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.
Mar
23
The Odd Future of Aggregation
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, Education, eLearning, Financial services, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, Publishing, Search, semantic web, social media, STM, Workflow | 1 Comment
Mr Bezos and his cohorts at WaPo (the Washington Post to you and I, earthlings) have decided, we are told, on an aggregation model. As far as skilled translators of Bezos-speak can tell, this will mean bringing together licensed news content from all over the globe – spicy bits of the Guardian, a thin but meaty slice of the London Times, a translated and processed sausage segment of FAZ, a little sauerkraut from Bild, a fricasse of Le Monde… well, you get the picture, and the fact that I am writing this before dinner. These ingredients will get poured into a WaPo membership pot, heated and served to members who want to feel that they are on top of global goings-on, from the horses mouth, and without having to read the endless recyclings and repetitions which characterize the world media at source.
Well, I see the point, and the idea of membership and participation seems to me one which has endless energy these days. But I have been thinking for several years now that the Aggregation business model as experienced from 1993 onwards on the Web is on its last legs. Believing that “curation” is too often a word which we use when we are trying to maintain or defend a job, I have tried to steer clear of imagining that storage, the ultimate network commodity, was a good place to start building a business. In the early days of the Web it was certainly different. Then we could create the whole idea of the “one stop shop” as a way of simplifying access and reducing friction for users. All of the things we were collecting and storing, for the purposes of aggregation, were in fact “documents”, and their owners wanted them to be stored and owned as documents, bought as documents and downloaded as documents. The early reluctance of STM publishers to apply DOI identity beyond the article level and make citations, or references or other document sub-divisions separately searchable seems in retrospect to demonstrate the willingness of IP owners to manipulate the access to protect the business model.
Three clear developments have comprehensively undermined the utility of content aggregation:
* the desire of users to move seamlessly from one part of one document through a link to another part of a different document seems to them a natural expression of their existence as Web users – and in the content industries we encouraged this belief.
* the availability of search tools in the Web which permit this self-expression simply raises the frustration level when content is locked away behind subscription walls, and increases the likelihood that such content will be outed to the Open web.
* the increasing use of semantic analysis and the huge extension of connectivity and discoverability which it suggests makes the idea that we need to collect all or sufficient content into a storehouse and define it as a utility for users just by the act of inclusion a very outdated notion indeed.
It seems to me that for the past decade the owners of major service centres in the aggregation game – think Nexis, or Factiva, or Gale or ProQuest – have all at various times felt a shiver of apprehension about where all of this is going, but with sufficient institutional customers thinking that it is easier to renew than rethink, the whole aggregation game has gone gently onwards, not growing very much, but not declining either. And while this marriage of convenience between vendors and payers gives stability, end users are getting frustrated by a bounded Web world which increasingly does not do what it says on the tin. And since the Web is not the only network service game in town, innovators look at what they might do elsewhere on internet infrastructure.
So, if content aggregation seems old-fashioned, will it be superseded by service aggregation, creating cloud-based communities of shared interests and shared/rented software toolsets? In one sense we see these in the Cloud already, as groups within Salesforce for example, begin to move from a tool-using environment to user-generated content and more recently the licensing of third party content. This is not simply, though, a new aggregation point, since the content externally acquired is now framed and referenced by the context in which users have used and commented upon it. Indeed, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, all of the great Aggregators mentioned above have sought to add tools to their armoury of services, but usually find that this is the wrong way round – the software must first enhance the end user performance, then lend itself to community exploitation – and then you add the rich beef stock of content. For me, Yahoo were the guys who got it right this week when they bought Vizify (www.vizify.com), a new way of visualizing data derived from social media. This expresses where we are far more accurately than the lauded success of Piano Media (www.pianomedia.com). I am all for software companies emerging as sector specialists from Slovakia onto a world stage, but the fact that there is a whole industry, exemplified by Newsweek’s adoption of Piano this week, concerned with building higher and harder paywalls instead of climbing up the service ladder to higher value seems to me faintly depressing.
And, of course, Mr Bezos may be right. He has a good track record in this regard. And I am told that there is great VC interest in “new” news: Buzzfeed $46m; Vox $80 m; Business Insider $30m, including a further $12m last week: Upworthy $12 m. Yet I still think that the future is distributed, that the collection aggregation has a sell-by date, and that the WaPo membership could be the membership that enables me to discover the opinions of the world rather than the news through a smartly specialized search tool that exposed editorial opinion and thinking – and saved us from the drug of our times – yet more syndicated news!
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