The on-going crisis in Scholarly Communications is no longer breaking news. We all are aware of the sky-rocketing costs of journals, the imploding market for scholarly monographs, the struggles to develop sustainable business models for open access publications, and the paralysis induced by the lack of an agreed-upon process for peer review of born digital scholarship. In the face of this dismal situation, the folks at the The Institute for the Future of the Book and Rice University have been busily planning two new initiatives, both of which address head-on many of our shared problems.