmer who already reads e-books downloaded to his pocket personal computer, said he saw no point in resisting technology. "I think circling the wagons and defending the fortress metaphors are a little misplaced," he said. "The barbarians at the gate are usually willing to negotiate a little, and the guys in the fort usually end up yelling that 'we are the only good things in the world and you guys don't understand it,' at which point the barbarians shrug, knock down your walls with their amazingly powerful weapons, and put a parking lot over your sacred grounds.
"If they are in a really good mood," he added, "they put up a pyramid of skulls."
Mr. Danielewski said that the physical book would persist as long as authors figure out ways to stretch the format in new ways. "Only Revolutions," he pointed out, tracks the experiences of two intersecting characters, whose narratives begin at different ends of the book, requiring readers to turn it upside down every eight pages to get both of their stories. "As excited as I am by technology, I'm ultimately creating a book that can't exist online," he said. "The experience of starting at either end of the book and feeling the space close between the characters until you're exactly at the halfway point is not something you could experience online. I think that's the bar that the Internet is driving towards: how to further emphasize what is different and exceptional about books."
Correction: June 7, 2006
An article in The Arts yesterday about the impact of new technology on the book industry misidentified the source of data on the decline of album and CD sales in noting fears that technology will have the same effect on books. It was Nielsen SoundScan, not Nielsen BookScan. |
2008-06-08 13:36 Buyers rush for the iPod of ebooks
Dominic Rushe and Nic Fleming
From The Sunday Times
June 8, 2008
add:http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article4087306.ece
THE new generation of electronic books – ebooks – has fired a revolution even before they go on sale in Britain. Such is the sudden success in the United States of the Amazon Kindle, a reading device capable of storing 200 books, that UK buyers are bidding for them on eBay in the hope of shipping them over.
Although the US versions will not be fully operational in Britain, the Kindle is rapidly taking on the must-have aura of Apple’s iPod. After many false dawns, publishers fear the ebook could finally do to the book trade what the iPod has done to the music industry: turn it upside down.
One UK literary agent said: “It’s a tremendously exciting time. I can imagine a world where I would sell books direct from an author’s website.”
Another said: “Amazon clearly wants the Kindle to be the iPod of the book business.”
The Kindle, which is expected to go on sale in the UK later this year, has surprised US publishers and authors by how rapidly it has moved into the mainstream. Pat Schroeder, president of the Association of American Publishers, said: “I think people initially thought it would attract young people. But old people like it, too.”
The Kindle allows the user to increase the type size, making books easier to read for older people with impaired eyesight. When Walter Isaacson, former chairman of CNN and managing editor of Time magazine, acquired a Kindle, he soon found that his 84-year-old father and his 86-year-old father-in-law were asking for one as well as his 18-year-old daughter.
In the six months since the Kindle went on sale in the United States, it has grabbed a significant chunk of book sales. Jeffrey Bezos, founder of Amazon, said last week that the Kindle was already taking 6% of sales of books that were available in both traditional print and new electronic form.
Electronic readers of one sort or another have been around for years but the Kindle, and its rival the Sony Reader, deliver a quality and ease of use that seem to have mass appeal. The International Digital Publishing Forum, a trade group for ebook sellers, estimates that sales in March 2008 were 59% higher than in March 2007.
More than 125,000 titles are available for downloading and Simon & Schuster, the publisher, said it would add a further 5,000 titles this year.
In 2006 Harlequin Enterprises, the world’s biggest romance publisher, which sells 130m books a year, released eight titles in electronic form. Last year it decided to make all its titles available in both traditional and ebook formats.
“We blew away a lot of people’s expectations about ebooks,” said Brent Lewis, vice-president of digital and internet for Harlequin. Growing numbers of the company’s customers, he said, are reading romances on the Kindle, the Sony Reader or a mobile phone. In Japan all Harlequin’s ebooks are sold directly to customers’ mobiles.
Amazon has not decided how much ebooks for the Kindle will cost in Britain, but in America new releases and bestsellers, for example, typically cost $9.99 (£5), compared with £7.50-£10 for traditional volumes bought through the company’s website.
The Kindle, which costs $359 (£182) in America, has built-in free wireless internet connection, allowing users to download titles direct from Amazon’s website. Other firms’ readers require ebooks to be downloaded onto a computer and then transferred.
The pace of change, and Amazon’s aggressive lead, are unnerving British authors and publishers. They fear Amazon will use its dominance to squeeze them. Publishers sell books to retailers at a discount off the cover price. While 20 years ago this was about 35%-40%, Waterstone’s and Amazon now expect discounts of 50%-55%.
A pricing dispute recently led the online retailer to refuse to sell new copies of books such as Labyrinth by Kate Mosse and The 6th Target by James Patterson. The website removed its “buy now” button from about 60 books by authors of the publisher Hachette Livre UK, which also publishes Patricia Cornwell, the crime writer.
Tracy Chevalier, the historical novelist who chairs the Society of Authors, said: “What is unusual here is, Amazon is saying: ‘We are not going to sell these books.’ It’s greatly disappointing that Amazon would choose to punish authors in this way.”
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2008-04-07 12:16 Amazon Accelerates Its Move to Digital
By BRAD STONE
Published: April 7, 2008
add:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/07/technology/07amazon.html?em&ex=1207627200&en=c6f0d94e50d45f7a&ei=5087%0A
SEATTLE — Over the last 14 years, Amazon.com has mastered the art of getting physical copies of books, music and movies to customers through the mail. Now it is trying to add to its repertoire in a hurry.
The overall market for entertainment and information is inexorably going digital. One day, most music, movies and perhaps even printed words will be sent as bits over the Internet instead of in bulky boxes. More than half of the company’s $15 billion in sales last year came from CDs, DVDs and books, shipped from Amazon’s 30 cavernous distribution centers around the world.
Last week, in what could be an omen of this shift, Apple proclaimed that its iTunes store had surpassed Wal-Mart Stores to become the No. 1 source of music sales in the United States. Amazon, which still sells mostly CDs, was the No. 3 seller last year but has since lost market share and is now tied with Target for fourth place. Best Buy is No. 3.
“Digital is where the growth in music is, and other industries are likely to follow,” said Bill Rosenblatt, chief executive of GiantSteps Media Technology Strategies, a New York consulting firm. “Amazon needs to position itself to capture that.”
If there were a Committee for the Preservation of Amazon.com, it would include Steven Kessel, Bill Carr and Ian Freed. Mr. Kessel oversees digital efforts for the company. Mr. Carr is in charge of the Amazon MP3 digital music store and its Amazon Unbox video download service. Mr. Freed oversees the company’s e-book-reading device, the Kindle.
As is typical of executives at Amazon, its digital chiefs are stingy with details about their plans. But in an interview, they emphasized the importance of the company’s new online offerings and said a sense of urgency now underlies its digital efforts.
“We wake up every day thinking about digital,” said Mr. Kessel, senior vice president for worldwide digital media, who reports to Jeffrey P. Bezos, Amazon’s founder. “Jeff once said he couldn’t imagine anything more important than reinventing the book. I think that sums it up really well, if you think about that across all our media products.”
Amazon has reached, in a sense, the end of Phase One of its digital media rollout. The Kindle was introduced in December. The company unveiled its digital TV and movie store, Amazon Unbox, in the fall of 2006 and gave TiVo owners access to the service directly from their televisions last summer.
The MP3 music store arrived last fall after years of rumors about its development. Amazon’s digital executives said they worked on the service for four years. At one point, they said, the company pursued an online store with music that would have been protected by the antipiracy locks known as digital rights management software, or D.R.M. That would have made the songs unplayable on Apple’s line of iPods, which dominate the market for music players and cannot play protected tracks other than those from the iTunes store.
“We made the decision that the right customer experience is music that would play on all devices,” said Mr. Carr, vice president of digital media. But the major music companies were wary of releasing music in the unprotected MP3 format.
“We thought we would be launching only with independent record labels,” Mr. Carr said.
To Amazon’s surprise, all four of the big record labels quickly signed on, in part to create a strong Internet alternative to iTunes and counter the influence of Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, in the music business.
Amazon does not release sales figures for its digital initiatives, so their initial success is difficult to gauge, although by all accounts the MP3 store has quickly become one of the top sellers of digital music.
The executives say they are happy with the service’s progress and are focusing on adding international music and expanding the service overseas. But they also say that most customers probably do not understand that songs bought in the MP3 format are more flexible and can be transferred to a greater number of devices.
“The average consumer probably doesn’t understand whether music has or does not have D.R.M.,” Mr. Carr said. “The point should be that it’s a consistently good experience for them. What we need is for that word of mouth to grow and more people to try it.”
To that end, the company has begun using its marketing strengths and repositories of customer information to direct people to these new digital offerings. The recommendations are subtle. People with a history of buying alternative rock music on Amazon, for example, may find the site pitching them the new R.E.M. album, “Accelerate,” in both CD and digital form.
“Our job is not to take all these people and have them stop listening to CDs anymore,” Mr. Carr said. “Our job is to introduce them to the fact that they now have a choice to do both.”
The Amazon Unbox video service may be in for the most striking overhaul of all the company’s digital services. There are more than 30,000 movies and TV show titles on the site available for rent or download. But the videos play only in Microsoft’s Windows Media format and are not accessible from many non-Windows devices, like Apple computers.
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2008-03-24 14:50 Bertelsmann exploring the sale of its book and music clubs
ReutersPublished: March 18, 2008
add:http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/03/18/business/bert.php
BERLIN: Bertelsmann is exploring the sale of its book and music clubs, a move that would close the door on a business that helped make it one of the world's top five media companies.
Net income at Bertelsmann fell more than 80 percent in 2007 to 405 million, or $640.4 million, largely on write-downs at the U.S. division of its Direct Group book business.
Hartmut Ostrowski, the chief executive of Bertelsmann, said every strategic option for the Direct Group would be examined, including a sale, and added that Bertelsmann wanted to reach a decision by mid-2009.
The chief financial officer, Thomas Rabe, said a significant decline in CD sales and in book club memberships, coupled with the weak dollar, led to 414 million in write-downs.
The priority of the company is to sell the North American part of Direct Group, Rabe said.
"We have initiated the sales process," said Peter Olsson, head of Direct Group North America, adding that Morgan Stanley was helping with the process.
Ostrowski declined to say how much the company expected to receive for its U.S. business, which it had hoped to bolster by purchasing the U.S. book club Bookspan last year, as well as Columbia House, a membership-based seller of DVDs and music, in 2005.
The global book club unit generates about 13 percent of Bertelsmann's revenue, which was 18.8 billion in 2007.
Founded in 1835, Bertelsmann's fortunes have traditionally been linked to publishing and book sales. Reinhard Mohn founded the book clubs in 1950 when he started Bertelsmann Lesering (Readers Ring), building it into an international business with more than 20 million members.
It allowed members to purchase books at lower prices than in bookstores but obliged them to buy books on a regular basis, which generated a constant revenue stream.
"The book club unit is the nucleus of Bertelsmann," Ostrowski said. "The money we made from our book clubs in the 1950s and 1960s helped us buy the publisher Gruner + Jahr and it helped us build our TV business."
Today, Bertelsmann has six divisions including the publisher Random House and the European TV broadcaster RTL Group.
The company has been controlled by the Mohn family for the past 100 years and has opted to remain private.
The German media giant did not quite reach its target debt-to-Ebitda ratio of 2.3 by the end of 2007, referring to earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. The actual ratio was 2.64 in 2007; Rabe said that by the end of February it was at 2.56 with debt standing at 6.1 billion.
Rabe said Bertelsmann expected to see moderate revenue growth this year, adding that net income was forecast to at least double compared with 2007.
"In 2007, we made extensive value corrections and removed risks such as the Napster legal dispute with the relevant expenses," Ostrowski said.
For Napster, payments of about 390 million in 2006 and 2007 to settle copyright-infringement claims filed by Warner Music, EMI Group and other companies probably helped to avert a $17 billion class-action lawsuit, Rabe said.
Ostrowski said Bertelsmann could decide next year on the future of its 50 percent stake in the music business Sony BMG, a joint venture with Sony. Options include buying Sony's stake, selling its stake to Sony or continuing the joint venture, he said. Operating profit at the BMG unit fell to 93 million in 2007 from 173 million a year earlier. |
2008-02-27 9:44 Sponsor shuts the book on glitzy Quill awards
Tue Feb 26, 2008
add：http://www.reuters.com/article/artsNews/idUSN2636701720080226
NEW YORK (Reuters) - A U.S. book award program created three years ago to bring glamour to the world of publishing and promote literacy has been shelved, its primary sponsor Reed Business Information said on Tuesday.
In a statement on www.publishersweekly.com, the publishing company gave no reason for its decision to end support for The Quill Literacy Foundation and the accompanying black tie Quill Awards, which were televised every year by NBC.
Quill awards were given to the best books of the year in 19 categories including humor, romance, science fiction/fantasy/horror, sports, health/self improvement and religion/spirituality. They were voted on by more than 6,000 invited booksellers and librarians
Former Vice President Al Gore was among the 2007 winners for "The Assault on Reason," announced in October at an event attended by celebrities including actresses Brooke Shields and Joan Allen and Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York.
"As part of the dissolution of the Quills, the remaining foundation funds will be distributed to (book-related charities) First Book and to Literacy Partners," the statement said. It did not say how much money would be distributed.
Reed Business Information is owned by Reed-Elsevier and was recently put up for sale by the company.
(Reporting by Michelle Nichols; Editing by Cynthia Osterman) |
2008-02-24 10:27 LexisNexis Parent Set to Buy ChoicePoint
By Ellen Nakashima and Robert O'Harrow Jr.
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, February 22, 2008; Page D01
add:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/21/AR2008022100809.html?hpid=topnews
Publishing company Reed Elsevier, owner of the LexisNexis Group, is seeking to acquire commercial data broker ChoicePoint in a $4.1 billion cash deal that would create a global information-gathering powerhouse that would collect and analyze billions of records about who people are, where they live and with whom, and what they own.
With customers including government agencies, insurance companies, banks, rental apartments, corporate personnel offices and private investigators, the combined company's reach would extend from national security offices to the living rooms of ordinary Americans.
Both companies have played key roles in law enforcement, homeland security and intelligence. Both have also had identity-theft and security problems.
The deal, announced yesterday by Reed Elsevier, which is based in London, is a bid to increase the company's risk-management business. It comes at a time of exploding demand for ways to establish identity, discern fraud, and detect criminal and other threats by sorting through electronic records. Companies like ChoicePoint and Reed Elsevier seek to amass vast amounts of data and to analyze the information relevant to companies and government agencies.
"We just think it's a logical next step in the use of our capabilities," said James Peck, chief executive of LexisNexis Risk and Information Analytics Group, the division that would acquire ChoicePoint.
The proposed acquisition could have important, if difficult to discern, implications for Americans, whose personal information has become more scrutinized than ever before by information companies and corporations for marketing and security.
LexisNexis and ChoicePoint flourished over the past decade, a time when computing power soared and methods of gathering data became more sophisticated. But they have different strengths, and a combined company would give them a deeper look into American homes and a combined influence on processes as varied as national-security probes, insurance claims and job applications.
"Increasingly, this is less about what big business knows and more about how business uses information to make decisions about consumers," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. "Both of these companies are having an increasing say over the opportunities that are available to consumers as well as to decisions that restrict individuals."
Since it began in 1997 as a reseller of credit data, ChoicePoint, headquartered in Alpharetta, Ga., has bought dozens of companies to become an all-purpose data broker. In recent years, the company has focused on refining data with analytical software. With a few clicks of a mouse, ChoicePoint's law enforcement, government and corporate customers can access information about personal holdings and activities.
"In a single report, ChoicePoint provides not only comprehensive data on the target of an inquiry, but also on associates, relatives, assets, affiliated companies, and neighbors, information which no other vendor offers in the same concise format," according to documents describing a 2007 contract with the Department of Energy.
ChoicePoint maintains the most extensive repository of insurance information obtained from claims applications, and it has developed systems that analyze that data to judge whether companies should offer a customer coverage or pay claims. The system, called the Comprehensive Loss Underwriting Exchange, receives data from almost every insurer about automobile and homeowners coverage.
LexisNexis, known for its legal and media services, also manages records about U.S. adults. The Risk and Information Analytics Group focuses on helping government, police and corporate customers peer into individuals' details to judge them for risk.
One of the group's more important assets is a computer system that came with the purchase in 2004 of Seisint, an information service. Seisint created a controversial tool called the Matrix, which gave state and federal authorities new power to analyze records about Americans after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. At the time, officials at LexisNexis said the technology would help government investigators who were scrambling to improve the collection, analysis and sharing of information in the war on terrorism.
Now, the Risk and Information Analytics Group works with collections firms and health-care, financial services and insurance companies, along with local, state and federal agencies.
ChoicePoint disclosed in 2005 that it had mistakenly sold personal information on 145,000 Americans to identity thieves. In 2006, it was fined $10 million by the Federal Trade Commission over its failure to protect consumers' personal data. In 2005, a security breach at LexisNexis exposed as many as 310,000 consumers' Social Security numbers, driver's license numbers, names and addresses.
ChoicePoint has since reformed its data-security practices, and some civil libertarians say it has become a leader in privacy.
Still, the proposed acquisition raises significant issues that regulators must weigh, Rotenberg said.
"These are companies that will be able to sell very detailed profiles of individuals to businesses, insurers, government agencies and others, but individuals do not currently have a right to see what information about them is being sold to third parties," he said. "That is a very big privacy issue."
Peck said the two companies' services are aimed at protecting people's identities. "When you put two organizations like ours together, we're going to be able to provide our customers -- financial institutions, health-care providers, law enforcement -- a better tool to fight identity fraud. They're actually helping to protect people rather than creating some privacy issue."
The deal, which requires approval from either the Justice Department or the FTC, is expected to close this summer.
Staff researcher Richard Drezen contributed to this report
Reed Elsevier to sell trade mags
Mark Sweney guardian.co.uk, Thursday February 21 2008 Article history
add：http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/feb/21/reedelsevier.pressandpublishing?gusrc=rss&feed=media
Reed Elsevier is to sell off its business and trade magazine division, which publishes titles including Variety, New Scientist and Estates Gazette, with predictions that it could be worth up to £1.3bn.
The company said that it had decided to sell off the Reed Business Information division because its advertising-based model and exposure to cyclical effects did not fit with its other subscription-based operations.
Reed Business Information publishes a wide range of trade and business titles including Publishers Weekly, Multichannel News, Computer Weekly, Flight International, Broadcasting and Cable, Poultry World and a large range of websites.
The potential value of the division, which has operations in countries including the US, UK, Netherlands, France, and Australia, has been put at between £1bn and £1.3bn.
"RBI is a well-managed high-quality business as evidenced by the success of its online growth and the control of costs," said Crispin Davis, the chief executive of Reed Elsevier.
The company said that no talks were yet under way with potential buyers and no timetable had been laid out for the disposal of the division.
"We are open-minded on the method and timing," said Davis.
Reed Business Information made revenues of £906m last year. Around 60% comes from advertising and 30% was earned online.
The sale of RBI will mean two of the UK's biggest trade magazine businesses have changed hands in a matter of months, following Emap's sale of its B2B operation in December for £1bn to private equity firm Apax and Guardian Media Guardian, which publishes MediaGuardian.co.uk.
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2007-12-18 13:24 December 11, 2007: 08:29 AM EST
Wolters Kluwer buys GEE compliance products portfolio from Thomson Corporation
ADD:http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/newstex/AFX-0013-21585088.htm
AMSTERDAM, Dec. 11, 2007 (Thomson Financial delivered by Newstex) -- Wolters Kluwer NV (OOTC:WOLTF) said it has bought the GEE compliance products portfolio from Thomson Corporation (TSX:TOC.B) (NYSE:TOC) (TSX:TOC) for an undisclosed sum.
Wolters Kluwer said that GEE will be integrated into Croner Group, part of the Law & Business division in the UK.
GEE provides regulatory and compliance information solutions in the UK, Wolters Kluwer said in a statement.
Thomson Financial News is a Thomson Corporation company.
By Kaj Leers, kaj.leers@thomson.com
Copyright Thomson Financial News Limited 2007. All rights reserved.
The copying, republication or redistribution of Thomson Financial News Content, including by framing or similar means, is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Thomson Financial News.
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2007-12-04 10:44 Ring! Ring! Ring!
In Japan, Novelists
Find a New Medium
Budding Scribes Peck
Their Tales on Cellphones;
Ms. Nakamura's Hurt Pinkie
By YUKARI IWATANI KANE
September 26, 2007; Page A1
add:http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB119074882854738970.html
TOKYO -- When Satomi Nakamura uses her cellphone, she has to be extra careful to take frequent breaks. That's because she isn't just chatting. The 22-year-old homemaker has recently finished writing a 200-page novel titled "To Love You Again" entirely on her tiny cellphone screen, using her right thumb to tap the keys and her pinkie to hold the phone steady. She got so carried away last month that she broke a blood vessel on her right little finger.
"PCs might be easier to type on, but I've had a cellphone since I was in sixth grade, so it's easier for me to use," says Ms. Nakamura, who has written eight novels on her little phone. More than 2,000 readers followed her latest story, about childhood sweethearts who reunite in high school, as she updated it every day on an Internet site.
In Japan, the cellphone is stirring the nation's staid fiction market. Young amateur writers in their teens and 20s who long ago mastered the art of zapping off emails and blogs on their cellphones, find it a convenient medium in which to loose their creative energies and get their stuff onto the Internet. For readers, mostly teenage girls who use their phones for an increasingly wide range of activities, from writing group diaries to listening to music, the mobile novel, as the genre is called, is the latest form of entertainment on the go.
Most of these novels, with their simple language and skimpy scene-setting, are rather unpolished. They are almost always on familiar themes about love and friendship. But they are hugely popular, and publishers are delighted with them. Book sales in Japan fell 15% between 1996 and 2006, according to the Research Institute for Publications. Several cellphone novels have been turned into real books, selling millions of copies and topping the best-seller lists. "Love Sky," one of the biggest successes so far, is about a boy with cancer who breaks up with his girlfriend to spare her the pain of his death. It has sold more than 1.3 million copies and is being made into a movie due out in November.
Many mobile novels are influenced by comic books the young writers grew up reading. That means lots of dialogue and really short paragraphs that fit nicely on a small screen. Huge empty spaces between sentences can convey that the characters are deep in thought.
In "To Love You Again," Shuhei, a high-school boy ushers his childhood sweetheart, Kaori, into an empty science room for a moment of privacy before class when someone locks the door. The following scene goes like this:
Kin Kon Kan Kon (sound of school bell ringing)
(space)
The school bell rang
(space)
"Sigh. We're missing class"
(space)
She said with an annoyed expression.
The trick is to envision a movie screen inside your head and translate those images into words, says Ms. Nakamura, the housewife with the sore pinkie.
Mobile novels first appeared about seven years ago when the community-based Web site, Maho i-Land, made it possible for budding writers to turn out stories with a cover page and chapters like a real book. About three years ago, phone companies began offering high-speed mobile Internet and affordable flat-rate plans for transmitting data. Users could then access the Internet as much as they wanted to for less than $50 a month.
![[Satomi Nakamura]](http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/HC-GK723_Nakamu_20070925233406.gif)
The now-bustling Maho i-Land has six million members, and the number of mobile novels on its site has jumped, to more than a million today from about 300,000 before the flat-rate plans cut phone bills in half. According to industrywide data cited by Japan's largest cellphone operator NTT DoCoMo Inc., sales from mobile-book and comic-book services are expected to more than double, to more than $200 million from about $90 million last year.
Mobile-novel writers like getting instant feedback from readers. That encourages them to keep going or even to change stories to suit readers. Of course, the close interaction between reader and writer can sometimes be too much. A 27-year-old woman, who wrote a sad love story called "What the Angel Gave Me" under the pen name Chaco, became so popular two years ago that she was getting 25,000 unique online visitors a day. Chaco, who won't disclose her real name, says she felt pressured to update her novel and respond to comments every day to keep readers happy.
"I was getting only one to two hours of sleep a night," says Chaco, a petite, neatly dressed woman. Her phone was ringing with email messages from fans at four in the morning. She eventually moved her Web page off the Maho i-Land's Web site onto a private site where she has more control over the feedback.
The novels with the most online readers also tend to sell well in the bookstores. Starts Publishing Corp., a small Tokyo publisher, was one of the first to take advantage of the mobile-novel genre when a Chaco fan called up and begged the company to turn her favorite story into a book. It sold 440,000 copies. Starts and a few other firms have turned more than two dozen of the most heavily accessed stories on Maho i-Land into printed books selling for about $9 each.
At that price they are collectibles. Publishers pay special attention to book design. "Clearness," a romantic tale of a female and male prostitute, has a transparent book jacket overlaid on the cover with the image of a bed sheet. To preserve the mystique of the authors, and to protect the privacy of those who write personal experience stories, publishers encourage keeping real identities a secret. Many use one-word pen names like Towa and Mika.
Published authors like Yuzuki Muroi, a 37-year-old known for her blunt essays on sex, love and single motherhood, scoff at the new genre. At an award ceremony for prize-winning mobile novelists last year, Ms. Muroi made clear her disapproval. "What is unfortunate is that your stories are mostly a string of conversation and emotion, and there is almost no setting, scene, or character development," she said.
Ms. Muroi was one of the judges for the contest last year but declined to participate this year.
Still, fans of mobile novels say the best of them are a good read. Maika Oya, a 17-year-old high-school student in southern Japan, says she likes to read dark mobile novels because they're often based on true stories and "they're more real" than the mobile novels with happy endings. "Deep Love," about a 17-year-old high-school student who has sex with men for money, is still one of her favorites.
Nobody knows how much staying power the genre will have, or whether authors who specialize in writing about their own experiences will run dry.
But some mobile novelists are determined not to let that happen. Chaco, who wrote the sad story of her romance with a boy who died in a motorcycle accident, wants to make a career of writing, and she is trying to improve her style. "I used to write whatever came to my mind without giving it much thought," she says. "But now I think a lot more about story development."
Write to Yukari Iwatani Kane at yukari.iwatani@wsj.com |
2007-12-04 10:21 In Japan, cellular storytelling is all the rage
Justin Norrie
December 3, 2007 - 10:29AM
Add：http://www.smh.com.au/news/mobiles--handhelds/in-japan-cellular-storytelling-is-all-the-rage/2007/12/03/1196530522543.html
It seems improbable, even at this early stage, that 21-year-old Rin (a nom de plume) might one day be granted a place alongside Fyodor Dostoevsky in the pantheon of literary giants.
The nursery school teacher from Kokura, in Japan's south, is celebrated for her skill with stichomythia and crude colloquialisms but not, like the great Dostoevsky, the extent to which her writing illuminates the darkest machinations of the mind.
For the time being at least, however, she is entrenched alongside the Russian master in Japan, where the two have become major best-sellers of fiction this year.
A new translation of Dostoevsky's classic The Brothers Karamazov, released in July, has surprised its publisher by notching up more than 300,000 sales already - but it is Rin's rather less challenging Moshimo Kimiga (If You ...), a 142-page hardback book about a high-school romance, that has caused the bigger fuss.
"I typed it all on my mobile phone," Rin explains matter-of-factly over the same device. "I started writing novels on my mobile when I was in junior high school and I got really quick with my thumbs, so after a while it didn't take so long. I never planned to be a novelist, if that's what you'd call me, so I'm still quite shocked at how successful it's turned out."
So successful that one volume of her book, which began its life in a series of instalments uploaded to an internet site and sent out to the phones of thousands of young subscribers, has sold more than 420,000 copies since it was converted into hardcopy format in January.
Remarkably, half of Japan's top-10 selling works of fiction in the first six months of the year were composed the same way - on the tiny handset of a mobile phone. They sold an average of 400,000 copies. By August, the president of Goma Books, Masayoshi Yoshino, was declaring in a manifesto that he was determined "to establish this not simply as a fad, but as a new kind of culture".
Conservative literary academics in Australia who have been huffing about the "radical" study in high-school English courses of SMS messages as "text" have cause to be anxious.
In just a few years, mobile phone novels - or keitai shousetsu - have become a publishing phenomenon in Japan, turning middle-of-the-road publishing houses into major concerns and making their authors a small fortune in the process.
Usually they are written by first-time writers, using one-name pseudonyms, for an audience of young female readers - who, in Japan especially, consult their mobile phones so regularly that the habit could be mistaken for a tic. The stories traverse teen romance, sex, drugs and other adolescent terrain in a succession of clipped one-liners, emoticons and spaces (used to show that a character is thinking), all of which can be read easily on a mobile phone interface. Scene and character development are notably missing. |
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