Frankfurt Supply Chain Meeting: Shatzkin & The Emergence of DADs

Mike Shatzkin of Idealogical company presented his research into Digital Asset Distributors in a speech entitled An Emerging Infrastructure of Digital Asset Distribution. Mike has presented this material on at least three occasions and I discussed it earlier this year here. He also has a copy of a similar speech from earlier this year on his web site here.

The publishing supply chain is changing and is no longer simple. In digital distribution even without ebooks they have more content to supply more trading formats, more trading partners and more customization. A lot of this content is about sales but also a lot about marketing. A little more than a year ago, Shatzkin saw a number of companies developing digital asset distribution (DAD) services who distribute content for digital asset producers (DAP) and pass the content to digital asset retailers (DAR). The role of a DAD is to get content delivered to a wide aray of content users. In his view there are more scale reasons for the development of DADs than there are/were for physical distribution which has been consolidating steadily for 40 years. Shatzkin went on to identify eight companies in the publishing arena he considers to be DADs: Biliovault, Bookbank, MPS Bookstore, Code Mantra, Ingram Digital, LibreDigital, Random House UK and ValueChain International. (These companies are also noted in the speech cited above).

In determining the need for a DAD a publisher should document all their use cases such as, files sent to printers including archiving and version control, files to merchants to support sale including covers, toc's etc., files sent for subrights reasons, files sent to websites and/or syndicators for pr reasons and files sent to online booksearch programs. Finally ebooks are the least important of the use cases as don't currently provide a lot of revenue but do provide promotional benefits. The objective of a publisher is to get a DAD that can support all their use cases and avoid retaining DADs that can only fulfill part of their use cases. New use cases arise all the time so the DAD also needs to be flexible.

In the long run Shatzkin believes that most DAD's will become industry resources for most publishers and publishers (with only a few exceptions) will forgo development of their own DAD capability.

There are a number of steps a publisher should take in beginning their DAD strategy.
Firstly, a publisher needs to develop a spreadsheet inventory of all their files, their locations and their formats. Secondly, the publisher needs to document all their use cases. Thirdly, understanding both the current costs of fulfillment and what is not getting done is also important. These three items are critical for the publisher to have a meaningful discussion with the potential DAD's about services and costs. If the publisher doesn't have the content in a form to distribute, the DAD will almost certainly work with them to transform the content for a fee.

Lastly no DAD is future proof and so you must get to know the provider not just the sales team. Be sure to build strict service level agreements into your contract which also includes an innovation clause enabling you as a customer to ensure the DAD continues to innovate and expand their services in line with your customer needs and requirements.

Publishers Worry About Amazon

Mike Shatzkin and I were intereviewed for an article published by SNL/Kagan about Amazon.com's relationship with publishers in light of the Hachette UK situation, Booksurge and the Kindle.

Excerpt:

Mike Shatzkin, founder and CEO of the publishing advisory firm The Idea Logical Co., said in a June 26 interview with SNL Kagan that Amazon is likely not getting those titles from publishers for under $9.99 and is probably taking a loss on those books. But Shatzkin added that situation could change if Amazon succeeds in establishing the Kindle as the dominant e-book platform. "If the Kindle reaches a critical mass, Amazon will have the ability to tell publishers that if they want their books available on the Kindle, they will have to sell them to Amazon for $6 or less," Shatzkin said. "That's going to be pretty rough." One reason it is so hard for publishers to meet Amazon's demand for increasingly lower prices, Cairns said, is because they must continue to offer their authors competitive advances and royalty packages to ensure they get the best titles. "Particularly for the brandname authors, publishers have to pay a very high price for that content," Cairns said. "It would be difficult for publishers to go back to their authors and say 'Give me a better price for your books.'" As a result, when Amazon asks for steeper discounts on titles, publishers are left trying to maintain their margins in other ways — such as by putting their marketing and distribution expenses. "And in this day and age, many of the larger publishers have already sweated out as much expense out of those cost areas as they possibly can, so there's not very much room left at all for them to do that," Cairns said. "It's very tight."

BookExpo: Session Picks

These are the sessions today and tomorrow that I think you would want to attend:

Thursday:

The Impact of Free (and Piracy) on Book Sales: An Update on The Piracy Project
9:30AM - 10:30AM (Thursday, May 28, 2009)
As digital content has become more available and more commonly distributed in book publishing, fears of piracy and lost sales have grown. While the debate over the impact of free content has been at times heated, the discussions are more often than not characterized by a lack of hard data. To address this data gap, O'Reilly Media began a project in 2008 to characterize the free universe, catalog and assess recent experiments, establish ways to measure the benefit or cost of free distribution and conduct some follow-on experiments of our own. Come to this session to hear an update on this ongoing study.
Presenter: Brian O'Leary - Principal, Magellan Media Consulting Partners

Stay Ahead of the Shift: What Product-Centric Publishers Can Do to Flourish in a Community-Centric Web World
11:00AM - 12:00PM (Thursday, May 28, 2009)
Publishers have necessarily been focused on short-term changes in their market environment because they've been happening fast. EBook sales are rising more quickly than anything else But Mike Shatzkin is thinking of much bigger changes than these. He looks out a couple of decades and imagines a world more different than today's than the world of 20 years ago is different from today's. He challenges the most basic assumptions we have always accepted that a book is "finished" when an author turns it in, that audiences are mostly reached through intermediaries, even that publishing is about products and paints a believable picture of a completely different media and content world which, he maintains, is coming whether publishers like it or not. so they require attention, but they don't amount to much yet in the way of sales. Individual title marketing, which worked through a bunch of "usual suspects" that hardly changed year to year, has become a game of Whack-a-mole, with new blogs and social networks popping up for every book between the time you get a manuscript and the time you print a book. And sales channels and how you reach them are shifting with new online accounts sprouting while many brick-and-mortar accounts are dying and catalogs, sales conferences, reps dedicated to bookstores, and even "publishing seasons" themselves are endangered species.
Presenter: Mike Shatzkin - Founder & CEO, Idea Logical Co, Inc

A Discussion with Softbank Capital's Eric Hippeau on where VC Dollars are Flowing and What it Means for Publishers
1:30PM - 2:30PM (Thursday, May 28, 2009)
New and radical innovation has accompanied each recession for the past four decades. And though the financial meltdown is historic in its roiling of hedge and mutual funds, there is still a substantial amount of uninvested money that will be invested soon. Couple this with the impact of new broadband and mobile media applications changing consumer behavior, and publishers are left with a future of media influence uncertainty. That is, unless you are talking with a major player who is directing investments into new media. Don't miss this discussion between Wired's Chris Anderson and Softbank Capital's Eric Hippeau as they dig into the detail of what's hot and where the VC dollars are flowing.
Host: Chris Anderson - Editor in Chief, WIRED, author, FREE
Guest: Eric Hippeau - Managing Partner, Softbank Capital

The End of the Supply Chain and the Beginning of the True Book Culture
2:30PM - 3:30PM (Thursday, May 28, 2009)
Knowing what we now know, about media and content in the digital networked age, and recognizing we may not yet know that much, let''s now ask ourselves: what might the ideal publishing company look like? Had we it to do over again, how would we build a system for connecting writers and readers? Richard Nash gave up his job in order to start to answer those questions and here offers his thoughts so far...
Panelist: Dedi Felman - (formerly) Sr. Editor, Simon & Schuster
Presenter: Richard Nash - (formerly) Publisher, Soft Skull Press

Friday:

D2T2: Digital Debut Tool Time
9:30AM - 10:30AM (Friday, May 29, 2009)
An insider’s presentation of new and soon-to-be-mainstreamed web-based entities providing innovative digital services and tools to authors, publishers and readers.
Moderator:

Mike Shatzkin - Founder & CEO, Idea Logical Co, Inc
Presenter: Peter Clifton - President & Ceo, FiledBy, Inc.
Mark Coker - founder & CEO, Smashwords, Inc.
Hugh McGuire - co-founder & President, BookOven

Do Publishers Still Hold the Keys to the Kingdom? A Panel of Authors Weigh In
2:00PM - 3:00PM (Friday, May 29, 2009)
Book publishers have been criticized for their reluctance to adopt new technologies. Yet their tepid forays into the digital media world have been due in part to flavor-of-the-day platforms that leave even the experts guessing what technology will be around tomorrow. Our panelists will discuss some of the thorniest issues facing old media today, what old media can learn from new media and what both must do to adapt and survive. NOTE This panel will be held on the Downtown Author Stage
Moderator: Steven Johnson, author of The Invention of Air, The Ghost Map, Everything Bad is Good For You, and other bestsellers
Panelist: Chris Anderson - Editor in Chief, WIRED, author, FREE
Lev Grossman, Sr. Writer & Book Critic, Time and author, The Magicians
Tom Standage, Business Editor, The Economist, and author, An Edible History of Humanity

Canon Tales: 7x20x21 - Sponsored by The New Yorker
4:30PM - 5:45PM (Friday, May 29, 2009) A unique event designed to inspire conversation, creativity, and passion for the future of publishing. It was born in the UK, where the most recent event at the London Book Fair was presented to a standing-room-only crowd.
Our panel will be the first US adaptation. Ten presenters who are at the forefront of what is exciting in publishing now will be given seven minutes each to present their stories to the crowd. Their presentations will be accompanied by a Powerpoint presentation of 20 slides, with a strict 21-second limit per slide, which forces the presenter to keep the presentation moving forward quickly. Our guidelines for what they discuss will be left wide open, in order to encourage a wide range of topics and styles of presentation throughout the panel. NOTE This panel will be held on the Downtown Author Stage.
Presenter: Debbie Stier, Harper Studio; Richard Nash, former publisher of Soft Skull; Lauren Cerand, PR rep; Jeff Yamaguchi, Digital Marketing, Random House; Mat (Some one - name cut off on program).

Missing Mike Shatzkin

Mike Shatzkin who passed away last week was a friend of mine.  Mike was a walking encyclopedia of the publishing industry and if he didn’t recall something he would call on his father’s long publishing experience to make a point or correct some bit of information. I first met Mike in the mid-1990s when he was working with Vista Computing to organize and present expert knowledge sessions about the industry. We didn’t interact at these sessions, but I recall immediately recognizing that Mike had a gift in thinking about big ideas and then determining what the consequences of those ideas would be.  Later, when I was newly installed at Bowker, he called me up with one of his signature lines, “I have an idea” and so he and Jim Lichtenburg came out to New Providence. 

Bowker had inherited a website named Bookwire from Publisher’s Weekly and Mike wanted to take it over from us and build it into a book and reader information hub. We already had traffic, but we had no idea what to do with this site. Mike saw the future: His vision for Bookwire in 1999 was Goodreads and Shelfari in 2005 but of course we never did the deal and Bookwire eventually disappeared.

As many of us who worked with Mike know, he prefaced may interesting and thought-provoking things with, “I have an idea” which was frequently followed by, “You know, wouldn't it be interesting (or great) if….” It is a testimony to Mike’s knowledge, intelligence, and persistence that he had (and held for years) the ears of many publishing leaders from John Ingram to Steve Riggio to Markus Dohle to Peter Wiley and it is such an incredible thing that Mike’s council and advice was so well received by the leaders of this industry.

We met for lunch many times and we met regularly at conferences, and he was always on point. He invited me to lunch after I was bounced from Bowker to see what I was planning to do. Lunch with Mike was always challenging and informative but at the end of the meal he asks “Why do you think you were fired?” and I say “Because I didn't kiss the owner's ass enough.” Mike says, “Well that wasn't very smart was it?”  He was often funny and practical. 

Many of you reading this will not know that Mike debated starting his own blog and, as hard as it is to believe if you know Mike, he wasn't sure if he could keep up with regularly posting!  It is impossible to believe Mike wasn't confident he had enough to say on a regular basis. I had launched PND a few months before and I was generating some attention (now dissipated), so he asked me if he could post to PND as an experiment. I had no hesitation in agreeing and this is where his first Shatzkin files post post was made (and 2nd). Needless to say, the stats were good, his responses and interactions were positive, and the rest is history. PND benefited from the attention but Mike’s influence via his long running blog was hugely significant to understanding the industry and the forces at play over the past 20 years.

During the Google book digitization controversy, Mike reached out to me with one of his “Wouldn’t it be interesting” ideas about trying to determine how may book license orphans existed.  At the time there were many wild estimations, but Mike and I thought about how I could come up with an estimate using some of the data Bowker and others had collected over many years. By now, I was long gone from Bowker, but this eventual report and PND post still generates consistent web traffic and for me, the work generated many conference appearances and notoriety.  This was a great example about Mike’s willingness to engage others in his work and refer work to other consultants like me. Mike knew what he was good at, and he also knew what bored him and he regularly referred potential and sometimes actual consulting clients to me. For this I am forever grateful.

Some of you will recall his keynote speech at one of the early Digital Book World (or Information Pays) conferences where he really commanded the audience and spoke expansively about the publishing business and the impact of digital workflows and reading. A week or so before that speech he invited me to his office (and for some reason the illusive Mrs. PND came along, and Martha was also there) because he wanted to run through the speech with me and get my feedback. I recall this often because I see how this showed how much he respected my input. There was one invite I wish I was able to make and that was a reunion of the band he used to manage – just hilarious if you can imagine it, but I was out of town that week.

I miss Mike and of course I can only regret that I didn’t follow up the last time we met over a year ago when we parted and agreed to do lunch again. Which never happened. Mike is kicking back now reading digitally – on a flip phone or e-reader it doesn’t matter, and by now has confirmed that there is no god. Mike, we miss you and love you and it is very likely many of us will be seeing you soon.

Farewell friend.

Five Questions with Shatzkin on DADs

At the Frankfurt supply chain meeting, Mike Shatzkin presented his white paper on Digital Asset Distributors. I summarized the content of the presentation here but I also followed up and asked Mike to expand on several points in the presentation. Here are his responses.

1. You mentioned that the research that resulted in the white paper on Digital Asset Distributors was developed for Klopotek. What is there interest in this research and why were they interested in this subject?
   
   Believe it or not, Klopotek really had a community interest in the subject (although that also translates into a marketing device.) They are not a DAD -- which we define as an operation that does digital storage, conversion, and distribution in response to a publisher's needs -- and have no interest in becoming a DAD. But they do sell systems to publishers that will have to account for digital activity, tying sales and revenues back into legacy systems to pay royalties, among other things. But, mainly, I think Klopotek -- which has been growing out of their German origins for the past several years -- saw a "thought leadership" opportunity to establish themselves in the English-speaking markets. And I think the White Paper and conferences -- the outputs from the research -- were successful for them in that regard.
   
   
2. You have given this presentation and speech a number of times over the past six months or so. What has been the reaction of the publishing community – not necessarily from the larger publishers – but the medium to smaller publishers? Are you starting to see an appreciation for the issues that this next tier of publisher needs to understand and appreciate as they consider their digital distribution needs?
   
   I don't see much of the smaller publishers; I think it is the nature of my consulting practice. But the mid-size ones are definitely feeling the issues raised by the DAD study. Right now, this is being driven by a combination of driving online sales (getting the content displayed with Amazon, BN.com, Google, Microsoft) and driving online marketing (widgets for MySpace and Facebook) for the consumer publishers. Publishers are also increasingly aware that there is a real ROI in developing a digital workflow, which becomes part of the thought process when they think about DADs. The more complex are the books a publisher creates -- the more highly illustrated and design-intensive -- the more benefits come from the digital workflow improvement.
   
   
3. What role are standards bodies playing in this area? Are the business needs and requirements moving ahead of the standards discussions and recommendations?
   
   Interesting that you raise this. Digital guru David Worlock said to me at Frankfurt that he wondered whether we should be worried so much about "standards" when we don't have a MARKET. Shouldn't we build the market first, he wondered? But Mark Bide, my partner in many ventures including the DADs research, would say that, without standards, you'll never build a market! I am not sure the business needs are yet moving ahead of the standards, but they probably will. I agree with something you have previously pointed out on your blog, which is that the identification of salable "chunks" can't really be done before the fact by publisher assignment of DOIs; it is the consumer who will identify what they want and how they want it put together and we don't really have a process to enable that.
   
   
4. You mentioned at Frankfurt that long term there may only be a few DAD’s but in the short term most publishers should/will contract with one of the existing players. Why do you think this is the case: Both the short term observation and the long term evolution.
   
   Technology drives scale is the answer in both cases. As it stands, all the DADs are struggling to build out their offerings to cover everything they have to do. They will all be challenged to provide real digital workflows -- real DAM capabilities -- or they will suffer competitively. They all need widgets. They all need nimble content conversion capabilities. And in the future they will need the capability to add value in sales of aggregated content. In the short term, obviously the players will choose from the choices on the table. In the US, that really means three major players (four if you are an academic publisher.) The biggest companies aren't quite all spoken for, but it will be increasingly difficult for new entrants to gain the scale that is necessary to play.
   
   
5. What will the evolution in services be for these DADs? Where/how do you think they will begin to differentiate themselves or will their services evolve into a commodity?
   
   One aspect of differentiation will be price and service. Pricing is a bit vague now and service is very hard to measure. But as new use cases arise -- Amazon Kindle, a Google device, new Web services like netGalley develop and need their database populated -- some DADs will handle these things more quickly and smoothly than others. That's why we urge strong service level requirements in publishers' agreements with DADs. In the longer run, I can see DADs "making sales." They can't really do that until they aggregate content and know they have it. But let's say a DAD has 500,000 recipes from 14 publishers and can convince Kroger to make use of them in marketing? If you're a publisher with that DAD, you make a sale. If you're not, you don't. In the physical distribution world, publishers look at "what else is in the bag?" when they pick a distributor or a sales rep group? It is too early for that kind of thinking in digital distribution, but it will come.
   
   
   Mike Shatzkin, mike@idealog.com

The Shatzkin Files

No not some espionage novel, but Mike Shatzkin who has written here once or twice has joined the blogging community. His blog address is: http://www.idealog.com/blog/ and we will all be look forward to reading his views on the industry. (And it was nice of him to give me a call out).

Here are two of his past posts at Personanondata:

Borders Stickers Books, Why? (Perhaps a coincidence but this got a comment today).

Amazon and Book Pricing.

BookExpo America Conferences

Ted Hill (fellow traveller and friend of the blog) let me know of a seminar he is hosting at BookExpo and here are the details:

Best Practices in Digital Marketing: The Publisher’s Perspective

Most trade publishers know that they can no longer rely on traditional marketing alone to connect with readers, but they are uncertain where they should invest scarce dollars in the many new opportunities presented by the net. Separate the buzzwords from the best working practices as you negotiate the shift from print to digital marketing. Topics include product marketing, working with online merchants, the company website, author-driven marketing, and how to build value over time.
Date: Thursday, May 31, 2007
Time: 12:30 PM to 1:30 PM
Place: Room 1E03

If you’re interested in the above, my frequent collaborators, Mike Shatzkin of the Idea Logical Company and Brian O’Leary of Magellan Media will also be speaking on topics on the same day that you may find valuable.

And as he mentions, Mike Shatzkin (fellow traveller and friend of the blog) also has a seminar and the details are as follows:

The End of General Trade Publishing Houses: Death or Rebirth in a Niche-by-Niche World describes how digital change is eliminating the ecosystem that sustains general trade publishing houses. But the good news is that the ecosystem we see replacing it is one general trade houses can actually migrate to, if they recognize the challenge, accept some painful realities, and start now. I know the speech will be provocative; I think it will also be entertaining and I hope it will put a lot of things most of us already know into a comprehensible framework.

Thursday, May 31, at 10 am, room 1E04

That same afternoon, May 31, at 2:30, in Room 1E11, I am moderating a session called Digital Search Intermediaries: New Roles and Channels for Publishers. This is about Digital Asset Distribution, a subject on which I am currently co-authoring a White Paper and co-hosting conferences dedicated to, in New York on June 21 and in London on July 12.

The speech I gave on DADs at BISG's Making Information Pay is now posted on our web site. You'll find it at http://www.idealog.com/speeches/mipdads.htm

The second seminar above conflicts with the session I am hosting unfortunately....

See you all there.

Author-centric website FiledByAuthor Launches

Mike Shatzkin and Peter Clifton (ex-Ingram) have annouced the private beta launch of a new author-centric web site named FiledByAuthor.com. I am proud to say I had a tiny role in its development. Check it out - especially if you are an author. Here is the press release:

FiledBy, Inc. Launches Online Directory of Published U.S. and Canadian Authors called filedbyauthor

Friday, December 12, 2008

Nashville, Tennessee. FiledBy, Inc. today announced the Private Beta launch of filedbyauthor, the most comprehensive online directory of published authors on the Internet. The company hopes the site will become a top 10 destination for readers and for authors.

FiledBy, Inc., was founded by publishing veteran Peter Clifton, former president of various Ingram Book Group companies, together with publishing visionary Mike Shatzkin, C.E.O. of the Idea Logical Company. The company's first project, filedbyauthor, is a massive author-centric web portal initially consisting of more than 1.2 million U.S. and Canadian author profiles.

"We are launching a Private Beta for published authors only, regardless of publishing category or level of success, to sign up, find their profile page and update or correct the information. With millions of books and more than 1.2 million pre-constructed profile pages, the site will ultimately be an invaluable resource for authors, writers, readers, researchers, and students.

"Filedbyauthor is the most comprehensive online directory of authors and their books," says President & C.E.O. Peter Clifton. The company hopes to quickly expand to all authors with works in the English language -- estimated to be over five million writers.

Filedbyauthor contains basic listings of information about all U.S. & Canadian authors in the directory. Authors may visit the site, claim their profiles, correct them, and enrich them in a variety of ways at no charge.

We hope you will tell your audience about this opportunity for exposure. Filedbyauthor plans to open the site to the public sometime early in 2009.

Contact Information:

STEVE O'KEEFE

for FiledBy, Inc.

http://author.filedby.com

(504) 342-4806

Shatzkin Speeches Posted

Mike Shatzkin informs me he has just posted on his website four talks delivered this year (three of them somewhat belatedly). Mike noted, "There is definitely a good deal of repetition here, but there is also a distinct slant to each piece. For those of you who are not gluttons for punishment, I'd suggest the one, delivered on Wednesday, May 7, 2008 in Copenhagen. The one titled The End of General Trade Publishing Houses is a completely rewritten version of an earlier version some of you may have read. The other two are described sufficiently below."

May 7, 2008 to Danish publishers and booksellers in Copenhagen on the Future for Publishers and Booksellers: Here

April 16, 2008 to UK publishers at London Book Fair, summarizing US state of affairs reporting on "The State of Digitization in the US": Here

March 10, 2008, "Publishing in the Digital Age" panel participant remarks at Book Business Conference and Expo: Here

January 22, 2008, rewritten reprise of "The End of General Trade Publishing Houses", to Random House's "Digital Day": Here

Shatzkin with Agents and FiledBy

Mike Shatzkin who needs no introduction nor help from me for that matter had an interesting post today about a panel discussion he participated in on the future of publishing. Importantly, however he also announced that his new business FiledByAuthor is now live:

This is the same phenomenon that has made it harder for new bands to break out for years: a kid today can still “discover” the Beatles or Bob Dylan and have dozens of songs to listen to and learn without any regard to what is “new”, because the Beatles and Dylan are new to them! We haven’t (yet) had the situation where a multi-book novelist from the 1880s or the 1930s becomes a new addiction, but we’re bound to eventually. And in the meantime, all those Long Tail units are just making the slope to success a little steeper for every new book.

I also told the agents (and, because I did, I want to tell you) about a brand new business I’m involved in called Filedby which, I’m happy to say, is addressing the Long Tail question from another direction. Filedby is now live with a web page for 1.8 million authors — every single one with a live ISBN in the US or Canada. The pages, already mounted, are “claimable” by the authors, providing a big head start on a personalized web page that Filedby has provided largely through automation. We see an enormous opportunity in helping authors help themselves. There are a lot of them not getting much help from their publishers. Frankly, except for Morgan Entrekin — who explictly spoke about working the internet finding the audiences for books that would sell between 6,000 and 25,000 copies — nobody was offering much hope that the publishers would be doing more for the authors in the days to come. Everybody seems to be looking to authors to do more for themselves. I think my co-founder Peter Clifton and I picked a very good time to be starting this business.

Book Expo - Quotes

Shatzkin - End of General Trade: "Print will be the last media to be read on a device....and we shouldn't be proud of that." With respect to published content, "all obsessions no matter what it is will be indulged" and brands as a result "move to a very granular level"

Gomez (Print is Dead): "there will be no e-book revolution until we come up with another name for it" which reflects the interactive nature of the product. And there will be "integration not another IPod". We need to "thinkof the children" who are and will be consumers of our content.

Hyatt - Social Networking for Publishers - It is important "to be authentic" in communications because users will see through what you are doing. Resist the temptation to have someone "ghost write your blog" because you will be found out.

Links of Interest

The Dallas DA has released boxes of material relating to the assination of JFK. The Dallas Morning news has launched a crowdsourcing effort to classify and identify the documents. Link. Tip o' hat to Brantley).

I wasn't aware Apple has an iTunes site dedicated to selling educational content to universities and students. Link

Larry Lesig may run for Congress and has launched a Change Congress initiative. (Tip to Hodgkin).

Stephen Fry has launched his Podgrams and also has an enjoyable post about digital cameras.

"Just about everybody who needs a camera has one. What is wrong with that Ixus I bought three years ago? That old Pentax Optio will see me through to my old age, don’t it? No! No, you crazed enemy of freedom, you wild-eyed anti-capitalist, you deranged luddite. Haven’t you heard of Face Detection Technology? Smile Capture? Best Shot Automatic YouTube Uploading?

WorldCat has a blog all to its own.

Shatzkin on horizontal to vertical redux.

Apax is already sniffing around Reed Business Information. Link

Tell this to Harpercollins. Link

Google Book Agreement

Mike Shatzkin has been thinking about what the Google Book agreement with AAP and AG could mean for revenues: Where will the money come from? (He's roped me in as well):

The part that interests me most is the potential revenue beyond the settlement. Where is the revenue for this going to come from? Who will buy what from the material Google has digitized and what will the revenue opportunities really be for those who “opt in”? And what will Google really have to sell?

I went to Michael Cairns, former CEO of Bowker with this question and he and I are starting to think it through.

All the focus on revenues in the conversations I’ve heard, including a very stimulating seminar at Columbia ten days ago, has been about digital revenue. And that’s what Cairns and I were thinking about too. What, besides the pre-1923 PD stuff do they have in the databases they can license to libraries? So how much can they charge? We saw Google’s pricing idea for ebooks. What will copyright owners do about pricing? And will copyright owners give Google books under this program, or under the Google Partnership Program? These are complicated questions.

Distracting, even.

More

BISG Announce "Start With XML Project"

BISG is pleased to announce its sponsorship and support of an exciting and important new venture, the StartwithXML project.

This project, co-presented by O'Reilly Media and The Idea Logical Company, is an industry-wide, multipart initiative to present and disseminate the information that publishers need in order to move forward with a StartwithXML workflow. Mike Shatzkin of The Idea Logical Company was a featured speaker at the recent BISG Annual Meeting, where he discussed the project and the importance of XML to the publishing world (click here to see his presentation).

Survey Now Open

The first part of the project involves a survey of current publishing and production processes. BISG urges its publisher members to participate in this survey; the information gathered from the industry is vital to the success of the program. click here to connect to the survey.

Sign Up for the January Event

A one-day forum is scheduled for January 13, 2009, at the McGraw-Hill Auditorium in New York. Through panels and presentations, you'll spend the morning understanding the “Why” of XML, and the afternoon learning about “How” to move forward. CLICK HERE for more information and registration details. BISG members will be eligible for a $100 discount off the full-day event, and $50 off for the half-day session; contact the BISG office (info@bisg.org) for discount codes.

Additional Features

The project will also include a detailed research report and an online community. The research report will include information, case studies, best practices, technology and vendor profiles, and interviews with industry experts discussing the factors that make a StartWithXML workflow both useful and tricky. The supporting online community will feature a blog, an open comments section for the report outline, and a discussion forum.

We invite all BISG members to participate in StartwithXML, starting with the survey!

StartwithXML is sponsored by

Code Mantra Klopotek Publishing Dimensions Rosetta Solutions, Inc.

Everyone Needs A Dad

There was a good deal of joking about the acronym DAD at last weeks Klopotek sponsored conference on Digital Asset Distribution for publishers, but that did not take away from the content which showcased a number of providers in this space.

The conference was one part of a two part conference that presented a white paper Digital Asset Distribution for Book Publishers written by Mike Shatzkin (The Idea Logical Company) and Mark Bide (Rightscom Limited). The second part of the conference, which will deliver largely the same content, will be delivered in London next month at which time the presentations from both meetings will be made available. The White paper establishes the context for digital asset distribution:

But now, and rather suddenly, every book publisher is finding it has the need to manage the digital distribution of their content. The same set of content is needed by different people, in different forms, in different places and at different times, over and over again.

The white paper poses a number of questions which they later answer based on an extensive set of interviews with the key players in the industry. The pair interviewed companies in the US and Europe and publishers and a set of the predominate DADs. Among the questions they pose:

• When is it sensible for publishers to buy or build their own technical infrastructure?
• What are the risks of outsourcing Digital Asset Distribution?
• What functions currently managed by publishers might be rendered obsolete by a DAD?
• What is the relationship between Digital Asset Management (DAM) and Digital Asset Distribution?
• How much does a publisher need to know in order even to make use of a DAD?
• How does on line access to publisher’s content change both processes and accountability?
• To what extent have the leading edge professional and academic publishers been disadvantaged by their early entry into digital distribution?
• How many DADs do we need?

Presenting at the meeting were representative from Harpercollins, Ingram, Newstand, Bibliovault, codeMantra, CPI Publishing, MPS Technologies and Value Chain International. Each presentation was interesting in documenting the direction each company was taking in this arena. The comments by Bibliovault were especially on point for any one thinking about digital asset management:

1. Make sure you have access to your files at any time – don’t be reliant on the vendor to provide access
2. Don’t hand off the content and walk away expecting everything will be OK
3. Get your short term goals met
4. Be sure you can stockpile: a place to put the content even-though the content may not be released to the public

The full report can be found here and in about a month you will also be able to find the presentations.

Digital Book World Conference Preview

Next week, the two-day Digital Book World conference gets underway in New York City at a moment when – for better or for worse – the digital tide may become a tsunami for the book publishing world. Ahead of the first-time conference, Chris Kenneally spoke with Conference Chair and industry pundit Mike Shatzkin of the Idea Logical Company and his DBW colleague Guy LeCharles Gonzalez for a special preview.

Here is the link to the interview.

FiledBy Announces Launch of filedbyauthor website

I have noted the early development of FiledBy before and here is an announcement of the launch of their site:

FiledBy, Inc. today announced the Beta launch of filedbyauthor. The site is the first large-scale author-centric promotional platform to provide every author that has been published in the U.S. or Canada a free, hosted, ecommerce enabled web page ready to be claimed and enhanced. With more than 1.8 million pre-assembled author web pages and over 7 million book titles, filedbyauthor is the most complete site for finding and engaging with authors and their work.

“All authors, regardless of publishing category are encouraged to visit the site, claim their page, make corrections, and enrich them in a variety of ways," says Founder, President & C.E.O. Peter Clifton.

Any published author or co-author can easily and immediately update their author page which is linked to individual work pages. In addition to the free level, FiledBy announced two new membership levels designed to make additional web marketing tools available at low cost. These additional levels include blog tools, additional linking and media postings, event listings, online press kits and banner customization.

And, any reader can join the filedbyauthor community and start connecting with authors. Readers can fill in their own pages, collect favorite authors and books, write reviews, rate works and authors, and comment through wall postings.

“We hope to level the web marketing playing field for all authors, eliminate some of the challenges authors face when designing their online presence, and help every author become more easily discoverable through a highly optimized site,” added Clifton.

FiledBy, Inc. is a digital marketing services company providing membership sites, web tools and community building solutions to authors and their fans. The Company, based in Nashville, TN, was co-founded by Peter Clifton, a former Ingram executive and Mike Shatzkin, a publishing industry strategist.

Google Windfall

Mike Shatzkin and I have been thinking hard about the commercial aspects of the Google Book search settlement (IdeaLog Blog):

Here is a sample of Mike's post:

We believe it is unfortunate that the attention has been focused there because there are some very real commercial questions that we think need answers to fully appreciate the practical implications of the settlement. We’ve been doing our best to build a model of what revenue will be and where it will go. Trying to do that makes it very clear how much important detail has been omitted from the debate we’ve heard so far (and we’ve both heard a lot of it.) Here’s a starter list of questions that need answers to forecast this business which we hope that people more familiar with the terms of the settlement than we are might be able to answer for us.

Speakers Announced for Making Information Pay: Constructing the 21st Century Publishing Enterprise

BISG will hold its eighth annual Making Information Pay conference (www.bisg.org/mip) on Thursday, May 5, 2011, at the McGraw-Hill Auditorium in New York City.

The conference will feature keynote speaker Kenneth Michaels, EVP & COO, Hachette Book Group, joined by a lineup of industry leaders sharing new ways to think about, create and deliver products that successfully connect with today’s consumer. Confirmed speakers and session topics include:

Kenneth Michaels, EVP & COO, Hachette Book Group “Publishers as 21st Century Content Providers”

Bill Kasdorf, Vice President, Apex Content Solutions “Toward Agility & Efficiency: Best Practices for ‘Future-Proofing’ New Content”

Andrew Savikas, CEO, Safari Books Online and VP, Digital Initiatives, O’Reilly Media “Flexible & Multi-Channel Content: Real-World Examples from O’Reilly Media”

Madi Solomon, Director of Content Standards, Pearson “Smart Content: The Importance of Semantics in Publishing”

Brett Sandusky, Director of Product Innovation, Kaplan Publishing “Building a Smarter Wrapper: Utilizing the Data Locked Inside Digital Content to Increase ‘E-’ and ‘P-’ Book Discoverability”

Heather Reid, Director of Data Systems and Services, Copyright Clearance Center “The State of Current Rights Management Systems: Initial Findings from BISG & CCC’s Joint Survey of Publishers and Vendors”

David Marlin, President and Co-Founder, MetaComet Systems “Content in the Wild: What Happens When Rights Management Goes Wrong”

Mike Shatzkin, Founder & CEO, The Idea Logical Company “The Key to Future Profits: More Transactions, Fewer Dollars”

Tara Catogge, Senior Vice President of Inbound Supply Chain, Levy Home Entertainment “Attention Shoppers: Building Opportunity Based on Customer Behavior Data”

REGISTER

For more information about Making Information Pay 2011 visit MIP

Making Information Pay 2009

BISG has announced the speaker line-up for next months Making Information Pay conference. Here is the link to the registration page. It should be another full house.

Speakers and topics include:

The first part of the conference will feature the latest data from multiple industry sources. Confirmed speakers and session topics include:

• Leigh Watson Healy, Chief Analyst, Outsell
  A Time of Great Change: Insights from Top Publishing Executives on the Future of our Business

• Mike Shatzkin, Founder & CEO , The Idea Logical Company
  The Publishing Climate 2009: Publishers Wrestling with Change

• Jim King, SVP & General Manager, BookScan US
  The Retail Perspective: What’s Up? What’s Down?

• Kelly Gallagher, General Manager, Business Intelligence, R.R. Bowker
  The Customer’s Always Right: Who Is Today’s Book Consumer?

The second half of the conference will feature leading publishers discussing their strategies for current and future success. Confirmed speakers and session topics include:

• Dominique Raccah, Publisher & CEO, Sourcebooks, Inc.
  Business Unusual: Rethinking the Publishing Enterprise in Response to Changing Times

• Marcus Leaver, President, Sterling Publishing
  The New Marketing Budget: Breaking Traditional Marketing Allocations to Build a More Effective Model

• Josh Marwell, President of Sales, HarperCollins
  The 21^st Century Catalog: A Look at HarperCollins’ Initiative to Shift from Print to Digital Catalogs

Dave Thompson, VP, Sales Analysis, Random House
Squeezing the Most Sales from Non-Book Accounts: Tactics for Working with Inexperienced Buyers in Mass Merchant and Other Non-Book Accounts