Consulting
The Idea Logical Company has a special interest in the opportunities and challenges presented by digital technology to publishers, especially book and journal publishers. Since co-organizing two Electronic Publishing and Rights Conferences (sponsored by Publishers Weekly and Knowledge Industry Publications) in 1992 and 1993, we have long been involved in this aspect of the business.
The company’s experience with publishing’s digital transition is extensive. Idea Logical’s Founder and CEO Mike Shatzkin co-organized what may have been the first two conferences on digital change for general publishers, sponsored by Publishers Weekly and Knowledge Industry Publications, in 1992 and 1993. Through the rest of the 1990s, Shatzkin was co-chair, with Mark Bide of Rightscom in the UK, of VISTA’s “Publishing in the 21st Century” research program. That encompassed the creation and publication of annual research papers, the presentation of semi-annual conferences in both New York and London, and a group called The Editorial Board especially recruited to provide thought leadership. The Editorial Board was comprised of journalists, consultants, retired industry leaders, and academics with a special knowledge of publishing from around the world. A great deal of “value chain” analysis was produced by this program, which has proven useful and has been repeatedly validated in the first decade of the 21st Century and which we believe is critical to understand the ways that digital technology affects existing practices.
In the Spring of 2000, we co-organized the “Publishing 2010″ conference at the London Book Fair and in October of 2001 we organized and chaired the “Big Questions” conference at the Frankfurt Book Fair, for which more than 200 executives from all over the world added a day to their busy Frankfurt schedules to discuss the industry’s future.
In the past two years, Idea Logical has led three major “industry education” initiatives in conjunction with other major players.
In 2007, the company explored the world of Digital Asset Distribution in an effort sponsored by Klopotek and done in conjunction with Mark Bide of Rightscom. The project delivered a Research Paper defining the world of DADs (digital asset distributors), DAPs (digital asset producers), and DARs (digital asset recipient) and included half-day conferences in both New York and London to present the findings to the industry. This project began when the concept of a digital distributor was pretty obscure, although that seems hard to believe only two years later.
In 2008, in conjunction with THA Consulting, Idea Logical did a similar project with the Book Industry Study Group on “Experimentation and Innovation.” An online survey explored current practices across the book industry. Ten experiments were chosen for more extensive documentation in a paper published by BISG and many of the experimenters presented at BISG’s annual Making Information Pay conference on May 9, 2008.
Starting in mid-2008, Idea Logical initiated the “StartWithXML: Why and How” project, sponsored by codeMantra, Klopotek, and Publishing Dimensions/Jouve, with Publishers Weekly as the media sponsor, and BISG support. To execute this project, Idea Logical worked with Magellan Media Consulting Partners, THA Consulting, and LJNDawson. StartWithXML also began with an online survey, where more than 150 industry members contributed information about their companies were doing with XML. The Research Paper for “StartWithXML” is published by O’Reilly Media, which also organized the all-day Forum on January 13, 2009 which concluded the first stage of what is seen as an ongoing project which lives at StartWithXML.com.
At this writing (January 2009), Idea Logical is working again with the Book Industry Study Group on an assessment of “Shifting Sales Channels”, a study looking at both channels and specific accounts where publishers see their business rising or falling. This project is also planned to have an online survey, research report, and conference component, concluding in BISG’s Making Information Pay event on May 7, 2009.
Idea Logical’s strategic clients have included many of the industry’s biggest names but also promising start-ups. In 2007 and 2008, Idea Logical worked on the development of NetGalley, an emerging community and tool set to unite publishers and reviewers, now owned by Firebrand. Over the years, Idea Logical worked with SoftBook, one of the first handheld “ebook readers”; Sprout, the pioneers of digital print-in-store technology (long before the Espresso Machine); OverDrive Systems, leaders in digital publishing and distribution systems; SealedMedia, a Digital Rights Management firm; and Publishing Dimensions, one of the industry pioneers in format conversion for ebooks.
Idea Logical also has its own “vertical”, an information site called BaseballLibrary.com that has millions of words and tens of thousands of Internet pages of baseball history. BaseballLibrary is still really an “Internet 1.0” site (no social aspect, no user-generated content) but its extensive linking still scores high with search engines and, despite having had very little investment or new content development in the 21st century, it still has a lot of traffic because its initial concept was strong.
In the late 1990s, we created a whole new business from scratch for The Butterick Company that sells the books of all publishers to specialty stores using automated distribution techniques we conceived and formulated. That distribution company is called West Broadway Book Distribution; it is an active and thriving business today.
We have helped develop brand-extending publishing opportunities for Butterick and Vogue Patterns, Family Circle magazine, Variety, the Petersen specialty magazines, and the Discovery networks, among many others.
Idea Logical also has its own “vertical”, an information site called BaseballLibrary.com that has millions of words and tens of thousands of Internet pages of baseball history. And most years we sell a project or two as an agent; one of our titles in current distribution is The Great Wall, by Michael Yamashita, published by Sterling in 2007.
