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

Are we there yet?

Along the way I’ve surveyed the current landscape and looked at the multi-dimensional influence of Web 2.0. The journey has highlighted tensions caused by Web 2.0, and the new software models of the API-driven web, and the pressure it puts on existing models of identity management which, as I have attempted to show, struggle to cope with the complexity of this new universe.

In this post I want to delve a little deeper into the privacy and security implications of that environment and to look forward to the semantic web, before making some recommendations for how I think identity management needs to develop in order to get us to our goal.

Lock-in, ownership & control

The providers of social network services have been quick to understand the potential of being online identity hubs for their users. This is a natural function of their prime aim of driving up usage; being an identity provider is just one more service that Google or Yahoo can deliver and one which keeps them firmly at the centre of our online worlds.

As we move more of our identity information online it becomes potentially much easier to move that information around. With that ease of moving data around, concern increases that our personal data could be passed on to third parties. At best it might then be used to spam us, or be sold to our competitors. At worst, we might loose control over ownership of our online identity altogether, and it could be used for fraudulent purposes. These data protection issues are furthermore set in a global context where national legal frameworks may no longer make sense.

Who to trust

In this federated environment of identity providers there are a number of important questions that must be addressed, including:

1. How much do we trust these identity providers with our personal details?
2. Who audits services such as Facebook or LinkedIn to ensure security issues are addressed?
3. How much to we trust the downstream sites using these identity services with our personal details?

With these questions in mind, it is possible to imagine an ‘identity supply chain’ where different entities within the chain only know the smallest parts of a given identity that are needed to perform their function. For example, I could log in to a website without the website itself knowing my password. Similarly I could order goods without disclosing my full identity to the shipping agent, and I could leave commentary on a blog without the blog system needing to know my postal address.

The semantic web

In the web of linked data, identity is centrally important for determining trust, provenance and authenticity. Understanding who made a particular assertion is essential within scientific communication, for example, which is necessarily a continuous debate. In such a discourse, degrees of trust and certainty are necessarily important in evaluating and combining facts from different sources. Identity is needed for:

• Annotation – making commentary and building discussion around facts and data
• Augmentation – adding new data and assertions to existing data sets based on new evidence and experiments
• Refutation – allowing statements to be contradicted according to new evidence or new interpretation of existing evidence, based on different degrees of trust within a system

All of the above types of communication are quite possible using the linked data semantic web model we have today. For example, I am free to publish any kind of statements I like which refer to other statements. However in doing this it is critical that the notion of my identity is preserved in relation to the statements I make, just as its is critical that the identity of the author of the original statements is clear.

Wikipedia or Schizopedia?

The huge success of Wikipedia has shown that collaboration and openness combined with low cost of usage can combine to produce true value. The centralised model of Wikipedia allows the tracking of individual edits but not necessarily on a named or identified user basis. Essentially, the decreased end user cost of building the information resource has been traded against a consequent lack of traceability and provenance.

Compare this with the semantic web linked data model. Here no centralisation is expected (or even possible). I can publish some facts, you can comment, agree, refute or augment these facts, and by publishing your assertions in the linked data cloud you can also join the conversation. So can many other people, with many other agreements, contradictions and additional observations. Here the conversation could start to resemble schizophrenia, with many voices talking at once. Without a solid notion of identity and provenance it is impossible to build a consistent and coherent model of the facts.

New licence models

Many publishers have traditionally licensed their intellectual property to third parties in the form of data sets. This could be, for example, to provide language translation devices to language students, or alternatively to provide an abstract service to complement the primary source materials in a particular discipline. These licence deals inevitably involve the simple transfer of the published content as a set of static files from licensor to licensee.

However, as the service offered by publishers matures to include APIs to their data and services instead of simple file transfer, the need to address identity issues arises. Typical identity issues include:

• The need to ensure the API is used only by the licensee
• The need to record usage metrics by each licensee

Additional issues may include the need to track the licensee’s individual users and their usage patterns. Furthermore if the API delivers services to the licensee’s end users beyond simple search and content retrieval, then it may be necessary to exchange authentication and identity information about the end user of the site.

Conclusions

Drawing all the threads together that I have explored in this and my previous posts on Identity Management I have come up with the following conclusions.

The answer the question ‘are we there yet?’ is of course no, not yet. The more interesting question is whether we are even on the right road to get there. In order for us to reach our destination, a rational and usable system for managing identities on the web, the following needs to happen in my view.

Publishers and information professionals need to collaborate to design an identity framework what meets the needs of all stakeholders including contributors, researchers and institutions. This framework should be built on existing open standards such as OpenID and DOI but must not sacrifice usability. The solution must be built on an organisational infrastructure which is credible and can be trusted across the industry, and should ideally be based on open source software which can be independently audited for security concerns by any interested party.

The starting point for such a collaboration may already be in place with the recently announced ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) initiative. I for one will be watching this project closely over the coming months and I look forward to their developments and progress.

And in the meantime … keep quiet you kids there in the back!

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.

As quality assurance assistant and junior developer for Semantico I spend a lot of time developing and implementing QA tests. Testing an e-publishing website can be time consuming.

Even a simple test of search functionality has several steps; go to the designated URL, log in, search, verify the search results, check hit highlighting, start an advanced search, verify those results, check hit highlighting again, start another search with a different term… well, you get the idea. It’s repetitive. And there are many aspects to test, not just the search facilities.

After a while you might find yourself thinking that there should be a more efficient way to test your website. You can hire someone to do all your QA tests for you of course. But will they test your website in an efficient way? Will they follow your test cases to the letter; the tests you have spent hours designing, editing and documenting? If only there were an automated tool to do all this – and one which did not require a degree in Computer Science to operate.

Enter Selenium

At Semantico we do extensive testing. To get the most out of budgets and man hours we now use Selenium IDE for the repetitive tasks.

The official website describes Selenium as “a suite of tools to automate web app testing across many platforms”. You can think of Selenium as a little piece of software that does not mind doing your testing for you. It will test your website exactly the way you want it to be tested, as many times as you wish. You just need to tell it what to test and how. Selenium is a life saving tool and can cut out a lot of time, effort and money. It’s got no price tag (it’s free!) and is fairly easy to learn. It comes in different flavours but we’ll only talk about the Firefox add-on version here because that’s the version we know best.

Installation and tutorials

Download Selenium IDE and let’s get started. Install it on Firefox, restart your browser and you are ready. Selenium now lives in Firefox’s Tools menu and has a minimal interface. If you have ever recorded macros in an office suite of applications (like OpenOffice or Microsoft Office for example) then using Selenium will be a breeze. If you haven’t, it will only take you a couple of hours to learn how to use it efficiently.

I have found two very useful tutorials so far, one from the official Selenium Wiki and one from the Software Testing Geek website . Both tutorials require Flash to run. These are only a couple of tutorials from the many available on the web. A quick search on your favourite search engine should help you find even more.

After that, you are ready to start recording your test cases and then share them with your colleagues if you want, so that they can do some QA work when you are not available.

Using Selenium

Using Selenium is fairly straightforward. You start Firefox, fire up Selenium IDE and it is already in record mode. As soon as you start clicking on links, typing in text boxes and pressing buttons, Selenium will record these actions. The simplest thing to do when you first run Selenium is use it to run a search on a website. Once you have initiated the search and the search results are displayed on the page, press the ‘Record’ button to deactivate it. Afterwards, you can run the newly-created test case and Selenium will play it back on demand, repeating your actions in exactly the same order as you have taken them.

Translating your test cases

Selenium stores your commands in its own programming language. This language, called Selenese, uses English words and can be easily read by non-programmers. Once you’ve created your test cases you can translate them into Selenese and they are ready to be used whenever you need them. This is where you can realise the true power of this tool. You simply run Selenium and it will handle the rest. You can either run a test suite or individual test cases. If there are any errors, Selenium will report them, along with an explanation, in a log file which is directly accessible from the programme’s interface.

Selenium’s interface will not win any beauty contests. But it’s incredibly easy to use and, most importantly of all, is constantly giving you helpful feedback on what is happening. Brains over beauty. Simple.

Most automated tools we have tried in the past have had one common problem: they will not let you change the base URL. The base URL is essentially the URL of your website. But as all experienced QA testers know, the URL can change. One day you are testing something on a test environment, later that day you are testing something on the live site. Implementing your test cases multiple times for each URL can be time consuming and inefficient. With Selenium IDE you can choose not to store a base URL, which makes it very versatile and easy to use on different environments.

Sharing your test cases

Once you are happy with the implementation of your test cases and you have separated them in test suites, you are able to share them with your colleagues and across different departments. The files are small enough to email, or you can save them to a shared drive.

It is not a panacea

No matter how powerful a testing tool is, it will never entirely substitute the work done by a QA team. Selenium IDE is great for testing specific functionalities of your website and can deal with most of your test cases – but it is not ideal for checking presentation-related issues. You cannot use it, for instance, to test whether your website looks the same on a wide-screen monitor, or to check the text on a particular menu for correct alignment.

Also, it is a Firefox add-on. Unless you install the server-based version of Selenium, Selenium RC on a server, you can only check your website on Firefox. There are CSS issues between browsers that you also need to examine before you give the developers the green light to go live.

Lastly, if there is one area that needs improving it’s that Selenium is a bit weak on dynamic content. If, for example, one of your pages involves different sections that are presented in tabs with JavaScript, Selenium will not always work.

Recap

Using Selenium to improve your tests on your website has many benefits: you save time, money and resources. Your tests are done in a fraction of the time it used to take you to fully test a website. Your test cases become more flexible, more dynamic and of course, you never forget to test anything.

I’ve found Selenium to be an exceptionally useful tool when it comes to regression tests and rapid functional tests. It’s not here to replace testing done by humans, but it does a great job of assisting and complementing human testing.

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

Video by River Valley TV.

This isn’t completely a matter of personal prejudice. We’ve taken as a starting point the Gartner hype curve, which charts emerging technologies as they ascend the Peak of Inflated Expectations, plunge into the Trough of Disillusionment, then haul their way painfully back up the Slope of Enlightenment - finally reaching the Plateau of Productivity. We’ve simply selected the technologies most relevant to online publishing, and added a few others based on our own experience (and personal prejudice).

We should emphasize that this is all about hype. We don’t expect the growth of adoption in e-books to slow down, for instance, we just expect to see a lot more negative comment about them – e.g. The Daily Mail digging out a tame scientist to say that they give you cancer.

It’s a light hearted, seasonal exercise and does not necessarily reflect the views of Semantico’s highly qualified consultants and developers, whose steely pragmatism and focus on the client business case lead them always to rise above the froth of mere fashion!

‘… KM is a business practice, e-learning a teaching (learning) technique, online publishing a distribution mechanism. The commonality? The underlying enabling technologies for each are largely the same.’

I recently helped to edit an article on unifying e-learning and knowledge management for a learning and communications company. The article addressed the silo problem within large organisations that divides the two disciplines of Knowledge Management (KM for short) and Training and stops them functioning in useful collaboration. Collaborating usefully is something which, on the face of it, these two disciplines ought to be able to do. After all, both have responsibilities in a similar area: i.e. in what an employee knows, and how that employee can be helped to do a particular job better by knowing new or different things.

In practice, however, KM and Training are two very different communities. They have their own languages, concepts and above all cultures: librarians don’t necessarily feel an instant sense of rapport with trainers (publishers may feel the same way!).

In the article I was editing, the glue proposed to hold these two disparate worlds together was Blended Learning.

Diagram showing unification of blended learning and knowledge management. Property of LINE Communications

Our model, as symbolised in the diagram shown here, had blended learning as the all-embracing design principle with KM activities as components within this design – or, to use the jargon of the e-learning world, as different ‘learning modalities’.  At the time it occurred to me that, had I been working for a KM client, we might be drawing the map very differently; with Knowledge Management as the organising principle, and e-learning as one of many knowledge and information modalities.

We all behave like medieval cartographers when we do these diagrams, putting our home territory at the centre of a map, so to speak. But before I get on to why I think there is a certain degree of justification for drawing the map in this rather e-learning-centric way, we should pause for a word or two about Blended Learning.

What is Blended Learning?

Blended Learning (for those who don’t know) is the combination of traditional stand-up training with e-learning. In its initial form it was largely about bolting self-paced modules of online learning onto pre-existing stand-up courses, but over the years it has gained more sophistication, and confounded the doubts of early naysayers who doubted its ability to scale.

Nowadays it can involve a wide variety of different components, both online and offline, orchestrated so as to make the most efficient and effective use both of trainer resources and trainee time. It’s a very diverse picture, but let me try to sketch for you an indicative example, typical of the more leading edge examples being launched within large organisations today.

An enterprise-scale blended learning programme might kick off with a series of webinars, ensuring global message control, and proceed with the help of face-to-face workshops, personal coaching, online videos, modules of self-paced e-learning web-delivered via computer and/or smartphone, and online assessments.

The rise of Web 2.0 has had an impact on blended learning as well, widening the available online tools to include blogs, wikis, rss feeds, and social networking. Typically, a large-scale programme will have its own dedicated learning portal, linked to a Learning Management System which tracks and reports on assessment scores, completions, etc. – and this portal can provide a focus for online Web-2.0-style collaboration. Somewhere in this mix is often a series of downloadable pdfs, and access to online texts.

The creation of rich-mix technology-enabled training programmes such as this throws a lot of responsibility on the instructional designer, who must co-ordinate all these media in a sensible way to achieve particular learning objectives. Instructional design (or learning design as it is increasingly called nowadays), is the core skill of a service-based e-learning company. The rich mix available to today’s learning designer, a diversity that was not present in the purely face-to-face world, contains the possibility of many interventions which are not, strictly speaking, instructional at all. The provision of access to searchable online texts could be more about reference than learning. Pdfs could be published as part of a compliance programme, for instance, solely to update the learner on new regulations and procedures – where no deep change in attitudes or behaviours is required.

An awareness has spread that there is a spectrum of interventions available within technology-enabled learning, as represented in the diagram below.

‘Depth of training’ really indicates the extent to which the learner’s enquiry is led and mediated. At the ‘deep’ end of the spectrum, educational experiences that involve personal transformation will require much more instructional design than interventions at the other end of the spectrum; instructors/educators provide structure to the experience. At the ‘shallow’ end of the spectrum, learners themselves provide structure and direction; it’s all about access and discoverability.

It’s important to understand that a given blended learning programme might include interventions that fall anywhere along this spectrum. Most do. Given this, it is clear from the paragraph above – if only in the terminology I have fallen into using – that such a programme will necessarily span different disciplines. ‘Discoverability’, for example, is a concept well known to knowledge managers and online publishers, but almost unheard of within e-learning circles. Perhaps it should be better known on that side of the fence, however, since there is more and more talk within e-learning about the importance of ‘the self-directed learner’.

When you look at it from this point of view, Blended Learning is an inherently silo-busting concept.

E-learning thriving, KM just surviving?

So if there really is an opportunity here for a less siloed approach, why should it be under the aegis of e-learning and not the other way round? Why shouldn’t knowledge management lead the charge?

One of the reasons is purely pragmatic. E-learning is an industry in boom, while KM, for the moment at least, looks to be in retreat.

The latest Ambient Insights report on the US e-learning market shows demand growing by a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 7.4% and revenues to reach $23.8 billion by 2014. This healthy picture is echoed in the UK. A 2009 report by Learning Light, building on work of my own in 2007, forecasts growth rates for UK e-learning of between 6.7% and 8%.

Meanwhile, according to the FT, knowledge management faces a more uncertain future. According to journalist Lucy Kellaway, companies are giving up on any attempt to manage their information, ‘… on the grounds that to do so costs too much. Since the recession began, many have closed their libraries and taken the axe to their knowledge management divisions, set up with such pride and optimism barely a decade ago’. (Published: 22 November 2009)

If information management really is becoming a ‘nice to have’, training seems, in the corporate market at least, to be holding its own. One cynical view of this picture offered to me by an IBM consultant, is that UK organizations train so little, and actually need to do so much, that there just isn’t any slack – no room for cuts. The shift to services, certainly, has made training a less negligible item for corporates. In certain industries – retail banking, mobile telephone sales, hotel and leisure – an organisation’s brand and service values are practically the only real basis of competitive advantage, and for a service-based organization, training offers the only real way to ensure that employees really understand and embody their brand. Organisations have other big needs too – compliance, product training and change management that can only really be met at scale with substantial help from technology.

In most of these programmes, the organisation is profiting from its own knowledge, recycling what it knows already – which is the basic job of knowledge management. But whereas KM is seen as a year round activity, a matter of infrastructure, e-learning programmes tend to be wrapped up in new, one-off initiatives, and are thus less vunerable to cutting.

A learning programme provides the impetus, the motivation, the objective, the unifying story to bring change about and attract investment from organizations, since its returns are often more measureable.

Online publishing and e-learning

This is also true of less immediately performance-related learning programmes, such as those involved with professional development. An organisation with a lot of accountants, for instance, like one of the big consultancy firms, has a strong interest in keeping the professional skills and knowledge of those accountants up to date. Learning programmes that do this can seem to have more urgency and point to them than general improvements in the ‘knowledge infrastructure’. This is especially true where learning is linked to a professional qualification. As in Education, qualifications are something which gives the acquisition of knowledge a shaping rationale and a measurable end-point.

It is in this latter field of professional development that many people expect to see convergence between e-learning and online publishing in the future. And it’s is not just about accountants, lawyers, doctors, nurses, etc.

Recently I was talking to a life sciences publisher, with a big audience for their products in the developing world, who are just about to launch their first e-learning programme. This is vital knowledge, from an authoritative source, linked to professional accreditation, and with a wide potential audience.

It will be interesting to watch developments in this space. Technology enabled learning is now such a rich and varied thing, with so many powerful new channels to exploit, that the potential for development seems huge. As user acceptance and bandwidth grows, the only thing holding us back from more convergence between e-learning, online publishing and knowledge management, will be the lack of mutual understanding. Were these silo walls to dissolve, a creative potential could be unleashed that could surely only benefit all the industries involved.