May
14
Sun and Storms over the Tiergarten
Filed Under Big Data, Blog, data analytics, eBook, Education, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, Publishing, Search, semantic web, social media, STM, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
“Its a moral and an ethical system”. Richard Charkin, in a passable imitation of the new business-like Archbishop of Canterbury, defended copyright at last week’s epic Publishers Forum in Berlin, though we all knew that he was referring to a set of trading rules which led Byron to tell his publisher, John Murray, that “Barabbas was the first publisher”. Klopotek’s Berlin show, over 250 strong this year, has become a stadium for opposing positions and sharply contrasted stances. Consider for example, the contrast between the aforesaid Mr Charkin, and Harald Greiner, his fellow opening keynoter on the first day. The Bloomsbury Executive Director remains the delightful iconoclast of his earlier years, though he moves in illustrious establishment circles as an ex President of the Publishers Association now about to become President of the International Publishers Association. A Prince amongst Publishers and our Renaissance Man, in fact, with a track record second to none in STM, reference, mass market paperback, fiction, professional, and in print and digital. Our old world looking into the new with the same passion, argumentativeness, curiosity and determination. A dealer and collaborator – his deal with Faber in drama is a clear sign of the times, as was his half-joking suggestion that Writers and Artists Yearbook was a portal for self-publishing.
Then step forward Mr Greiner. Here we saw the necessary technocrat preparing to create another world that all “publishers” (whatever that now means) increasingly recognize. Mr Greiner runs the IT infrastructure – an increasingly strategic component – of Holtzbrinck. For those of us who recall the German newspaper group, this is now a publishing corporation which owns only Die Welt, which has 75 % of its revenues outside of Germany and which has built a powerful science and education interest to replace its former news organization. With technology hubs in the US and the UK as well as in Germany, Harold Greiner’s drive was towards the industrialization and the professionalization of the industry. Older readers will recall the 1960s lament that the accountants were taking over publishing: the equivalent today is the new men of technology, and, if they are like Mr Greiner, they will be very impressive colleagues (as well as the people who return the margins to the business).
They talk the talk of services and solutions, and walk the Agile way, these New Men. Another who surfaced later on the first day was Marcello Vena, CEO of Digital Publishing from RCS Libri in Italy (think Fabbri, Rizzioli etc) Here was the Technologist as Digital Adventurer – from his eBooks Aboard experiment of making eBook reading free on the fast trains of Italy (clever marketing – get stuck in then you have to download to finish it when you arrive at your destination) to Big Jump, a joint venture with Amazon (yes, that is correct!) on a self-publishing, contest-based, crowd-reviewed platform which has generated 500 new books and 500,000 views. This excitingly followed Bob Stein, who pointed us back to the steady march of social reading , reminded us that writing will change as the Social Book becomes more important, and then pointed to the future of independent bookselling – in recommendation and review sites like www.brainpicking.com.
Day 2 set us different challenges. Put your head into 2020 and tell us what you see, the keynoters were asked. Nigel Newton, founder of Bloomsbury, saw the revival of the SME as the technology allowed small start-ups in a world where Amazon had sliced and diced the margins of big players. Francis Bennett, Deputy Chairman at Yale University Press and well-known as the creator of the book trade’s first digital metadata system, saw the role of publishing in the branded competition of universities struggling to attract research funds and grants. Monograph publishing was commercially exhausted and scholarly communication which had value needed immediate availability. Sven Fund, CEO and architect of the rebirth of Walter de Gruyter, saw focus and specialization and size as the answers to the fragmentation he saw around him, and stressed the need for partnership and technology standards in the world we are entering. Matt Turner, CTO at MarkLogic took up that theme. There was no time at which it was more important for publishers to concentrate their working capital of data on one platform, to have complete control over it and access to it, to be able to search it fluently within the platform and relate it to third party or remotely held data, and to be able to fully enhance it with semantic analysis.
And as we began to debate the future that these voices described it became ever clearer that the “publishing” community is not owned by those who self-described themselves as publishers. Baldur Bjarnason of Unbound challenged the very right of publishers to exist in a Viking raid on the high ground of publishing morality (a very different concept from that of Richard Charkin), and the Prince of Self Publishing, Hugh Howey, earnt real respect from an audience which might have felt challenged as he displayed some of the potential of self publishing, pointed out that it is a larger activity than most people think (and larger than “publishing” itself), and guided our thinking away from selection of original works and towards investing in the marketing and development of existing self-published work. And with Fionnuala Duggan and Eric Razenberg (CEO, ThiemeMeulenhoff) underscoring the revolution in education around learner-centric networks and the arrival of real personalised learning, the revolution seemed complete. Hugh Howey, Porter Anderson and Ed Nawotka ended the day in style, but the voice I recalled that night was that of Brian O’Leary. A quiet voice calling for a new architecture of Collaboration. A calm and rational presence embedded in two days of high excitement in a publishing conference that really did bring all the voices to the table.
Helmut von Berg, indefatigable organizer of this event for a decade, retires this year. He earnt the grateful thanks of all of us present in Berlin. He is succeeded by Ruediger Wischenbart and an editorial board who now know how hard it will be to improve on this.
May
3
Lies, Damned Lies and Irrelevancies
Filed Under Blog, data analytics, eBook, Education, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, STM, Uncategorized | 1 Comment
Benjamin Disraeli’s old adage about “lies, damned lies and statistics” is now spinning away from its original placement (he actually meant to say “expert witnesses” rather than pure statistics!) and is moving beyond oxymoron into cliche. But since the UK’s Publishers Association statistics book (www.publishers.org.uk) was published on 2 May, and sparked the usual irrelevant radio and newspaper commentary on its findings, I found myself pondering both our gross misuse of statistics in everyday life, and how increasingly the thirty or so trade bodies in the British Media, and their European confederations and US co-evals continuously mislead us by pretending to be a market measure when they are actually a symptom of change for producers, and an increasingly misleading one.
The statistic from the UK Publishers Association (PA) that got me itching in this rabid manner was this line: “Total physical and digital book sales have fallen from £3.5 billion in 2012 to £3.4 billion in 2013”. This got the chattering classes going at a furious rate. The Death of Reading? The Decline of Britain’s Place in World Culture? Collapse of Educational Standards in a once Great Nation? Well, I am all for firing the current Secretary of State for Education, re-opening the libraries and even, if it helps the struggling book trade, allowing prisoners in our teeming jails to receive books for reading purposes (currently forbidden in the UK), but, seriously, this is not down to the Government, or even the poor old publishers. It could be the start of a trend or a post-Fifty Shades statistical blip, or it could simply be a statistical error. It is not a “market” figure at all, but simply reflects the information collected by the Publishers Association from those publishers who happened in the years in question to be in membership of it. It indicates nothing and has no deeper significance until it becomes greater over time, so why do we fill so much airtime with premature discussion of things that have not yet happened?
The fact is, of course, that we build bricks from muddy statistics to support our own arguments. The wise men at the UK Office of Statistics reserve the right to change major announcements – GDP, cost of living, inflation – in the months following their monthly (absurd time interval) releases, as new and better evidence arrives. In the content, media and technology industries we should do the same, and rigidly differentiate between producer statistics, which reflect segments of sales data , and market statistics, which reflect consumption within a market. Thus the radio interviewer who I caught dilating on the PA figures was obviously unaware that the same report indicates that 43% of UK output from these publishers was exported, even further diminishing their usefulness as a guide to the literacy and reading habits of the Great British Public.
And then there is the Digital Thing. Here I must take issue with the Publishers Association CEO, while sympathizing with his need to sell as many of his reports as he can. The report, he says “shows revenues from books at an interesting equilibrium moment with the total growth up by the same figure as physical sales are declining, showing that digital books are fully pulling their weight in the market”. Apart from the thought that “equilibrium” is a strange word to apply in a market where digital is growing and print declining for the publishers indexed here, there is no acknowledgement of the Howey Thesis – that an examination of Amazon’s sales figures would quickly show that genre fiction sales of self-published works are far greater than publishers believe. It would reveal that, with these self-published elements added, between 70 and 90% of sales were digital. In the view of many, the fiction market has gone digital already, but we have no way of recognizing the change. The only short term hope for the major players is consolidation (Harper Collins and Harlequin this week). With self-publishing for initial publication becoming the order of the day publisher selection of the best for advanced marketing treatment creates a derivative business model. So what is this, Publishers Association, about “Publishers have a strong historical record in driving innovation, providing products and services appropriate to the digital age”. Well, the first part of the sentence would apply to Allen Lane, the last great innovator in British book publishing history, but the last part of the sentence strains credulity. True, independent players like Dorling Kindersley did wonderful things in multimedia in the 1990s, but that soon stopped when they were bought by a conglomerate, and replicating a print book in Epub3 is hardly a startling breakthrough, even for a publisher. But it does point to an issue that I have no statistical reason for asserting: if the UK consumer publishing industry does not quickly find a way of investing in and developing new forms and attributes appropriate to a networked age with mobile technology then it will, in the 2025 statistics, be shown to have expired – like the dodo, or the newspaper.
But, of course, we all love a figure. Buzzfeed is always full of nice stats for us to send to our friends and start an argument. But they are not entirely serious. In the same way I could point out, for example, that the UK publishers output in sales revenue terms have now climbed/fallen to 66% of Amazon’s book sales (believed to be $7.75 billion). And now that Amazon Publishing have sold over 1 million copies of each of two author’s works (Helen Bryan and Oliver Potzsch) surely it would make sense to recruit Amazon into the Publishers Association, and make the stats look vastly better in a single year (Headlines: “New Boost to literacy”, “Education Minister says strategies to get the nation reading have worked” etc).
And a final point. The UK Publishers Association launched, for the first time this year, their statistics on the UK academic journals market. I wonder why. Journals is essentially a global market. “Made in Britain” journals are great, but no greater than “Made in the Netherlands” or made anywhere else. The figure the PA comes up with for British journals revenue is £1.3 billion in sales, of which £850 million was digital. In other words, Reed Elsevier-owned Elsevier is not British, since its revenues are larger than this UK total. On the other hand Wiley does its journal publishing in the UK at Oxford and Chichester – but is presumably, because it is NYSE listed, a US company. In small, fully digital globalized markets this type of geographical output recording is next to useless. The PA would be well-advised to licence access to a good market research database and tell its members something much more valuable – whether the UK grew as a buyer of academic information last year.
Over 50 years ago I secured a vacation job at Gallup Poll to keep a penurious student going. After a frustrating first day I returned to the office and asked my controller whether anyone ever told the truth to pollsters, or had I encountered an unrepresentative sample of London liars. He thought, and replied “Well, the polls that derive from these interviews are surprisingly accurate – if you allow for a statistical error rate of 5% either side of the result” Quite.
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