Dec

11

Where Debutantes Danced

Filed Under B2B, Blog, Education, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, STM | 3 Comments

The Grand Ballroom of the Plaza Hotel is hallowed ground in the history of  Golden Age America.  It seemed therefore both incongruous and quite proper to find myself on a stage where Ellington once played, looking out at a full room of industry participants summoned from all quarters by MarkLogic to take part in their annual Digital Publishing Summit.  The splendid team at this company, which now has an enviable record of successful industry events behind it, registered 563 delegates for this meeting.  I have no way of knowing whether they all attended, but the vast  room was packed.  And as befits the location, this audience had gathered to hear about innovation and service development, and to note the decline of an ancien content regime based on publisher control of selection, distribution and pricing.  And where better: Gatsby walked the room when we spoke of the world we had lost, Henry Ford and Rockefeller jostled in the aisles as we described the opportunities in front of us.

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.

Dec

3

Slowly back to Earth

Filed Under B2B, Blog, Education, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, STM, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Or at least to the hut.  And I wasn’t the victim of mirage between here and Germany, since I had a cup of coffee with a very real Richard Charkin on the way back.  He had been with Berlin Verlag, and as always re-routed my speculations about recent events down entirely different lines from those that I had thought obvious, or at least  likely.  So when I reached my seat on the plane I did begin to rethink a great deal , and so relaxed into restful and much needed sleep.

Several things were clear when I woke up.  In the first instance we are coming out of recession just as we did in 2000-2002.  Internet services are once again leading the charge, and Monday was a real eye-opener in this regard.  Hopefully this time we shall see major plays in cross-border services development in Europe.  This certainly seemed the case on Monday.  All these companies were start-ups in the past five years: none of them owed anything to existing media players except where they needed to trade legacy content.

Then again, in Berlin, you could see the start-ups but not the traditional players (excepting only Pearson, as I said yesterday).  So is it really true that publishers are not investing in next generation educational developments?  No , not at all, but it is true that publishers start from the point of view of creating the successor to yesterday’s marketplace by building electronic content in the shape of an eTextbook , or a blended learning environment.  So at least two pictures of the future are in contention here: in one the teacher is still directing the learning process, though now doing it digitally.  In the other, the learning process is pursued by learners or groups of learners, moderated by teachers or assistants.  This gap is as wide as that between textbook publishing and what we then called ” resource – based learning ” in the late 1960s, which was when I entered educational publishing.  We returned in the 1980s to the textbook: will the same happen in a digital world?

And then, between these events, I spent a day walking around Online at Olympia.  And there I felt, once more, that content was becoming less important in a digital age, and that secondary aggregation through licensing would fill most requirements.  The real priority in business and professional markets was to create the service environment.  This is light years from the crusade fought by my old Chairman, Michael Brown, at Thomson when we scoured the earth to buy, usually pretty expensively, ” have-to-have and need-to-know ” content, that was owned by us and proprietary to us.  I left Online more concerned than ever that players who could not migrate to the service level would be left with only one option – to rent content to those who could.  And that means that however powerful and proprietary the content , its owner was exposed to the risks of losing touch with end-users and being ” emulated ” by those who do not care to pay for content, but who believe it can all be reconstructed from the Web.

I had a bottle of champagne on the plane, not to celebrate the sidelining of traditional publishing, but as a symbolic gesture marking the thought that we must not allow ourselves to go gentle into that good night …

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