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.”
