Publishers Search for Standards, Tipping Points

by Jim Milliot, PW Daily -- Publishers Weekly, 5/11/2007

Although the two events were not officially linked, Book Industry Study Group's Making Information Pay conference yesterday picked up two of the main themes of the International Digital Publishing Forum's day-long Wednesday seminar—the need for more standards in the industry and the eventual arrival of a tipping point when publishing's digital dreams turn into a real business. "The day is going to come when you'll say, 'I should have done that yesterday,' " said Mike Shatzkin, founder of the Idea Logical Company, about the need for publishers to step up their digital efforts.

Two panelists showed that they have made large strides in the digital world. Allen Noren, director of online marketing at O'Reilly Media, said the company's Safari Books Online Web site is now its third largest sales channel and gets three million unique visitors a month. In addition to selling books and subscription services online, the site sells PDFs of its titles, and when he revealed that 43% of PDF sales are made to the international market, a murmur from the 250 attendees could be heard. O'Reilly also has recently started working with the Copyright Clearance Center to facilitate the sale of reprints of its material to schools, and is starting to sell book chapters online.

Testing different business models is one reason Random House has invested so much in technology, said Chris Hart, v-p of publishing and sales applications. Among the areas Random is exploring are subscription services, ad-supported services, licensing deals, and digital sales of pages or chapters. Random's Insight initiative is designed to "help authors sell beyond the book," Hart said. To make that a reality, not only does there need to be industrywide standards, but publishers need to have the same in-house standards, Hart advised.

Random has built its own digital warehouse, not because it is anti-Google, Hart said, but because it gives the company more control over its content, when the demand for bits and pieces of Random's materials from customers has skyrocketed. Random supplies "hundreds" of different formats to vendors, but the effort is worth it because if books are to remain relevant in the culture they need to be talked about online, Hart said.

Shatzkin used his time to explore how different companies will participate in the digital supply chain. His focus was on DADs (digital asset distributors), which he defined as companies that will store, convert and deliver digital content. Currently, there are 10 DADs, Shatzkin said: Accenture, Bibliovault, codeMantra, CPI, Donnelley, HarperCollins/Libre Digital, Holtzbrinck/Macmillan Bookstore, Ingram Digital Ventures, Random House and VCI. These DADs will help publishers react to the changing dynamics in the marketplace, which include shifting from large-scale marketing to niche marketing, from ad expenditures to investments in online reading communities, and from "shout" to "interact." All these shifts need electronic capabilities, something DADs can supply, Shatzkin said.

Just how seriously publishers are taking the need for standards was underscored during the meeting when it was (unofficially) announced that the AAP and the BISG will soon work together to develop a common standard for searching for online book content that is not entirely dependent on using Google. An official agreement could come during BEA.