Feb
10
Post-Imperial Publishing
Filed Under B2B, Blog, eBook, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Uncategorized | 4 Comments
I am writing a lecture this week on the future history of electronic publishing and it is giving me a creepy “deja vu all over again” sort of feeling. For a start, when I came into the publishing business in 1967, before we had an “information marketplace” and long before Publishing acquired its current low-tech reputation in the wider world, there was a wonderful certainty about publishers and the profit model. Last week , going to and from San Francisco and reading Saul David’s splendid history of the Indian Mutiny on my Sony eBook Reader, I was forced to think about the uncertainty of our current position. This half-way house world of ePub cannot last, and only publishers want it to do so. Screen reflection, no back-lighting , inadequate reproduction of maps (which could have been better than the print version) etc etc made me critical of the digital experience while enjoying the ease of use, lightness, storage space etc of my current eReading device.
There will be other devices and things will get better. Yet we have a long way to go before we reach the certainties espoused by Sir Stanley Unwin in ” The Truth about Publishing “, which I have returned to browse while writing my talk.
Sir Stanley began his publishing career, he tells us, in January 1906, and published his great work in 1926. The book is a wonderful testament to certainty and conviction. He is able to describe in clause by clause detail what publishing agreements and distribution arrangements should contain. He is absolute in his conviction that there is no acceptable manuscript which cannot be exploited a bit further through good sales arrangements in the English language world of the British Empire, or through effective translation deals at the Frankfurt Book Fair. And “publishing” is books, as securely as for my father “hunting” was foxes. Newspapers and magazines were clearly lesser breeds without the law. And you will only survive if you follow Sir Stanley’s maxims: “It is easy to become a publisher but difficult to remain one; the mortality in infancy is higher than in any other trade or profession.”
I bought my copy in 1967 (the seventh edition), partly because I wanted a job at George Allen and Unwin, was rejected but advised to read the book. When some years later I went for a job at Cambridge University Press I was interviewed by the same individual, who had morphed from Mr into Sir Geoffrey Cass. This time I pointed out that I had read and mastered the book. This was of no avail in my case, but I was left with a strong idea that “scientific” publishers like these two British knights “knew” how to publish: they had mastered the ratios and processes to the extent that they had rationalized out the dangerous tendencies (“flair” was the word which earnt special contempt) of wilful book selection and were therefore bound to make money.
When, I wondered, would this sense of certainty and exactitude reach electronic publishing? Are there yet certain rules which, if we follow them, will keep us out of trouble, or is it inevitable that alongside the businesses dedicated to the transition of the printed book to e-devices and platforms will arise new businesses dedicated to exploiting that technology in original ways for literary, informational or aesthetic satisfaction, without the prior creation of a book?
By the end of my book publishing career in 1985, the business that Sir Stanley saw in such certain terms was beginning its long decline. Alongside Sir Stanley on my shelves sits “In Cold Type : Overcoming the Book Crisis” by Leonard Shatzkin (celebrated father of the very excellent Mike). My copy is inscribed by the author “For David, to mark the good fortune of meeting in Santander, July12, 1985”. The good fortune was all mine, as I quickly learnt why it was that the economic model of book publishing was falling from the trees. And they never followed his sage advice: it is still falling, and the consolidation that removed even Sir Stanley’s old firm is still taking place. Publishers still over-publish and over-print and over-price. Except that in this Gibbonian epic we may be past Decline and moving towards Fall – an essential step if real re-invention is to occur.
Feb
4
It’s all called Innovation…
Filed Under Blog, Education, Publishing, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
I was working the floor of a trade fair the other day when I was stopped in my tracks by an old friend who said, rather wistfully I thought, “you see, we don’t innovate here. The Board were all born before the middle of the last century, and I think we are in the wrong sector for rapid change anyway”. This week I am in California, and whatever I feel about Silicon Valley (like, how do you know that you are in Cupertino or Los Altos or Mountain View when it all looks the same?) the residents have a refreshingly uncomplicated view of innovation outside of the built environment. They know it is all the same.
In an earlier blog I sought to explain some of my thinking about education and innovation in the context of the great January trade fair on British educational technology, BETT. So afterwards I checked back to see who won the awards at the great event. To my delight, the leading award for innovation in digital content went to Cambridge University Press. Now you must know that this 400 year old publisher (founded in 1584), part of an 850 year old educational institution, is not normally regarded these days as a frontline primary (elementary) school publisher, and attracts some condescending and at times downright derogatory remarks from its major competitors in this field. Yet Race To Learn, developed with the Williams Formula One motor racing team, is a fit for purpose digital product which is both attractive to learners and uses a great deal of blended digital innovation to succeed. “Superb activities that are highly engaging for children …a well thought through support for cross-curricular learning ” said the judges of this scheme built around software for interactive whiteboards by the Cambridge team at Cambridge-Hitachi.
And the Cambridge team is not composed of frame-breaking digital whiz kid geniuses from the world of games or of consumer entertainment. It is however built around huge experience of the marketplace, a willingness to find out how learners learn, and a lack of inhibition around experimentation and trialling. These elements all belong in the innovation bag. And it does collaborate – note the Hitachi link – and the unit responsible for this work at Cambridge is called the New Directions Group, which also suggests people who are licensed to innovate. These factors are vital too.
And then when you see one you start, in the same week, to see others. There was Atmospeer , a research tool for workflow and social connectivity in Atmospheric Sciences. So who did that? Some whizzy software group down here in the Valley? No, that comes from Proquest, whose name goes with Archive and Aggregator, not Innovator. Brilliant! And over here we have disruption of the old-style college textbook markets with innovatory business models ( innovation does not have to be written in code). Who is doing that? CengageBrain is a rental scheme developed by textbook market leader Cengage. In the same week Barnes and Noble made a similar announcement. If you cannot beat Chegg and CourseSmart, innovate around them.
In short, innovation is a game we can all play regardless of age and background. It reminds me of selling dial-up online law in the early 1980s. We thought our lawyer users were all the newly-qualified lawyers with a modern minded approach to productivity and content completion for effective decision-making. Wrong. Many of the young users were “old” fogies who wanted the practise of law to be just the way they had imagined it to be when they were growing up. And some of the best users were close to retirement practitioners who didn’t worry about status (computers were then for secretaries only) or making mistakes. You never can tell until you immerse yourself.
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