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
2
Righting Copyright’s Wrongs?
Filed Under B2B, Blog, eBook, Education, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, Publishing, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
They are at it again, you know. I have warned about this before. It seems that you cannot stop legislators making laws. They seem to think it is what they are for, while we older people know that the only way to preserve a reputation as a wise law-giver is to give nothing away. Nobody is happy with a patched road or a mended fence. Most Western legal systems are full of patched legal garments, most legislators are patching the patches, many of us know that only revolutions will allow a complete remake. The Sumerian agricultural revolution and the laws of Hammurabi. The Byzantine revolution and the laws of Justinian. The French Revolution and the Napoleonic code. The Digital Revolution and the redefinition of networked trading and ownership rights…?
Well, you certainly need a broad historical canvas if you are going to start a conversation in this area at all. One man of vision over many years in this field is the British media lawyer, Laurie Kaye, whose latest blog (http://laurencekaye.typepad.com/laurence_kayes_blog/) on 29 March sets out the battleground for the digital media marketplace arguments for 2015. And I share his respect for the enthusiasm of Commissioner Oettinger of the European Union, while adding a touch of personal despair at how long we Europeans have been about this Single Market business. Who amongst us is not frustrated by the limitations of the world we have now moved into? The librarians and researchers launched their London Manifesto yesterday to try to encourage the Commissioner in the right direction. (http://www.cilip.org.uk/sites/default/files/documents/The_London_Manifesto.pdf). Well they would do that, wouldn’t they? Yet more and more their impatience is just an echo of common place resistance and outright defiance in the market place.
And its not just copyright as ownership, its the whole content trading system of which copyright is the centre piece. As a good Brit I pay my BBC annual licence fee, but the rule of territoriality in a global networked society means I cannot view the videos I can see in London while I am in New York. Each of the media has a different rulebook, yet we live in a world of multiple and multi media developments. Above all, the interests of the players in the cycle of content creation and distribution are beginning to diverge, and great gaps, more significant than ever before, appear between what authors want and need, and the way in which publishers, ever protective of their business model, require for survival. The increasing dissonance that I hear as I listen to the strident voices protecting the copyright regime of the last century (representing a business model where publishers held the whip hand), and the equally strident voices demanding the freedom in the network to control for themselves the way authorial output is distributed is becoming distressing. Please, Officer Oettinger, what is a man to do?
In some ways this started in the academic world. When we write the history, Open Access will be seen not just as a way of allowing all citizens to discover the content of state-funded research. It will also be seen as authors wanting to use the network, with its ability to create huge access and impact for global populations, as a way of building reputation in the communities they target. The communities where they earn their bread and seek preferment. And is this so very different from the science fiction author who spoke to me recently about his publishing as a way to create an income stream – in his case from lecturing fees, public appearances, film scripts derived from the content, and commissioned writing for on and offline magazines. The book made the reputation, just as the scholarly research article does, and the key issue is not its royalty yield, but the breadth of readership and brand recognition that it creates. All too often the defence of copyright is the defence of the publishing business model, without a realisation alongside it that the role and value of the intermediary which is in question here. Networks, we always used to say, disintermediate intermediaries. In a world where it is so relatively easy to create your online eBook, and publishers are deserting the scrutiny of unsolicited manuscripts in favour of bringing successful self -publishers into contract as authors, publishers must – and can – demonstrate the value of their editorial preparation (something few now indulge in for cost reasons), their ability to discover talent and their excellence as reputation formers and mass marketeers. These are not all areas of strength for everyone, but they are becoming survival skills. Recall for a moment how proactive agents have been diminishing the rights granted to publishers in order to increase the flexibility of their clients. Recall for a moment how often now (Quebec City this week, Montreal airport last year and the Italian railways just before that) you can download an eBook from a library in order to read while travelling.
So when we want to debate the small print of copyright licensing rules we have to bear in mind that the revolution coming will have such violence that it will completely transform the way that longform text is created, marketed and distributed. No industry can be kept on life-support by virtue of making a concession on library lending while winning a point on fair dealing. We now need to resolve, as a matter of prime concern, whether territoriality in terms of making agreements about content is of any continuing use. We need to address issues that affect market receptivity, like net neutrality. We have made huge strides, thanks to the efforts of Lawrence Lessing, in writing into licensing a real recognition of origin and authorship while freeing up a good deal of re-use, and we need to look at ways in which the Creative Commons movement give pointers to future treatment in a licenced – and implied licence – network world. But above all we must urgently clear our minds and begin to redefine “ownership” of intangible intellectual property. For anyone under 17 this is a meaningless blog , and no one could explain it to them. Living in a world where the network sorts out licences and rewards on an M2M basis – machine to machine – this will never be an issue. Until then, different rules will govern downloading from those that govern streaming, and the lawyerly debate on whether that was a product or this was a service will create fresh intellectual property from the argument itself.
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