Wild West

Holding the odd bestseller aside, the digital disruption of the print world that is transforming commercial publishing also affects publishers of scholarly books and journals-and is changing structures for teaching, research, and hiring and promoting professors. Time-honored traditions appear vulnerable to overhaul or even extinction. Sarah Thomas, vice president for the Harvard Library and Larsen librarian for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, says, "We are still in the Wild West of sorting out how we will communicate our academic developments effectively." Consider the situation of academic presses.

Is Social Media to Blame for the Increase in Graphic Images in the Media? (Media Shift) Social media platforms are the Wild West of publication. Journalists and traditional news publishers are no longer the primary information “gatekeepers” of public discourse; neither are they able to impose their professional publication standards and ethics on social media […]

The post Morning Roundup: Same-day delivery doesn’t best bookstores. If we were Patterson appeared first on TeleRead: News and views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics.

The e-book may be the future but it is not yet working, according to librarians and scholarly publishers speaking to the annual meeting of the Special Libraries Association in Chicago in late July.

‘Where are we? In the Wild West,’ Rebecca Vargha of the University of North Carolina’s Library told the meeting during her discussion about ‘e-books: promises and realities’. She noted: ‘I don’t think there is an optimal model yet. Students and instructors are dissatisfied with the content and the interface of e-books.’

It's well-known that reference books generally have been suffering lately, another facet of the industry that has been affected by the Internet and consumers' easy access to free information. "For 2009, revenue-wise, … we estimated reference book sales would fall much [more] than that of the other categories we expected to do poorly this year …," says Michael Norris, senior analyst at Simba Information, a market research and consulting firm in Stamford, Conn. "The simple reason is that consumers have a different relationship with reference-book content than they do with, say, a great work of fiction or an engaging biography. They mostly just need a snippet of information here and there, and being that the Web houses a lot of what a consumer thinks he or she needs, few are bothering to buy traditional reference books."

The education market has made major technological strides—but in some ways, it’s still a bit behind the learning curve. You hear it all the time—the joke that kids these days come out of the womb with a laptop. More than making for a painful birth, it signifies that the Internet is the future of business, in both sales and marketing. Still, most educational publishing orders are made through paper channels, and direct mail continues to be the major method to attract sales. Then again, teachers are making these purchases much more frequently than the more tech-entrenched students. “You’d think the Internet would be the main