The Bookseller.com

9th September 2010

David Attwooll is director of Attwooll Associates, a publishing consultancy and digital licensing agency (www.attwoollassociates.com) . He is also chair of Liverpool University Press.

My favourite digital myths

21.09.09

1. “Content is King”
This smug little phrase wasn’t true in the dotcom boom and it’s not true now. Why is Google the dominant beast, and not the 1990s content mammoths? If content was ever king there was regicide years ago, and we’re living in the Commonwealth of context. People will pay for – or enable others to monetize – what’s relevant to them when they want it. Often this is transactional: people use computers to do things: their jobs, homework, leisure activities, research, etc. Signposts can be more valuable than destinations online: capture ‘metadata’ in what you publish, from simple bibliographic data through to curriculum structures embedded in textbooks or tagged reference data, so search engines can hook onto the relevant information.

2. E-book readers are the only future
The trade is obsessed with e-book readers, the hype suggesting that this is the first and only digital opportunity for publishers. There may soon be the perfect e-book reader, and maybe people will carry it around with their smart phones, laptops, etc. Publish on them, but they’re not the only show in town. There are currently around 40 times as many iPhones/ iPod Touches as all the e-book readers combined – and that’s just one company.
My old outfit Helicon produced titles for Sony’s ‘Data Discman’ or Franklin’s ‘Bookman’ e-readers 17 years ago, as well as producing CD-ROMs,  but we also profitably licensed content to online library aggregators.

3. We don’t need to do anything: no one’s making any money
The PA Yearbook 2008 estimated the total ‘digital market’ at £75 to £80m (The Bookseller, 27/4/09):  mostly academic/professional, some school/ ELT and reference, and just £1m to £2m for fiction, non-fiction, and children’s. Of this last, 85% were audio downloads, leaving £150 to £300k for ‘pure’ trade books. Justification for inertia by the complacent and fearful?
But didn’t Reed Elsevier announce around £3bn online revenues p.a. with ‘productivity-enhancing’ online services (content in context) for lawyers, scientists, insurers, etc? The Yearbook’s ‘digital market’ was clearly narrowly defined, now online boundaries between journals, books, databases, etc are breaking down. Similarly, many educational publishers have developed ranges of digital products, including for whiteboards or ‘Virtual learning Environments’.
As for consumer ‘digital sales’, last year our digital licensing agency generated much more revenue overall than £150 to £300k - just for our 18 publishing clients!
Be prepared: doing an ‘asset audit’ of the digital rights you have; and ensuring that new typeset books are ‘born digital’ prepares for eventual POD output, and allows content to be future –proofed to exploit whatever digital opportunities arise.

4. We need to do everything ourselves
As with conventional print production and sales channels, so too with digital developments: outsourcing is the norm (but with robust in-house management of quality, schedules and budgets). Neurotic control-freakery or delusions of digital grandeur need to be kept in business perspective.

To be continued . . .