Open Access for Backlist Books, Part II: The All-Stars

Libraries know that a big fraction of their book collections never circulate, even once. The flip side of this fact is that a small fraction of a library's collection accounts for most of the circulation. This is often referred to as Zipf's law; as a physicist I prefer to think of it as another manifestation of log-normal statistics resulting a preferential attachment mechanism for reading. (English translation: "word-of-mouth".)

In my post about the value of Open Access for books, I suggested that usage statistics (circulation, downloads, etc.) are a useful proxy for the value that books generate for their readers. The logical conclusion is that the largest amount of value that can be generated from opening of the backlist comes from the books that are most used, the "all-stars" of the library, not the discount rack or the discards. If libraries are to provide funding for Open Access backlist books, shouldn't they focus their resources on the books that create the most value?

The question of course, is how the library community would ever convince publishers, who have monopolies on these books as a consequence of international copyright laws, to convert these books to Open Access. Although some sort of statutory licensing or fair-use carve-outs could eventually do the trick, I believe that Open Access for a significant number of "backlist All-Stars" can be achieved today by pushing ALL the buttons available to supporters of Open Access. Here's where the Open Access can learn from the game (and business) of baseball.

"Baseball", Henry Sandham, L. Prang & Co. (1861).
  from Digital Commonwealth

Baseball's best player, Mike Trout, should earn $33.25 million this year, a bit over $205,000 per regular season game. If he's chosen for the All-Star game, he won't get even a penny extra to play unless he's named MVP, in which case he earns a $50,000 bonus. So why would he bother to play for free? It turns out there are lots of reasons. The most important have everything to with the recognition and honor of being named as an All-Star, and with having respect for his fans. But being an All-Star is not without financial benefits considering endorsement contracts and earning potential outside of baseball. Playing in the All-Star game is an all-around no-brainer for Mike Trout.

Open Access should be an All-Star game for backlist books. We need to create community-based award programs that recognize and reward backlist conversions to OA. If the world's libraries want to spend $50,000 on backlist physics books, for example, isn't it better to spend it on the the Mike Trout of physics books than on a team full of discount-rack replacement-level players?

Competent publishers would line up in droves for major-league all-star backlist OA programs. They know that publicity will drive demand for their print versions (especially if NC licenses are used.) They know that awards will boost their prestige, and if they're trying to build Open Access publication programs, prestige and quality are a publisher's most important selling points.

The Newbury Medal

Over a hundred backlist books have been converted to open access already this year. Can you name one of them? Probably not, because the publicity value of existing OA conversion programs is negligible. To relicense an All-Star book, you need an all-star publicity program. You've heard of the Newbury Medal, right? You've seen the Newbury medal sticker on children's books, maybe even special sections for them in bookstores. That prize, award by the American Library Association every year to honor the most distinguished contributions to American literature for children, is a powerful driver of sales. The winners get feted in a gala banquet and party (at least they did in the before-times). That's the sort of publicity we need to create for open access books.

If you doubt that "All-Star Open Access" could work, don't discount the fact that it's also the right thing to do. Authors of All-Star backlist books want their books to be used, cherished and remembered. Libraries want books that measurably benefit the communities they serve. Foundations and governmental agencies want to make a difference. Even publishers who look only at their bottom lines can structure a rights conversion as a charitable donation to reduce their tax bills.

And did I mention that there could be Gala Award Celebrations? We need more celebrations, don't you think?

If your community is interest in creating an Open-Access program for backlist books, don't hesitate to contact me at the Free Ebook Foundation!

Notes

I've written about the statistics of book usage here, here and here.

This is the third in a series of posts about creating value of Open Access books. The first two are:

• Creating Value with Open Access Books
• Open Access for Backlist Books, Part I: The Slush Pile

Secret Desert Meeting Report: It Was Hot

Don't think that a relative absence of blog posts means I haven't been working hard.

Unglue.it was a first-time exhibitor at the American Library Association Annual Meeting. We talked to a lot of people. We gave out stickers. I gave a talk. I met a mermaid. Here are my observations:

• I'll bet we talked to 200 people. And of those 200, there were about 5 who weren't excited to learn about what Unglue.it is doing. That's a pretty good batting average.
• Of the 200, half said they'd heard about us or read about us somewhere. About 5 of those had actually supported one of the campaigns. And those 5 were bringing Andromeda cookies to keep her from expiring. That's hitting a lot of singles but not scoring a lot of runs. But I'm happy to report that the unglue.it team survived.
• The total attendance at ALA was around 20,000. That means we barely reached 1% of attendees. But they were a very good 1%. The number of people who have signed up to be ungluers passed 1,400. Ungluers pledged over $1500 to the campaign for Joe Nassise's Riverwatch. But Joe will make much more than that by leaving the ebook on Amazon, so it won't be our next book to unglue. We need to multiply our numbers by 10. And we will. Our 195 converts will talk to 195 more and so on. We have enough stickers.
• The mermaid was also excited about Unglue.it.
• We had some discussions that will lead to amazing things. 

After the meeting was over, The unglue.it team converged on an undisclosed desert location to figure out what to do next. We decided to get some sleep.

It gets hot in the desert. 100°F by noontime. But that didn't stop us from our mission. We had electronics. We had internet.  We had expense reimbursement policy to discuss. The words "Gold Lamé" were mentioned. World domination was considered inevitable, given enough time.

And speaking of a good batting average, Carlos Ruiz of the Philadelphia Phillies was named to the National League All-Star team today, and the honor has never been more deserved. Major-league catchers crouch and stand about 200 times a game, catching 90 mile-per-hour fast balls and curves that make the air hum. Or not, and then they have to block the ball with their bodies. They are routine smash targets for runners trying to score through their bodies. On top of this, they're expected to throw out runners, manage their pitchers,  and know the weaknesses of the opposing hitters. Oh, and hit occasionally. This year, Ruiz is leading the league in batting average, and to use a techniccal term, mashing.

There was a time when Ruiz was considered too old to be a prospect. He just needed some time.

Awesomeness takes its own time.

My Optimized Baseball Media Diet and Why Motoko Rich Can't Count

40 years ago I started following the Philadelphia Phillies. I think that it started the month that my family rented a beach house on Long Beach Island. Every morning I would walk to the store to buy a newspaper- the Philadephia Inquirer- because I wanted to read everything about Apollo 11. After the astronauts got home safely I continued my morning newspaper ritual, and that's when I started reading about the baseball. Between then and now, there were some years when it was hard to follow my team, and I don't mean because they were bad. When I lived in California, the local newspapers barely covered my team, even though it was a National League city. I would study the boxscores and the three sentences in the AP summaries to retain an emotional connection to my team. That's when I first imagined a newspaper of the future that could be customized and printed for me so that I could have the New York Times front page along with an Inquirer sports page with my morning coffee. Then the internet happened, and all of a sudden I could track the Phillies games on Yahoo Sports and read articles on the Inquirer's web site, Philly.com, even though I was living in Mets and Yankees-land. I barely read the sports section of my local paper any more. With cable television, I could watch games whenever the Phils played Atlanta or the Mets. My baseball media diet had reverted to what it was growing up, except now I got it over wires instead of the airwaves and on paper. Over the past three years, however, my baseball media diet has changed profoundly, and not just because the Phillies won the World Series. This season, I was able to watch most games on my iPhone or on my laptop via MLB.com. Every day I read the blog of the best sports writer covering the Phillies, Jason Weitzel. I get breaking news via Twitter from Scott Lauber, a writer for some paper in Wilmington, Delaware. I read game summaries from Todd Zolecki and other writers who work for MLB.com. I read news about Phillies prospects at PhuturePhillies.com, and I read stat-head analysis (partly enabled by huge volumes of game transactional data released by major league baseball) at the Hardball Times. In my optimized Phillies media diet, there's not much role for traditional media, or even for transitional media aggregators like Yahoo or Philly.com. The media providors I've ended up with have all specialized in areas of strength. I don't have to endure sports writers I don't like just because they've managed to gain special access to the flow of information. The same sort of change is happening all over the landscape of news reporting. Two weeks ago, I had a chance to see first hand how the professional media reported a rather minor event in a story I'd been following quite closely. I went to a federal courtroom in New York and witnessed a meeting of a judge and the parties of a lawsuit involving Google, copyright and ebooks. At the end of my report, I added links to other reports published about the same event. It's interesting to read these reports, and think about how they fit into an optimized media diet. The most knowledgable report was by James Grimmelmann, a professor at NYU law school. Those of us who have followed the lawsuit closely have come to rely on Prof. Grimmelmann's blog for insight into the relevant law. The best written coverage, in my opinion, was that of Motoko Rich of the New York Times. She condensed the event down to its bare essence, and chose exactly the right story lines. At the event, I watched her in action. After its conclusion, she made a beeline for a publishing executive, sitting two seats away from me, and asked him exactly the right question. But it seems Motoko Rich made a small mistake. If you compare her well-written story with my notes-dump, you'll note a tiny discrepancy. She reports that there were "fewer than 70 people" in the courtroom. I was amazed to see so many people, and it was my very first time in a Federal courtroom, so I decided to make a careful count. There were four rows of benches, filled with 12 people each. There were 8 members of the press seated in the jury box. There were 8 attorneys for the parties and the Department of Justice at the lawyers tables. Seated along the back wall were 16 people, eight on each side. So not including the Judge and his staff or the courtroom official and security, there were 80 people in the courtroom. Where did Motoko Rich's "fewer than 70" number come from? Perhaps she meant to write "more than 70". Perhaps an editor or fact-checker could believe that so many people could fit in the courtroom. I don't know. I left a comment on the Times' website, but for whatever reason it was not approved. Perhaps the correction was considered so trivial that it was better to leave the mistake in the story. In fact, version of the story put the number at "approximately 70 people", and the print version omitted any reference to the audience size. This episode got me thinking about the proper role of professional reporters in my media diet. I don't expect a reporter to have the expertise of a Law Professor, but I really want people like Motoko Rich to be asking the right people piercing questions. Although I can go to the same event that she can, it's just not my job to badger people with questions, even if I do happen to know them. But having been accustomed to the accountability of sports reporting that has to stand up to hundreds of reader comments, I would really like to see similar accountability in the news reporting I read. It should matter more, not less. I'm also worried about the business models that support my news sources. I hope that Jason Weitzel is making enough from his blog to support himself- he's probably made only a few dollars from me (I bought his book last year). I'm glad Scott Lauber is supported by his newspaper, but it has close to zero revenue from me. Major League Baseball is getting significant revenue from me- I hope they're smart enough to add to the media that they support. Whith the whole news industry experiencing the wholesale rearrangement of roles that has already happened for me for baseball, what is a reporter to do? Should she focus on developing contacts, asking questions and crafting stories, or should she focus more on building a reader contituency? Should a "newspaper" business focus on aggregating news or nurturing reporters? Should it be building a information access platform, or should it be developing a community news resource? Maybe it should be contributing to the cloud of linked data. I don't have answers for these questions, but I can tell you why you should trust me to count courtroom spectators more accurately than Motoko Rich. I'm taller than she is. I can see better over people's heads. And somehow we should figure out a way for Motoko Rich's physical stature to not be relevant to her stature as a reporter.