May

9

Written on Vellum

Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, eBook, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, online advertising, Publishing, Search, semantic web, social media, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment

So off I went to the PPA (Periodical Publishers Association) conference, arriving unexpectedly early and thus catching the Minister of Culture trying manfully – and succeeding brilliantly – in saying nothing of consequence to the future of magazines for 20 minutes. I have encountered Ed Vaizey before – as pleasant and affable a politician as one would wish to meet – but he made it clear that everything significant was decided, as he put it, “above his payscale” so there was no real point in asking him a question at all. I reflected on the wit who suggested that if you needed a Minister for Culture you have no culture, and on a political society in which the government reacted to criticism that it had doctored yesterdays’ Queen’s Speech laying out its legislative programme in the light of election results the previous week, by pointing out that the speech in question is written on goatskin vellum, which takes a week to prepare and inscribe, and where the ink takes three days to dry. And we expect politicians to help us into a networked society! Really!

But from this low point everything got better. Under the ebullient chairmanship of Barry McIlhenney we looked through the PPA Publishing Futures report, where some of the characteristics of the industry became clear. In old world terms, the PPA’s consumer and B2B sectors are pulling further apart, and after a year of slippage in 2012, forecasts for the coming year are more buoyant in B2B than elsewhere. My surprize was that 34% of sales revenue was outside the UK (46% in B2B). It was not surprizing that consumer is only 8% digital, or that B2B is down to 41% of revenues coming from print (though the remainder is a mix of digital with events and consultancy). Average profit margin was 15-16%: very much higher for many B2B companies: rather lower for some consumer players who see little advertising recovery in print. But the world of the future that they all see is a wider range of revenue sources derived from additional services from remodelled businesses which are more “customer-centric” (one of the expressions du jour). The risks are the UK’s dodgy economy, the shortage of investment, the speed of change and the skills gap. B2B now recognizes that scale matters, and confidence is linked to size. On a scale of 1-10, member confidence stood at 8.4, with B2B averaging 9.1.

If indeed confidence is half the battle then this is good. And what followed bore out a good deal of that. Future’s Nial Ferguson showed the T3 technology service platform, a real mix of events, awards and digital services that has 40k subscriptions and 4 m uniques a year, doubling year on year. This has the same usage in the US as in the UK. Less than 20% of margins is now print, while 50% is digital.William Reed Publishing’s 50 Best Restaurants service has similar characteristics, with significant sponsorship (another theme of the day was the importance of sponsorship) and use of social media marketing techniques. Some players still feared the cannibalistic tendency of some digital developments (dmgmedia) but others saw and grasped for completely new business model concepts. In the latter category Immediate Media (BBC Magazines and Magicalia) was a stand-out, with CEO Tom Bureau placing ecommerce centre stage and using brand astutely with some key demographics. But was this really customer-centric? Going retail, in a High Street retail market in the UK that seems to have lost touch with customers, must surely imply that you know customer needs better than bricks and mortar retail does. What we heard about was not mass customization, but a development of reader reply cards, making it hard to see just what the partnership (another good word of the day) with market data player CACI really meant. The big pull at Immediate is Radio Times (bought by 900k AB1s a month and 2.2 m at Christmas; the problem is that they are mostly over 55). Making programming links to travel services (inviting people to book beach holidays at the murder scene in the successful UK crime thriller Broadchurch was a stretch too far for me!), is one thing: supplying customer needs in a user-centric matter is quite another. But I really liked the idea of using brand clout to get the travel companies to share booking data with you.

Dennis, in the hands of James Tye, their CEO, had a more relaxed view. He feels the key problem is format transfer. So they have invested in their supplier, Contentment, and their Padify environment, and have based themselves on HTML5 so as to “future-proof” the business. With 50 apps in the market and 50% of The Week’s subscribers taking a digital product, and given the strength of their print, there is an implication here, as well as elsewhere, that management have time to plan and strategize a response to a networked world. Listening to this I wondered if it was justified: I would have said that the only way to secure any degree of future-proofing was to get all the data – not content – semantically enriched and upon a single platform capable of interrogating structured and unstructured information, and make the key asset the searchable metadata, thus enabling content production to HTML5 or anything else, regardless of format. This prepares the way for a truly user driven network world – one where, amongst other things, the user drives the service through personalization. Templating is very restrictive, and Create Once, Publish Everywhere sounds grand, but only works when the user sees the format and editorial input that you have created for him as more important than removing those constraints and giving him just the content he needs or requires at a particular point in time or in a particular context.

And then on to Events. I did not go on the stream headed Content: Still King? for fear of blood pressure problems, but I really enjoyed the B2B sessions. People kept using words like Collaboration, Community – and even client ROI. Many of my anticipated criticisms from the previous post were confounded. I really liked the IHS Janes experience of getting users to ask for and subscribe to online seminar sessions, using the expertise of the Janes advisors in a new way. And then feeding back the data gathered into the publication system for blogs, articles etc. I rejoiced at the EMAP presentation: how refreshing it was to hear a manager in a unit that creates about 30% of EMAP’s revenue say that sales staff had to be retrained to ask the right questions and listen to the answers in the cause of getting customers to tell you what they want. EMAP’s 780 sponsors are now some 50% of gross revenue, and the object, as yet not attained, is to retain 75% each year. Naming rights enjoyed by BT and Oracle in terms of Retail Week events made a good case study, and supported the idea of a 12% growth rate in the coming year (given performances of 7 and 17 % in the two previous years, during which the changeover to a sponsor centric view has taken place).

And my grand vision of event software that allowed attendees, sponsors and exhibitors to create their own meetings and agendas within the event? It all takes place on Twitter and Facebook, apparently – which implies that event owners do not have the data flowing from this either. But the good news is that event organizers do need to give sponsors and exhibitors some idea of the ROI on the event: it might help here to have some convincing data to put into that model!

By the time I reached the street it had stopped raining. I hope that is true for this industry as a whole, and that they sound convincing when they meet their historic users once again – in the network.

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.

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