Prescription For Growth

All great commercial successes, from the Model T to television to the VCR, have one thing in common: standards. Without standards, the industrial revolution would have been impossible. Standards are a critical component of designing, producing, manufacturing and marketing a product. Rather than imposing limitations, standards, like fences, make for good neighbors, allowing users to talk across previously impenetrable boundaries.

The VCR, for example became a standard item in most households only after the debate over its format was resolved. As a result, a mushrooming number of videos became available via ubiquitous video stores, greatly benefiting the motion-picture industry as well as the consumer. Now a burgeoning related industry is successfully penetrating the marketplace: the DVD, born of a concerted, cross-industry effort to set standards.

Standards are far from an academic exercise,. A product of strategic debate and consensus building, standards are essential for the evolution of any industry. They contribute directly to the bottom line.

Unfortunately, a lack of standards is costing the publishing industry both revenue and profits, as well as constraining future growth into lucrative new markets.

Two years ago, experts were speculating that the e-book industry would generate new revenue worth several billion dollars by 2005. Now it is obvious that this is unlikely to happen. The reason? The prediction was based on publishers, software manufacturers and producers of high-tech devices agreeing on standards for content platforms, file formats and systems for copy protection and secure exchange of content.

Readers are more likely to buy an e-book once they are able to use it easily on a variety of devices, like an audio CD. But the read-anywhere-on-any-device e-book is still just a dream, because there is no overall agreement on platforms and file formats.

The lack of a standard file format creates another barrier to market growth, since publishers now must undertake the time-consuming and costly process of accommodating different file formats for different reader systems.

To paraphrase Shakespeare, the problem is in ourselves, not in articles in the New York Times. Lack of standards is what turned "blue sky into red ink," to use Larry Kirshbaum's felicitous phrase. But e-books are only one area in which new standards will benefit publishing.

The National Information Standards Organization is working to develop an Open URL that will exponentially increase the value of published works by allowing users to access documents across library collections and databases. Asking a search engine to find references for Shakespeare, for example, will also produce links to Stratford-on-Avon, playwrights, Henry IV, Elizabethan theater—chosen for their relevance to the specific user, wherever he or she may reside.

The publishing industry is to be complimented for its efforts to create a new metadata standard for book distribution, ONIX, although much more work needs to be done in education and implementation. Even a standard as essential to publishing as the ISBN was not a sure thing until the entire publishing community was educated about its utility.

In 2002, publishing finds itself at a moment of unique opportunity. As individual companies adopt increasingly sophisticated software for their own business processes, they are coming to see the internal importance of standards and interoperability. Efficiency, cost savings and the capacity to leverage assets and create new products are only some of the benefits.

Now, by actively participating in the work of standards organizations, educating themselves as to which business activities need new or better standards, and making standards consideration a regular part of high-level strategic thinking, publishers can bring these same benefits into the marketplace. The understanding and adoption of business-critical standards can break the logjam publishing is currently facing, returning the industry to an era of revenue growth and renewed profitability.