All of a sudden, a development that for too long appeared to be stalled by the chicken-and-egg problem of how website owners could be induced to tag their metadata looks to be in imminent danger of going seriously mainstream.

Marketers, it seems likely, rather than academics, will lead the charge to the VW campers from here on in. And in all probability, publishers and information providers who aren’t already waxing their boards in preparation for this particular wave of technologic change could risk being left behind as it steadily takes on tsunami proportions and thunders beachwards.

Google, Facebook, Twitter embrace semantic technologies

A recent article in New Scientist (subscription required) described how the giants of search and social media are making moves to actualize the semantic web.

1. Google’s recent acquisition of Metaweb’s Freebase, an open-source repository of structured data – or ‘entity graph’ as the company styles it – containing more than 12 million entities, will potentially enable much smarter searching. Entries in Freebase are tagged in such a way that machines can ‘understand’ what they are about and make meaningful connections between them. At the simplest level, computer searches would, for instance, be able to distinguish between David Mitchell the British Novelist and David Mitchell the British Actor, Comedian and Writer (not to mention David Mitchell the Tory politician, David Mitchell the retired American ice dancer, etc. etc.).
2. Twitter has recently released information about its new ‘annotations’ feature, which allows users to annotate a tweet with structured metadata. A tweet about a new book release, for example, might let you link straight to a ‘look inside’ book widget or the Amazon page for the paperback. Launch of a test version is apparently imminent.
3. Facebook is making changes to its Open Graph protocol that have a semantic element. Website owners can add a “like” button to their site, along with semantic tags that tell Facebook’s servers what the page is about. According to Facebook: ‘based on the structured data you provide via the Open Graph protocol, your pages show up richly across Facebook: in user profiles, within search results and in News Feed’. So when a Facebook user clicks the ‘like’ button on a publisher’s site – relating to a particular title, or author, perhaps – a link is established between that site and their Facebook profile.

Advertising goes semantic

Any change in the way Google works has major implications for marketers. If using an entity graph changes the way Google delivers its search results significantly, the dark art of Search Engine optimization will have to respond and weighty volumes of SEO best practice to be revised.

But even more wide-ranging changes will have to be made to practice around online marketing, with micro-writing and metadata tagging becoming ever more critical aspects of the marketer’s art, as websites lose their traffic to Google’s interface, which now not only provides a place for people to enter search terms, but also a place for them to read the answers, with no further click-through taking place.

New Scientist speculates, however, that it is in the Facebook and Twitter changes that the main attraction of these developments may lie for advertisers. With the major players in social media on board, apps are already beginning to be written that can exploit the potential of semantically tagged data.

And – oh dear – here comes another water-based metaphor: mainstream adoption is likely to open the floodgates for such third-party development. This is because it solves the chicken-and-egg incentive problem of how you get website owners to tag their content. There is a clear incentive for any content owner to tag their content appropriately, providing structured metadata, if it means targeted, relevant access to Facebook’s 500 million plus user base.

Why should you care about this?

The implications for publishers are obvious. The opportunity exists, through semantic technologies, to massively improve the discoverability of their content online. But they also present a threat. Those who move fastest stand to gain a march on their competitors, while those who lag could well miss out.

This throws down yet another gauntlet to a traditionally conservative industry that may well feel it already has quite a bit on its plate to deal with. Even more reason, then, for publishers to embrace the world of online in a concerted fashion, if they are to reap the benefits and stay ahead of the competition.

Surf’s up!

If you’re investigating the use of semantic technologies, talk to Semantico first. We offer a Semantic Web consultancy service focused on helping publishers improve the discoverability of their content using the evolving semantic web. Contact us today.

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.

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.

Queue for the launch of iPhone 4.0 in Brighton

Clearly not everybody knows about ‘The Apple Effect’. While I was taking this picture outside the O2 shop in Brighton, a bystander asked me what the queue was for. I told him it was for the new Apple iPhone 4.0, which is launched today in the UK. ‘So is that free or what?’ was his incredulous reply.

Er, no. There is no free lunch – not this year anyway – as George Osbourne, the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer was at pains to tell us this Tuesday, though perhaps not in so many words. In tune with the new spirit of austerity and restraint we also learned recently that O2 is putting a cap on data downloads, replacing its previous ‘unlimited’ data contracts, for all new and renewed iPhone contracts. Though the download limits are fairly generous, those eager early adopters queuing up for their new iPhone’s will be getting a marginally less good deal than iPhone users have enjoyed previously. Although they will of course enjoy a more richly-featured handset.

O2, the first network operator to have offered the iPhone in the UK has introduced the measure following serious overload problems in 2009 that brought the network to its knees, necessitating a costly emergency upgrade.

It seems that the runaway success of smartphones and smartphone apps is putting serious strains on network infrastructure. And the situation is only going to get worse, with sales of smartphones, internet-enabled mobile devices and mobile apps all on steep upward sales curves.

If O2’s data cap catches on with other network operators it could be one to watch. Together with the Digital Economy Act’s punitive measures on illicit downloading, which if they remain unaltered look likely to seriously curtail the spread of wi-fi coverage, limits to mobile data could seriously slow the growth of the mobile internet, which is currently forecast to pass internet access from desktop computing as early as 2013.

John Scott, Earl of Eldon

Rushed into law in the dying days of the Labour government, The Digital Economy Act has been described by Guardian Columnist Cory Doctorow as establishing an unprecedented realm of web censorship in Britain.

This is not what the Act seeks to do, ostensibly at least, but it is seen as an inevitable if perhaps unintended consequence of a badly framed, hurriedly passed piece of legislation.  The Act has many aims, not least among which is combating illegal
file-sharing.

Critics have pointed out that Sweden’s similar attempt to legislate in this area recently suffered an epic fail due to that pesky law of unintended consequences. An initial 30% dip in internet traffic was followed within months by a surge to yet higher levels– only now much of the traffic was encrypted and untraceable, presenting the authorities with even bigger problems than before.

In researching previous blog posts on the history of copyright, I came across an interesting earlier example of the law of unintended consequences leading to outcomes directly opposite to those which had been intended, in the area of copyright and censorship.

Enter Lord Eldon.

Lord Eldon was Britain’s Lord Chancellor between 1801 and 1827, and also took on himself the role of ‘Licensor of the Press and Censor’. This was an edgy time for the British establishment, with the fall-out from French Revolution to contend with abroad, and the Romantic one at home providing a source of sedition and revolt in print. Though his ardour in attempting to suppress ‘pernicious’ literary works could not be doubted, Eldon’s efforts often proved counter-productive. Three times during his career, efforts to censor works by Southey, Shelley and Byron backfired on him badly.

How censorship helped the pirates

The first of these disasters occurred when Southey, who by 1817 had renounced his early revolutionary sympathies and was courting respectability as poet laureate, attempted to suppress publication of Wat Tyler, an early unpublished play of radical taint. Southey sued the publisher for breach of copyright. Unfortunately however, because both the poet and his counsel chose to characterise the work in question as wicked and ‘injurious’, Lord Eldon felt unable to grant them the injunction they wanted. The rationale behind Eldon’s decision was that if he, as censor, judged the work to be pernicious, he could not grant it the necessary license for publication: it was therefore unlawful and could not be afforded copyright protection.

With no copyright to protect the work, the pirates had a field day. The resultant sales for the play were spectacular: Wat Tyler outsold all Southey’s other works combined by two or three times.

On very much the same point of principle Eldon went on to perform the same service for Shelley’s Queen Mab and Byron’s Don Juan, both of which subsequently enjoyed huge readerships. ’By withholding intellectual property protection from books he considered pernicious, he was in theory penalising their authors. In practice, though, the chief effect of his rulings was to ensure that the books he disliked were given a huge circulation.’ (Ian Gilmour, LRB). Despite the absurdity of this situation being pointed out to him, Eldon stuck to his guns. He certainly wasn’t the last public guardian of morality to find himself acting as an inadvertant publicist for the very works he was trying to suppress.

Conclusion

This parable shouldn’t be read as a counsel of despair. Printed works certainly need copyright protection, but it has to be done properly. Legislators as well as lawyers know that the law of unintended consequences is a perverse and irritatingly pervasive thing, and one to whose bad effects rushed-though legislation such as the Digital Economy Act tend to be particularly prone.

It may be a while before any of these bad effects are seen. Writing in April, The Register’s Andrew Orlowski provided a user’s timetable to the Digital Economy Act describing how it could work itself out. He doesn’t expect any technical measure to be put in force until Spring 2012. Sooner or later however, it’s a fair bet that the legion of bloggers and columnists who have predicted disaster are going to get their I-told-you-so moment.

Sources

The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period by William St Clair
Cambridge, 765 pp, £90.00, July 2004, ISBN 0 521 81006 X

Out of Bounds
Ian Gilmour: why Wordsworth sold a lot less than Byron 20 January 2005
Article in the London Review of Books (subscription needed)

Digital Economy Act: This means war by Cory Doctorow
Guardian.co.uk

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.

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?

Piracy of copyrights in texts, of course is nothing new. The default state of the nascent book market in the 15th Century, before printers banded together to get themselves some protection, was freebooting, unregulated chaos. Even after the Statute of Anne in 1710, the legislation with which modern copyright begins, piracy continued to be a thorn in the side of publishers – and eventually authors, as the latter began gradually to gain more control in the publishing process.

‘Everyone goes to Paris’

Much of the piracy came from abroad. Foreign territories were not subject to English copyright law; indeed, there was no harmonisation of the copyright regimes in different countries until the establishment of the Berne Convention in 1886 (large parts of which were not implemented in the UK until more than a hundred years later in 1998). During the 19th Century, Parisian publishers did a roaring trade in cheap editions of books by UK authors. The poet Wordsworth deplored Galignani’s 1828 ‘pirate’ edition of his poems, which cost a mere 20 francs, but that didn’t stop him purchasing for his library Galignani editions of Coleridge, Shelley and Keats. It was common practice for travellers to pick up such editions; a temptation to which even the high-minded Wordsworth, clearly, fell prey.

Why Byron sold more than Wordsworth

The Romantics were the first generation of British writers to exert much influence over the way their works appeared in print. Naturally, this exposed them to the threat from pirates, and they differed in the way they dealt with it.

Byron was all for beating the pirates at their own game. He wanted his long satiric poem Don Juan to be published not only in the usual lavish publisher’s edition but also in compact, cheap version, to ‘anticipate and neutralise’ the pirates. So strongly did he feel about this marketing strategy that he moved publisher half way through the project (the poem was published in parts), from John Murray to John Hunt. Byron’s market instincts turned out to be largely right. He could not forstall the pirates entirely: following his death there were numerous editions; but the latter cantos of the poem sold in huge numbers, with the result that Don Juan, by William St Clair’s reckoning (see sources), was read by more people than any previous work of English literature.

Wordsworth, by contrast, was dead against selling his books cheaply. His own epic-scale work, The Excursion, when it was published in 1814 at at cost of 42 shillings, was probably the most expensive work of literature ever published in England. Perhaps as a consequence, it sold only 400 copies in six years, and 22 years after publication, only another 64 had gone (by way of comparison, Byron’s Corsair sold 25,000 copies). This failure must have been all the more galling since Wordsworth had a stake in the project. In exchange for two-thirds of net profit, he had stumped up two-thirds of the production costs.

He might have thought twice about venturing into self-publishing again, but Wordsworth did not back down from his stance on cheap editions, and his Poetical Works, issued at 24 shillings in 1832, similarly tanked. Astonishingly, to the Poet of the Lakes, not a single copy was sold by one of the leading booksellers in Cumberland.

Wordsworth, it has to be said, was not as racy or ‘media-friendly’, in modern terms as Byron. His poetry, with its stark plainness, was possibly less accessible to readers of the time – although critically speaking, his star has risen higher than Byron’s subsequently. Nevertheless, he would almost certainly have sold a few more copies in his lifetime had he taken a view of publishing business models closer to Byron’s.

Piracy and market intelligence

The moral of this story hardly needs pointing out, and its implications for our own time are also fairly obvious. Pirating of literary works may indeed be no better than theft, and something to be strongly resisted, but it does provide, for publishers, one highly valuable by-product whose value cannot be gainsayed: tangible and specific knowledge about buyer behaviour. Marketing is a very data-driven business, and too often it has to make decisions based on theory, extrapolation and flawed statistics. Where real intelligence about what buyers want and how they want to buy is provided, marketers ought to be duty-bound to listen.

The success of Napster, earlier in the decade, demonstrated not only the obvious truth that people would rather get something for free than have to pay for it, but also that perfectly law-abiding people would succumb to the convenience of online downloading where no comparable paid offering was in place (it also told us that CDs were criminally over-priced – but then, we knew that already). What consumers chiefly want is convenience, and anything which carries the taint of illegality offers the threat of a potentially huge amount of inconvenience – from, for instance, police action, infection of one’s equipment by virus and spyware, identity theft, etc etc.  Pirates may well be ‘bad people’, but the music business presented far too easy a target for their broadsides with the slowness of its reaction to the shift to digital among its heavily younger-demographic consumers. Having come later to online downloading publishers are, as has often been pointed out, well placed to learn from the mistakes of the music business. The long and illustrious history of publishing as an industry also contains some pointers, as I hope this series of posts is showing, in some small way!

Conclusions

Proselytising, prosecution and paywalls are not of themselves going to make piracy disappear. Neither are consumers so cash-strapped, even in this credit-crunched age, that they won’t pay for a convenience, added value and authoritative content if it is on offer. Ordinary people don’t like breaking the law. Publishers just have to be certain they are keeping a close watch on what the pirates are up to, and being perhaps more Byronic in their reactions than Wordsworthian.

The stakes are high, and it is not just a case of being outmanoeuvred by smaller, fleeter piratical competitors. Google and Amazon, to many publishers, although organisations of considerable scale, have a distinctly piratical way about them. However, these are not nippy little corsairs we’re dealing with. They’re more of an armada.

Sources

The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period by William St Clair
Cambridge, 765 pp, £90.00, July 2004, ISBN 0 521 81006 X

Article in the London Review of Books (subscription needed):

Out of Bounds
Ian Gilmour: why Wordsworth sold a lot less than Byron 20 January 2005

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.

Sutherland could hardly have foreseen how much more uncertain things were about to become. The particular issue exercising him at the time, harmonisation of UK law with the latest EU regulations on copyright, surely pales into insignificance compared to subsequent events. The threat from internet piracy, the emergence of Amazon as a dominant player in book supply and the Google Books settlement: all of these were seismic developments, the cumulative effects of which has been to transform the landscape of publishing utterly.

Intellectual property rights are fundamental to any publishing business, so disruption in this area strikes to the heart. And disruption there has been. In Google and Amazon, Publishers have not just new competitors, but competitors from an entirely different part of the publishing value chain – the distribution end. And far from seeking to compete on a level playing field, these players have at times seemed to want to take their bulldozers to the pitch.

Google, in particular, seems to want to move the goalposts on copyright. And there have been howls of protest. ‘Say goodbye to your rights forever, authors, if this mess goes through’, said Lynn Chu, Principal at Writer’s Representatives LLC, writing in the Wall Street Journal last Spring (Google’s Book Settlement Is a Ripoff for Authors). At time of writing, a federal judge in New York is about to hear arguments over whether to approve the Google Book Settlement. The Settlement is far from settled, still, almost six years after Google first started digitizing the University of Michigan library.

You have to go back further than Sutherland to find a comparable period when quite so much seemed up for grabs in copyright; back to age of Caxton and Guttenberg.

The birth of copyright

According to  William St Clair (The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period, Cambridge, July 2004) the need for protection of intellectual property rights in text-based works arose with the invention of the printing press. It was not authors looking for protection in 16^th Century England, but printers.

Hand-copying by monks, which machine printing replaced, had required no commitment of fixed capital. With capital tied up in machinery and a stock of type, and inventory in the warehouse, early printers found themselves with an investment that was highly vunerable to the cut-throat competition of the emerging market. By 1553 competition between printers had come to an end by mutual agreement; but their investments still needed protection from rogue traders and foreign pirates. This protection was provided by the state, through the system of royal privileges.

In 1583, the Privy Council recommended that the first printer of a text be granted exclusive rights to that text. Following this, the Stationers’ Company, a London guild which received a royal charter of incorporation in 1557, established a ‘quasi-monopolistic’ ownership of the most well-known titles. A system grew up of monopoly rights in individual texts, which were held in perpetuity.

Although this framework of regulation came in to being to protect the investments of printers, control of this nascent industry passed early on from printers to booksellers; from manufacturers to distributors. Printers found that they were now fee-paid contractors in the publishing process. Publishing became virtualized, and has been a heavily outsourced industry ever since. The investment risk in publishing passed into the hands of entrepreneurs more comfortable dealing with ‘assets which existed only in the virtual world of agreements, claims, obligations, and promises’ than were printers, presumably.

So where were authors in all this? The answer is nowhere. Not until the 1709 (or 1710) act, known as the Statute of Anne, were authors given any rights over their work. Even then, the full provisions of the Act did not come into force for a further 64 years. Dr Johnson, who lived during this period, exercised a degree of influence over his printed works that stopped short of actual control. Famously, his Lives of the Poets contained a lot of C-list writers, many of whose fame had barely survived their own deaths, because his publishers, not he, got to chose about whom he wrote.

Not until the Nineteenth Century, and the generation of the Romantics, did writers begin to achieve, and exercise, some real clout in publishing.

Search = distribution

It’s not hard to see parallels with Google and Amazon in the early jostlings for control between different entities within the publishing value chain.

Intellectual property in a text, always the most virtual of assets, has undergone a further stage of virtualisation in our own time with the advent of digital media. It is in a sense only fitting that the project of digitizing the world’s books en masse should have been initiated by the most virtual of entities, Google, a company founded on internet search. It may seem strange to call Google a distributor, but in the disintermediated world of the internet, where the gap between consumer desire and supply has been reduced to one-click ordering, search surely becomes a function of distribution.

In any emerging free market, control tends to pass to the party most able and willing to handle the capitalisation necessary for the new distribution technology to achieve its market potential. That’s what seems to have happened at the end of the Sixteenth Century, when the booksellers (or ‘Stationers’) took over from the printers. And something similar has been underway in Google’s great digitization project, perhaps. No company other than Google has the ability (plus desire) to digitize books on the scale it has done, just as no other online distributor has Amazon’s reach. With scale, and first mover advantage of this order inevitably comes a degree of control that very quickly begins to feel oppressive.

None of which is to excuse in any way how Google has behaved in the courts. Personally, as an author whose moral right has been asserted, I can’t but cheer Lynn Chu on as she seeks to defend the hard-won rights of authors.

However, when she says that the Google settlement deal ‘reverses the economics of books’, it’s worth reflecting – if only to give a bit of context – on exactly how hard-won those authorial rights were, on how late authors came to the party, and on exactly whose interests copyright was invented to protect in the first place.

Sources

The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period by William St Clair
Cambridge, 765 pp, £90.00, July 2004, ISBN 0 521 81006 X

Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright by Mark Rose
Harvard, 176 pp, £21.95, October 1993, ISBN 0 674 05308 7

Articles in the London Review of Books (subscription needed):

The Great Copyright Disaster
John Sutherland, 12 January 1995

Copyright
John Sutherland 2 October 1980

Out of Bounds
Ian Gilmour: why Wordsworth sold a lot less than Byron 20 January 2005