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The Association of American Publishers (AAP) has revealed that its latest stats for February show a growth of 202%. The annual figures from January/February 2010 to the same time this year is equally impressive – a 169% rise to $164m (£100m).

 

Print books fared badly in the last year with sales falling 25% to $442m (£270m). But there is one area that is bucking that trend, which does not show up in AAP’s figures. That is the market for renting books – the printed versions, not the e-book versions.

And the audience that is the most open to this practice is arguably the most digitally literate: students. Chegg is the leading book-renter in the industry and has been dubbed the Netflix of college textbooks. Its chief executive officer Dan Rosensweig says that, for students, accessing information in what might be regarded “the old fashioned’ way is all about the bottom line:

“Our mission has not been to rent textbooks or not rent textbooks. Our mission has been to save students time, money and help them get smarter,” said Mr Rosensweig, who previously worked as an exec at Yahoo and at Activision Blizzard.

“The higher education market textbooks continue to be easily 98% of the market. The reason for that is the technology is only getting ready now. Books have a better battery life. You can always depend on them. But just as importantly, you can rent a textbook substantially cheaper than you can get a new textbook, or a used one, or one that you can buy digitally,” said Mr Rosensweig.

“Students are looking to get access to the content they want in the easiest format and at the least expense. For the moment, that means renting books.”

Chegg said that last year it reached 25% of college students and plants a tree for every book it rents out. The company has just announced that it has planted its five-millionth tree, so I will leave you to do the maths.

In cold hard cash, Chegg said in January 2010 it had saved students a total of $100m. That represented the difference between what a student would have had to pay to buy a book versus renting it.

 

“This is a $10bn market, with over 200 million books changing hands every year,” said Mr Rosensweig.

“If a textbook was $120 new to the student it would cost $100 used and we would probably rent it for about $55. That represents a substantial saving at a time when families in the US are struggling and education becomes more and more expensive.”

A number of other players vying for the attention of struggling students agree there is money to be made in second hand books.

Rival company CampusBookRentals.com said about 10% of college students rent their books.

BookRenter.com, which had a bit of spat with Chegg over just who could lay claim to the #1 slot moniker, said it serves six million students, representing about 31% of the North American market. The company also claims to be “one of the fastest growing start-ups in Silicon Valley, growing at over 725% each year”.

ValoreBooks.com promises to provide the cheapest textbooks in the nation by having students sell to students:

“We are an online marketplace. What an online marketplace is is an open platform. Anybody can sell their books and any buyer can buy any book,” said CEO Bobby Brannigan.

“As you get more sellers on the site it drives price down. It’s basic economics.”

A new competitor will enter the fray at the beginning of next month, proving the industry is booming.

BookDecay.com will allow students to review how professors use required textbooks in a class, helping others to make informed decisions as to how – or whether – they should obtain the book themselves.

“One semester I bought several books, and they sat on a windowsill and kind of decayed, if you will,” Rocco Carzo told the Democrat And Chronicle.

The site will allow students to buy, swap or rent books and will link to Chegg and Amazon.

While the physical textbook doesn’t seem set to be replaced anytime soon, what about its digital rival? Why have e-textbooks failed to penetrate?

“It is a matter of getting the experience right and the price,” said Mr Rosensweig.

“One of the things that holds it back isn’t so much the technology, which will be solved. It’s that school starts once a year. If it’s not this August, it’s next August.

“Education is one of the areas where technology has not yet had a chance to work its magic. Like everything in technology, you can’t pick the day it is going to flip but you need to make sure you are ready for it. But it is going to happen.”

He is betting that 2012 is the year the digital future will arrive.

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Sure, they weren’t any ordinary guys and they weren’t alone.

This was President Barack Obama and Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg, who had abandoned his trademark hoodie to host the first ever visit by a sitting head of state at the bricks and mortar headquarters of the world’s biggest social network.

 

Mr Obama came to Facebook for an online town hall meeting to sell his deficit reduction plan and himself for another stint in the White House in 2012.

It seemed nothing was off the agenda as he happily answered questions asked by Mr Zuckerberg, live audience members and Facebook users who had logged in to take part virtually.

“A lot of people all over the world use Facebook to share a lot of things – things about their day, their families, their kids and of course their views on politics,” said Mr Zuckerberg.

“It has never been as easy in the history of the world for people to have their voice heard and exercise their freedom of speech. Just post something, comment, like. But it’s good to complement that online dialogue with some face time as well.”

Mr Obama was in complete agreement, recognising the opportunity as one to reach out to some of the 600 million users who make up a younger demographic of the population and generally rely on their social group to keep them informed.

Throughout, Mr Obama played to the crowd by tackling issues dear to their heart. Silicon Valley has for a long time been pushing for changes in immigration law, at a time when the technology industry is fighting for talented engineers and computer scientists.

The president asked: “If we’ve got smart people who want to come here and start businesses and are PhDs in math and science and computer science, why don’t we want them to stay? Why would we want to send them someplace else?”

 

To huge applause he added: “We want more Andy Grove’s here (founder of the world’s biggest chip maker Intel and an immigrant from Hungary). We don’t want them starting an Intel in China or France. We want them starting them here.”

On education, the president scored big time with this audience:

“We have got to lift our game up when it comes to teaching math and science,” he said. “That hopefully is one of the most important legacies I can have as president of the United States.”

Mr Obama also said he wanted to get people as excited as they once were about going to the Moon:

“I always hear stories about how we can’t find engineers, and that’s why we’re emphasising math and science. We want to start making science cool,” said Mr Obama.

“I want people to feel about the next big energy breakthrough and the next big internet breakthrough the same way they felt about the moonwalk.”

Reducing the country’s reliance on oil was another touchstone.

“It is so important for us to invest in new approaches to energy. We have got to have a long-term plan. It means investing in things like solar and wind.”

And let’s not forget the deficit which was the president’s raison d’etre for coming to Facebook.

“We have an unsustainable situation,” he said. “We face a critical time where we are going make some decisions – how do we bring down the debt in the short term, and how do we bring down the debt in the long term?”

Mr Obama repeated his call for the end of tax cuts for the wealthy and noted that millionaires like himself and Mr Zuckerberg will have to pay more. “I’m cool with that,” the 26-year-old Zuckerberg interjected. Though according to Facebook’s latest valuation, Mr Zuckerberg is no longer a millionaire. His company is now worth $60bn.

Mr Obama’s final pitch came to the young people who came out in force to help elect him to the White House in 2008. While he recognised that many who played such a pivotal role back then might well feel frustrated at the pace of change and the lack of progress, the President appealed to them to get involved once again for 2012 – whether it be for him or the other guy:

“I know that some of you who might have been involved in the campaign or been energised back in 2008, you’re frustrated that, gosh, it didn’t get done fast enough and it seems like everybody’s bickering all the time,” said Mr Obama.

“Just remember that we’ve been through tougher times before. If you don’t give us a shove, if you don’t give the system a push, it’s just not going to change. And you’re going to be the ones who end up suffering the consequences,” he added.

 

The town hall, which pulled in over 2,800 online comments, was seen as a landmark event for Facebook and it’s internet TV channel.

“I could never have dreamed when I first started working here that six years later Facebook would be the platform that the president of the country would choose to speak to everyone in America,” said Randi Zuckerberg, Facebook’s head of consumer marketing.

“It’s a pinnacle for us in the United States but I think there is still so much that can be covered by Facebook Live around the world. Facebook is a really global platform and President Obama’s view is the view of one political party and we want to make sure we hit a representative sample because Facebook users come from all over the world, all political beliefs.”

The audience was made up of about 500 Facebook employees who won a ticket in a company lottery. Other guests included well-known Silicon Valley figures like Ron Conway, dubbed the godfather of angel investing, Yelp chief executive Jeremy Stoppelman, Dan Rosenswieg of Chegg, and Meebo’s Seth Steinberg. MC Hammer, musician and entrepreneur added a little bit of glamour to the occasion.

Before the event kicked off, there was a lot of buzz about what Mr Zuckerberg would be wearing. Famed for his dressed down look, he did don a jacket, shirt and tie when he joined other tech titans in February to dine with Mr Obama.

This time around, he dusted off the same outfit – something the President made fun about:

“My name is Barack Obama and I am the guy who got Mark Zuckerberg to wear a jacket and tie,” he quipped.

In reply, Mr Zuckerberg presented the president with his very own Facebook hoodie: “in case you want to dress like me”.

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A slew of environmental groups have commended the company for increasing its energy efficiency by 38%. But Greenpeace has slated Facebook for not going far enough. The problem, they say, is that while Facebook is building more efficient facilities, such as the one at Prineville and another in North Carolina, they are still relying on good old King Coal to power them. Greenpeace say that 62% of the electricity for these centres will be provided by utility companies that use coal-burning plants.

“Information technology is at the vanguard of technology but it is increasing demand for a 19th Century technology which is coal,” said Daniel Kessler of Greenpeace.

“Facebook is an iconic brand. In many ways they are changing the world and we want them to change the way they use energy. But their new centres are hooked up to very dirty grids. While they may be taking the efficiency part of what they are doing very seriously they are not factoring in the type of energy they are using. Coal is the number one contributor to climate change,” added Mr Kessler.

A video posted on YouTube by Greenpeace takes that thought one step further, by throwing in some hyperbole and charging Facebook as “the number one contributor to climate change”.

But Facebook’s vice president for technical operations Jonathan Heiliger said what they are doing “represents a quantum leap in energy efficiency”:

“Reducing energy usage is the best thing we can do for the environment,” said Mr Heiliger.

“Instead of worrying about what energy source you may have to choose and the impact on the environment, the best way to reduce CO2 and improve the environment is to cut energy consumption and that is what we are doing.”

In a bid to influence the company at a grassroots level, Greenpeace is targeting Facebook’s employees and bringing their message right to the social network’s front doorstep.

Throughout this morning, employees will be accosted on their way into the office by Greenpeace campaigners urging them to take up the fight.

On the back of a flat bed truck there will be a giant 160-inch monitor, flashing LED messages and comments posted by people worldwide on a Facebook page set up for the campaign.

The page is part of an effort to amass the most comments ever to a Facebook post and earn a place in the Guinness Book of Records. Greenpeace said at least 50,000 comments are needed before 10pm Pacific standard time (0600 BST) tonight.

“A big part of our strategy is targeting Facebook’s employees who we believe are on our side,” said Mr Kessler:

“They share our values, they are young and they think they are working for a ‘green’ company. But they may not be aware that in fact Facebook contributes to the growing rate of emissions that are affecting our planet. We want the employees to start this conversation inside the company,” he said.

Overhead there will be a 174ft-long “flying ship”, or airship, with a banner calling on Facebook to “join the energy revolution”.

Greenpeace volunteers in Ireland have already lobbied Facebook’s offices in Dublin as part of the campaign.

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Steve Jobs, the man who is known as one of the most secretive in Silicon Valley, has been co-operating with a biography of his life.

Steve Wozniack and Steve Jobs with the Apple 1 computer

Gossip about such a book has been doing the rounds for a while in the Valley but until publishers Simon & Schuster confirmed it this weekend, those rumours seemed nothing more than just that.

“This is the perfect match of subject and author, and it is certain to be a landmark book about one of the world’s greatest innovators,” Jonathan Karp, publisher of Simon & Schuster, said in a statement.

 
“Just as he did with Einstein and Benjamin Franklin, Walter Isaacson is telling a unique story of revolutionary genius.”

The biography will be called iSteve: The Book of Jobs. Its author , has previously written Einstein: His Life and Universe, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life and Kissinger: A Biography. Mr Isaacson was also a former executive at CNN and Time magazine.

Apparently Mr Isaacson has already carried out a series of interviews with Mr Jobs, his family, friends, colleagues and competitors. One report stated that he had even toured Mr Jobs’ childhood home.

Fortune’s Phillip Elmer DeWitt said when he was at the launch of the original iPad last year, he was surprised to see his former boss among the assembled journalists and analysts. On reflection, he said, the choice of Mr Isaacson as Mr Jobs’ official biographer made perfect sense.

“The news came as no surprise to anyone who has worked with Isaacson. If there is one thread that runs through his long career in journalism and public service, it’s his talent for spotting the most influential people in any room and finding a way to get close to them.

 
“Until Sunday’s announcement, it wasn’t clear to outsiders that the book was a sure thing. Because what Jobs gives, he can also take away.”

He recalls a book written by the then journalist – and now successful venture capitalist Michael Moritz – about the creation of the Macintosh called The Little Kingdom.

“When Moritz reported, in Time’s 1983 Machine of the Year cover package, the story of how Jobs’ initially refused to acknowledge paternity of his first daughter, Lisa, access was abruptly cut off. Moritz had to finish the book without Apple’s cooperation.”

It is not the only book to have displeased Apple’s chief. iCon: Steve Jobs, The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business, written by Jeffrey Young, promised “insider scoops and no-holds-barred style”.

It displeased Mr Jobs so much he had all books pulled from Apple stores.

As with all previous biographers, Mr Isaacson has some great material to work with. From persuading his friend and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak to design and sell one of the first successful personal computers to being ousted from his beloved company in a bitter power struggle only to bring it back from the brink of extinction. In his personal life there is the story of his adoption and his conversion to Buddhism.

Mr Jobs has long resisted the approaches of countless authors over the years to tell his story. The question has to be what finally changed his mind? As he endures a third leave of absence from Apple due to health issues in the wake of pancreatic cancer, perhaps he is beginning to fear his own mortality.

There is little doubt that iSteve will make fascinating reading. The fear will be, given Mr Jobs’ famed need to control everything down to the last detail, how true a picture we will get of the man who has reversed the fortunes of Apple and turned it into the most valuable technology firm in the world.

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AHHHA.com is the brainchild of entrepreneur and business advisor Matt Crowe. He calls it social ideation:

“Like a lot of engineers, I saw an inefficient process when it comes to the currency of ideas and an opportunity to do things better,” he says.

“Ideas are cheap. Execution is rare. The execution is the hard part. What does your idea look like? What colour should it be? Where should it be sold? How much should it cost? We can divvy all that up with our community and smart algorithms.”

Mr Crowe says he believes Ahhha is part of an evolution occurring in the social space:

“Facebook gives us social networking with the intrinsic value of having friends and pictures. The next state was Twitter which was really creating a personal brand for yourself and creating value that way. Then there’s Zynga with social gaming which is basically people paying money to buy virtual swords and fight with people.

“I believe where we found our footing is with social ideation and helping people make hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars of real money. At Ahhha we are collecting ingenuity.”

In short Mr Crowe says Ahhha is a platform to create, generate, develop and communicate new ideas and use the wisdom of the crowd to turn that idea into a business or a real product.

Here’s how it works: First, enter your idea on the home page. Upload images, descriptions, a YouTube video, then hit submit and sit back as other users chime in on perfecting your idea. As the community becomes involved, bringing together designers, engineers and funders, the web app tracks each product’s progress.

“I’ve seen good ideas not come to fruition, but with Ahhha, we streamline the process,” says Mr Crowe.

“If ideas are liked by the crowd and have good content around them, essentially we can identify companies that would be interested in them as a product or service. Our algorithms allow us to understand that path to monetisation.”

Mr Crowe says Ahhha has mapped 200 paths to monetisation, with more being added every day. Some of them include licensing, securing patents and the use of online marketplaces. He reckons that about 20% of ideas will be successful.

There are other sites that also work along similar lines helping people finance their ideas. They range from Kickstarter to Quirky, Spigit and corporate versions like Toyota’s Ideas for Good and General Electric’s eco challenge. Mr Crowe said they have only had limited success because they are “super niche” and his approach is “broad and wide”:

“Ahhha accepts an innumerable amount of ideas from right across the board – from time machines and world peace, to innovative solar technology and everything in between. We are creating the market of ideas.”

But of course, not every idea is a good idea and Mr Crowe says that is why the crowdsourcing element is crucial in this process along with data that will tell Ahhha what will work or not work:

“The data comes from algorithms we have developed and from the users. We are able to take a wide breadth of data and knowledge from different areas and different individuals and apply that to gauge the chances of an idea taking off.”

The person with the bright idea is not the only one who can make money. Ahhha has put in place a system that allows all those who contribute to making that idea great the ability to collect points which can in turn be redeemed for cash, products and services.

“Our business model is to make money from transaction fees and bundled services,” says Mr Crowe.

He also has plans for Ahhha to set up a microfund to finance some of these ideas and eventually to host contests like the X-Prize which aims to encourage ideas around space.

“I want Ahhha to be known as the brand of ideas and that is very powerful,” says Mr Crowe.

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Of late it has been Facebook and Twitter that have been viewed as the hip and happening places to visit in Silicon Valley. But while those two companies can brag about Katie Perry and Snoop Dogg, Google has shown it can still pull in the big names with undoubtedly the biggest get in showbiz.

The packed event, which was part of the company’s musicians@google series, started off with a video they had made to illustrate how instrumental the web, and Google, have been in the musician’s career.

Google’s Marissa Mayer peeled away Lady Gaga by the numbers. She told the performer that she is a “search star” with 443 million hits for the term “Lady Gaga” on Google, 630 million views on Gaga’s “Bad Romance” YouTube video and 20 million singles downloaded on iTunes. Over the last three and a half days 54,000 questions were posed using Google Moderator with 250,000 votes on her YouTube page.

Dressed in thigh high boots and black sunnies, Lady Gaga was revealing and funny and nerdy as they come: “When I was in high school all my girlfriends wanted to get jobs here [at Google] and I wanted to be what they were searching for,” said the pop diva. Big score for the recruitment folks at Google, which was cited as the number one place to work by the Wall Street Journal this week.

Watch the interview with Lady Gaga here.

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Twitter co-founder Biz Stone at the company’s headquarters

It reminds me of the time as a junior reporter working for a BBC rival when I got sent out to cover a murder in North London with the aid of one of the first mobile phones. It was the size of a brick and weighed a ton.

Previous to that “mobile” era, I would have to find a red phone box to file copy and then take the phone apart to attack crock clips to feed audio down the line.

Now with my trusty BlackBerry, I rarely log onto my BBC PC and do everything via the phone. Especially tweet. Which takes me back to where I started this conversation.

When I spoke to co-founder Biz Stone, he described this birthday much like sending a child off to school.

“It’s so crazy, it just doesn’t feel like five years have passed. We were sitting up here [at Twitter HQ]: me, Jack [Dorsey] and Ev [Williams] in front of the company talking about what we were doing and the fun stuff and messages between Jack and me when we were building the first prototype. I think one of the first SMS text messages I sent was ‘come here Watson, I need you’.”

“The other day someone asked ‘you are five-years-old, what does that mean to you?’ and I said the image popped into my head of a five-year-old getting ready to go to kindergarten. We are at that point where we are at the beginning of a life of adventure.”

For the last couple of weeks Jack Dorsey, who had been noodling on this kind of idea since early 2001, has been digging through his archives and tweeting his thoughts, memories and copies of the tweets and IM’s that passed between the team. See them on his stream here. They make for fascinating reading.

Contrary to popular belief, the first tweet was not “just setting up my twttr”, which was an automated message. Instead, Jack revealed the first message was “inviting workers”. While it doesn’t hold a candle to “one small step for man” it will go down in the history books nonetheless.

If you want to see what other people were tweeting about back then, go here. Jack’s plea to ask people to dig into their own archives helped get the #5yrs hashtag into trending topics.

So as the once commonly referred to micro-blogging service grows up as an information and communications platform, what does Twitter mean to you?

It was a question I asked all the founders. Naturally answers conform to the 140 character rule.

@Biz: Twitter means connecting with those things I find most meaningful in life and it really has been true.

As an example he cited trying to find out details about what was going on in Japan and the fall out from the nuclear reactor at Fukishima. He was looking for specific answers and not the generalisations he was finding everywhere else and said he found them thanks to Twitter.

@Ev: Twitter means having a direct link to the minds of hundreds of the people I most admire on the planet–and millions more I’ve yet to know.

@jack: The best technologies make us more human. Twitter enables one to take what was once unapproachable & complex, and makes it human, instantly.

So what does Twitter mean to you? No more than 140 characters please.

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The issue will be front and centre when shareholders gather at the firm’s Cupertino HQ in California for the annual boondoggle today amid Mr Jobs’ third medical leave of absence.

Leading the charge to have this extremely secretive Silicon Valley stalwart talk about succession plans is the Central Laborers’ Pension Fund of Jackson, Illinois which holds nearly 11,500 Apple shares worth around $4m.

Given that Mr Jobs is seen as so central to the success of Apple, it doesn’t seem unreasonable that the Fund wants to protect the investment it has made on behalf of its members, who work mainly in the construction industry. Especially given that this time around, Mr Jobs and Apple has said little about his actual state of health and how long he will be on leave for.

His statement last month was short and terse and lacking in such detail unlike that in January 2009 when Mr Jobs clearly stated he would be returning to work.

The resolution put forward by the Fund calls on Apple’s board to adopt and disclose a written “succession planning policy”. Under such a policy, the board would review its succession plan every year, maintain an emergency succession plan and “identify and develop internal candidates”.

This isn’t a case of trying to drive Mr Jobs out of the position as he deals with his latest health issues said the Fund’s corporate governance chief Jennifer O’Dell.

“The last thing we want is for Steve Jobs to step down. His is the classic American success story, coming from nothing to run the second-largest company in the country. We would like him to be there forever, but that is not realistic.”

Apple is not best pleased at the move and in its written response in its proxy statement has said “by publicly naming these potential successors, Proposal No. 5 invites competitors to recruit high-value executives away from Apple.”

In other words, take a hike, we will keep as tight lipped as we always have on the subject.

The issue of “high-value executives” being enticed from Apple is such a red herring as to be laughable because it has so far not happened during any of the times Mr Jobs has temporarily stepped down.

Of course we know that even though he was busy dealing with pancreatic cancer in 2004, a liver transplant in 2009 and other issues today, he has remained in charge on the big issues working from home. He was reportedly spotted on the Apple campus over the last few weeks, looking frail and thin but nevertheless keeping an eye on the company he founded along with Steve Wozniak.

Over the last few years while I have been covering Apple and this issue, analyst after analyst has cited Apple’s “deep management bench” as being well capable of looking after the mother ship while Steve is not there on a daily basis.

They have also underlined how dedicated those top execs are to the Apple cause and to Mr Jobs from Phil Schiller the senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, to Scott Forstall in charge of software for the iPhone and from Jonny Ive senior VP of industrial design to of course Tim Cook, the chief operating officer and the man who has stepped into the breach and taken over from Mr Jobs.

It could also be argued that what really does the Laborers’ Fund need to know when for the third time in a row, Apple has survived and thrived during Mr Jobs’ illness and that the team looking after the shop is so seasoned and skilled at the job in hand. Apple shares dipped in the days following Mr Jobs’ most recent announcement to take time off. They have since recovered and hit an all time high this week at $363.13.

“Of all the years to have this discussion, this is the year,” said the Fund’s Ms O’Dell.

“We need to have a plan in place because we are long-term investors. We are going to be here for the long haul.”

And that is the issue, no one knows how long Mr Jobs will be around given his ongoing medical problems. All the analysts agree that Apple will do well in the short term. The big question is the long term.

Take last year’s launch of the iPad, which to date has sold over 15m. The tablet computer was not an Apple invention, but they did reignite the category and turned it into the big computing story of last year and this year.

The same with the iPhone which changed the way people use phones and the iPod and iTunes which changed the way people consume music.

Will they continue having such huge successes without Mr Jobs? That is a question no-one can answer at this stage.

On the smaller issue of the iPad, its successor is due out next month. The blogosphere is alight with “news” that Apple will take the wraps off the iPad 2 on 2 March in San Francisco.

Will Mr Jobs be there? He made it to dinner with President Obama last week when he came to town to speak to a number of leading Valley CEO’s.

My betting is yes because simply put Mr Jobs is a showman who loves what he does, loves his company, loves his products and would love to cock a snook at those who have counted him out of the game.

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“We are completely in the dark until they do a keynote speech. We have no idea what is coming and are not allowed to openly speculate. You can get into serious trouble if you speculate – especially to a customer. I am asked five times per day about the next iPad or iPhone, and I quite simply don’t know.

“If you talk to the press or speculate to a customer about the next iPad? That’s the end of you.”

Read the full interview here.

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