Gordon Woolf's Blog

Get ready for the ISTC - a new book identifier

ISTC (International Standard Text Code) is likely to come into use in the book industry worldwide late this year or early 2011. Basically it goes beyond ISBNs (International Standard Book Numbers) to identify content rather than edition.

Different editions of a work, even from different publishers, should have the same ISTC.

It will look something like:

ISTC 0A9-2010-12B4A105-7

and may appear on the back cover but is more likely to be referenced just on the copyright page and will be listed in database information about the book.

In this way, you'll be able to tell instantly whether a trade paperback, a hardback, an audio book or an ebook have the same content. It should also help end the confusion on whether different presentations of the same book should have the same ISBN. They should not. They should have the same ISTC.

The issuers of ISTCs will almost certainly be the same as the issuers of ISBNs, in other words the biggest players will be Bowker and Nielsen under the supervision of the ISTC Agency and using a single, global XML database system.

Items covered are described as "creative works" such as prose, peotry. lyrics, original screenplays, audio and stage scripts. Photographs, although they can be part of such works, are not in themselves covered and while graphic novels would be, the registration would cover only the text elements of these.

The registration agency will run a computer test to check whether the content has already been registered.

Works can be registered by an author, publisher, agent, library, rights management or collection agency or distributor. It is not yet clear what the fee structure is likely to be. The present ISBN structure is commonly a price per code which reduces with quantity, although there are provisions is some countries for free issue of ISBNs, especially single registrations.

The ISTC identifier is a 16-character code (using numbers 0-9 and letters A-F, i.e. the hexadecimal system) in four sections to identify the registration agency, the year of registration, the identifier and a check digit.

It has no section for registrant, so the same content can be published by diffreent publishers but would have only one ISTC. That's a major difference to the ISBN which identifies primarily a publisher.

A work that is translated, abridged, annotated, a compilation, criticism, excerpt, expurgated, revised or adapted, will get a new ISTC but the metadata for that must state the original ISTC and just what its relationship is.

This will also be a problem for authors and publishers of non-fiction works which have frequent editions. New ISBN are usually adopted if there is anything but superficial changes but often there are substantial changes between editions, and all degrees inbetween. It seems it will still be a matter of opinion with the publisher making the decision whether to use the same ISTC or gain a new one with a reference to the original.

There will be internet search engines to identify works from the ISTC and for prospective publishers etc to search on title, author etc to establish whether a work has been registered. They will not link to ISBN data and it would be normal for a work to be registered for an ISTC well before it gains an ISBN, such as that an author might register it before submitting to an agent or publisher, or an agent might register a work before submitting it to publishers.

No one will own any single ISTC once it has been created and an ISTC will not imply any rights to the material. (To my mind, however, it may discourage plagiarism).

It may help in book searches, since once a particular example of a work has been found, that will provide the ISTC which is what is needed to identify the work in other formats, even if they have a different title. It may also help avoid duplication of axquisitions by libraries.

The usefulness of ISTC will increase with time, more rapidly if the registration agencies and especially those who already maintain databases used extensively by the book industry decide to start entering past works. There seems to have been some indications that this will happen though that may depend on what they see as possible financial benefits.

For an author or small publisher I would suggest that ITSC is not something they need to act on instantly, but they do need to watch what is happening. Once the codes start to appear for new works by major publishers in your genre then that will be the time to act.

In the meantime you may like to delve further:

ISTC: http://www.istc-international.org/ (see resources page for a link to the user manual)

Book Industry Study Group discussion paper:
http://www.bisg.org/contentweb/papers/the-international-standard-text-code-istc-a-work-in-progress/

A 2009 overview by Andy Weissberg, VP of Identifier Services at Bowker: http://www.myidentifiers.com/multimedia/pdfs/ISTC_overview_ISQv21no3.pdf

How to work out what to charge for ads

Magazines provide a fascinating problem for anyone interesting in the mathematics of costing production. That's because there are so many variables.

Think of this: you plan a new magazine and you follow the usual practice of giving discounts for larger advertisements. Or maybe you work it out the other way: $500 for a full page, $260 for a half, $150 for a quarter, $80 for an eighth-page. Now you reckon that most of your ads will be small sizes, but then in come the orders for full pages and someone asking what's your discount for a double page spread (a "truck" they may call it). Instead of celebrating you suddenly realize that instead of getting upwards of $650 a page, you are giving discounts below $500.

That truck is driving straight through all your cost estimates, accompanied by a dozen Humvees. You may save a little on the time of putting one ad on a page instead of placing 6 or 8 little ones, but you may also find that the advertisers or their agents are ultra critical on proofs and the quality of the final job. Then you realize that those full page advertisers placed orders for 3 or 6 or even 12 months and your revenue is disappearing fast. Your costs may be going down a little, but they'll still want to keep changing their copy.

Fortunately there is a calculator around to help. The Adrates calculator is not completely free - it comes as a free download with copies of How to Start and Produce a Magazine or Newsletter and is an Excel spreadsheet that lets you do all those what-of calculations before you start telling people what your rates are (or helps you work out what they will have to become if you already have a publication).

Enter your suggested full page rate and the percentage extra you will charge for smaller ads and the discount you will give for series ads. Guess the percentages you may get in series bookings (you can play around with all these figures as much as you like) and the spreadsheet will give you a guide to what your rate card might look like.

Then, and this is the clever part, it will tell you, based on what percentage of pages you intend to devote to ads, how many pages of ads you will need. Then you can enter all kinds of combinations of the sizes they might be. If you go over the total it will tell you and it will give a cumulative total as you enter the numbers of ads.

Finally it gives you the total income at full rates, and then, the really important figure: based on your previously entered proportions of repeat ads, it gives your likely revenue per issue. And that is the figure which may come as a shock.

Of course you can then work out what happens if you get an extra full page. Sure, the revenue will shoot up but there is the calculation this spreadsheet does not do for you: what effect does it have on your printing and other production costs (especially if it takes you into the next postage category and you have a lot of mail subscribers).

This isn't a magic solution, but it will help with calculations that every magazine and newsletter publisher has to do at some stage, even if it is on the back of an envelope.

The book is available from Worsley Press or from Amazon, at US$26.95 and there's a lot more help than just this spreadsheet.

But first, have a look at the Adrates file (Download Adrates) which shows how the spreadsheet works.

 

Skating on the Photoshop sliders

I noticed that the occasional mono pages which one of our local newspapers runs had pictures which were very muddy. It's a strong possibility that they are preparing all their pages in colour and just accepting that some of them may be run in black and white but a little time really should be taken to adjust for the lack of colour before it becomes almost a forgotten art.

It's a couple of years since a DTP-er I know was having trouble coping with instructions from a printer that detailed their pic specs as no less than 5% highlight dot, 80% max shadow, and midtones of 35 to 40%. The printer then added that this particular press might want the midtones down by another 10 or 15%.

That seems like a lot of old newspaper presses I know. Though, on second thoughts, they'd be hard pressed to hold a 5% highlight dot. My instructions on one paper were to drag both sliders in Photoshop in significantly, then drag the gamma slider across most of the way: no point in talking numbers, this was like engraving with a chainsaw -- provided you could hardly see anything on screen, there was a chance the final result would be fine.

The really amazing thing is that the final results were quite good.

This is the skill in working without color, and it is a good idea to ask a printer to show you what the original looks like for any black-and-white photos that look good (and maybe to give you the file) so you can see what you have to produce. Once you know what an original should look like on your screen, it is less necessary to work by the numbers. And some of those movements in the sliders within Photoshop can be far more than you would try without seeing an example.

The same principles apply to photocopying. Color is more forgiving than mono, but it is still worth learning some of the old skills. They can produce better color pics too.

And why do some pages have to run in black and white? That is because it does not matter to a large web press whether it is printing one color or many. It is the total number of plates which matter. A press can have the paper run from the reel (web) in many different ways so if fewer color plates are needed then more pages can be printed in the one run. So, some late ads can be accomodated without a second run and collating the two sections if some of the existing pages can be printed in one color instead of four.