LISNews: Librarian News

Why We Publish
It isn’t to obtain tenure. And it isn’t for money. Although to some, that is what publishing has become. The rationale for why we publish is (should be) to communicate results to as great an audience as possible and advance our understanding of the world around us. At Mendeley, we started to wonder how we could help communicate results and bring new models to the publication ecosystem. We think that Open Access content, where the full-text is readily accessible to all, will be the standard communication model in the future. And as such, we are rethinking how we shape our discovery algorithms.
[Thanks G!]

The e-book era promises us all the pleasure of wading through the slush pile ourselves, even as the pile grows exponentially. Much of that growth comes from eager literary hopefuls making earnest efforts. But spammers are also making their contribution to the teeming digital library. As Reuters recently reported, some unscrupulous self-publishers have begun creating books by the ream merely by grabbing a few pages of text from websites and dumping them into ultraquickie e-books. The authors of such faux tomes can knock out 10 or 20 a day. And even if only a handful of people make the mistake of downloading one of these "books," the spammer still makes enough pennies to keep at it.

This year’s BookExpo America, an annual publishing business trade show, is full of talk of e-reading and other shifts in the industry.

There is a Wild West quality to the book business these days, and it is on full display at BookExpo America, an annual trade show that draws tens of thousands of authors, publishers and booksellers; this year it is at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York.

Authors are shrugging off publishers to self-publish their work. Publishers are advancing into retail. Barnes & Noble is getting deeper into the gadget business, and Amazon is stepping into publishing.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/26/books/bookexpo-america-underlines-industry-shifts.html?ref...

Are Books An Endangered Species?
Michael Levin is an eight-time best-selling author, a former member of the Authors Guild Council and a business writer. In the following piece, he writes that the disappearance of books is not because of Amazon or the Web, but because of book publishers themselves.