Gilbane Publishing Practice Blog

It has been a week since the O’Reilly Tools of Change conference adjourned.
The topics and presentations were provocative and there are sure to be some lively debates continuing on for months to come...

Several of the keynotes centered on the theme that “information wants to be free”.
Chris Anderson, Editor in Chief of Wired and author of the best seller, “The Long Tail”, was one of the early keynoters. He started the debate by announcing that the title of his next book would be “Free” and would focus upon making a case for providing content to consumers for no charge.

Towards the end of the first day, Jimmy Wales, President of the Wikimedia foundation, spoke about his new company called Wikia. His goal is for Wikia to do for the rest of the library what Wikipedia did for the Encyclopedia section and to make the assembled knowledge of the world available to the masses for free. And by the way, he's going to produce a free Google competitor at the same time. (He certainly doesn’t lack for ambition.)

Erin McKean of the Oxford University Press closed the conference with a vivid discussion of “book-shaped objects” and openly questioned whether books were the best information package for the future. As a lexicographer, she weighed in on the “free” debate by saying that it would be better to state that all “information wants to be ambient”. She indicated that in this sense ambient means readily available for use. (Because I always had associated the word ambient with sound, lighting, or atmosphere, I checked several other dictionaries to clarify this sense of ambient. It did not appear. When I went to OED online, I found that their definition of ambient was neither free nor ambient but available for a mere $29.95/month. Because, Erin has yet to post her presentation on the O’Reilly site, you’ll have to trust my memory for this definition.) Her point is well taken; the word “free” is simply to vague. The American Heritage Dictionary (AHD) lists 17 different definitions or senses ranging from “matters of liberty” to “lack of restraint” to “lack of encumbrance” to “provided without consideration or reward”.

Mr. Anderson’s talk seemed to stress the economic meaning of “free”. . Thus, we must assume that he means that information or content should be available without consideration or reward. The popular justification for this approach to content valuation is that because cost of digital distribution is negligible, it is unfair to charge for content or information that is essentially free. If the distribution cost method were used to price traditional book content, the cost of printing, paper and binding would be the determining factor. Of course, that’s not the case. That approach omits many of the costs of publishing content including: reviewing, editing, formatting, proofreading, publicizing, selling, and marketing. And, of course, most authors like to be paid royalties for their work. It also neglects to consider the notion that many readers prefer traditional book formats and therefore many content elements will eventually be published in several media formats.

Mr. Anderson is first to admit, his book entitled "Free" won't actually be free. Okay, the audio book or e-book may be free to those who purchase the printed book.. But if you want to purchase only the e-book or the audio book, you'll be expected to pay for it. Mr. Anderson is also exploring various forms of online books or printed books that would either be sponsored by corporations or supported by (gasp) advertising. While some of these offerings might be free to the reader, it seems that there will be considerations and rewards built somewhere into this project.

He went on to say that he might well be in favor of making the book free because of the publicity benefits to his consulting practice, speaking fees, and the promotion value to his “personal brand”. However, he felt that his publisher would likely object because they are in the business of generating sales and revenues from selling books. (After the session, I heard several people suggest that Mr. Anderson could self-publish his new work and then he would be free to make it free).

Based upon his work at Wikipedia, Mr. Wales could be seen as a developer of truly free content. The governing organization is a charitable foundation and all of the authors are volunteers. The costs of supporting the staff and technology infrastructure are paid by donations. However, during his keynote, Mr. Wales was quick to point out two major differences between Wikipedia and Wikia. The scope of Wikia is much broader and it has been organized as a for profit entity.

Wikipedia represents the “perfect storm” for a collaborative work or “peering”. According to Wikinomics by Tapscott and Williams, there are three factors necessary to make peering effective: 1) the object of production is information or culture which keeps the cost of participation low for contributors; 2) Tasks can be chunked out into bite-sized pieces that individuals can contribute in small increments and independent of other producers. This makes their overall investment of time and energy minimal in relation to the benefits they receive in return; 3) The costs of integrating those pieces into a finished end product, including the leadership and quality control mechanisms must be low.”

While these criteria would apply to a number of other works found in a library, there are many others (novels, monographs, complex texts, dissertations, etc) that don’t meet these criteria well at all and aren’t likely to be challenged by collaboratative works. The costs associated with “wikiing” the rest of the library would likely be enormous. Mr. Wales seems to be banking on advertising dollars to support this effort. If this were the model, these works might be considered free from a consumer pricing perspective but the advertising revenues and potential profits would have to be deemed consideration in economic terms.

One also wonders whether the volunteer authorship model is extensible. I can see how it would work when the author is writing about a topic that is intensely interesting ( as I am doing at this moment). However, a great deal of content is more the result of craftsmanship than inspiration. It seems unlikely that volunteers could be recruited to write “drudge works”.
And as appealing as it may be to write essays or modules on interesting topics for free, I for one would enjoy it even more if I received some consideration for my hard work. (no wise cracks please). As popular as Wikipedia is today, someday it too may face a challenge from some organization (i.e. Google or Microsoft) that might add new features or devise a revenue sharing model that provides authors with incentives.

I guess my point is that an author’s ideas and created content are products. And like other products they should have a value proposition and a go-to-market strategy. The valuation/pricing options might include: purchase, subscription, sponsorship, syndication, promotion, and free. Depending on the utility, creativity, entertainment value, uniqueness of content, etc of content, one or more of the above models might be appropriate. While ‘free’ is one option, why should it be the preferred choice? Talented people like Mssrs. Anderson and Wales create content that is very good and are entitled to receive proper consideration if they so desire. Jeff Patterson, CEO of Safari Books Online, had some fascinating data on this topic. He studied how their customers for largely technical information value their information products vs. other content some of which are "free". He found that some quality content was indeed free. However, most "free" content was either advertising supported or was offered in exchange for specific information about the content consumer or their work projects. He asked customers about the tradeoffs that they were willing to make to obtain content for free. If I recall correctly, about ¼ of their customers would rather pay for content if the advertising was inappropriate and/or distracting. !/3 of their customers would rather pay for content than reveal any personal information other that name and e-mail address. And 2/3 of their customers would rather pay for content than reveal in depth information about a project that they were working on. (Patterson’s presentation was one of the best—I hope that he posts his slides)

Advocating for universally free content might indeed have the unwanted effect of reducing the amount of excellent content that is created by professional authors who depend on their writing as their livelihood. I think that Bruce Chizen, Adobe’s CEO, summed it up nicely when asked by Tim O’Reilly where he stood in this debate. He said that Adobe makes many large investments of human and financial capital in the inventions and products that they produce. While he is all in favor of providing some of their intellectual property to consumers, standards organizations, and society for free, he reserves the right to make the decision as to what should be free. I’m sure that his stakeholders support that position.

I’ll conclude this entry with some thoughts on the provocative concept of ambient information. For many years, content was created for a single purpose and was closely regulated against peripheral usages. With the advent of the digital era, came significant opportunities for deriving additional value from content. I will forever be grateful to the senior management of Houghton Mifflin Company who saw the wisdom of freeing the content of their dictionary from exclusively “booklike objects” and allowed linguists and software engineers to build spelling correction technology. In fact, most of the English language spelling technology that is used today was derived from their American Heritage Dictionary database. And as I described in an earlier Blog entry, Thomson’s retiring CEO Richard Harrington made information ambience central to their core strategy and judging from their financial statements, they are receiving significant consideration for their efforts!!

Making content accessible to inform, educate, and entertain people is a worthy goal, Making content more ambient will offer content creators and publishers many new opportunities to publicize their work, create goodwill, answer new questions, solve difficult problems, and the option to generate new income streams that are appropriate and commensurate with the value of the content.

Posted by Steve Paxhia at 5:12 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)
and tagged: Adobe, American Heritage Dictionary, Bruce Chizen, Chris Anderson, Erin McKean, Houghton Mifflin, Jeff Patterson, Jimmy Wales, O'Reilly TOC Conference, Oxford University Press, Peering, Richard Harrington, Safari Books Online, Steve Paxhia, Tapscott and Williams, The Long Tail, Thomson, Tim O'Reilly, Wikia, Wikinomics, Wikipedia Foundation
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Last month,I had the privilege of being a guest lecturer at MIT for Howard Anderson and Peter Kurzina's Course entitled "Managing in Crisis". I prepared a case study about the current status of the College Publishing market. It included concerns about price pressures, used book competition, channel issues, new competitors and new media requirements, pending legislation about pricing practices, and the continued lack in the growth of unit sales.

The class was composed of 40 or so very bright students who did an excellent job analyzing the case. One student really captured the essence of the case when she said that it reminded her of the photography industry as the major players struggle with the transition from traditional film and paper products to digital photography.

While Kodak moments have long been associated with joyful celebrations, the aforementioned transition has been anything but a celebration. In fact, it is likely that this Kodak moment will come to exemplify the struggles of a powerful corporation as they strive and perhaps even fail due their inability to recognize the customer benefits, opportunities, and challenges associated with non-traditional types of photographic media.

Many publishers are struggling with their own "Kodak Moments". And I think that the transition issues are similar to the photography industry. First, Kodak seems to have been focused on the products that people had been buying for years and trying to preserve the advantages that their film and paper technologies provided. Like many of us who have had market leading products, they were arrogant about their technology, processes, market position and quality. While they clearly were aware of digital photography technology, they dismissed digital products because the image quality was significantly poorer. Then they concentrated on turning digital photos into traditional photos. It seems to met hat they missed
the potential in offering less expensive digital images that could easily be posted on the Internet or e-mailed to relatives.

For many years, publishers offerings have been closely related to technological developments in the Software and Printing industries. For example, software has enabled improvements in authoring, composition, and thereby lowered the costs of elegant or complex page designs. Printing Technology has made four color printing much more affordable and had made shorter print runs economical. These changes have been passed along to consumers of information. (While I understand that there are differences between the terms: content, information, and intellectual property, I will use the term information to subsume all three terms for purposes of brevity) In many cases, they have added value to the customer's experience but there are cases where formats were enhanced and color offered because they could be rather than because they were beneficial. In reality, I believe that the net result was that the size, format, and frequency of the traditional economical delivery unit EDU (my term) of information (a book, journal, or magazine) were modified by technology advances but the traditional media form has remained essentially the same for 100+ years.

The Internet has presented publishers with a radical paradigm shift ( I don't like the term either). All types of publishing entities have had to deal with changes in customer expectations that are easily as profound as those experienced by the Photography industry. They don't just want their information to be more timely and less expensive, they also want their information to concisely answer their questions and seamlessly integrate with their work flows or learning styles.

Perhaps the most significant change is the redefinition of the EDU. In the purely print era, there needed to be a certain mass of information to build a product that would be economical to print and sufficiently valuable to consumers to generate a profit. In manycases, it was assumed that relatively few information consumers would use all of the information that was presented in a single EDU. Rather, the scope of the information (or content) had to be broad enough to attract enough customers without being so broad as to make customers feel that they were procuring too much information that wasn't pertinent to their interests. Hence, we have witnessed a generation of books where authors and market researchers work closely together.

In the digital world, authors and publishers are potentially freed from the strictures of printing economies. Therefore, information currently found in textbooks, references, magazines and journals can be rendered as as short information objects or more comprehensive content modules. Or publishers can produce information objects or content modules that are not anticipated to ever take book form. The objects can be delivered in many ways including search engines such as Google. These new EDUs can be purchased or licenses separately or mixed and matched to create a course of instruction or a personal reference work. One benefit of these nimbler EDUs is that they blend nicely with software to offer increased value in the form of better instruction or more productive work flows.

The availability of these more compact EDUs will likely spawn many debates concerning academic traditions and learning methodologies that we have come to hold dear. It has long been the practice for students to read and master significant quantities of information with the expectation that many of the specific facts will fade from memory leaving a general understanding of the topic. And many people are considered well read because they have plowed through many traditional EDUs (Books) The question will be: Could one become well educated or well read by learning to explore topics of interest through smaller EDUs and/or what blend of contextual and specific information delivers the best and most productive intellectual outcome. There will be some interesting face-offs between technology enabled active exploration and discovery of information to allow students to pursue topics that they find interesting vs. the more structured mastery of a set of information presented in book form. Of course, it is not an either/or proposition as they methods must eventually be blended to enable meaningful knowledge acquisition.

The digital world has also created a demand for information that is developed and delivered as rapidly as possible. Where traditional publishers often justified their value by guaranteeing the accuracy and authority of their published information, many of today's information consumers are willing to trade authority for velocity of information and now rely upon other information consumers to tell them what information is the most accurate and useful. Individuals now actively participate in communities that generate and evaluate large quantities of information objects and content modules. The Wikipedia/media organization and the MERLOT community are excellent examples of communities that produce quality information modules.

While many information consumers may still prefer to consume their information in print form, they may now wish to print their own copies or to create and purchase custom versions produced by rapidly improving print on demand technology. To many publishers, the perfectly formatted page has become almost an art form. They consider those pages to have many of the same aesthetic values that Kodak attributed to images produced via their traditional film technologies. Because customers rarely have the choice of formats, it is difficult to gauge the value that they derive from "perfect pages" vs potentially less expensive simpler pages. Chip Pettibone of O'Reilly Publishing reported at the recent Gilbane Conference that when readers of e-books were offered the choice between a simple HTML design and a faithful rendition of the original book page, 50% chose the HTML version and that population seemed to be gaining in numbers. Because books and computer screens represent quite different form factors, the value of the perfect page can actually limit rather that enhance the effective presentation of information in digital formats. Therefore, rather than trying to maintain the integrity of the printed page, modern publishers are designing their content to be presented equally well in a variety of media forms. Publishers that cling to the page metaphor are putting their futures in jeopardy.

This paradigm shift is replete with challenges and opportunities. Many traditional reference products (including Microsoft's Encarta) have been decimated by new products created in the Internet Era. Newspapers and magazines have had to adapt to the challenges or multiple media environments by creating online products as they have seen their traditional readership dwindle. Journal publishers have had to derive new models to serve their subscriber base. Many categories of trade books now include websites with fancy multimedia elements and discussion groups. I think that some of the most exciting and interesting challenges and opportunities will be found in the world of educational publishing. As witnessed by the decisions of major publishing conglomerates to divest their educational publishing operations, the challenges of mastering the Internet paradigm shift are both daunting and expensive. To succeed, new generations of products will need to be built to take advantage of technology as opposed to being web versions of existing products. Business models will need to be revised and channel strategies re-engineered. One important outcome will be increased information accessibility for readers and learners with disabilities.

Over the next few years, the publishing industry will witness many Kodak moments.... Hopefully the majority will be the old fashioned Kodak moments of victory and celebration.

Posted by Steve Paxhia at 1:10 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)
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Is the Caravan Project the right new distribution model for trade publishers? The basic offering is compelling--providing simultaneous access to print, print-on-demand, eBook, chapter eBook, and digital audio versions of titles. The Caravan Project's publishers include university presses like Yale University Press and nonprofit publishers like Beacon Press.

Continue reading "Good Books, 5 Ways" »

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:19 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)
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Well, if not dead, at least dying. Via Paid Content: IDG No Longer A Print Company; Online 35 Percent Of U.S. Publishing Revenues

IDG is no longer a print media company, declares Colin Crawford, the SVP of Online at the company, in a rather revealing post on his own blog. The trade behemoth is a private company, so this insight is a helpful one.
-- The absolute dollar growth of our online revenues now exceeds the decline in our print revenues. This occurred in the US in 2006 and in Europe during the last quarter.
-- In the US, our online revenue now accounts for over 35% of our total US publishing revenues. Next year, for many brands online revenues will be greater than print revenues, if fact they already are at some of our key brand and by 2009 – about 50% of IDG’s US revenues will come from online.
-- “Going forward IDG Communications will define itself as a web centric information company complemented by expos, events and print publications.”

The metrics are compelling, don't you think?

Posted by Bill Trippe at 7:25 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)
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Magazines have been doing electronic publishing for a long time. Magazine articles, for example, have been in databases for at least 20 years, and some of the magazine publishers were the earliest to leverage the Web--and some with tremendous success even at the very beginning. (I was at ZDNet briefly in the 1990s when the traffic seemed to double monthly.) Yet some other magazines have been laggards, nervous perhaps about what the digital product might do to the print. Still others have developed interesting mixed models, where some content in the print ends up free on the Web while other content is available only to print subscibers. And others have developed wholly different digital products that share little more than the brand with the print product. There is no end to the potential models, and perhaps for very good reason--every audience is different and every mix of advertisers is different.

I happened on a very thoughtful discussion about magazine digital publishing models. Staci Kramer of paidContent.org moderated "a fireside chat" with Jim Spanfeller, CEO of Forbes.com and Jeff Price, President of SI.com at the SIIA conference in NYC earlier this week. The video can be watched in its entirety here; it's about 30 minutes long, and well worth your time if you are thinking about these issues.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)
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This week's Campus Marketplace has a nice article summarizing new legislation meant to regulate the sale of college textbooks-- www.nacs.org/news/011907-legislation.asp. I'm not sure that the proposed legislation will do much to help students. This legislation could yield a bigger win by providing incentives for the College Publishing industry to focus upon furthering true cross media publishing initiatives and on developing alternate revenue models. The result would be lower priced product suites that would offer more utility and value for students. Of course, the win for publishers would be reduced used books and higher recurring revenues.

Posted by Steve Paxhia at 4:11 PM | Permalink
and tagged: College Publishing, NACS, Steven Paxhia
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Oxford, UK , Boston, USA, and Melbourne, Australia —January 12th, 2007—Blackwell Publishing announced its newly redesigned online delivery platform, Blackwell Synergy (www.blackwell-synergy.com).
Blackwell Synergy enables its users to search 1 million articles from over 850 leading scholarly journals across the sciences, social sciences, humanities and medicine. The redesign provides easier navigation, faster loading times and improved access to tools for researchers, as well as meeting the latest accessibility standards (ADA section 508 and W3C’s WAI-AA).
The new Blackwell Synergy website retains all the essential benefits that researchers, librarians and authors value and uses the same URL structure. In addition to a new look and feel, features have been repositioned to highlight options more clearly to users and enable them to make best use of the suite of tools available such as most read and most cited articles, citation alerts, download to reference manager software, and the ability to email the article to a friend. Full-text online access to the journals on Blackwell Synergy is available at thousands of institutions worldwide.
Key site features for researchers include:
- clear search and browse functions and ability to search within other databases
- abstracts and sample issues free to all users
- many articles also free after a certain time or as open access through the OnlineOpen initiative
- HTML articles include embedded references, figures and tables
- OnlineEarly and OnlineAccepted articles available online before issue publication
- quick links to the most-downloaded and most-cited articles by journal
- reference links and citing article links allow users to follow the research
- export citations of articles directly into reference management software
- receive e-alerts for tables of contents, topic and author research alerts, citation alerts and OnlineEarly and OnlineAccepted alerts
- all e-alerts available as email or RSS newsfeeds

This release does a nice job of supporting new standards, passing information from articles to content management systems, and support of new RSS protocols. The Online early feature rewards publishers that have solid cross media publishing practices.

Posted by Steve Paxhia at 3:24 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)
and tagged: Blackwell, Steven Paxhia, Synergy
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We marvelled when we saw the prestigious Encyclopedia Britannica usurped by Microsoft's Encarta. It was a tribute to the clever utilization of multimedia and excellent marketing that leveraged Microsoft's position in the software world. Given Microsoft's incredible resources and market clout, it was assumed that the Encarta franchise would build and thrive to become the most heavily utilized fact resource. Therefore, it was even more shocking when Wikipedia burst onto the scene in 2001. And it's continued evolution demonstrates that this project is no fluke. There are over 1.5 million articles and there are over 100 international versions. How is this possible? Is it simply because it is a free reference resource? I do not think so. Average consumers seem to have voted for breadth and currency over authority. More importantly, a large group of contributors and reviewers seem to feel a pride of ownership in the work of their collaboration. This phenomena has interesting implications for publishing firms.

Wikimedia now has a number of related projects including Wikibooks and Wikiversity. Wikibooks has generated 23,476 content modules for over 1000 topics in less than three years. Wikiversity is in its formative stages but plans to offer free course materials and may provide a platform for developing research topics into wikimongraphs.

It is sometimes difficult to get past the fact that all Wikimedia content is free to focus upon the powerful authoring metaphor that they have created and proliferated. These very same techniques could be used by commercial and corporate publishers. All School, College, and Professional publishers could use these techniques to refine and improve the quality of their publications. These techniques could enable publishers to keep their intellectual property much more current than is possible with today's authoring approach. And the collaboration aspect could help learners and professionals grow by exchanging and debating ideas. In the corporate world, we need look no further than the communities established around Microsoft Sharepoint to see how valuable information can be rapidly developed and disseminated. These communities have relieved Microsoft of a tremendous support burden.

The Wiki modules are quite similar to open source code modules... More on this in a subsequent post.... Your comments are encouraged!!

Posted by Steve Paxhia at 3:25 PM | Permalink
and tagged: britannica, encarta, microsoft, sharepoint, steven paxhia, wikibooks, wikipedia, wikiversity
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One of the most important trends in technology over the past two years has been the emergence of Wikis. Like many newish technologies there is a lot of controversy and confusion about Wikis. To many people the word Wiki is linked primarily to the Wikipedia and to the other projects of Wikimedia. To others, Wiki technology is open source collaboration technology. And more recently, Wiki technology has been developed to provide easily installed, high value solutions to a number of enterprise level workflow problems. Over the next week or so, I'll be writing entries on a number of key questions concerning Wikis and their role in the strategy for forward looking publishing organizations.

Posted by Steve Paxhia at 10:30 AM | Permalink
and tagged: collaboration, communities, steven paxhia, wikis
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One of the themes that we'll be stressing on this blog is cross-media publishing strategies and we'll als be offering several sessions on this topic at the SanFrancisco Gilbane Conference in April. We'd like to hear your nominations for examples of products that started life in a traditional print format but have now evolved to successful product offerings with multiple media options. We'll also like to know about successful new product offerings that were created in a media-neutral approach. To respond, please e-mail me Steve Paxhia at steve@gilbane.com.

Posted by Steve Paxhia at 10:12 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)
and tagged: cross-media, gilbane conference, steven paxhia
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Dick Harrington is the CEO of Thomson. During a December investor's conference presentation, he clearly described Thomson's future strategy. Their vision is to be the leading provider of workflow solutions to business and professional customers. Their goal is to develop "must-have" products with high utilization and renewal rates. I would assume that a recurring revenue model is also preferred. As they create technology to leverage their content, they find that they achieve greater leverage and higher margins. This is a very sound strategy.

His decision to divest Thomson Learning aside, it would seem that there are excellent opportunities awaiting College and Educational publishers who employ similar strategies. Students, professors, teachers, and parents could all benefit from tighter integration of enabling technology and multimedia including simulations with more traditional text based materials. Many publishers are already finding success with next generation products that offer customers their choice of media options combined with technology that helps this group of professionals do their jobs better. The key is to focus on customer needs and creating innovative new products rather than creating new media versions of existing products. These new products also have the potential to be licensed for specific terms and usages rather than be sold outright. This model would likely accelerate revenue growth and yield better margins.

We'll strive to provide examples of successful ventures in later posts......

Posted by Steve Paxhia at 4:38 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)
and tagged: harrington, new media, steven paxhia, thomson, thomson learning
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