Publishers know they have to innovate to survive in the jungle of online publishing, with the big beasts of technology such as Amazon, Google and Apple all too willing and able, it seems, to disintermediate traditional publishers out of existence.

But two conflicting models of innovation seem to present themselves. One is open, data-driven and responsive, the other more ‘walled garden’ and perhaps even hieratic in character. How should publishers decide which to follow?

This was one of the key points discussed at the inaugural Semantico Symposium, held recently in London to discuss implications of the shift to mobile for publishers and information providers. An invited audience of publishing industry leaders debated the issues under Chatham House rules, covering the following three themes:

• Devices and technology
• Business models
• Future strategy options

It was a stimulating event with a high calibre guest list, delegates attending from organisations including Oxford University Press, Nature Publishing Group, Macmillan Education, Wiley-Blackwell, CrossRef, CABI, BSI Group and the Institute of Engineering and Technology. To do justice to the discussion, we’ve reported it over three blog posts. This final post is on the theme of future strategy options.

Listen to your users

Publishers from a traditional print background have one notable advantage over the tech companies that dominate the online information environment, which is that having been around a lot longer, they know their market very well. As a result, they know a lot about the needs of their readers and their institutional users.

Added to this hoard of existing knowledge about their specific niche in publishing is the wealth of data now available to publishers through web analytics. Sales and attitudinal research garnered through focus groups and the like are no longer the only source of market information. Customer behaviour online can be studied in minute detail, across large data sets.

Amazon, the online retail behemoth, which from its inception has had the stated aim of being the world’s most customer-focused company, has made a business out of data mining at large scale. However, Amazon is a generalist. Publishers benefit from highly specific knowledge of their individual niches, a knowledge whose specificity is growing all the time. Surely it makes sense for publishers to play to their strengths by setting their sites on the customer interface, pressing home their advantage of greater focus and beating the behemoths of the tech industry at their own game?

Several around the table at our symposium were clearly of this mind, believing that the roots of true innovation lie in researching customer behaviour and attitudes ever more effectively.

The online culture of openness and its threats

If companies can expect more transparency from their customers online, the reverse also holds true. Publishers must operate with a greater deal of openness on the internet than they might previously have been used to.

This is not an ideological point but a practical one. Unpacking extra value from content may well necessitate making it more freely available, at a lower level of granularity and in an unredacted form – particularly where those information resources have the character of data rather than text. In order that a company can benefit from the highly connected nature of the web it might have to be prepared to let the user use that data in any way they want to; e.g. third-party use of data for mash-ups, open APIs, semantic web etc.

Guardian News & Media was cited as a company trying to build a whole new business online from the data they gather in the course of their normal activities, making it openly available in many different ways for third party use. Clearly, this is a very different view of the online world from that taken by The Times Online, whose experimental retreat behind the paywall is being watched with some interest by The Guardian as well as its many other competitors.

What’s the big deal?

In the academic world too there has been a call for more openness – openness in the way publishers deal with their institutional users. Librarians facing the prospect of further, deeper funding cuts are rebelling against the ‘big deal’, with confidentiality clauses in big-deal contracts often leading to big differences in what universities are paying for their information resources. This tends to make subscriptions prices dependant, to a large extent, on the individual library’s negotiating skills.  At least one of our delegates felt that this was unfair, as in his view, librarians do not have these skills.

This type of practice is not uncommon in the offline world, and no doubt many would see some of Amazon’s online exploitation of its virtual monopoly position as equally invidious. Both seem light years away from the more idealistic tenor of Jeff Bezos’s formula for customer-centric innovation:

‘There are two ways to extend a business. Take inventory of what you’re good at and extend out from your skills. Or determine what your customers need and work backward, even if it requires learning new skills. Kindle is an example of working backward.’

Apple not in the buggy whip business

Not everybody agrees with working backwards. A counter to the call to watch the user in this way is the reflection that best practice keeps you alive, but doesn’t push you forward.

Apple, for instance, has innovated not by giving its customers what they want but by inventing new, cool things for consumers that they didn’t know they needed until they saw them. When this works, so cool are the things they produce; so pleasingly are they designed and packaged, that once consumers actually do set eyes on them, they quickly find them essential, must-have items. Soon they’re wondering what they ever did without their iPod/iPhone/iPad.

Apple has achieved its success in innovation not by watching and following customers, but by being one step ahead of them.  ‘You can’t go out and ask people,’ says Steve Jobs famously, ‘what’s the next big [thing.] There’s a great quote by Henry Ford, right? He said, “If I’d have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me ‘A faster horse.’’’

Apple, allegedly, does not do market research. ‘We figure out what we want. And I think we’re pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That’s what we get paid to do.’

So who’s right?

Opinion was split around the table, with the term ‘Apple Fanboy’ (apologies to all female fans of the company) surfacing as the pejorative of choice – as in ‘I don’t want to sound like an Apple Fanboy, but …’

Others felt there was no inherent contradiction between the two approaches, and that they were both perfectly valid depending on exactly what you were trying to invent and what sort of company you were. A consensus view seemed to be that there has to be a balance between inspiration and observation.

Conclusion

One thing this part of discussion highlighted was how big a culture change publishing faces in coping with the raft of new competitive pressures brought about by the move online. Many around our table were among the vanguard of those bringing innovation to the business of delivering content online – but the picture over all is of an industry still struggling slightly to get off its back foot.

New understandings, new ways of working – and, to a degree, a whole new language – have to be taken on board. We hope that in some way this symposium has contributed to that effort.

Some publishers choose to adapt an existing off-the-shelf journals platform to meet their needs for consolidation. However there can be technical problems inherent in this approach.

In a recent post to the CrossTech blog, publishing guru Geoffrey Bilder analysed the issues facing CrossRef members wishing to use the DOI system for non-journal content. Geoff’s analysis holds good for more than just the CrossRef DOI system, so I’ve taken it as a starting point below.

Reference publications and databases introduce fundamental challenges to any existing system designed around the journal article content model. These challenges fall into two areas:

• Structure. Reference works and databases can have complex nested substructures and there is a need for granular identification of these content substructures along with a mechanism for recording the relationship between them (e.g. “part-of” relationships between sub-section, section and chapter divisions, as well as “previous-next” navigational relationships between entries).
• Versioning. Unlike most journals, many reference books and databases change over time. To properly support archiving and perpetual access business models, there is a need to identify and maintain previous versions of reference content.

Both of these areas require support from the core architecture of any publishing system; without such support publishers have to resort to ugly work-arounds such as coercing all content into journal-article-shaped chunks. Such work-arounds fundamentally compromise the end-user experience and ultimately risk devaluing the publisher brand.

Furthermore the technology stack commonly used to build a typical journals system does not necessarily provide a good base to build support for the structural and versioning requirements outlined above. This is because the mixture of technologies used tends to match closely the typical structure of a journal article.

In an article the metadata and content are two separable parts which map nicely to a relational metadata store (typically SQL or RDF) plus a full text retrieval engine (Lucene/Solr, Autonomy, etc). Although the full text may contain semantic annotations such as chemical or gene markup, the homogenous nature of the content means that a single metadata schema can be devised which will fit the whole collection well.

However, when publishers want to add non journal content to the system this simple separation of content and metadata will no longer suffice. Reference and book content is much more demanding in terms of hierarchical structure and navigation. Many hierarchical structures in reference books cannot easily (if at all) be modelled using conventional relational metadata; these structures fit much more naturally and easily into native XML. Trying to create a single relational metadata schema capable of modelling all hierarchies across the full variety of reference and book content that publishers produce is an impossible task.

The structural problems of adding books and reference content to systems designed to separate full text and metadata can be broken down into two distinct areas:

1. Fragile schema problem. The problem of updating conventional database schemas as requirements (and the real world) change is often called the fragile schema problem. Because the design of the database must be fixed at the outset, any changes to the system, to accommodate extra metadata, new content types or changes to business process become costly and risk-laden. This is because assumptions about the structure or schema of a database tend to be hard-wired into the structure of all the software written to talk to the database.
2. Divorce of metadata from full text. Systems which use RDF or SQL databases for metadata suffer from a fundamental structural weakness as it is normally impossible to issue queries which examine both the full text and metadata within a single request. RDF suffers particularly in this respect as it has no support for XML mixed content; full text search plays no part in the RDF world view. Furthermore, such systems also often require content to be ‘loaded’ into several different internal content stores (e.g. once for full text index, once to ‘strip’ metadata to the RDF/SQL store). This builds a structural inefficiency into the system as content must be found, queried and updated in multiple locations.

When we design the architecture for our publishing platforms we like to think hard about these problems. Often we conclude that XML database technology (such as MarkLogic Server) provides the best solution because it allows content to be stored and queried in a single place. Using an XML database removes the artificial split between content and metadata inherent in conventional journals systems and allows us to build search queries across an entire collection of content. This in turn helps to drive discovery and usage by building deeper links between related content and combining and assembling content from an entire collection in new ways.

However we also realise that different clients have different needs and that it is critical to prioritise meeting business goals ahead of making specific technology choices. The motivation for our overall technical architecture choice in a given project is simple; to learn the lessons of past systems and ensure we choose the best possible technology basis for any new system. Understanding the problems publishers have faced in trying to adapt legacy journals systems to the more challenging world of books and reference helps us to make the most appropriate technology choices for future publishing platforms.

Publishers must widen their frame of reference in order fully to understand the change in business models that taking their content online might necessitate – looking beyond traditional pricing models and text formats within their particular field of publishing.

This was one of the key finding of the inaugural Semantico Symposium, held recently in London to discuss implications of the shift to mobile for publishers and information providers. An invited audience of publishing industry leaders debated the issues under Chatham House rules, covering the following three themes:

• Devices and technology
• Business models
• Future strategy options

It was a stimulating event with a high calibre guest list, delegates attending from organisations including Oxford University Press, Nature Publishing Group, Macmillan Education, Wiley-Blackwell, CrossRef, CABI, BSI Group and the Institute of Engineering and Technology. To do justice to the discussion, we’re reporting it over three blog posts. This post is on the theme of business models.

Business as usual?

Publishers putting their content online find a very different commercial environment from that which they are used to in offering their physical, print products. However in some respects, the issues with online are not always that unique, though publishers often need to look outside their own particular niches sometimes to see this – even where mobile is concerned.

One thing that is often held up as a major disruptor is the ‘freebie’ culture of the internet – the widespread expectation that information should be free; an attitude that is opportunistic in some quarters, profoundly ideological in others. Though there are obvious problems with this from a publisher’s point of view, the other side of the coin is that the interconnected, globalised nature of the web offers unprecedented reach for content that is easily discoverable and not sequestered behind a paywall. Mobile holds out the promise of intensifying this reach, since more people have mobile phones than computers. Free presents big opportunities as well as big threats.

How this trade-off between reach and revenue protection will work itself out is currently being watched with great interest in the news publishing market, with Murdoch’s Times Online leading the charge for keeping content behind the paywall. A wide variety of subscription models are being experimented with online, and mobile has slightly upped the ante here through the way it enables micro-payments (fairly seamlessly in the case of Apple). Apps are a micro-payment system, looked at from a certain point of view, and the fact that many apps are offered in both premium and free versions points towards a pricing model that will be familiar to many. Freemium/premium models, if they can be made to work, offer big opportunities for marketing, while safeguarding the value of core content – and in doing this many publishers will feel themselves on (reasonably) familiar ground.

As someone who has recently upgraded his shredder to a more industrial model partly to deal with the quantity of publisher offers that fall through the letterbox on a daily basis, I can testify to the many and various ways in which publishers deploy free and cut-price offers offline.

Free trials, forced free trials, freemium, premium, tiered subscription – all of these physical-world species of offer have their online equivalents in the age of the app; and seeing this point of similarity perhaps provides a more useful way of looking at the whole ‘free’ debate. In the end, it’s a case of plus ça change, perhaps.

Who pays?

One result of the internet’s ‘freebie’ culture, in consumer markets at least, has been a drive towards funding content in different ways, notably through advertising-driven models (Google being the most successful example, of course).

Clearly this is not going to wash in more specialized areas of publishing such as learned journals, but even there we have see something of a ferment, with the Open Access movement proposing a move to an ‘author pays’ model. Although this has failed to make serious inroads to date, nevertheless the issue of ‘who pays’ continues to be a live one in academic publishing, where many markets are three-cornered, involving institutions (or organisations) and end-users as well as authors. At least one of our symposium guests felt that in their view underlying market structures were not in revolution, despite changes in the way people pay for content: ‘basically, the same people end up paying.’

There’s no doubt that online does provide different ways to pay. It has enabled the Big Deal, still a dominant model in institutional sales, although coming under some pressure. Easier micropayments, and more sophisticated access management, hold the promise of a more varied and flexible future for pricing models – even though it is a future in which publishers are going to have to stay on their toes in order to protect the value of their content.

Greater convenience and sophistication in the way content is paid for may well be necessary, however, in order to cope with the way the content itself keeps threatening to transmogrify.

iPad and incunabula

Printed works in physical formats – be they monographs, journals, dictionaries or whatever – owe their form to purely physical constraints that do not obtain online. Why do we turn pages rather than unroll a scroll when we read a book? Because the codex, derived from the wax-covered tablet used by the Romans, supplanted the scroll sometime around the sixth century AD by virtue of its superior compactness, sturdiness, ease of reference and economy (i.e. it used both sides of the paper). On an electronic device, the choice to scroll or click to a new page is dictated only by latency, a restriction that is fast disappearing as bandwidth increases, so that eventually that choice will be a pure design decision.

As this point approaches, with the launch of the iPad, it seems likely that we are seeing new hybrids and evolutionary experiments in the form of text – the equivalent of incunabula.

Though e-books currently mimic the conventions of the printed book, it is not always so clear with other types of text how helpful it really is for a book to preserve its physical-world form. An educational textbook, for instance, looks a lot like a magazine. Would it make sense to format them as such when they end up on iPads? Similarly a learned journal can resemble a database in its essential form more than it does a magazine. With a proliferation of devices with which to access electronic information products, including smartphones, e-readers, touchscreen tablets, netbooks and the (now) old-fashioned desktop, will the device we buy end up being dictated by the type of content we want to access on it?

The choice also exists, with certain reference works, for example, to turn a book into a software application that answers specific questions or helps the user through a specific task in real time, such as diagnosing a medical condition – or finding the nearest Michelin star restaurant – or choosing the wheat crop to grow in a particular type of soil. In this new future, some books will really have very little reason to be books anymore.

New forms, new models

Clearly, new and changed content formats are likely to create a need for new pricing models, and by extension for new business models. But they also put pressure on the traditional fault lines that divide one niche of the publishing industry from another. It is a source of frustration for some ‘techies’ in the online publishing industry that these lines are still so rigidly drawn; that there is a monographs industry and a journals industry, for instance, and never the twain shall meet.

This seems all the more counter-productive as two things are clear from the discussion above. Firstly, that there is a lot to be learned from one area of publishing watching closely what is going on in another, since many of the issues being faced online are common ones for all information providers of whatever stamp. And secondly that the old divisions will increasingly lose meaning as terms like ‘monograph’ and ‘journal’ gradually become irrelevant to the way that information is presented and consumed online.

The debate continues

Tune in next time for a further report from the Symposium, as we move to discuss future strategy.

For those who were unable to attend, or would like to listen in full again, you can listen to a recording of eBook readers and the Future of Other New Technologies and view the accompanying slides below.

If you would like to view the slides or listen later at your own leisure I have made the accompanying slides and an mp3 recording of the presentation available here.

The inaugural Semantico Symposium was held recently in London to discuss implications of the shift to mobile for publishers and information providers. An invited audience of publishing industry leaders debated the issues under Chatham House rules, covering the following three themes:

• Devices and technology
• Business models
• Future strategy options

This was a stimulating event with a high calibre guest list, delegates attending from organisations including Oxford University Press, Nature Publishing Group, Macmillan Education, Wiley-Blackwell, CrossRef, CABI, BSI Group and the Institute of Engineering and Technology. To do justice to the discussion, we’re going to report it over a couple of blog posts, starting with initial theme of devices and technology (yes, it’s a partwork!).

Forget devices, focus on the underlying technology

If proof were needed that these are nervous times for publishers, just consider the case of Flash. Not only does Apple not support Flash technology on the iPhone or iPad, but the world’s most popular video-sharing site, YouTube (owned by Google), is quietly in the process of moving away from Flash video. In addition the emerging HTML5 standard, which aims to reduce the need for such proprietary plug-ins, looks likely to make it all but obsolete.  So will Flash die? Almost certainly, say the tech-heads.

This is appalling news for publishers with large amounts of legacy online content in Flash. It also serves as an example of one of the strongest themes to emerge from our Symposium, which is that publishers and information providers who hope to thrive (or at the very least survive) in the turbulent times ahead would be well-advised to disregard, to a certain extent, the hype and wow surrounding high-profile device launches like that of the iPad, and focus on the underlying technology issues in cross-platform delivery. That’s where the real uncertainty lies. Marvellous though they are, it’s not about the devices – but about the content, and the user’s experience of the content.

There is no denying that the iPhone has instituted something of a paradigm shift in the delivery of content, but notwithstanding this undoubted fact, a good deal of skepticism was evinced by our delegates about what is perhaps the most significant innovation to be introduced along with that device, the App Store.

A significant strand of opinion believes that an app is really not that much different from a mobile-optimised website. As far as the user is concerned there is little difference. In the not-too-distant future, it was predicted, you will download something you think is an app but you will actually be interacting with a website optimised for mobile use.

The iPad experience of web surfing (about 42% of our small but select sample had had hands-on experience of the device) might make us question whether we need apps at all, in the opinion of one delegate. Maybe what we need is not apps but better-designed, more mobile-friendly websites.

So far, so heretical

However, there is another strand of opinion. From the user’s point of view, the experience of using an app is utterly different from that of using a PC. One virtue of the app is that it does a very narrow, specific thing. Apps streamline our use of the internet and cut out – or at least reduce – much of the pain associated with PCs (e.g. constant downloads of plug-ins, patches and updates, the state of total war we have to live in with viruses, spyware and spam, etc.).

A website is always going to feel like a place you go to, to harvest a crop of information. In the case of an app, the crop is turned into biofuel: information becomes the petrol that gets your knowledge car from A to B – to a designated destination. A website might be a field of dreams (if you’ll excuse a criminally over-used film reference), but an app helps you actually do something.

These two points of view are not, in essence, irreconcilable. It’s a matter of perspective; of whether you are looking at things from the producer’s end of things or from the consumer’s. If you strip away the wow, yes, an app is no more than a website. But what produces the ‘wow’ is fantastic usability – and that’s a matter of primary importance for most end-users.

Search lags on mobile

… Which is not to say at all that the current generation of mobile devices together embody a giant leap forward for usability. In actual fact they can look like a bad step backwards.

In particular, search took a while to get established on the desktop internet, and to reach its current state of utility. By comparison, search on mobile is very slow at the moment, even on 3G networks. Also, it is not that easy to find the app you want: the discoverability of apps is not great. This situation is liable to get worse before it gets better, as apps and app stores proliferate.

A certain frustration is surely excusable for those who soldiered through the difficult early years of the millennium when publishers were just beginning to build their first sites, and had to cope with the teething troubles of the early web – only to see many of the same problems coming back to them in 2010. There is a new network, and it has yet to organize itself effectively.

Monitoring the Big Tech face-offs

Focusing on underlying technology and networks throws a deal of emphasis on the importance of monitoring and understanding what is going on with some of the major tech companies – and not solely because a few (particularly Amazon and Google) have forged themselves into the publishing value chain, where they are fast becoming almost unavoidable links. We mentioned Flash earlier, owned by Adobe, but there are others to consider as well.

Apple’s new prominence, which has come about largely as a result of the huge success of the iPhone, is beginning to foreground some of the ways it has of going about things that most annoy people. The dead hand of control that it exercises over what can and cannot be offered through the App Store – amounting to censorship – has led to comparisons with China. Will Google’s Android prove to be a viable Open Source alternative?

Apple has become the company to attack, and the company to position against.

Microsoft appears to be positioning against Apple with Windows 7 by placing emphasis on social networking. This is an important battleground if it really can be established as a point of difference. RIM’s Blackberry Curve phone has crossed over into the teenage market not only because it is a lot cheaper than an iPhone, but because it offers their young audience a more effective way of interacting with their online social networks. It is too easy to write off Microsoft and believe that the important dust-up nowadays is between Apple and Google, but there may well be life in the old dog yet – and Microsoft still has significant market share in mobile operating systems.

Publishers likewise dare not forget, in the age of the read/write web, that online publishing is not just about how the stuff gets delivered, but also about how it gets produced, edited, commented, redacted, peer-reviewed … etc., etc. Nowhere is this more true than in the field of academic publishing – because one of the central concerns of academic publishing is scholarly communication.

What this becomes is a debate about how we consume and produce information. Corporate positioning takes on a philosophical, even ideological aspect, the nuances of which publishers have to tune their ears to detect. The first task is to be aware.

Government unhelpful

Someone who seems to have a bit of a tin ear in this regard is the great clunking fist himself – if Gordon Brown can be held responsible for the controversial Digital Economy Bill which, at time of writing, is awaiting Royal Assent. There wasn’t much controversy here: instead it was roundly condemned as a piece of rushed and unworkable legislation that will, nevertheless, no doubt remain on the statute books for many years to come.

The debate continues

Tune in next time for a further report from the Symposium, as we move to discuss business models.

Developing mobile optimised websites

By developing a mobile optimised website publishers can provide the best user experience  for users with limited screen sizes and limited connection speeds. For example, this blog is fully optimised for mobile devices, so do try reading it from your smartphone to check out how the experience differs.

Advantages

• Lower cost of development (compared to app development)
• Fast time to market
• Support for dynamic content, content updates can happen in real time
• Completely cross platform and cross device
• The ability to leverage existing publishing commercial infrastructure; access controls and subscription models for existing websites apply equally well to mobile optimised websites
• Leverage existing development and production processes and tools
• Leverage publishers existing hosting and support services

Disadvantages

• Internet connection required at all times
• Speed & latency of the site must be fully optimised
• Mobile delivery creates new ways of using content and business models will have to adapt
• Discovery of the content will be via existing channels; SEO work may be needed to ensure users can find your content effectively

Developing apps

Developing an app allows a publisher to take full control of all of the capabilities of the underlying device. It gives you the opportunity to use every advantage that mobile delivery has to offer. If fast interactive graphics and immersive functionality are important to your content then developing an app will be the most appropriate choice.

Advantages

• You can control the user experience, ensuring all users get the best you can offer
• Ability to use native UI for fast graphics
• You can leverage existing distribution and monetization services via app stores (e.g. Apple and Google)
• B2B publishers can extend their reach into direct consumer markets by using app store services
• The app upgrade mechanism can be used to push new content and functionality onto devices automatically

Disadvantages

• Custom app development may be expensive
• Publishers may have to re-invent the wheel by re-implementing solutions to problems they have already solved in the web environment
• There is little or no potential for sharing development effort between different mobile platforms
• Lack of ways to hyperlink apps together. Academic citation depends on linking but apps cannot be linked in the way web resources can.
• Limited memory of mobile devices means large publisher datasets cannot be accomodated.

These are just some of the pros and cons of each approach. Inevitably the best choice in any given situation will depend on the content, the market, the level of investment needed and the risk publishers are willing to take on individual titles.

At Semantico we anticipate that some new titles and projects will need development for both web and apps whilst existing online titles may have apps designed for them. By offering both web and app development we’re giving publishers the chance to treat the two ways of presenting content as one project.

Each one of the bullet points could be a blog post in itself and no doubt we’ll be revisiting some of these issues future posts. Because whilst the issue of whether or not apps are the future of ebooks is still undecided, those publishers who’ve not yet dipped their toe in the water need to start rolling up their trousers. Do contact us now to start a conversation about your mobile delivery options.

It’s a decisive move, but is it a wise one? Will parents resist higher-cost platforms like the iPad, in favour of cheaper, page-turning e-readers like Sony and Kindle? Only time can tell.

Penguin has made a bold pre-emptive strike. Spotting an opening in this fledgling market it has opted for the expanded functionality offered by the iPad (not to mention the many copycat tablets now scheduled for 2010 launch). It has long been anticipated that media outlets such as newspapers and magazines would be quick on the uptake with app based solutions, which give them the capability to embed images, interactive elements and videos alongside stories, in something resembling an edition of the Hogwarts Daily Prophet.

The main question to ask however (if you’ll excuse a slightly excruciating pun), is whether this will actually result in App-ier readers?

Many publishers have started using the iPhone App Store as a channel to sell book content by packaging e-books as applications. There are currently 18,000 books in the App Store, and books are the fastest growing category of application in the store.

With the launch of the iPad and the iBookstore, Apple has given publishers another option for delivering content. In this post we analyse the pros and cons of both approaches.

Conclusion

For straightforward chapter based book content it seems clear there is no longer a compelling case for publishers to deliver e-books as apps. The extra cost of software development, combined with the slowness and lack of scalability in the approval process no longer make sense now that Apple have introduced the iBookstore.

For other types of content the case is not so clear cut. Publishers with the ability to invest can develop reference based apps which add value by delivering content in context. Mobile workflow applications will still be a signifiant growth opportunity for publishers.

As the iBookstore is currently geared toward the consumer market, publishers who deliver large databases of journal and book content to institutional markets should look to the iBook model as a way of tapping into a traditionally harder to reach individual market. And publishers wishing to monetise currently offline backlist content should look carefully at the opportunities afforded by the iBook platform.

Although the iBook reader app is not currently available on the iPhone there seems no compelling reason why it will not be released in response to market demand. Bearing in mind the popularity of e-book applications on the iPhone this would appear to be a very simple decision for Apple.

The iPad

Apple have approached the challenge of creating a tablet computer from the opposite direction to most established devices on the market. Instead of stripping down a laptop or netbook they have chosen to create a device which is essentially a scaled up iPhone. The iPad runs the iPhone OS, and consequently runs all of the 140,000+ currently available iPhone applications. The user experience is very similar to the iPhone, albeit with all of the advantages of a much larger screen, faster processor and more memory.

The iBookstore

OK, lets cut straight to the chase. For publishers the iBookstore is the iPad’s main event. Apple have signed deals with Penguin, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan and Hachette to seed the iBookstore with content in the EPUB format. Apple are planning to offer 70% of the sales revenue to publishers, following closely the model already in place for application developers in their app store. This compares very favourably to the cut of up to 50% which Amazon take from titles sold on the Kindle.

The business model is a one-time purchase of the content which will be downloaded to the user’s iPad device. The iBookstore uses the EPUB format, which allows the iBook reader application to reflow the text according to screen orientation and to change fonts and font sizes.

The iBookstore will be the only way of purchasing eBook content to use with the built in iBook application, although other applications, such as Stanza, will be free to compete with Apple’s business model. If they can.

The DRM issue

Digital rights management will not be needed with the iPad because content, once downloaded from the iBookstore, cannot be copied from one device to another. This is because Apple have followed the iPhone model in making the iPad an essentially closed, locked device. There is no user access to the underlying file system, and moreover only books purchased from the iBookstore can be read with the built in iBook reader application.

A device I’d give my grandmother

Apple know a thing or two about usability. This device neatly fills the gap between the iPhone and a MacBook. It is essentially a laptop for those who don’t want a laptop or a smartphone. The iPhone OS is so simple and intuitive to use that it would really be suitable for even the most computer phobic. And this weighs heavily in my thinking that it will win out as a consumer eBook device.

Although at $499 it is twice the cost of the Kindle or Sony readers (for an entry level model) the extra cost is extremely easy to understand. Colour, smooth graphics and the availability of 140,000 applications make it clear this is much more than a single function device. In this respect it simply can’t be compared to the Kindle or Sony reader.

Conclusion

In many ways Apple are attempting to replicate the situation which led to the huge success of the iPod/iTunes combination in disrupting the offline music sales and distribution industry nine years ago. By providing sexy, easy to use commoditised hardware at the right price point, combined with a single simple way to purchase content, they stand an extremely good chance of disrupting the established eBook readers. Furthermore the sheer appeal of the device can only fuel the further growth of the eBook marketplace.

More on this excellent seminar can be found at The International Association of Scientific Technical and Medical Publishers website.

Video by River Valley TV.