January 1, 2010

France : Le livre numérique ne fait pas recette… pour l’instant

Clément M,, de eBouquin, (http://www.ebouquin.fr/2010/01/01/france-le-livre-numerique-ne-fait-pas-recette-pour-linstant/) constate aujourd'hui que, au contraire de ce quise passe aux Etats-Unis (où certains éditeurs se posent la question de savoir si la version numérique ne va pas venir cannibaliser les ventes de la version papier -"réflexion propre à la période de transition dans laquelle nous nous trouvons") , un tel débat n’a pas encore lieu en France. .

La raison proche de ce constat se doit à la sortie simultanée en papier et en numérique du dernier roman de Marc Levy, La première nuit.

lapremierenuit-marclevy

Marc Lévy est le romancier français qui a vendu le plus de livres en France et dans le monde, selon Wikipedia:, ses neuf derniers romans ont été publiés à 19 millions d’exemplaires (toutes langues et éditions confondues).

La première nuit, tiré à 400 000 exemplaires, n’a pas rencontré le succès en numérique. Selon un article du Nouvel Observateur ("Livre numérique:Le village gaulois résiste" http://hebdo.nouvelobs.com/hebdo/parution/p2354/articles/a415155-.html) , d'ailleurs essentiallement sur Google et l'édition française, «le lancement en version numérique de «la Première Nuit», de Marc Levy n'a entraîné que 140 téléchargements sur Fnac.com en quinze jours, malgré le prix (15,99 euros), inférieur de 5 euros par rapport au livre physique.» Par rapport à l’opération médiatique engagée pour la promotion du livre, le résultat est décevant, considère Clément M., qui s'interroge sur "Comment peut-on expliquer ce chiffre?"

Pour lui, plusieurs éléments peuvent l’expliquer et confirme le fait que le marché français du livre électronique est encore à bâtir (encore selon l'article du Nouvel Obs «les ventes numériques sont balbutiantes, avec à peine 0,1% du marché»): Suivons Clément M.:

Tout d’abord, la faiblesse du parc existant de readers (peut estimer le parc actuel entre 20 000 et 30 000 appareils, toutes marques confondues); on peut aussi déplorer l’existence d’un “reader star” comme le Kindle;
le prix des ebooks. Quoiqu’on en dise, les prix sont encore trop élevés. Il est difficile de faire comprendre au consommateur d’acheter un livre numérique à un prix plus proche de livre papier que des prix numériques qui ont été atteints sur d’autres produits culturels comme la musique et la vidéo.
les DRM. L’existence de DRM est un obstacle complémentaire. Comme s’assurer qu’un fichier ePub protégés par des DRM Adobe sera lisible dans quelques années? Et cela sans même envisager les conditions d’utilisations du fichier qui surprendrait plus d’une association de consommateurs.

Conclusion; "L’émergence d’un marché autour de la lecture numérique est dans l’ère du temps et inévitable. En revanche, la question du chemin à suivre pour arriver à construire un modèle durable, tant sur le point de vue culturel que sur le point de vue économique, demeure encore sans réponse."

Cela va sans dire qu'on pourrait dire le même, à quelques nuances près, des autres pays européens, surtout de l'Arc du Sud. En ayant des doutes sur les raisons entrevues pour la faillite des livres numériques en France, d'un côté, et sur la dimension de leur succès aux Etats-Unis, je ne peux que conseiller vivement la lecture du commentaire de François Bon:

«on pourrait dire aussi que le modèle choisi par les éditeurs “tradi” dans leur ensemble est une espèce de dinosaure empaillé :

- les drm
- le prix
- le refus de tout modèle d’abonnement (notamment via bibliothèques)

et deuxième point, essentiel : comment le numérique, changeant le rapport du langage au monde, pourrait s’établir sur des formes artistiques issues d’un modèle précédent ? – je doute que ce soit les objets marchands d’aujourd’hui qui émergent comme nos objets de réflexion et désir demain...»

November 10, 2009

Want To Sell Books? Start Gathering Fans, by Richard Nash

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Book Expo America, the largest book convention in the US, and one of the largest in the world, announced that they'd dropped plans to have the exhibits open on Tuesday, the day before the convention opens.

Richard Nash has an insightful article on Huffington Post on the matter (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-nash/want-to-sell-books-start_b_350845.html).

He stresses two decisive points:

· «Books was once a business where publishers sold to booksellers, and booksellers sold to readers. So BEA was an event where publishers sold to booksellers.

But with the chains not needing an event to meet everyone, since everyone beats a path to their door, and with the explosion in the number of books available means that publishers need to motivate readers to read their books, and not take for granted they'll walk into bookstores and buy, the event needs to be about exciting readers/customers, not hustling the retailers.» (bold emphasis mine)

· «The publishing business is not in trouble because there's no demand for books. It is in trouble because there are changes afoot in how best to satisfy the demand, changes to which there are suitable responses, two of which are:

o fostering fan culture and

o generating a sense of occasion,

and the leaders of the largest publishing organizations are failing in their professional responsibility to implement these responses. By reducing their participation in BEA at the same time the media participation has increased by almost 50%, by refusing to open the Fair to the readers on Sunday, these CEOs have effectively thrown in the towel. They are managing the demise of the book business, pointing fingers at any generic social forces they can find, failing to see the one place the responsibility can be found, their own damn offices.» (bold emphasis mine).

Who would say it better?

November 4, 2009

How long can Amazon.com put off paying its bills?

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A Wall Street Journal report by Martin Peers (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125682780621816085.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_LEFTTopStories) details some of the secret tactics used by Amazon.com, a company which has never made a profit, to control the book industry by simply delaying payment of its debts , as says Dennis Johnson at MobyLives.

According to Peers, it isn't a secret that Amazon's financial success is partly based on its ability to take in money for selling merchandise before it has to pay its suppliers.

But lately Amazon has gone one better: «steadily lengthening the time it takes to pay suppliers. That has been a factor behind the retailer's soaring cash flow.»

Amazon has lengthened is “account-payable” delays — 30 days for most of the known world — from an initial 49 days in 2003 to 72 days today.

As Brian Evans, an analyst for research firm Behind the Numbers, notes, this "theoretically means that Amazon has not paid suppliers for sales consummated in mid-June." Amazon's sales rose 28% in the quarter, but accounts payable nearly doubled, helping push free cash flow up 116%.

Averaged through the year, «Amazon's accounts-payable days have risen from 49.25 days in 2003 to 59 last year before jumping this year to an average of 64.6. Free cash flow has risen to $1.36 billion in 2008 from $346 million in 2003», says Peers.

Such efficient working-capital management is to be envied. But investors shouldn't get too used to it. Amazon can't keep extending payment terms with its vendors indefinitely. When it stops, one source of free cash-flow growth will disappear, stresses Martin Peers.

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Charles Mulford, an accounting professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, notes how sharply boosting accounts payable helped Robert Nardelli transform Home Depot's cash generation after he took charge at the end of 2000. The retailer went from reporting negative free cash flow to $2.57 billion in fiscal 2002. But gains from working-capital efficiency petered out.

Such things won't flow Amazon's way forever.

November 3, 2009

IPhone challenge to Kindle

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According to The Bookseller (http://www.thebookseller.com/news/101600-iphone-challenge-to-kindle-as-book-apps-surge.html) the iPhone may take market share from the Amazon Kindle, following an explosion in the supply of book apps last month.

The Bookseller quotes a a report by San Francisco-based mobile application analytics company Flurry.

The Flurry report, «Flurry Smartphone Industry Pulse, October 2009», Posted by Peter Farago (http://blog.flurry.com/bid/27796/Flurry-Smartphone-Industry-Pulse-October-2009), reveals that he number of book apps supplied to the iPhone App Store overtook the number of games apps for the first time in September.

After Playing Games, iPhone Gets Serious about Books

According to Flurry, «The iPhone is a versatile multi-media device that has already significantly impacted the business models of music, games and other Media & Entertainment industry categories. In particular, since Apple launched the App Store in July 2008, game developers have flocked to the iPhone, creating an alternative for consumers to the leading handheld gaming platform, Nintendo DS.»

So, to predict which sector of Media & Entertainment iPhone might next impact, Flurry researched the number of applications released to the App Store, by category, since its inception. From August 2008 to August 2009, more apps were released in the Games category than any other. This September, however, «we observed another category, Books, usurping Games for the first time ever. To illustrate the surge in the supply of books to the App Store, the chart below compares the number of books and games released to the App Store per month, over the last four months, as a percentage of all released applications.»

In October, one out of every five new apps launching in the iPhone has been a book. Publishers of all kinds, from small ones like Your Mobile Apps to mega-publishers like Softbank, are porting existing IP into the App Store at record rates. (bold highlight mine)

In its August Pulse report, Flurry observed that during the month of August 1% of the entire U.S. population was already reading a book on the iPhone. Now, with books shipping in droves, we are seeing the supply-side explode.

The sharp rise in eBook activity on the iPhone indicates that «Apple is positioned take market share from the Amazon Kindle as it did from the Nintendo DS. Despite the smaller form factor of the display, we predict that the iPhone will be a significant player in the book category of the Media & Entertainment space. Further, with Apple working on a larger tablet form factor, running on the iPhone OS, we believe Jeff Bezos and team will face significant competition», Flurry reported.

There is another interesting point in the report, related with consumer loyalty.

Addicted to iPhone Apps? There's an App for That.

In its August Pulse report, Flurry reviewed consumer loyalty by looking at how long and how frequently consumers used their downloaded applications.

This time around, we're escalating the conversation from retention to outright addiction. The chart below depicts growth of what the report call the "Addict" segment, «consumers that use an application more than 100 times per month, or more than three times each day of the month. These are the most active users Flurry tracks, and they fire up their applications more than 10 times more often than the average user, who access their applications around 8 times per month.»

In July, Flurry rebealed that more than 3 million people read usually on the iPhone.

Now, the graph above shows significant growth in the Addict segment over the past six months.

In September, 1.2% of the more than 40 million users Flurry tracked, or roughly one half of a million, used apps more than 100 times per month. There is no denying the level of addiction iPhone users are demonstrating around app usage, says the report.

Last week Benedicte Page wrote at The Bookseller a piece, “Move quick on apps or lose out, warning to publishers (http://www.thebookseller.com/news/101468-move-quick-on-apps-or-lose-out-warning-to-publishers.html) where revealed that slow-moving publishers could be left out of the "explosion" in demand for the creation of book applications for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch. Adam Martin, head of the interactive department at United Agents, said apps were a "game-changer" for authors and publishers. He warned that publishers needed to move "within the next six months". "If they are slow, they may get left out," he said.

(The data in this report is computed from a sample size of over 2,500 applications, 40 million consumers and 4 platforms: Apple (iPhone and iPod Touch), Blackberry, JavaME and Google Android.)

However, «while it might be true that the number of Book apps is growing at a faster rate, Games continue to dominate the list of popular U.S. iTunes Apps. Games accounted for about a fifth of all iTunes apps over the past week, but the category continued to have a disproportionate share of the Top 100 charts, accounting for 52% of the Top Grossing, 56% of the Top Paid, and 50% of the Top Free apps», says Ben Lorica from O’Reilly – “Games Top the Charts in the iPhone and Android App Markets” (http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/11/games-top-the-charts-iphone-android-markets.html):

pathint

Lorica emphasizes that «Since most Book apps are actually individual e-books, the Gaming category would have a hard time keeping up with the ever increasing number of Books. Once publishers figured out how to turn their titles into iPhone apps, the number of Book apps started growing faster than Games. Nevertheless Games continue to rule the Top 100 charts»

On the other hand, David Coursey, from PC World, says that «just because developers are creating book applications for iPhone does not mean Apple's handset threatens Amazon's Kindle or B&N's Nook e-readers.»

In his pice “iPhone e-Books Don't Threaten Kindle Or Nook” (http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/181166/iphone_ebooks_dont_threaten_kindle_or_nook.html), Coursey’s rationale:

· At the very least, there is the issue that books are easy to port to the iPhone when compared to the difficulty of developing games. It is no surprise that there would be more books developed, provided developers can make money doing so;

· «I have already downloaded (and paid for) several iPhone books, but they are all reference material. Not things that I would spend a long time reading in a single sitting (…) Because of its small screen, I cannot imagine reading hundreds of pages on an iPhone, something the Nook and Kindle make quite pleasant.»

· That is a very different market and use model than what the Nook, Kindle, and (perhaps) the widely rumored Apple tablet address: «iPhone books fulfill a different purpose, I think, than books on the dedicated e-reader devices. If I were Amazon or Barnes & Noble, I would be much more worried about the other and emerging e-reader companies that I would be about the iPhone.»

John Herrman from Gizmodo, in his piece “iPhone Ebooks: The New Fart Apps” (http://gizmodo.com/5395396/iphone-ebooks-the-new-fart-apps ) sems to agree: « the data shows a clear rise in ebook apps over the last few months, such that they account for a staggering number of the new apps showing up in the store. It's true! (…) But here's the thing: this is purely a measure of how many new apps there are, not how well they're doing. But still, why such a huge uptick? Let's do a little experiment:

Pick your favorite public domain book. No, scratch that, pick your least favorite public domain book—something you had to read back in freshman year of college, and that you immediately and angrily sold back to the campus bookstore. Now, search for it in the App Store. Here's our answer:

«Treasure Island, a free, public domain book, is available for purchase as a standalone app from over a dozen different developers, in all kinds of containers, at all kinds of prices. And why not! the content is free, so once developer has designed an ebook app container, he can just paste any public domain etext in there and throw it into the App Store. I have no idea if these things sell, but to be honest, they wouldn't have to do very well to make money for their developers—the investment is minimal.»

His conclusion: « Even more to the point, if the iPhone really starts to pose a threat to tradition ereaders, it won't be evident in stats like this—it'll be through increased book downloads in all-in-one ereader apps, like Amazon's Kindle, B&N's Reader and unaffiliated apps like eReader and Stanza. That's a real possibility, but for now, we should call this rapid explosion of redundant, overpriced, exploitative apps like we see it.» (my bold emphasis)

However, as Nicholas Clee points (“IPhone ebook apps proliferate”: http://bookbrunch.co.uk/index.php?option=com_myblog&show=IPhone-ebook-apps-proliferate.html&Itemid=71 ): «the problem remains: while reading devices cost $200 or more, and while they perform a single function, they will reach only a limited audience.»

We must be caucious interpretating the “proliferation” of ebook apps for the iPhone. We know almost nothing about the presence of the last titles under copyright. More: what about the reading practices of the iPhone users? That’s an essential point in thinking about the conundrum of the book for tomorrow.

October 29, 2009

Roy DeCarava dies at 89

Roy Rudolph DeCarava (December 9, 1919 – October 27, 2009) was an African American photographer. Born in Harlem, lived there through many decades of important changes and development to the neighborhood. In DeCarava’s childhood, the Harlem Renaissance gave prominence to many black artists, musicians and writers.

He always lived in New York City and almost always has photographed there, creating from his immediate world the world of his art. He found his poetic voice almost as soon as he picked up a camera, in the late 1940s, and has never diverged from it, wrote Peter Galassi in the Introduction to Roy Decarava: A Retrospective (Museum of Modern Art New York, NY 1996).

DeCarava photographed Harlem during the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s with an insider’s view of the subway stations, restaurants, apartments and especially the people who lived in the predominantly African American neighborhood.

Graduation, 1949

He also was well known for his candid shots of jazz musicians — many of them taken in smoky clubs using only available light. Shadow and darkness became hallmarks of DeCarava’s style. (Mary Rourke, Los Angeles Times: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/arts/la-me-roy-decarava29-2009oct29,0,341609,full.story

Coltrane on soprano, 1963, Roy DeCarava

Billie Holiday and Mal Waldron at the piano, 1958

DeCarava was a painter and graphic artist before turning to photography, what does much to explain the strong lines, extraordinarily rich tonality, and dramatic exploitation of light in his photos. Their emotional charge, however, arises from the social choices DeCarava made for his career.

DeCarava told National Public Radio in a 1996 interview that when he started taking pictures "there were no black images of dignity, no images of beautiful black people. There was this big hole. I tried to fill it."

If there were few images of beautiful black people before DeCarava made them, there were also few black photographers who had achieved wide recognition.

Gordon Parks, seven years older than DeCarava, broke the color line in photojournalism in the 1940s, shooting for Life, Look and other national magazines. James VanDerZee became known beyond the black community for his portraits of middle-class African Americans that offer glimpses into Harlem in the 1920s and '30s. But DeCarava's interest in photography as art led him in another direction, says Mary Rourke.

Using a small, 35-millimeter camera that allowed him freedom to roam, DeCarava captured spontaneous moments. He shot in black and white, creating highly impressionistic images, and printed in a style that produced velvety shades of gray and black.

DeCarava was the first black photographer to receive the grant, in 1952. He used the $3,200 to support himself during his first year of photographing in Harlem.

The images he took that year became a book, "The Sweet Flypaper of Life" (1955), with text by Langston Hughes, the foremost black poet of his time.

The same year DeCarava opened A Photographer's Gallery at his home, an important New York City gallery pioneering an effort to win recognition for photography as a fine art, that remained open for more than two years.

DeCarava's first major exhibit was at the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego in 1986. Ten years later, he was the subject of a one-man exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

"At the heart of DeCarava's photography is an aesthetic of patient contemplation. It is common that we say to ourselves (or to others) that our lives would be richer if we could only slow down, if we could take time to savor and consider, if we would attend to our own backyards. DeCarava's work achieves this reflective state of grace, in the way he looks at the world and in the way his pictures invite us to look at them. He loves the luxurious subtlety of photography's infinitely divisible scale of grays, and it pleases him when viewers feel obliged to pause and peer closely into the dense but articulate shadows of his pictures. Having paused, the viewer has entered DeCarava's world.”, said Galassi.

Roy DeCarava, Mississippi Freedom Marcher, Washington, D.C., 1963

"Whatever's there, I use it," DeCarava said of his work in a 1996 interview with National Public Radio. "I improvise. Improvisation is all about individual interpretations, individual expression. And that's what I'm doing

October 25, 2009

HP and the University of Michigan deal

HP and the University of Michigan have inked a deal that will see HP reprinting rare and out-of-print books from Michigan's library via the printer maker's print-on-demand service.

In a retro twist on the Google Books idea, HP has announced (Press Release: HP Makes Rare and Hard-to-find Books Available Through Collaboration with University of Michigan: http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2009/091021xc.html) a partnership with the University of Michigan library to sell physical copies of over 500,000 rare and out-of-print works, while making the digital versions available online for free.

HP's BookPrep service (HP BookPrep is a cloud computing service that enables on-demand printing of books – brings new life to the traditional publishing model, making it possible to bring any book ever published back into print through an economical and sustainable service model)currently in beta, will take in raw scans of books, clean them up to prepare them for re-printing, and then offer print-on-demand copies for sale via normal online book distribution channels like Amazon. This new arrangement mixes a number of aspects of existing efforts like Google Books and current print-on-demand (PoD) offerings, while being a little different from either, and in the process it points the way to a real future for the digital contents of libraries' special collections.

Jon Stokes (from Ars Technica) says this is "potentially as important as anything Google Books is doing." (http://arstechnica.com/media/news/2009/10/-in-a-novel-retro.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss)

Here is the rationale:

All scanned in and no place to go

«The first way in which the HP/Michigan deal differs from Google Books is that HP itself is not doing the scanning. Instead, HP is taking advantage of the rare book scanning efforts that are already underway at Michigan—HP just takes Michigan's raw scans and turns them back into books. This basic idea has much wider applicability than just at Michigan, since libraries across the country are currently in the process of digitizing their special collections.»

The PoD aspect of the HP/Michigan effort isn't just about making books available in a convenient, universally accessible format—it's also part of the printer maker's ongoing attempt to keep people printing in the face of the nascent e-paper and e-book revolution.

"People around the world still value reading books in print," said Andrew Bolwell, HP's director of New Business Initiatives, in a press releases. HP clearly hopes that this statement will continue to hold true for some time to come.

Not ordinary PoD

HP's BookPrep is by no means the only PoD service in the world, nor is HP the only on-demand printer. PoD services like Hulu.com and Apple's iPhoto books have deals with on-demand printers that do the actual printing, binding, and shipping for them, and most large printing houses, like R.R. Donnelly, have print-on-demand services in addition to their traditional presses.

However, «what separates BookPrep from the rest is that normal PoD shops take in only print-ready digital files, usually PDFs. BookPrep, in contrast, will take high-resolution scans that aren't fit to print, and automatically clean them up for printing. Take a look at the examples below from HP's BookPrep website (http://www.bookprep.com/), where the original scan is on top and the print-ready copy is below it.

An example of BookPrep's automated image processing. Source: HP BookPrep

This presentation problem is currently the number one barrier to getting most of the aforementioned special collections' material on the Web, even if the institutions that produced the scans could afford to host them (which they can't). Making an interface that lets you usefully interact with high-resolution scans of papyri, books, handwritten notes, photographs, and the like is a massive undertaking, and there currently exists no off-the-shelf package designed specifically for this purpose, says Jon Stokes.

Hopefully, HP will announce more such deals in the near future, because there are plenty more institutions that would love to take the terabytes of raw, high-resolution scans that are sitting on dusty hard drives and make them available to the viewing public.

October 20, 2009

Children distracted from reading by TV and computers & a comment by Chris Meade

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Booktrust carried out a Research into children’s reading habits for its free books programmes, Booktime and Booked Up projects, which will involve the distribution of 2m free books.

Some 1,772 UK parents of primary school aged children and 1,318 children aged 5-12 years took part in the research.

According to Bookseller’ Caroline Horn (http://www.thebookseller.com/news/100503-children-distracted-from-reading-by-tv-and-computers.html) , the Research has found that :

· 96% of the children surveyed said that they enjoyed reading, peaking at 99% among seven year olds and falling to 89% of 12 year olds.

· This is a 5% increase on a similar study completed last September 2008.

But children admitted they were distracted from reading by sedentary habits including:

· watching TV (54%) and

· playing on the computer or video games (41%).

· In fact, 56% of all parents and carers, and almost half of all parents of four to five year olds (48%), said their child spent more time facing a screen, playing computer games and watching DVDs than reading.

Most children, 74%, said they were the key decision maker when it comes to choosing which books to read, while 15% said their mum decided what they read, 5% said teachers and only 3% their dads.

The research also indicated a clear gender split. Parents and carers of boys were twice as likely not to read with them compared to those who have girls, and households with girls have ten more children’s books than those with boys. One in every 20 family homes in Britain today has fewer than ten books. One in every 12 children said that they rarely or never saw their parents or carers reading for pleasure.

Chris Meade, Director of if:book london («a think and do tank exploring the future of the book as our culture moves from printed page to networked screen, and the potential of new media for creative readers and writers») has an incisivel comment at Bookfutures (http://bookfutures.blogspot.com/2009/10/statistics.html)

«So does this research assume that facing a screen doesn't involve reading - or writing? And did they really "admit they were distracted" by Tv and games, or do they just like doing them? I hereby admit I was distracted from sleeping last night by the book I was reading. »

October 20, 2009

Pearson 2009 Interim results

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According to Reuters Pearson raises guidance as education excels. The British publishing group (PSON.L) raised its full-year guidance on Tuesday, saying it now expects adjusted earnings to be at or above 60 pence per share following a strong performance from its education business.

Kate Holton from Reuters quotes Numis analysts that said "Pearson has raised its guidance by 10 percent this year," and that "Q4 remains important, and for Pearson to raise guidance again at this stage indicates to us that this guidance (and our forecasts) are still likely to prove conservative."

UBS also said it saw further upside potential to forecasts.

Reuters also emphasizes that «Pearson, the world's largest education publisher and the owner of The Financial Times and Penguin Books, said nine-month sales were up 2 percent at constant exchange rates after the group traded ahead of expectations.»

Despite the tough economic environment, the FT Group and Penguin performed in line with expectations after benefiting from investments in digital products and emerging markets.

"We began 2009 in a cautious mood, wary of the impact of the global economic crisis on our company," Chief Executive Marjorie Scardino said in a statement. "We have now seen enough of it to say that, though no part of Pearson has been untouched, the company as a whole has proved its strength."

Education and 'good publishing' at Penguin drive Pearson

Bookseller’s Graeme Neill thinks that « Education and 'good publishing' at Penguin drive Pearson.

STRENGTH IN EDUCATION

According to Bookseller, Pearson Education reported "significant" growth in its international academic publishing programme. During the trading period, sales were up 18% on a headline basis and 10% at CER. The Group statement said: "Our good growth in Latin America, Southern Africa, the Gulf region and the UK has been partially offset by weaker market conditions in Spain and Japan."

Also Reuters says that in education, Pearson gained share and grown faster than expected in North America, with growth of 4 percent at constant exchange rates.

Analysts attributed the growth to a good performance in testing, taking market share gains from struggling rivals and margin benefits from previous acquisitions and restructuring.

Although The U.S. school publishing industry remained under pressure due to weaker state budgets « Pearson managed to outperform the market and deliver its strongest overall competitive performance for a decade. The higher education business was also described as having "an exceptional year".

International education sales were up 10 percent due to the demand for assessment services, higher education materials and digital learning tools. Professional education, which includes sectors such as nursing and training, saw sales down 1 percent, writes Kate Holton.

'Good publishing' at Penguin

-->

Penguin has seen double-digit growth in the first nine months of 2009, according to a trading update from its parent Pearson.

Graeme Neill says that Penguin's sales were up 12%, but declined by 4% at constant exchange rates and by 2% on an underlying basis. Pearson said that tough retail conditions were offset by a "good publishing performance". It said e-book sales grew four-fold over the period with more than 12,000 Penguin e-books now available.

The Press release from Pearson stresses some:

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Penguin's first-half highlights include:

In the US, Penguin led the industry for #1 New York Times bestsellers in the first half. Penguin's 18 #1 bestsellers included titles from established authors such as Greg Mortenson with Three Cups of Tea, Charlaine Harris' Dead and Gone, Nora Roberts' Vision in White, Harlan Coben's Long Lost and Sarah Dessen's Along for the Ride. We helped turn debut novelists Kathryn Stockett, with The Help, and Janice K. Lee, with The Piano Teacher, into national New York Times bestsellers.
In the UK, #1 bestsellers included Jamie Oliver's Ministry of Food, Antony Beevor's D-Day and Marian Keyes' This Charming Man. At the Nibbies, Penguin won the Marketing Campaign of the Year for Sebastian Faulks' Devil May Care (which won the Sainsbury's Popular Fiction Award at the Galaxy British Book Awards).
In Australia, Penguin was named Publisher of the Year for the second year running at the Australian Book Industry Awards (and won half of the awards for individual books). #1 best-sellers from Australian authors included Tom Winton (Breath) and Bryce Courtenay (Fishing for Stars) alongside international authors including Jamie Oliver (Ministry of Food).
In Canada, Penguin author Joseph Boyden won Fiction Book of the Year and Author of the Year at the Canadian Booksellers Association 2009 awards with Through Black Spruce.
In India, Penguin is the largest English language trade publisher, with bestselling authors in the first half of 2009 including Narayana Murthy, Dipankar Gupta and Nandan Nilekani. Penguin Books India launched e-commerce functionality on its website (www.penguinbooksindia.com) in partnership with Indiaplaza and won the Best Book award in two out of the three major categories (Jury) at the Vodafone Crossword national book awards with Amitav Ghosh's best-selling epic saga Sea of Poppies, which was named joint winner of the Best Book (Fiction) award, and Manohar Shyam Joshi's T'ta Professor (translated by Ira Pande) won the Best Book in Translation award.
In China, Penguin signed an agreement with Apabi to become the first International trade publisher to sell titles as eBooks in the market.
A strong second half publishing list is led by major new books in the US, including titles by Patricia Cornwell, Sue Grafton and Anthony Zuiker. The US also has new works by David Plouffe, Greg Mortenson and David Benedictus & Mark Burgess with Return to the Hundred Acre Wood, the first authorised sequel to A.A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner. Penguin UK has works by Nick Hornby, Eoin Colfer, Marina Lewycka, Vladimir Nabokov, Jamie Oliver, Lauren Child and Charlie Higson.

Digital innovation

Significant expansion of eBook publishing and sales. In the US and UK, Penguin has almost 10,000 eBooks available to date and expects to have almost 14,000 by year end including eSpecials and Enriched eBook Classics.
In the US, Penguin launched an online network with three channels featuring nine series of book-related programming for adults, young adults and children. Titled "From the Publishers Office", the site aims to build on Penguin's 2.0 initiatives to engage new audiences and to enhance the dialogue between authors and readers.
In the UK, Penguin and Puffin launch We Make Stories, a unique set of digital tools for children to create, print and share a variety of innovative story forms including pop-up books, customised audio books, comics and interactive treasure maps. The site is designed to encourage literacy, creativity and storytelling skills and is Penguin's first move into providing services. We launched iPhone applications for the Top 10 DK Eyewitness travel guides retailing at £4.99.
Penguin China is the first major international publisher to sell English books directly under its own brand on Taobao (http://shop37092254.taobao.com/ ), the leading direct-to-consumer online auction site in China.

LINKS

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October 19, 2009

Nancy Spero Dies at Age 83

"I have deliberately attempted to distance my art from the Western emphasis on the subjective portrayal of individuality by using a hand-printing and collage technique utilizing zinc plates as an artist's tool instead of a brush or palette knife. Figures derived from various cultures co-exist in simultaneous time... The figures themselves could become hieroglyphs--extensions of a text denoting rites of passage, birth to old age, motion and gesture...Woman as activator or protagonist dancing in procession, elegiac or celebrator a continuous presence, engaged directly or glimpsed peripherally; the eye, as a moving camera, scans the re-imaging of women."

Nancy Spero from an unpublished 1989 statement by the artist entitled "The Continuous Presence."

Nancy Spero (1926 - October 18, 2009) was an American artist born in Cleveland, Ohio.

Spero earned a B.F.A. from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1949, and lived in Chicago with her husband, the painter Leon Golub (1922–2004) in the early 1950s (where both were associated with the Monster Ronster group of Chicago artists, which also included Don Baum and H.C. Westermann) before moving to Paris to study painting at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and at the Atelier of Andre Lhote, an early Cubist painter, teacher and critic.

Spero and Golub returned to New York in 1964, where the couple remained to live and work

An activist and early feminist, Spero was a member of the Art Workers Coalition (1968-69), Women Artists in Revolution (1969), and in 1972 she was a founding member of the first women’s cooperative gallery, A.I.R. (Artists in Residence) in SoHo. (Wikipedia)

Studio of Nancy

According to Bookforum, "In 1974, Spero chose to focus on themes involving women and their representation in various cultures; her Torture in Chile, 1974, and the long scroll, Torture of Women, 1976, blend oral testimonies with images of women throughout history, linking the contemporary governmental brutality of Latin American dictatorships (from Amnesty International reports) with the historical repression of women."

ThDeveloping a pictographic language of body gestures and motion, a bodily hieroglyphics, Spero reconstructed the diversity of representations of women from pre-history to the present. From 1976 through 1979, she researched and worked on Notes in Time on Women, a 20 inch by 210 foot paper scroll. She elaborated and amplified this theme in The First Language (1979-81, 20 inches by 190 feet), eschewing text altogether in favor of an irregular rhythm of painted, hand-printed, and collaged figures, thus creating her “cast of characters.” e acknowledgement of Spero’s international status as a preeminent figurative and feminist artist was signaled in 1987 by her traveling retrospective exhibitions in the United States and United Kingdom. By 1988, she developed her first wall installations. For these, Spero extended the picture plane of the scrolls by moving her printed images directly onto the walls of museums and public spaces. (Wikipedia & other sources)

Harnessing a capacious imaginative energy and a ferocious will, Spero continued to mine the full range of power relations. In 1987, following retrospective exhibitions in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada, the artist created images that leapt from the scroll surface to the wall surface, refiguring representational forms of women over time and engaging in a dialogue with architectural space. Spero’s wall paintings in Chicago, Vienna, Dresden, Toronto, and Derry form poetic reconstructions of the diversity of representations of women from the ancient to the contemporary world, validating a subjectivity of female experience.

Spero once wrote, “I’ve always sought to express a tension in form and meaning in order to achieve a veracity. I have come to the conclusion that the art world has to join us, women artists, not we join it. When women are in leadership roles and gain rewards and recognition, then perhaps ‘we’ [women and men] can all work together in art world actions.”

Basic Data:

Biography, interviews, essays, artwork images and video clips from PBS series Art:21 -- Art in the Twenty-First Century - Season 4 (2007). Link: http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/spero/

October 14, 2009

Les Français lisent toujours moins de livres

Le Département des études, de la prospective et des statistiques du Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication vient de publier les résultats de l'enquête 2008 sur Les pratiques culturelles des Français à l’ère numérique, sous la responsabilité de Olivier Donnat.

Comme on peut lire sur le site web créé pour la divulgation des conclusions du travail (http://www.pratiquesculturelles.culture.gouv.fr/index.php), depuis les années 1970, l’enquête Pratiques culturelles «constitue le principal baromètre des comportements des Français dans le domaine de la culture et des médias. Les résultats de 2008 révèlent, plus de dix ans après ceux de 1997, l’ampleur des effets d’une décennie de mutations induites par l’essor de la culture numérique et de l’internet.»

Les résultats ont été présentés à la presse mercredi 14 octobre, et le même jour a été publié le livre Les pratiques culturelles des Français à l’ère numérique, de Olivier Donnat, à la Découverte / Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication (ISBN: 978-2-7071-5800-0).

Selon l’analyse en ligne de Livres Hebdo (http://www.livreshebdo.fr/actualites/DetailsActuRub.aspx?id=3579#3579), l’étude confirme l’érosion de la place du livre dans la société:

· La proportion des moyens et forts lecteurs a diminué dans la population française, tandis que la part des non-lecteurs et des très faibles lecteurs a augmenté.

En effet, les Éléments de synthèse 1997-2008 (PDF) disponibles sur le site mentionné, confirment cette assertion: «En matière de lecture d’imprimés, les deux principales tendances à l’oeuvre depuis les années 1980 se sont poursuivies au cours de la dernière décennie : la lecture quotidienne de journaux (payants) a continué à diminuer, de même que la quantité de livres lus en dehors de toute contrainte scolaire ou professionnelle.»

Il s’agit ainsi d’un mouvement de long terme que se poursuit, mettant en évidence la “montée en puissance de la culture d’écran”, par rapport à 1997, lorsque seulement 1% de la population française était équipée d’un accès à Internet, contre 56% aujourd’hui.

Pourtant, l’origine de cette tendance est bien antérieure à l’arrivée de l’internet, mais «a continué à peu près au même rythme que lors de la décennie précédente, entraînant une augmentation de la part des très faibles lecteurs – 1 à 4 livres lus dans l’année – mais aussi des non-lecteurs : il y a aujourd’hui plus de Français à n’avoir lu aucun livre dans le cadre de leur temps libre au cours des douze derniers mois qu’il n’y en avait en 1997, et ceux qui n’ont pas délaissé le monde du livre ont réduit leur rythme de lecture d’environ cinq livres par an.» (p.5).

D’ailleurs, «les Français dans l’ensemble reconnaissent eux-mêmes que leurs relations avec le monde du livre se sont distendues puisque 53% d’entre eux déclarent spontanément lire peu ou pas du tout de livres.» (c’est moi qui souligne)

Donc, Livres Hebdo signale qu’il n’établit pas un lien de cause à effet entre l’omniprésence des écrans et le recul de la lecture de livres, rappelant aux journalistes que “cette tendance était déjà à l’œuvre dans les années 1990. On ne peut pas interpréter toutes les données à l’aune du numérique.”

Par exemple, les jeunes en 2008 lisent moins que les jeunes en 1997. Mais, “depuis plusieurs décennies, chaque nouvelle génération arrive à l’âge adulte avec niveau d’engagement dans la lecture inférieur à la précédente, si bien que l’érosion des lecteurs quotidiens de presse et des forts lecteurs de livres s’accompagne d’un vieillissement du lectorat”, écrit Olivier Donnat.

Cette approche générationnelle ne masque pas des inégalités sociales persistantes. Et les analyses de Bourdieu n’ont rien perdu de leur actualité dans ce domaine, au contraire.

“Les différences entre milieux sociaux (...) ont eu tendance à se creuser au cours de la dernière décennie du fait du décrochage d’une partie des milieux populaires, notamment ouvrier”, souligne Donnat.

Par ailleurs, les hommes sont plus nombreux à ne pas lire que les femmes, 62% déclarant lire peu ou pas du tout de livres, contre 46% pour les femmes.

La baisse de la proportion des forts lecteurs peut s’expliquer par plusieurs facteurs.

· D’abord, “un recul de la littérature dans l’ensemble des livres lus. En situation d’enquête, on pense moins à déclarer les livres pratiques, les beaux livres que l’on consulte, les BD...”

· De plus, les gens osent peut-être davantage avouer aujourd’hui qu’ils lisent peu ou pas du tout. (“J’ai toujours pensé qu’une partie de la baisse de la lecture renvoyait probablement à une moindre surdéclaration”, explique le sociologue:

“Le livre ayant perdu une partie de sa légitimité, notamment chez les jeunes, les gens sont plus enclins à dire qu’ils ne lisent pas.”

Livres Hebdo nous informe que Philippe Chantepie, directeur du DEPS au ministère, a par ailleurs annoncé qu’un colloque international sera organisé en 2010, probablement avec Sciences Po, pour effectuer des comparaisons avec d’autres pays.

Un ouvrage sur les pratiques culturelles des moins de 18 ans devrait voir le jour au printemps 2010 et sera suivi lui aussi d’un colloque.

joseafonsofurtado's posterous

Books, reading and publishing in a digital era, as well as other media and new ICTs. (In Portuguese,English, French,Spanish and Italian).