May
4
A Stroll in the Tiergarten
Filed Under Big Data, Blog, eBook, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, Publishing, social media, STM, Uncategorized | 1 Comment
It was almost May. The asparagus is just arriving and the rhubarb at its best. This can only be the backdrop for the annual Publishers Forum in Berlin, now celebrating its 12th year and consistently performing as the focus for publishing discussion in central Europe, and celebrating the global view Europeans now take of publishing in all its forms and marketplaces. This show is put on by Klopotek for the industry it serves, which is a service that its industry should appreciate With some 260 delegates from Germany and central Europe, that appreciation certainly seems to be in place. This year’s theme “How to Reconstruct Publishing: Competing Visions, Channels and Audiences”, was the first under the direction of Dr Ruediger Wischenbart, but was as typically challenging as ever. A real debate about where we are going is still hard to find.
In a typically stirring piece in Scholarly Kitchen this week Joe Esposito (http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2015/05/04/the-half-life-of-print/) made the point that whenever we debate the future of publishing someone stands up and asks about the future of the book. I agree with him, and I find this as annoying and pointless as he does. Quite apart from the fact that print has disappeared in very many contexts in society, the digitally networked world releases us from this fruitless debate by the promise of being able to deliver anything to anyone at the point of use in their preferred medium. Ergo, print will survive where people value it and disapear entirely where they do not – yellow pages, trade maggazines, academic journals, newspapers…? Well, you see what I mean. Joe makes the point that digital publishing has not yet been kind to coffee table artbooks, so I was interested to hear Rolf Grisebach, CEO at Thames and Hudson, give one of the opening keynotes in Berlin.
His not-unreasonable argument turned on the large file size and lack of a decisive advantage in image viewing that digital currently offers users of art books. In last weeks’ piece in this place I pointed to the virtual reality benefits of displaying architecture online, as practiced by the New York Times. I would like art publishing that allowed me to focus on the eyes of the artist and then move me through a slide show of Rembrandt’s self-portraits in chronological order. I would like a virtual reality tour of Christopher Wren. I have the Waste Land app on my iPad and I am a customer for new approaches to valuing art, literature, architecture and music in a digital age. Here I think we can do more, though I was very grateful to Rolf for re-awakening memories of his company founder, Walter Neurath, and for reminding me that the company is named for its two founding cities, London and New York.
In some ways there was more comfort for the progressives in the next keynote, from Jacob Dalborg, the CEO of Bonnier Books. Here was an integrated vision which sounded like an investible business plan on the one hand, while stressing the way the digital world makes marketing to niches more potentially profitable than ever before. Any session that hammers home the need to build and exploit metadata and expand metadata values must be of prime importance today. With global standard expertise on the agenda (Graham Bell, Director of Editeur) this conference could hardly be accused of ducking the issue, but I still feel that we see this as “marketing utilities” and it always gets sidelined when we talk “creativity”. Well, if you want to create markets there is no more important subject, and it was good to see Jacob Dalborg underlining it.
This conference does bilingual brilliantly, but it also does breakout sessions that create wonderful debate but mean I lose some agenda items. Thus I really wanted to hear Publishing goes Pop: instead I moderated a session with a small group in which a very valuable discussion took place. Across the table was an Open Access STM publisher from Poland and a consumer publishing marketing executive from Germany. The others at the table were left to listen as these two set out to demonstrate the parallels in their very different specialities and effectively draw together the themes of the conference. This was the antidote to any idea that publishing is pulling apart. Indeed, at the end of this I was convinced that the digital network is helping publishing of all types re-focus on the user, and services to the user, in a way that in the world of physically formatted publishing we could only pay lip service.
And of course we had some technology, but it is now noticeable that we do not talk “tech” to these audiences at all. Matt Turner, CTO at MarkLogic, talks about flexibility, about speed of new product generation, and, in this agenda, putting content and context into action. It remains a surprize to many of us that publishers seem to set so much value on creative content, understandably, while according such reduced value to the contextual data about customers and how they use content in general, and their own content in particular. Meanwhile, Steve Odart of IXXUS moved us into a consideration of how we run our businesses and how we innovate when he took the Agile project management philosophy away from tech and into business as a way of working creatively in digital marketplaces.
Two days and we did not even get a stroll in the park – though perhaps that was what we enjoyed in the sort of company which is thinking seriously, not about the book, but about where publishing goes now.
Apr
26
Not Virtual, Just Reality
Filed Under B2B, Blog, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, online advertising, Publishing, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
Many people seem to have fallen victim to what I want to call TES (Tech Expectation Syndrome). They get lost in the ocean swells between over-hyped pre-exploitation excitement, and gradual market development under a different guise is a different context. Looking back through my file of words that seem to have disappointed at the top of the typical Gartner expectation spike and are now safely on the plateau of exploitation, I find things like VADs and VANs (now our digital networks), GIS (now a part of every activity known to man since geolocation became the bedrock of mobile telephony), AI (now becoming the M2M nexus of the working world, and so terrifying that even Stephen Hawking cannot exorcise it) …and, of course, VR, the wonderfully exciting 3D environment that we fell in love with, and then decided that headsets were not for us, and that this would only work for dedicated gamers.
And if forgetfulness about how much unexploited technology is available to our new product and service development cycles is one of our sins in the publishing and media marketplaces, let me add another while the Sunday afternoon mood of self-flagellation is upon me. After sustained efforts of re-invention, we keep falling back on PSP (product simulation psychosis). We put extra stuff, more video, longer text, archival support and other elements into the digital “version” and then promote it and sell it just as if it were analogous to the print “version”. We know these things are growing apart but we seem reluctant to acknowledge the difference. No where has this been more marked than in the newspaper industry, which strictly speaking we should now stop calling the newspaper industry. If we called it “news media” we might get closer to seeing how differentiation is taking place, and mark the points at which the digital service elements are going out on a track that print can never follow, and creating information in formats which will become the hallmark of communication. They are the defining moments in the separation of print and digital, and we should point to them whenever some senior executive says (so many do, I am afraid) “There will always be a market for print” or “digital is neat but what are its real advantages for which I would pay extra”.
They still say these things and there have been moments when I have thought the entire news industry would go the way of Yellow Pages, despite Vox, Buzzfeed, Fast Company (and that stubbornly non-innovative digital analogue of print, the Huffington Post). And then last week I saw surprizing green shoots of change, and not from the new digital news industry, but from those good souls who have huffed and puffed up and down the the peaks of inflated expectations a time or two, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. The latter have been celebrating Nasdaq’s birthday in fine style. They have taken my pathetic wave metaphors in a different context into a graphers delight, a 3D journey around the index from its inception (http://graphics.wsj.com/3d-nasdaq/). Use it on your mobile, walk round the room with it, or (get this!) get the WSJ headset and really appreciate it. This is not just a beautiful birthday card – you are looking at the way graphical information will be read, or, rather experienced, as the years go on. Here we move away from anything which can be “printed”, and once this style of activity does become the way in which we experience and record change, then only the network can deliver it.
But I would have to reserve special praise for what the New York Times did last week on an architectural review of the new Whitney Museum building (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/04/19/arts/artsspecial/new-whitney-museum.html). This is a delight to the eye. Once you have seen this you will never want to read a review of a new building which does not include this type of 3D analytical effect. It enhances every readers’ appreciation of the points Michael Kimmelman is making, yet this is VR lite, needing no headset and simply deploying great VR graphics to display the planes and vistas of a new building in a moving dynamic. And until they start moving you think you are just encountering another illustration in text. This answers the question – what would you pay extra for – because it adds a new dimension to understanding which could only have come from this environment.
We have noted here before the way in which old businesses can survive, despite and sometimes because, they are family businesses with a history of transition. A few months ago the Holtzbrinck family cashed their “get out of newspaper jail” card with Springer; both DMGT and Hearst have made huge strides in diminishing the effects of blighted newspaper advertising cycles by becoming experts in B2B data businesses, to the point where these assets begin to dominate all others. But if the Sulzburgers and the Murdochs are to escape then it will probably have to be re-invention that does it, and until last week there seemed to be few signs that this was likely to happen. But here, rather than playing games with the paywall business model, or buying related digital businesses that are not well understood corporately, both of these traditional market players showed early signs of trying to understand how technology could be deployed to add new value for the user. These are late conversions on the road to digital Damascus, but perhaps even more welcome as a result.
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