No Pain, No
E-Gain?
FROM PUBLISHING
TRENDS (MAY 2001)
Despite
lackluster sales and the death of all things ‘e’, there
is continued interest from publishers in ebooks,
epublishing, and elearning. So the seventh annual seminar
hosted by University of Virginia and the Library
of Congress on “Publishing in the 21st Century”
was very much web-focused. The keynote was given by
Hungry Minds’ CEO John Kilcullen (before
his company was put on the market, though he made many
self-deprecating remarks about its precarious state),
and the panels were focused on “the new breed” of publishers,
as one panel was indeed called.
One of the liveliest panels was devoted to “The Promise
of Distance Learning.” The market of college-aged students
is estimated to reach 160 million by 2010, with 60%
of those in Asia. Singapore alone has 400,000 users
on its university site, while a robust online university
is flourishing in Istanbul, because it cannot afford
to build schools to educate all of its youth. Michael
Moh, a principal with ThinkEquity, an investor
in educational companies, said that if the Internet
is in the 21st century what the railroad was to the
industrial revolution, then “distance learning is its
tracks.” Most participants felt that a combination of
on-site participation with distance learning was most
successful.
There was much discussion of the future of textbook
publishing, with Bob Christie, CEO of Thomson
Learning Group, admitting that 52% of college students
do not buy new textbooks; they either buy used, or they
share with friends. But textbooks sales went up when
there was also a web component. His company is looking
at site-licensing online book content through participating
universities. (At present, though all Thomson books
are digitized as PDF files, the cost of adding tagging
for all but a few is prohibitive.) Becoming ever more
competitive on the p-book front, Thomson is testing
a program that charges bookstores for returns, and offers
the used book price to students whose professors require
that they buy the textbook.
While pondering other “New Ways to Value Information,”
Jon Winder, senior vp of Harvard Business
School Publishing, confirmed that — yes — the “pay-for-content
model” is on the ascendancy, as ad-driven schemes litter
the dot-com wasteland and publishers scramble for alternate
revenue streams. He noted that subscription or pay-per-use
models were gaining favor, and examined some early successes
such as the online edition of the Wall Street Journal
(citing its financial relevancy) and the boom in X-rated
content (it’s based on a “core passion”).
Moving on to passions of a different sort, David
Sidman, CEO of Content Directions, plunged
into the world of “recombinant publishing,” arguing
that publishers must work to offer information at the
right level of “granularity.” For example, online travel
guides could sell just the “hotel” or “sights” sections,
while business information publishers might consider
selling pieces of analyst reports instead of a full
subscription. The tricky part will be tagging all this
content so that it can be identified at the granular
level — the individual chapter, encyclopedia entry,
recipe, etc. — and publishers must then create a “metadata
database” so that the content can actually be looked
up. Probably the cutest message from Sidman’s talk on
digital object identifiers, however, was the heartwarming
tagline: “A DOI is Forever.” Elsewhere, HarperCollins’
Larry Bryant shared a few e-publishing tips.
Most problems aren’t technical, but are process-related,
he noted, before chanting the new corporate mantra,
“Standards are GOOD.”
Few at the seminar, however, reported unalloyed success
online, though Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Associates,
with 21 million pages views per month, was closest
to crowing. Laura Fillmore of Open Book Systems
probably summed it up best when, referring back to John
Kilcullen’s advice to “follow the money,” added, referring
to the complexity and cost of co-ordinating technology
and content, “I say, follow the pain.”
©2001
Publishing Trends
