Apr
24
Spring in the Ku’damm
Filed Under Big Data, Blog, eBook, Education, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, Publishing, Search, semantic web, social media, STM, Uncategorized, Workflow | 1 Comment
Spring came late to Berlin this year, as elsewhere in Europe. But with the Spargel festival just starting, the trees in bud on Unter den Linden, the German courts ruling that you cannot re-sell an ebook and the German Government’s technical advisors indicating that government-funded research must be Open Access, it was clearly time to be there for the 10th annual Publishers’ Forum. Developed by Helmut von Berg and his colleagues at Klopotek, this has now clearly emerged as one of the leading places in Europe to talk about the future of what we are increasingly calling “networked publishing”. The meeting has moved from the Brandenburg Gate and the Pariserplatz back to the regenerating West Berlin of the Kurfurstendamm, but the urge to get to the roots of progressive development in what we once called the book business has not diminished.
By design and accident (loss of a keynoter) I played to more halls in this meeting than in any of the previous five that I have attended. Leave that to one side: my slideset is available under downloads on this site and on the conference site at www.publishersforum.de you will find slides, summaries, images, videos and references (including a very interesting tweetstream at #publishersforum) as these meetings get increasingly blanket-documented with linked description, comment and commentary. Data, in fact. An audience of 350 people at work with speakers, organizers, and media to discuss and share. Collaboration. And that was the theme of the meeting – Collaboration in the Age of Data adds up to Networked Publishing.
And from these sessions it is now clear where we are headed This Spring is definitive in ways that other Springs have not quite been. In every previous year you could be sure, here in thoughtful, conservative Germany, that someone would say that we wee jumping the gun, that format would survive fragmentation, that the “book would never die”. No such voices this week. In an audience that loves books and lives by them, I felt an absolute certainty that while “book as comforting metaphor” would survive, my friends and colleagues in the body of the hall knew that they had entered the Age of Data. We described network publishing as allusive, particulate, and above all, linked. We talked about workflow: our customer’s workflow as well as our own. This was the age of Metadata as well as the Age of Data. Speaker after speaker spoke of the potential to release new value from content as data, and the need for systems and services to support that monetization potential.
And the feedback loop was everywhere in evidence. The user and the networked power of users has completely shifted the balance from the editorial selectivity of gatekeeper producers to the individualized requirements of users. We once Pushed where now the increasingly Pull. But loyalty was not sacrificed on the way: if you provide solutions that fit user needs exactly then you can experience what Jan Reicert of Mendeley described in a private session as “amazing user love”. On the main agenda, Brian O’Leary spoke, with his usual lucid intelligence, on the disaggregation of supply, and amongst publishers Dan Pollock (formerly Nature, now Jordans) effectively defined the network publishing challenge, (replete like the auto industry with lack of standards) while Fionnuala Duggan of Coursesmart tracked the way in which the textbook in digital form becomes a change agent in conservative teaching societies while enabling the development of new learning tools. Kim Sienkiewicz of IIl demonstrated the semantic web at work in educational metadata. And Christian Dirschl of Wolters Kluwer Germany updated us on the continued development of the Jurion project, a landmark in semantic web publishing for lawyers.
Alongside the publishers stood the Enablers. Publishing seldom realises the value that it gets from its suppliers. Indeed, one of my current mantras is that the importance of software in the industry is now so great that few content players are not also software developers, and that the relationships they enter into with third parties are often no longer supplier agreements, but really partnership and often strategic alliance agreements, and need to be recognized as such. They not only add value, but they materially affect the valuation of the content players themselves. It is no accident that it was Uli von Klopotek who opened this event for his company, and it was gratifying to see on the platform a range of services that are symptomatic of the re-birth described here. Hugh McGuire from Pressbooks in Canada exemplifies that enablement, as does Martin Kaltenbock of Austria’s Semantic Web Company. Jack Freivald of Information Builders, Adam DuVander of Progammable Web, and Anna Lewis and Oliver Brooks of ValoBox were each able to demonstrate further value additionality through an elaboration of networked publishing. The result was a rich gulasch suppe of networked expedients ( far more nutritional than the prevalent currywurst of this city!).
The conference agenda spoke of momentum. Laura Dawson (Bowker), a prescient commentator, noted how far we had gone in her Open Book presentation. And if we still lack standards, we have people like BISG and Editeur on this agenda struggling towards them. One of the most attractive features of the old book business was its anarchic and “cottage industry” flavour. I think it will retain many anarchic and small business qualities in the network, but it will be increasing bounded by standards of networked communication.
Apr
18
The Editor is You
Filed Under Blog, eBook, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, Publishing, social media, Thomson, Uncategorized | 4 Comments
For a brief but happy period I rejoiced in the somewhat overblown title of “Executive Publisher” at Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd, and was delighted when one of the handful of Edinburgh -sourced executives who had made the long journey with the company to London reminded me portentously that I was “sitting on the chair once graced by John Buchan”. And, indeed, Buchan in his writing days was also editorial director, keeping things safe for his old friend Tommy Nelson while that great leader was at the War – from which he never returned. So I responded with alacrity to a London Book Fair press release from Faber in which they announced an app for “The Thirty Nine Steps” (published in 1915) to create a “fully playable, fully immersive” (if its neither I shall want my money back) new product. This app includes “classic stop-frame animation and original silent film music”: what a huge mound of mine-able data this one book has produced. Hopefully the beautifully taut story-telling of Buchan himself is somewhere in there alongside what Henry Volans, digital supremo at Faber, calls “a new way of reading, with John Buchan’s story at its heart, presented afresh through a TV and gaming-inspired lens”.
I love this and want it to work: at the same time I get all sorts of goosebumps about what the result might be. I believe passionately that the network will produce art forms of its own. The long history of gaming, graphic novels, manga, picaresque narrative, novels of manners, film and television, and animated developments of all types from cartoons onwards, must, if our culture plays out true to type, be antecedents to something else. Clearly narrative is very important and clearly visualization is as well. In the same PR tranche a further Faber announcement indicated that the new Ian Pears novel, Arcadia, to be published next year, will appear first of all in an “semi-interactive” form, and only subsequently in a printed form. Here again is evidence of open-mindedness, though I found the idea that Mr Pears, whose writing I have enjoyed, wrote the novel, according to the Guardian (16 April) “inspired by quantum physics, and written in “nodes” which had been mapped to a graph constructed after consultation with an Oxford Mathematics professor. The aim was to create an infinite number of ways in which the story could be read -“. That word “infinite” has a whiff of the publicity department about it if you ask me, especially since Mr Pears later says “I’m still in charge of the story because I am arrogant enough to feel that I’m a better story-teller”.
Never mind. This is brave and ambitious stuff. The announcement occurred in this same week when The Guardian itself launched its own first essay in Citizen Journalism (see my 4 April blog on “Editorial Views and Viewers”). The Guardian has not gone for nOtice, but has created an app of its own for community responses and submissions. TNW characterized it like this:
“You can access the app via the Web, but there’s also native incarnations for Android and iOS. To contribute content to GuardianWitness, you need to create an account, either using your existing Guardian credentials, or through your Facebook and Twitter details.
The Guardian actually posts ‘assignments’, inviting users to post content based on themes – for example, when Britain experiences unseasonably bad weather. Editors set a range of assignments each week, covering news, sport, culture and life and style.
Photos and videos will constitute a large part of this, particularly for users out and about on the streets with their smartphones.
Selected submissions could be featured on the Guardian website or also in the Guardian and Observer newspapers, while video submissions could be added to the GuardianWitness YouTube channel.
The apps also lend themselves well to big breaking news stories, where Guardian and Observer journalists simply can’t cover the sheer scale of it on their own.
However, if you don’t fancy one of the assignments, and there’s nothing big going on in your neck of the woods, you can also simply submit a story, which constitutes an ‘open’ assignment.
For the Guardian, encouraging the public to submit their content via dedicated apps is a great move, and serves to formalize the growing shift towards user-generated content. It transforms anyone into a roving reporter, giving them direct access to a major news brand. Surely it’s only a matter of time before more big-brand news outlets follow suit, including the BBC.”
When John Buchan climbed down from the editorial chair at Thomas Nelson he went off to govern Canada. I always envied him this in my time: it had to be easier than trying to govern (Canadian) Thomson Corporation’s regiments of accountant managers (as my Chairman said, with deep seriousness, “you could make this so much easier for yourself if you stuck to only publishing bestsellers”). But the equations that we faced then will never be the same again. Just as print will go, so will editorial and authorial control. In a contributory content world, users will assess and vote for each others contribution, pre-buy content to which they are contributing, subscribe where they are contributors, and vote for each others contributions, views, plotlines or innovative media narrative combinations. The tools of the trade are on their desks: for some years now everyone has the potential to be his own studio, or her own graphic artist. The result may not be High Art, but the skills levels of whole populations will increase rapidly as “entertainment” becomes not just experiencing things, but participating in them as well. If self-publishing eBooks has taught us anything, from Amanda Hockings and John Lock onwards, it is that the publisher editorial selection process does not satisfy the participatory urges of large populations, and that user review and rating is seen as the selectivity tool, not publisher puff and blurb.
Now I must dash. There is a real hold-up on the M25 that I feel I should cover for the Guardian…!
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