Tech companies need to look like they understand publishing, which they don’t always do

Posted by Mike Shatzkin on March 17, 2010 at 9:59 am · Under Digital Book World, Industry Events, New Models, Publishing, eBooks


I showed up Tuesday morning at the gorgeous Cipriani restaurant and ballroom on 42nd Street for The Future of Publishing Summit, not knowing what to expect. I had been invited to attend this in an email last month which promised an interesting program (lots of big tech companies plus a book publishing “track” led by the always-interesting Carolyn Pittis of HarperCollins) at an all-day conference. I was invited because of my status as a “thought leader”; an all-day event like this with no fee is not unheard of, but it also isn’t common. I accepted.

Then when I heard from my friend Evan Schnittman of OUP over the weekend that he’d be going, I decided I should look at “what is this” more carefully. So I went to the web site for it and I found it almost impossible to figure out who was staging this thing and what they hoped to get out of it. My prior experience with free events — many I helped organize that were run by VISTA Computer Services (now renamed Publishing Technology) in the 1990s and several since hosted by MarkLogic — tended to have the organizer highly branded and visible. This one was opaque. “About us” on the “The Future of Publishing” web site described the conference, the agenda, and the goal of “setting the agenda for publishing’s new business model amid digital disruption”, and it led to a link listing the sponsoring companies. But nowhere did it say, “I’m the organizer of this event and this is why I want you there.”

When I got to Cipriani in the morning, I started to see some people I knew: Evan, David Young and Maja Thomas from Hachette, Peter Balis from Wiley, Dominique Raccah from Sourcebooks. “What is this about?”, I asked them. “Who is behind this?” Nobody really seemed to know.

As the day developed, it seemed that the two parties in charge were Tim Bajarin, President of Creative Strategies and Colin Crawford, former EVP Digital at IDG Communications, Inc. Bajarin kicked off the session recalling a critical meeting at UCLA in 1990 that really charted the course for CD-Rom development.

Uh oh, I thought. I wonder if these guys know what “CD-Rom” calls up in the mind of anybody in the room who was in trade publishing the 1990s.

What I had walked into took me back to the early 1990s when I went to a conference sponsored very openly sponsored by Microsoft for book publishers. The message then was, “here are the amazing things we are going to be able to do with CD-Roms in the very near future. To realize the true value of this technology, we need content. We’re not sure exactly how you make money from the content, but, hey, guys, get creative.” And, in fact, that was the message that the five key sponsors of this Summit — Sony, Adobe, Marvell, Qualcomm, and HP — had for their publishing audience.

This was the takeaway. Consumers are going to be navigating their content on faster, smarter, lighter, and cheaper devices that will open up more flexible and robust content delivery and consumption models. Publishers should take advantage of this! But “taking advantage” in this case often meant “more sound, more pictures, more video”. And that recalls the veritable disaster of CD-Rom development for book publishers: largely uncontrolled spending in development of new kinds of products, ostensibly but loosely rooted in books, that had no established market and never found one. The iPad had already unleashed several sparks of enthusiasm for enhanced ebooks; this conference wanted to pour fuel on those sparks and start a real fire burning.

The format of the day was that each of the primary sponsors got a half-hour to present their technology, following 30 minutes from Tom Turvey of Google on the forthcoming Google Editions. (Turvey joked about the fact that he had given the presentation to just about everybody in the room before in their office or his.) I’d say that most of the 30 minute presentations packed at least 5 minutes of useful information into them. There were definitely people buzzing about the fact that Adobe has a workaround to enable Flash-like content on the iPhone, which doesn’t support Flash. We all got the message that connectivity will be more robust and more routine; that both LCD color and e-ink (and before long, color e-ink) will be available in a staggering number of devices (or “form factors.”)

With all that capability in your hand, you can pull up just about any content you want. “Why would you read a plain old book” was certainly part of the message.

Then after a really terrific lunch, about half to two-thirds of the audience (I’d reckon; couldn’t really see because we were broken into three groups in different rooms for books, magazines, and newspapers and no more than a fourth of the audience was there for the final part of the program after the breakouts) remained to hear the content-based presentations. The intention here was “the tech guys will explain what’s coming in the morning; the publishing guys will explain where they are in the early afternoon; and then our experts will ‘pull it all together’ at the end of the day, allowing us to leave with a new plan for publishing.” The “experts”were additional sponsors, of course, and creators of tools or platforms for products or presentation: Zinio, Notion Ink, ScrollMotion, Vook, and Skiff. These are all very worthy companies with substantial propositions that have made real inroads working with established media.

But are they qualified to chart a commercial course forward for complex publishing enterprises? Frankly, I don’t think so.

Cader said privately on Monday that he had joined Conferences Anonymous. He wasn’t going. Admittedly, these guys had a rough row to hoe trying to tell people something new following on the heels of Digital Book World in January, Tools of Change in February, Pub Business Conference and Expo earlier in March, and an ABA meeting on digital change in between. People who are really junkies for this stuff were out at SXSW, which apparently also didn’t seem as revelatory to some savvy book practioners as it did last year (or so said my buddy from the Microsoft conference two decades ago, Lorraine Shanley.)

My sense of this one was “nice try”, but it didn’t work. The superficial logic of putting the tech and publishing people together, laying out the picture from each side and then coming up with “answers” within a single stimulating day is appealing, but it is ultimately impractical. Book publishers (and, I suspect, other publishers as well) aren’t going to do much today based on what they see tech might deliver two or four years from now. And book publishing isn’t one business anyhow. As Turvey of Google, who understands the publishing business better than any other tech company representative I know and, frankly, better than most publishers, spelled out in the beginning: “book publishing is about five different businesses that don’t have much to do with each other.” We in publishing know that very well. Tech companies that want to get our attention need to make clear that they know that too.


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  • Mike, an interesting summary and observations.

    “Tech companies need to look like they understand publishing...”, they certainly do if sessions like the one you are describing are to be interesting and beneficial, but will it ever truly happen? When referring to the big and/or horizontal firms, I doubt it, and this is partially because they don’t accept that book and journal publishing is not just “another form of media”. With the notable exception of Google, who have people like Graham Turvey, few horizontally targeted tech firms focus on book and journal publishing, nor hire specialists, and therefore do not realise that talking in generalist terms at a publishing conference is a quick turn off.

    I don’t think it will change because our industry is not big enough to warrant a change. Big or horizontal tech businesses have a large number of delivery resources/people and their business models can only sustain a certain number of true specialists to “feed” the army of resources. So if the model is one specialist must feed 100 deliverers, and then we understand that most publishing tech projects support 3 – 20 people, and 30% of those must be specialists for it to work well, the metrics don’t work. Google can get around this because what they are delivering is very different, and specialist suppliers like us and others, invest heavily in ensuring 50%+ of staff understand at least some of the complex publishing industry.

    Biased I clearly am, but I don’t think it is going to happen, and as a result, conferences too heavy with generalist or horizontal tech firms will always feel a little painful to book publishing professionals, but a mix that includes them can be stimulating.
  • George, I think your analysis is spot on. Google is an exception, led by TOM
    Turvey, because they made a serious commitment to book publishing and hired
    a LOT of people with pretty long and deep experience in book publishing to
    shape their strategy and their offering. We don't see the same sort of
    commitment on the part of, for example, Apple.

    Service firms that specialize in the book business like yours and Firebrand
    and, in their ways, Ingram and other DADs, have the best chance of matching
    up their offerings to what publishers really need.

    Mike
  • Mike,

    Hilarious admission/comment by M Cader. I am experiencing digital conference fatigue in a big way. I had intended to make this summit since so many influential and bright people were in attendance but got back into the city at 2AMfollowing weather delays from SXSWi (the Adobe-Wired team did their sales demo across devices there too only the day prior).

    A few points:

    I think Lorraine is in the minority (based on the pulishing people I spent time with in Austin) when it comes to finding value in SXSWi and "revelatory" may be a high bar to set. I didn't hear anything new in the Brave New World for Publishing panel but it was well-received and I was there to look outside of digital book content for a change. Transmedia, wireframing workshop, live video streaming, crowdsourcing, HTML5 and so much more. It is a lot of conference programming.

    As for the companies you mention in the creator of tools class, including Zinio, obviously each in that group need funding to scale towards a more templated approach for apps, interactive design, etc and could be less necessary if the publishers have the talent, competency and wherewithal to create multimedia content and distribute it broadly. Clearly, success will depend on access/distribution to a global audience either in partnership with OEMS and/or developing digital content for all screens and future devices beyond Apple (Nokia/Symbian, Android, etc).

    I follow Colin Crawford on Twitter and think he is always in the know ahead of most whether it is Apple or Flash-related. His opening remarks, especially his data points about mobile from its personal nature to its measurability were insightful.

    Here is the link--http://colincrawford.typepad.com/idg/

    Best,

    Andrew

  • Andrew, there's not much danger that *most* publishers will develop the
    capability to do what Zinio and others can do for them. I am in no way an
    advocate of publishers doing this tech for themselves. They'll need service
    providers and aggregators, as they always have.

    What I objected to, and this is in no way the fault of the companies put in
    this position, was the notion that a bunch of non-publishing companies could
    "tie it all together" and define the business models for the future of
    publishing, which seemed to be the hope and intention of the organizers.

    Mike
  • Andrew Malkin
    Got it. That is all a tall order and there certainly are many who are outspoken about their vision and belief in some business models over others for the years to come. I can certainly say we are all about forming partnerships. Wish I was there to hear that last part of the conference. The hashtag wasn't enough! Thanks.
  • Andrew, the number of people wanting to "form partnerships" with publishers
    at the moment is vast. It is very hard for publishers to sort out who's
    critical and who's not. I know that positioning one's proposition as
    "critical" is essential for the potential publisher partners and, of course,
    everybody's proposition comes with a point of view. I am sure that every one
    of the companies that were on the last panel have useful things to inject
    into the conversation about publishing's future. But the positioning wasn't
    that: the positioning was that these panelists would take the tech vision
    expressed by the big tech companies and the publishing vision and work as
    presented in each of the format-specific sessions and "put it all together"
    into a roadmap for publishing's future. That's incredibly presumptuous. And
    not nearly granular enough for such a hydra-headed beast as the content
    business.

    Mike
  • Thanks for this summary, Mike. I enjoyed seeing you—briefly.

    I didn’t see anything I hadn’t already seen before. The afternoon was especially painful, given the lack of amplification for the panelists. I couldn’t hear half of what they were saying.

    Unfortunately, I ducked out before the final session with all the answers. From your review, I assume that wasn’t particularly insightful.
  • Mike, I'll be honest with you and with everybody else who reads down this
    far and admit that I didn't pay a lot of attention to most of that last
    session. It was taking place in a cavernous room pretty devoid or energy and
    I was in the back with a few publishing people engaged in animated
    conversation about an issue that had arisen in the session featuring
    publishers; namely, how the relationships among international companies and
    international rights might change going forward.

    We understand the tech guys telling us about the tech. But for a bunch of
    tech providers -- which is essentially what the afternoon panel was -- to
    tell us about where the *business* needed to be going; well, let's just say
    we had a better conversation going on that would have been over their head.

    Believe me, I say this meaning no disrespect. I wouldn't tell them what to
    make a screen out of or how long it will take before the price of screens
    can be cut in half. I don't have the foggiest idea. But our business is
    equivalently complicated and it requires an equivalently long and dedicated
    effort to know and understand it (probably Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hours),
    and I just find a lot of the pontificating about the book business from
    people who don't have five hundred hours in incredibly presumptuous.

    Mike
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