Thomson Gale has announced that several new publishers will be adding their content to Gale Virtual Reference Library. (See article here.) Among those partners is Omnigraphics. No word on when material from these publishers will be added.
ProQuest is apparently having financial difficulties. (See article.) An audit has uncovered the dreaded “accounting irregularities” in which earnings were overstated in the past few years. The company may sell its Business Solutions unit to try to ease its burdens. Unlike most other library reference publishers, ProQuest is a publicly traded company. Despite its troubles, the company continues to roll out new products. Its ads for its Historical Newspapers product, in particular, are ubiquitous.
I recently subscribed to the magazine eContent, one of Information Today’s offerings. So far, many of the articles I’ve read are way over my head technically and/or are about very arcane (to me) issues related to publishing for the Web. But I was excited last week to get an invite to an upcoming Web seminar titled “The Future of Content Delivery: Oxford University Press.” The Webinar will discuss OUP’s African American Studies Center, which is one of their big new electronic offerings. This is right up our alley for a number of reasons. First, we handled the copyediting on a lot of the content that is going into that database, including the biographies from African-American Lives and about half of their upcoming, multivolume Encyclopedia of African-American History. Second, as we work on developing our own reference content, we are thinking hard about how to create data that can be published in book format for libraries and yet also offered online, perhaps in a direct-to-consumer paradigm. Finally, on a technical level, hearing more about XML will be very useful. Much of the content we work with at present is in SGML format, but so far our biggest customers have not ventured into XML conversion, although most people say it is the way of the future. For our own data, we will definitely look to create everythign using XML code. The Webinar is on June 1, and I’ll be sure to report back after it’s over.
Financial Times reports that a leading Chinese Web search company, Baidu, has launched an online encyclopedia modeled after Wikipedia. It’s called Baidupedia, and like Wikipedia it consists of user-generated content. Unlike Wikipedia, which was initially very popular in China but which was banned by the government last year because of unsuitable content, Baidupedia self-censors to avoid any content that the government would not like. It will be interesting to see how popular the site becomes. My guess is that, in the absence of any other competing product, it will quite popular. Users may miss the discussion of political realities, but they will welcome the nonpolitical content.
Thomson Gale continues to aggressively pursue selling its reference content direct to consumers through various websites. They have sold some of their literature content as e-book chapters on Amazon.com for some time now. Today I noticed that they are now selling individual Contemporary Authors entries on Amazon.com for $5.95 per entry. They are smart for pursuing this strategy; one wonders when other publishers will get in the game.
In the latest salvo of the Opal Mehta plagiarism scandal, Publishers Weekly has now published a column by Sara Nelson that criticizes the role of book packagers in today’s publishing world–particularly in mainstream fiction. In response, the American Book Producers Association has sent a letter to PW that rebuts Nelson’s views about book packaging. Here are some highlights of the letter, which was written by ABPA president Dan Tucker: “Just as publishers publish across the spectrum from literature to entertainment, so book producers keep our clients supplied with books across that same spectrum. Why would we ignore any market opportunity?… As a group, ABPA members produce a wide variety of books that, it’s true,often involve large numbers of people, … I’m speaking of important reference books, favorably reviewed, strong-selling, and beloved illustrated books, books that have some production complexity such as paper engineering, and yes, even works of genre fiction.” Interestingly, Nelson delivered the keynote address at an ABPA conference in November 2005.
Ten public and school libraries in Louisiana and Mississippi that were destroyed by Hurricane Katrina will receive grants worth $500,000 to help them rebuild. First Lady Laura Bush announced the grants at a news conference yesterday. Here’s the CNN story about it.
The National Geographic Society has released its annual report on the state of geographic knowledge by 18-24-year-olds in the United States, and once again the results are astonishing and depressing. The vast majority of those tested could not find Iraq, Israel, or Afghanistan on a map. Half couldn’t locate the state of New York, and a third couldn’t find Louisiana. Not surprisingly, the people tested in other countries (Japan, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Sweden, and Great Britain) did better on the test. The report once again makes it clear that geography education in middle schools and high schools is failing badly. One positive finding is that enrollment in university-level geography courses in the United States is increasing. Like many people, I continue to wonder how our country can possibly compete in the global economy in the twenty-first century when students in other countries are so much better equipped than our own.