While pioneering trade publishers were not exactly in evidence among the crowd at the Digital Rights Management & Digital Distribution conference in New York on February 23-24, John Wiley’s Gregory St. John offered a glimpse into that rare publishing phenomenon known as the New Business Model. Besides offering a gloss on new-economy jargon (“opportunities” are erstwhile “problems”; “customer-driven features” are actually the counterparts to “things we did wrong”), St. John explained how Wiley came to put 300 technical and professional journals on the Web and attract over 140,000 users in the bargain.
Following an “invaluable” pilot program that traded free online journal content for the feedback of 70,000 users over a 15-month period, Wiley rolled out its commercial site (www.interscience.wiley.com) in January 1999, and is now getting set to put the print versions of these journals unceremoniously out to pasture. Granted, appealing to a technically savvy print subscriber base was a no-brainer. But the company has still bent over backwards to draw people to the site, including free web access for all print subscribers (although a fee will probably kick in for this access in 2001) and unrestricted guest access to article abstracts. The real strategy is to lure users into “enhanced” web access with added features, or into a full-blown “society member access” program that aspires to be a portal-like community. In addition, there are plans to roll out web-based access to over 30 major reference works this year, all the while jettisoning those former New Business Models that didn’t quite fly (“I’m trying desperately to get out of the CD-ROM business,” said St. John).
On the down side, the web venture required an unplanned excursion into the wilderness of software development. Initially, a vendor affiliated with Mitsubishi was hired to devise the web program, but when the Asian economy crashed, Mitsubishi dumped its non-essential programs, along with Wiley’s project. Wiley was forced to hire the system engineers directly, and now, claims St. John, the company’s London-based engineering group is said to function more efficiently than any vendor it could have hired for the job. Other changes included a shift in marketing attitude (“We now do press releases rather than brochures”) and a branding campaign focused on promoting the entire service rather than the individual products. All in all, the program amounts to “an integrated process of relationship building” more akin to how services are sold than to how products are sold.
As Wiley reportedly prepares to decamp for digs west of the Hudson — and symbolically shed its old-media address — stay tuned to find out whether St. John’s paradigm-busting mantras turn out to be, shall we say, content-rich.
