Jun
25
Every Man His Own Platform
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, eBook, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, Search, semantic web, STM, Uncategorized, Workflow | 1 Comment
I have enjoyed reading an Outsell Market Update today entitled “STM Platform Providers”. It reminds me of the speed of change in a very forceful way, and Deni Auclair’s expert analysis brings out the differences between the various publishing and distribution offerings in the market place. But it also reminds me that the words we use to describe things are more rapidly eroded than we imagine, and that this can lead to imprecision if we are not careful. Thus in recent years I have begun to reserve “platform” for infrastructure. So I would reserve the word in this context for something like MarkLogic, a way of organizing and searching your total content, applying analytics to it (semantic in this instance) and developing new products through adding value to existing content or recombining it with third party content. By comparison, I would see Highwire as essentially a delivery system, Semantico as a systems integrator now developing its own tools, and IXXUS as a brilliant systems integrator using mostly MarkLogic and Alfresco to build platforms upon which publishing and distribution tools can sit.
This search for distinctions may just be pedantry, so please feel free to ignore it. Or it could be that there is something stirring out there which relates to wider changes. The worrying part, to me, of the work of the Atypons or the Publishing Technologys analysed here is that they tend to reflect the publisher’s need/desire to control and distribute content in its existing packages. Yet, as Deni wisely points out, eBook publishers commonly sell “by the drink” – typically in chapter-sized portions though if their metadata were better they could go smaller. This points me to the thought that these publishing and distribution technologies are often a barrier to change, locking publishers into format driven responses to markets that now want something different. New product development that starts with end-user requirements must begin on format neutral platforms, where content-as-data has to be the rule, where third party data can be absorbed and integrated with existing data and where analytics are semantic from the very start, and not added later.
So I am going to continue for a bit to define “platform” my way, and whenever I meet a publisher who says he is “re-platforming” I will ask the same question: “do you have your customer data and your sales data on the same platform as your content?” If they say “No” then I know they are buying bandages, not addressing the problems of rapid, iterative new product development, where those data sets are vital to the process. But then again, we may all be wrong.We may all be dancing in an emptying ballroom. For this was the week when writeLaTex partnered with Rubriq (www.rubriq.com). Or let me put it another way: this was the week when a prominent (and free) self-publishing service for scholarly research authors joined up with a developing service for pre-submission peer review (standard cost $600, well below any publisher). Or think of it this way: they do not need us for authoring and they do not need us for peer review, so how do you re-insert the value in the publishing sandwich?
And this was a week when the great things STM publishers do just got greater. I was delighted to see that IOPP had decided to make a further 5 physics journals wholly digital and I expect that in the next three years print will yield entirely in this marketplace. I was even happier to see that the brilliant men and women who built Elsevier’s Scopus have just launched the first Chinese language search interface to the service. I think this is a first anywhere and much to be welcomed: what an anomaly if the world’s largest science research source nation continued to function only in English. And then, yesterday, IMS Health (www.imshealth.com) announced that they had bought a group of data-intensive businesses from Cegedim. Bringing these data sets onto the IMS Health platform is clearly seen as a huge boost to the latter’s ability to derive new products and services. The revenue earned by this data at Cegedim last year was approx. $573m with Ebitda of $86m. IMS Health paid $520m in cash. As a result they add to their platform, amongst other things, a database of analytical comparisons covering 13.7 million healthcare professionals around the world and a range of information solutions that use primary research data. This deal may not be widely reported, but in the sense that building data into platforms for new product development purposes is important, this could be very significant.
This is the age of self-publishing. We know that the consumer fiction genre market now sells a greater volume of self-published digital fiction than all of the traditional publishers put together. We shall soon see similarly large proportions of STM markets devoted to self publishing. When that happens, the battle will not be around how effectively we deliver traditional products in familiar formats. The winners will be between those who can leverage their own, and third party/Open Web content, to produce the tools, the viewers, the analytics needed to support end-user researchers in their workflow-related tasks. Our data revolution has scarcely even started!
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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