Oct
1
Never say Never
Filed Under Blog, eBook, Education, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, Publishing, social media, Uncategorized | 2 Comments
I really enjoyed a brief stopover in New York last week, en route to the Outsell Signature Event in Northern Virginia. It meant that I was able to respond to a kind invitation from BISG to chair a panel at their annual meeting. And it also meant that I was there on the historic day when they announced that they are moving from being the “book” industry study group to becoming the “content” industry study group. The rationale behind this was brilliantly explained by their CEO, Len Vlahos, a refreshing change from many of his contempories running trade bodies. Here was someone who saw the significance of a web of connected objects, who understood the dynamics of collaboration in the network, and was determined to position his organization at the right place to observe how the network is changing the nature of content in communication. His board, headed by the catalytic figure of Ken Michaels, currently transferring from Hachette to Macmillan, set up a study group to examine the mission of BISG itself, and here was the result, and in my view an admirable first: a trade grouping moving with the times, and not just re-branding or taking over weaker brethren.
Being there on this day was all the more interesting for me because I have always had a huge regard for BISG. When it was deeply unfashionable it positioned itself horizontally to study the supply chain, and inevitably the value chain, of the book. When I became the silent partner of Francis Bennett and David Martin in founding Book Data in the early 1990s, BISG was the only place to go to get studies of what was actually happening in the movement of knowledge and entertainment from the desk of the creator to the eyes of the user. When it comes up with a new title for itself “book” may be a casualty. No bad thing if that means we concentrate on the use and re-use of content, but I also anticipate some push back. Yet I recall that BISG is an ancestor of BIC, and thus a forerunner of the thinking that led to Editeur. If we are to have standards and benchmarks then we must have these orgnizations or others like them. Call it what you will, the BISG mission is now clearly designed around tracking content flows and what happens commercially around them. They tabled the new mission and voted for it.
In a sense therefore the panel that I moderated was a bit of an anti-climax. Ron Schlosser, representing educational companies, fully accepted the thesis that we are now entering the age of educational services and solutions. The textbook was not the answer if we wanted to respond to different speeds and characteristics of learners. How well, I thought, does the world of adaptive learning fit into the new BISG mission. Then I turned to Simon Ross, now New York resident for Cambridge University Press and a true academic publisher. He noted the tendency for students and researchers to want to search across articles and books, to make and retain their own collections of useful excerpts and references and even, I suggested, wrap them up as eBooks, which may themselves attract the IP protection of an anthology. We spoke glowingly, did Ron, Simon and I, as we moved through the prepared questions, of the world of content to come. Then we hit a reef and went down with the loss of all hands.
And the reef was the word “Never”. We had reached the very capable and highly intelligent COO of Penguin Random House, North America, Madeline McIntosh. Since I saw the book as a product format losing its primacy in educational and academic markets, it seemed at least polite if not wholly pertinent to ask about the prospects for fiction writing, and indeed the whole marketplace for non-fiction, from self-help to popular history. It was then that I learnt that the fiction market will Never change. Indeed, while Ms McIntosh’s company have self-publishing and eBook publishing properly covered, their view is that their market will never desert them, because of the respect in which they are held as selectors and editors of the very best fiction. And, that word again, readers will Never give up the fiction that they love so much.
It was no place to pursue the argument, and if time had been available I might have learnt all sorts of clever things that Penguin Random House have up their sleeves to stave off change and preserve the status quo. The novel form as a narrative seems to me to begin with Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding in the mid-eighteenth century. Much of the last century, from James Joyce and Virginia Woolf onwards was occupied in trying to blow up the form Things that have a beginning often also have an end. Did Sophocles remark to Euripides, “Well, old boy, one thing is certain. We shall always have a job because plebs will always want three act tragedy!” For this Never thing to work for fiction publishers the demographics have to be right, and I see no evidence that the form, if we discount the odd phenomena of Fifty Shades (perhaps itself a pointer to a future?), is growing or diminishing in audience. If I was working in fiction publishing, then I would want a small unit dedicated to second guessing the future – be it multiple media, narrative choice for the reader, the future of smartphone as a narrative platform or any of the other emerging network options for telling stories to each other.
And I would study closely what is happening to television, as networks become stressed by users exercising choice and making downloads a reasonable viewing option. Five years ago I was told this would Never happen. And the music industry would always go on just as before because kids would Never stop buying albums. And, as a newspaper executive once said to me, “Kids don’t read the ‘papers but everyone comes back to them in their 50s – they will never replace our position in local lives”. He has retired early and his former company is in its death throes. All the bad things that have happened to people and companies that I really respected and want to help to change are marked by that one word. Never.
Sep
22
Goodbye Native Websites!
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, data protection, Education, eLearning, Financial services, healthcare, Industry Analysis, mobile content, privacy, Publishing, Search, semantic web, social media, STM, Uncategorized, Workflow | 3 Comments
It was the second afternoon of the last EASDP annual conference, last Friday in Amsterdam. The Big Business of the day was said to be over, in that at their General Council EASDP, representing Europe’s directory publishers, had voted to merge with EIDQ, Europe’s directory enquiries services. Sic transit the glory of the yellow page players. I was sad – EASDP in its heyday ran some of the most entertaining meetings in Europe. I was happy, since I had lost a night’s sleep en route to Amsterdam and was approaching going home time. And then he threw this thunderbolt across the stage and rocked us all back in our seats, “You may never visit a native website again!”
The line had added impact in that it came from a former CEO of Experian’s B2B services, Phil Cotter. He was speaking for BIIA and his own consulting interests, and addressing the issues posed by predictive analytics. And he was skilfully piling up the arguments around a machine-to-machine future, the role of the intelligence in the network, the ability to track and map our activities as predicted by the past activities of ourselves and others like us. And suddenly, all of the chat about behavioural targeting and the future of advertising on the web crumbled into dust for me. The website now becomes a totally different proposition. This is not the display table, advertising driven, designed to bring users to your goods and services. This is the storehouse of your advanced metadata and this the key to your discoverability. Mostly you will get discovered by machines, so you need to be very aware of how to tell them who you are and what you are about in language they can understand and use. As it happens I am moderating a session at the Frankfurt Book Fair (http://en.book-fair.com/fbf/programme/calendar_of_events/detail.aspx?PageRequestId=6ea4655a-3dd4-4209-872a-fcd3a6240b02&a1850834-d682-44a4-9b98-1ff33a3bcb5c=72b77c9a-c2af-4cca-a94f-268d1d3987ed) where some of the best brains in STM will address this issue: yet Phil makes me realize that this is not just an issue for the advance guards of science and technology publishing: it is about to crash, with frightening speed, on your shore as well.
Later in the session, as Phil was explaining the way in which the LAPD use predictive analysis to create patrol patterns for police cars, a hand shot up. “If patterns of crime exist so that you can say where the next lookalike crime will occur, after a few nights the cars will be entirely in the wrong places” Phil explained gently that this was why the analysis was run every day, and thereby gives me a second insight into what is happening. We are still thinking at our own speed about real world cycles of change. It does not matter to the machine that we are so slow to process: predictive analysis can be run repeatedly to catch nuanced change in activity if that activity is important enough to justify it. Then again, most of the apps that run predictive analysis are going to lodged, for consumers and for commercial users, on the advanced smartphones of the future. There the emphasis is likely to be upon rapid decision-making in an increasingly time-constrained society. Predictive analysis only needs to be “right enough” to allow a decision to be made.
And, of course, intelligent predictive analytics software is everywhere you look. SAP and SAS have history here: IBM and Oracle have serious offerings: TIBCO and Orange have activity here. But have a look at WEKA from Waikato in New Zealand (http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~ml/weka) for some fascinating stuff on machine learning, and kick the tyres of specialist players like Foresee (www.foresee.com) or Absolutdata.com. This is a fast-changing world and the time between research lab and application grows ever shorter. Meanwhile I heard a good interview on the radio last week. An independent television producer was complaining that the advertising muscle of major agencies like WPP was being used to compel the co-financing of the TV they wanted – no shared deal equals no advertising was the implication. And we were expected to disapprove of the power of advertising being used in this way. But what if the agencies simply have a realistic view of the future of advertising and want their business to migrate to different places in the value chain. They will discover in time that content production is not the route to riches, but maybe they have already worked out that advertising is unlikely to go to the networks without being wholly changed – by predictive analysis, by recommendation engines, by community buying and countless other network driven expedients. Once again, the power migrates in the network to the user.
Then Laurie Kaye, now at Shoosmiths as their lead man in media legal pyrotechnics, came on stage and told us about the “right to be forgotten”. Not a good day for advertising and lead generation – in a conference dedicated to advertising-based directories and marketing services. The world is moving too fast to allow for the realtime re-calibration of the trade associations.
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