Oct

18

…And thence, to Frankfurt

Filed Under Big Data, Blog, data analytics, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, Search, semantic web, STM, Workflow | Leave a Comment

The great Book Messe is the autumn opener for me. As showers and brown leaves gust across the huge fairground, I seized the hour for bier and knackwurst, and contemplated the future in the light of a kindly young woman having stood up on the Pendelbus to allow my ancient self, lame of leg and rheumy of eye, to sit down. Having concluded that this was evidence that the human race has hope, I had another bier.

Yet despite this blip, the highlight of the fair for me was not a book or a party, though plenty of both were in evidence, but an interesting conversation with a group who really knew what they were talking about at one of the International Friday conference sessions. Here, in the Production stream (how very strange it now seems to call data part of “Production”!) we did a session on Discoverability and Metadata. As speakers we had Jason Markos, Director of Knowledge Management at Wiley to get us started, followed by Timo Hannay, CEO of Macmillan Digital Science; Dr Sven Fund, CEO of De Gruyter; and, to keep us technologically honest, Andreas Blumauer, CEO of Vienna’s Semantic Web company. So, a mass of talent from whom came massive elucidation of what I take to be a critical developmental issue for STM today and the rest of the information marketplace tomorrow. The problem of knowledge. The problem that when we have solved the knowledge problem, will we ex-publishing groundlings still be needed?

Jason got us afloat in a very admirable way. As we move from a world of documents and segments of former documents (book, journal and article moving to lower levels of granularity – abstract, reference, citation) – so we eventually recognize that entity extraction and text enrichment become ways of interconnecting thoughts and ideas horizontally in knowledge structures that represent the discovery of new insights that were not effectively available in the years when we were searching documents for word matches. Once we are underlining meaning with a range of possibilities and allowing semantic web analysis to use knowledge of meaning in context to illuminate underlying thinking (along with what is not on the page but is implied by what we have read or written), then we are into a Knowledge game which moves past content and beyond data and into some very new territory.

Companies like Wiley and Macmillan and Elsevier and Springer will exploit this very effectively using their own content. In disciplines like chemistry, building knowledge stores and allowing researchers to archive both effective and failed discovery work will become commonplace. Extended metadata will take us beyond the descriptive towards recording analytics and following knowledge pathways. People like Timo will create the knowledge – based infrastructure that allows this to become a part of the workflow of science. Sven will keep our feet on the ground by ensuring that we do not try to sell concepts before users are ready, and Andreas will help us to master the disciplines of the semantic web – and then, just as I was padding round the audience with a microphone picking up some really interesting questions, our little theatre was over, we could strut and fret no more and the audience could escape from Frankfurt’s economy drive of the year – no wifi in conference spaces!

So I was left on the Pendelbus and under the biergarten tarpaulin to ponder the impact of all of this. In the self-publishing future, when scholars publish straight to figstore and F1000 does post-publication peer review, the data to be organized will have to be collected. Indeed current Open Access has already begun the fragmentation. As knowledge structures grow, some scholars will demand that, except in extreme circumstances, they will never see primary text, but work only on advanced, knowledge-infused metadata. Further, that metadata will have to cover everything relevant to the topic. Will the lions and lambs of Elsevier and Wiley, Springer and Macmillan, lie down with each other and co-operate, or will external metadata harvesting become a new business, over the heads of primary content players. And will it be professional bodies like ACS or RCS who do this – or technology players? Knowing where everything is, being able to visualize its relationships with everything else, and being able to organize universal knowledge searching may be a different business from the historical publishing/information model. And the metadata that matters in this context? Who owns it may be a matter of the context in which it is collected. Certainly owning the underlying content would seem to give that owner very few rights to ownership of metadata derived from enquiries and research that included it, yet here I predict future sturm and drang as publishers seek to own and control the extension of metadata into the knowledge domain. And if these are autumnal topics, what can winter be like when it comes?

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.

« go back — keep looking »