Predictions 2010: The Powerpoint Version

Close readers will recall my predictions for 2010 and here I have created a convenient Powerpoint version.

Predictions 2010

View more presentations from Michael Cairns.

Brands to Publish - Repost

It's Friday which means another regurgitation from several years back. This one originally published on January 13, 2007:

Nancy Drew has always held a fascination for me, not because I clamor for a good girlie mystery but because of how The Nancy Drew series evolved. Established by Edward Stratemeyer, The Drew books were written by a number of ‘house’ writers (Mildred Benson) and the books were never dependent upon one author for their success. While the publisher of the titles was little recognized, the Drew series grew to become a strong branded product line and, as such, represents a model today's publishers may want to emulate. Corporate branding exercises little impact in the publishing world: We all know this and, while some publishers have tried to create brand strength (i.e., Paramount Publishing), success has been sparse and probably – in truth - not aggressively sought after.

There are exceptions. I used to start my Intro to Publishing courses at Price Waterhouse by asking the group to name a publisher. I stopped doing this when a partner once popped up and said HARLEQUIN! While some consumers might be able to identify Harlequin or Hungry Minds or Fodors, they would be hard-pressed to cite HarperCollins or Simon & Schuster with any relevance. Consumers have little emotive connection with publishing trademarks (a fundamental facet of brand awareness) and publishers are unlikely to ever achieve this connection with consumers. So, in an age in which the author transcends the publisher (Patterson, Grisham, Ludlum, Courtnay) what is a publisher to do? Investing in a branding campaign would be expensive and ultimately pointless, but embarking on a strategy similar to that which produced the Drew books might be more constructive.

My extrapolation of the Drew example led me to wonder why publishers don’t establish their own character-based brands. More publishers will do what Nelson has done and drop imprints, but will they also start to develop their own character-based franchises? Clearly, it is hard to ‘bottle’ what makes John Grisham a popular writer, but there are examples where existing characters have been extended in new ways. For example, there is a cottage industry of TV soap-opera lovers who create stories, novelizations and back-stories for the characters that appear in the TV soap operas. George Macdonald Frasier took a minor character out of Tom Brown’s School Days and created The Flashman series of satirical historical novels. The book packager Alloy Entertainment (which got caught up in a plagiarism charge last year) also operates a Nancy Drew model. There must be many others.

Publishers don’t have to look far to see how powerful character-based publishing could be. The comic book industry has been doing this for 50 years. In this industry the corporate brands (Marvel, DC Comics, etc.) have benefited from some of the reflected brand indentity that characters such as Superman, Spiderman, Aquaman and others have created in the minds and behavior of consumers. In book publishing, the opportunities to create character franchises are there for the asking. James Patterson has embarked on developing an author/character franchise and, if publishers were smart, they would be thinking about creating contracts that gave them the ability to broadly leverage the characters that authors create. This would include (with the author's permission) ghost-written books and stories of both the main characters and development of derivative story lines out of the books (as in the Flashman example). The opportunity to expand the content output and publish to a ‘template’ would generate higher revenues for publisher and author, stable consistent output and content consumers could enjoy.

The above scenario still accords some level of risk for publishers that the ‘powerful’ author may go off on his or her own. Given the examples in the music industry of late, some have suggested that major authors will do what Radiohead has done and walk away from the traditional publishing model. Some may, but it will hardly be an avalanche and this threat is no worse for a publisher than losing an established author to a rival house. The bigger question is how publishers can maintain a consistent funnel of marketable branded content. I believe publishers should be attempting to develop their own proprietary content franchises by building character properties in the same way the Nancy Drew series was created. There are several ways to develop this: Firstly, publishers can simply buy out an authors work so that they own it in total and can leverage it anyway they want. Secondly, they can license characters from other media: Who wouldn’t want to read a hard-boiled procedural featuring Law & Order’s Lennie Brisco, for example? As publishers begin to travel down this road, they could evolve into character based enterprises similar to Disney and Marvel. This, in turn, would make them less susceptible to the whims of authors and the corresponding limitations of their contracts.

Harpercollins is owned by NewsCorp which owns Fox. Assume that Fox owns the character "Dr. House"; why don’t you see a series of House mysteries written to a formula by ‘house’ (sorry) authors whose job it is to churn these out every two weeks? And there is no need to limit the books to Dr House; any of the characters in the show should be fair game. Publishers who focus on their publishing brands have things backwards: They should see things from the consumer's point of view and that view is more than likely focused on either an author or a character. Build the product pipeline up with a character based publishing approach and the publisher may grow in the ascendancy.

Obviously, authors are a critical component to a publishing house’s viability but as distribution flattens, barriers to entry drop and generally the industry changes. Publishers need to reassess their content-acquisition strategies to ensure they have access to revenue-producing assets that will remain with them for an extended period of time. Perhaps the Drew model will become more widespread.

My Modern Classics

Niche publishers like The Folio Society have been re-purposing publishing content into finely re-worked books for many years. These titles have expressly designed covers, often come slip cased and contain commissioned illustrations that were never in the original versions. They are beautiful objects but they are also one person's representation of design and manufacturing and other than the high quality there is only minimal uniformity across the titles. On a different level other titles from series such as Everyman's Library are similar in format but not of the unique quality as The Folio titles.

With not too much work you could create your own collection of titles. It would be one of my goals to work with my own editor and book designer to select titles, design a look for the exterior and interiors of the books and start publishing my own Modern Classic collection. With the costs of publishing one title through sites like blurb and Lulu.com it isn't an idea that is too far fetched. In the short term the content would likely be limited to public domain works but I believe over time more publishers will allow 'be-spoke' versions of their content where the consumer pays for the right to 'publish' the material for private use.

For someone like me who values the book as an object, creating my own title list of classic books with covers and interiors designed by me could become a viable avocation and source of deeper engagement in reading.

Victoria Departs

Without prior knowledge I was caught out as the Queeen Victoria floated down the Hudson around 8:45 this evening. Hence the blurriness. Oh well.

EBSCO Releases Discovery Product

In last weeks media round-up I mentioned the new federated search product from EBSCO. Here is a sample from a deeper review of the product from Information Today:

EDS (www.ebscohost.com/discovery) harvests metadata from both internal (library) and external (database vendors) sources and creates a preindexed service of impressive size and speed. Although the resulting collection is massive in size and scope, Sam Brooks, senior vice president of sales and marketing, says the fact that it is indexed directly on the EBSCOhost servers allows for exceptionally fast search response times and for the ability to leverage the familiar powerful features of the EBSCOhost user experience across all resources.

Content in EDS can include the following:

• Detailed metadata (e.g., author-supplied abstracts, keywords, subjects, etc.) from content providers and publishers
• Complete indexing from EBSCOhost databases to which an institution subscribes (e.g., Academic Search, Business Source, CINAHL, Historical Abstracts, etc.)
• Complete indexing from non-EBSCOhost databases (to which a customer subscribes), including resources from Alexander Street Press, LexisNexis, NewsBank, Readex, etc.
• Complete OPAC loaded directly into EDS (and searched along with all other EDS content); includes real-time availability checks and daily updates
• Book jacket images, book records, entertainment records, annotations, family keys, subject headings, demand information, awards, review citations, etc., for hundreds of thousands of publications
• Institutional archives/repositories directly loaded into EDS and searched as part of the overall experience

BISG Webinar: Book Server from the Internet Archive

BISG has a few webinars coming up, and the first is one featuring Book Server from the Internet Archive.

Following is a description of the presentation and here is the registration link.

The high-volume digitization efforts of many, in concert with an increasing number of e-book reading devices, has accelerated reader desire to find, buy or borrow digital books in a way that is web-based, user-friendly and transparent.

In October 2009, The Internet Archive, in concert with O'Reilly Media, Threepress, Feedbooks, OLPC, Adobe, the Book Oven, and many others, announced development of an open specification that provides a web-based, mobile-friendly mechanism for distributing digital books.
The specification is called "BookServer"...and it's really shaking things up.

For the first time, BookServer's open architecture makes it possible for anyone to make digital book content available in online search independent of which search engine the reader uses and regardless of which e-book reading device he or she prefers.

During this presentation, two of the those closest to the BookServer project will explain its genesis and vision, discuss the components of the BookServer architecture, and highlight opportunities for publishers, distributors, and aggregators to expand the reach of their digital content in today's burgeoning mobile and e-book landscape.

To learn more about BookServer, visit: http://www.archive.org/bookserver

MediaWeek (Vol 3, No 1): Libraries, EBSCO, EBrary, UBM, Prognostications

Martin Amis is profiled in the Observer this morning (Link):

And last year, Amis drew criticism when he noted of the public interest in Katie Price that "all we are really worshipping is two bags of silicone" – though it probably says more about the dislocation of feminism than about Amis that mocking the cult of Jordan is deemed worthy of rebuke.

In one way or another, Amis's subject has always been sex, particularly the male view of sex, and therefore of women. At the same time, his method has remained extravagantly and grotesquely comic. In novels like Money, he pioneered a baroque-pornographic style to depict the sexualisation of the contemporary world. It was one of the aspects of Amis writing that his father, Kingsley, found unappealing.

"Sex is a fascinating area," Amis senior once explained, "but it's harder than he thinks. Nobody says that fiction should be able to discuss everything; he thinks he can do it, but I wonder if he can."

New blogger Dan D'Agostino (no known connection) at Teleread takes a look at why libraries may be ill advised to buy eBooks: No one will read them (Link):

With a vigorous, searchable Google Books on the horizon, could academic libraries suddenly find themselves and their e-book collections completely bypassed by their students and faculty? The New Year finds both academic libraries and the big commercial publishers that serve the academic community in a state of paralysis, on the one hand knowing that their onscreen e-books are not reaching potential readers and on the other unable to embrace the exploding popularity of e-readers and smart phones as platforms for their content.

How did it come to this? In order to explain it’s first necessary to understand that the world of academic publishing and academic libraries, probably the single biggest sector of the current e-book market, is a strange parallel universe in relation to the rest of the e-book world. And in this strange universe, two fundamental laws currently govern all activities.

NPR looks at How To Work Your Social Network To Find Jobs (Link)

Some burgeoning social networks not only target specific professions but also authenticate people's real-life identities to create secure networks that aren't searchable on the Web. The goal is to let people be comfortable sharing information and get advice without all of the information coming up the next time someone runs a Google search.

A case in point is Martindale-Hubbell Connected from LexisNexis. Michael Walsh, the chief executive officer for LexisNexis U.S. Legal Markets, describes it as "a combination of LinkedIn and Facebook for the legal community."

The service, which has about 24,000 members, provides a way for attorneys to search for future business, get legal advice and find a job. One feature allows users to cross-reference contacts they may already have established on LinkedIn. Each profile shows the law school a person attended and any articles they might have written. Users also can connect with Martindale-Hubbell's career center.

Walsh says LexisNexis' research found that 70 percent of lawyers use social networking tools. He says this number is extraordinary given how busy lawyers are and the extent to which they often keep information close to the vest.

EBSCO announced the launch of an enhanced version of their federated search tool EBSCO Discovery Service (link):

EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) provides much deeper indexing than any other discovery solution, as well as access to all of the library’s full-text content (both electronic and print resources)—an integrated one-stop search experience for a library’s journals, magazines, books, special collections, OPAC and more.

In addition to the most comprehensive and robust collection of metadata from the best content sources, EDS also provides full indexing from EBSCOhost database subscriptions, as well as many non-EBSCOhost partners, including: NewsBank, Readex, LexisNexis, Alexander Street Press and more. Superior relationships & licenses with academic publishers make EDS the most comprehensive service for searching the complete full text of journal articles and other sources. Nearly every major academic publisher is included in EDS.

Ebrary is doing market research into patron driven acquisitions (Link):

“As usage plays a key role in determining the value of electronic products and services, patron driven acquisition is quickly evolving as a model of choice,” said Leslie Lees, ebrary’s Vice President, Content Development. “We are proud to report an outstanding response to the first phase of our PDA pilot, and look forward to gaining even more invaluable input that will help shape our final product.”

ebrary’s PDA pilot participants are given access to a selection of approximately 100,000 e-books and other authoritative titles from the world’s leading publishers such as Wiley, Elsevier, and McGraw-Hill. Purchases are automatically triggered based on usage measured by page views, copies, and prints.

Titles purchased through the PDA pilot, integrate with other ebrary products and services including Academic Complete, ebrary’s flagship subscription product that provides cost-effective, multi-user access to a growing selection of more than 45,100 titles. Additionally, all ebrary titles include rich functionality for quickly and easily discovering and managing information online such as InfoTools, which turns every word into a portal to other online resources of the library’s choice; highlighting and annotating; multiple search options; and personal bookshelves.

Bowker has licensed the print versions of their Books In Print line to Grey House. (Press Release). The agreement is effective January 1, 2010 and I understand both companies are very happy with the agreement.

Other news items posted on the twitter last week: Interview w/ David Levin at United Business Media. Acquisitions get the attention but "divestitures are very important" http://bit.ly/6GdiXq The FT looks at Informa and the possible frustrations of the company's CEO Peter Rigby: How can Informa grow and provide shareholders with a decent return? http://bit.ly/7as6lF The Dallas Morning News looks at Textbook rental programs. These articles are often amusing and informative for the questions. Students often don't hold back. (DMN) All the prognoticators prognostications - and a big thanks for George for putting this schedule together. (Link)

• Also: David Worlock: Ten Things That Won’t Happen In 2010 http://bit.ly/8ZZLgf

The Bookseller tells us that the Administrator working on the Borders UK wind down has been able to sell the Books Etc brand which will in turn be revived, but only online. (LINK) As an aside it was quite depressing to see the Borders store on Charring Cross Road completely gutted as of December 24th. If I remember correctly that used to be an old Books Etc location. More on the opportunities for media investment in China. http://bit.ly/4Sqqrh and a related item on China publishing: http://bit.ly/4VJE9N Financial information companies are seeing significant expansion in the Gulf. http://bit.ly/7C7YFz. Over the next few years, this growth is likely to cover the softness in the European and North American marketplace. Christ, is it 2010 already...? I just got over Y2K. Speaking of which Gary A is now on the back nine as of this week.