Dear reader
I spent last Monday at The Bookseller's 'FutureBook' conference (#fb12) and came away more with a sense of affirmation than radical new insight. As one presenter put it, "the future's now". The market is real. Sales of ereaders, tablets and ebook are all rising fast. The mist surrounding forecasts a few years ago is being dispelled by a strong blast of 'on the ground' activity. And it's just the beginning, as the possibilities for the "book" and reading continue to expand.
All of which requires hard graft and a strong reality check.
OK, so what were the 'big themes' and the big lessons? Amazingly, I have boiled them down to my 'Top 10' and many of which feature in my White Paper - plug - which I wrote earlier this year on 'the 4C's: The Building Blocks of a Future Business Model for Publishers' (click here).
1. The world is is reader/consumer/community centric
"The world is being re-defined from the viewpoint of the customer rather than the industrial process." (Rebecca Smart, Osprey Publishing). For instance, Osprey have used crowdsourcing to identify potential new series. Generally, books are becoming more social, personal and interactive. The shift is from the product to the reader - As Dominique Raccah of sourcebooks put it, the key question is to ask is "what creates the best immersive experience."
But is this really new? Hasn't publishing always been about the reader? I think this is a radical shift which is changing the internal organisation and skills within publishers and in the way that they engage with readers.
2. Author Power
Self-publishing platforms provide authors with direct access to their readers, giving them the opportunity to build readership communities and their brand. They also strengthen author's negotiating position with agents and publishers if they're already self-published.
Authors are the creators of the narratives that can be expressed across different multiple formats.
Authors, and their brands, are at the heart of the creative, digital world. Everyone else in the chain between author and reader has to find their added value in order to secure their place.
3. Owning creativity
Charlie Redmayne, Pottermore's CEO, exhorted publishers to own creativity and innovation and to exploit the huge opportunities to build their own brand (referring to Lonely Planet as an examplar) and to harness fan bases. In Charlie's words: "It's about the monetisation of content on every digital platform that makes sense."
From physical to digital book, from plain text to rich media, from online and mobile to augmented reality, the possibilities are huge.
4. IP Centric
'Format free, IP centric' is my new mantra. There's great scope for creative and innovative new business models and to use core and derivative copyrights and other intellectual property rights to power creativity.
Personally, I think we're still in the very early days of what I'd call 'business model innovation'. But we need to remember, and remind others, that copyright is the enabler for that innovation.
5. Collaboration
Collaboration was one of my '4C's in my White Paper on 21st century publishing.Collaboration across industry sectors, not segmentation and keeping rights in silos. It was repeatedly mentioned at 'FutureBook'. But it isn't all 'peace and love'. Collaborations have to manage conflicting and competing interests. That takes skill! (Add that to the next point as a core skill!).
6. New skills,new organisations
This isn't news to publishers but it may not be apparent to those outside the industry how fast things are changing. The new "digital skillsets" include product development, marketing, consumer insight and data analytics. Consumer focus groups, common in consumer products industries, are now an increasing feature of product development for publishers.
7. New organisations
And it's not just the skills. Creating "books" across a range of mobile devices with rich media requires a team-based, collaborative approach that breaks down silos that may exist within organisations.
8. Agile and iterative
"Books" are now software, as much as editorial, projects. So project management techniques for developing new products are closer to software development. For instance the use of 'agile' is becoming increasingly common, involving an iterative approach in which the "book" is developed in short sprints at the outset of which the client and developer (in-house or external) agree what is going to be developed in each phase. This needs close client involvement in the project and testing on a phased basis.
9. Role of data
As Kobo's presentation showed, syncing to the cloud provides publishers with huge (anonymised, aggregated) data and insight into what readers read and, as important, what they finish and what they don't. Data analytics is another core skill in 21st century publishing. And, yes, ensuring privacy and data protection compliance is equally essential.
10. Just the beginning, carpe diem
Mike Sabinas of Kobo described a 25 year transformation from physical to digital and encouraged everyone to "play the long game." So if let's look beyond today's zero sum game of cuts and low/no investment to the huge opportunities which everyone in the industry can grasp, including authors, agents, publishers, retailers, developers, platform and service providers and, why not, even lawyers!
Have a good week.
Laurie Kaye
Nowadays, with the ever growing technological advancement, people are now exposed with different tools for reading and easily accessible with different data. It is somehow very helpful for a lot of things when it comes to our day to day activities.
Posted by: Best Project Management in the Philippines | January 17, 2013 at 05:20 AM