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Publishers have the skills and the brands to thrive online, argues Ian Grant
As an industry, we have been publishing in print for 500 years; we have been publishing online for a little over 10 years. We are at the very beginning of an invigorating voyage of publishing discovery.
The last 10 years have demanded that publishers up our game. The main change in that time is where people are congregating. One billion are online. The importance of the internet is not its accessibility as a platform on which to perform but as a place to build a market. The common idea, that anyone can publish anything online and that distribution has become a simple commodity available to all, just skims the surface of the internet. As in book publishing, accurate marketing - meaning a clear understanding of the end-user’s needs, the development of an identifiable product that one imagines might meet that need, and the delivery of that product swiftly, competently, and at a price that feels right to the purchaser, are the three cardinal principles of doing business online.
As publishers, we have been driven online, rightly, because that’s where people are. But many publishers still struggle with the concept of being online because of the confusion between the sale of physical goods through online stores and the development of products - creating something fresh and exciting that uses the medium itself. Technology develops at pace, and publishing online should both keep up with that pace and shape the direction of change in order to deliver an experience that people immediately feel is valuable. People who recognise that value will agree to express that value in payment for the experience. There is real opportunity for publishing to rise to the level of a new market.
Publishers are much exercised by e-books and whether they are a threat or an opportunity. The perspective shifts depending on how clearly one knows one’s audience. In academic libraries, where there is increasing demand for electronic delivery of studiable material, then a form of e-book makes some sense. That form should be (and often is) very short, since user research shows that the academic audience is tremendously promiscuous in its use of electronic documents, diving in and out at speed and mainly digesting a gist of the editorial matter. In the consumer market, the issue is the platform. So few people have chosen to own an e-book reader in the last decade that even the current generation of devices, which are starting to sell in decent volumes, appear to represent a very transient technology. The installed base of devices will not grow sufficiently for it to drive new product development. The publishing that has been delivered on them is static, largely an electronic photocopy of a printed text, and that is how it is likely to stay. E-book readers will be overtaken by the huge subscriber base that forms the mobile phone market.
In the consumer market, photocopying full-length books onto portable devices has limited life. In the mobile phone world, where people are, the pace of life in the broadband-enabled mobile world requires short-form material, with moving graphics and ways in and out of the editorial matter. In the United States, northern Europe and some parts of Asia, static broadband-enabled devices (computers) also offer huge potential to creative publishers to deliver spectacularly good material, learning and life-enhancing experiences. In emerging markets, some obviously vast, the way of receiving material will tend much more to the mobile device, and that’s what the next billion consumers will use to accept or reject what we choose to publish.
There is a brisk debate about audience and ‘content’ going on at Mike Shatzkin’s IdeaLogical café. The central exchange in the last couple of days (I write on 22 December) has been between Mike Shatzkin and Erik Sherman, and it turns on the nature of editorial material and distribution. Erik believes that curated material, built with intellectual rigour and derived from strongly held views, is essential to the survival of publishing. Mike believes that audiences are more important than the quality of material they are offered, and that the “owners” of audiences are likely to be the next winners as trade book publishing crumbles.
Both have good insights, and combined they point the way. People respond to brands that have delivered a more than satisfactory experience to them previously. There are a small number of very powerful brands in publishing. In the open space that is the online publishing market, such brands have substantial opportunities to grow new, profit-generating businesses. Such new businesses do not replace the old. Publishing books that have to be sold and shipped to customers, as we have been doing for 500 years, is not going to go away. The book experience and the online experience are different and entirely complementary.
The new online world has given book publishers good reason to review everything that they do, from what to publish to how to run their businesses. It is a noisy call to new action and fresh efforts, but publishers are well-placed to respond. The core skills we have had for generations - imagining our users, creating shapely products that meet their needs, and identifying the transfer of value that results in a sale, are precisely the skills that make good publishing online successful and satisfying. Information does not “want to be free”; customers want to be inspired and satisfied. Publishers, upping our game, will do this.
Ian Grant is Managing Director of Encyclopaedia Britannica (UK) Ltd
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