The Bookseller.com

1st December 2008

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Pan Mac issues call to arms

29.05.08 Benedicte Page

A provocative series of ­articles by Pan Mac­millan’s head of digital publishing, Sara Lloyd, has seen the company’s digital blog, www.thedigitalist.net, experiencing a massive spike in popularity.
In the six-part series "A Book Publisher’s Manifesto for the 21st Century", which is to be published in a forthcoming issue of the US library journal Library Trends, Lloyd says the book industry is over-obsessed by downloadable e-books, and refutes the idea there will be an "iPod moment" for the trade.

Instead, she says trade publishers should be thinking about digitisation much more in terms of using digital versions to aid online discoverability of book content. The majority of trade book content is still invisible in web terms, she says.

Lloyd also argues that trade publishers have been very slow to see the real threats and opportunities of the internet, including disintermediation. She says both publishers and authors need to accept huge cultural and social changes, and to think creatively about the very nature of the book, accepting that in the digital future it may have more "porous" boundaries.

Pan Macmillan digital publishing executive Michael Bhaskar said that prior to the posting of the "Manifesto", The Digitalist had a healthy readership for a niche blog of 40-50 readers per day, peaking at 100 for popular articles. Since the posting, readership was 700 per day, with more than 10,000 page views for the "Manifesto", concentrated on readers in London, New York and San Francisco.

Lloyd said: "I called the article a manifesto because it’s a kind of call to arms and it’s deliberately radical. I wrote it to stir up debate and it certainly seems to have achieved that goal."

Benedicte Page Pan Macmillan digitisation Sara Lloyd the digitalist