The Future is Not Binary – Creating and Developing Intellectual Property

To become digital, publishing has to digitise its internal processes and break free of the book jacket and spine that has long ‘straight jacketed’ it.

Publishing is not just about selling books it’s about the total process from author to reader and beyond. So when we look at development we must not just break away from the paper concept but recognise that rights and contextual information, or what many today know as bibliographic, metadata and marketing material, are mere attributes of the content. In other words, they go hand in hand right across the life-cycle.

Today many manage their rights within Royalty systems not Rights systems and as a result have a one dimensional perspective of the rights they actually acquired. Where rights systems do exist these are often restricted to the exploitation of specific subsidiary rights. Permission rights which should have a greater impact in the digital world are all too often forgotten or managed on an ad hoc basis.
The question we would pose is why rights aren’t tagged to content and managed alongside it on a granular basis? Imagine clicking on a title, an illustration, a paragraph and being able to access the relevant rights information?

Today although context information is developed in parallel to content it is all too often managed and developed separately, stored in separate silos and accessed via different systems. The accuracy, level of detail and availability of contextual information has come a long way in a relatively short period of time. We now have ‘authoritative’ web sites such as Amazon and ABE with rich information, widgets and even Google’s developing Book Search. Yet we still have failed to do the simple tasks such as effectively group related titles and still mange ‘lists of titles and authors’ not content. It’s all too often down to the new entrants to show the industry how to manage our information.

Publishing is diverse and it’s this variety and wealth of material that makes it such an attractive consumer offer. It is hard to imagine a mass sea change in how publishers will develop their assets but it is easy to see that there will be a huge disparity between those who are able to fully exploit the power of rich contextual information and those who still see the AI sheet as the answer. Rights management will continue to grow in importance and some will manage these whilst others will continue to heavily depend on others to do it for them.

Digitisation is impacting the publishing development process and players. Just as desktop publishing first challenged the processes and SGML challenged the journals process, technology is again challenging the total process from manuscript to ‘finished’ or published products. Will everyone migrate on mass to one tool and approach? We can’t say, but we can see major players such as Adobe and Microsoft lining up to offer a one stop approach. If we adopt the logical XML database approach, will this be extended to cover context and rights? Again we can’t say but we would predict that those who make that leap will have greater control of their own destiny in this Brave New World.

Create Digital First

If we look once more at the economic model for publishers in the emerging digital age, we have to ask whether the old model is sustainable? If we start to question this, then the next question is often more about margin than models, but are costs tied to current processes?

We have all seen the decimation of pricing in the music industry. Only last week we visited a media mega store in Piccadilly Circus. The thing that struck us was; not the range, it was huge, nor the listening stands waiting for any album to be scanned, but the pricing. Remember when the record companies and retailers successfully defended themselves against the allegations that CD were being allegedly sold at artificially high prices and that territorial pricing was a sham. Last week we saw big £1 dump bins, many collectable albums at £3 and then the vast majority, even in niche genre, priced at £6. Two for £10 or even 3 for £10 offrers where plastered across the cases Those costing more than £10 were rare and restricted to those special and scarce collectables such as ‘Rubber Soul’ by The Beatles. Was the store heaving? No. Were there long queues at the checkouts? No.

The music world has been shaken long and hard. How people buy, what they buy, how they consume and as a result, what they are prepared to pay for it, are all changing.

‘But books are different,’ we all scream and we may well be right, but perception is what counts and reality often has to follow. It’s the consumer perception that really counts; after all they pay at the end of the day. Do we know or understand their perceptions on digital pricing, or do we assume we know their views? The UK’s Book Marketing company, have stared to extend their highly respected services to cover digital consumer trends, but is it enough, and are we all contributing, listening and responding to any findings?

Today we are the start of a digital consumer offer but it is in the main based on yesterday’s physical cost model, processes and perceptions. Merely taking the finished book and generating a digital rendition that mirrors the physical one is what music did with CDs. Is it logical to merely replicate the book and create just another rendition? We don’t envisage the same demand change as music experienced in selling just fragments (tracks), but it is possible to see the selling of instalments or part works, where all the complete ‘book’ may not be bought.

Some would argue that only when publishers fully digitise their pre press processes and create format neutral content will they have the flexibility to change not only their cost structure but also their product offer. The alternative could be consumer demand driving down prices where the only flexible element is the margin.

The current rights debates do not stop publishers digitising their processes they merely stop them being able to realise all the possible opportunities. However, at a time when the digital market is not established, for many, this may be a huge leap into the dark.