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Y S Chi, London-based chairman of Elsevier and president of the International Publishers Association, stepped off one of the 200 planes he takes each year to deliver a keynote at the Book Industry Study Group’s annual meeting last Friday (19th September). Lurking in the background of his remarks and those of others – whether outgoing BISG chair Ken Michaels, c.o.o. of Macmillan Science and Education; incoming chair Tara Catogge, v.p. and sales director of Quarto US; or Shane Snow, founder of Contently – were the names Amazon, Google, Facebook and Apple.
Although Chi expounded on “challenges and opportunities in the digital age” using examples from STM publishing, trade publishers were well aware that he is ex-Random House and ex-Ingram. “What does it mean to be a publisher in the digital age?” he began by asking. “The definition is now both more inclusive and more nebulous. Facebook and Google are called ‘publishers.’” Consumers “think about time, value and money in new ways, demand more at lower prices…The work of the author and publisher becomes undervalued.”
We have “an image problem,” he warned. Publishing “doesn’t look modern or hip” at a time of youthful innovation. People think e-books “take less work to produce. They don’t see the high infrastructure cost. There’s a growing disconnect between how much we do and how much is known by the public.” In STM, the sheer quantity of research “doubles roughly every nine years” and is “overwhelming” for any researcher. It’s the publisher’s job “to help the user find the right information in the right context at the right time.”
Chi outlined four recommended approaches: enhancing the traditional role; expanding it to get creative; experimenting how to monetize content and make reading “more experiential,” since “the value of raw content will decline with abundance”; and engaging with the public. Two days before thousands gathered in New York for the Climate Change March, he called for publishers to “make science – like the science behind climate change - interesting and accessible without dumbing down. We have a larger moral responsibility: we have to show how we curate information in pursuit of the truth.”
Michaels, called away from New York on business, delivered his swansong as BISG chair via video recording, outlining four areas for the group to focus on: helping people to collaborate more effectively; building domestic and international partnerships to advance interoperability; and two others, “quality” and “analytics.” The last two struck a chord with Chi’s remarks.
“There is so much more content and less physical space, you need curation enabling discovery to define what you mean by quality today….The new battleground is to help people find and sift content,” Michaels said. As to analytics, it didn’t escape listeners that Michaels’ previous job was with Hachette. “Very few rules today govern the sharing of analytics,” he noted. “It can be frustrating when you can’t get data from retail partners….Some are unimaginably huge. Their impact is getting bigger. We can compete by extending quality metrics into areas like social media.”
Michaels also ended by invoking the moral high ground: “We must help to preserve the power of reading in whatever form, which will depend upon a logical, well-thought-out knowledge structure and increasingly on the sharing of information, local and global. We are the vital custodians of reading and knowledge.”
His successor as chair, the trade-oriented Catogge, was more direct. “When a species is immersed in a hostile environment, it either dies or adapts very, very quickly and thrives,” she asserted, speaking on a panel of members from the BISG executive committee. “We’re seeing examples of that now in independent stores, with new energy and ways of going to business that are upending typical models” of the past.
Shane Snow’s lunchtime food-for-thought comprised lessons from his new book, Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators and Icons Accelerate Success (HarperBusiness). Adopt lateral, “sideways” thinking, he told his audience. Staying on the linear track is less successful. Engage in “radical simplification – think simpler.” Fussy thinking involves more decisions at every turn, and that can sap creativity.
Finally, engage in “10 x thinking. It’s easier to make something 10 x better than 10% better. No one ever changed the world by cutting corners – or by not changing.”