And that story is particularly relevant to the fascinating conference that I was attending. Last week’s seminar on “Ready for Web 3.0?” organized by ALPSP and chaired by Louise Tutton of Publishing Technologies was just what the doctor ordered in terms of curing us of the idea that we still have time to consider whether we embrace the semantic web or not. It is here, and in scholarly publishing terms it is becoming the default embedded value, the new plateau onto which we must all struggle in order to catch our breath while building the next level of value-add which forms the expectation of users coming to grips with a networked information society today. And from the scholarly world it will spread everywhere. I will put my own slides from the introductory scene-setting on this site, but if you can find any of the meaty exemplar presentations from ALPSP (it is worth joining them if they are going to do more sessions of this quality) or elsewhere then please review them carefully. They are worth it.

Particularly noteworthy was a talk by Professor Terri Attwood and Dr Steve Pettifer from the University of Manchester (how good to see a biochemistry informatician and a computer scientist sharing the same platform!). They spoke about Utopia Documents, a next generation document reader developed for the Biochemical Journal which identifies features in PDFs and semantically annotates them, seamlessly connecting documents to online data. All of a sudden we are emerging onto the semantic web stage with very practical and pragmatic demonstrations of the virtues of Linked Data. The message was very clear: go home and mark-up everything you have, for no one now knows what content will need to link to what in a web of increasing linkage universality and complexity. At the very least every one who considers themselves a publisher, and especially a science publisher, should read the review article by Attwood, Pettifer and their colleagues in Biochemical Journal (Calling International Rescue: Knowledge Lost in the Literature and information Landslide  http://www.biochemj.org/bj/424/0317/bj4240317.htm) Incidentally, they cite Amos Bairoch and his reflections on Annotation in Nature Precedings (http://precedings.nature.com/documents/3092/version/1) and this is hugely useful if you can generalize from the problems of biocuration to the chaos that each of us faces in our own domains.

Two other aspects were intriguing. Utopia Documents had some funding from the European Commission, EPSRC, BBSRC, the University of Manchester and, above all, the BJ’s publisher, Portland Press. One expects the public bodies to do what they should be doing with the taxpayer’s cash: one respects a small publisher putting its money where its value is. And in another session, on the semantic web collaboration between the European Respiratory Society and the American Thoracic Society, called felicitously “Breathing Space”, we heard that the collaborators created some 30% of the citations in respiratory medicine, and that their work had the effect of “helping their authors towards greater visibility”. Since that is why the industry exists, it would seem that the semantic promise  underpins the original publication promise. Publishers should be creating altars for the veneration of St Tim Berners Lee and dedicating devotions to the works Shadbolt and Hall, scholars of Southampton.

Sadly they are not, but coming out of this day of intense knowledge sharing one could not doubt that semantic web, aka Linked Data, had arrived and taken up residence these several years in scientific academe. Now if it will only bite government information and B2B then we shall be on our way. And, as Leigh Dodds of Talis reminded us, we shall have to learn a new language on that way. Alongside new friends like ontologies  and entity recognition and RDF, add RDFa, SKOS (simple knowledge organizing systems to you!), XCRI education mark-up, OpenCalais (go to Thomson Reuters for more), triples, Facebook Open Graph, and Google Rich Snippets. Even that wonderful old hypertext heretic Ted Nelson got quoted later in the day: “Everything is deeply intertwingled”.  And lets remember, this is not a “lets tackle these issues at our own pace when we think the market is ready” sort of problem: it is a “we are sinking under the weight of our own data and the lifeboat was needed yesterday” sort of a problem. Publishers must tackle it: if we learn how to resolve it without intermediaries then we certainly shall not need publishers.

First off the blocks were the New York Times , Apple Inc and Alphonso Labs Inc . Who ? You may be forgiven for not knowing that the last-named are a brand new , boys -in- their- early- twenties -working -in -a-Palo-Alto -garage set-up . We shall no doubt hear more of Akshay Kothari and Ankit Gupta , not least because their first product , the Pulse News Reader App for the iPad, was specifically mentioned last week in his WWDC speech by Steve Jobs , first in line of great Palo Alto garage graduates , as a great example of how Apps could focus usage and intensify reader experience .

So it was a great surprize when Pulse was withdrawn mid-week , apparently at the request of the New York Times . Was it because the Pulse advert featured the NYT in its frame ? Was it because the Pulse application was better than the NYT’s own reader app ( while it was up in its original state the app was downloaded in a few days 35,000 times at £2.39 each ) ? Or was it because , although as yet it has no paywall policy , the NYT objects in principle to being framed by anyone ( are we really going to get back to that tired old internet argument ) ? Or did the NYT simply want a cut of the action and didn’t know whom to ask ?

The iPad is the latest ace hookah from which we take our info-drugs . The Pulse App is simply a smarter way of collecting RSS feeds , for which individuals could register for free , and playing them on the new hookah through a software called Safari , which everyone , including NYT , have to use if they are to have access to the new habit . The boys from the garage just gave the NYT 35,000 new subscribers to a service they already offer , and featured the NYT in their advertisements . Seems to me that editors with bouquets should attend their garage doors , not lawyers with writs . And Apple , far from removing the kids ( who won a Stanford Institute of Design award for this ) should give them a job . But Apple , having moved from hardware/software supplier to access controller and owner of the user profile on the Web , must now play a different game with content suppliers . And this one is a dangerous one .Apple , like Google in a similar role , would be too powerful in this position to make life comfortable for either growers or smokers .

( PS I understand that Pulse has now gone back up – with the NYT amputated . Who does that help ? )

At the same time in California a noisy spat was taking place between the University of California and Nature Publishing Group . Nature has been renegotiating its deal with the California Digital Library . Talks surrounded the depth of discount that the library should enjoy : Nature says it currently gives California an 88% discount on its list prices , and wants this to be close to the average of 50% that it gives other users , while California stigmatizes this as a 400% price increase .  California wrote an open letter to faculty representatives on its ten campuses , thus “outing ” the argument  in an attempt to put public pressure on Nature . , who point out that they have capped list prices at 7%, and are the major publisher most compliant with the so-called ” green agenda ” of open access .

No one is going to win this one either . Nature’s output is  “must-have ” to an outfit of California’s standing , but not beyond price . As a major buyer the university authorities could imagine that by making an example of a medium-sized player they will soften up the negotiations with the larger lists of Elsevier , Wiley-Blackwell or Springer . Both parties are in a recession , and both will plead poverty and the need to guarantee survival . It is however as unthinkable that California will not supply its students and researchers with Nature magazine at an average download price , under Nature’s proposed pricing , of $0.56 per download , as it is that Nature will walk away from an institution where its authors litter every street corner . So who blinks first , and who blows smoke in the faces of addicts and users everywhere ?

At the end , these are power plays . Is the University a big enough power block to make its will felt , and can the newspaper use its ownership any more to control how the end-user views its content ? These struggles used to take place behind closed doors . Then the golden rules were – never push your power too far , for in the exercise of using it you are losing it . NYT is clearly some way down that track : if the University of California forces its students to subscribe seperately to Nature then it too begins to lose control of the argument . How much do you need it and can you kick the habit are still powerful questions in the world of commoditized information .

Well , anyway , it passed the time , did this thought . And recalled a splendid conversation with my daughter , who is planning to set out on a medical education , which took place some days ago . I had alluded to www.23andMe.com , the very interesting start-up site which should be known because it is bringing a new look to genetic analysis ( and is known because its founder , Anne Wojcicki, is the wife of Sergey Brin ). This service , for a price of between $399 and $599 , sends you a saliva test , analyses your sample , finds your relatives out as far as fourth cousins , and then gives you guidance on conditions that may be inherent in your genetic make-up . All fairly crude , of course , but enough to be compulsive -or dangerous.

My daughter opted for the latter . Donning the mantle of an aspiring professional , she could see only too clearly the dangers of knowing enough to be frightened and not enough to be fully informed . And what about employer discrimination , and insurance company refusals to insure known risks ? Clearly it was a minefield and it was best if amateurs ( I qualify here ) kept clear . But I still wonder. I see citizens of the future carrying and trading this type of information as part of a restoration of the balance in their relationships with the medical profession . I feel certain that the avoidance of risk will become a powerful factor in decisions about having children , and I have little confidence left in doctors or politicians when they know best .

And if there is any value in this thought , then it points a finger directly at medical publishing and medical informatics in regard to the communication job that they carry out at present . We all laughed at the very idea in the early days of Open Access that the woman on the Idaho omnibus would be able to make sense of a research article on her child’s cancer . www.23andMe.com has the same problem . Fine graphics , videos and cartoons got us over the ealy explanatory stages ( I loved the English English voice over – an American voice in this context suggests marketing ? ). Then we are in citation country , and gene-talk is very hard to follow . For example , I would need to be paid $599 to understand this :

“Although a variety of factors influence a patient’s ideal dose of warfarin, the genetic variations in the CYP2C9 and VKORC1 genes reported by 23andMe play an important part. In January 2010 the FDA updated warfarin’s label to say that information on these variants can assist physicians in selecting a starting dose of the drug. The agency also provided initial dosage recommendations for patients with different variant combinations. The FDA does not, however, require that genetic testing be done before prescribing warfarin.

Versions of the CYP2C9 gene known as *2 and *3 can slow down the body’s ability to break down warfarin. This causes the drug’s concentration in the bloodstream to decrease more slowly, so the patient needs a lower dose to begin with. Each T at rs1799853 indicates a copy of CYP2C9*2. Each C at rs1057910 indicates a copy of CYP2C9*3.

The normally functioning version of CYP2C9 is called *1.”

But this will change . Our genetic heritage may well be the health equivalent of internet banking . If it is , then medical publishers will need to explain themselves to a much wider readership – or maybe , in instances like Nature Publishing taking on the management of  Scientific American , this is already happening . As I walked out of Hotel Dieu into a Spring evening in the square outside of Notre Dame I could already imagine the disintegration and re-integration of medical publishing as we know it , all built around lifetime alerting services updating us on knowledge about research into the subject that most concerns us – ourselves .

My answer is the Cisco CRS-3 , the newest router which really equips the internet as an integrator of digital video (http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2011300638_cisco10.html) . It could , say Cisco , move the entire Library of Congress in one second , or the entire archive of every film ever made in four minutes . But the thing that fascinates me at the moment is the way in which networks with embedded technologies like this will remove the volume/speed excuse that has traditionally lain beneath the reluctance of niched information providers to give whole solutions to user problems/demands . This is no where more obvious than in STM , which is where my second question arose .

“Well, ” he said , ” you clearly took a shine to Globalspec : what is the equivalent in STM  and why are they any better than we are “. I ignored the challenge implicit here , and replied that my pick in STM over a decade had been Nature Publishing , and this was about attitude . ” Full of geeks and nerds , eh ? ” Not at all , I replied ( mentally writing the title to this piece as I did so),

but it is certainly true that they are very quickly responsive to change , and experiment publicly in beta and in conjunction with their users until they find useful combinations that fit . Clearly therefore the new Nature iPhone App ( http://www.nature.com/mobileapps/) is not the end of the story , but it demonstrates Nature’s keen concern to get involved , early on and with an open mind , and strive to create utility for their users . This was the case with Connotea , their ground-breaking social tagging environment , with Scintilla , their news-tagging activity , with Nature Networks and with the network local hubs . It seems to me that the attitude here is service -orientated and not product -centric , and that the logic says that users who are involved in service developments and have a stake in them are less likely to go elsewhere , especially if they started with Nature as grad students .

This does not mean that more traditional business development activities can be ignored . Nature has to be top of the heap in quality terms . Over a decade its content coverage has improved mightily and , through its associated publishing , it is now well on the way to core coverage across the “hard ” sciences . In one sense nothing is more traditional than recruitment advertising : once an area of neglect this is now a keystone of the arch and a factor which helps cement the Nature community together . I predicted to my interlocutor that I thought education would be a continuing interest , and that I was vitally concerned to see how Nature was able in time to make rafts of multiple media experimental evidential data available to users . Their Gateway strategy , from Cell Signalling and Neuroscience , had led the way in this field : when , I wondered , would it become the norm for research published by Nature to be linked to the evidential databases behind the work .

He leapt upon “education “. ” You mean Second Nature on Second Life – if we had all gone there we would be bankrupt “. Well , I have no idea what Nature has spent with Second Life , but I do know that when people like me stop writing about things , then other people tend to think that they have ceased to exist . Plainly wrong . Traded revenues on Second Life in 2009 totalled , in real world dollars , 567 million , a 65% increase on the previous year . And in December , with  770,000 unique users during the month , residents/users  checked out $ 55 million in earnings converted into cash . Not centre stage , but certainly not dead ( see also  .http://lindenlab.com/pressroom/releases/22_09_09 )

And no doubt Nature will be pursuing other educational initiatives : pulling Scientific American under the same management is undoubtedly a step forward in this regard. While continually consolidating and refining their offerings through the lessons taught by their users , I have also no doubt that  their tradition of experimentation will continue to thrive in a company increasing divergent from its peers in this respect . Elsewhere  the impact of technology , while far-reaching , has often been isolated from the thinking about editorially constructing a research journal . But then , Nature was always more than just a research journal .

Last word with Google . In the week of the Cisco announcement , they  indicated an experiment with Dish to create Google TV-Search (http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10465956-93.html ) , a way of intercombining a Google search and a set-top box , while TiVo announced new digital video recorders which bring back video from the Web . This is the next New Frontier : we need to calculate the impact on the expectations of users in B2B, STM or other areas of business and professional information now , while we are at the on-ramp , not when we are facing new competitors . This is what Nature have done so well .

PS In my note Viva , Las Vegas , and here  , I have tried to emphasize the continuing importance of virtual reality , so it was good to see  UBM relaunch the Comdex compueter show as VR only(.http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10463726-93.html )

Ok , guilty as charged.  I have become too used to having to shock traditional media owners into action through prophecies of instant decline.  And I do claim to be an individual of sunny and optimistic disposition.  So I am going to write about a 1996 start-up which now has a commanding market position in its sector. It announced its global registered users for the end of 2009 in a statement this week, and though it is a success story well worth telling, for traditional media players in engineering, manufacturing and the science and technology segments attached to them, it is a filter placed between themselves and their users which few can now avoid or supplant.

The company is GlobalSpec.  Here a now hugely experienced team under Jeff Killeen have slowly but surely created a category leader through the simple device of treating engineers as a community, and encouraging them to do so around the data content of the sector.  Put all the product catalogues and listings with the product specifications in one place (25,000 catalogues, with 2.2 million products and 184 million searchable product specs).  Make them parametrically searchable, and you have a result that slots into engineering workflow as a must have component. Then add a vertical search engine alongside this, where all sources of engineering information available on the web can be categorized and found, where the design specifications of working engineers can be sourced, and where third party content as well as freely available public content can be obtained ( if you own an engineering journal, you face the agony of being here – or of not being seen).  Then add over 60 emailed engineering sector newsletters, all pushing industry news and announcements to self-qualified audiences.  And from this year, add eEvents, meetings, conference and exhibitions) .

So they have got a tiny segment well sewn up?  You could say that.  This week’s announcement about this “tiny segment” indicates that their registered user count rose during 2009, recession notwithstanding, by some 900,000 engineers. They now have 5.6 million registered users. In that same year of slowdown and industrial decline globally, registered readership of  the e-newsletters went up 21% , to an astounding total of 9.1 million.  And still new users are coming on board: the company indicates an accretion rate of 80,000 new users a month.

So something fairly significent is happening in places like this.  This is not about whether people will read their engineering newspaper on their laptop or their iPad, or whether there is still a place for long-form narrative in engineering texts, reference books or white papers.  It is about solutions to information handling that increase productivity, improve decision making and ensure better and less costly compliance with the regulation that bedevils the sector.  It is about the nature of the network: a community identifying itself, and communicating with and between itself.  GlobalSpec is the result of the painstaking work of people who now understand exactly how engineers work on their desktops within their enterprise systems.

So the engineers have congregated at Globalspec: how do you make money out of them?  With their willing co-operation you create sales and marketing services that suppliers in this marketplace will pay for.  Real-time sales leads from the database which give those suppliers who put their content in lead generation which is filtered, measured and immediately contactable.  Do not contaminate this with the word Advertising, but it is paid for from the same budget.  The newsletters, now moving down into highly fragmented sub-sectors of product and service types in the industry (and providing more inventory as they subdivide), also give more traditional promotional opportunities, as do the e-events.  Ask yourself: as a seller, do you go to the traditional engineering newsheet classifieds page to place your product in the community eye – or do you come here?

And this is truly Global.  If you want to speak to engineers in Shanghai instead of Scunthorpe or Spokane, then come here. The questions about it are many: How many GlobalSpecs can a sector sustain?  What happens to traditional media players who now supply their customers through this interface?  Do “old media” buy these success stories and could they run them if they did?  The fact is however that a new world order has arrived, and we all need to recognise it.  A colleague said recently “You never write about vertical search anymore – did it fail?”  No.  I don’t need to write about it anymore , because it has succeeded.

Footnote : Warburg Pincus, and Mark Colodny, the Managing Director who has been responsible for Globalspec, deserve recognition for patient and consistent support through the growth period.  As a result they now have a property of high value.  The exit is the real test!

Here then is a first clue to the nature of this new year.  Investors are getting more pro-active.  Prices for the major players have upside and, in Reed’s case, downside, built into them.  Analysts  perceive the coming media market reconstruction and want to get on with it.  At least that way share prices move and people get commissions.  Pearson is a long time target.  Its portfolio nature in Lord Blakenham’s Golden Day even included Madame Tussauds and Alton Towers.  Dame Marjorie Scardino cleared out the non-strategic, but drew a line at the FT and Penguin.  Ever since everyone has wondered why, but neither seemed likely even in the boom years to reach interesting valuations, so analysts concentrated instead on the growth and development of Pearson as a global education market leader.  But Execution is right.  There is unfinished business here.  Pearson add no value to the FT in the vertical, despite Dow Jones Mr Murdoch may still be interested, Bloomberg did buy BusinessWeek and are now as determined acquirors as they were once emulators.  And the FT would help in the great Boomberg struggle with Thomson Reuters, where IDC would be a very valuable component.

But why should a good story end there?  Penguin is now subscale in the consolidation of consumer publishing.  Would Mr Murdoch like to buy that for Harper Collins (or Hachette, or Bertelsmann for Random House?)?  The growth of world education markets, and the potential availability of Santillana, which could be an important route to building scale in Spain and Latin America, could be the targets on which investors might prefer to see Pearson concentrate. Meanwhile, Peter Rigby’s woes at Informa are said to derive from the investor revolt which prevented him from doing the Big Deal with Springer.  But Springer, now owned by the Wallenburg’s EQT, will want to do a big deal of its own to get the growth going which will justify buying that debt mountain.  Does the break up of Informa make sense, with Taylor & Francis going to Springer after all?  Or does that simply create a Reed-style problem of selling the rest at premium prices?  Datamonitor would surely find a home, but would Performance Improvement?  As buyers, Informa were fast and lucky: as sellers, those are qualities more usually found on the other side of the table.

So now we have gone full circle in investment terms from safely weighted porfolio media ownerships in which the variations in the cycle meant that not everything went wrong at once, to companies based on broad vertical specialization.  Pearson shorn of the FT and Penguin, or Thomson Reuters sans Healthcare, or, indeed, Bloomberg, are the role models.  The ancien regime is now McGraw-Hill and Reed Elsevier in this analysis.

On a cold night there may be persuasive logic here.  At least the equity markets hope so.  Something must be done to get those post-vacation media markets moving again, and what normally works is the power of rumour – turning into self-fulfilling prophesy.

1. All forecasts of a return of advertising levels, regardless of media or format, to “normal”, “pre-recession levels” or equivalent values.  It is not going to happen.
2. All pronouncements, political or commercial, that suggest that a law, technology or even divine intervention will solve the crisis of intellectual property management or control in the network.  We are in Eden and have eaten the Apple.  Live with it.
3. Any press release that suggests that eBook, its standards or the technology of access is a finished process ready to be slotted into normal life on Earth.  It takes five steps to download to my Sony eReader – this is an abnormal process and only afficionados would begin to attempt it.
4. Any pronouncement, even from Mr Murdoch himself, that says that paywalls work OK, people love them and are more than happy to contribute to the funds of hard-pressed News Corp.  Water still flows around a dam, given half a chance.
5. Anyone who says that the advocates of Open Access in science publishing are winning, losing or changing anything with this argument.  The real issue is defining the future of scholarly communication in the network, and seeing where the commercial entrepreneurial input is needed.  Those who get detained in false arguments with fakirs and fake prophets will be engulfed and lost in the morass of inter-academic argument.
6. All those who proclaim the eTextbook and say that a format switch will ensure that educational publishers will  live happily ever after.  Education is the Frontline, and is now changing rapidly.  2010 will be the year of critical transformation in many parts of the world except where state control is absolute (e.g. France) or the system is too poor to cope (the UK).
7. All claims that commoditisation of content will  ease because some content players have re-enacted the parable of King Canute (or Cnut, or Knut – when you have Danish kings you have to live with constant variation).  Google, at a stroke, is now a provider of primary law globally.  If law publishers have any idea of where the value chain is they need to be climbing it to safety with the speed of Canute’s courtiers saving him from the incoming tide.
8. Any continuing claims that you can move the brand of a trade magazine to the network without fundamentally altering its role or its customer relationships, and that brand values will enable it to survive.  The network is a service zone, not a product promotion space.  We have spent a decade learning this and surely we do not have to go through it all again in 2010?
9. Anyone who says that customer-created content does not work.  Now that our financial services operators fully recognize their role as value re-cyclers and aggregators, there is no excuse for the rest of the class.
10. Anyone who proclaims the arrival of a new age and names it web 3.0 , 4.2 or X marks the spot.  We are working within a new continuum, every technology we will use in the next 15 years has already been invented and patented, and what remains to be seen is only the way in which consumers react to which combinations of hardware/software/content to solve which problems in what contexts. And nothing is lost by experimentation.

If we are all unfazed by the the tendency of the market to create smoke and erect mirrors, then we can get on with the real game.  As in every year from 2000 to 2010, clever and knowing players, whatever they call themselves, will make real money in information markets.  I hope you are one.  Happy New Year from the bottom of the Garden!

One of those great debates concerns the articles and reportage surrounding the free publication on the web of essays dedicated to the memory of Jim Gray, the Microsoft researcher lost at sea three years ago.  Gray’s argument, the Fourth Paradigm, concerned the way in which data intensive scientific discovery is altering the way in which science conducts itself.  Gray pointed to the nature of collaboration and data sharing as critical areas, and demonstrated in astronomy, very often a good exemplar, that getting all of the literature in the same places as all of the data, and making them interoperable through distributed computing you could create new findings and, in effect, ” a worldwide telescope” as the New York Times notes in the article referenced above.  Another good example might be in cell signalling, where Signalling Gateway has the same effect in a collaborative environment commissioned from Nature.  And neuroscience now throws up a number of examples.

Even in my enforced absence from the network, I have not read everything in this collection (much of which I would imperfectly understand anyway), but I would strongly recommend Clifford Lynch’s contribution.  He sees the research paper as a “window” on the research field, and points not just to evidential data , but also reference data collections (often computed upon as the stuff of research) and to data mining, with all of the power of inferencing and semantic search brought to bear to discover the things we knew, but did not know we knew.

There is a huge challenge here for STM  traditional publishing and for the information sciences alike.  Who in this new world takes the impresarial role of ensuring that all these elements are available, and not just for science and medicine, but also for the soft sciences and humanities, is critical for the survival in the medium to long term of the structures of public-private sector interaction in the research marketplace.  Yet all around us publishers and the “Open Access” lobby are locked in a footling debate about whether an article is Green or Gold (degrees of openness to those who have too much real work to do).

And the way in which that trivial pursuit is now conducted  was the subject of an excellent note by Phil Davis on the SSP Scholarly Kitchen blog.  Why, he asked on December 15, does the consultative process set up by the Office of Science and Technology Policy have to be dominated by people like Stevan Harnad (the self-appointed arch evangelist of OA), who alone has made 26% of the contributions to this forum online: in  the real world, at a public meeting, “these blowhards are given their time and asked politely to sit down.  We don’t tolerate these people very well because deep down we feel that they are disruptive of democratic discussion where diversity is valued over dominance”.

Quite so.  This is an important comment about democracy and the way we debate on the web: it also reminds us that the time is long overdue for us to get away from the sterile open access debate, which on both sides freezes the research communication process in aspic, and get back to exploring the fast moving world of knowledge discovery itself, which is where Jim Gray takes us.  Then we can begin to properly re-invent “publishing “, and it will need the brains and risk capital of the private sector as well as the needs of scientists and institutions to carry that off.

One saga concerns the sale, after a very lengthy process, of Springer Science+Business.  Well, not much business any longer, since the guts of the small B2B operation that went into the mix when Bertelsmann went out had already been sold to offset debt.  In an earlier blog post (Springer’s Dance to the Music of Time) I looked at the potential of this deal to help consolidate the STM market, and concluded that while Informa was unlikely to do the trick (and so it proved) , putting Springer alongside Thomson Reuter’s remaining science interests did make sense.  Well, if that was an opportunity it went begging, since according to the Financial Times (10 December 2009) a deal has been struck with the Swedish private equity house, EQT, backed by the Wallenberg Family.  The reason the strategics kept their hands in their pockets was undoubtedly the debt issue: in the final analysis it looks as if Springer was sold for around €100 million, plus €2.2 billion in debt.

So this means that EQT will put in some fresh capital (€450 million says the FT), renegotiate the debt package at a new level of €1.6 billion, and then presumably refinance to take its profit out of Springer prior to a flotation in happier times when the public markets will be invited to take on these debts.  While the initial private equity intervention gave a strong new management team under Derk Haank scope to regenerate Springer, create efficiencies, make economies, restore margins etc – all of which they did in style – what does this new deal do?  Does it invest something in the company that it does not have already?  Does it improve its current industry-level profitability through creating scope for new investments in technology, or major acquisitions?  No, one sadly suspects it does not…in fact, it may just allow a wealthy Swedish family to eat at the same table where formerly the British Coal Board pensioners ate.  Not in itself an unworthy cause, but hardly a very progressive one for the industry.

Then again, look at what strategic buyers are doing.  Last week mighty Bloomberg bought the fledgling New Energy Finance.  Yes, Bloomberg.  After years of looking at everything and then emulating what it wanted, the very private Bloomberg has suddenly become an active purchaser.  The reason has to be speed.  Clearly, as markets move out of recession, comparisons between the major players in the financial services markets will become more acute. Bloomberg is the expensive one, yet Thomson Reuters is thought by many to more than match it in content.  This has to be a move about service levels and online commentary: energy is a vital market and New Energy Finance, the brainchild of Michael Liebrich, a man just as energetic as his subject matter, had grown a reputation for good commentary in a key sector.  Yet this was a start-up still in the initial growth spurt, so part of this decision has to be about the sort of growth that Michael and his team can do with Bloomberg support, as well as what this content adds to the Bloomberg offering.  Why this, why now?  The latter half of that question seems to be about speed to market – it is cheaper and faster to buy someone half way there than to start from scatch and try to overtake him, especially if you need what he can give right now.  And the energy information market is indeed contracting, as is the market for good financial commentary (Breaking Views would be the analogous case study there).

I should point out here that this blog has now reached 20 entries and while unformed and immature (i’ts the writers, I’m afraid) is very certainly available, and can be taken in a consolidation move while debt levels are as modest as its readership.  Offers please.

My formal contribution can be found in the downloads on this site and in Dave Kellogg’s blog.   But I was much more interested in two of the afternoon sessions.  In one, McGraw-Hill in the shape of Shannon Holman spoke about the return of her company to the ground occupied with Primis in 1992.  This struck a chord.  In that year I welcomed Primis as a wonderful innovation in the cause of the abolition of textbook publishing.  I asserted that this scheme for custom publishing Higher Ed texts in a mix dictated by faculty staff would revolutionize the business and make the publisher’s fortune.  So it failed: teachers were uninterested, other publishers would not lease rights, print on demand at that time was too crude.

Now, after Pearson and after Safari Online, it is back.  It looks splendid in its re-engineered form, and 17 years later one can see why it was too early.  And now the bells and whistles, like the eCommerce counter which keeps a running tab on the cost of content so far included in your custom textbook, will endear themselves to a new teaching audience.  And clearly some problems still remain, like access to third party content, and the inability of otherwise sensible education publishers to sit down in a circle and sort out a pricing convention for the exchange of content into each other’s custom services.  I guess that, like eBook publishers delaying publication dates, being a control freak is a measure of the threat notionally posed to treasured business models.

Yet Kent Anderson of the New England Journal of Medicine did not seem very threatened when he introduced NEJM This Week, a free summarization medical news environment, and NEJM Image Challenge, a soon to be paid for image quiz for physicians.  Both seemed excellent service zones for the push to iPhone, and both will yield Kent and his colleagues a great deal of information about doctors and mobile content.  But both are peripheral to the big push, which is surely finding applications which produce efficientcy and productivity gains in medical practise.

In both instances I must stand in admiration of  these players.  Kent has been working on mobile since 2002.  McGraw-Hill has been working on custom since 1992.  At a time when we sometimes criticize publishers (well, I do) for not moving more decisively with the times, these long development cycles of constant endeavour and imaginative response before market conditions dictated change bear remembering.  The music played on, but these stylish performers added a great deal to a really intense and engaging day.