SchlagerBlog

The November 15 edition of Library Journal contains an article about e-reference trends told from the perspective of publishers: “Reference into the Future.” Among the publisher snapshots is one about Schlager Group. In it, I mention that we are actively looking into a pay-per-article paradigm for our upcoming Milestone Documents content. This is a sensitive topic, because librarians are rightly concerned that their patrons may end up paying for information via the Web that they could have gotten for free at the library. That conundrum is partly why existing reference publishers–many of whom have the resources and technological know-how to do this immediately–have shied away from pay-per-article up to now. In our case, we have thought about pay-per-article from the beginning of our imprint planning and launch. Lacking the resources of the industry giants, and entering the market after several years of declining print sales, we thought it was foolish not to investigate all possible options for our content. So that’s what we’re doing. We haven’t made any decisions about this yet, but as I say in the LJ article, our librarian customers should rest assured that if we ever do go down the pay-per-article path, we’ll do so in a way that respects their mission and their patrons.

In the meantime, we couldn’t be more excited about our partnership with Salem, which will include the launch of Salem’s e-history platform, Salem History, which is also mentioned in the LJ article. You can read more about this partnership in our recent press release.

John Blossom of ContentBlogger has written an interesting post about Madonna’s apparent decision to leave her longtime record label, Warner Bros., in favor of a unique arrangement with the concert company Live Nation. Blossom puts this decision in the context of content providers by noting that the things that are now increasingly driving the music business–artists taking advantage of their relationship with their fans by create unique spaces and places for the delivery of their music–are the same things that are coming into play in the traditional information industry.

Just like Madonna or Radiohead, publishers like ourselves need to identify ways to interact with our audiences directly–and to do so in the context of our audience’s choosing. This is a challenge for reference publishers, since until now the only way to reach our audience was via libraries. That venue is still vitally important, and it’s not going anywhere (thank goodness). But we also need to explore other options for our content, whether it’s the Internet, or a school classroom, or something else, and we need to find ways to build stronger “communities” with librarians and students alike. Many publishers are already tackling these issues in myriad ways, and we too are hard at work planning our own path. When people ask me why Schlager Group has decided to enter a mature and very crowded reference publishing marketplace, my response is simple: that marketplace is changing rapidly in many interesting ways, and what could be more fun than trying to succeed in the midst of all this excitement?

The New York Times recently featured an article about an Internet entrepreneur who has embarked on an effort to make legal decisions available online. This may seem like small news, but the relevance comes from the fact that for decades, this kind of information has been virtually the exclusive domain of two publishing giants: West (still part of Thomson; it was not sold along with Thomson Learning) and LexisNexis. Previous challengers to their dominance first had to fight legal battles to ensure that case law decisions were public domain, but in most cases the challengers have fallen by the wayside or lack the resources to pose much of a threat to the big boys. The new effort is led by Carl Malamud, who has long argued that government information should be available free on the Internet, not locked away and available only to subscription users. I happen to agree with him, and it’s interesting that West and LexisNexis have maintained this monopoly for so long, especially in this age of Wikipedia. One would think that those 2 companies add enough other value to their databases that their livelihoods are not threatened. The NYT article requires registration, but it’s an interesting read.

Facts On File, Inc., the reference and education publisher, has announced that is is reacquiring the Facts On File News Services. The news service division was sold to the WRC Media in 1996; WRC merged with Readers Digest in March 2007. Here is a press release from FOF about the new acquisition.

Thomson Learning, which was just sold to private equity firms, has announced that it is changing its name to the rather odd (in my view) Cengage Learning. According to this article, they chose “Cengage” because they believe they are at the “center of engagement” for their customers. All of the individual companies (e.g., Gale) within Thomson Cengage Learning will retain their own names, of course.

Schlager Group managing editor Marcia Merryman-Means has formally launched her new blog, titled “Marcial Arts and Letters.” As you’ll see from the first post, Marcia will devote her blog to matters of style and grammar. Everyone who works in reference publishing, from publishers to freelance writers and editors, knows that we all place great emphasis on communicating with precision and consistency. The Chicago Manual of Style, with which most editors have a love/hate relationship (well, in the case of the 15th edition, the scale tips toward hate), is our bible, while Merriam-Webster’s 11th Collegiate Dictionary (to name one standard dictionary) is also a sacred text. I’m sure Marcia will offer many words of wisdom on her blog in the weeks and months to come. Make sure you subscribe to her blog or bookmark it.

In the wake of U.K. publisher Houghton Mifflin Riverdeep purchasing Harcourt from Reed Elsevier (this following Riverdeep’s acquisition of Houghton Mifflin last year), thus creating a huge educational publishing conglomerate, Michael Cairns of the PersonaNonData blog offers some interesting analysis about the changing landscape of educational publishing and what it means for the big players in the years to come.

Karen Christensen, CEO of Berkshire Publishing, has written an interesting blog post (”Who Writes Encyclopedias?”) about the nature of encyclopedia compilation. She notes that some publishers rely on scholars while others rely on freelance writers. I would add a couple of wrinkles: 1) many publishers use one paradigm or the other depending on the book and subject matter in question; and 2) many projects end up using a mix of scholars and freelancers, usually for the simple reason that the editors are unable to find enough scholars to cover all topics. The link that Karen includes in her blog to a posting by another publisher seeking scholars is quite illuminating, in that it indicates that some publishers essentially pay their scholars nothing for their work. I used to think that the payment v. nonpayment divide was one thing that separated traditional reference publishers from Wikipedia and its ilk, but apparently not. For what it’s worth, we always pay our writers, whether freelancers or scholars.

A while back I blogged about how so many publishers were launching electronic databases related to social/current issues. Of course, this same thing happens all the time with print encyclopedias, and it may even be increasing, as every publisher tries to stake a claim for the proprietary electronic databases that these print encyclopedias will feed into.

The latest example of this can be seen in the sudden proliferation of multivolume world history encyclopedias. Berkshire was really the first to publish a modern encyclopedia along these lines, with its 5-volume, 2500-page effort published in 2005. Their effort was obviously intended to be a print product all along, not just a cog in an electronic wheel. But I’m not so sure about some of the other titles that are forthcoming. Recently, I noticed that ABC-CLIO had a gigantic 21-volume world history set planned. I blogged about this too but got the publication date wrong; it’s April 2009, not April 2008. Now I see that Facts On File is coming out with its own multivolume effort: 7 volumes, 3200 pages, and available in October of this year.

Is it just me, or wouldn’t these publishers’ electronic databases be more attractive if they carried unique content rather than covering the same, well-trod ground? That’s not to say that these encyclopedias don’t offer intrinsic value in and of themselves. But one does wonder how it makes economic sense to go this route, and whether these bets will pay off in the end.

The largest university press in the country, the University of Chicago Press, has announced that Garrett P. Kiely is taking over as director of the press in September. The current director, Paula Barker Duffy, is retiring. Kiely was formerly president of Palgrave Macmillan (formerly St. Martin’s Press Scholarly & Reference Division). Here is a link to the UC news item about the announcement. The article describes the press as a “$60 million operation” (per year, presumably) and notes that the press employs 300 people.