Off the Page

On Change, 5: Thing One and Thing Two (Three, Four and Five)

2012-01-24T10:27:00.000-08:00

In this series of posts I've been looking at how the Book Industry Supply Chain is changing, whilst giving that change a wider frame of reference. Now it's time to narrow the focus back down to our industry, and to mention an uncomfortable truth - which is the adversarial undercurrent in relationships between many publishers and their distribution partners (and in "partners" I include outsourced distribution services and resellers further down the chain). Publishers regularly put their distributors through competitive tenders, book wholesalers and retailers routinely press publishers for margin. All of this is sound cost-management. But if supply chain costs aren't looked at in the round (that is within a strategic context) we risk putting short-term savings ahead of a collaboration that could benefit all of us.

Over the past decade many publishers (but not all - and I have the great privilege to work with many in the latter category) have been prone to regard distributors as a necessary evil rather than as key partners in the crucial endeavour of servicing customers. The supply chain is seen as a place to shave cost, not gain a competitive or strategic advantage. Meanwhile customers are frustrated that outside of Amazon and a few other on line retailers, their expectations for information and supply of books, particularly specialist and back-list books are rarely well met.

Last Wednesday I mentioned that Peter Kilborn of BIC had been surprised when he read the first draft of my New Trends keynote, having anticipated a narrower and possibly more pessimistic view of the future. To redress the balance I rounded off with five “distributor-type” implications of the observations I had made. Except they aren't just for distributors or publishers. They're for all of us interested in the supply chain for physical books - and the new suite of products and services that are related to them. Change can be an opportunity, and it's time for us to look through the other end of the telescope and see it that way. And this is how:

Those of us in the supply chain for physical books have reached a point where to remain competitive we have to put our arms’ length and mistrusting relationships behind us. The economic forces at play in our technological environment, economic environment and social environment are creating empowered, demanding customers. To make a paradigm shift into the service economy, we must collaborate to deliver services across multiple product and service ranges – which will include books – and to interface with customers in many new and different ways.
Our industry needs to hire in new customer service and transactional expertise. This could be a hard one to swallow because traditionally we like to think in term of volume sales in big round numbers. But very soon we are going to have to get to grips with micro-payments. A less scary way to think of it might be: much larger volume sales involving fractions, not rounding.
The supply chain requires investment in systems, expertise and human and electronic interfaces. Big investment. We need to think about how we can afford great customer-facing staff and excellent transactional I.T. systems before we cost-cut in the supply chain.
1-3 above suggest to me that we are approaching a time when publishers and third-party distributors might have to consider putting their financial relationship on a different footing. In a changing world, commission on print book sales may not be fit-for-purpose much longer.
Collaboration starts with open, honest and trusting conversations. And those conversations need to start now.

Reviewing this five-point call to action, I find myself thinking: gosh, that's not actually all that difficult then, is it? And then I remember, as Dr Seuss said, "Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple".

On Change 4. And Your Point Is?

2012-01-23T07:44:00.000-08:00

In last week's posts I (re)presented some observations on change I originally made at last June's Book Industry Communication summer seminar. In two post this week I’m going to summarise why I made them and in particular what I think there relevance is to people who still put print books into the retail & consumer supply chain, and make money from doing so.

Until recently book distribution has actually meant, “print book distribution”. Bearing in mind Moore’s Law (cf. last week's posts) and its technological and social impacts, it is obvious that within a very short time the majority of publishers will earn very significant revenues from products and services other than books. In fact publishers have derived revenues from a variety of sources including, permissions, serialisation, foreign language rights, co-editions and so on for many decades. However now is the first time that income has derived simultaneously in volume from multiple products, channels and services through multiple transactional interfaces. Income ancillary to the printed book traditionally derived from a few transactions of high value. That is now being turned on its head to multiple transactions of low value.

Something I’ve been talking about here for years is the fact that most publishers know almost nothing about customer or consumer transactions because they’ve been outsourcing them to intermediaries for decades. As an industry we seem to really like to put people and things into silos. And that’s not the way the world is moving. Empowered, informed consumers expect instant answers to all their needs and questions, so woe betide us if we haven’t anticipated them correctly. Publishers with diversifying distribution mechanisms for their content need to have a much more detailed understanding of their individual consumers: who, when, what and how.

At the 2011 O’Reilly Tools of Change conference in New York Brian O’Leary give a presentation Context First in which he coined the phrase: “context not containers”. O'Leary is a work flow expert and Harvard MBA who came to publishing from a magazine background, and who understands that publishers getting their digital work flow right will enable them to effectively use and monetise content in multiple channels. He proposes that in order to survive and prosper, publishers must understand the contexts in which consumers wish to obtain and utilise information and content. The context of the interaction with the content then takes primacy over the container in which that content is delivered. Brian’s thesis, in a nutshell goes: hire people and partners who know about creating content components, selling them directly and accepting micro payments. A theme he developed further later on in 2011 with a presentation titled Opportunity in Abundance. Both are available at the Magellan Media Partners web site.

Brian’s thoughts ought to threaten the distributor in me because at face value they further liberate content from physical books. But in fact they chime with mine on the fact that the publisher has got to get a whole lot more interested in the customer – and in particular how consumers want to access content, and where, when and how they are prepared to pay for it (or someone else is prepared to pay for it on their behalf). Publishers are going to have to get interested in customer service. At the moment, distributors are at the front line of customer interactions, and even in the context of new work flows and delivery, distributors' experience of customers has immense value, and needs to be both retained and built on, not eroded through aggressive downward commission negotiations and short-term cost analysis.

Tomorrow I’ll round up this series of posts with a list of five things I believe we- as an industry - need to be doing urgently.

On Change, 3: time to mention investment

2012-01-20T16:15:00.000-08:00

I've been astonished at the response to and the page views of this week's posts. Thank you to everyone who has been taking an interest and for the comments which have been coming in via Twitter and email rather than in the "comments" function here. I suspect there's a lesson I should learn from that, but right now I'm not sure what it is. It's Friday, it's late and I have been travelling for much of the day. So I'm going to wrap up this week with my fifth and final brief point about change. Next week I'll move onto the final section of my keynote, which focused in on and explored the implications of my observations very much from a supply chain perspective.

Observation 5: change requires investment

Change doesn’t just happen. It requires decisions and investment in those decisions. Alexander Graham Bell didn't just happen to invent the a mechanism for transmitting speech and sound. He spent years exploring sound and hearing - an intentional activity culminating in his eventually being awarded the first US patent on a telephone. In the modern supply chain, change always requires an investment in software (be it a new system or ongoing improvements to an existing one) and follow-on investment in training. Distribution is underpinned by data, and databases cost money (lots of money). Improving and upgrading databases costs even more money. Mining, exploring and exploiting the meaning and value of data from those databases costs even more more money.

Our industry started off well in pioneering change in the form of isbns and bar codes, but failed capitalise on its advantage by not following up swiftly enough with EDI initiatives, more and better metadata, RFID and so on. We relied on point of sale data collated only from bricks and mortar bookstores long after they were no longer the only game in town (or more precisely in our homes via the web). Despite the sterling work of people like Peter Kilborn at BIC (and his counterparts at BISG) pushing for the standards that came to facilitate the transactional basis of our businesses - we failed to understand how investing in systems and databases is key to our future success. We let disruptive technologies and technologists steal our advantage.

Of course change is not only technological: it’s cultural. Systems are only as good as the people who specify them and the people who use them – and unless those people are educated, trained and buy into what you are trying to achieve, it will all be money wasted. Or as my I.T. manager said to me last week: if you think training is expensive, try ignorance... And in business, cultural change can be expensive because it can mean re-organising work flow, work forces, and business models. Particularly in Europe, making structural changes in work forces can be costly in terms of HR resource, cash and management time. But in highly process-driven environments where there can be a focus on what "the system" requires as opposed to what the customer or the future of the company needs, change that puts the customer and the future of the company - not the process - first must be made if there is to be any chance of success.

Change requires intentional investment in systems and people.
Next week: suggestions for what this all means for books and the supply chain...

On Change: 2 (via Tertiarisation & Moore's Law)

2012-01-19T10:43:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I offered up the first part of my keynote to BIC’s 2011 New Trends summer seminar, sliced into short posts. I began with two of five key observations about change (as it pertains to publishers and the supply chain). First, Change isn’t new, and second Change can go unnoticed. So here goes for observations 3 & 4. No literary references today – instead we're skimming over some economic principles. I like to keep my frame of reference eclectic...

Observation 3: change happens

I grew up in the North East of England when the region was suffering an identity crisis of epic proportions. The traditional employers (coal mining and shipbuilding) were dying, resulting in social and economic pressures that culminated in the miners’ strike (immortalised in the musical and film Billy Eliot, and engraved painfully deep into the psyche of those of us who grew up witnessing the conflict and social schisms that accompanied the stand-off). In the following decades the employment profile in the area has migrated to service industries such as call centres and financial services (until the sub-prime mortgage market did for Northern Rock, in any case).

Those of us studying A’ level geography at the time learned that what we were witnessing was the economic theory known as “Tertiarisation”, or “the three sector economy” (developed by Jean Fourastie and Colin Clark) in action. Something that puzzles me about the Book Industry is that because we work with books – which have been around for so many centuries – we seem to see ourselves as insulated from the great economic trends that sweep the world’s economies. Publishers’ self-perception seems rooted in phase one of the three-sector economy (extraction) – extracting IP from authors, or possibly stage two (manufacturing) – making books as physical objects. Perhaps we’d all do well to take a running jump into the third sector – the service economy – because if we regarded ourselves as service providers – we might get back ahead of the game.

We are operating in a world where our product is rapidly uncoupling from its long-established delivery method (the book). Yet right now, revenue from those same books still forms the majority of revenues and cash flow for most publishers and booksellers (innovators like Sourcebooks being possible rare exceptions). Therefore we must buy ourselves time to invest in our future by making the process of obtaining physical books as easy and as pain-free for consumers as possible. That is to say we must invest in an efficient, effective supply chain that competes credibly with other offline and online consumer experiences in the service economy.

Observation 4: change is speeding up

Yesterday I was dismissive of a tendency to panic at the notion of change – however I do believe the pace of change gives us plenty to be concerned about - and Moore's Law is why I believe this. Wikipedia describes Moore's law as follows:

“a long-term trend in the history of computing hardware. The number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years.^[1] This trend has continued for more than half a century and is expected to continue until 2015 or 2020 or later. The capabilities of many digital electronic devices are strongly linked to Moore's law: processing speed, memory capacity, sensors and even the number and size of pixels in digital cameras.^[3] All of these are improving at (roughly) exponential rates as well. This exponential improvement has dramatically enhanced the impact of digital electronics in nearly every segment of the world economy.^[4] Moore's law describes a driving force of technological and social change in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.”

So not only have content and books moved out of their exclusive marriage into an open relationship that can include all sorts of other partners (web-based delivery, e-book readers, apps), but publishers and booksellers are operating their businesses within the context of an technological information infrastructure that is being propelled by laws of exponential change, with knock-on effects on the pace of change within our social and economic frameworks. The book is a product with a comparatively stable (if low) perceived value fighting for life in a dynamic, volatile world of constantly upgraded high-price consumer goods, free social media applications, rapidly changing social expectations and enormous peer pressure.

Moore’s law has made change exponential technologically, economically and socially.

That’s enough for one day, don’t you think? Observation 5 tomorrow…

On Change (via Dr Seuss & W H Auden)

2012-01-18T10:26:00.000-08:00

In June 2011 I was privileged to be invited to give the Keynote at Book Industry Communication’s New Trends summer seminar. Peter Kilborn challenged me to talk about Book Distribution in a Changing World. I was delighted that Peter included the word “changing”, because endemic change is what makes the supply chain a fascinating place to work. Peter later told me that he had been expecting a “distributor-type polemic against change”. But that was not what I gave. I did promise to post the presentation here on my blog – but for various reasons including the fact that it is significantly too long to work online – I didn’t. It’s been suggested to me that I might do this in slices. Like a publisher I need to learn to slice and dice my content. So here goes: Slice One.

To understand and adapt to change we must ask ourselves many questions – but remember – as Dr Seuss famously said “Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple”.

I should disclose that my professional life is currently engaged almost entirely with physical books and managing what is required to get them into the hands of the people who need & want them. You, Dear Reader, may well be far more engaged with the realities of new technology and digital delivery - but our commonality is likely to be the primacy of data. Product data is the engine of the business I manage, sales data is its lifeblood, and market data is something I spend a lot of time analysing for trends that indicate transformational change. It might also help if I pause and wind back for a moment to these words from one of my favourite poets, W H Auden in his poem Atlantis, which pretty much sum up how I felt on landing up in the book industry supply chain seven years ago.

Being set on the idea
Of getting to Atlantis,
You have discovered of course
Only the Ship of Fools is
Making the voyage this year,
As gales of abnormal force
Are predicted, and that you
Must therefore be ready to
Behave absurdly enough
To pass for one of The Boys,
At least appearing to love
Hard liquor, horseplay and noise.

I was very much a novice in a world dominated by enormous spaces, pallets, trucks, racking, process, standards and data (confession: I am one of the world’s least process-driven people). But looking in from an outsider perspective can make it much easier to identify change, and its impacts. So whilst I can occasionally pass for “one of the boys”, can hold my liquor and now know more about racking, fork lifts, carriers and pallets than I ever hoped I would – I have deliberately preserved my outsider way of looking at things, because it helps me to understand and manage change. As a result I have five key observations to make about change as it pertains to the book industry – and I’ll share the first two today

Observation 1: Change isn't new
Many people dislike change in their personal lives and in their professional lives. But the book industry has been changing ever since a scribe put quill to parchment (or stylus to tablet). The way in which the written word and ideas are packaged up has moved through scrolls to codex, mass manufacture of manuscripts, to print with movable type, cold type and hot type, There’s been artwork and paste-up, which is roughly the point on the time line where I entered the industry. I’m a dab hand with typeset text; a grid, scalpel and spray mount and I can even strip corrections into 4-colour separated film. Oh – and by the way – those are skills that are entirely redundant in the days of straight to plate technology. Change is very definitely not new.

Observation 2: Change isn’t always obvious
Whilst change isn’t new, it can sometimes be invisible. Publishers don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the changes that have taken place in how the books they publish get into the hands of readers. This is because the customer interface is largely seen as a back office or an outsourced task. Publishers like to think in terms of the “channels” that books are sold through – chain, wholesale, independent, library supply (if you are lucky). Only highly specialist publishers of very high-priced product think in terms of the individual customer.

The company I work for asks our client publishers to allow our customer-facing staff to attend their sales conferences – to improve product knowledge and build relationships. In the over 23 years I have been working with publishers in one way or another I have never once known a publisher ask to send any of their editorial or marketing staff to a customer service centre – to work on the phones, listening to customers and learning to understand the processes involved in getting books into customers’ hands. (If publishing office staff did so, they’d understand a whole lot more about the primacy of good bibliographic data.) In fact there seems to be a communal blindness to the enormous educative power of consumer interactions. (And I suggest you read HG Wells’ The Valley of the Blind for some insights on where communal blindness can lead.)

The fact that change can be invisible is how a whole revolution can have taken place in the supply chain without publishers noticing. For example, I am astonished to still be asked by some specialist non-trade publishers, “Who are the Book Depository?” (Note: I am not at all anti-Book Depository. They are a brilliant company – but their just-in-time-zero-stock-holding business model beautifully illustrates the way in which rapid data exchange, EDI and rising customer expectations have transformed the operations and fundamental premise of book distribution.)

So remember change is not new - and it is not always obvious - but that doesn't mean it's not important. Stand by for observations 3, 4 and possibly even 5 tomorrow.

On Experience

2012-01-17T14:29:00.000-08:00

Although I’ve been quiet here (and elsewhere in social media) over the past six months, I’ve been thinking a lot about experience. Specifically it seems to me that those of us who sell goods – be they books, white goods, clothes or anything else – need to learn to think far more closely about the user experience. Designers of products habitually think about usage – and those of us who retail or are involved in the selling and supply of goods need to pay closer attention to design. But in our case it isn’t just the design of the product – but the design of the experience of purchasing and then interacting with that product (or service) – that we need to engage with, and do better at. My friend and sometime sounding board Brian O’Leary highlights these issues in his presentations Context First and The Opportunity in Abundance.

Of course this thought extends to selling services. And a group of people who are very smart about this are those involved at the high end of the entertainment industry. Last Thursday evening I took my daughter Hannah to the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden to see Federico Bonelli and Sarah Lamb dance in Romeo and Juliet. The ROH is an object lesson in purveying “experience”. (Whether it is a commercially viable one is a separate issue – let’s leave public funding for the arts for another day).

From the moment of greeting at the front door by the liveried doormen to the moment the last applause has ended – what one has purchased is an experience. Arguably in Hannah’s case it starts before that in that one has also purchased weeks of delicious anticipation – which certainly adds to the sense of value-for-money. Visitors to the Opera House enter a world where one is willing to suspend day-to-day life and enter the fantasy. Not just the narrative fantasy of the evening’s performance (and last Thursday that was a indeed lyrical narrative, powerfully but delicately performed) but the fantasy and drama of the opulent setting and the interaction with other audience members and the abundant staff. It's a truly immersive experience.

Imagine my horror – therefore – to find that though we had some of the best seats in the amphitheatre (that’s the gods to you and me) – we were directly behind a young lawyer who spent both of the intervals dealing with email on her blackberry. Walking out at the end I overheard her saying to another of her party “I just couldn’t stop thinking about work”.

It could just be that ballet is not her bag. Although given the intensity of the colour, light, costumes, music and the sheer breathtaking lightness of Lamb as Juliet, it’s hard to know how. Or could it be that – useful as it is – being constantly on line, and constantly available to a world outside our immediate locale is hardening us to something that most enhances life – human experience: direct, immediate experience of the visible, tactile, audible world around us?

Something in me is deeply disquieted – and somewhere in what my mother calls my "back brain” there’s a gnawing consciousness that as a society and in our businesses we need to prize experience. Not to do so will be to collaborate in a gradual deadening to what is physically immediate. I can't help wondering if the start of such a slow death is somehow bound up in the current woes of Western economies – whether it be in the retail sector where people simply aren’t parting with money on the high street (except – ironically – for the experience of drinking coffee in Costa, Starbucks and Café Nero) or in other struggling manufacturing and commercial sectors.

And the fact that it is lurking there in the background makes me think that experience is going to be my recurring theme for 2012. Let's hope I can be more than a Jeremiah on the subject - but somehow link together my thoughts and observations to some mutual use.

Let out of the Supply Chain Silo

2011-06-29T14:04:00.000-07:00

After a few weeks confined to the Plymouth barracks (aside from a flying trip to BEA), I was finally out and about again this week. Peter Kilborn of Book Industry Communication (the UK equivalent of BISG) had asked me some time back if I would present at this year's BIC New Trends 2011 Summer Seminar, which took place on Tuesday afternoon at RIBA in London. Originally he asked for "something on the future of book distribution" to which a now ex-friend of mine remarked pithily "well that's going to be a short presentation, then". Fortunately my theme was later modulated to Book Distribution in a Changing World. Just as daunting, but a little less implied doom.

My presentation was on the long side - far too long for a blogpost - so I plan to break it into chunks for posting here next week. But before that I've come away from the seminar itself with some immediate thoughts to share. Some positive, and some scary.

On the positive side, I noted that four out of six presentations were given by women (Sarah Hilderly of EDItEUR, Ruth Jones of Ingram and Gabrielle Wallington of Waterstone's were the other three). When I first started attending BIC events ten years ago, then on behalf of the IPG, that ratio of women speakers on supply chain issues would just not have happened. I think it is indicative of the way in which supply chain issues increasingly interface with new technology and product development that the balance is shifting, and I take that as a positive sign because it suggests that the group is broadening its expertise-base (not just because of a vested interest in shifting the gender balance for the sake of it). In the meantime 14 out of 47 attendees were female - so there is still some way to go on that score.

On the scary side I found myself deeply depressed that almost all of the attendees were either from organisations like Nielsen, or were the designated "supply chain" specialists from the large corporate publishers and distributors. Good that they were in attendance. But bad, and worrying, that the work of BIC seems invisible or uninteresting to medium sized publishers - who in many ways are the constituency with the most to lose by not being informed about the way in which data standards and systems are changing the ways customers find and access books (print and e). It was as if the occupants of the supply chain silo had been sent out on an afternoon trip all on their own.

My presentation - of which more next week - looked at how publishers have outsourced their customer relationships and whilst that scores high on convenience - and indeed keeps people like me in jobs - it leaves them badly prepared for an economy in which direct consumer interactions and quasi-social commercial interactions are a growing trend. Data and standards underpin the modern physical and digital supply chains, and I am worried that the majority of medium-sized publishers are not engaged with the work of BIC and are therefore not sufficiently aware of the power and implications of data and work-flow standards.

Gabrielle Wallington of Waterstone's (on the day the bookseller formally left the HMV Group and passed into new ownership - so Gabrielle would be forgiven for having had other things on her mind) presented a pithy insight into price and availability codes. I can hear you yawning already. But as Gabrielle pointed out - there are no industry standards for the application of P&A codes - and that lack of standardisation leads to lots of confusion and ultimately confusion results in poor customer services. During a recession, and at a time when books have so much competition from other leisure and media choices, anything that results in poor customer service depresses sales and must be challenged.

Ruth Jones, Director of Ingram Publisher Services (formerly head of product development at the British Library), gave a disingenuously self-deprecating but most insightful and amusing commentary on the challenges of standardising digital workflows. Do I hear double yawning out there in the ether? If so, shame on you. Because effective, standardised digital workflows will (as Ruth said) help us out of the muddly quagmire that's currently impeding all of our progress. My key take-away from Ruth - and she will have to forgive me if I paraphrase incorrectly - was her quoting Faber's Stephen Page saying (during an airport lounge conversation when they were both delayed en route to a conference) "the metadata conversation is the new cover meeting". Which reminded me strongly of a phrase I overheard at last year's AAUP meeting: "Metadata is Marketing".

And that's why we should all care deeply about the work of BIC and BISG and take every opportunity to participate in it.

Post scripts:
1. BIC's Price and Availability Working Group holds its next meeting next week. Anyone interested in participating in this or any of the other work done by BIC can contact Peter Kilborn: peter@bic.org.uk
2. RIBA's HQ on Portland Place is in such an elegant and stylish building. Every time I enter its doors I wish publishing had its own equivalent.

Who wants what from whom..?

2011-05-28T13:02:00.000-07:00

When I dipped into Twitter this morning, a blog post (from @wayzgoose) entitled What Publishers Want from Book Bloggers, Reviewers & Readers piqued my sense of irony. It's a good piece of writing and like the best blog posts, brief (something I rarely manage), on point and reasonable. But what prompted my own wry response is that last night I was reading Robert B. Cohen's recent book Changing the Face of the Internet. (Note to American readers: don't be put off by the mention of Europe in the subtitle: the content is still relevant). Cohen is an economist with a particular interest in the impact of the Internet and virtual worlds. Those of us who take the Internet for granted, use it in our day-to-day personal and business lives, but don't think much about how it will continue to change, and (more to the point) will continue to change us - would do well to engage with this challenging read.

Cohen points to the fact that developments in online technologies are fundamentally altering the ways in which people organise themselves professionally and socially - and are increasingly drivers to both a different kind of service economy and new, less hierarchical corporate structures. Until last night I thought of software companies as product manufacturers. Now I think of them as service providers. Cohen shows how cloud computing has given rise to SaaS (Software as a Service). A change in the ways users access and utilise software that has restructured the business models of software companies. Just two of the many significant economic benefits arising are (i) that the cost base (capital investment in I.T. infrastructure) of start up businesses will be substantially reduced and (ii) work groups from across the globe can work simultaneously and collaboratively.

So what, you may ask, does this have to do with a post about what publishers want from bloggers, reviewers and readers? My thought is, simply, that it is a question that spotlights the tipping point publishers are heading for in a digital world that challenges our old workflows and self-images. A tipping point that is going to turn the question the other way around: what do bloggers, reviewers, readers (our audience) want from publishers? It seems to me that the answer - as with the software industry - is going to be delivered, and monetized, as service, not product.

Book Distribution: Broad Brush or Fine Detail? The Conclusions are Quite Different.

2011-03-24T18:49:00.000-07:00

This month Dominic Myers, MD of Waterstone's (the UK's last remaining national "bricks-and-mortar" book retail chain), has twice made startling public suggestions that over-capacity in book distribution space in the UK is contributing to inflated costs and thereby threatening the future of book retail. When a retailer suggests that the UK book industry as a whole is subsidising approximately £150 million-worth of excess supply chain space, and that this is squeezing everyone's margins, I would suggest that a closer examination of the problem suggests that increased discount to retailers is not the only place that the money could be better spent.

I should add that Myers did have the grace to add wryly that his comments might sound rich coming from the MD of a company that has recently added to the overall sum of UK distribution space through the implementation of its own 150,000 sq ft hub. But what alarms me about his statements is not their lack of tact in view of the hub's troubled gestation that still vexes many publishers. It is that Myers' observations contain a potentially dangerous half-truth. Modern book distribution is a macro-scale task underpinned by micro-scale detail. In such circumstances broad brush statements are potentially misleading.

I suspect that Mr Myers believes that there are too many books in too many sheds. And he has a point. It is indisputable that publishers world-wide frequently over-print, tying up too much cash in physical stock that occupies storage space that must be paid for. And even when overstocks are patently obvious to publishers, facing up to writing them down and pulping them can be a painfully slow process. But it concerns me that taken just at face value, what Mr Myers is saying might be grist to the mill for those who think that the supply chain is where we as an industry need to look in order to reduce costs. I wholeheartedly agree with Mr Myers that supply chain efficiency is a prerequisite for success. But it certainly does not follow that distribution is therefore a place that publishers should be looking for savings, or retailers should be pointing to as a place where more margin can be eked out of net revenues that are not increasing in line with volume sales or inflation.

At the recent IPG conference near Oxford, Myers said that he estimated that the UK book market has approximately 3.7 million square feet of distribution space at an average of £50 per sq ft. Statistics he then repeated at the BA's Academic and Professional Booksellers' Conference. Having recently been involved in NBNi's move to modern warehouse premises (the company I work for made a three-quarter of a million pound investment in more efficient warehousing facilities last year), £50 psf pa seems to me to be an astonishingly high estimate unless Myers was aggregating all book industry supply space: warehouse; pick/pack space, wholesale, retailers' hubs plus expensive high-street retail space. All of this is in one sense or another distribution space - but each category with significantly different overheads and purposes, and lumping these together is not necessarily illuminating.

It's worth noting that one of the ironies of the modern supply chain is that the requirement for just-in-time supply of all product lines, including deep back list, now demanded as a condition of supply by online resellers and (dare I say it) bricks and mortar retailers' own distribution hubs requires (if anything) more distribution space and less storage space. Increasing amounts of slow-moving product lines need to be kept available for instant pick rather than retrievable (more slowly) from bulk storage - and are taking up valuable picking locations that require a fast stock turn to be efficiently profitable. (Yes, in the long-term the answer to that could be print-on-demand - but for high-quality colour books with high production values, cost-effective technology to make this happen just isn't there yet.)

Plus, we should remember that a generation ago the major costs of the supply chain were rent and manpower. Nowadays there is a third major cost-component to efficient supply: I.T. investment. Constant I.T. investment is required in order to interface with customers. The book buying experience - whether it happens online or in-store is underpinned by millions of data messages across the web, be they price and availability data from PubEasy or BookNet; EDI ordering of stock by large customers through their own systems; payment information through Batch; individual orders placed on publishers' own web sites; title data hoovered up from myriad sources by Amazon; daily stock feeds sent to online retailers; EPoS statistics; or even the tentative experiments with RFID currently being made by some publishers and retailers in a few territories. The technology required to make all of this happen is costly and requires constant upgrading. And the people who facilitate such technologies command considerably higher remuneration than the labour force of an old-fashioned warehouse. All of this cost is lumped by our industry under the generic heading of "distribution".

Nor should it be forgotten that what we traditionally think of as "distribution" includes customer services. Modern customers - be they the buyers employed by book trade intermediaries - or individuals sourcing direct from publishers (and there are a growing numbers of publishers for whom off-trade and direct-to-consumer supply are increasingly important) - are extremely demanding. Physical books require a top-class customer service experience paving their complicated path from the printer into the hands of the consumer. With increased competition from non-traditional media and gaming as well as e-books, customer service has never been a more important element of book distribution provision than it is now.

When thinking about where we can save money, increase margins and leverage discount, we need to remember that modern book distribution is about more than sheds. It is about data excellence, service excellence and the end consumer.

Useful links
The Bookseller's report on the IPG conference
The Bookseller's report on the APS conference

Please add your comments & observations below. I'm interested in your opinions!

A Big If: Key Take-aways from the Academic & Professional Booksellers Group Conference 2011

2011-03-17T17:14:00.000-07:00

As it's book industry conference season here in the UK, here's another quick overview. I'm just home from the academic & professional bookseller's group conference where (tellingly) I was a lone tweeter. (You can find my somewhat patchy summary at #apsba2011). This conference is renowned for it's collaborative and collegiate atmosphere. As one of my new colleagues remarked - it's like being the new girl at a school where everyone else has been there for several terms - thereby pointing out that what is one of the meeting's strengths is also its Achilles heel.

You know you're at an academic booksellers conference when the session chairman remarks that one of the slides gave her a "Proustian rush". However the pervading bonhomie was dispersed in an instant this morning by an address from Waterstone's MD Dominic Myers. In half-an-hour he brought the room to a total - and eloquent - silence. Myers warned of a tipping point for academic books on the high street, and for the second time in two weeks (cf. the IPG Conference) pointed to over-capacity in the supply chain as an area of huge wastage in our industry. He also called for academic books to be supplied to stores on consignment if they are to be stocked outside of peak selling season. There are probably several full-length future posts in unpicking the implications what Myers had to say, so I'll save that for when I have time to think them through properly.

So here in the meantime are my ten key take-aways, which include some unexpected (to me anyway) nuggets:

1. Whilst cuts in government higher education funding coupled with escalating student fees/loans are a very serious concern - it is possible that they present an opportunity. Students will have less face-to-face lecture and tutor time - and therefore to get their grades they'll need to access and use other learning resources (e.g. books!).

2. We talk about today's students being "digital natives". Based on the student panel interviewed, I'd say that we aren't there yet. Today's 14 -year-olds are digital natives. But today's students in higher ed still show a marked preference for the print book. One even made a call for "bigger margins" for her notes. (Whereupon one wag in the room quipped that we all need bigger margins).

3. We all mean different things by "e-book". To students"e-book" means anything available digitally whether it is sourced via a publisher, library or from any one of a variety of free online sources (or their peers' memory sticks).

4. Students are not interested in dedicated e-readers. They already have an e-reader. It's called their laptop. Academic publishers do not need to wait for an e-reader tipping point to deliver electronic materials.

5. Higher Education is diverging between vocational courses and academic courses, and the resource requirements of the two different types of course are also diverging. (The more academic the course, the more likely the student still to engage in immersive reading).

6. Students aren't interested in e-books that don't add value through enhancements (video, sound, graphics, interactive test modules). Flat reproductions of the printed text don't cut the mustard.

7. Academics are going to come under greater scrutiny as their students become increasingly aware of their status as customers of the institution.

8. Changing pressures on academics and institutions mean that institutions are going to become more interested in getting involved with publishers at a product development stage.

9. Academics are under pressure about how they spend their time, and their free contributions to the publishing industry (peer review) are going to come under closer scrutiny.

10. In my view the other side of (9) is that academics need to acknowledge the extent to which publishing props up the structure of academic career progression and tenure (where tenure still exists). Publishers and institutions need to engage in a dialogue about what the impact of financial pressures upon their fundamental symbiosis is going to be. I don't hear that discussion happening yet.

So I end today reflecting that we live in interesting times. But that publishers are still highly relevant to the academic and student community, and will become more so if they can get their delivery channels, customer services and business models right. Which could be a very big if.

Please feel free to add comments below
Permission to reproduce with full attribution

IPG Conference 2011: (Social Networking) Butterflies Emerge from their Cocoons

2011-03-14T16:34:00.000-07:00

South by Southwest may be dominating the American creative psyche at present, but on a somewhat different scale over here in the UK last week's IPG conference near Chipping Norton was the biggest and most vibrant to date. It was a meeting of startling juxtapositions: olde worlde Cotswold charm on the approaching back roads to a stunning modern venue. And in an ironic illustration of the pitfalls of misalignment between technology and content, top quality sessions on social media delivered in a state-of-the-art lecture theatre where a near total lack of Internet connection and blocked mobile phone signals were reducing the twitterati to frustration (and good old analogue pen and paper).

This was my 12th IPG conference and the organization has blossomed in the time since my first event at The Royal Hotel, York in 1999, when as the organization's new "Secretary", I was nervously navigating the first of my six annual conferences at the helm. Over the twelve years since then not only has the IPG changed, but the landscape of publishing and bookselling has irreversibly altered. (To say seismically altered would be disrespectful of those caught up with the horrific natural disaster currently unfolding in Japan, and which puts all of our preoccupations into perspective.)

Back then, independent publishers and the IPG were usually the butt of industry jokes and looked down upon by their corporate cousins. Horace Bent made free on the last page of The Bookseller with pithy observations about the average age of IPG members being older than the Deity. Having a panel of major book retailers to speak at the conference would have been an impossibility, and no-one had the slightest inkling of what online sales were going to do to the market. In 1999, Beverley Hodson, then in charge of WHS, delivered the keynote in which she enjoined the audience to bear with WHS as they were dealing with the legacy of a large, outdated organisation, by which she meant their arcane warehouse. I wonder how long before a Waterstone's CEO describes the Hub as a legacy issue. Later the same day, Michael Schmidt, MD of Carcanet told the audience that he took a "forestry ecology approach" to publishing, Paul Clifford of Lion Hudson talked about collaborating with other independent publishers on seasonal (Easter) in-store promotions and Bob Rooney of T&F US made some pithy (and colourful) observations about the book industry's approach to Customer Services.

Interesting to note that what the publishers were saying in 1999 (about niches, markets and customers) has maintained more currency than the retailer's contribution. How moribund and Canute-like some (but not all) modern retailers seem in contrast to today's independent publishers. And how ironic that some of the very qualities that made independent publishers so unfashionable in 1999 are those that are enabling them to emerge as victors in 2011.

IPG publishers are almost all specialist in one way of another. Most have a level of detailed customer and market knowledge unimaginable to their corporate competitors. Knowledge they own and don't need to buy from Nielsen. In an era of Twitter and other social media, publishing to an audience you know by name is an enviable position. Independent publishers are engaging with their customers online in ways the corporates cannot emulate, because these indies are already deeply integrated in the dialogue and community of their specialist markets. They are able to use social media to share and engage and not simply to broadcast. Inspired tweeting from a different period of history each week by a member of the Osprey team, or the way in which children's publisher @nosycrow - herself a refugee from corporate life - engages with parents online could not be a greater contrast to excruciating Publicity Dept tweeting from some of the corporates. (Perhaps the IPG should organise the equivalent of the annual "bad sex" award for the crassest book tweeting.)

Last week's conference was absolutely remarkable for the way in which an atmosphere of excitement and optimism pervaded the group. Given fears about inflation and the prospect of a double-dip recession there can't be many industry groups that are genuinely so excited about what the future has to offer, and how new technologies are going to help them achieve their aims. Over in the US, Mike Shatzkin has been talking for a while now about the emergence of vertical markets as a response to changing technologies. IPG publishers provide some excellent examples of the points he is making.

Useful links:
The IPG
Mike Shatzkin's blog
@nosycrow
Osprey Blogs

Feel free to add comments below.

Permission to quote with full attribution.

Monetizing the Book Buying Experience

2011-03-01T14:50:00.000-08:00

There's been a lot of media attention focused on bricks and mortar booksellers recently. Hardly surprising given the storms rocking high streets the world over. We're only two months into 2011 and already this year in the US Borders has gone into Chapter 11 (its British cousin having failed some time back); Waterstones/HMV in the UK is closing stores and laying off head office staff; British Bookshops & Stationers (the chain) is in administration, and in Australia RedGroup Retail has gone to the wall owing over $44million Australian dollars.

On 21 February, online journalism pioneer Robert Niles blogged on "imagining the 21st Century's Digital Bookstore". The publishing industry's big mistake, according to Niles, has been to view print and digital as two separate businesses. He goes on to envisage bookstores as chill-out zones and social spaces where customers can engage with digital and print product, experience live narrative, and pay for it all on their credit cards. Monday's Guardian carried an interesting piece by Robert McCrum urging authors to engage in social media (or be left high and dry by their audience). McCrum dryly observed that the days when a book being available in bookstores on a predetermined and well-advertised publication day was enough to guarantee sales seem "as remote as the Regency". The same day's New York Times contained an article by Stephanie Clifford and Julie Bosman highlighting the growing trend for publishers to work with non-traditional high street retailers to boost sales, citing Anthropologie, Target and Cracker Barrel as examples of stores upping the ante when it comes to their book offering. In the meantime back in the UK the online Bookseller reported on the Big Green Bookshop's appeal for 1,000 customers as a bid to ensure their survival (in a campaign reminiscent of Salt Publishing's 2009 Just One Book).

All of these pieces are fascinating. But none of them interrogate consumer preferences. Are bookshops struggling because people's buying habits have changed so much that they prefer to buy books online, or because the prices offered online are lower?

The reality, I suspect, is a mixture of the two. I'm usually very wary of using myself as a research sample - those of us who are closely connected with the book industry have a very different relationship with books as desirable objects and sources of pleasure than most other potential customers. However something we all know - whether we work in the industry or not - is that the experience of buying books online is totally different to browsing in a physical book store. Online purchases tend to be prompted by need (a textbook or professional reference book), desire (a favourite author) or recommendation (for example from Amazon's recommendations, or from other online prompts such as recommendations on Twitter). These are all valid and effective pulls and pushes towards books. But they do not replicate the experience of spending an hour in a well stocked bookshop. I'm fortunate enough to live near to the Ely Topping & Co bookstore where I invariably buy books I had no idea I wanted until I encountered them there. I may not have previously known about the books I purchase in Topping - but after the fact I am invariably glad to have found them.

Of course not everyone behaves on impulse, and consumers do not have an obligation to buy in store. Those from outside the book industry do not necessarily feel a responsibility to support their local shop if the prices there are higher than online. In a recession customers are much more likely to browse, and then go home an buy online to save money. The key questions therefore are how else can physical bookstores monetize what they offer? And, should publishers be much more proactive in supporting them through increased discount and other measures?

There are three elephants in the room here. Namely order turnaround time, discounts and returns. Publishers are usually alert to returns & discount. It is well known that when it comes to returns, bricks and mortar booksellers feel that they deserve equal discounts to those enjoyed by the online retailers whilst also maintaining that in order to offer range, they must have the right to return. What this ignores is that although the online retailers theoretically have the right to return, they almost never exercise it. Returns from online resellers run at less than 1% of invoice value. From the high street it is usually well in excess of 10% and often very very much higher. Returns are a drain on publishers' resources. Not just in terms of the cost of the book which is often unsaleable - but in terms of the cost of administration.

That's the easy bit. What many don't add into the balance is the fact that when it comes to order turnaround, it is the online booksellers placing far greater pressures - and therefore cost burdens - onto the supply chain. Online retailers often require individually tailored data feeds (and in the case of Amazon, the EDI protocol they use is not industry standard). Books from a range of deep backlist must be constantly available for instant supply, which has big allocation of pick-space implications for distribution. Whereas publishers often supply in bulk, or at least several units per isbn to the bricks and mortar trade, many online retailers have pushed just-in-time-supply to its very limits by eliminating all stock holdings. All orders are responses to their customer orders and must be supplied within a very tight time frame for the online retailer to be competitive. Thus savvy online booksellers are pushing the logistical costs of their business models onto their suppliers. There's nothing inherently wrong with this. What is worrying is that many publishers are not alert to it and therefore do not factor these costs into their decisions about discount.

For publishers to make informed and sound choices about whether or not they are prepared to stand by and watch high street bookshops continue to close at such an alarming rate they need to understand that while online retailers are saving them money on returns, they are pushing up the cost of supply. Without such a recognition the danger is that bookshops will continue to close at a frightening pace, and publishers' end consumers will be denied the opportunity to make purchasing decisions based on the complex emotional, psychological and visceral mixture that makes up the bookshop browsing experience. Without this experience and opportunity available, publishers may find themselves driven towards rising supply costs and a much narrower range of products.

Useful links:
Robert McCrum in the Guardian
Clifford and Julie Bosman in the NYT
Robert Niles' Blog on reimagining bookstores
The Bookseller on The Big Green Bookshop

Thanks as always to @jafurtado for useful feeds & links via Twitter

And if you have never been to a branch of Topping & Co (Bath and Ely) - go visit - you won't be disappointed...

Reviewing Publishing as a Profession

2011-02-21T14:37:00.000-08:00

Rachel Maund at Marketability recently gave me the opportunity to review Richard Balkwill and Gill Davies new book, The Professionals' Guide to Publishing. It was a useful opportunity to think about the state of the book publishing industry and where we're going.

As with all good titles, the semantics of this one give a heavy hint at the strength of the book: “The Professionals’ Guide…” If I wondered initially why the word “professionals’” was appropriate for a book clearly aimed at those considering a career in publishing (and therefore not yet professionals) it quickly became clear that is a strategic choice. What Davies and Balkwill do with consistent excellence throughout is underline the fact that publishing is a business, and working in the industry requires a firm grasp of a range of professional disciplines. In doing so, it does of course reveal that a career in publishing has not always been thus. Moreover it perhaps unconsciously hints at a potential profound irony; that publishing has finally got a grasp of itself as a profession at just the point that its business model and therefore its structures are on the verge of being blown apart by the digital age.

Chapters focusing on the various major professional roles (Commissioning, Marketing, Sales, Production) give clear insights into the demands of each discipline, and the personality types well-suited to them. These key “discipline” chapters are preceded by looser, more discursive introductory sections that contextualise the whole. All chapters are written in a style that cleverly blends narrative with fact, and which makes some quite complex concepts a remarkably easy read. Worked examples of P&Ls and clear case studies continually move the emphasis from theory to actual. Moreover those who don’t know the authors personally or professionally would be challenged to work out who wrote what – indicative of a highly successful collaboration.

As a denizen of the supply chain, I was frustrated to find sales, distribution and the supply chain lumped together. For me this echoes one of the common misconceptions of our industry – which is that these back office functions are not worthy of close scrutiny. It is clear from their discussion of returns that the authors understand that the publisher’s customer is not necessarily the ultimate consumer. Therefore it is disappointing that there was no acknowledgement that the customer services department (usually outsourced to the distributor) is a key interface with the customer. That distributors provide warehousing is an axiom. That they are in daily contact with customers should be of critical concern to publishers in an age where understanding the consumer is key to survival. I would also have liked more reference in this section and elsewhere to the growth of online resellers – of which Amazon although dominant is far from the only one. Online sales of print books are a key force for change in the supply chain.

Similarly I felt that production was – in a manner perhaps characteristic of our industry – unfairly shunted to end of the chapters on the various publishing disciplines. Just as the supply chain is where the changing relationship between publisher and consumer is thrown into sharp focus, it is production that it bearing the brunt of the challenges inherent in facilitating a whole range of potential products – not just printed books. Buried on page 183 comes the phrase “A whole new approach is now needed because the end product is no longer the printed book…” Yes, this is also acknowledged in the chapter on commissioning and elsewhere– but its impact is really felt in production departments. The chapter concludes “one thing you should draw from this chapter is the way that production has moved from being a back-office service department to a front office partner in product development”. What it doesn’t and perhaps should say is that digital savvy innovators and entrepreneurial spirits are badly needed in production. Davies and Balkwill are correct to say that production has come out of its silo in recent years – but what they don’t acknowledge is that competing industries: gaming; media; digital media; etc. are increasingly dominated by those with technical expertise (Google – one of the most successful businesses on the planet – is run by software engineers). Publishing has to grasp this and put production and its people on at least an equal status with commissioning and editors. Maybe in the second edition of this book (and I have no doubt there will be one) production will come before commissioning. Or then again by then it may be impossible to separate the two.

But these two criticisms are essentially marginal notes on a book that does precisely what it sets out to do with eloquence, charm and detail. The section on law re-enforces the book’s underlying ethos that publishing is a serious professional matter, and I was glad to see a glossary (there’s a whole other book in the making). It’s a shame it was not written ten years ago when publishing as a course at undergraduate and post-graduate level began to gain ground. It should certainly be required reading for anyone entering the industry or thinking of doing so. Moreover it would be a useful background read for anyone employed in the many service industries associated with publishing. There’s no substitute for a thorough understanding of the pressures on one’s clients – and this book certainly provides that. Which is why I shall be making copies available to many of the people working in our business who are in day-to-day contact with publishers and customers.

It is because of its thoroughness that this is a book that both clarifies the construction of the “ship” that is today’s publishing industry and the professional ranks aboard, and in doing so reveals the fact that we are on a voyage through a thickening sea of icebergs. I hope – for all our sakes – that the brightest and the best of the next generation don’t infer from this that we’re already holed below the water-line.

Technology, Change & Customers

2010-10-05T14:18:00.000-07:00

(or) Back to the Future

Here's the text of my presentation at today's O'Reilly Tools of Change conference in Frankfurt...

Last week Publishing Perspectives billed me as “the odd woman out” at this conference – in that my concerns – and what I will be focussing on today – are some of the less tangible aspects of the impacts of technologies. There’s a tendency for us to focus on the “tools” and think much less about the “change” and even less about how our existing customers and our existing employees are going to experience that change – and for the next 45 minutes at least, I’d like to reverse that trend.

For clarity – and to dispel the sense that I might be a Luddite imposter here – I’m a daily user of new technologies; the happy owner of blackberry, iPhone and iPad. And I can’t imagine a working life without technological tools developed over the past two decades. For a humanities graduate I spend an astonishingly large portion of my life analysing data mined out of the Oracle database that is the fundamental infrastructure for the business I currently work in.

Time and clarity are of the essence this morning – so here’s an overview of what I’m going to be looking at.

Context:
Why I’m here
Tools of Change (what do we mean?)
Thoughts about Change (and how it’s funded) mixed with a Bit of Industry History

Keywords:
In this presentation you’ll encounter some key words. Be alert to them.
Experience
Customer
Competition

Examples:
Towards the end I’ll be taking some of the more general points I have been making and illustrating how they inform relationships with customers, using some of these businesses as examples.

Conclusions:
(or) Things you really need to think about to make good decisions

Just a final introductory point – a lot of what I say today is informed by my experience at NBNi & Rowman & Littlefield – but for clarity the opinions I am expressing are my own and not necessarily those of the business.

Why I’m Here (in the present rather than the existential sense)
So if I’m not a technologist – why am I up here in front of you at a meeting that has become associated with cutting-edge technologies (or at least what passes in publishing as cutting-edge, even if it isn’t always news out in the wider world)?
Well, there two are primary reasons…

Firstly, for the past six years I have worked in distribution. My current working life is engaged with service provision – to publishers and to their customers – for supply of print books (and some ebooks and software products). Remember – although it may not be the case down the line from now – today, cash in return for print books is still the primary revenue source for the vast majority of publishers.

Most people in publishing – and quite a few in bookselling – have traditionally seen the supply chain as the ultimate in boredom – and certainly not the place for bright young media types in search of a glittering career. Yet today it is the place to get a grandstand view of change as it is embodied in our customer interactions, revenue streams, business models and profit margins.

And secondly, I have spent my whole professional life engaging with change. It is very tempting for us to think that change is new - but it isn’t. I’ve been in this industry for more than 23 years in five different roles, and every one of them has been in a business coming to terms with the need to change. It there is anything I know a little about – it is change and how it affects businesses.

Twenty-two years ago, I was a partner in the family business, Chapman Bounford & Associates (later bounford.com). In the months before I became involved, the Chapman from that partnership – the wonderful airbrush illustrator, Bob Chapman, died very suddenly. In the following months my (then) husband, Trevor Bounford, was struggling to rebuild a business based around his own somewhat different cartographic, information design and editorial project management skills. Trevor had the foresight to spend a substantial portion of the business’s life insurance payout for Bob on Apple Macs and software (at eye-watering expense compared to present costs). It was an inspired move, because it catapulted us to the forefront of technological change in the illustrated reference field in London. Within a few months we became the first graphic design studio in London to draw maps on the Mac and have them output to 4-colour separated film. (But remember, this step-change was funded by an unexpected cash injection to the business, and I am going to return to cash to fund change later. Though I won’t be advocating a premature demise for one of your business partners as a method for raising that cash.)

Around the same time we became the last studio to draw the London Underground map by hand. Trevor is the man responsible for putting the bend in the Central Line in a major, time-consuming and somewhat traumatic re-design of the map. Yet a mere year after that redesign, the tube map had been digitised and from then on could be continuously modified and updated. (Which is a poetic irony given that Beck’s inspiration for the original was a circuit board diagram).

Then, in the late 1990s, I became Executive Director of the Independent Publishers Guild. I had the luck to be at the organisational heart of that trade body during a time of enormous change. During my tenure, the UK book industry was first learning how to take advantage of Print-on-Demand technologies to keep backlist in print, and to control cash – and at the same time many of us first started worrying about eBooks.
Most significantly for our purposes today - the organisation of the IPG itself was literally transformed by our specifying and implementing a new database that could act as the administrative, commercial and communications engine for the organisation. With one fundamental technological shift, the executive was liberated from the need to keep multiple address lists for different purposes (finance, events billing, membership subscriptions, publications, mailing labels and so on). And in doing so, we finally had time to engage with the very real issues facing the industry – rather than merely administrating a handful of annual get-togethers. Whenever I am anxious about forthcoming technological change, I think back to the enormous benefits we reaped grasping and deploying a new technology at the IPG.

With this perspective, I think that although an instinctive response to the prospect of rapid migration to digital delivery channels can be alarm, we should not forget that publishing and bookselling have always had a symbiotic relationship with technology. (I live in a village called “Caxton” – which is the English equivalent of living in a German village called “Gutenberg” – so I am reminded of this on a daily basis).

But there is a difference between the technological innovation that was movable type for the printing press and today’s innovations. When publishing as a potentially viable business venture first exploded in the West as a result of Gutenberg, Caxton et al, it was absolutely clear how the printer/publisher was going to monetize their investment and activities to receive a satisfactory ROI. Usually the printer and the publisher were one and the same person. With that new technology one copy was turned to multiple copies, quickly, and at a price the market was prepared to bear, as they were a fraction of the price of copies produced in scriptoria. There was a time-rich market hungry for printed entertainment and information product and with no alternative options for accessing content, and few distractions from that content. Which was a price-to-market revolution that was mirrored in a small way centuries later with the arrival of mass-market paperbacks).

In our diverse electronic world with so much competition for attention, our future revenue streams are much less obvious and far more fragmented. And given that I.T. investment is so incredibly expensive, I don’t really buy the argument that eBooks are cheaper to produce than pBooks. If you are thinking just in terms of unit production costs – yes – possibly. But the I.T. and time investment required to morph a print publishing business to an e-publishing business is certain to be a major expense in terms of the initial financial and human-resource investment (and change in human resource deployment is always accompanied by incalculable quantities of management pain and therefore management time).

We may be able to outsource file conversion to the developing world – but the beating hearts of our publishing businesses are in the minds and creativity of our editors and authors. Unless we secure substantial ongoing revenue streams from what that heart pumps out - it will suffer a terminal cardiac arrest.

The costs of changing our technologies and retraining people or hiring in new skills are huge – and often not factored into our notions of cost. For decades – if not right back to Gutenberg – the publishing industry has been hopelessly wedded to the notion of multiples of unit cost as the primary method of determining future profit. (You only have to come into our warehouse and look at the pallets on the very top racks of our hi-bay to grasp the pitfalls of that approach.)

Earlier this morning Andrew Savikas of O’Reilly shared some information about the volume of ebooks being sold from their web site. It’s useful for us to note that the sales Andrew talked about take place in the context of consumers accessing the O’Reilly brand direct from the corporate web site(and not purchasing via resellers). It is time for us to think less about unit margin and much more about our overall brand value.

Given that both development costs and any future revenue streams remain uncertain, the financial and human investment required for us to change in response to new content delivery channels is quite some commitment to make. We’re back to the old cliché that “if I want to go there, I wouldn’t necessarily start from here”.

Back in the days of Gutenberg & Caxton printers & publishers were the technological innovators. In the twenty-first century the technological innovators are not publishers. They are venture-capital backed organisations working on totally different risk/reward cycle to the traditional publishing industry – be they the giants like Amazon, or student start-ups that go on to change the ways in which people communicate across the globe.

Currently I work in a book industry supply chain business owned by The Rowman and Littlefield Publishing Group - an international academic publisher. We are constantly adapting and developing our systems in order to keep pace with change in the way books are being published by publishers and bought and “experienced” by customers. By far our most demanding customers are the Internet resellers who have much more exacting data requirements than bricks and mortar booksellers – and next to them in term of service expectations come individuals purchasing books direct. I realised after joining NBNi that I was over 18 years into a career in publishing at a senior level before I did a job that brought me into any sort of proximity with the “customer”. Over the same time-frame I am prepared to bet that there are many in publishing of a similar age, enjoying successful careers - who have had even less contact with or concept of their customer.

Tools of Change

So – bearing in mind that my career history demonstrates that neither technology nor change are exactly new to our industry – I’d like to take a brief look at the title of this meeting – which in itself has become a powerful brand – “Tools of Change”.

Change
Starting with “change”, which the OED defines firstly as “the act or fact of changing” – which I like because it carries with it the notion that change is often an ongoing or continuous process. It’s unfortunate that many of us think of the second definition – which is “exchange” – as in changing merchandise or currency or to change one’s clothes. A quick transaction or transition from one state to another – which when complete requires no more thought.

I was discussing the problem of the word “change” with a prolific author of ethics and theology texts – asking if he could think of a word for change that was freighted with an implication of a continuous activity. He couldn’t. However he could point me to a Latin tag that’s particularly appropriate given that we are here in Germany.

Anyone who happens to be familiar with Calvinist doctrine will know this tag:
“Ecclesia reformata semper reformanda est” - which translates as: “The reformed Church must go on being reformed”. The point being that change doesn’t just happen once. To be worth anything it must be continuous.

The other thing to say about change – particularly when it comes to changing an existing business is that it is a human process that requires both vision and leadership. I’ve had first hand experience this year of how difficult change can be to effect and how scared individuals can be that it is going to annihilate their jobs. And of course the more scared and negative they are – the more likely that outcome becomes.

Change need leaders, generals and troops – and even then, victory is not assured.

Tool
As for “tool” – the OED provides “any instrument of manual operation; a mechanical implement”. (It is arguable that a traditional print book is a tool – in that it is a mechanism for conveying printed words.)

Slightly more usefully the OED’s second definition is “to work or shape with a tool” – this definition comes closer to a more continuous process, which again is a more useful notion for our purposes.

So, why am I knocking holes into the title of our conference and risking offence to our hosts from O’Reilly and the Frankfurt Book Fair? Because I think that we have to adjust our focus a little and stop thinking that we will find magical techniques and technologies that are going to facilitate change and then we can all settle back down into nicely profitable business routines. We tend to think of change as pivoting around moments of crisis – not an ongoing process.

The last time I spoke to this issue was in June at the American Association of University Presses conference at Salt Lake City where my great friend and client Richard Brown - Director of Georgetown University Press said “This is not a crisis but a transition, a perpetual transition that will become, in time, as natural as the air we breathe.” Richard could just as easily have quoted the Calvinist tag “Ecclesia reformata semper reformanda est!” (Except as the Georgetown University was established by Jesuits – it would be an unlikely choice of phrase.)

Thoughts about Funding Change Mixed with A Dash of Industry History
At the same meeting in Salt Lake City, Joseph Esposito, CEO of giantchair.com proposed a five-stage model of the development of university press publishing – with University Presses currently in stage 3. I’d urge anyone thinking about the commercial structure of publishing to go to the AAUP website and download and read his presentation. I don’t fully agree with all of it – and I am not at all sure he is right about the texture and structure of stages 4 & 5. However – like all of the most useful presentations, Esposito’s session crystallised for me in a moment something that I had gradually been realising over a long time – but had not ever articulated to myself. And that is that the publishing industry is preparing for its future while being funded by its past, unlike new media and technology companies – which are preparing for the future at the same time as being funded by that future – in the form of Venture Capital and other start-up funding mechanisms.

(As an aside – you may be asking yourselves when I am quoting events at the AAUP meeting – when the Unversity Press sector is often considered to be one of the less commercial sectors – supported as it often is by contributions to operating cost from the parent university. And the answer is that because of budget cuts many of these presses are now having to sink or swim on their own – at the same time as facing huge pressure from librarians in particular to provide content electronically on a pay-per-use basis. These presses are being squeezed at both ends, and they have to reshape themselves fast).

Tech and social media companies spend vast portions of their funds on R&D. For centuries the only R&D costs that the publishing industry has had to bear are author advances and in the case of illustrated publishing – artwork. I’d suggest that one of the reasons why the Wylie agency decision on eBook rights caused such a furore (albeit something of a furore in a teacup earlier in the year) is that it went straight to the heart of an issue we aren’t talking about. Are royalties sustainable for publishers needing to invest in new content delivery methods?

Esposito’s thesis that the industry is currently in stage 3 of a 5-stage progression captures the essence of the Gordian knot that most publishers are currently faced with. Our current revenue streams come from old technologies and old financial models and systems – yet we need to fund new technologies and new financial models – for which we currently have few defined supply chain systems (and I’m using supply chain in the broad sense of getting a product or service to the consumer here). Plus there’s the complication that we have little evidence that these delivery methods can be financially self-supporting in terms of profit, cash management or subsidiary revenue streams.

In our headlong rush to be able to supply eBooks, many publishers have failed to think about how fundamentally different the new world is. Replicating print books as eBooks and disseminating them through intermediaries as lots of us are currently doing is an important first step. Indeed the company I work for is engaged in facilitating this process for publishers – because the publishers we work with are asking us for this service.

However on a purely personal level I have some concerns about the audit-“ability” of eBooks supplied to the customer by resellers. The business model in play here is fundamentally the same as that of the Amazon Advantage programme – where stock is supplied on consignment and paid for in retrospect. The eBook reselling model works in very much the same way, with the HUGE exception that the electronic file is obtained from the eBook aggregator once and once only. We are placing huge levels of trust in both the moral compass and – more importantly – the robustness of the distribution, recording and reporting technologies used by eBook resellers. I work in the supply chain and I have to report back to my clients daily about their sales. And I know from experience that reporting systems don’t always do what you think you have instructed your I.T. people tell them to do. In the word of print books we have the checks and balances of physical stock movements to audit our reporting. I am unsure what the checks and balances in the eBook reselling world are.

I think that it is for this reason that in a Twitter exchange (under the #followreader hash tag) earlier this year, Tim Spadling, founder of LibraryThing, described publishers’ current approaches to eBooks as publishers selling their inheritance for a mess of potage.

But in case you think I am being hopelessly negative about eBooks I am not at all. I buy them and occasionally read them (in roughly the same sort of proportion as the percentage of print books I buy and then actually manage the time to read). My biggest reservation about the notion of eBook reselling as it is currently constructed in our industry is that it misses the whole point that eBooks are NOT print books and present a completely different range of opportunities to the publisher – most significantly for interaction and engagement with the customer. A possibility that is entirely lost under the eBook reselling model. (And this is why I think eBook reselling is just a first – and temporary – step for many publishers.) And in the last few minutes I’ll be looking at some examples of how publishers are exploiting these possibilities.

But back to my point. Ongoing change presents us with real problems. Doing what is sensible for our business in the “here and now” is not necessarily what prepares it best for the “tomorrow and beyond”. Indeed doing what seems logically right today can be exactly the opposite of what is good for the long-term.

A great example of this conundrum lies in the way in which the Publisher-Customer dynamic altered during the twentieth century (and which is also key to the problems we are facing today and why people like you and me come to meetings like this in search of answers.) The C20 began with most publishing enterprises as independent entities, frequently with offices over their own shops – shops that may or may not have contained their own printing press in the back room. Publishers were commissioners, editors, producers, and retailers. Customers obtained books by visiting the shop or by ordering through the mail, which was the only option for the transfer of goods and correspondence in the marketplace. The closest example I can think of today is the Persephone Bookshop on Lamb’s Conduit Street in London. They don’t print there, but Nicola and her team do everything else from commission to wrap and pack. And I think we’re all agreed that it’s not a model that could become universal in a digital age. In fact the reason that it works today is because it is so individual.

As the twentieth century progressed, our industry (along with many others) began to consolidate. Smaller presses were bought by larger presses – grandparents of the major international conglomerates we are now familiar with, and instead of multiple offices over shops, we began to see the establishment of warehouses – and the beginning of a distancing between customer and publisher – as independent bookselling took off. (Bookshops had previously existed in the university cities – but gradually they were established in most sizeable market towns). These bookshops were supplied by the publishers’ central warehouse, while smaller publishers continued to supply direct.

Gradually the larger publishers – sensing an opportunity to defray their costs – began distributing for smaller publishers. Direct contact with the customer was all but lost by the vast majority (by volume) of publishers for any purpose other than “selling” and discount negotiations. The service of providing the book – and making the experience of obtaining the book as pleasant an experience as possible was entirely outsourced and largely forgotten about. In many larger companies the distance between a commissioning editor and the warehouse, supply chain and customer became so great that you needed the metaphorical equivalent of several visas and a passport to traverse it.

As the pace of consolidation and outsourcing accelerated in the last decades of the century we ended up with a situation where the last thing many publishers wanted was contact with end users, the only time they ever thought about the supply chain was when something was going wrong. Even worse, more often than not the publisher thought of their “customer” as another book trade intermediary – a wholesaler, library supplier, chain bookstore or independent bookstore.

Academic publishers were amongst the closest connected to their customers in that their stable of authors taught their cohort of customers. They were proactive in direct mail campaigns and in seeking adoptions from academics, but for the general trade, contact with the end user was almost non-existent. Not only did publishers avoid contact with customers – but if at all possible they avoided booksellers too. I remember being speechless when suggesting to a member of the IPG Board in 2001 that we hold a joint meeting for members of the IPG and the Booksellers Association and being told: “Oh I really don’t think we have enough in common to run a meeting together”. Fortunately things have moved on rapidly since and the same thing would not happen now – but it is indicative of how very far removed some publishers became from their customers.

At the same time, the publishing industry was (and remains) notoriously poor at utilising professional market research, with tiny budgets – if any – apportioned to direct consumer research. Editors, agents and to some extent literary reviewers, acted as arbiters and gatekeepers to the public taste. One of the few sectors of the publishing industry to have made intensive and sustained use of the sorts of market research processes being commonly employed by most other design and manufacturing industries was the part-works publishing sector (a sector that many in the mainstream looked down their noses on as “not proper publishing”).

(For an indication of the lack of importance attached to consumer research by the UK Book Industry, we need look no further than the UK’s only book-specialist consumer research company, Book Marketing Ltd. When this company was put up for sale not long ago, it was purchased by an American company, Bowker – not a British or European company.)

It’s a profound irony that whilst the financial drive to outsourcing was increasing the distance between publisher and customer developments elsewhere in the technology sector and the retail sector have taken us full circle to where the closest possible relationship with the customer is possible – and indeed desirable. Today technology is driving us towards flexible publishing tools that permit, enable, facilitate and (god forbid) even encourage interactions between author and consumer, publisher and consumer, consumer and consumer. At a time when the mainstream publishers found themselves more distanced from their customer than ever before – technology has plunged them into a situation where they need to learn to understand and interact with their customer – or suffer the consequences of competitors leaping into the vacuum. And by competitors I don’t necessarily mean other publishers. I mean competitors for attention.

So – it’s useful to remember that what’s financially good for a business today is not necessarily what prepares it for a sustainable future and just as the pressure to outsource warehousing lead to – what is now - an unhelpful distancing between publisher and customer, in the same way the current rush to providing ebooks via reselling models that ape print book reselling models may not be the best long-term strategic solution.

As I have already mentioned – many publishing types think of distribution and the supply chain as the most tedious part of our industry – not worthy of the attention of creative people. If the ISBN was the Cinderella of our industry – until she became a princess in these days of metadata, metadata and more metadata – then the warehouse was the hearth she slept in at night. However I consider myself lucky to have spent the past six years working in this sector. Being part of a distribution company has also led to me become increasingly concerned with the customer experience of book buying. And thinking about precisely that - “the experience of book buying”- can be very illuminating.

This phrase is so important I am going to repeat it again – I am concerned with – and spend time thinking about – “the experience of book buying”.

Over the past three months our business has expanded into new premises – and the process of moving 3.4 million units of stock at the same time as keeping 39,500 individual product lines available for instant supply has been enormously difficult. Indeed, we haven’t always managed it. If I needed any evidence at all of how important focussing on the customer experience is – I have had it in spades this summer. I can confirm that modern consumers have very low tolerance levels to inconvenience and delay.

The paradigm shift that has lowered customer tolerance to inconvenience (or to put it another way – raised their expectation of information, speed and faultless service), is of course Amazon. Closely followed by many other Internet resellers.

One of the reasons Amazon has transformed the landscape of bookselling is because it has transformed the customer experience. Because they are purchasing online, the customer acts as their own personal order-entry clerk – embedding their own requirements directly into Amazon’s systems. This – combined with Amazon’s ability to invest large sums of money in I.T. – facilitates total transparency about where in the process of supply the customer’s order is – without the nasty gap that traditional distributors experience in between receipt of an order (even by EDI – where the EDI message still has to be tested and accepted by the system) and the order being placed in the system.

Amazon has introduced a new customer-transparency paradigm that traditional publishers’ and distributors’ systems were not designed around. They were built around reselling-via-intermediary business models. The snowballing of Internet retailing in all sectors has transformed customer expectations – whether that customer be an individual or another business. Amazon and other Internet retailers have catapulted all of us into a world where we (and we are all customers) expect not only speed, but also information and visibility. Ever since Amazon was established, the traditional book distribution sector has been playing catch-up. And more critically, playing catch up at the same time as revenues are being squeezed by publishers looking for the lowest possible fulfilment costs (and at the same time as publishers in turn are squeezed for more discount by retailers – further diminishing the distributor’s margin and ability to invest in quality I.T. and quality customer services people.

Any distributor will tell you it is nigh on impossible to run a business that needs to make major I.T. spends at the same time as being squeezed for margin at every front. I like to think that our company is an exception. We have been making large capital investments this year – but it is very difficult to do in a sector that is considered to be on the way out. And for the record I don’t believe that Distribution is on the way out. I believe it has to undergo a process of change in order to provide the services publishers need to engage in a world of much more diverse revenue streams. Distributors have to invest in warehouses and systems – and the best possible customer service staff – so that we can do what we have always done much better than ever before for two reasons
(i) because we are competing with instant access, and
(ii) because Esposito’s 5-stage model suggests that publishers can’t get to stages four and five without maximising revenues from stages 1, 2 and 3 and that can only be done with the best possible customer service – or customers will simply migrate to other media.

To put it another way, it is only through having the best possible physical supply chains and providing a customer experience that is informed about all of your products and services (and that has therefore been the subject of major investments) that publishers will maintain their print book revenues for long enough for them to work out how to magnetize their content in new ways.

The expectations of what we as publishers & distributors of consumer goods ought to deliver are now being determined by companies like Amazon which – sustained losses year on year – are so well capitalised that they can afford the continuous software development that is now a pre-requisite of being an effective part of the supply chain. The tension between the need to reduce costs now – and the need to invest – has exacerbated publishing’s crash course for disaster, without publishers even being aware of it – so far removed are they from the reality of the customer’s experience of obtaining their products.

Finally, I’d like to turn to some examples of publishers who are creatively exploiting the opportunities now available to them. And example No1 is dead easy. We’re in the room with it. O’Reilly (recently re-branded O’Reilly Media) is a brilliant example of how a publisher can use its content strengths to become a pivotal member of a community of interest.

O’Reilly started out publishing print books. Today they publish eBooks – which in turn enhance demand for print book. They hold webinars, events like Tools of Change and many other specialist tech meetings. I was talking with Sharon Cordesse from O’Reilly over dinner last night and discovered that only a little over 50% of O’Reilly’s revenues now arise from e- and p-books. The remainder comes from the complex web business activities built up around their specialist brand.

I also asked Sharon about their customer interface – whether each business unit has its own billing and customer service interface. The answer is “no” O’Reilly has one centralised customer services department that can take care of any transaction (or trouble-shoot any problem). From the same customer services unit I can organise booking a place at ToC or purchase of e-books. O’Reilly therefore is providing a joined-up customer service experience – not one that exposes the customer to the frustration of dealing with separate silos within the O’Reilly businesses.

I’m also fortunate to work with a company called PasTest – a medical publisher that publishes test prep materials for qualified doctors who are taking their professional exams (FRCP, FRCS, etc.). PasTest are really closely tuned in to their customer’s requirements – particularly speed of turnover. They know that their customers are busy, work very long hours, are dedicating year of their lives to taking exams that have a very high first time failure rate. PasTest know that their customers don’t have time to waste and don’t have time to wait for books once they have been ordered.

As well as supplying books, PasTest provide online webinars and self-test materials. They also organise courses where doctors can practise making diagnoses on real patients with real ailments. PasTest’s multi-textured relationship – and multiple points of contact with their audience offers them many more ways to know and get to understand their customers’ requirements than many other publishers will ever have.

Publishers can also learn from what some non-publishers are doing. We have a member of staff currently going through the Edinburgh Business School MBA. The organisation provides a complete course pack (no need to buy books), online learning resources, online tutorial support, weekend crammer courses – and of course the final exam. The customer service experience for the executive student is brilliant.

Something that all of these publishers are organisations are doing is building a brand. Which is a novel concept to most publishers – who for years have been hostage to the brands of their author. The demands of the modern publisher mean that publishers have more opportunities than ever to build their own brand(s) and in doing so get much closer to their customers.

So – I promised you some conclusions – which would not be answers but questions. And here they are.

Do you provide a coherent, informed and joined-up customer service experience across your entire range of publications, products and services?

What is the infrastructure that supports your customer’s engagement with your products and services – and does it provide them with the best possible customer experience?

On NBNi's Summer 2010 Expansion Project

2010-08-11T12:26:00.000-07:00

This post first appeared on the NBNi web site earlier today, where it was the inaugural post on the blog we have launched in order encourage the exchange of information and ideas with our industry colleages about how to meet changing cusotmer needs.

If you are distributed by us or if you buy books from us in any quantity, you almost certainly know by now that NBNi is expanding into larger, more modern distribution premises in Plymouth this summer (the main switchover between locations takes place this coming weekend). Over the months we have been preparing for and running this project, many clients, customers and colleagues in the industry have been asking us: "If the future's digital, why are you taking more space?" It's a simple question with a simple short answer, and a not-quite-so-simple long one. Today I'm going to focus on the short answer (the longer one will follow in a separate post). The key words are service, efficiency, turnaround times, customer expectations, quality control, communication, people.

We've been running our business from premises designed over thirty years ago when the book industry supply chain worked at a much slower pace than it does now. We’ve also more than doubled in size in the past six years, and we can’t continue in the same premises. When our old warehouse was built, just-in-time ordering was an unknown phrase; Amazon wasn't even a twinkle in Jeff Bezos' eye; customers were used to waiting for books to come into stock in their local bookstore, and most publishers thought of the "customer" as the buyer in the bookshop, library supplier, wholesaler - not the ultimate user or consumer of the book.

Everything's different now. Internet retailers have been the dominant force in changing the supply chain for some years, and more recently in the UK the centralisation of Waterstone’s has also engendered change. The Internet resellers have incredibly high expectations of both data and physical book supply, and each one works to a slightly different model with its own service needs and priorities. Amazon needs consignment supply, The Book Depository needs daily actual stock data, Boffin requires direct-to-consumer supply, to name but a few. In the meantime some of the difficulties Waterstone’s have experienced at the hub have driven us to invest in new technologies that enable us to ensure and prove accuracy of supply.

On top of all of that, far more specialist publishers are now engaged in direct-to-consumer activities, with email and web-based marketing campaigns replacing traditional direct mail. What’s certain is that whatever route the customer is ordering through, they now have far more choice, and wield far more power than 30 years ago. And that's not just choice of books - but choice of what to do with their time, period. If the book isn't available when they want it, there are plenty of other ways to engage with ideas and text on and offline. Our changed consumer culture demands a different level of responsiveness from those of us still engaged with supplying physical books to resellers and end users. And to provide that responsiveness, we need to be working from premises designed around the new paradigms of book supply, where we can communicate with each other and our clients and customers more effectively, and where we can work faster and more accurately.

Most of our clients still rely on print books as their primary source of revenue. And the best way in which we can support our publishers through the present turbulent and unsettling times is to ensure that the experience of obtaining those physical books is as simple, and enjoyable as possible for the customer. Whether they are a wholesaler, a librarian, an independent bookshop in a German or Italian university town, a consignment distributor in the Far East, or an individual ordering via a vendor or publisher web site - people need to like ordering from us.

It is with all this in mind that we are going through the pain of relocating 3.4 million units of stock; a pressurised process that hasn't always been smooth. With thousands of active isbns, some of which sell only a few units of stock a year combining the process of a move, with keeping everything available for order and continuing timely supply has been a huge challenge. And of course it is not just books that we are relocating; our staff are also moving over to the new premises. No-one has to move house as our new warehouse and offices are less than a mile from the old ones. But people will be working in a new environment. It's a much better-planned, safer work space. (For example the new picking face is completely separate from the hi-bay storage, so there will be far less interaction of people and fork lift trucks). On balance our teams are excited to be working for a company that is so obviously investing in expansion and the future at a time when much of the economic news is doom and gloom. But even good change causes disruption and we’ve all had to retain our senses of humour at times.

We're deeply grateful to all of our publisher clients and to all of our customers for the support and encouragement we've received during the course of the project. Our objective is to reward you for this support with faster service, greater efficiency, better communication, greater accuracy and above all to be a company that you want to work with and want to buy from, staffed by people you really enjoy communicating and working with.

With thanks to my colleagues at NBNi for permission to re-post here.

The technology of reading: a long view (ii)

2010-07-28T07:42:00.000-07:00

My second eureka insight arising from Casson's Libraries in the Ancient World centres around the question of "who makes money from books?". Whilst we are accustomed to the norm that (some) authors, (most) publishers and (most) booksellers are able to make money out of words, it's salutary to note that this was certainly not the case in the ancient world. In all of the ancient societies reading and writing were high status activities, and anyone who was anyone sought to write down and disseminate their works. If we stop to think, we know this: after all the writings of Julius Caesar are still taught in those (largely private) schools that still have Latin and other ancient languages on the curriculum. And just as publishing one's thoughts was an indication of power, insight and status - so was ownership of and access to texts. It's interesting that one of the love gifts from Antony to Cleopatra (possibly the world's first celebrity couple) was a library; the 200,000 volume collection in the library at Pergamum to be precise. Casson comments that this could have been a shrewd cost-control measure on Mark Antony's part - the funds required to maintain such a resource were enormous. Nonetheless it's hard to imagine such a gift exchanging hands between twenty-first century A-listers as a token of esteem and devotion (although it's a fair bet that a few iPads have).

It seems the only people in the ancient world who made money from texts were booksellers and librarians. Authors received not a penny for their efforts (their rewards were indirect, on the way up the intellectual, social and political ladder). Most authors completed a master copy and employed scribes (usually slaves) to make a limited number of presentation copies which were then bestowed upon those individuals the author held in high regard (or wanted to ingratiate themselves with). Thereafter the text was considered to be in the public domain and anyone could make a copy. Indeed the earliest booksellers ran scriptoria - copy shops using human labour in place of any form of mechanised duplication. By the last century B.C. it was possible to buy most of the acknowledged "classics" from Rome's booksellers. Even if Cicero bemoaned in a letter to his brother that "For books in Latin I don't know where to go; the copies sold are so full of errors." Q.A. issues have obviously beset our industry from the outset.

Librarianship gradually became an valued occupation, sometimes carried out by highly educated slaves who were often manumitted for long and devoted service, and also by freemen. Indeed in Rome stewardship of the city's libraries became one of the recognised stepping stones on the fast-track civil service ladder to high office. So those who curated texts and those who organised the reproduction of texts were the only people who actually made a living from them. There were no agents brokering deals - and the author and the publisher were one and the same (unpaid) person.

In the West, the invention of the printing press in 1440 was what made publishing as a financial enterprise viable - and for centuries thereafter the printer and the publisher were one and the same (and sometimes even printer, publisher and author). Sir Walter Scott was one of the first writers to pen his way out of bankruptcy, and he is amongst those authors who had a financial involvement with his printing company. Even in the twentieth century, authors and Bloomsbury Group luminaries Virginia and Leonard Woolf established The Hogarth Press which (ironically given the current e-royalty furore) was eventually subsumed into Random House upon the purchase of Chatto and Windus in 1987.

All of which takes us full circle. No-one in our industry has an automatic right to make a living out of what we do. It is not enshrined in law (state or economic) that authors, agents, publishers or booksellers can and shall make a living and run economically viable businesses. We can only do so if we know exactly who values what we have and what we do; if we know how much they are prepared to pay, and this price is one that covers the costs of our activities. As Brian O'Leary (content work flow guru and founder of Magellan Media Partners) observed in a blog post today - what we really learn from the conflict between The Wylie Agency and The Random House Group is about the supply chain - and the fact that Amazon is entirely customer focused (which might explain the phenomenon a marketing director I know calls "the Circle of Hell known as Vendor Central"). Amazon understand that in a consumer society, serving the customer is where there's money to be made. Like those first bookshop owners in ancient Rome.

The technology of reading: a long view (i)

2010-07-26T14:53:00.000-07:00

I'm currently enjoying reading a (print) copy of Lionel Casson's Libraries in the Ancient World (Yale). It's a great read for anyone interested in the cultural heritage of literature, information, authorship, book selling and publishing. When I first picked it up in Topping's Ely bookshop (more of which in a later post) I did not expect illumination for the many puzzles that beset me in my professional life, but that's precisely what it has provided. The conventional axiom is that Gutenberg and movable type were the point at which books and technology began to merge - but I'm now reminded that this isn't true. The technologies of reading and publishing have entwined and evolved since writing was first invented - often in response to the available resources and the cultural pressures in play as societies have changed. So over the next few days I'm planning a sequence of short posts on some of "eureka" moments I've experienced while reading the book.

Let's start with publishing formats. Casson describes the formats known to have existed in the Ancient world - starting with wood and clay tablets, and graduating through papyrus and parchment scrolls to the codex (bound volumes). Each one of these technologies had advantages and disadvantages for their manufacturers, readers and librarians. In his discussion of the shift to codices, Casson shares some statistics using archaeological finds from the dry sands of Egypt, as base data:

"Over 1,330 pieces of Greek literary, scientific and other such writings have been discovered that date to the first and the second centuries: all are on rolls save less than twenty, a mere 1.5 percent, on codices. In the third century the percentage rises from 1.5% to about 17 per cent; clearly the codex was gaining favour. Around AD 300 the percentage has climbed to 50 percent - a parity with the roll that is reflected ins some preserved representations which depict a man holding a roll next to one holding a codex. By A.D. 400 it is up to 80 per cent and by A.D. 500 to 90 percent. The roll still had centuries of life ahead of it, but only for documents; what people read for pleasure, edification , or instruction was virtually all on codices."

After describing the manufacture of codices, Casson highlights a remarkable exception to their gradual adoption over several centuries. He points out that all eleven earliest surviving copies of the Bible date from between the end of the second century and the early part of the third century and all eleven are codices. Yet the evidence previously quoted suggests that in the same period as these codices were manufactured, the vast majority of non-Christian literary, scientific, historical, philosophical and spiritual texts were still produced on parchment and papyrus rolls. The codex was not yet the preferred format.

Casson comments that there could be a number of contributory factors that led to the Christian preference for the Codex ranging from the fact that Rome - where Christianity was quick to take hold - is where the codex format seems to have begun, to the fact that the codex was free from the cultural connotations attached to Jewish parchment scrolls and pagan papyrus scrolls. Moreover, he suggests that Christians used their scripture as a manual for living - rather than simply a sacred document - and the codex was much more suited to this utility.

All of which set me thinking. It seems that the most significant change to the format in which text and information was disseminated from ancient times to the advent of the eBook was driven by a coalescence of technological development (aka human inventiveness), emotional and cultural sensibilities and sensitivities, and utility. Or to put it another way, the drivers for change were the needs and preferences of the user or consumer of the text. It was all about what the customer wanted.

On (i)Tools and (i)Toys

2010-07-18T08:51:00.000-07:00

We have all known have we not, Dear Reader, that the events of yesterday have been inevitable for over a year? The Caxton branch of the Bounford family finally bowed to fate and become a household possessed of (and obsessed with) not just one, but two ipads.

So yes - along with the Victorian music cabinet (a recent ebay purchase collected yesterday evening) it's been an eye-wateringly expensive weekend in this corner of England. But already my only regret is that I didn't bite the bullet earlier. I recall blogging last year that my reluctance to part with cash for a Kindle lay in the fact I couldn't use it for anything other than reading books bought from Amazon. Whereas I wanted one piece of kit I could read from, purchase my groceries on, watch films, view photos, IM with the children from. And here, in the ipad is something that does all that and more. I haven't yet rigged up a camera so I can spy on the chickens via it - but I'm pretty sure it would be possible.

Here I sit, therefore, in the garden blogging on the ipad with it docked into a lovely little portable keyboard (that would also work with my iphone). And I know I've fallen in love - in a way I never did with the Kindle (still defunct on the dresser - looking hopelessly old world and analogue next to this shiny new toy) or even my iphone which - useful as it is - never grabbed me in the way this has. Thanks to Project Gutenberg and the ibooks app I sat in bed last night grazing on Marcus Aurelius, Huckleberry Finn, Shakespeare (mugging up on The Comedy of Errors so I can answer the children's questions when we see it at the Open Air Theatre in Regent's Park next Saturday). Today I reluctantly went down-market and loaded Dan Brown's Angels and Demons - which Felix was half way through on the ill-fated Kindle. We couldn't find this book on ibooks so loaded the kindle app for free and bought it that way.

So why two ipads? I've been a parent long enough to know that if I'd only bought one - I'd never get a look in. And also Hannah was due a laptop. She'd been eyeing up a Hewlett Packard with a swivel screen (at significantly greater cost than the ipad). And I had an epiphany. There's just no point buying her a laptop, when she will get so much more out of this. Docked to the keyboard she can write essays, while she surfs content online and in books. Through Project Gutenburg she has instant access to the classics and the staples of world literature, culture, philosophy and religion. Not to mention Angry Birds, Facebook, Hotmail, Gmail, YouTube, and all the other mandatory requirements of the modern 14-year old. She has resources at her fingertips I could not have dreamed possible when I was the same age. And moreover all rolled into a bit of kit that's totally seductive and as cool as it comes. Libraries were never this sexy.

I've heard educational and children's publishers talking a lot since the arrival of the ipad about the blurring between books and games that is beginning to take place. I think the change is more fundamental than that. In this instance it's not about the content it's about the kit. Just as interactive whiteboards have changed the classroom, the ipad has crossed a social Rubicon in a way smart phones, kindles, laptops and net books have never quite managed in being both a tool that is necessary and/or useful to achieve constructive work - and a toy that brings entertainment, pleasure, creativity and play. Smart phones nearly got there - but the screen size was always going to inhibit them. When I first saw Steve Jobs proudly holding the ipad aloft - like many others I sniggered that all Apple had done was create an iphone on steroids. But now I'm using one, I'm embarrassed by that cynicism.

Yes, I'm concerned that the infinite variety on offer has a detrimental effect on concentration and self discipline - my own let alone Hannah's. But something in me tells me that in this - and the generations of technology that will follow hot on its heels - there is a blended-experience future for our industry and probably our culture. Unless we want to go the way of the Amish and become a tiny, quaint minority, we have to address the inherent problems through engagement, use and experience - not through abstention.

Publishing in Future: Not an Oxymoron

2010-06-21T03:58:00.000-07:00

On my way back over Atlantic airspace I am digesting lessons learned at this year's AAUP Meeting, and mapping out how I shall be using them in the coming weeks. Apart from connecting in person with some great contacts made online via Twitter (more of this later) my highlight of the meeting was, without doubt, the first half of the final plenary session: Digital Humanities is Not an Oxymoron - a provocative presentation from Alexander C. Halavais, Associate Professor of Interactive Communications at Quinnipiac University.

Halavais was an excellent choice of speaker for this audience. He is from the Academy (which most AAUP member presses exist to serve) and yet unafraid to challenge either the institution or the processes of scholarly publishing - or of scholarship itself. There can be few individuals brave enough to confess - in front of an audience of 500+ publishers - to having systematically destroyed thousands of books in his ownership (to scan them for personal use). Coming - as I do - from a professional life in the independent publishing sector I have always been somewhat mystified by a deep reverence for scholarship over profit (or at least break-even). It has always seemed to me that independent-mindedness is only truly independent if it is fiscally self-supporting. Therefore Halavais' ability to speak radically within the vernacular of his audience was illuminating to me. He used an iron fist wrapped within the most eloquent and witty of velvet gloves - and I'd recommend that anyone with an interest in the way text is used in the digitally connected academic world read the draft of his presentation available online. Unfortunately the sublimely subversive accompanying slide show is not there - but it would undoubtedly fall flat without the live narrative, which was a sequence of riffs improvised around the themes laid out in the written draft.

Halavais was full of pithy observations, one of the most striking of which was "publishing isn't about what you make - it is about what you do" (like all the best epigrams, a construction of elegant simplicity in its perception and accuracy). It is a phrase that all publishers would do well keep in mind through the turbulent times ahead of us.

It was clear from the discussions going on in and outside of sessions that for all of the angst that surrounds the future of printed books (and most particularly in this forum, printed scholarly books), many medium-sized American university press publishers are significantly ahead of their UK independent counterparts in embracing e-book formats. Three aspects of this situation struck me forcibly. Firstly, e-book distribution, particularly to libraries, brings with it actual usage statistics. And what those statistics reveal about (the lack of) usage of monographs in particular is - if not surprising - shocking. The fact that monograph publishing exists to support tenure and the structure of academic employment is an inconvenient truth that can no longer be glossed by either the Academy its associated University Presses. At some point the Academy is either going to have to stop expecting University Presses to fulfil this need, or find a more honest and transparent way of funding it. After all, publication by the for-profit sector (Wiley, T&F, Continuum, Rowman & Littlefield to name but a few) is as valid to academics for resume purposes as publication by a not-for-profit. And moreover if the likes of Wiley et al are willing to publish - it suggests that the book is meaningful enough for at least a few copies to be read within a year of publication.

Secondly, although e-books are firmly established in the academic publishing environment in the US - there seemed to be little discussion of the opportunities that this creates. The e-book is a new format largely bolted into an old business model. There was little talk of what can be learned from consumer data - and the opportunities for publishers that are created by the shortening of the supply chain to permit two-way publisher-consumer information flow.

The third (and related) striking aspect of these University Presses' relationships with e-books was that, by and large, there seemed to be an acceptance of the e-book as merely an electronic reproduction of the printed text. I heard virtually no discussion of enhanced e-books - or the unleashing of numerous possibilities for innovation that accompanies shifting text from the printed to the digital environment. And therefore no mention of the potential for creative new blended revenue streams that could be facilitated by the liberation of ideas from ink. I understand that there was a session "Designing in the E-book Era which did address some of these issues (to a packed crowd) - but I had chosen another of the concurrent sessions (thinking that this was a design and production session rather than a business strategy session). I am certainly hoping that next year's meeting in Baltimore might consider taking a look at new business models in more depth.

To revert to the discussion of and on Twitter - this meeting was undoubtedly enhanced (for those of us who tweet) by the #AAUP10 tweetstream- which provided subtext and counterpoint to the formal presentations, not to mention a great deal of good natured teasing of this year's programme organiser, the urbane, charming and seemingly ubiquitous Greg Britton, Publisher at the Getty Foundation. (Indeed the AAUP owes a great debt to Britton and his program committee colleagues for picking up from last year's deeply gloomy recession-hit Philadelphia Annual Meeting and making a huge success this year.) I've been an intermittent Tweeter over the past few months - but the experience of #AAUP10 - and of meeting up face to face with tweeps such as @KatMeyer of #followreader and O'Reilly's Tools of Change, @brianoleary of Magellan Consulting and @susanmpls - all of whom I first connected with via Twitter - has reminded me of the extraordinary global connecting power of online discussion and networking. Certainly the AAUP's use of Twitter from Salt Lake City this weekend was more edifying than that of Utah's Attorney General, Mark Shurtleff, who controversially used the medium to tweet his decision to give the go-ahead to an execution by firing squad (the first execution to take place in the state for many years). One could find few more startling snapshots of the sheer diversity of preset-day American culture.

A final takeaway from this year's meeting comes from Richard Brown of Georgetown University Press (with whom I have the privilege of working in my day job). Richard made a characteristically poised and thoughtful speech when accepting this year's AAUP presidency. "We are organisations in transition," he said. "And that's not going to stop. From now on perpetual transition will become as natural as the air we breathe." Publishing is an activity that has evolved at a leisurely pace since the invention of movable type and Brown's words summarise the challenge and the opportunities we all face whether we work in the scholarly sector, or elsewhere in the publishing industry.

On Technological Change, Publishers & Customers

2010-06-17T06:10:00.000-07:00

On the plane to the AAUP Meeting just over a month after I attended the Book Industry Conference in London - and I am dwelling on the most challenging presentation of that last conference. In retrospect it should be no surprise that it came from someone outside the book world: Benedict Evans of Enders Analysis. Taking an overview of the impact of new technologies, he made some salutary points - most notably that our business environment is rapidly becoming dominated by international companies that are neither publishers nor retailers.

Google: which is not a technology company - it is an advertising business - using cash flow to build a dominant content position so that the journey is always started from Google, thus maximising the opportunity to derive advertising revenues.
Amazon: which pushes physical products through its logistics chain to the end consumer, thereby deriving revenues. Although Amazon has made significant investments in kindle and e-books, this is not their core business - but a way of retaining the buying relationship. (Indeed Evans suggested that the fact that there is no logistics business model in ebooks explains Amazon's "latent aggression" regarding ebooks.)
Apple (and other platform manufacturers): which are consumer technology companies whose strategic objective is to create products that people want to buy (and upgrade, and own the next model soonest).

Evans then drew our attention to the cash reserves of these three companies:

Apple: $41.7 billion cash on hand
Amazon: $5.6 billion cash on hand
Google; $26.5 billion cash on hand

He then suggested that we compare those figures with the cash reserves of any of the key book industry players. It's a sobering thought particularly when combined with the anonymous adage doing the rounds: "Google kills industries without noticing". Listening to this - and feeling chilled - made me think of Gavin Weightman's immensely readable book The Frozen Water Trade, which charts the rise and fall of the business of shipping ice from New England down the East Coast of America and on to the Caribbean; a once thriving enterprise that was completely annihilated by the advent of the domestic fridge and freezer. (How many homes do you know that still have ice-houses?)

If there is any good news it is that - none of the three dominant companies is a content generator- and their core business models lie a long way from the business of creating content. (Although it seems to me they could all clearly afford to buy content generators from out of the petty cash tin - should they decide they want to do so).

As Benedict Evans pointed out - bolting new technologies into old ways of doing things does not remain a viable model for long. Therefore now - more than ever - is time for publishers to pay close attention to their customers, and to the value that they provide to those customers. Our new techno-charged world is one where wealthy companies can change the destiny of traditional industries without setting out to do so. Systemic and structural change throughout the book industry - from the perspective of these highly capitalised companies - will be an accidental by-product of what they are doing in their own core businesses.

To remodel themselves for a world dominated by Google, Amazon and Apple publishers need to focus on their unique abilities to commission top-class content, nurture authors, and create pleasurable information and entertainment products - regardless of the customer's method of consumption - be it print, ipod, ipad, Kindle, nook, library platform, desktop, smartphone, Nintendo DS, or the next generation of far more radical interactive and virtual world technologies.

I am often asked if - employed as I am in the physical supply chain for books - I fear for the future of our business (and therefore my job). In a way I feel I am at an advantage, because it is so obvious that our business has to reconfigure itself for its medium to long-term future. The great thing about working in distribution is that it teaches you to think about books as products that customers want with the shortest possible time frame in between making that choice and receiving the book. Inhabiting the supply chain also teaches one to draw distinctions between "customers" (who may in fact be intermediaries) and the end "consumer" of the book. In that sense the mind[set of those of us in the academic and reference supply chain is way ahead of many publishers, particularly many in the mainstream "trade".

Distribution is driven by the customer's needs, and a perception of the book as a consumer item. Yes, in my private life I may also consider individual books to be desirable to own and pleasurable to read. But professionally I know that publishers have to be more aware than ever of precisely what value they add to the experience(s) of accessing content that the consumer wants - and able to deliver those experiences in multiple ways - depending upon the consumer's preference and choice.

On International Marketing

2010-06-16T01:42:00.000-07:00

I'm in the taxi on the way to Heathrow turning my attention to this week's AAUP Annual Meeting and in particular to structuring my thoughts for Friday's Export panel. At last year's meeting in Philadelphia I was somewhat stunned that although many American university presses were experiencing turbulent times in their traditional domestic market - barely any mention was made of the fact that the European market remained buoyant. Indeed I knew for a fact that several American scholarly presses were experiencing significant growth in export markets. I had always thought that not boasting about one's successes was a peculiarly British trait - but it seems it extends to the American scholarly publishing community too.

As I think about this year's meeting, and the panel I am participating in, I realise that I wish the title referred to "international" rather than "export". The word "export" is such an old fashioned word - heavily freighted (if you will forgive the pun) with the assumption of a "push" selling model. Which is not, I realise, what I want to talk about at all! I shall be taking a look at some of the factors that make for success in international markets and in an Internet-enabled world, that is as much about "pull" as it is about "push".

AAUP attendees would be mistaken if they think that this is a session for marketing personnel only. International success comes to organisations that adopt an international mindset as part of their overall culture. I suspect that this comes more easily to European presses for a number of reasons. We have many more centuries of international trade under our belt, we have the remnants of colonial territories or in the case of the UK the Commonwealth, and our domestic markets are comparatively small. Therefore I'm planning to take a look at some of the best European independent reference and academic publishers - to see what lessons can be drawn from them.

Last year the AAUP meeting seemed somewhat insular, downbeat and pervaded by a sense of genuine shock at the depth of the financial crisis, and the downturn in the domestic market for scholarly books. I am aware that this year some presses are feeling the knock-on effect with difficulty in agreeing budgets with their institutions, and the likelihood of deep cuts to balance budgets. It is encouraging, therefore, that this year's meeting in Salt Lake City has sold out its room allocation and looks set to be an energetic meeting. All the more reason to be taking a look at what can be learned about international strategy from the best of the financially independent sector. All press employees from directors to editors, marketeers and production managers need to be interested in the opportunities afforded them by expanding their international horizons and thinking entrepreneurially.

The good news is that university presses have huge advantages over many other publishers when it comes to finding international opportunities. The Academy is international, highly mobile, and committed to the value of the written word. In a world where intermediaries are being disenfranchised from the supply chain, and publishers are building direct two-way relationships with customers, many university press publishers have multiple opportunities for this kind of relationship building built into the structure of their institutions and wider constituencies.

"International" is a key strategic issue. Publishing iconoclast Mike Shatzkin talks a lot about "verticals" (cf. his recent post about a presentation to Harlequin). University Presses serve classic vertical markets, focused around specific interests. Vertical markets are liberated from the geographical boundaries of territorial markets. I'm hoping therefore that this year's AAUP meeting will feel less insular and be embracing a little of the modern flat earth syndrome. Export is no longer just another task for an over-worked sales or marketing department. It is an integral aspect of the overall strategic mindset that needs to permeate the whole press.

Of Eggs and Ebooks (reprise)

2010-06-15T12:38:00.000-07:00

I have been asked several times in the past week why I stopped blogging last year. There's no simple answer, and certainly nothing succinct enough to write here. But the questions - combined with the fact that there is lots going on in the UK book industry at present - suggest that it seems a good time to pick up the reins again.

Tomorrow I fly to Salt Lake City for the 2010 AAUP Annual Meeting where much of the talk will be of ipads, kindles, nooks and other digital reading devices. (As up-to-the-moment as ever the panel I am participating in focuses on maximising export impact for print books). Therefore I thought I should begin to revive this site with a reprise of last year's eggs and e-books post.

You may recall that the Eglu and its feathered occupants arrived shortly after London Book Fair last year. The Eglu has been everything that the marketing blurb promised. Easy to clean and funky. And as predicted it has retained its value despite being used by the ladies every day for over a year for purposes ranging from egg laying to excreting - eating to sleeping. It has been left out in the freezing cold for weeks on end (see pic). Yet if I were to ebay it tomorrow I could set a reserve close to what I paid for it and be sure to sell. The girls might be a little grumpy about losing their home and it would be a poor way to repay them for the over 700 eggs and huge entertainment they have provided.

On the other hand, the Kindle arrived in January this year. It was the focus of much attention from me for a few days, and was then commandeered by the younger generation, who were more comfortable with it, and who loved being able to sit in bed late at night, finish one book, buy the next in the series and start reading it before I'd had a chance to say "lights out". All went well until after about a month - when carrying a pile of exercise books - Hannah slipped dropping the kindle on our tiled kitchen floor. Suddenly I remembered why I like print books so much. They don't provoke panic and inconsolable tears when dropped. The screen of the Kindle has been frozen ever since, and although I understand from Martin Gardner at Amazon in the UK that I could get it sorted out - somehow none of us has mustered the energy.

Meanwhile we've also acquired an iphone and an ipod touch. Since using them the Kindle doesn't seem worth reviving because the black-and-white display and lack of touch screen seem so very analogue in the face of the shiny new-world ipad. Felix - owner of the ipod touch - has discovered the app store. Thank goodness we linked his impossible-run-up-an-overdraft cash card and not my credit card to his itunes account. To cap it all last week, Trevor, my ex-business partner and ex-husband (but very much my present-friend and present-father to E, H & F) acquired not one but two ipads. Which I suspect knocks the final nail into the coffin of our Kindle.

In a recent blogpost Seth Godin proposed the "Paperback Kindle" as a low-cost mass market information tool as well as commercial e-reader. I suspect Amazon won't give up the e-reader fight easily - but whatever their response - it is going to have to be radical. Even without a broken screen, our Kindle is no longer worth anything like what we paid for it by any measure of value.

On Twitter, Agitation and Collaboration (via Radicalism, Regicide and St Benedict)

2009-07-13T11:53:00.000-07:00

Last Friday afternoon I was somewhat surprised to find myself sitting in an English parish church musing on the year 1670 and the relationship between St Benedict’s Little Rule for Beginners and Twitter. To explain how it came about you’ll have to permit me to provide some context.

For the English 1660 is a far more recognisable date than 1670. 1660 was the year in which England shut the door on decades of political turmoil and the aftermath of a civil war that culminated in regicide with the beheading of Charles I in 1649 and the ensuing Lord Protectorship of Oliver Cromwell. It was the year the “long parliament” was finally dissolved and at the end of May Charles II, son of the beheaded king, returned to London and the monarchy was restored. (Fans of English letters will also recognise it as the year in which Samuel Pepys commenced his diary on 1st January.)

One individual caught up in the political turmoil of the English civil war was a Cambridge scholar, fellow of Clare Hall (now Clare College) and Vicar of the Cambridgeshire village of Great Gransden. As a staunch Royalist, Barnabas Oley was forced into hiding for his beliefs. Cambridgeshire was a difficult place to be loyal to the King, given that it was Cromwell’s home county and a hotbed of Parliamentarian Puritanism. For several years Oley lived in fear for his life, taking refuge in northern England. It was only the Restoration of 1660 that allowed Oley to come out of hiding, resume his post at Clare and take up residence in Gransden again. He reached the rank of Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge, was involved with the University Press, and was responsible, amongst other things, for posthumous publication of the metaphysical poet George Herbert, whose work had failed to get past the press licensors in the pre-puritan era following the death of James I

Most significantly for me, amongst Oley’s philanthropic deeds in his parish was the foundation of a village school in 1670. Although Elizabeth I had granted charters for numerous town grammar schools in England during her reign, rural education was at best ad hoc and was largely non-existent, so in this Oley’s actions were characteristically charitable, radical and ahead of their time. So now, in the penultimate week of every summer term, Barnabas Oley is remembered in Gransden. On Wednesday the final year children visit Clare College. Then on Friday – Founder’s Day – a member of the academic staff of Clare pays a return visit to the school, makes a speech and presents prizes in the church where Oley served as vicar for so many years.

So there’s a thread from the Restoration of 1660, through Barnabas Oley founding a school in 1670 (the same school that my youngest child will attend for the last time this week), to me sitting in a church in 2009 listening to the current Dean of Clare College, the Rev Gregory Seach, explaining Benedict’s “Little Rule for Beginners” to a group of 4-11 year olds. Cambridge academics are not universally skilled in communicating with primary school children, so over my 12 years of attending I’ve heard some variable speeches. But although he now teaches Divinity at Cambridge, Seach is an energetic Australian who taught English and Drama in schools for ten years before training for the ministry. He knows how to attract and retain the attention of children and adults.

Greg told us that in the “Little Rule” Benedict exhorted people to recognise each day as a new beginning with new opportunities for learning. And he also instructed them to work and learn together because humans don’t learn in isolation – but rather with and from each other. Benedict saw learning as a collaborative activity, just as he saw work as one of the essential disciplines of life.

Co-incidentally, the previous evening, I had participated in a Twitter discussion about e-readers co-ordinated by @KatMeyer under the #followreader hashtag. I would never have thought a useful and meaningful conversation on a subject so complicated would be possible in 140-character tweets. I was wrong. I learned a huge amount in less than an hour thanks to the participation of many well-informed people, who were patient and courteous with the less well-informed. (The exchanges should all still be visible by searching #followreader and Kat will also post an online summary.)

Then Friday itself had begun with some vigorous online exchanges with @MackCollier. Mack had tweeted that he felt #followfriday – the convention by which on Friday users of Twitter suggest others worth “following” under the #followfriday hashtag – has had its day and should be let go. Mack is a social media expert with considerable influence online (and offline too no doubt). With 24,434 tweets and 9,063 followers under his belt it’s fair to assume his opinions come from experience. In his view #followfriday has become a routine to promote egos and the already well-known, rather than genuinely widen the real inclusiveness of Twitter.

All this was on my mind as I shifted gears from the digital world to the story of Benedict’s Little Rule. In making a school prize day speech, I found Greg Seach articulating one aspect of why Twitter is such an engaging forum. Within the group of publishers, authors, readers, writers, journalists, industry professionals, friends, family and other tangents I am following and meeting online, there is a sense of a group endeavour. Yes there are egos present, individual agendas followed and corporate profits sought – within a cocktail made all the more punchy by the participation of self-styled enfants terribles such as @ajkeen who don’t hesitate to disrupt – but even that disruption is productive because it is questioning and deliberately provocative. Even in our modern secular media we need agitators and catalysts to make things happen – as Barnabas Oley well knew. And by working and learning collaboratively we learn better and faster – as Benedict of Nursia pointed out in the 6th Century – and Twitter still proves in the 21st.

On Conches and Conversation

2009-06-19T15:18:00.000-07:00

The change of time zone that comes with my current business travels in the US allowed me to take part in the Twitter Book Club discussion (#tbc) on Monday 15th June 9pm EST. Although there is nothing to stop me taking part from the UK, I’m not entirely sure in normal circumstances I’d want it to be visible to my friends, family & colleagues that I’d been wide awake tweeting between 2-3am GMT. Insomnia is public in Twitter.

Monday’s #tbc was a fascinating hour (anyone on Twitter can see the exchanges posted by searching on #tbc). The discussion was of Lloyd Jones’ novel Mr Pip, first published in 2006 – so a book that has been doing the rounds for some time. (I embarrassed myself by enthusing about it at home last week whereupon Ellie (15) rolled her eyes and replied “I read it last year and told you it’s great….”)

Mr Pip was a smart choice for #tbc. Short, compelling, well-paced, full of ambiguities and unanswered questions, redolent with literary references (which while they can enhance enjoyment of the book, don’t detract if the reader is unfamiliar with them). The hour-long session produced some intriguing posts (not least the revelation that @MissLiberty has her mother up for sale on Craig’s List). But I’m not sure I’d call it a “conversation” in any conventional sense. Was it a book group? Well – in one sense, yes – we were a group of people focussing on the same book at the same time. And yes I’ve taken away some new ideas and thoughts that have increased my enjoyment of a great book that were not derived from my own individual reading.

Yet discussing a book with others in Twitter in a compressed time frame presents a number of challenges, the first of which is simply remembering to include the hashtag in each post. Forget the hashtag and no-one in the group will see your comments unless they happen to be following your tweets anyway. Using Tweetdeck helps as it enables the participant to create a separate #tbc column. Furthermore it seems to me there are four simultaneous and sometimes counteractive pressures in play when participating in such an event in Twitter: listening (reading), posting, chronology and speed. As the tweet stream emerges, framing an intelligent response in a 140-character bite quickly enough for it to arrive in anything like a logical juxtaposition to the tweet that prompted it is extremely challenging. Indeed it could be seen as an interactive art form all of its own. Forget Haiku: 140 character posts under speed in response to others are more difficult than 3-5-3 or even 5-7-5 syllables. The result is almost like the transcript of an intriguing discussion that someone has taken a pair of scissors to and randomly reorganised.

For those who haven’t read Mr Pip, I don’t want to give the plot away. However I will say that it is set on an island torn by civil-war and includes a violent scene including butchery and pigs. At one point I tweeted that both islands and pigs are freighted in literary terms because of the reference to Lord of the Flies. Since then, re-reading the #tbc tweetstream, I have realised that the whole #tbc concept has another fundamental parallel with Golding’s novel. Whilst I enjoyed participating, and will certainly do so again, insomnia permitting, at no point was it clear who was “holding the conch”. In a face-to-face group there is a joint focus on each person as they speak that simply is not possible in Twitter. So as things stand I’m divided over whether I’m frustrated by the limitations of or excited by the possibilities for using Twitter to encourage engagement with books. Why not join in and let me know what you think…?

On Roadmapping the Future

2009-06-10T15:11:00.000-07:00

Yesterday's Huffington Post included a blogpost by Don Tapscott on the impending demise of universities. It is a subject of some interest given that I work in academic publishing and my eldest child is almost 16, so the university years lie ahead for her and her siblings. As ever the comments following the post are as interesting as Tapscott's typically iconoclastic piece, divided as they are into some voices of support and a number wondering where Mr Tapscott has been for the past couple of decades. For me neither blogpost nor comments ask the crucial questions which focus around how we facilitate change management conducted in an economically viable manner within long established businesses and organisations. And I mean viable for the individual institutions that need to change - and viable for our society which requires an educated and enabled population.

The post was placed on the Huffington Post specifically to solicit feedback, as Edge, where it was originally placed, does not publish reader comments. True to form I read and I commented. Only to find (infuriatingly) that what I had written had exceeded Huffington's maximum comment word count (by 311 words). So I have decided to place it here instead...

Dear Don
I read your post with interest as it addresses what are currently two of my most pressing (and parallel) personal and professional concerns, viz
(i) what sort of university education should I be envisaging for my (currently young teen) children, and,
(ii) where will academic publishing be in five years time.
Regarding education I am torn between a sense of excitement about how much more interesting and purposeful learning is becoming, and, watching my children, a despair that although they know how to source, interact with and dissect information intellectually, they find it very difficult to write and structure a sustained analysis. As an employer I still value the skill of written analysis.

I find it useful to think about publishing and education together because both are businesses (often long-established, frequently old-fashioned businesses). Yes, educational establishments are often semi-public sector businesses but nonetheless they have budgets to meet - and it helps to remind ourselves of this when considering their future. Universities and academic publishers are faced with markets that are evolving by the hour in their demands for new delivery channels and methodologies. Both are being rapidly pulled into a world where they are increasingly driven by the requirement to respond to the ways in which changing and emerging technologies are modulating what students and employers want and how they want, it rather than being driven by traditional pedagogy and academic values.

So far, so good - and nothing wrong with this. I am all for dragging academe into the real world. The crux is how to effect such change at the same time as remaining a viable business. The problem is that educational establishments (like publishing companies) are restricted by their histories, their funding models, their obligations as employers, and multiple other pre-existing social and commercial contracts. It is all very well to comment that they have to change - but they have to be enabled to change - and at the moment the impedimenta of their histories (and their business models) is making that difficult.

Seeing where they need to go is not that hard. There are plenty of visionaries and change evangelists out there - yourself included - who are thinking, writing and speaking about what needs to happen. However what we are remarkably short of is people with the skills, the insight and commercial acumen needed to chart the roadmap from "here" to "there". How does an institution or business with a model built around a pedagogical approach remain a viable enterprise whilst rapidly adapting to deliver - or rather enable - learning in a completely different style, channel and model (subject to rapid change and therefore ongoing cost to adapt and develop)? Just because the future of education could be significantly Internet-based, that does not for one moment mean that it will necessarily be cheaper.

The interesting question for me is not - "do we have to change?" That we do seems axiomatic. Much more important is how we free up institutions and businesses to be able to adapt quickly in a way that does not destroy what is still inherently valuable in them. The education and publishing establishments urgently need advanced change management skills of the most pragmatic and enabling sort. In both publishing and education if we don't find ways of roadmapping and structuring the change that is required within viable business models, we risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Of Success and Salt (or dare to fail not fail to dare)

2009-05-29T09:38:00.000-07:00

Twitter and its simultaneous capacity for both linear and lateral information flow remains very much in the (book industry) news (and on my mind) at the moment with the NY Book Expo Tweetup being the talk of the fair and over here in the UK Salt’s Just One Book campaign attracting attention.

That I am a Salt groupie and therefore hopelessly prejudiced in their favour is a well-established fact. But you don’t have to be a fan to discern that Salt make beautiful, intellectually rigorous books in collaboration with authors who like being published by them. However Salt have yet to create a robust business model even though they have been pushing boundaries to achieve this – most particularly in their innovative use of social media to promote the company and its authors.

The power of Twitter and #hashtags is that suddenly, off the back of Just One Book there now exists a fast, simple mechanism to search and follow others who are also rooting for Salt. (And the same applies for thousands of other special interest subjects that people are using hashtags to flag up for others.) Through this mechanism Twitter has led me to a variety of postings about Salt including ghostwriter Jane Smith’s blog (not one I would normally visit, aimed as it is at authors). What drew my attention was not the fairly brief post (23 May) – but rather the fierce debate that ensued in the comments column. One anonymous reader (who subsequently identified him or herself as "Rae") had been dismissive of Salt’s campaign as a “gimmick” and was rounded on by a number of Jane’s more regular followers some of whom are Salt authors. However I was struck by the remarks "Perhaps Salt Publishing should try publishing books people want to read rather than resorting to emotional blackmail…” and – on the Salt website - “There are just too many steps for the uninitiated, other book websites are not quite so cumbersome - I guess that's why they aren't having problems with sales”.

I found myself pausing to reflect whether there is something of the emperor’s new clothes syndrome going on here. Are those of us deeply engaged with books and publishing so blinded by our beliefs and our self-belief that we can’t risk seeing ourselves through the eyes of others? The comment thread reveals both an unwillingness to tolerate criticism and some of the unwritten expectations we have of the way in which people comment on blogposts and in discussion fora. This is not the first time I have observed a dissenting voice raising the ire of a committed and converted community of followers and in doing so often terminating a discussion.

It seems to me, however, that Rae raised three most apposite points -

1. "Perhaps Salt should publish books people want to read...”
This is a statement freighted with assumptions – first and foremost that people are aware of Salt’s books in the first place. According to the Salt Confidential blog, Chris Hamilton-Emery has been humbled by discovering just how little awareness there is of Salt outside those with a real commitment to poetry. It is evident that for all of their Facebooking and assorted innovations, Salt have remained outside of the mainstream and consequently many active book buyers remain unaware of their lists. The reasons for this are too diverse and numerous to enumerate here. Now the real crux of the matter is that the exposure the Just One Book Campaign grants them will get books and authors into new hands, or rather in front of new eyeballs. Ergo we will soon see whether Salt are publishing books people want to read if – after Just One Book – sales can be sustained at significantly higher levels than before the campaign. If not, maybe it tells us something that we don’t really want to know.

2. (re website) “there are just too many steps for the uninitiated…”
Here was genuine feedback from someone who had made the effort to visit the site. And it was slightly shocking to read given that many of us in the industry envy Salt’s content-rich web site. But because we are engaged we don’t need to evaluate the site objectively for its new-user-friendliness (and how many of us are guilty of that in relation to our own sites). If writers and publishers resent and reject such useful feedback from first time visitors – then we deserve to fall victim to our own hubris.

3. “…other book websites… not having problems with sales”
Of course many other book websites are run by large retailers and not by independent publishers. The fact that Amazon, B&N and The Book Depository set the standard for the online book purchasing experience is a real problem for under-resourced independent publishers (not to mention everyone else in the supply chain). The rest are playing catch-up. (As an aside, the assertion that others are not having problems with sales is debatable and unanswerable. Are we talking about publishers or retailers here? Other poetry publishers may well be having problems with sales – but if they are part of a larger group there may be other resources deployed to support poetry, and then of course some others have long-term public funding arrangements in place.)

As a result of watching the Just One Book campaign, I am renewed in my belief that just because a company publishes wonderful books, it does not follow that they are a successful publisher. Production and editorial values alone do not make for publishing success. Publishing, as practised by commercial publishing ventures, is about creating lists that successfully reach a paying market (which may or may not be the end consumer) and are therefore profitable. The required scale of that profit is for the publisher to determine according to their own objectives and shareholder or stakeholder pressures. But whilst there are many measures of creative and artistic success in the form of literary gongs and industry awards, Mr Micawber’s advice about what represents financial success still holds true today.

In 1999 (co-incidentally the year Salt was founded) I attended my first Independent Publisher's Guild conference as the newly appointed Secretary of the organisation. From the Platform, Michael Schmidt, publisher of Carcanet, said something that lodged in my mind and has remained with me ever since: "I take a forestry ecology approach to publishing poetry". So saying, Michael recognised that successful publishing needs first and foremost an enthusiastic, informed audience that values what is published highly enough to be prepared to pay for it (a market). Whether Schmidt and Carcanet have been successful in husbanding or enlarging poetry’s habitat is a separate question, and not for now.

If you are paying attention you may recall that in my opening sentence I asserted that Twitter is lateral as well as linear. Even better, the lateral can link back into the linear in serendipitous ways. A couple of days ago a random retweet threw up a perfect example of this by leading me to a blogpost by Mack Collier (@MackCollier) entitled “You will fail at social media.” Intrigued, I read on – and I thoroughly recommend that you do too. Embedded in the post is a video of a TED lecture from Sir Ken Robinson whose 15-minute presentation on why education matters posits that creativity demands we have to dare to fail in order to succeed. This short video has radically altered my thinking about my childrens’ education and training and education in the company I help to run. I can't recommend it highly enough. Sir Ken’s thesis observes that children dare to fail until adults educate that courage out of them – and that this traditional approach to education is disastrous in the context of the global creative economy we live and work in.

Then it dawned on me that what Chris and Jen at Salt have been doing for the last ten years is daring to fail. And when it looked like that failure was complete (in commercial if not artistic terms) they dared to be brutally honest about it – and apply their own brand of wit and creativity to facing up to that reality. How ironic it will be – and how salutary – if that failure is the birth of a level of success they could never previously dream of achieving.

On (the value of Tweet)streams and silence

2009-05-20T23:34:00.000-07:00

Aside from a return to the blogosphere last weekend also provided some badly needed R&R in the form of a day in the Kent countryside. We were meant to be walking but as rain threatened we took detours to the homes of two remarkable men. First Down House, home and laboratory to the naturalist Charles Darwin, whose Origin of Species radically altered our understanding of mankind, provoking a debate between creationists and evolutionists that continually resurfaces (and has been much in the news this bicentennial year). Then to Chartwell, creation of Winston Churchill, a man who lived multiple lives as a journalist, soldier, politician, trade-union-card-carrying bricklayer, artist, Prime Minister and Nobel-prize-winning author in just one legendary incarnation. Both visits have caused me to dwell on the nature of thought, ideas, information and work.

Since returning to my desk on Monday I’ve been amused to realise that my comments about Twitter being a river of information seem to be somewhat on point (a refreshing change). In past three days I’ve read numerous references to “stream” and “flow” in the way people talk about what Twitter and for that matter Web 2.0 is about. Of course thinking about information as a flow is not new: thread, flow, train, trail, stream are all words historically applied to the way in which information is shared between people. There is a commonality in the imagery deployed – a visualisation of information as being something linear and continuous or connected. What’s different about Twitter is it is not a thread but rather a medium for parcels of discontinuous information of almost infinitely variable usefulness, relevance and quality, to move along at various speeds and in multiple directions or even dimensions. Since loading Tweetdeck I’ve discovered that it is perfectly possible to sit and watch a stream of information parcels flowing in front of my eyes.

On a good day I feel like a heron perched on a rock watching the tweetstream flow by and choosing which is the plumpest, most promising fish to dive for. Conversely on a not-so-good day I feel like I’m in the Matrix, watching ribbons of code wash down the screen, and wonder whether I’m being reprogrammed or reconditioned as it flows in front of my eyes. Then of course there’s the suggestion that Twitter is “crack for the easily distractible” (apologies to whoever tweeted that remark, I didn’t have the wit to favourite it and I'm yet to discover a time-efficient way of swimming upstream to fish it out again.) Whatever one’s view, it is clear that Twitter and other media/ social media/ electronic networks are capable of transforming the way in which humans engage with information, ideas and possibly even with each other – or at least those humans with access to the web who are willing to spend considerable portions of time to splashing about in this virtual paddling pool.

Interestingly the two houses we visited on Sunday are only a few miles apart and both set deep in the Kent countryside in locations that command wonderful rural views and feel quintessentially English. Both have a sense of timelessness. Of course the “mothballing” effect of being frozen in an English Heritage or National Trust package is partly responsible for this: a house preserved as an exhibit is markedly different to a house full of the hurly-burly of family life (in Darwin’s case) or the extraordinary pageant of society figures that passed through Churchill’s country residence. Yet both houses were clearly refuges and places where creativity and ideas were given time and space to be nurtured.

Churchill employed numerous research assistants for his extraordinary published opus, whereas Darwin harnessed his children’s energy to aid his experiments by monitoring the work of earthworms and charting the flight of bees. Neither man laboured in isolation – but conversely each of them created around himself time and space in which to think, work and play. Time and space into which selected colleagues and collaborators were invited rather than manifesting as a constantly available flow of information. Both houses are characterised by sense of completeness and detachment from unwanted intrusion, which I suspect is intrinsic and not the result of the heritage package deal.

So I find myself wondering what role Twitter and Web 2.0 might have played in the life and works of these two extraordinary men. Would the homes they lived and worked in still have provided them with the space they needed to develop themselves and their projects? Darwin in particular spent years working on his theories. He knew that they would shake the establishment to its core and provoke controversy throughout the Western world, and therefore he refined and re-defined them scrupulously for years. Ultimately he was forced into publication by receipt of an unsolicited paper from Alfred Russel Wallace, another young naturalist who had independently reached similar conclusions. One can’t help wondering how much longer he would have worked before publication without this external impetus – or whether in a world of 24/7 external information exchange he would have developed the powers of observation that gave rise to his discoveries in the first place? Would Churchill have had an army of research assistants Tweeting constant updates on the life of the Duke of Marlborough manuscript in progress and if so would the Tweets have obviated the need for anyone to buy the book when complete?

Intrigued as I am by Twitter and the connectivity it opens up to us – I can’t help wondering if the information flow it creates and the speed at which the packages of wisdom we tweet and retweet flash past will aid the development and discoveries of new Darwins and Churchills – or hinder them. Both Darwin and Churchill fully understood the necessity to self-brand and to stay ahead – and each deployed the media of their age to this end. Both endured their own intellectual and emotional hardships, despite each being born to extraordinary privilege and opportunity. And each of them created around them a private haven, free of external intrusions, in which to work, play, think, create, write and, ultimately, to publish. I can’t help worrying that the exponential acceleration of the information exchange we’re creating online means we will never see their like again.

Of Tweets (and Clucks)

2009-05-16T06:59:00.000-07:00

Back to blogging my opinions after a few weeks muted by the demands of the physical world (as opposed to the intangible world that exists somewhere in the interface between my mind, fingertips, laptop and the internet). And I realise that what I have at the moment is not so much opinions – but a whole swathe of unanswered questions.

Top on the list is Why is Twitter talked about as part of the “social" media revolution? So far it looks to me that whilst it can be used to communicate the minutiae of one’s social life – that is just about its least interesting and in many cases its least frequent use. In the case of Twitter surely "Semi-Professional Media", "Self Branding Media", "Maven Media", "Free Advertising Media", "Fan Club Media", or even "Get a Life Media" could all be more descriptively accurate labels. To date by far the most interesting Twitterers I have followed are those actively engaged in working out what social and digital media are and how people engage with them now and in the future

Watching the different ways in which people tweet, I am coming to view the 140 character microblog as a mini blank canvas that’s moving at top speed while you are trying to paint the right characters onto it, and that accelerates away once the send button is hit. Tweets are something like a blank postcards on which one can both sketch a picture and write a message. But the card isn’t addressed or posted to one person – it’s cast out to sea like a message in a bottle. Except it isn’t a sea – it’s a torrent, a flowing river, chock full of other bottles and messages all shooting down the rapids.

I suspect that for some the challenge of being clever / witty/ interesting in the prescribed space adds an addictive frisson to Twitter (something like the challenge inherent in the NYRB personal ads). It’s clearly a wonderful medium for maven personality types, a global platform from which to broadcast their hints, tips, leads & ideas. I’m less certain of its worth or contribution to celebrity culture – although humans have an obvious and ancient urge to connect in some way with their idols, heroes and heroines no matter how remote. Perhaps following on Twitter provides an illusion of direct contact that speaks to this need.

I’m mystified by the ongoing discussion about whether Twitter will be a flash in the pan and the angst over Nielsen’s figures showing that more people drop out of Twitter than Facebook. Firstly, we know that fashions come and go in this space. So what if not everyone sticks with Twitter or it is not the flavour of 2010 or beyond. The point is that it is here now, and even in the small way I’ve been using it, its an incredibly powerful tool for connecting with people outside of one’s physical ambit and – crucially – for accessing and sharing ideas. If you want a highly reasoned and fascinating specialist disquisition on this try John Borthwick’s fascinating post The Rise of Social Distribution Networks on the Silicon Valley Insider. I particularly like his quote of Dave Winer’s metaphor of a “rope of information”. Except that in a rope the fibres are homogeneous and systematically intertwined. Twitter’s inherent structure is much more random – a sort of chaos theory applied to disembodied fragments of conversation. But that chaos is part of its attraction and its value. I certainly don’t care whether more people use Facebook or Linked In than Twitter – so why does it matter to others? I wonder if the answer to that question lies with those responsible for monetizing Silicon Valley.

I’m also bemused by the debate about the potential for passing around misinformation. Since when did any of us expect information put about by others – even if we know them (or in this virtual space “know” them) – to be consistently and entirely accurate? Has free information ever been considered to be inherently more reliable than paid-for information? Any of us who are specialists in a particular field know that the in traditional mainstream media what passes as information is often based on biased press releases that time-poor journalists working to deadlines have not had time to interrogate or even re-hash. It is axiomatic that much of what is tweeted and retweeted is second-hand information, gleaned quickly from others and re-broadcast to a follow group for a variety of purposes ranging from altruism to naked self-interest and every shade on the spectrum of motives in between and therefore is potentially inaccurate. If any of us wants to take what we find there seriously and act on its contents it remains our own responsibility to make reliable judgements about the original source and the potential for accuracy

This all links – tangentially – to the other big question that’s been bugging me. Why does it matter how many people I follow or am followed by? The culture of maximising followers strikes me as being an old-media ambition. What’s wrong with a small and self-selecting audience? Since when was biggest best? And we all know that democracies can get it spectacularly wrong. I’m not unhappy that so far I have just over 50 followers and am following about 80. Yes I plan to follow more, but slowly because I’d rather follow the most interesting few than the uninteresting many. So far Twitter is by far the most powerful Internet application I have encountered for access to diverse, relevant information which is pre-filtered for potential relevance to me by those I have chosen to follow. It's a bonus than in the process I'm also able to identify others with common interests and concerns and reach out to them.

All I have to do now is learn to fish the best bottles out of the river whilst avoiding drowning in it in the process.

Meanwhile back here in real, physical Caxland, the chickens arrived long before the ebook reader, as predicted. (I’m still hanging out for Kindle on iphone so it’s a case of waiting until the UK becomes part of Amazon’s e-universe). The girls: Elsie Hepzibah, Alchy and Gaia Artemis (names that divulge much about the individual characters of the resident teens and proto-teen who named them) are finding their voices and becoming daily funnier, bigger, bolder, cheekier and more beguiling. At the same time they are invading and threatening ever more of the garden. (Much as ebooks and digital information are growing up, becoming more sophisticated and penetrating ever more areas of the traditional publishing world). I’m going to have to reconfigure my tiny estate and build some discreet fences so the girls and my flowers and food crops can co-exist in harmony. It remains to be seen whether any legal, free market compliant, effective fences can be constructed that will allow books and ebooks to co-exist in a way that works for publishers, authors and readers.

Of eggs & ebooks II

2009-04-12T02:39:00.000-07:00

Easter Sunday seems an appropriate moment for an eggs & ebooks update.

The two most interesting purchases made here in Caxland since my last post have been a book and a purple eglu. Note I said a book, not an ebook. Ian Bremmer and Preston Keats' The Fat Tail, purchased at Bremmer's excellent RSA Thursday talk, to be precise. I observed that Blackwells who run booksales at the RSA gave no information about ebook purchasing options, and as Bremmer was signing my copy it crossed my mind that an ebook reader is going to fall down badly when it comes to feeding my signed hardback first edition habit.

(As an aside, anyone interested in an insight into the interplay of global recession with political pressures and the implications for business risk and investment, follow the link to the RSA's video. Once you get past the Woody Allen body language, Bremmer's presentation is a fascinating and accessible precis of the political and economic forces shaping the world we live and work in.)

So, no ebook reader as yet. The key problem here is that despite reservations about the dominance of amazon, I find myself veering inexorably towards Kindle 2, heavily influenced by the American commentators I'm following via blogs, Twitter and elsewhere. Everyone seems passionate about their Kindles. It is maddening that my colleagues over on the other side of the Altantic have access to Kindle while over here I don't. With no UK launch date yet announced, I've thought seriously about buying one in America. But I can't find any reassurance that I'd receive much support for it as UK-based user. Wireless certainly wouldn't work, and I'd only be able to purchase US editions from my laptop and then load onto my device via USB. But from what I understand this only works if I have a US billing address for my credit card, which I don't. What with all those barriers in place it somehow it seems like I'd be carrying around a stateless refugee with no rights in the world of global e-content. Similarly I can't find information available about Kindle for iphone anywhere outside the US.

In fact a bit of me is beginning to wonder whether amazon deserves the level of interest I am displaying in their product and the energy I am putting into finding out about it. The .co.uk website is scoring numerous marketing own goals in this regard. When I search Kindle 2 on the site, I find myself able to purchase accessories for my as-yet-hypothetical-Kindle (USB cables, leather covers and books about using and finding content). I'm also guided to other ebook devices, such as the Sony ebook Reader. Worse still if I go to the books section and search just Kindle, I find a list of books with Kindle in the title. Not a whisper (let alone a whispersync) of when UK customers are going to be able to buy into amazon's ebook reading device. I would have thought that if ever there was a company that understood the international market for goods and services and the fact that different availability in different territories just leads to frustration, it would be amazon. Yet when here in England decide I want to buy a Kindle 2 and look for information, I find myself directed to:

1. To Kindle the Starling (Aquila new poetry) by Michael Edwards (Paperback - 7 Feb 1973)
2 Used & new from £47.13

2. The Complete User's Guide to the Amazing Amazon Kindle by Stephen Windwalker (Paperback - 29 Aug 2008)
8 Used & new from £19.35

3. Puttin' on My Big Girl Panties by Michelle Kindle-Clyburn (Paperback - 16 Jul 2007)
Buy new: £13.49
13 Used & new from £9.18

(I kid you not.)

It seems very old world to have no indication of when Kindle will be available in the UK, when in America there's so much talk of how great Kindle is. In fact I'm beginning to understand how very frustrated blind and visually impaired people feel when they have to wait months for large-print, audio and braille editions of books the rest of us have had access to and been chattering about for months.

In the meantime, no chickens in the garden yet, but the purple eglu has arrived safely, in a piece of exemplary customer services from the people at Omlet. It was ordered online, arrived first thing on the selected delivery date with a note reminding me that whoever recommended the eglu to me is eligible for a £20 voucher. Jenny, in whose garden I first saw a red eglu some years ago, was mightily surprised to receive an over-excited phone call while she was sitting at Gatwick waiting to fly off to a week’s retreat in a remote French monastery, telling her to apply for her voucher when she returns. (I don't think that keeping chickens and the wish to go on a retreat are linked, but I'll check when she's back.)

No hens yet, though. It’s torture, but I’m waiting until London Book Fair is over. I don’t want to move the girls in and then abandon them for four days while I check in with the international publishing community in the aisles at Earls Court.

I'm amused by how much interest my future flock is raising though. It seems that the British publishing world is full of wannabe smallholders (co-incidentally Jenny of the red eglu is founder of Advance Materials, independent publisher of language teaching materials). And whilst I've had no recommendations at all from british publishers about which ebook reader to buy, there have been several suggestions on the right breeds to populate the eglu (it's comforting for example to know that someone at Britannica knows his Sussexes from his Orpingtons). I wonder - when and if I finally obtain my Kindle - whether I'll receive half so many suggestions for what to read on it.

Of eggs & ebooks

2009-03-30T11:39:00.000-07:00

Payday tomorrow and I'm contemplating the next two major purchases to be made here in Caxland: a henhouse and an ebook reader. The irony is that I've spent a lifetime reading and never looked after a hen in my life, yet choosing the right accommodation for the soon-to-arrive chickens is proving significantly easier than selecting an ebook device. And I'm talking orders of magnitude here. When it comes to housing poultry I know I need maximum ease, minimum maintenance, easy to clean and as foxproof as possible. That the eglu from Omlet looks funky and maintains its value with virtually zero depreciation are a fantastic bonus (the rare occasions on which one appears second hand on eBay it fetches only a few pounds less than a brand new model). Yes it's going to be expensive, but do I care? Only a bit. I've wanted hens for years, and despite a peripatetic lifestyle the eglu and kind neighbours willing to trade shutting-up duty for fresh eggs are finally going to make it happen.

Compare the ease of this purchase then with my dilemma over what hardware or device I select to read ebooks with. I know more about books than I'll ever know about chickens. And yet I really have no idea what to go with: Sony E-book Reader; iLiad; Cybooks Gen 3 ebook; Kindle 2; Kindle on iphone... You may be wondering why if I like printed books so much I even want to do this (cf. yesterday's post). The answer is multi-textured and certainly not because I've wanted an ebook reader for years. Sure I've owned various PDAs and electronic notebooks, but none of them has ever become an indispensible tool or the only repository of my contacts list. And each time I bought a new electronic organiser I thought this was the device that would finally house diary, contacts, to do list and latterly Internet access - making everything finally cohere into one easy package. But here I am years later, with a mobile phone, laptop, access to a massive database at work and a dongle for online access on the move. Oh yes - and a decaying filofax. A niggling voice tells me that whatever ebook option I choose it might end up just as much of a let down as the last generation of devices.

Why an ebook reader and why now, then? Well because Web 2.0 and beyond, that's why. I live and work in a world of information, ideas, books and speed. Much as I love print books - and let's face it my daily working life revolves around enabling publishers to get them out of a warehouse and into customers' hands - I don't always want to wait. If one of my colleagues or friends emails or blogs about a writer, or if I read a review or hear a speaker talking about a book, particularly a non-fiction book, I'd like to read and discuss it now - not next week. So although I can't imagine ever not buying any print books, there are some texts for which I'd happily trade bound paper for speed. For an English Literature & Drama graduate I purchase a terrifying number of business books - and guess what - they're not the ones in pride of place on my sitting room shelves.

I search online for clues about which bit of kit to select and my heart sinks. OK, I admit, I held and had a play with a Kindle 2 at the IPG Conference and was temporarily seduced. But why would I want to carry one with me everywhere when it can't do anything other than host books. Why can't I blog from it, tweet from it, make calls from it, order my groceries from it, check in with the children on it, and maybe if I rig up a webcam, look out for Mr Fox to boot? If I do go for Kindle, it'll be on iphone, no matter how sexy the Kinde 2 looks and feels. But then there's not even a Kindle 2 page on the .co.uk website yet, and luddite that I am I can't work out if I can download Kindle for iphone from the .com website to a UK phone. Moreover if I can, do I really want to only be able to buy US editions from the .com site?

There are alternatives of course. I know that as at 21 August last year Gail Rebuck thought her Sony ebook Reader the bees knees. But she's not in my Filofax on my Linked In network, so how do I know if she still thinks so? For all I know it might already be discarded in the back of a storage box along with a jumble of chargers, dead mobile phones, ethernet cables and other detritus of modern life. And above all the Sony seems to me to have many of the same downsides as Kindle 2.

So, dear Reader, if you're using an ebook reader - your opinions and advice will be most welcome.

In the meantime one thing's certain. There'll be chickens in the garden and omlette for breakfast long before I've made my reader choice. Here in Caxland eggs seem a whole lot easier to crack than ebooks. And I'll bet that whatever device I do choose I won't be able to sell it a year later on eBay for as much as it cost me.

On Twitterverse

2009-03-29T11:29:00.000-07:00

I hope to return to some of the issues raised by Tapscott, Keen et al, but as it’s the weekend I thought I’d permit myself a little detour into reading for pleasure. And most specifically reading poetry. I accept it's not a widespread habit. Moreover most booksellers I know reckon more people write poetry than buy it. The relative health of the US and UK poetry book markets can be gauged by comparing the two stacks of poetry on offer at the Union Station Washington branch of R Dalton with W H Smith at Kings Cross London, where it is virtually impossible to find a single poetry book except the occasional Poems on the Underground or Forward Book of Poetry (even when the shop isn't halved in size due to the ongoing station refurbishment). But bear with me. Poetry reading lurks deep in my DNA, and I like to think there are wider lessons about publishing to be found via an occasional detour into verse. And in this instance, Twitterverse.

Last week marked two debuts for me: blogging and tweeting. And by a happy co-incidence it was also the week in which Ben Okri began publishing a poem a line a day on Twitter. Today is Day 5 and when I checked this afternoon, Okri had attracted 268 followers. Compare this to 11,776 for Cheryl Cole and draw your own conclusions.

I'm finding it hard to know what to make of Okri's experiment, other than its obvious role as a hook for sales of his forthcoming Tales of Freedom, in which Okri is said to be experimenting with the boundaries between short story and verse forms. (I'm presuming that as it is in the public domain on Twitter, I'm not breaching copyright by reproducing it here.) So far the poem reads:

I sing a new freedom -
Freedom with discipline.
We need freedom to rise higher.
Be true to yourself.
In the follies of our times.

Except of course that isn't how I've experienced it. The "follower" receives a line a day. If like me, you twitter on your laptop not your phone or PDA (uncool I know, but I'm over 40 and on a steep learning curve) it's likely that by the time you look, Okri's tweet of the day is already buried way down out of sight under a pile of pressing/ diverting/ informative/ amusing/ crass/ inane comments. And then there's the question: is a line a poem? It's certainly a reading experience of sorts. But not satisfying one. So far it has only been the fact that I know Okri's credentials as a poet and thinker that on reading a line like We need to rise higher I haven't rolled my eyes in pretty much the same way my 13-year-old does every time I open my mouth, dismissed Okri as a spent new age guru and hit the remove button. I might be more lenient if I felt Okri were writing the poem on a day-by-day basis. But based on the Guardian's report I think not. And I note that since Day 3 tweets have been sent at precisely 10.00am from Hootsuite, which presumably frees the poet from the responsibility of being online at the time.

Still, I'm in too deep to stop. On Okri's profile page the poem so far reads upside down, as follows:

Line 5: In the follies of our time. #benokri
10.00am MAR 28 from Hootsuite
Line 4: Be true to yourself. - #benokri
10.00am MAR 27 from Hootsuite
Line 3: We need freedom to rise higher. - #benokri
10.00am MAR 26 from Hootsuite
Line 2: Freedom with discipline. #benokri
5.30pm MAR 25 from web
Line 1: I sing a new freedom - #benokri
5.29pm MAR 24 from web

Looking at it like this prompts some insight into the nature of reading for pleasure. I find myself irritated that I have no idea how long this poem is. I can't flick through the pages and know at the outset whether I am in for a haiku or an epic. I'm annoyed too that I can't see the poem the right way up and without the interruptions of twitter rubric. Are they a refrain that the poet wants to be part of the poem? If so it's a dissonant harmony. I want this poem now. I want to see its shape; to make some judgements about it based on its form, its visual impact on a printed page (not scrawled on my notepad day-by-day). I want to know now whether it's worth spending my time and energy on - not at some indeterminate future date when the final line is delivered. Yet I'm also fascinated by questions like is this a poem yet? When does a poem become a poem? At present it's the poetical social networking equivalent of Bishop Berkley's table or possibly Schrödinger's cat. Does it exist, and is it alive or dead? Or has it even been completely born yet?

I'm exercised too by wondering when it is finished which way round will it be? I've never intentionally read a poem from the bottom up before (excepting perhaps Zukofsky's final 80 Flowers which he wrote hoping all of the relative juxtapostions of the words would resonate). So far this poem could work read from the top, but which is actually the bottom:

In the follies of our time.
Be true to yourself.
We need freedom to rise higher.
Freedom with discipline.
I sing a new freedom.

I find myself waiting to know whether tomorrow's tweet will add a new dimension to the poem and maybe tell me once and for all which way up it goes. Or sound like another throwaway from a second rate life coach. Either way I'll be looking for it at 10am.

So, I ask myself, do I like poetry delivered this way? No, not much. Will I be buying Tales of Freedom? You bet.

Twitter brought me back to Okri's work (and back to poetry after a few weeks off). But I'll be buying it in print, on paper.

Authors and publishers preach social & economic change at RSA/Britannica debate

2009-03-29T10:39:00.001-07:00

I’m encouraged to notice that although the world of the word published on paper in volumes known as books is undergoing something of an identity crisis, it is still authors and publishers who are driving forward vital social discussion. Thursday evening's energetic RSA/Britannica debate The Economic Crisis and the Age of Uncertainty featured three prominent authors alongside an eminent academic economist who, between them, set a fair few cats amongst the pigeons.

After a tentative start with a temporary Powerpoint failure neatly counterpointing his evangelism of the transformational power of new technologies Don Tapscott soon hit his stride (with the support of an off-stage tecchy). Those familiar with Tapscott’s Wikinomics will not have been surprised at his proselytising web 2.0 as a force for collaboration, self-organisation, economic renewal and, ultimately, for good (and that’s leaving aside the way in which web-based social interaction is believed to be rewiring the human brain).

Two of Tapscott’s three respondents, economist Professor Lord Eatwell and Dan Hind (author of The Threat to Reason: how the enlightenment was hijacked and how we can reclaim it - and publisher at the Bodley Head for his day job), approached the economic theme of the evening more directly than Tapscott in his upbeat but tangential presentation. For a while it looked as though the evening would fail to cohere or to fulfil its potential. Hind mused that having been failed by the self-regulation of financial institutions and the inability of the advertising-funded media to explore the truth, the public must step up to the plate to both demand and promulgate transparency by, amongst other methods, creating a new structure for funding investigative journalism. Professor Lord Eatwell, meantime, began by expressing the view that the interactive web is nowhere near so significant a force for change as the steam engine, electricity or the combustion engine. Notwithstanding the fact that Web 2.0 could not exist without electricity there was almost an audible intake of breath from the disbelieving audience. As his speech progressed although we were moving deeper into the causes of abject failure in our global financial systems, we were straying further from the heart of the matter – which is (it seems to me) the question: how can we transform the global economy into a viable, sustainable and maybe even fair framework for humanity to support itself within?

And then respondent number three, Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur - how the Internet is killing our culture – whose body language confirmed his contrarian mindset as he resolutely remained seated, eschewing the lectern – spoke out in resolute tones articulating both his disagreement with Lord Eatwell over the relative significance of old and new technologies and his dubiousness about the over-simplicity of Tapscott’s view that it is the young who have become enabled experts and who will moderate the social and economic transitions that we so desperately need. Keen pointed out that although the young are empowered by new technologies, they are still children and we are still their parents. Sparks began to fly as he spoke of the unnoticed social revolution that has handed children supremacy over adults and he posed the questions “have we let our children down?” and “have we failed as parents?”.

By this time all four panelists had begun to bristle with energy as the debate jumped several gears into overdrive. The woefully inadequate time remaining for Q&As brought four viewpoints from the floor, including the question – “if pedagogy is dead, will universities be reinvented?” and a fascinating insight into what is wrong with the structure of the economy from the founder of a peer-based banking organisation (his view seemed to be that the fundamental flaw of our historical economic structures lies the homogeneity of education, thinking and expectations of the highly intelligent people who devised and operated them). Each of the four points raised could form the basis of a whole new debate in their own right (and it is to be hoped that the RSA and Britannica take note of that).

Almost out of time, the four speakers were engaging at a level that was simultaneously contentious and collaborative – all four in their summations managed to agree and disagree with the others. The final few minutes ranged from Tapscott’s suggestion that a far better comparison for the changes that are being wrought by Web 2.0 is not the steam engine, but the printed book, which was the first vehicle for mass dissemination of information, to Keen’s disturbing and unanswered question, “what would have happened to global democracy in the 1930s if the social web had existed then?”

Chairman Matthew Taylor (Chief Executive of the RSA) in closing the evening described it as the most contentious he had witnessed in RSA lecture theatre. The pity is that it was far too short - the room was bursting with informed professionals many of whom had much to contribute to the discussion. I can only hope that all of us present left asking ourselves how we as individuals can ensure that the debate is not left within the four walls of the RSA – but taken out into our lives, workplaces and homes – to find a way forward for the economy, and thereby for society, that does not go down the paths that Andrew Keen so darkly hinted at in his references to 1930s fascism.

And in the meantime - three cheers for authors and publishers.