Two weeks ago, the term widget was something most people in the publishing world would have said they were not in the business of making. Not so, anymore. After Random House and HarperCollins unveiled their respective widgets last month, PW checked in with the other four major trade houses to see where their digital plans stand. Are they working on widgets of their own? Do they want them? Do they have Harper and Random-style digital libraries or warehouses? We found that the terminology being tossed around is as hard to pin down as everyone's varied digital status.
Random House and HarperCollins are the only two publishers that currently have their own internally hosted digital warehouse of fully searchable titles. While HarperCollins claims 3,700 titles under this heading, Random has over 5,000. The files in these warehouses are comparable to those offered by Google in its Book Search project. These warehouses allow RH and HC more freedom to market and distributre their content—in their entirety or in chunks—online. And while none of the other houses have digital warehouses similar to HC's and Random's, all said they are in various stages of establishing them. And, in the future, being able to sell digital content could be a big part of a publisher's business. "What matters is who has the best [digital] distribution model, and who gets out to the consumer with the most efficiency," said technology consultant Laura Dawson. "It's all about reaching the consumer, and whoever gets a lock on that is the one who wins."
Maja Thomas, who holds three titles at Hachette—v-p and digital publisher of Hachette Group Livre, v-p of Hachette Book Group digital media and v-p, publisher of digital audio—said the house is currently talking to outside companies about building Hachette's digital warehouse. Noting that Hachette has no intention of being the sole host of said content—"I know other publishers have decided this... but we don't think that's reasonable or logical"—Thomas added that the publisher also has no specific plans to develop anything akin to a widget. "We think the widget is really great and ingenious, but we believe it's just one of many ways to engage people online." Hachette, for example, has several thousand titles available on Amazon's "search inside" program and 14,000 with Google.
At Holtzbrinck Publishers USA, president Brian Napack said his house is working internally with the India-based Holtzbrinck company ICC Macmillan to build its own privately hosted digital library. While no specific person is in charge of Holtzbrinck's digital efforts in the U.S., Napack said, the heads of the company's various houses are "taking a very active role as leader in this area." Noting that Holtzbrinck has over 10,000 titles with Google, Napack said that who's hosting a house's digital files "doesn't really matter." Nonetheless, when asked about Random's and HC's digital libraries, he countered: "We are moving rapidly in that direction." On the widget front, Napack called the technology "a terrific idea" and said that Holtzbrinck has "programs that will deliver the same functionality."
Penguin USA's digital efforts are heavily tied to a content management system that is being developed in cooperation with parent company Pearson. And while Penguin USA does not currently have someone dedicated to directing its digital program, Penguin Group chairman John Makinson is looking to appoint someone to oversee digital operations worldwide. In the U.S., Penguin has thousands of files available to consumers in e-book or digital downloads, and thousands of titles with Amazon and Google.
Although Simon & Schuster has had a digital asset bank for years that houses thousands of digital files, earlier this month it hired Innodata to digitize the rest of its backlist and help create a digital archive and transactional system. S&S's senior v-p of digital media, Kate Tentler, said that the big publishers are, in a sense, all doing the same thing: "We're taking a book in its print form and reformatting it." What no one is sure about, Tentler added, is "what's going to happen with this content."
Dawson concurred with Tentler, saying new publishing models are cropping up rapidly. "[We're in a period now] where it's about flinging stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks."