Well, let's get on with it.... :
First of all I would like to say thank you to Anthony Watkinson for organizing this conference and the entire summer program. It has been an unforgettable and invaluable experience. The quality of the speakers throughout has been outstanding, and as I said, the speakers at the conference promise to be absolutely top notch! Thank you also, of course, to Tula Giannini, our dean, who intuited that a partnership with UCL's publishing department could yield promising results. Well, I concur wholeheartedly.
Anthony conceived of this conference as an opportunity to bring together representatives of various facets of the publishing and e-publishing worlds, in order to highlight what he calls "the drivers of change". The conference as a whole will focus primarily on e-books and e-journals, since we are concerned mainly with scholarly publications. Each speaker has been asked to concentrate on business models, how they were, how they are, how they might and will be, with special attention to sustainability, reliability and effectiveness in the delivery of content.
Today, Thursday, the presentations will revolve mostly around the book, and tomorrow around the journal.
Most of the speakers have sent Andy (our wonderful technical and logistical coordinator) their presentations in PowerPoint form, so I will be able to include links for most of them.
I will try to be brief in my outline of each presentation and point out what made me pause and ponder.
For the first time at UCL, we moved from our classroom in the Henry Morley building to the Darwin Lecture Theatre, a largish amphitheater of a room with a podium at the front, very well suited to our purposes.
First up was Graham Taylor, of the Publishers Association. Graham gave us an Overview of the e-content scene. He spoke first of what he knows: namely that the big deal works for all concerned parties and he can't see it going away soon, since library budgets are pitifully small and about half of them are for acquisitions. He dispelled a myth that publishers want to limit access, and I can appreciate that. He told us that copyright law is not the enemy but a way to maintain order, and one interesting fact that I did not know is that copyright is responsible for 11% of the country's economy, more than TV and more than the movies. Very interesting. Then he spoke of what he does not know: namely how open access is going to work, who is going to pay for digital preservation over time, what students want, and what constitute fair dealing and fair use in digital media. He spoke about what concerns him: "good enough" is taking over, can Open Access be sustainable as a business model, self-archiving will probably lead to fewer subscriptions, the uncertain future of retailers, the Google plan to take over the world.
He also talked about what intrigues him: the possibility of "the iPod for reading" (he's seen something promising); the future of blogging and other user-generated e-content, what e-books are going to look like in the future (we ain't seen nothing yet); social networking.
All in all, a very interesting overview, and a good beginning.
Anthony and his collaborators have selected six drivers of change. The first speaker addressed the first of these:
David Nicholas, Centre for Publishing at University College London : The first driver of change - What the virtual user seems to want.
Dave had spoken to us at the very beginning of our class here, I think on the first day. The focus of his research in recent years has been very much the user. He believes that in most cases institutions, publishers, academics pay lip service to the user, but no one actually conducts sound scientific studies aimed at figuring out what it is, really and truly, that the user does when in an e-environment, and what he or she might be looking for, or might do upon finding something.
The user has how become a consumer, and that is the first driver of change. Scholarly communication has become a popular commodity, but the market is volatile and the only way to understand where it is going is by evaluating. But very few people are doing that. In this market, visibility is everything, and it is increasingly difficult to establish or even identify where authority lies. Search engines create a semblance of order, but often only exacerbate the problem of visibility vs. authority. Dave sees e-books as accelerators of change, with a potential market made up of students, scholars and the general public. He sees great potential in the virtual scholar environment. He reiterated the concept that the market is slow to respond to user needs, and that we need to move away from questionnaires, because people give inaccurate answers for many reasons, and look at what people actually do, using deep log analysis.
Libraries are in a tight spot, are perceived as being too large, too expensive, and not able to keep up with the times sufficiently. E-books could change that. Dave suggests that perhaps libraries should invest in "user observatories", and commented on the fact that as far as he knows there is not even one library that has one.
Publishers may have to face the fact that their "honeymoon" with libraries has come to an end, but they can bounce back by understanding and embracing the fact that the user/consumer is becoming more important than the author.
Users should be able to benefit from the large amount of information available, though there are real dangers of "dumbing down". Downloads cannot be considered a measurement of success, because people download and then don't read.
An interesting fact that he pointed out, in terms of analyzing usage of scholarly content sites, is that 45% of "visitors" to Oxford Scholarship Online are robots!
The third speaker was Richard Withey, from Independent News and Media PLC. His presentation was great for two reasons: 1. He comes from the world of paper publishing and had an interesting take on things, and; 2. He was the first and perhaps only speaker, really, in the two weeks we've been here, to incorporate significant multimedia in his presentation. We had not one but two videos. Fun! His talk was on The second driver of change -- Changing economics, lessons from another sector. Unfortunately, I can't provide a link to this presentation, but I will do my best to summarize.
Richard too notes that consumers have simply taken the power for themselves. In the world of digital television and radio, for instance, there are many channels and many on-demand services, that allow consumers to choose what and when they will watch/listen. On this same topic, he mentioned two phenomena thought by the publishing industry to be dead, that have now returned to haunt us: personalization and disintermediation. "Personalization tends to force disintermediation," in his words. He dates the beginning of the end of old ways to 2004, when consumers first began to take control of communication.
The publishing industry has much to do to retain and regain the attention of the generation of 20-30-year-olds, who tend to read newspapers less and less. He spoke of the "Google generation" -- a term we heard a week ago from Ian Rowlands -- as those children born in or after 1993 who will never have known a world without the internet and Google. We have to be ready for these people when they reach newspaper-reading age. These people have an entirely new and different set of expectations.
One of the two videos he showed us is the Google video 2014 Epic, found on YouTube. It was entertaining and also gave us food for thought. Interesting that it's not about 2300, but about 2014, a very, very near future, underscoring the speed at which the world of information is changing.
The fourth and last speaker for the morning was Robert Kiley of the Wellcome Trust. His presentation was on The third driver of change -- He who pays the piper. The Wellcome Trust is the largest charity organization in the UK and the second largest medical charity in the world. The tagline on their home page reads "The Wellcome Trust is an independent charity funding research to improve human and animal health." They are incredibly wealthy and spend enormous amounts of money each year on research. What was most interesting about Robert's talk, however, was that it pointed out the fact that in recent years funding agencies like his have begun to focus not only on research that is being conducted, but on the dissemination of scholarship. This is a very significant shift in the policies of funders, and worthy of note. Robert is the head of e-strategy at the Wellcome Library. He has been involved mainly in devising strategies for the development and preservation of digital resources. His main focus of the past couple of years has gone into developing the Wellcome Trust's open access policy. He has succeeded in securing the cooperation of several other funding agencies, some of which are governmental, in the funding and development of UK PubMed Central. Two other interesting projects he has been involved in are: the digitization of the image holdings of the Wellcome Library, and a joint project with the JISC and the US National Library of Medicine to digitize a selection of historically significant medical journals.
Preservation is very important when talking about digital resources, and Robert has also initiated what is known as the UK Web Archiving Consortium. His talk focused on existing models of e-publishing, how they work, followed by an overview of the open access model, with particular attention to its sustainability and who pays for what.
This talk ended the morning of the first day of the conference. After lunch in the Garden Room, a very pleasant space overlooking a beautiful lawn, we assembled in the Darwin Theatre once again for the afternoon session. Because we were running a little late on the schedule, they decided to skip the panel on books that was scheduled to kick off the afternoon session, and go right on to the first presentation. Anthony had other commitments for the afternoon, so he left the chair for the afternoon session to Iain Stevenson, Professor of Publishing at UCL.
We had four speakers in the afternoon. Before we started, however, we had an introductory speech by Christoph Chesher of Taylor&Francis/Informa on how far we have come in the digital revolution. He spoke to us of the challenges of the many available formats. What platform should be used for digital output of books: XML? OEB? MS Reader? Mobipocket, PDF? He talked about what libraries want vs. what publishers offer, and where these can meet. One of the problems in libraries is always that of unlimited simultaneous usage of e-books vs. 1 pair of eyes at a time. He also mentioned the ongoing discussion of bibliographic identification of e-books: i.e. should we use ISBN's, DOI's (digital object identifiers). DOI's have the advantage of being "permanent" and unique. And he touched on Digital Rights Management and piracy. A good starting point for the afternoon talks.
The first speaker of the afternoon was Linda Bennett, an e-book consultant. Her talk was titled: Publisher business models. Linda mentioned that there is an increasing trend toward sales to individual users, and that they want to buy parts of books. The sale of chapters of books is increasing. This is something we heard about in one of the lectures during the course, and of course it raises many questions. If you sell a chapter by itself, do you write a short bibliography at the end of each chapter that refers only to that chapter? Do you write chapters so that they can be narrative wholes, in and of themselves, rather than a step in the narrative arc of a larger work? Should there be an alphabetized index at the end of each chapter? All these things need to be thought out and will generate much debate, I'm sure.
Librarians want e-books to be free or cheap. They also want simultaneous users and textbooks to be available. Some librarians prefer a single platform, which would justify the continued existence of aggregators.
Publishers, on the other hand, maintain that it costs as much to publish an e-book as it does a print book, that they should be compensated for multiple simultaneous uses and that high-demand books should cost more.
Aggregators allow librarians to have to deal with fewer intermediaries and enlarge publishers' client base by providing more routes to market.
The reality is that it is very rare that many users are reading one e-book at the same time, at least until now. Linda talked about the retail model and the various refinements that can be offered, like read only or single chapters. Then she spoke of various sales models to libraries, who can purchase single copies in perpetuity at prices similar to the print versions and pay a maintenance fee for the digital platform. She also talked about the subscription model, and about how some publishers allow simultaneous viewings and others don't.
Finally, she outlined the major characteristics of some aggregators (NetLibrary, MyiLibrary, Books24x7) and of some e-book publishers (Elsevier, Springer, Taylor & Francis, OUP, CUP, etc.).
The second speaker of the afternoon was Terry Bucknell of the University of Liverpool Libraries, who gave us A librarian's perspective on eBooks. Terry is the manager of electronic resources at the University of Liverpool, and manages a large portfolio of e-journals, databases and e-books in addition to a medium-sized amount of print subscriptions. He is part of the JISC E-Books Observatory Project, which I have already written about in this blog, and he is also Project Leader for the JISC ticTOCs project, which is just kicking off, and which will provide a personalizable webspace (similar to delicious or other similar tools) for scholars, in which they will be able to aggregate, organize and republish Tables of Contents (TOCs) from many different journals. His presentation was really a list of "demands" that librarians have of publishers. It was not uninteresting, because it always helps to hear things reiterated in an organized fashion, but none of the things he mentioned was new to us, after the two-week course.
The third and fourth speakers switched places due to scheduling conflicts, so the third presentation was given by Michael Holdsworth, now a consultant but formerly of Cambridge University Press. His presentation was on Amazon, Google & Windows Live. Michael is an expert on these three companies and his presentation's focus was on the programs and models they are employing in e-publishing, and the impact that they may have on traditional bookselling.
He is personally partial to Windows Live -- Live Search Books is better than Google in terms of search. He put the missions of the companies side by side and analyzed them:
Google - to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.
Amazon (unofficial) - to be the world's most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they may want to buy online at a great price.
Google has always said it would not sell anything. This is no longer strictly true, as they have just announced that they are going to start to commercialize their publisher content, with online access and a consumer e-subscription model. They will offer both rental and purchase.
Amazon has launched Amazon Upgrade, which is a pathbreaking new service. you get online access to the books you purchase in print. For 10-20% extra on the purchase price you get unlimited perpetual online access. There is talk about a "secret" Amazon e-book reader, but Amazon's online e-book reading platform is already very good, with highlighting, notes, shareable notes, sticky notes, etc.
Michael outlined the four conditions for e-books to succeed:
- A good device
- Enough content
- Cheaper prices
- Easy DRM (digital rights management)
- What is online access really worth?
- What should Google's price model be?
- Will people, as publishers hope, be willing to pay more for more?
- Will Safari compete with Google?
- Will Google allow all eyeballs to go search on the publishers' sites?
- Will Google stay out of library and university supply?
The last speaker of the day was Christopher Warnock, the CEO of Ebrary. The title of his talk was The eBrary vision: A case study. Christopher did not provide us with an online copy of his presentation, so I cannot provide you with a link, but I will do my best to summarize and if you follow the links I do provide you will easily be able to see what eBrary is all about.
In the future all information will be available to everyone online.
Interesting factoid: there are not enough trees in China to provide every Chinese citizen with a daily newspaper.
Initially eBrary produced a platform of e-content accessible through a proprietary reader. Today more than 85% or the world's commercially printed documents are printed from PostScript or PDF, while being authored through x/sgml. Ebrary builds software that builds full-text databases from PostScript, PDF and XML files that integrate with other, web-based electronic resources.
Christopher said that if they can add value to something that is perceived to have little or no value, they see that as a success. Their main goal was to create a client experience that added significantly to the user's experience.
They made InfoTools, an application that allows users to highlight any word or phrase and draw upon any reference work the library subscribes to, in addition to many web resources and any other specified catalog.
Another resource they have is eBop, a self-service e-book ordering platform that has some features in common with Amazon, like "others who ordered this also ordered...", but it also has other very useful features like the ability to check if the ordering library already has ordered this particular title.
As for generation of revenue, they have implemented microtransactions, and they seem to be working.
This ends our overview of the first day of our two-day conference.
Goodnight and love to all my friends and family, until tomorrow. :-)
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