Music Lessons?

Music is a complex business that is not just about selling recorded music. It like all media is fundamentally a rights business with creation, performance, synchronised royalties.

We all know the music business remains stuck in digital treacle and it is no surprise to see that the global recorded music sales fell by some $1.5bn (£930m) last year.

The UK music business physical sales dropped by almost 20% with the overall performance down some 11% and although digital sales continued to rise by some 20% it did not offset the equivalent loss in physical sales. The result is that the market is shrinking and the UK is sliding down the ranking and has now been overtaken by Germany.

Now US economist Joel Waldfogel disagrees with the music industry bodies and major labels and claims that music piracy hasn’t hurt the creation of new music, but that changes in creation, production and distribution have turned the previous economics of scale of their head. He and many academics also claim that there is no link between Internet piracy and the revenues of the major music labels and that the losses claimed by the industry itself are being hugely exaggerated.

With new and cheaper recording technologies, digital music outlets and social networks, many of the tasks that were previously fulfilled by the big labels could easily be taken over by independent labels, or even the artists themselves. This sounds very familiar to that being experience in other media sectors. The economics are changing and scale is no longer an asset.

EMI was acquired last month by Citigroup and rival Warner Music is also seeking a buyer and many question whether there is a future for these former titans? EMI's losses over the past four years total £2.82bn.Warner’s fourth-quarter revenues in 2010 was down 14% at $789m and its digital turnover fell 5%, giving it a loss for the quarter.

The big labels’ monopoly is falling apart as their role can be taken over by independent labels that operate with a much smaller profit margin. Where the majors sometimes have to sell half a million albums to break even, independent labels can do the same by selling 25,000 or less.

Established artist now make a substantial amount of their money from live music and some claim this could be as high as 90%.

Creation, promotion, and distribution aided by new technologies have changed the music landscape and the Internet offers millions of ways to promote content at a fraction of the cost of the old world. Youtube, Facebook, Last.fm, Spotify and Pandora, now offer artists many new platforms to promote themselves.

Distribution has changed too and with little investment artists can now upload their work for sale on iTunes. The loss of major UK retailers such as Zavvi, Borders and Woolworth has also changed people access to physical music as they are increasingly forced online and once there they aren’t going back.

The impact of these seismic changes don’t just impact the UK with the global recorded music revenues falling by 8.4% last year. According to the Recording Industry body, the IFPI, physical sales, fell by 14.2% year on year. Again although digital revenues grew by 5.3% and account for 29% of all recorded music revenues the growth rate of digital revenue growth has halved year on year .US overall sales fell by 10% with physical sales down 20% and digital sales are stagnating with 1.2% growth. Japan’s music market declined by 8.3%. Digital revenue growth in Europe continues to grow by some 20% plus but still does not compensate for the decline in physical sales.

So is Waldfogel correct to conclude that piracy is not the root of the music industry’s declining fortunes and that the entire music industry has instead changed with more power going to the artists and smaller labels? We believe that today music is more alive, accessible and broader in its offer than ever before. If we accept this, or even a large proportion of this, then we better take a cold look at what is happening closer to home and focus less on yesterday’s economics and models and more on tomorrow’s.

Digital Library Madness: 26 and You Are Out

In being able to potentially offer ebooks for free and from anywhere, against the retail model of payment, the digital public library now challenges the wider book market's pricing, revenues and licensing models.

Some would suggest that the recent statements by the UK Publishers Association which declared new restrictions and rules for digital lending in UK public libraries were misguided and naive. We now read that the leading public library digital service, Overdrive, has now issued a letter to their library customers in which their CEO, Steve Potash claims, ‘several trade publishers are re-evaluating eBook licensing terms for library lending services. Publishers are expressing concern and debating their digital future where a single eBook license to a library may never expire, never wear out, and never need replacement.’

Apparently, a group of trade publishers now wish to change the commercials based on ebooks being different! However, they appear to want to still align them to the physical product's commercials. It is claimed that HarperCollins has already revised its terms for new e-book loans, limiting the number of times an e-book can be licensed for checkout to 26. The revised terms, which will apply only to new titles come with a short statement from HarperCollins that they are , " committed to the library channel. We believe this change balances the value libraries get from our titles with the need to protect our authors and ensure a presence in public libraries and the communities they serve for years to come."

There is nothing wrong with the realisation that digital is about licensing titles within a perpetual collection. However tying a digital licence to the commercials of an outright purchase makes little sense. The notional '26' license is not based on a annual rental value, but on the average lifespan of a print book, the wear and tear on circulating copies and what is seen as a lifetime of one year for a popular e-book title based on a lending period of two weeks.

Apparently today Macmillan or Simon and Shuster are not even permitting any library circulation of their e-books.

Digital books are digital full stop. Mixing them with physical books does not make sense as one is purchase and the other clear licence. eBooks don’t wear out so claiming that as the pricing model is naive. The lending of digital media can be controlled effectively in terms of concurrent lending, territorial rights and removal of access. They don’t sit in huge library repositories, but often with aggregators and libraries merely access their own collection. So why can’t all parties sort this out properly and create a proper digital framework and avoid what some would see as posturing and ill thought out strategy? Instead of imposing one after another restriction and shoehorning digital terms into physical ones, why not look at a new model and avoid the mixed messages and alienating a major channel and consumer interface?

Players such as Bloomsbury licence their innovative library shelf and European services such as eBog have clearly separated the digital from the physical. A group of libraries led by the Internet Archive have announced a new, cooperative 80,000+ eBook lending collection of mostly 20th century books. OpenLibrary.org, today offers over 1 million eBooks.

Overdrive may dominate today, but we have yet to see Google’s reach and Amazon and others are all champing at the bit to get into rentals and lending. All services are capable of integrating with library management systems to ensure registration and community catchment are valid and it is easy to ensure that the number of copies available at any time relates to the licence.

Why not make the ‘licence’ tiered to offer a range of lending rights and terms? At the basic level we could have a restriction to allow a single concurrent loan on an annual licence. We then could allow the concurrency of access to increase in bands based on licence fee, effectively buying bands of access at title level. We could permit ‘on demand lending’ based not on individual collection but the whole repository and where the charge is retrospective based on actual loans and on usage not on filling virtual shelves with ebooks which may not move. On demand could be a charged premium service. The institutional and academic markets have long risen to the flexible approaches to collection licensing but its as if the trade is either naïve to these options, or seek to reinvent the wheel.

As we increasingly move towards on demand streaming. digital loans and rental for ebooks we have to recognise that common licensing models make sense. The digital options are many and the opportunity to engage and invigorate the public library channel is significant.

Public Libraries: PA's Plan Fails to Join the Dots

We are pleased that the issue of free to lend from a public library, versus a fee to buy from a reseller has been brought out into the open today. This problem is one we have written about all year. The debate is long overdue but today’s Bookseller story ‘PA sets out restrictions on library e-book lending’ was quickly countered by a further one titled ‘Librarians worried by publisher e-book restrictions’ The stories cover the latest position adopted by the PA ( UK Publishers Association) at the CILIP Public Library Authorities conference in Leeds.

Stephen Page, CEO Faber and Faber, announced the new guidelines, telling delegates that "all the major trade publishers have agreed to work with aggregators to make it possible for libraries to offer e-book lending". However, users would only be able download an ebook from within the library's physical premises and via a computer terminal.

The plan would extend the fee paid by a library to buy a book and give them the right to loan one digital copy, to one individual at any given time.

We believe bringing the issue to the table is both timely and correct, but question whether the decision was forged in consultation with the libraries, or came down the mountain on tablets of stone. The problem is far from solved by the PA’s plan as it tries to shoe horn tomorrow’s digital world into yesterday’s physical practices.

Were the libraries consulted?

We fully agree that it doesn’t make sense to expose the reseller to a free offer from the libraries that they can’t compete with. However, it is equally ludicrous to tie the libraries hands behind the backs and pretend that ebooks are no different to pbooks and place restrictions on them. We now find that, one day after the big spending cuts were announced that the PA has clearly got their own way of cutting back on libraries. Some may feel that this move makes a mockery of all the support the industry has recently given libraries.

What is needed is a bit of common sense and above all communication between all parties.

This move will almost kill off the public library as a digital lender and further hasten its demise within these austere times. It is impossible to understand the logic of why downloads have to be via a library terminal. Hello, hasn’t anyone at the PA worked out what WiFi and 3G is yet? This tethering of the ebook download to the physical library building and terminal makes no sense at all. Even the much derided Margret Hodge offered more sense than this.

The answer is not easy but is not born out of a one sided perspective of life. Tying individuals to local public libraries is not an issue, it is done in many countries and systems today. Access and authorisation can be governed by the library system so that registration is maintained and auditable. It doesn’t matter where anyone is, it only matters that they are authorised. The only potential issue is with respect to inter library loans which may have to be restricted for ebooks, or incur a further fee payable to the rights owner.

So what about the thorny issue of ‘free.’

We are moving towards an online mobile and 'rental on demand' world. So why not allow libraries to ‘rent out’ as opposed to ‘loan’ to their members and charge a rental fee for any download. We have operated such a system in Denmark for libraries and similar systems are being proposed in other countries. Does anyone look outside of the UK and other than the US? The download can be easily protected, restricted to a specific time window and copying prohibited. This would allow libraries to rent out anything to an authorised member, at anytime and they simply pay a fee for the service and availability over the internet. Title rents can be collated and even contribute to improving the PLR deal to the author.

We realise that this a significant shift, which basically says pbooks are free in libraries and are restricted by the physical need for members to collect and return them, whilst digital ebooks offer added value and can be virtually rented, but for a fee. The beauty of the model is that is could also be offered to anyone including resellers, societies, institutions etc . Libraries then can use their communities and collective power to grow their service, whilst resellers and others can compete with online subscription and rental models as well as offering outright purchase of downloads.

This may appear far fetched to many who believe that libraries must remain free. There may also be other issues that need to be addressed. However, it could actually enable libraries to coexist and grow membership within a new wider commercial digital environment.

The question now is, whether all parties have the will to co-operate in order to find a solution that works for all.

Where's the Value Chain in Agency Pricing?

To some the agency model appears to be the way forward and the answer to discounting of ebooks. To others it seems to not only like a step backwards towards fixed price maintenance, but similar to the boy sticking his finger into the dam and hoping it will stop the flood.

This week came an interesting piece from the Doris Booth, Editor in Chief of Authorlink titled ‘Publishers’ Agency Model Punishes Mid-List Authors’ and we recommend it be read, irrespective of your persuasion. Booth has a witty take on the conversations that may have happened between the publisher and reseller and also points out the flaw in Macmillan CEO, John Sargent’s public defence of his actions from a mid list author’s prespective.

Many analyse the maths and conclude their perspective is correct. It is hard to argue with maths, but we first must agree on the common figures which are to be manipulated and there we often unfortunately loose the will to live. We however take a very simplistic ‘value chain’ approach that views, the author putting value in at one end and the consumer putting cash in at the other. Everyone in between has to add value and justify the cash they take out, or their place in the chain. There is no divine right to exist and no matter who you are, you have to earn your place between the author and reader.

In free markets competition is healthy and although it often drives down prices and rewards this keeps everyone on their toes and ensures the consumer gets a competitive price. A fixed price market often creates pockets of fat and can result in a poor deal for those that count, the creator and the consumer, whilst making a guaranteed deal for those that should be striving to add value.

It is interesting that the agency model was introduced with Apple iBookstore and introduced contractual price fixing on ebooks and a simple way for them to calculate revenues. Why are physical books different why isn’t price fixing introduced to these and why is the consumer subjected to false regulation in one format and not in another?

Some believe the agency model creates a level playing field for all resellers. The reality is that the only level playing field is between the giant technology companies and resellers. The rest could be said the be wearing very unattractive one piece swimming costumes in a beauty contest competing with a bikini clad Amazonian. Guess who wins that contest?

The agency model like the Google Book Settlement before it appears to being force on the industry by some who some would say know best. However just like these other leaps into the dark it appears to be ill conceived and now faces review by two state Attorney Generals. Also there are tax collection issues and the need for retail pricing strategies that are often foreign to publishers. It has already been adopted by a number of large publishers and resellers, but the issues surrounding the new agency pricing may be far from over.

Jisui: Digital Book DIY

Who has not copied music and films for personal use? We can all remember taping radio music, cutting cassettes off vinyl, copying CDs and downloading files from the likes of Kazaa. We all tape TV or now simply watch it on demand. We have all updated our media libraries as we migrate to new technology. So what is different about taking a book and scanning it to create your own digital file?

"Jisui," ("cooking one's own meals"), is a new digital book community in Japan which is creating its own digital copies of books. The process is no different to what many publishers do with their back list titles and involves scanning pages of a book through a scanner. The technology has been around for years, so what has changed and why would you break a book to just create a digital copy?

In June, Internet research company Macromill Inc. surveyed 300 iPad owners in Japan and found that 20% had digitized their own books and a further 30% were interested in doing so. The reasons given by the respondents were that, digital versions of the books were not available and that it was easier to read the digital versions of books than paper books whose pages had faded. The numbers surveyed may appear small but we still have to ask what has changed and why do these people feel the urge to perform digital DIY?

First they now have an ereader they like in the iPad and we must remember that the survey was focused on iPad owners. Secondly if there is a dearth of digital content people will always create it themselves. Thirdly the scanning technology has improved and has become cheaper. Forth creating an image file such as PDF from a scan is simple.

The combination of these factors has resulted in an increase in sales of related products. PFU, which is part of the Fujitsu Group, said its June sales of duplex scanners were double that of May. It is claimed that Amazon also saw orders of scanners and paper cutters double from April to June. The interest has even resulted in major electronics retailer Yodobashi Camera setting up an in-store demonstration area to show customers how to digitise books. Another company Jissen, even offers a service to cut books into loose pages for 110 yen per copy and claim to now cut between 1,000 and 1,500 books a day.

Digitization of books by the purchaser for "personal use" is permitted under Japanese copyright law as long as the individual does the reproduction themselves.

Some would suggest that copyright law is out of step with current times. Others that the practise is OK but only if it is ‘for personal use’ The professional pirate has had the capability to do this for years and can even convert captured text into any format and re typeset it for print. Until now digitisation was presumed too expensive for individuals and they didn’t have devices that made digitisation worth the effort. It is not the professional pirate that is the new threat but the individual.

"Jisui" may be confined in the main to Japan today, but it easy to see communities created to follow its example and the obvious outcome will be the sharing of files.

Fighting file sharing on a service is one thing but is often struggling under the reactive take down notices and first finding the content. Fighting copying and sharing content at the local community and friend level is completely different. As the publishing world locks up its digital files behind DRM encryption it be could merely encouraging the individual to bypass that source and go the original book and scan it. After all that is what happening with music until sense prevailed and MP3 was widely accepted.

We may think this is small and insignificant and that we should to focus on locking up the digital files whilst we also continue to fight low prices and make it expensive in the mind of the consumer. We perhaps need to be careful what we wish for and instead consider making ebooks really cheap, available and DRM free. Soft DRM, digital watermarking, makes far more sense than the current clunky hard DRM. But we appear to be hell bent on encouraging consumers to consider a DIY future.

A group of students only need a scanner and one textbook.

source http://mainichi.jp/universalon/clipping/news/20100820dde001040002000c.html

Chasing Cheap Labour in a Digital World

Chasing cheap labour in a global economy is easy at first, but becomes harder over time. Every supplier of goods and services wants the lowest cost base and the highest margin and cheap labour will always be a major factor. Managing costs has become somewhat of an art form in this connected world and often work simply flows from one low cost center to another in search of cheap labour. Today components may have to be source from one specific place or a limited number of options. All the various components may be sourced from many countries and then merely assembled in another and then transported and sold in the most profitable markets.

So the New York Times today reports on changing situation and aspirations of China and the potential impact on gadgets such as Mobiles and the iPad. China’s labour costs are rising and being fuelled by worker shortages, a booming Chinese currency, worker unrest, inflation is rising so is the cost of housing and consumer affluence. Wages in China since 2005, have risen by over 50% and now are under extreme pressure to rise significantly again. China’s currency has also appreciated against the US dollar since 2005, and is now expected to rise about 3 to 5% a year for the next several years.

You can see the same on many Asian countries and what was cheap a few years ago is no longer the case. China labour will and can be moved from areas such as Shenzhen to cheaper and more rural areas, but the same issue slowly reappears. It’s no different in India where centres such as Bangalore, Pune and Chennai are stating to look unattractive and new cities are opening up and becoming attractive.

As we about to fly out to India again to our digital content factory in Pune and the in Coimbatore we note that the labour rates vary significantly between the two. We will also visit our team in Bangalore which is different again. There are so are many other factors that influence what one do where and the overall mix. Ability to recruit, transport infrastructure, the right raw skill set and much more effect the ability to migrate work between different cost bases. Someone was talking to us only last week about moving to Vietnam and setting up a factory there. Someone else trains their operators in the city then equips them to operate from their villages. The common factor is the cost of people and the fixed cost of doing business in a location. If you want Arabic digital conversion the cheapest place today is probably Cairo, but it is not the best place to do English or European languages as the cost base is geared to deal with other issues such as the lack of effective Arabic OCR software.

All, manufactures and service providers, chase the elusive cheap ticket but must face the reality of their business needs and stability.

The ultimate challenge is to manage the margin, and whilst companies such as Apple can accommodate rising costs within their ‘fat’ 60% margin, others making personal computers, mobiles and other electronics may not have the same levels of fat. Commodity services such as digital conversion also live on tight margins and have started to change as prices that have flattened or even dropped. There again these may start to come under pressure to rise sharply as digital demand starts to surge and capacity remains constrained.

It was interesting to read in the NYT article about the breakdown of the iPhone 4’s expensive component costs. More than a dozen integrated circuit chips accounting for some 60% of the cost of a single device. It’s claimed that Apple pays, Samsung some $27 for flash memory and $10.75 to make its applications processor; German chip maker Infineon receives $14.05 a phone and the gyroscope, by STMicroelectronics, costs some $2.60. It is claimed that the total bill of materials on a $600 iPhone is $187.51. The assembly in China is the cheap part with workers being paid less than a dollar an hour today to assemble and package the iPhone 4. However rising wage demands directly will continue to impact cost and logistics is only cheap when it is in bulk.

The most interesting point is that counties such as China and India no longer want the low end assembly and service work. “China doesn’t want to be the workshop of the world anymore,” says Pietra Rivoli, a professor of international business at Georgetown University. India is already maturing as a workforce and aspirations and wages are growing fast. The question is will the West pay more or simply flow to the next cheap source of labour?

GBBR: Here Comes The Judge

The ‘G day’ final arrived and not surprisingly Judge Chin declared that he would deliberate before announcing his verdict. Google's opponents made a formidable line up and claimed them to be monopolistic, rapacious, and contemptuous of laws that protect copyright and protect consumers from dominant corporations. Google's who mantra is "Don't be evil" continued to display innocence , but now an increasing number of legal systems and people are questioning how Google defines ‘evil’.

William Cavanaugh Jr. , Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Civil Matters, representing the DOJ stated that “The underlying law is copyright law. This turns copyright law on its head.” He also stated that the issue would be best left to Congress. “If there’s going to be a fundamental shift [in copyright law]. If we’re going to establish compulsory licensing, that should be left to Congress.”

Judge Chin suggested that if the settlement were opt in and not opt out some of the objectors, “you’d eliminate a lot of objections.” The response from Author Guild attorney Michael Boni was, “You wouldn’t have a settlement.”

The Judge hit the nail on the head by saying "I would surmise that Google wants the orphan books and this is what it is about -- orphan books that will remain unclaimed."

We don’t know how long the deliberations will take but only that the publishing industry has been polarized and torn apart by Google’s actions and the perceived need to cut a deal and questionable negotiations. We still believe this is a bad deal, that is about an infringement that was settled by a give away of something no-one owned – orphans.

Music on Demand = Book on Demand?

As we sit and listen to Spotify, free over our Android phone we now read that HP has joined forces with Omnifone, a cloud-based unlimited music services, to launch a European music store. MusicStation will be available to HP PC customers in the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Austria, Belgium, The Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland and will give them unlimited access to millions of tracks for a monthly fee.

New users will be given a 14-day free trial period in which they can download and keep up to 10 DRM-free tracks per month onto their computer, for later playback, copying etc., or can access 6.5 million tracks streamed from the cloud. The monthly subscription is similar to that offered by Spotify.

So would you buy a PC because of it, or would you be prepared to spend the subscription to access it? HP is a gorilla in the PC market shipping 48 million units a year and having 20% global market share, but is the move strategic and about music and media, or merely about shifting tin?

The major issue is one of ‘subscription and access’ to music versus ‘pay for and own’. Music, unlike most media, is often a short time experience which can be in the background and the individual tracks are often repeated far more than any other media. ‘Music on demand’ makes a lot of sense, and irrespective of whether its Spotify’s advertising plus subscription model, or HP’s subsidy plus subscription model, it has to be paid for. What is clear, is that the days of seeing shelves of vinyl or CDs are numbered and if its on a hard drive and accessible on demand, does it really carry the same ownership hang-ups?

The book market should not assume that books are different. As we move digitally ownership and access on demand offer equally interesting options.

Children's Book Publishing in a Digital Age

It is interesting to read the recent article in PW about the US forum held by the Children’s Book Council on “The Current State of E: Publishing in the Digital Age,” and also to note that The Bookseller is to hold a similar event on 1st October.

Digital children’s publishing is a difficult genre. After all there are significant differences between the needs of the various age groups. The infant is learning to read in basic steps and needs lots of images to help them, they are also read to by guardians which changes the dynamics of the experience to one that is shared.

Illustrations and graphics are important in these formative years and the stories or texts are often short and certainly the pages are full of colour. As the child develops and starts to read to themselves then the stories get longer and the need for graphics diminishes until they reach an age when pure textural stories take over and they are able to form their own images. Children’s book buying also changes over the development of the child where initially the books are bought by others to a stage where they are chosen and eventually bought by the child and even driven by peer groups. The age of the reading group also demands many similar changes over the creative, editorial, production development period which all can impact the content, the packaging, the marketing, selling and the way the work is read.

So having stated the obvious, how does digital impact children’s publishing? What should publishers be considering today and what is likely to happen moving forward into this Brave New World?

Publishing is a rights business and children’s publishing has had a potential wide usage of rights. After all, we can all picture images from our childhood, many of which had associated merchandising. Some were lucky to transform onto the small screen and some even the big screen. The classic rights rule of acquire wide and use narrow is never more true than in children’s books. It is likely to even be more important in the digital world where digital games, animation, graphics, video is no longer a skill of the few but open to all and the ability to exploit rights very easy. We also live in a global networked economy and although the words may change, the images may remain the same, or visa versa and digital technology can often now transform content and associated materials in a click.

The work itself is no longer straight jacketed between two pieces of stiff card. Publishers may not want to be the experts in technology but they now have to manage diverse technology and its interaction with content. We have often wondered which the more valuable asset the image is and artwork or the text and the story. Both go hand in hand and the lower the age group the more the balance. It is not just a case of capturing and developing digital content but managing it as digital assets that can be repurposed many ways. Publishers now must consider the interaction with the reader that digital offers and manage multiple user offers. There is also the question of whether the child can customise the work and ‘own’ it in a way that increases the value to them.

We all remember the books we experienced and enjoyed and often want to share these with our own children. However, like most books they go out of print and over a generation they can become orphans. The author’s rights may revert but the illustrator was fee based and remains tethered to the publisher or can be reverted but is separate to the work. As more and more digitisation exposes the potential wealth of the out of print world then the children’s market is one that offers huge potential. The books may require re editing to survive the politically correct world we now have to conform to but the material is an Aladdin’s cave as it is already known to many parents.

Marketing children’s books is about exciting parents and children. It isn’t about catalogues and dry AI sheets but about creating something that grabs the bookseller, the parent and the child’s attention. Publisher may create digital marketing material to sell physical books and never create a digital rendition and there is nothing wrong with that approach. Marketing widgets need to be two page spreads, support full colour and contain a wealth of support material and extras. They challenge is to get them in front of the buyer and not the store buyer but the consumer buyer. We should also recognise that the child, until they are old enough, will care less about the author or the illustrator but care a lot about the characters and getting closer to them.

Then there is the new laws on safety and whether the child is exposed to lead, danger etc. These would make you think digital could re introduce the sizzle that may be lost soon.


Finally anyone who believes that the digital ebook readers in there current form pass the test are mad. Its asking a child who is familiar with the internet, games machines, HD Television to go back to watching black and white TV. eInk is not just inappropriate in this sector it dies in this sector. Even in school it fails to even come close to the benchmark and publisher here must think as a child not as the devices manufactures wish them to think. Also here we must recognise that children do not have the most expensive smartphones but often the more practical and cheaper mobile. They do all have, or increasingly all have access to PCs, laptops etc.

This brings us back to the original article on the US forum. As reported it appeared to be more of a sales pitch by technology and channel providers than a serious look at the digital opportunities, trends and landscape that is children’s publishing. The US speakers included Follett Digital Resources, Ingram Digital, OverDrive, ScrollMotion. It is also interesting to note that the UK speakers come from Nielsen BookScan the BA children's bookselling chair, Scholastic Children's Books, Waterstones.com and the panels includes Tesco, BCA, Bounce Sales & Marketing, Gardners, Penguin , PatandPals and TIGA, the national trade association that represents game developers in the UK and Europe.

Digital Playboy Archive For Free

If there is males who have never seen the Playboy magazine nows your chance and its free!

Microsoft, Bondi digital Publishing and Playboy Enterprises bring you 53 classic issues of Playboy all viewable through Microsoft’s Silverlight viewer.

The issues at playboy Archive.com and go back to the 1950s, 60s, 70s and right up to 2007. When the archive first loads, an array of Playboy covers can be viewed and clicked upon and after that, several pages from the inside of the magazine appear. A table of contents is also available, and the archive is searchable. What is amazing is to see how the magazine and styles have changed over the last 50 years. It is easy to understand its appeal as it clearly offered more than the female form and this is clear as you view the pages and articles.

Bondi Digital Publishing who had previously developed the platform for The Complete New Yorker and had to scan and re-type each issue of Playboy. Some boys get all the good jobs!Go on be a devil and take a peek its well worth a visit.