Philosopher Tim O'Reilly Lights Up Publishing

Tim O'Reilly, Founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, didn't mean to become a publisher, he just fell into it. He started out doing technical documentation by accident because a friend who was a programmer was asked to write a manual but didn't know how. O'Reilly had written a book about Frank Herbert, and agreed to help. After doing consulting for a while, he noticed that all his clients wanted manuals for the same software, so he started to retain his rights so he could sell the same manual over and over again. He never wanted to be a publisher; the job he wanted to do was to "spread the knowledge of innovators".

That single-minded attention to "doing a job" has set him apart from many of his colleagues in publishing, because it has led his company into efforts that focus on spreading knowledge rather than selling books. He recognized that by publishing books, he was taking an oral culture around technology and translating it into a written culture.

Early on, O'Reilly expanded into conferences. He found that despite the strong sales of "Programming Perl", no one was talking about or spreading the word about Perl. He organized a "Party for Perl" and a lot of people showed up. The resulting conference business built on the realization that his best selling books were being written by innovators who had no place to get to know each other and spread their innovations.

Another direction that grew naturally out of O'Reilly's focus on spreading knowledge was a digital distribution business. O'Reilly had taken the trouble to figure out how to do some of the messy bits in selling digital versions of their books, so when other publishers saw what they had, they were happy to have O'Reilly help them do the same.

O'Reilly was interviewed in front of a room full of New York publishers on Wednesday as part of a series of interviews produced by the Publishing Point group. He  combined an enthusiasm for the changes sweeping publishing with a missional faith in its practicality. Yet many of his themes were deeply at odds with the conventional wisdom of traditional publishers, and he claims not to be a publisher at all from a philosophical point of view. O'Reilly wants to see more innovation in pricing, and thinks that people will buy more books - and spend more, if ebooks are more moderately priced. Publishers trying to preserve the pricing of print books in the shift to ebooks are not following a winning strategy, according to O'Reilly.

O'Reilly's notions of what's NOT important for publishing were surprising to hear. They're shaped by O'Reilly's formative experiences in publishing. He claims to fight the notion that publishing is about quality. His first books sold even though they didn't have an index or an ISBN, or even a spine. They didn't have pretty formatting, but they had good information, and they paid attention to the things that mattered for the job they were meant to do. In a book about programming, the code samples needn't look good, but they do need to be correct, without extra spaces that break syntax. They were selling  books for $5, and people would call up from Europe asking them to overnight a copy.

He's also skeptical of the notion that an important role of publishers is curation.

In the old days, we had a long period where it was fairly clear what were the hard things that publishers did. To be quite honest, It was NOT curating the content and finding great stuff. I think that's certainly part of what a publisher does, you know winnow through the chaff and find something really great. It's still part of what you have to do. But I think It's seductive to think 'we're really good at that'.

O'Reilly learned not to overvalue curation the hard way. At the very start of the internet, O'Reilly developed a website called GNN (for Global Network Navigator) which selected the very best websites from the internet and organized them into categories. "We had a publisher's mindset. We said: we're going to winnow through all these emerging world-wide web sites, and we're going to pick out the ones that are the best." You've probably not heard of GNN; that's because Yahoo came along and categorized all the websites it could find, not just the good ones. Google then came along and made Yahoo's categorization irrelevant by indexing all the pages on the web without even bothering to categorizing the web sites.

According to O'Reilly, "Manual curation is going to get it wrong a lot." He mentioned that Frank Herbert's bestseller "Dune" was turned down by over 50 publishers until it was finally published by Chilton's, a publisher of automobile repair manuals, of all things!

Michael Healy, the interviewer for the day, wanted to clarify what he heard O'Reilly saying. "With the notion of curation having been disrupted, if you're a general trade publisher and you're relying on curation as your value-add, are you screwed, or have I missed something?"

"It's certainly true that alot of my thinking is biased by the fact that I publish stuff that people need rather than the stuff that they just want, so I'm not sure how deep my insight goes into the problems of general trade publishing."

Audience member Bill Glass expressed concern about the low prices for ebooks. He pointed to the room (in the Random House building overlooking Broadway), and asked "In the ebook world of the future, will we still be able to afford THIS?"

To me, you gotta care about something more than preserving your business. Because, obviously companies have made these types of transitions, and this is just my personal response. We're all gonna die one day anyway and we'll lose all our stuff. So don't worry too much about it. Just do something that lights you up, and lights up your customers, and lights up the world and scale to that. Because what's going to happen is people who are lit up by the future are going to be pursuing that future, and the people who hold onto the past are going to hold on too long.

Amen.

Are Public Libraries in a Death Spiral?

The year and a half that I worked for Intel was marked by a sharp recession in the semiconductor industry. Most of the industry was plagued with a boom and bust cycle; during the busts, most companies laid off staff. Intel had at that point managed to avoid layoffs, and Andy Grove, Intel's hard-charging President, wanted to protect that record. He came up with a program called the "125% solution". As an alternative to layoffs, Grove asked Intel employees to work 50 hours a week instead of 40, without a pay increase.  We were told that we would work our way through the recession by developing new products.

The management of the Technology Development division, where I worked, had a hard time with this plan. At the meeting where they explained the program to us, they anticipated the obvious question. "No, this doesn't mean you should cut back your hours to 50 from the 50-80 hours some of you have been working." Even so, most of us were relieved that there would be no layoffs, and the line workers felt the same way.

I apologize in advance if this article comes off a bit Grove-ish, but I've become increasingly worried about the future of public libraries. It's not just the large library budget cuts that seem to be pandemic across the country (see the list below if you need any confirmation) but it's the way that budget cuts are preventing preventing libraries from addressing the fundamental changes that are occuring in the ways that people interact with books.

A favorite budget-cutting tactic of public library directors seems to be curtailment of opening hours (with branch-closing a close second). To me, this seems like the worst possible thing for a public library to do. It's as if Andy Grove had told us that we needed to get rid of 25% of our customers. Public library funding comes from the public, and the best way to convince the public that their library deserves more funding is to get the public inside the library doors.

Public Broadcasting is a good example for public libraries (and a competitor for donor support). Does public radio turn off their transmitter when they need money? No, they put on specially good programming and have pledge drives. My local library puts donor names on bricks; I'd like to see libraries put donor names on opening hours.

Tough economic times are exactly when public libraries are needed the most. The assistance that libraries offer to people looking for work, training for new occupations, learning to read, or finding social networks makes public libraries valuable parts of their communities, but that doesn't happen when the doors are locked. I can imagine a future where public library services are online and always open, but that's not today's reality.

One argument for cutting hours might be that the visibility of these cuts makes it easier to restore funding when the economic cycle turns. This may have been true in the past, but I think that the funding that goes away this year will never come back. The way most people access information has changed profoundly since the last economic downturn. A library that reduces its hours is just training its public to meet information needs elsewhere, and that public isn't going to rush back. The library's funding will get cut again and again, and eventually it will have to close its doors.

The public library of the future has to stop being about collections and start being about helping people and communities. Google can't be a physical place where people offer access, assistance and education for the internet and the information it accesses; local public libraries CAN be.   It's these "new" directions that will attract renewed public support and funding into the future. But library directors struggling to deal with budget cuts will find it hard to also reposition their services to meet the needs of an increasingly internet-based society.

Although I don't like cutting hours, it's not like there are lots of alternatives. Libraries with slashed budgets have painful cuts to make. Difficult choices will be made on acquisitions, staff, buildings, user fees, organizational mergers and consolidations. If you're involved with a library that's going through this, don't give up.

Intel survived that recession, and gave us beer mugs to celebrate the end of the "125% Solution". But it didn't escape the endless spiral of economic expansion and contraction. The next contraction cycle combined with competition from Japan to force Intel to lay off many workers and re-examine its businesses. Intel left the DRAM business to focus on microprocessors. You can read the rest of the story...in the library. (Or at Amazon)

Funding cuts in libraries (thanks to Gary Price at ResourceShelf, the Library Journal Funding Page, and LISNews for many of the links):

• Philadelphians protest library cuts
• New York Area Libraries face budget cuts
• Troy, Michigan library to close
• Los Angeles libraries cut hours
• Toledo Ohio library cuts
• DC Library reduces staff
• Pasadena library may sit empty
• Fair Lawn New Jersey cutting hours
• Salem Wisconsin library cutting programs
• Dallas, Texas
• Decatur, Illinois budget cuts
• Birmingham, Alabama budget cuts
• Wilkes County, North Carolina cuts staff
• Siskiyou County, California Library likely to close
• Prescott, Arizona library cuts hours
• More cuts in Bakersfield California
• Job cuts at Shenandoah County Library
• New Boston library president pushes branch closings
• Montgomery County, Maryland budget cuts force library to re-evaluate mobile services
• Illinois library system layoffs
• Alliance Library System, Illinois cuts services
• Shawnee Library System, Illinois
• Youngstown, Ohio funding shortfalls
• Las Vegas, Nevada reduces service hours and staff
• Lewis & Clark Library System forced to suspend services
• Illinois Regional systems cut
• Indianapolis, Indiana may close branches
• Tacoma, Washington library in crosshairs
• Jacksonville, Florida cuts hours
• Houston, Texas library system to cut hours
• Mineral County, West Virginia to cut hours
• Hoboken, New Jersey faces cuts
• Dallas, Texas libraries slashed
• Pomona, California library to cut hours
• Kansas City libraries propose cuts
• Hood River, Oregon Library to close
• Charlotte Mecklenburg to close branches
• Portland, Maine to close branches
• Lexington, Kentucky library to cut staff
• Muncie, Indiana to close locations
  

Death, another unsolved problem. Wait... Facebook says it's a "Known Problem"

Last September, the library world lost one of its really nice people and great resources. Johan van Halm was one of those people I would see at practically every conference I went to. I remember meeting him a bit more than 10 years ago when I had just started in the library and information business. He went out of his way to introduce me to many of his friends, and I soon realized that he knew just about everyone in the library automation world. We would make it a point to get together for a drink at least once every ALA. I really miss him.

But I'm not writing about Johan today- but I had to get that out of the way. I wanted to write about LinkedIn. You see, Johan is a "connection" of mine on LinkedIn. Every time I look at the list of my connections on LinkedIn, there I see Johan, living on forever in social network space. I could remove him as a connection, of course, but somehow that just doesn't seem right. Also, LinkedIn encourages you to treat your connections and the network they expoe to you as valuable assets and protects them accordingly. In contrast, your Facebook and Twitter "friends" are by default exposed to just about everyone. So on LinkedIn, it would not be to one's advantage to unconnect with someone just because they've left the corporeal parts of this life.

I hope you're sitting down, dear reader, because I have some serious things to discuss with you. Neither you nor I are going to be forever avoid "becoming deceased". However, to make this bleak situation a bit easier to swallow, let's assume, just for fun, that both you and are are going to live forever. In that case, I can pretty much guarantee you that everyone who is following you now on Twitter, all your Facebook Friends, all your LinkedIn Connections, all the friends of your friends, and even all the email accounts that you send jokes to, they will all either pass away into inactivity or become zombies controlled by someone else who is probably not your friend or connection.

Now it might just be that all the social networks we have become so enthralled with have just assumed that they themeselves will have gone belly-up or will have gone through their liquidity event before the death problem becomes severe. Or more likely, its just that they experence such a large volume of accounts fading away into inactivity that having users die is only a small perturbation on their services. But it is certainly the case that as these services become more important to our lives, the fact that we are not immortal increasingly must be addressed.

LinkedIn has done it this way:

What if I see a Profile of someone who is deceased?

Unfortunately, there may be a time when you come across a Profile of a deceased colleague, classmate or connection. If this occurs you are welcome to notify Customer Service that the Profile still exists and may need to be removed. We ask that you provide any important information about the deceased member that may aid our Privacy Department in their investigations and act on the account accordingly. Items to provide in your email would be one or two of the following:

1. An Obituary Link.
2. A Death Notice.
3. Consular Report of Death.
4. Death Certificate.

The profile "may need to be removed"?????

Facebook is also ready with a policy:

Profile: Bugs and Known Problems

I’d like to report a deceased user or an account that needs to be memorialized.

Please report this information here so that we can memorialize this person’s account. Memorializing the account removes certain more sensitive information like status updates and restricts profile access to confirmed friends only. Please note that in order to protect the privacy of the deceased user, we cannot provide login information for the account to anyone. We do honor requests from close family members to close the account completely.

"Bugs and Known Problems"???? There are some other odd results when you search Facebook help for "death", and following one of these results, you get: a link to Facebook's "Deceased" page.

GMail has an elaborate paper based procedure to access a deceased person's mail:

Accessing a deceased person's mail

If an individual has passed away and you need access to the content of his or her mail, please fax or mail us the following information:

1. Your full name and contact information, including a verifiable email address.
2. The Gmail address of the individual who passed away.
3. a.The full header from an email message that you have received at your verifiable email address, from the Gmail address in question. (To obtain the header from a message in Gmail, open the message, click 'More options,' then click 'Show original.' Copy everything from 'Delivered-To:' through the 'References:' line. To obtain headers from other webmail or email providers, please refer to http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=22454#) b.The entire contents of the message.
4. Proof of death.
5. One of the following: a) if the decedent was 18 or older, please provide a proof of authority under local law that you are the lawful representative of the deceased or his or her estate or b) if the decedent was under the age of 18 and you are the parent of the individual, please provide a copy of the decedent’s birth certificate.

Postal Mail:

Google Inc.
Attention: Gmail User Support
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043
Fax: 650-644-0358 After we've received the above information, we'll need 30 days to process and validate the documents that you've provided. If you need access to the address sooner, in accordance with state and federal law, it is Google's policy to only provide information pursuant to a valid third party court order or other appropriate legal process. Please note that our ability to ability to comply with these requests varies according to applicable law.

I'll bet that even if you have made a last will and testament, you've not included any instructions there about what your executor is to do with your email accounts, your blog passwords, your websites, your social networks. Probably your family might want access to your flickr and youtube account. Also, if you think about it, you don't really want your executor poking around in your e-mails, especially that address you use only for illicit activity.

Part of my interest in the death problem stems from my interest in the Google Book Search settlement. You see, book authors and publishers have been ignoring the death problem for much longer than the Facebooks and Gmails of the world have been. The result is that many works are "orphaned", which means that the rights holders cannot be found or died without leaving instructions or documention about what to do with their intellectual property. It's worse outside the US, because the duration of copyright protection frequently depends on the death date of the author, which can be rather difficult to ascertain. Now that we have the technology to make out-of-print books in libraries generally available through the internet, the corpus of orphan works is once again important, but copyright law presents barriers to many uses, particularly those with economic value less that the cost of finding rights holders and obtaining permissions.

Do you think that perhaps Google is saving its deceased-person access requests for the day 50 years from now when they will become relevant to copyright status? I'll bet the answer is NO.