Panelists at the 15th annual meeting of the AAP's professional and scholarly publishing division, held earlier this month in Washington, D.C., presented a dizzying preview of technology changes that will affect the industry in the near future. Among the issues speakers dealt with were the explosion in computing power, wireless delivery, bandwidth and storage capacity. Indeed, one panelist noted that by 2005 it will be possible to store the entire contents of the Library of Congress on a chip the size of a fingernail.
Introduced as the after-dinner keynote by AAP president Pat Schr der, Marjorie Scardino, CEO of Pearson PLC, exhorted publishers to "not hide behind the way things have always been done.... These new technologies are changing our lives as publishers forever. Just make sure the people who get disintermediated by the Internet are not you!"
Tina Ravitz, COO of Versaware, an e-publishing Web portal and publishing software developer, predicted that in three to five years researchers will receive movie-quality visuals and endless multiple-media data on paper-crisp, Internet-linked screens on their cell phones. Keiron Hyton, senior v-p at publishing and information media investment banking firm Berkerey Noyes, urged publishers to experiment with a variety of business models--business to business or business to consumer--and to leverage the power of their content over many delivery systems. Ravitz called this the "chop shop" approach and pointed out that "the parts, sold separately, may be worth more than the whole."
Metadata: The Key to Sales
Throughout the sessions, attendees heard that the customer wants content, not a specific format. Quoting a disgruntled publisher, Hyton told the group, "Now the ducks have the guns."
The "Bookselling: New Channels, New Challenges" panel outlined exactly the kind of effective metadata (digitized bibliographic information about content) needed for marketing books and journals on the Internet. Sloane Lederer, trade sales and marketing director at W.H. Freeman, explained: "This is our first chance to offer the reader as much information as we have in-house." Mathew Davie, online data manager at S&S, emphasized that "sales of titles online with rich metadata outsell those with just title and author by a ratio of eight to one."
Tim Lafferty, v-p of sales at Reciprocal, a developer of digital rights management software for e-commerce, noted that publishers such as Houghton Mifflin and Freeman are partnering with Reciprocal to deliver documents to students and faculty online by credit card.
"Publishers' content is either online or it's nowhere," cautioned Audrey Melkin, v-p, North American sales, of Catchword.com, a Web-based British firm that provides online academic content to libraries. Melkin noted that librarians report foot traffic is down and electronic use is up. She urged publishers to consider partnering with technology companies for distribution and added that Catchword.com is so aggressive at making content available that it offers access to content upon request and checks the subscriptions details later. "The key," said Melkin, "is to facilitate access."
In the final session, Derk J. Haank, chairman of Elsevier Science, the international STM publisher, noted, "The [print] journal has been a fine product, but it is time to move to a higher-functionality format. Cars are never going to cost less, they are just going to have more features. We must use electronic means to add value [to our content] and satisfy our customers."
Nevertheless, in the midst of this technological extravaganza, one skeptical attendee noted during a break, "Every year we focus on the digital stuff, yet every year the same companies hang back, doing little that's really new." But it's clear that attitude simply can't last. Barbara Meredith, v-p of the AAP's PSP division, noted: "The first digital sessions were given in 1994, with increasing attention each year. In the past, some people have complained about it. This time, no complaints."
