Much of the change we are living through in publishing is plain as day to see. The shift from print to digital, like the shift from stores to online purchasing, is evident to all of us, inside the industry and out.
But there’s another aspect of the change that is not nearly as visible and that’s around systems and workflows. Publishing, even in the pre-digital age, was a systems-driven business. The big companies are producing 3,000 to 5,000 titles a year: each one with its own unique contract, metadata, editing requirements, and (in most cases) market. I like to observe that “each book published presents the opportunity to make an unlimited number of decisions, which must be resisted.” Most of the time the systems don’t help so much in making the decisions, but it takes a lot of support just to keep track of them all and report them to each person who needs to know!
Over the years, the companies with stronger systems have tended to acquire the companies with weaker ones. It doesn’t always work out that way, but it has most of the time. And over the years there have been stories about when publishers almost lost their business because systems broke down. The original Macmillan (now a division of Simon & Schuster) almost died in the 1960s when they fell so far behind on returns processing that they couldn’t properly dun bookstores to pay their bills. In the late 1980s or early 90s, Penguin had a warehouse crisis that was a similar existential threat. A friend of mine with a process-oriented consulting practice really made his year working on that problem.
In the digital age, systems are once again front and center. Every publisher is facing new requirements and seeing the parameters change for the old ones. Most of a trade publisher’s revenue, for at least a while longer, comes from print but the digital side is where the growth is. Systems have to support both.
Until recently, publishers ran on systems that were, primarily, housed on their own computers, either created or heavily customized by their own IT departments, and the operators in the publishing house (editors, production people, marketers, salespeople) were at the mercy of their IT department queues. If they wanted something done, they had to get on line for tech support.
And smaller publishers doing 50 titles or 100 titles or 200 titles a year had to make do with less robust, less customized, and often less capable systems even though their outputs also required thousands of decisions to be tracked and they are no less affected by the shift from print to digital.
But this is changing. Or maybe we should say it has changed. The new systems in publishing are Cloud-based. They are frequently referred to as SaaS: software as a service. They don’t live on a company’s own computers but are hosted by the service provider. They often don’t require an IT department to customize them and they certainly don’t require an IT department to keep them up to date. And the best news of all is that they are cheaper to acquire and faster to install in a company’s workflow than the systems of the past.
Within this change, there is enormous opportunity. Big publishers can sidestep the tricky question of scaling down their print-based systems and scaling up their digital ones. Small publishers can now use systems and workflows that give them capabilities equivalent to their much larger competitors.
But nothing comes pain- or hassle-free and neither do Cloud systems. Executives in big companies find their IT-led systems configuration challenged. When an operator in the production department decides they need a Cloud service like Dropbox to move files around, they don’t need to get IT support to put it in. But IT departments are still responsible for providing support and integrating all of a house’s technology. So “unsanctioned technology” starts to abound and IT departments don’t like that.
They might also not like the fact that Cloud systems could result in cuts to their budget and headcount. Can non-technical executives feel comfortable that their IT departments will look at cost-reducing Cloud systems the same way the CEO or CFO would?
In smaller companies, Cloud systems are a much less ambiguous benefit providing, as they often do, capabilities a smaller house would never be able to afford as a stand-alone system. But without an IT department, how do you know which Cloud offering is best? And how does a company without much in the way of inside tech knowledge and almost no surplus labor cope with implementation?
It was these questions that moved us to stage our first technology-centric Publishers Launch Conference. It is called “Publishing in the Cloud” and it will take place at Baruch College on 25th Street and Lexington Avenue on July 26.
Our conference really has three groups of resources for attendees: big publishers, smaller publishers, and suppliers of Cloud services. For the most part, the publishers will speak from the stage and the suppliers will be available at breaks and during a 2-hour “conversations with the experts” session when both the suppliers and the speakers will be available to talk in small enough groups so that all the conference attendees can get their own specific questions answered.
Some context and stage-setting will come from my Publishers Launch Conferences partner Michael Cader, whose Publishers Lunch and Publishers Marketplace enterprise has been a heavy user of Cloud services, which he will explain. Ted Hill of THA Consulting, who was the one who first clued me to this topic, will sketch out the landscape, segmenting the service offerings, spelling out the suppliers in the various niches, and providing a “checklist” for publishers looking into these services. And our Platinum sponsor TCS, Tata Consulting Services, did a survey of hundreds of companies using Cloud services from which they will deliver useful insights.
Looking at this from the perspective of big publishers, we have Ken Michaels of Hachette and Yuvi Kochar of The Washington Post. Michaels will kick off the day with his take on why Cloud services are critical to publishers at this time. Michaels is the Chair of Book Industry Study Group, so he speaks from an industry-wide perspective. In fact, he was instrumental in persuading us that the overall topic of Cloud services for publishing was worthy of an all-day conference, which it never had before.
Michaels will also talk about tools that Hachette developed because they needed them and they didn’t exist which they are now able to offer to other publishers on a Cloud model.
Kochar is the CTO of The Washington Post companies. He uses a Cloud model to distribute both internally-developed and outside services to his constituent companies, which include the newspaper and Kaplan Publishing. Kochar will talk about his company’s service model and the organizational structure it takes to make sure things will all work a level removed from the solution provider.
Another presentation from a large company discussing an implementation will be from Alfredo Santana of John Wiley. They have just put in the RightsLink capability offered by our global sponsor, Copyright Clearance Center, to automate the licensing of permission requests directly from the publisher’s website. RightsLink, which is used by many top publishers, can be a big labor-saver and revenue-producer, but it takes planning and work to do a proper implementation, particularly at a company like Wiley that has such a range of markets to serve.
And we’ll have a panel of big publishers, including Ralph Munsen of Hachette, Rick Schwartz of HarperCollins, Bruce Marcus of McGraw-Hill, and Chris Hart of Random House discussing “The Changing Role of the IT Department”, addressing the many issues I referred to earlier in this piece.
We have two speakers who have a broad view of the challenges smaller publishers face. Rick Joyce of our global sponsor Constellation serves the needs of more than 300 publishers who use their services and, among other things, rely on them to vet Cloud offerings for them.
Michael Covington will call on his previous role with the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association where he was responsible for vetting and inking partnerships with various cloud-based service companies such as Firebrand Technologies, Metacomet, and Bowker. Now serving as the Director of Digital Content for David C Cook, an international non-profit which publishes trade books, music and curriculum for the Christian church worldwide, Covington will also discuss the opportunities and challenges publishers face in moving from legacy systems and “tribal knowledge” to a “Service Oriented Architecture”.
Andrea Fleck-Nesbit of Workman has an interesting case history to talk about. Workman is taking the Title Management capabilities developed as an in-house system by its Canadian distributor and helping turn it into a hosted offering so they can use it too.
Covington and Fleck-Nesbit will be joined by Patricia Gallagher of Liberty Fund and Bonnie Russell of Wayne State University Press, both of which have just completed their own switchover to a Cloud service for core functions. As a panel they will extend the discussion about smaller publishers finding and implementing Cloud services.
For two hours in the afternoon, our attendees will be able to meet with our expert speakers and our sponsors in small groups to facilitate more focused discussions, In addition to CCC, Constellation, and TCS, event sponsors for “Publishing in the Cloud” include Firebrand Technologies, IBM, Klopotek, and Virtusales.
Cloud computing for publishing is a big subject and an important one that has gotten no focused attention before now. We think our conference will give our attendees, and the industry, a quick start getting a handle on the opportunities and how to take advantage of them.
On this coming Wednesday, July 11, we will have a FREE 1-hour webinar on this subject. Michael Cader and I will be joined by conference speakers Ken Michaels of Hachette, Rick Joyce of Perseus, and Ted Hill of THA Consulting as well as by John Wicker of TCS. The webinar will touch the high spots of this very important topic. And, as I said, the webinar is free!