University of California Press Blog

UC Press and JSTOR to Create Shared Online Platform

University of California Press and JSTOR, the leading journals archive hosting platform, are pleased to announce their partnership in the Current Scholarship Program, which will bring legacy and current content from all UC Press journals together on a single platform.

From 2011, libraries, researchers, and readers will be able to find UC Press content on an integrated and updated JSTOR platform, with a single point of access and purchase.

Faculty and students will be able to access all licensed content on JSTOR--both current and back issues, along with a growing set of primary source materials.

Libraries will be able to buy content either title-by-title or as part of a Current Scholarship collection simply by checking a box online to add to add them to current JSTOR holdings, and will benefit from a consolidated JSTOR invoice for all titles on the platform.

For more information on UC Press journals, or the Current Scholarship Program please see our joint press release (PDF).

Taste Fine Wines, Visit Old California, and Explore the History of Life on Earth

UC Press will unveil three brand-new series this fall. The new arrivals travel to Champagne, Tuscany, and colonial California, and to the forefront of systematic biology. The fall season also marks the debut of UC Publishing Services (UCPubS), a sustainable system combining print and digital publishing for scholarly books.

UC Press has about one hundred and thirty series in print. They introduce students to ancient philosophies, chronicle excavations of hominid remains in Ethiopia’s Middle Awash region, celebrate food and culture, reveal California's natural wonders, and explore many other subjects. The new series, The World’s Finest Wines, Western Histories, and Species and Systematics, each have two books due this fall.

The experienced palate can trace a glass of Chianti back to the sprawling vineyards of Tuscany, and a celebratory sip of Champagne back to its namesake province in rural France. In THE WORLD’S FINEST WINES series, the experts behind World of Fine Wine magazine profile these and other classic regions, capturing each area's complex character. In The Finest Wines of Tuscany and Central Italy, Nicholas Belfrage visits more than ninety producers, selects his one hundred favorite wines, and reviews all the best vintages. In The Finest Wines of Champagne, Michael Edwards takes us on a terroir-based journey through the ultimate sparkling wine region. Exploring both traditions and trends, he tastes the most interesting wines, including two decades of vintages. 

SPECIES AND SYSTEMATICS is a scholarly series that investigates fundamental and practical aspects of systematics and taxonomy. Malte Ebach, co-author of Comparative Biogeography, is the series editor.  
    Earth and life share a complex history that stretches far beyond the origin of our species. Yet if we look closely enough at the mountains, oceans, and organisms of today, the entire history of life on earth can unfold before our eyes. To unlock these elusive secrets, biogeographers analyze patterns of biodiversity, species distribution, and geological history. In the landmark text Comparative Biogeography, Lynne Parenti and Malte Ebach outline a comparative approach to biogeography, rooted in phylogenetic systematics.
    Like organisms themselves, the idea and meaning of “species” has evolved over time. In Species, John Wilkins chronicles this concept's evolution from antiquity to the present. "Few topics have engaged biologists and philosophers more than the concept of species, and arguably no idea is more important for evolutionary science,” says Joel Cracraft of the American Museum of Natural History. Adds UC Berkeley’s Kevin Padian of the book: "This is not the potted history that one usually finds in texts and review articles." 

WESTERN HISTORIES is a new series published by the Huntington Library Press and the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, in partnership with the University of California Press. Drawing on the resources and programs of these institutions, the series enriches our understanding of California and the American West.    
    It is always fascinating to imagine what life was like for those who lived and died before our time. How did the people of the past see themselves and their worlds? In Alta California, Steven Hackel collects nine essays examining individual and collective identity in Spanish California. Innovative and extensively researched, the essays bring to light the perspectives of colonial California’s diverse population.
    In The Father of All, the Oakland Museum of California’s chief history curator Louise Pubols presents an illuminating study of the powerful de la Guerra family of Santa Barbara. Through their story, and analysis of the era’s political and economic upheaval, she reveals how patriarchy functioned through the generations in Spanish and Mexican California. 

UC Press and the California Digital Library are pleased to announce University of California Publishing Services (UCPubS). This integrated system combines print distribution, sales, and marketing services offered by UC Press with the open access digital publishing services provided by the California Digital Library through eScholarship. UCPubS is part of the University of California’s broader effort to ensure a sustainable scholarly publishing system in the service of research and teaching. Here's a preview of the UCPubS books coming this fall:

Nietzsche's Negative Ecologies, by Malcolm Bull, T.J. Clark, & Anthony Cascardi

Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury and Free Speech, by Talal Asad, Judith Butler, Saba Mahmood, & Wendy Brown

Stories from Schools: Case Studies of the California Academic Partnership Program, edited by Alice Kawazoe

Hard Work, Hard Times: Global Volatility and African Subjectives, by Anne-Maria Makhulu, Beth A. Buggenhagen, & Stephen Jackson

Reflections from My First Charleston Conference: The Buzz about Ebooks

The Charleston Conference has quickly become a place where libraries, vendors, and publishers come together to talk about what's next for digital collection development. This year's program seemed particularly appealing, so I was looking forward to checking out the conference for the first time.

While there is still tremendous skepticism about what I call the “ipod moment” for the book industry (whether there will ever be a killer device for reading ebooks) there was little doubt that library users want access to books away from the library. Fellow attendees confirmed that the rigorous attention to ebooks in session after session was new to this year’s conference. Here is my list of the top themes from Charleston as they relate to ebooks.

1.    A Business Model for Everyone. Book publishers need to understand how libraries buy electronic content: through resellers, buying clubs, cooperative collection development groups, and consortia. Publishers also need to make sure that their ebooks are incorporated into approval plans through Blackwell, Yankee Book Peddler and others (many libraries are now considering ebook-preferred approval plans). It’s important to offer a variety of business models, directly and through different vendors, with a great deal of flexibility for libraries to fit buying into current systems and to deal with budget issues. Publishers should look at new business model trends, particularly the trend toward patron/demand-driven purchasing.

2.    Providing Quality Metadata is What We Do. One of the key ways publishers can add significant amounts of value to their ebooks is to make them easily discoverable through library channels. Part of this is the quality of ONIX data being pushed out to vendors and librarians (correct author names, consistent series names, and making clear if a title is a reprint or reissue were just a few specifics mentioned over and over again) and developing effective MARC records. The second part is to provide new title info at least six months prior to publication date, publish print and electronic simultaneously (no embargoes), work with vendors to add value to your data, and provide lots of context: cover art, tables of contents, reviews, pricing, subjects, series, level, reprints, availability, call numbers, subjects, descriptions, and, internally, cross-references. 

3.    Beyond the Book and Journal. The conference had only limited talk about new kinds of scholarship being done, or publication outside of the book or journal container. Toby Green, Head of Publishing, Organization of Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), gave a standing-room only presentation on the work he is doing with datasets and the challenges OECD has faced in publishing this kind of content. This week the OECD will issue a white paper on Publishing Standards for Datasets and is also looking to work with a partner to make its technology available to other publishers. Green also demonstrated several projects innovating in the presentation of complex data: Gapminder (now being developed by Google), Mappingworlds, and Swivel.

4.    Digital Rights Management and Intellectual Property. Although publishers and libraries may still disagree about what falls under fair use, Digital Rights Management technologies continue to dissuade users and prevent significant uptake of ebooks. See my past blog entry on this issue.

5.    Textbooks, Textbooks, Textbooks. Every librarian wanted textbooks and noted the rise of online instruction and access. But are libraries willing or able to take over the cost of those textbooks if it shifts from student’s pocketbooks to library budgets? Kate Price at Library of Surrey recognized that libraries and publishers may need to negotiate special business models that suit both parties. Another speaker suggested a model where a library buys etextbooks for their premium prices and charges students a reasonable fee for access. There is a pent-up demand for these titles, so experiments with premium pricing in this area would be useful.

6.    License Negotiations are a Pain—for Everyone. Every librarian begged and pleaded for publishers to use the library’s model license or, at the least, the SERU model license. Is it realistic? Publishers don’t seem convinced. One of the main issues may be SERU’s perpetual access requirement, especially for certain types of ebook packages.

7.    Budgets for eBooks and other eResources. Expect that only about a quarter of the library’s overall budget is being used for books—the rest is for journals and other electronic resources. A high percentage of the library budget is already committed at the beginning of the year, with only a small percentage of discretionary funds. To deal with budgeting issues, many libraries are shifting their collections focus to institutional strengths and local and unique collections. As it’s not always cheaper for a library to go completely e with books, it will be interesting to see what the rise of the ebook will mean for the library budget.

8.    Interface Thresholds. Hope Barton, Director of Central Technical Services at University of Iowa Libraries, noted that a user can only master about three or four different interfaces. Many speakers remarked that one of the challenges to ebook use is that, unlike journals, there is no standard user interface. Sometimes librarians referred to the UI as a “platform”, but I suspect that it’s not about whether you’re using ebrary or MyiLibrary; rather whether these and other platforms are providing standardized methods for browsing, searching, reading, etc.

9.    Keep in Touch. In general, publishers need to be more in tune with library concerns—from the basics of invoices and fulfillment to broader issues related to scholarly communications. Librarians actually want to be consulted during the product development process, and both librarians and university presses are interested in the same subjects: preservation, contextualizing content, discovering content, demonstrating value to the institution, and developing trust in electronic content among users.

10.    Case Studies to Case Out. I didn’t catch every ebook case study presented during the conference, but here are a few case studies to watch: OhioLINK, a consortium of 89 libraries and 600,000 users, is trying a variety of new business models; Georgia State University has been working on their own ebook experiment for several years; North Carolina University is also working on expanding ebook buying and recommends that publishers need to try every kind of model for their ebooks; Kate Price from the Library of Surrey gave an excellent presentation on their growing portfolio of ebooks and the challenges they’ve faced in the process of developing their collection; and University of Texas is testing out demand-driven purchasing models.

Laura Cerruti is Director of Digital Content Development at University of California Press

Another E Ink Reader Joins the Fray

Today, the NY Times announced a new e-newspaper reader from Plastic Logic. No, this is still not the publishing industry's iPod moment. Still, it's interesting to note that new iterations of E Ink readers are appearing in faster cycles and that more companies are entering into the fray.

A question for readers of this post who resent the fact that they have to read it on screen: is the back-lit screen a major reason that you don't currently like to read books, newspapers, and magazines on you computer or PDA?

Laura Cerruti is Director of Digital Content Development at University of California Press

Response to the latest from Ithaka: "Sustainability and Revenue Models for Online Academic Resources"

Once again, Ithaka has done a great service to the scholarly publishing community. Their report on sustainability for online academic resources (OAR) is another important contribution to the literature. Following are a few thoughts I had on the report.

Ithaka does an excellent job of characterizing the personality of OARs. I appreciated its forceful recommendation that OARs need to adapt the techniques used in the business world for determining the viability of their projects. Although many “chose a life in the academic environment and culture,” (section 2 introduction) to avoid market pressures, the truth is that those in the public sector are also competing for limited money and even more limited time and attention span.

The emphasis on the user assessment process and market research, cautioning against “a single product aimed at a single market” (summary #4) and pointing out that “most online academic resources invest too little in market research” (summary), seems quite central to this idea. Could this be a good project for Ithaka or another like-minded organization: a user assessment and market research how-to guide for OARs?

I would also like to see Ithaka follow up on some of their “areas for futher research” including, “how much is spend on subscription fees worldwide?” (Section 4.1.a). As a part of this, it would be useful to have some historic data on who is subscribing and how the proportion of dollars spend on subscriptions has shifted, and where that money has shifted from.

It's always helpful to hear “most would counsel the project to fail early and often, to develop the capability for rapid cycles of experimentation, rather than spending multiple years attempting to build the optimal resource in isolation from the market.” This is the basis of the Agile IT manifesto and one that always bears repeating. See: http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html and also the powerpoints from “The Agile It Organization” presentation at the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) 2008 annual meeting. In a print world, the work needs to be perfect before it hits the press. In a digital world, it's about quick prototyping and churning quickly through new versions. Sounds great, but it's a real paradigm shift for a world that is very much about conferring reward on a static product of research.

I agree that pay-per-view interest (4.1.b) is increasing. At SSP, a librarian said she would be thrilled if the library could stop paying for institutional subscriptions (and making difficult decisions about where they should spend their money) and reallocated money directly to scholars to invest in pay-per-view. This shift is not going to happen any time soon, but I thought it was an insightful comment.

With Open Access still a hot topic for OARs, the contributor pays model (4.1.c.) brings up all sorts of interesting questions. Well-established in STM publishing, it's greeted with suspicion by those in the humanities and social sciences: “resistance among faculty to the author pays model because of associations with vanity publishing.” Some that I've talked to in H&SS assume that OA is equivalent to free, when it is really just free-to-the-user. In terms of revenue growth issues “if the publication only accepts author fees for those works it chooses to publish,” I'm interested in models where posting and review are open to all, followed by a second, unrelated selection process, which constitutes final acceptance/certification under a particular publication's brand. Also at issue is brand and certification in an OA environment: can having a strong university press or society brand counteract concerns about vanity publishing? What happens to perceptions of that brand if all submissions are posted if not officially "published"?

I did notice a few omissions. I was surprised the institutional repositories were not sited more explicitly in the “host institutional funds/in-kind contributions” section (2.2.a). In section 2.2.b on corporate sponsorships, I thought they missed out on talking about recent university associations with Microsoft and Google. Was it too much of a minefield? Even so, these have been some of the largest content partnerships to date.

It is useful to have advertising included among the business models, but how realistic is it for OARs? Advertising models depend on traffic: how much traffic should a site anticipate? Under “how much revenue can a scholarly resource generate from advertising,” the report uses the scale of two million page views per month. That is a lot of page views. Tim O'Reilly outlined the challenges of advertising revenue in his keynote at O'Reilly's Tools for Publishing Change conference and Scott Gray included a slide on this in his talk, “Adding Enough Value to Digital Content to Actually Make Money” at O'Reilly's Tools for Publishing Change. I think advertising could be an unrealistic model for most academic sites, but I'd be curious to hear from anyone who has made this model work.

Also see Wired's How-To wiki for more business model ideas.

Laura Cerruti is Director of Digital Content Development at UC Press.

Keeping an Eye on the Music Industry

Today, the New York Times posted an article MySpace and Record Companies Create Music Site, which is not surprising and probably long overdue. The more options and opportunities that media has for delivering electronic content easily to the user, the better off our industry will be.

A while back, I promised to blog about a session I saw at the O'Reilly conference on what the book industry can learn from the music industry. Here, finally, is that post.

Far and away the best session I attended at O'Reilly's Tools of Change for Publishing conference was DRM, Digital Content, and the Consumer Experience by Kirk Biglione of Medialoper. Publishers are constantly thinking about issues of digital rights management (the industry term for any effort to use technology to protect copyrighted work). My  own opinions change from day to day as I receive new information and watch trends. After this talk, I became pretty convinced the Biglione was onto something.

The first thing Biglione pointed out is that the book industry is simply waiting for its iPod moment. Kindle may not be it, but the next generation of devices may be. All media will be digital, and if we let fear of piracy and fear of changing business models stymie us, we will be left behind.

DRM of any kind, from the most "secure" to the mildly obtrusive (watermarking, for example), simply doesn't prevent pirates from being pirates. Instead, it prevents legitimate users from accessing the content that they desire in the form that they prefer and without frustrating obstacles. DRM can be very frustrating to customers, thereby preventing them from taking advantage of legitimate content purchasing venues. DRM often malfunctions, so there is also a cottage industry that now provides tools to help users break DRM systems.

Publishers are trying to learn from the music industry. As you know, the music industry spent over ten years suing their best customers instead of investing in a better way to legally deliver (and even charge for) the music that their customers wanted in a digital form. To attract the music industry to its system, Apple developed one of the better DRM solutions (which they are now dismantling, by the way). As a result, Apple iTunes now controls the digital music space while the music industry continues to sue and decline. The industry was so concerned with iTunes DRM that it gave up its control over pricing and distribution.

Yet publishers are not learning from the music industry. Our trade organizations have already launched a number of lawsuits against libraries, search engines, and bookstores, i.e. our best customers. You may have also heard that the publisher of the latest Harry Potter book decided not to release it as an ebook for fear of piracy. This means that they have not distributed (or sold) a single ebook. However, if you were to google "Harry Potter ebook" you would find so many pirated copies it would make your head spin. In effect, they have made their legitimate users into pirates and lost millions of dollars and potential customers in the process.

In the end, customers want a wide selection of reasonably-priced, inter-operable, DRM-free content, and in the digital age, the customer will win. We need to respect and trust our customers and spend our effort on delivering a better product.

At the end of the day, I fear that the damage is greatest when our best users can't easily get to the content. We should invest the money we might spend in lawsuits  to develop better systems to also allow users to easily purchase, license, and credit content that they would like to borrow.

Laura Cerruti is Director of Digital Content Development at UC Press.

What Publishers Talk About When They Talk About Content Part II: Reflections from TOC2008

The themes at O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference 2008 (TOC)  were similar to those at PSP, which I blogged about a week ago in "What Publishers Talk about When They Talk about Content." TOC did have some new spins on these themes, and there were a few memorable sessions and quotes that are worth relating here.

1. “The biggest threat to publishers is obscurity, not piracy.” —Bill Burger, Copyright Clearance Center. Kirk Biglione of Medialoper continued the theme in his session titled “DRM, Digital Content, and the Consumer Experience: Lessons Learned from the Music Industry.” I was so taken by this presentation on digital rights management, that I’m going to devote another entire blog entry to it. Stay tuned, but check out the powerpoint.

2. “Content is not King. Context is not King. Contact is King.” —Douglas Rushkoff. Social networking was also very big at this conference, especially the idea that readers use content to connect with other people. University presses have always understood that our content started, finished, or continued a conversation. How can capitalize on the opportunities of the digital age to provide even more such opportunities for scholars?

3. Passionate users tend to be experts, and it’s the feedback loop on their content makes them care. —Kathy Sierra, author of Creating Passionate Users. Although Sierra’s presentation was a little thin, it did get me thinking. Scholars are the ultimate in experts, so how can we provide them with the feedback loop and make them passionate users of our content?

4. Changing organizational structures for the digital age is difficult and painful. —Kenneth Brooks, Cengage Learning. Okay, he didn’t say it that way, but the underlying pains quickly became clear during his talk. In an informal conversation after the session, a fellow university press colleague expressed puzzlement that most of university press “digital publishing” has ended up in marketing. There was good reason for this early on, but the time has come that it needs to begin to infiltrate other departments. Among university presses, our production departments will need to acquire new skills, and we need to move many of the tasks that somehow fell on the shoulders of our marketing staff into our production departments. I’m certainly not proposing that we follow in the footsteps of a corporate publishing giant, but is there anything we can learn from the scorched-earth methods of Cengage so that our staff can be happy about these transitions? Or is change always difficult?

5. Pre-publishing and community-based pricing models. —Bob Pritchett, Logos Bible Software. Unlike a traditional book or journal product, new digital products require a significant investment. The models that Logos employs to make sure that there is a market for its products could be a helpful way for university presses to venture into this new territory with less risk.

6. Find ways to monetize around content—and that doesn’t mean advertising. —Tim O'Reilly. In his keynote, O'Reilly brainstormed revenue models built around content (even free content). Later in the day,  Scott Gray (O’Reillys School of Technology) argued  for publishers to create essential, niche products that can be priced high to maximize revenue. One of their methods has been to add an educational component around their content. For me, this was a lightbulb. A group of us here at UC Press have been talking about the University as Publisher; here is O’Reilly taking the view of Publisher as University. I think we can learn much from what the School of Technology  is doing. Note that O’Reilly has considered opening up their learning platform for others to use.

Laura Cerruti is Director of Digital Content Development at UC Press.

What Scholarly Publishers Talk About When They Talk About Content: Reflections from PSP 2008

The theme for this year's annual conference of the Professional/Scholarly Publishing (PSP) division of The Association of American Publishers (AAP)  was “Interactivity 2008: Communities, Content, Connectivity.” I noticed nine distinct themes running throughout the sessions. They are as follows:

1.    Social-networking. People are using content to interact with others. In the context of that interaction, content creates identity, particularly online and particularly as personal and professional spaces merge. Publishers need to be in the conversation.

2.    User-generated content. Users now expect to participate. Publishers risk missing out on the opportunities, not only to enrich core content but to capitalize on the added value that users bring to the content. (Example: Sermo)

3.    The New Peer Review. Publishers should consider integrating new, democratic methods of peer review. New methods of quality review may never fully replace traditional peer review, but publishers need to be aware of new ways that users are determining the quality and usefulness of content. This includes voting, search engine optimization, impact (citations), commenting, referrals, and head-to-head competition (Example: Helium).

4.    eBooks. We are reaching the tipping point for ebooks. If it's not online, it doesn't exist to the new generation of students. Publishers may also want to integrate ebook content with other kinds of content, especially journals. The argument for XML is also growing as users begin to read this type of content using devices such as cell phones, which need the flexibility of XML text.

5.    Consistent User Experience. When librarians talked about digital access to traditional publications such as ebooks and ejournals, they complained about the amount of time they spend teaching their users to use a new and different platform. They called for fewer more consistent platforms and discouraged all but the largest publishers from building their own platforms.

6.    Complementary Tools. Publishers should not try to compete with robust search and social networking tools or hardware and software, such as FaceBook, YouTube, and Kindle. Nevertheless, it's important that publishers understand these new tools and figure out a way to make their content work with and on these tools.

7.    Beyond Text. The next generation of students and researchers will NOT be text-centric. Whether or not we want to accept it, the next generation of students will not prioritize text as a learning tool. Audio, Video, Static, Images, and 3-Dimensional spaces need to be integrated with text into the development of new digital publications. (Example: Vectors)

8.    Marketing As a Service. New technology enables marketing to become a dialog rather than a monologue across both online and offline channels. Marketing needs to have methods for tracking the dialog, responding to it with automated yet customized outreach and follow up, and recording it for future use. By making marketing more relevant for the individual customer, the organization can build trust behind the brand.

9.    New Organizational Structures. Publishers need new kinds of staff, new kinds of cross-genre and cross-channel organizational structures, and new kinds of job descriptions in marketing and product development. All staff need to understand the synergy between offline and online. All staff need to be more focused on up-front analysis and responding on the fly to the user.

I have also just returned from O'Reilly's Tools for Publishing Change conference. Stay tuned for more thoughts and impressions.

Laura Cerruti is Director of Digital Content Development at UC Press.

Amazon Kindling New Interest in eBooks?

Amazon's unveiling of their new ebook reader, the Kindle, has generated much attention in both publishing circles and in the general media.  Everybody seems to have an opinion about the Kindle.  The most recent high-profile discussion of the merits of the Amazon Kindle was a piece by Randall Stross in the January 27th edition of the New York Times.

From the beginning, Amazon has been betting that the Kindle will be to book lovers what the iPod has been to music lovers.  Whether the Kindle really catches fire (no pun intended) or lands on the ash heap of failed attempts to digitize the general book business, I do think the conversations about books that the unveiling of the Kindle have started have been profitable for both consumers, publishers, and other people involved in the book trade. 

UC Press has agreed to participate in the Kindle program, and Amazon is in the process of preparing a few dozen files for inclusion as downloadable ebooks for the Kindle reader, so we don't currently have a big stake in this.  But from the media attention that's been lavished on this homely little ebook reading device, one would think that the future of the book business hinged upon its success.  Is it all hyperbole?

From the time I first saw a prototype of the device, I had my doubts that people would want yet another gadget, let alone an expensive gadget, in order to read digital books.  This is, unfortunately, a limitation of today's digital book reading technology.  The very technology that currently makes digital books more readable on screen, E-ink technology, requires a different display than your computer monitor, cell phone, or PDA use.  Indeed, Joe Wikert of John Wiley and Sons recently blogged about this on the Teleread ebook blog, positing that the ideal gadget for reading digital books would be a laptop that is somehow e-ink enabled.

Ultimately, though, Randall Stross's piece in the New York Times, spends less time discussing the technology behind the Kindle and more time discussing how the fate of reading book length treatments of anything in this country might be joined at the hip with wider adoption of electronic reading devices.  The book industry (it has been pointed out many times before) is one of the few entertainment industries that has stubbornly resisted digitization.  This is partly attributable to intellectual property issues with digital books and with borrowed material contained within books themselves, which isn't so much an issue for, say, musical compositions, unless they contain tons of samples.  It's also partially attributable to a sense that a book is in and of itself an aesthetic object, and avid readers from the time they start reading beautifully illustrated, four-color children's books are brought up with this mentality.  And, well, frankly, things just don't move along very quickly in the book business.  But, mostly, readers just haven't take to reading books online, although they're increasingly reading tons of other stuff online.

While none of these things is likely to change overnight, I think that the heat is being turned up by a younger generation that is accustomed to reading on screen and wants instant gratification.  But whether ebooks are ultimately widely adopted turns on not the technology itself but whether or not avid readers (those 20% of the population who buy the overwhelming number of the books sold in this country) begin to turn to ebooks.  Gadget collectors and technophiles won't make or break the ebook business–avid readers will. It also hinges upon whether this country will continue to produce avid readers of books, and some anecdotal evidence from a recent Frontline piece on social networking suggested we might be having some difficulty in this area.

Nonetheless, Amazon is in an excellent position to deliver the goods to these avid readers.  People may argue about Amazon's use of a proprietary format and digital rights management to lock down Kindle ebooks, but for users who just want to get on with the business of reading and who don't care much about managing their ebook collections, these features make this system easy to work with.  This could be the real upside to what Amazon has done.

If the Kindle itself hasn't delivered the future of the ebook, the conversations generated by its introduction have at least given us a glimpse. 

University of California Press Journals + Digital Publishing Implements New Features for Libraries: RefWorks & LOCKSS

University of California Press Journals + Digital Publishing Division is pleased to announce that its Caliber and AnthroSource online content platforms are now compatible with RefWorks citation manager. Also, AnthroSource will be made available for archiving through LOCKSS which ensures the long-term preservation and security for the over 40,000 articles that are a part of the premier online resource for anthropologists. In the short time since the launch of both sites, the Press has made a number of improvements and refinements as a response to customer demand. The addition of RefWorks to the existing roster of citation managers and the participation in LOCKSS comes as a result of requests from users and librarians and highlights the Press's commitment to providing user-friendly content that is secure.

RefWorks allows for the easy management of references and quick generation of bibliographies and footnotes. These tools dramatically reduce the reference management burden on scholars and researchers, decrease the chance of errors, and offer significant flexibility when making changes.

LOCKSS (for "Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe") is open source software that provides librarians with an easy and inexpensive way to collect, store, preserve, and provide access to their own, local copy of authorized content they purchase. Running on standard desktop hardware LOCKSS converts a personal computer into a digital preservation appliance, creating low-cost, persistent, accessible copies of e-journal content as it is published.

With the growth of digital collections, there is an increasing need to ensure the longevity of electronic archives. Smaller publishers also face the challenge of keeping pace with these sophisticated technological requirements. LOCKSS resolves both these issues.

"It's always important to listen to our customer's changing needs and maintaining electronic resources is a an area of concern for librarians. Joining LOCKSS is an excellent solution: it helps UC Press keep pace with technological demands and continue to meet our customers' requirements." says Rachel Lee, University of California Press Library Relations Specialist. "RefWorks is a very popular citation manager and we've had many requests to add this functionality to AnthroSource. We strive to make our content as user-friendly as possible; RefWorks represents another step in this direction."