Thriving on Chaos

Jim Kollegger moderates a panel - Genesys Partners. Panelists: Dan'l Lewin, Microsoft; Neal Nipschutz, Dow Jones; Steve Lohr, NY Times; Jon Miller, former CEO of AOL and now founder of Velocity Interactive Group.

Dan'l gives us a finger wave.

Economy, Obama, technology diaspora, what does it all mean to business models?

To Steve: "How do you look at the economic mess and what do you see?" Steve: "Most of the stimulus package will go to the states for 'shovel ready' or 'keyboard ready' projects. One area to watch is that Christine Varney is the head of antitrust - there'll be a step back; anything that can be described as stabilizing will be fine."

To Dan'l: "Steve Ballmer said that our model is not for a quick turnaround." Dan'l: "Our operating system business is impacted as people migrate to handhelds - as businesses scale back their headcount, our business is affected. In the long run, we're optimistic."

Neal: "I don't think you go back to anything resembling what we had before during boom times. Part of it will be that areas like financial services will be risk-averse for a while."

Jon: "If you think about the traditional media industry, they typically trade at 10/12 times EBITDA, but now CBS is trading at 4 times EBITDA, and that feels very depressed. If you talk about reset - where does it go? I suspect it resets at a lower level and these companies will trade at a different level. It's good for digital media because it's a less expensive kind of consumption" - more consumers will be consuming.

Dan'l: "There's a huge long-term opportunity because IT is a huge component of this - as developing countries modernize with IT infrastructure, they're going to reach much further - there's opportunity on the other side of this."

Neal: "It's true - America's going to be less strong over the next decade."

Steve: "Isn't it surprising, though, how the world fell off a cliff on September 15th?"

Neal: "Yes, one of the side effects of globalization."

Jim: "What does 'the digital dime' mean to journalism?"

Steve: "It means to double down on digital. We're selling off the building, physical assets."

Neal: "You would hope and think that in a democracy serious news would be supported but that's not necessarily so. Media may have to revert to a subscription business."

Steve: "You really think the genie can be put back into the bottle?"

Jon: "The issue is not the news...paper but the news. News consumption has probably never been higher than it is today. But the business model isn't supporting that right now. I don't think the genie goes back."

Jim: The new political administration - going from an XBox to an Atari. Any insights?

Steve: "It's pretty obvious, isn't it?" He adds that this administration is "much more technocratic."

Jim: "The tools of the teenager have come into the White House - the president puts out an address on YouTube."

Neal: "You can use the greater knowledge of technology to be more closed and secret - you can bypass the media entirely."

Steve: "They're very good at getting onto message and communicating - and they stuck with the message - they never did 'the polling thing', and in that sense it's very elitist. It wasn't the wisdom of crowds. They had a vision and stuck to it."

Jim: "You have two things going on - practical application of technology, and $37 billion of information stimulus coming."

Neal: "We've never seen this before, this kind of spending on technology. There's no real recent experience in the 'get it out fast' kind of spending we're talking about."

Steve: "And there's a workforce bottleneck - do we have the people with the skills to implement this?"

Jim: "What other technology trends do you see being driven or affected by this?"

Neal: "There'll be new media that we don't even think about now that'll be disruptive in teh next 18-24 months, I'd imagine that there'll be some cities that don't have a major newspaper in print; all these trends accelerate and if the downturn in time is longer than the consensus view, it'll just accelerate."

Dan'l: "There's a lot of infrastructure stuff going on; there are big shifts that will change the economics. Where will compute cycles come from, where will the storage be, where will the backup facilities be?"

Neal: "If you can provide content, the technological delivery mechanisms may change radically, more targeted types of information and news will still have a place."

Jon: "Every four years there's a pretty big reset - the most recent one has been the impact of video and social networking; before that there was Google; before that, Yahoo/AOL/Ebay. Things do change and continue to evolve, but the stuff that really rises to the top is these kind of larger movements. The industry will continue to recreate itself over time - not the thousand little things, but these really large things."

Jim brings up the fact that you don't know what you don't know.

Dan'l: "Where you are is a vital thing - GPS affects what comes to you. Those services will surface soon. Also the notion of the mesh - this location in the cloud that's yours, that synchronizes all the relevant information to your devices" - he says Microsoft is the first to do this, but Apple has MobileMe, so I don't think he's right.

Jon: "Something happened at the end of 2008 - consumer usage of the internet passed enterprise usage. That's one of those things that never goes the other way. The consumers are driving much of the use and development on the web that works its way back to business."

Steve: "Jon, where would you invest in 2009?"

Jon: "Following consumers. You see video consumption taking off, makes perfect sense because of high speed connections to the home, and storage devices for both information and entertainment. There are two trends: we're starting to see deconsolidation in traditional media - separating content and distribution. On the internet side we'll start to see consolidation."

Jim: "If you're a company in this marketplace, what do you keep your eyes on?"

Dan'l: "We're paying attention to lots of stuff; my particular area of interest is to look at entrepreneurial activity around the world and where their energy goes and money flows to support them. I have a pretty good bead on that side of global innovation - how does that fit into things that we care about, and it does lead to buying companies; we're pretty acquisitive. You'll see more of the same from us."

Jon: "My firm is most focused on digital media - what are people doing in these new mobile environments? What are the usage contours? If you look at things like the iPhone apps, smartphone applications - I think we haven't yet understood what that behavior's going to look like."

Steve: "Regarding the iPhone, why could Apple do this and not Microsoft?" Dan'l: "We should've. And we'll play catch-up."

Question: "Who should 25-year-olds look up to?"

Neal: "The general advice is find something you're passionate about and do it. Having grown up with those skills, the business world is full of opportunities."

Steve: "The great irony is that journalism schools are booming." Neal: "And all the newspaper editors are losing their jobs and going back to teach."

Dan'l: "LIfe sciences and information around life sciences. I think there will be an implication on the economy when you can understand your genome and make life choices based on it. Technology is an essential enabler, but it's just another language. Learn Chinese, too."

Question: "How many of you talk to your own peers who use new technologies all the time and understand them possibly more and use them more effectively than young people?"

Dan'l: "That's exactly what I do. My group is a bunch of 30-year-olds - how do THEY use Facebook? It never hurts to insert a rookie into that, a college kid who'll call them on it." Steve: "People who are 35-and-older are more suited to multitasking because they have more focus."

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Posted by Laura Dawson , January 27, 09, 5:14 PM , comments(0) , permalink ,

What's the value of value-add?

Moderated by Lee Greenhouse of Greenhouse Associates. Panelists: Diane Corrado, Walters Kluwer Health; Tom Brown, LexisNexis; Joe Jaksha, Thomson West.

Lee: "Is the value of content declining?" Tom: "In some regards, if we're preventing a case of identity theft, you can argue that the content is adding value. To maintain a certain value proposition you should really keep adding to it, enhancing and improving the consumer's experience." Diane: "Although my customers want a robust platform, they tell me content is king, and without the right information it doesn't matter how good the platform is. In the medical space, it's vital." Joe: "You have to have content - as the table stakes - and then build on top of it. Customers expect that to be there before you even open the door."

Lee: "historically, how has West added value to content?" Joe: "Historically it was codification of the legal system. Created a de facto standard before standards were created. In the 70s and 80s it was about aggregation. But that's become the table stakes as well - in the 80s it was integration, cross-linking. Focus on the specific customer, lawyers and legal professionals - how do you wrap that package with sophisticated technologies and a service model that supports it."

Lee to Tom: "What's the nature of content in your business and how do you increase the value of it?" Tom: "Evolving the data to reflect the economy and behaviors that are present. Cell phones, for example. There's an expectation that this is available. Identity theft has been perpetrated throughout the economy - there's an expectation that fraudulent addresses will be notated - that's an expectation that customers have." Lee: "You guys deal with the lowest form of life - public records." Tom: "The challenge is to resolve the public record so that banks, government and law enforcement can use it...In my world, I'm responsible for the products we offer to banks - we help them solve money laundering and terrorist financing. The essence of that is helping them to know the individuals they're doing business with. We also help prevent identity theft - a growing problem and only going to get worse as the economy deteriorates. We also help identify the 'underbanked' so that credit can be extended to them on terms that are acceptable to the consumer." Lee: "This is all from mining data."

Diane: "I think what's happening in legal and medical industries is that you'd walk up to the librarian's desk, bearing a gift, hoping they'd shine a light on you and help you do your research. But it's moved out of the library and into the hands and devices of people doing the research. Information has to be fast - we're different from Google, in that you don't want 12,000 hits but you want one hit, or five, or a manageable number. Getting the information you're looking for, with as few clicks as possible, without the intervention of a librarian....We use a process called contextual design; most companies who interview their customers run a simple interview, but contextual inquiry allows us to sit in your office for a couple of days and watch you work. Henry Ford said if you asked people what they wanted, they'd say, 'A faster horse.' One of the good examples I could use is that we'd question users about their eye-rolling, and they'd deny it - but we noticed that the search results they wanted were at the bottom, so when we got the search results closer to the top, their fatigue went down 60%."

Diane points out that they are not just publishers, but aggregators. Databases, journals (peer-reviewed and scientifically proven).

Lee to Joe: "What's next for Thomson West?" Joe: "The information units have been focused on smaller information bites - it's not books, or even the full case - and where that wraps into the ability to monetize is where you can take that piece of information where you can present it in different contexts; that's where we are really focused."

What's the impact of adding value - are you running faster just to stay in place? - Joe: "There's an expectation that you continue to add more for the same price. But the bigger part is making it sustainable - it changes the way our customers do their business and becomes a critical part of the way they do their business, where it's woven so deeply into what they do, so the cost of changing is prohibitive."

Tom: "Do you add coverage, content on individuals that are hard to have info on - how do you do that? If you're just providing redundant information, that'll be of less value. We're also looking at new applications. With the underbanked, we aggregate a lot of data so that the underbanked can be assessed from a credit-worthy standpoint just like everyone else. That's a population of 75MM people that are unattainable to the financial sector."

Diane: "We spend a lot of time talking about the customer's customer and what their needs are. Many people who use our data are doing it on behalf of someone else."

Tom: "Becoming more relevant to the customer means you bring more value to them."

Lee to Joe: "You're a product guy - you're not going to let these sales folks get away with that!" Joe: "I think the percentages vary by project - we're focused on taking the time and effort to do things that are hard. If it seems like too quick of a win, it might not be sustainable. We're looking at some investments in our core capabilities that are extensive and expensive - but which would be difficult for a 'free' content provider to create with open source code." Examples of "the hard stuff" - "the unique blend of 'brute force editorial' and some of the higher end AI capabilities and how do you uniquely combine those in product offerings with a knowledge of the customer?"

Lee: "How is service a part of the value-add?"

Joe: "One of the things that we see is that our customers have a high degree of expertise in what they do, but when they get a request slightly out of that area, they need help."

Tom: When you misjudge the value that the customer is placing on the product or service, you can overengineer the solution and give them more than they need - so they won't pay for it.

Diane: You also have to be aware of what the competition or coopetition is doing so you don't invest a lot.

Question: "how do your customers define value - what is their willingness to pay?" Diane: "it falls very succinctly into categories: productivity enhancement; if you can enhance my relationship with my customer or profitability; they will also pay for something that saves them expense - if it consolidates two or three things into one thing, you'll get them to pay more."

Question: "how you feel about content as a value add - what kind of content is a value add?" Tom: "It's vital." Joe: "It's that content creation has become an expectation. The definition of content has broadened in terms of the metadata associated with content - the context around that particular article, the metadata becomes extremely powerful content that is not physically attached to that document." Diane: "What we're seeing is that the content's there - everybody's a publisher now - the problem is how do you sift through that to get through the relevant material? We're the vendors who are going to help you zero in on what you want and what you want it for."

Question: "To what degree does scale matter?" Joe: "Niche publishers who've found a focus in adding value to a particular area, that becomes less of a scale thing, and in fact it doesn't scale very well. When you start to cross verticals, it doesn't scale very well." Tom: "Scale's vital to give you the ability to respond. The challenge is relevance."

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Posted by Laura Dawson , January 27, 09, 4:16 PM , comments(0) , permalink ,

At the blogger table

We're right in the middle of the room. There are six of us. I'll see if I can get business cards and link out to their blogs as well. It's the same size table as every other one - seats 8 - but with all the laptops on it, it's a little crowded. Ours is the only table with a power strip. Yes, we have power.

And they're loading up for the next panel.

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Posted by Laura Dawson , January 27, 09, 3:28 PM , comments(0) , permalink ,

Frictionless Information

Kristian J. Hammond, Northwest University - talking about "Adding Value in the Age of Google". Dr. Hammond walks around, he ROAMS. Joking about making an engineering presentation.

First he defines us, as his audience - mostly print media, some broadcast, vertical niche producers. High production/high value content. Our problems - Google, social media, the nature of content itself (what's "good"?), something he calls "bounce" (that people don't stay long on the site), and free (if not now, then eventually).

Approaches his lab sees: "Head to head on search" - competing with Google. It doesn't matter if your search is better, you're not going to win that way. "Cease and desist orders" - content is showing up all over the place, but it's a losing battle. Unless there are really strong safeguards in place, it will always be the case that the last battle you fought will be fought over and over and over again. He refers to it as an "arms race". Also, "web mirroring" - so the content provider can become the "one-stop shop".

He brings up cell phones - where cell adoption in developing nations leapfrogged land lines. Don't bother to solve the problems, just jump over them.

"We want to get rid of the text box."

And now he launches into a series of abstractions that are impossible to document but utterly riveting to listen to.

Now we are looking at "The Relevance Engine" - he shows us a Word document. The RE runs a series of analytics on the doc, and pulls up information from the web, discussions, experts, educational sources, etc. - it's called "Watson". Pretty cool!

Then he shows the server side version of it. Shows us a prototype with the Chicago Sun-Times. Now he's showing us a diagram of how it works. There is absolutely no danger of anyone here stealing this idea.

On to video! "Beyond Broadcast" works with a TiVo box - looks at the channel, the time, and the close-caption; the code builds a micro-site based on the context. Took it to online video.

It's a white-label solution that provides related content to what you are displaying.

No matter what you're searching for, there is always spam. Any way to harness spam technology for "good"? "Make my Page" checks search engines, takes the queries, and looks for related content and pulls together a new document in a structured and contextual way. It's also responsive to the audience - editable.

"My goal is I want to rid the world of search."

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Posted by Laura Dawson , January 27, 09, 2:58 PM , comments(0) , permalink ,

Licensing Digital Content

Moderated by Dan Duncan of McGraw-Hill; panelists are Caitlin Grusaukas, a law student; Mindy Pennington, librarian at Pfizer; Ed Colleran, CCC; Dominic Young, News Int'l.

Oops, I just unplugged the camera by mistake. That lapse in video? My fault. Sorry.

Question to panel: "What do users not like?" Caitlin: "Younger people have expectations that everything is going to be free. We're used to having everything at our fingertips - for a lot of people of my generation, the idea of copyright is something that we associate with MP3s and Napster, but people are not quite as cognizant of copyright restrictions on news and websites; access means that you can share it." Mindy: "People want to make it easy to share, and checking rights takes time. More and more people want to use content on their mobile device, and there's also issues around who they can share it with." People doing research together who don't have the same copyright clearance...it's difficult. Ed: "From the user standpoint, two big themes are ease of use, but they also want a broader set of rights; collaboration is a key to the business community." Dominic: "We're giving our users everything for free" - but he is also part of ACAP, which tries to allow those who own and control content to set the rules themselves.

Dan: "Many of the users don't even look at terms and conditions when they access content; the language is confusing, reads like a contract." Dominic: "It's important for users to know what they can and can't do, and making it difficult for them doesn't help anybody. Doing it in a way that's compatible with how the internet works is really important - the tools aren't there to do that." Dan to Mindy: "Are users educated as to terms and conditions?" Mindy: "Users never see the legal contracts. For purposes of reprints and taking things to conferences, we've implemented the CCC tool. We let users know what they're allowed and not allowed to do with it. Most people are fairly cognizant of what they're allowed to do."

Dan points out that content-generating/IP companies are generally more cognizant.

Caitlin: "In the broader university community, access is all seamless." But she points out that she can't always print, or access, everything - the copyright restrictions affect access.

Mindy: "License trumps copyright - there may be rights available to you that are not necessarily there under copyright." Dan: "Likewise licensing agreements can restrict."

Dan throws to Dominic...ACAP. "ACAP comes out of the free user industry, and the way the content is accessed and used by search engines works well for some publishers and not so well for others. The idea is that it can be done machine-to-machine, but to scale up the capability on the network."

Ed: "There's also an opportunity here with the advent of social media tools and online communities - some publishers have found a branding opportunity for their content."

Dan to Caitlin - would students pay for content? Caitlin: Students want information/media fast and quick, they'd be interested in paying a little bit for that. Mindy: Why aren't publishers releasing content in different formats, ones that would allow for ad placement? A lot of end users would like to flip through the journal even virtually, rather than article by article in a database.

Dan to Ed and Dominic - what now? Dominic stresses ACAP. He is difficult to hear; I don't think he's miked well. Ed: "It's not just about text content anymore - people want the video clip, the photograph - we see that as a big thing going down the line. It's not just the publishers, but authors as well - authors are taking a more predominant role, self-publishing, and that sort of thing.

Dan to Ed: "What ABOUT the authors?" Ed: "We see a whole other market, the Creative Commons type of authors, anybody who wants to get paid for certain uses and allowing it to be accessed for free for other uses."

Dan to Mindy: "Next 5 years?" Mindy: Micropayments, further chunkability. And chunkability in terms of audience, not just content - only 10 people want to use this chart. "A more granular approach to how we're going to do licensing."

Dan cites some MicroScripts: "Ease of use. Compliance." Also education. Publishers need to educate users about what they can and can't do.

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Posted by Laura Dawson , January 27, 09, 2:10 PM , comments(0) , permalink ,

Updike

Just got the word - Updike is no longer with us.

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Posted by Laura Dawson , January 27, 09, 1:32 PM , comments(0) , permalink ,

We Interrupt This Broadcast

Via Brantley's List: The Kindle 2.0, intro'd at the Morgan Library on 2/9, the same day as TOC. http://www.alleyinsider.com/2009/1/kindle-2-coming.

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Posted by Laura Dawson , January 27, 09, 12:45 PM , comments(0) , permalink ,

Lunch Keynote - Mark Walsh

The Lunch Keynote does not mean lunch.

Mark Walsh wants to talk about "Lessons from Politics". Given that he was the CEO of Air America - he has a radio voice. Washington really IS the hot spot; it keeps coming up.

He brings up Oppenheimer, one of my favorite historical characters. Getting on the bus to the detonation - the mathmatician wasn't on the bus. Oppie: "What up?" Mathie: "If I got the math wrong, none of you is coming back." Point being: "We got the math wrong on everything in the last few months."

His story: In March 2005, he's at a dinner party for Obama, newly elected Sen from Illinois, who wants to hear what they're most concerned about. Walsh: "I'm afraid of two things - Democrats never bring a knife to a knife fight; we're not prepared to push back when the going gets tough. Second, you're the newly installed freshman senator from Illinois, and YOU'RE the savior of the party?"

He leaps to some assumptions: we have trouble assimilating information, hence sound bites. He brings up Al Gore's "I invented the internet" problem, and talks about "Microscripts" - one-word scripts that have intense meaning. "Lipstick". "Change". "Maverick".

How does this affect business people? "We must learn to find shorter and shorter ways to express core product features." And that works in reverse, too - you need to have them for your competition as well. Not an elevator speech; a bumper sticker.

He states that Facebook, Twitter, SMS texting all are personal Micro-Scripts. Marketers have to mimic these. And he feels that the current generation 25 and younger have a generational Micro-Script: "Whatever".

Obama is going to "reboot" the country: "He will be a force-feeder of more thoughtful ways to approach things....He is Human Ritalin." This means that transparency, accountability, forethought will resurge. Except most people won't "get it".

Walsh's Micro-Script? "Shift happens".

Question: Well, I didn't hear the question, but the answer is, "There's no one to tuck us into bed, and that fear will cause a searching and a hunger. Politicians will be asked not to pander - fear is so deep it cannot be assuaged by micro-scripts. Fear is a magnificent sales point."

Question: "Who does Micro-Scripting well?" "Apple, Wrangler (Real. American. Jeans.). IBM." But some sectors have failed micro-scripting: autos, except Volvo (Drive. Safely.)."

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Posted by Laura Dawson , January 27, 09, 11:47 AM , comments(0) , permalink ,

SIIA Executive Face-Time

Hal Espo, formerly of the DOI Federation and now running Contextual Connections, interviews Glenn Goldberg, president of the Info/Media group at McGraw-Hill. An insider tells me that he reports directly to Terry McGraw. Normally they do webcasts, but this one is in person. Hal apparently does all the Executive Face-Time interviews.

Goldberg seems to be a MH lifer, but prior to that worked in government.

Billion-dollar portfolio, B2B publications are doing well. Because they are a large company, they are selective about the markets in which they participate. It's a challenging environment in the US but a robust market in China. "Scale and leverage matter." You can overdo on scale, but customer notice is important.

When asked where growth was coming from in the next 12-14 months on the B2B side, he responded that the energy markets have been robust overt he last 5/6 years. MH is in Russia, in Asia - "content really matters; editorial really matters". He mentions the lesson of "sticking to your knitting" - and he's absolutely right.

Goldberg looks a bit restless on the stage - as if he'd rather be playing football or something.

Playing in an environment where heavy investment is going on, this is important to MH on a B2B level.

He talks about the MH Construction Network - over the last 10 years the value prop has not just been around advertising but also around solutions. How leverage-able is your brand in that space? Taken an ad-based business model and developed a really integrated proposition around tracking the lifestyle around commercial construction. Your customer needs to evolve with you. You sometimes have to work at the pace of your markets as well (true enough!).

In-depth about JD Power - bought about 4 years ago. Relationship had primarily been with OEMs. Do a syndicated survey on a yearly basis, but asked themselves what else can be done? They began to do consulting, branching into the "C-Suite" - moving up the value chain of the company. That kind of evolution doesn't happen as quickly as some people would like.

Each of the MH businesses has benchmarks/standards (JD Power, S&P, MHE) - "we don't want to be all things to all people", but building deep w/in certain verticals.

He describes Umbria - a recent acquisition. Until that acquisition, they did syndicated studies every year - but MH needed to provide more assessment more frequently. Umbria has the ability to pull from the web comments about brands, organize these comments based on "tribes" (customer segmentation), and use that to supplement the once-a-year service to add additional value.

What about the customer? Who can get information from just about anywhere, immediately? "We still believe people care about quality content; we think it's a balance."

What role does advertising play? "Advertising was the core of many of the franchises that we own - absolutely essential part of the value prop of our B2B business, but we have dramatically morphed those business models" - getting away from ads. "You don't want to mess up your brand." Apparently there's great interest in monetizing that content on the web, but they don't want to dilute the brand. "You need to be thoughtful around how advertising plays."

As for the commoditizing of news? "We're in the content business, but how we do that is changing." He cites Steve Adler - "create content as we always have, winning awards, helping people make important decisions. We'll also curate content. What are the best thinkers saying about a subject? And we'll also create communities via the Business Exchange Online."

What about television - particularly local broadcast television? "It needs to change - there's no question it needs to change. News early in the day and late at night is still relevant. I don't think it's the medium - it's partly about the value proposition - we need to invest in local news; we do believe it has a role to play. There's still an incredible value in broadcast. There's a dichotomy going on - you have these big events like the Super Bowl or Academy Awards, and you have local events. The balance is something we're all trying to figure out."

And the big question: "What keeps you up at night?"

The answer is "I say the same thing everybody else does. We have people who understand what the customer needs. I think I have the right people to really be a part of the solution for the next 25 years - but we don't always get it right. How do you get the tech people and content people to talk the same language? Can you get it done, can you break down the barriers and align people and keep things simple?"

And what about the children? "The world truly is borderless now - it's great for countries, individuals, and business. At the end of the day, all of our kids still need to build relationships. And they'll be a little bit different, the devices will be a bit different, but they still need to be holistic about it."

Audience questions:

John Blossom: "One of the challenges you must be facing is that sometimes benchmarks change and get questioned - how do you see the role of S&P these days as benchmarks are changing?" Goldberg: "We're very proud of the fact that over the last 50 years we've helped create a language around the credit business that's being used and will be used for many years. We welcome the opportunity to respond to this - the most important thing is to take uncertainty out of the marketplace."

Lee Greenhouse: "In an environment like this, there's a lot of pressure to trim costs in a hurry - what are the risks as manager that you'll overreact and cut back too much and find out later you should have been more selective or surgical?" Goldberg: "That's the balance, isn't it? Here's Platt's doing really well, and we have a very large presence in Washington covering regulatory issues. But we've made a decision to cut back in Washington and redeploying on a global level."

Another questioner talks about "selling information by the pound on a subscription level" - I think of a lot of library and institutional subscriptions.

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Posted by Laura Dawson , January 27, 09, 11:44 AM , comments(0) , permalink ,

More SIIA notes

We're about to reconvene - I have my beloved Firefox working, and I am praying to the Sudafed gods to DRY ME THE HELL UP. And unclog my ears so I can hear things.

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Posted by Laura Dawson , January 27, 09, 11:01 AM , comments(0) , permalink ,

Oookay, let me explain now

I'm liveblogging the SIIA Information Industry Summit at Cipriani today. I also have a terrible terrible cold, and can barely keep three thoughts together in my head at once, which is a necessary skill for liveblogging. Also, my sleeves are bugging me. I should've worn my other jacket.

I am blogging on Tess and Hamid's PHPBlogManager program, but using Safari as my browser because unfortunately Firefox wouldn't handle the login at Cipriani. Safari tends to run out of screen after a while, so I may be actually posting in the middle of a blogging session, and then going back for Round 2, as I had to do during the Sink or Swim panel below.

Right now, it's networking time, I am trying not to choke audibly, and my nose is running. My tissues smell like dill. Don't ask me, I'm just using them. Jacket off, back to work!

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Posted by Laura Dawson , January 27, 09, 10:48 AM , comments(0) , permalink ,

Sink or Swim Panel con't

Let me just say that Safari is an awful browser for blogging.

A back-and-forth between Wolff and Shah - and Kevin English says "If you look at the newest generation of media consumers, they're used to getting their content for free" - how do you make money at that? He taps Oakleigh, who says, "I avoid consumer media like the plague." On to Bob Merry - how does your model differ from the free media model and how do you compete? Through subscriptions. Derive close to 80% of CQ revenue through circ - but they have advertising revenue as well. Shah: "It's usual for us to cast the debate between print vs digital" but what if we reframe it as "brand marketing vs other types?" Clickthrough rates are low. Advertisers thus think that internet ads are ineffective.

Wolff: "If the internet is largely a direct medium, it doesn't have the margins to create content." Extending this means that the value of content has consistently gone down. You have to create products in which the content costs less and less and less - probably via technology as a tool to create a cheaper content and to provide cheaper content.

Oakleigh: "National news is a commodity but local news is not." Smaller newspapers in smaller communities. Merry: "When the web came along it practically killed my business, and it killed my competitor. Information is commoditized. We had to fight that by increasing the value of the content."

And now it's question time. To Wolff: "Who's paying for foreign correspondents if all the news is free?" Wolff: "The answer is probably no one. The foreign bureau as we know it goes away - and it already has. We actually have MORE info from foreign markets than we ever did before. We have instant access to information sources - newspapers and otherwise - in exactly those areas where once we were dependent on the NYT or Time magazine for what we knew about the news coming out of wherever." And "you cannot just assume that because change has come, we can't do it the way we did before, that we'll do it worse."

Shah: "The brands you all know, that you come to trust, are the brands you're visiting online. Time has 26 million people a month visiting billions of pages. But you need voice, personality, a byline that people recognize."

Merry: Papers used to be partisan, and consumers knew it. English: How is that different from Fox and CNN? Panel: vigorous agreement.

Oakleigh (I know that's not his last name but his first name is too cool not to use): Newsrooms carried a lot of dead weight.

Shah: "We've talked about all the losers - who's the winner?" Merry: "Me, actually." DC is trendy now, and there are trillions of dollars in the budget.

English: "The winner is arguably the consumer" - more media from more locations more cheaply than ever before. (Snore) And we're back to the original question - how do you take this new environment and translate that into a new business? "There's probably no single right model or right answer." 45 minutes spent chasing our rhetorical tails.

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Posted by Laura Dawson , January 27, 09, 10:09 AM , comments(0) , permalink ,

SIIA Panel - Sink or Swim?

Kevin English from Satyam moderates a panel with Oakleigh Thorne of Blumenstein/Thorne, Michael Wolff, Bob Merry of CQ, and Vivek Shah.

Question: What do information companies look like now? Michael Wolff tackles this right away and asks back, "How do we look at what Google's doing it and mimic it and adapt to it and possibly steal from it?" Wolff continues - "How do we pay less for content? How do we pay nothing at all for content?" Well, this is an old question - I was asking this back in 1995, and then again in 1998, and then again in 2001. Wolff touts his own company Newser, which uses other people's content - just links out to people.

English moves on to Shah, who runs the digital group at Time: "The core fundamentals of a media business are the same - a great product, an audience, and a way to make money. Two ways to make money - ads and consumers." Tilting more towards advertising. But there needs to be a focus on meeting the needs of users. Economic advantage used to be the scoop - but on the internet, that advantage is very very narrow. Voice, personality matter a lot right now. As the formats change - from PC-based web to mobile - all of a sudden the real estate devoted to ads is small and so revenue potential goes on.

Oakleigh Thorne goes on to say that a lot of this has been talked about before, with business media rather than consumer media - and invokes the transition from print to CD-ROM, changing printing plants and sales forces, etc. How did B2B publishers handle some of these transitions? Very good questions.

Bob Merry pipes up with a question which I have lost the thread of - to Shah, who demurs by saying he's responsible only for the website not the magazine. What's the difference between print and web content? The web medium is an "hourly medium"? Have had to change the nature of editorial orgs that have a "different metabolism".

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Posted by Laura Dawson , January 27, 09, 9:59 AM , comments(0) , permalink ,

SIIA Information Industry Summit in NYC - 1/27/2009

Keynote from Marjorie Scardino, Pearson:

I arrived late and there were some issues in setting up the network, but I'm pasting my notes below:

Keynote about public education. TIMS Study – latest result – US students in 4^th and 9^th grade sci classes have stagnated when compared to the rest of the world. South Korea, Hong Kong, Scandinavia – we made some progress in math but not a lot. PISA study – same deal.

Invokes Obama unicorns and rainbows, and the fact that those of his gen can’t live w/o their blackberries.

Teenage communication – mostly electronic – text/phone/im – but we knew that.

Educational publishing – downloadable language lessons to iPod, semantic analysis, geotagging. “Personal web” – mobileMe – electrophoretic screens that roll up.

How to approach as a corporate citizen – “slay a lot of dragons”, such as…”You have to take a long-term view; innovation takes a long time.” “Sustained investment – innovation funding cannot be turned on and off like a faucet. Any public company will not find this easy. Shareholders don’t find this easy.” “Have customer interaction – release software early so customers can interact and help you refine it.” “Ideas come from everywhere – companies aren’t so great about getting serious about ideas that don’t come from the top. We asked someone from apple where do ideas come from here, and he said…”Steve”.”

“Inclusive and inquisitive culture. Pearson has a long history and now we have to change our history. Content is necessary but not sufficient for everything we do.”

Can’t predict trends in software, but know that jobs will be different, that employers will expect employees to do many different jobs over the course of their careers.

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Posted by Laura Dawson , January 27, 09, 9:54 AM , comments(0) , permalink ,

SIIA Previews - 1/26/2009

SIIA previews 1/26 – 12:51 p.m.

Larry Schwartz taking pictures of everything. My cold is putting me in a frowny mood – I’m hoping he’s not snapping any with me in them.

No network connection here at the PWC auditorium – I am blogging in Word and going to have to upload later. How strange is that?

1:01

Ed Keating kicks things off. Is nice to see some of my former clients here – Newstex’s Larry Schwartz is running quite a bit of the show at SIIA.

Kate Bluvol – Audit Partner with PWC – begins a presentation called “Shaking the MoneyTree”. Based on Thomson Reuters data, the MoneyTree report is now 14 years old – you can get it at pwcmoneytree.com, among other places.

Venture investments in the 4^th quarter of 08 were down - $5.4 billion – a 26% drop in the 4^th quarter, and the lowest investment since 2005. (The peak was, obviously, 2000.) First yearly decline in total investments since 2003.

Fifth highest year of annual investments in the 14 years of the report – and if you get rid of the “bubble” years of 2001-2002, it was the 2^nd highest.

New York is the 3^rd highest area of investment – and Media/Entertainment was the 5^th highest sector (after Software, Biotech, Industrial/Energy, Medical Equipment). Retailing is last.

Most investment $ going to later and expansion stage categories, but only early-stage companies increased after last year – 24% over 17%.

“Traunch” is such a great word.

BioTech is in the lead in getting $ in NY in the 4^th quarter.

There were no IPOs for venture-backed co’s in 4^th Q 2008 (or 2^nd Q)

Kate tries to put a positive spin on this – “good ideas are still getting funded” – but of course that’s like painting a smile on a sad clown.

Well, that was depressing!!! When’s cocktails?

1:17

Joel Dreyfuss of Red Herring continues the “it’s not so bad”. He’s moderating a panel that includes Tom Aley, of Dow Jones, and Ed REitler, who is a lawyer. Kate Bluvol is also on the panel.

Joel’s first question: “How do you survive?” Tom Aley’s response, “Create ROI models right away – you have to prove ROI – give away your software if you have to, in order to benchmark your ROI. Don’t fool yourself or your investors. Make the hard decisions now. The good news is that people are still buying products – Dow Jones is beginning to buy products, and people we sell to are coming back. Try to get really efficient in understanding where the money is, and that crosses over to venture capitalists and investors too. Understand how you, your board of directors, your key network map into those places.”

“Hunker down – you’ll be a better company for it.”

Joel: “Is there anything out of the Obama stimulus plan for startups?” Ed, “Nothing yet. The Obama admin has promised some tax cuts for small companies. What I was hoping to see was some room in the plan for funding like the old securities program like the SBA used to run. A great driver of job growth historically has been small businesses. If there was some effort to put as little as a billion dollars into the SBA and reopen participating securities program, we could see a lot of job creation.”

The securities program: Venture funds could be broken into two categories: SBIC and non-SBIC (Small Business Investment Company). During the 90s, the Clinton admin opened up small business loans being made through the government via SBICs. The unintended effect was that it allowed the SBICs to invest in venture-preferred equities, which created a boom in tech and biotech companies on both coasts, and the amount of job creation was tremendous – there are policy implications to that, and the Bush admin shut it down in 2004 – this would be a very efficient mechanism for creating jobs.

Joel throws it to Kate: “The current venture investments and players are looking at their portfolios and may be investing in companies they believe in to the detriment of companies that haven’t met expectations previously.”

Joel: “A lot of the VCs are pruning their portfolios pretty quickly these days, and if they feel a company doesn’t have potential they’re more inclined to cut it off.” Kate agrees: “They’re being much more cautious but it’s still encouraging that they’re looking at new ideas.”

Ed: “I’m a partner in a law firm and all we do is venture work – saying that it’s a good time to start a business isn’t the same as saying that it’s an easy thing to do right now. VCs are reserving more cash for their A players – the funds are making fewer new investments.”

Tom: “What do we do now? Pay a lot of attention to strategic investors” – inspirational yadda yadda. “Large corporations are starting to come around again, they may have shuttered their venture cap units but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t investing.” Cites Lexis-Nexis. “Project based, milestone based.” And whoever’s investing in your work, find the value prop for them, because they might acquire you.

Ed: “The valuations with strategic investors tend to be higher than ventures – but sometimes they want most favored nations status, first right of refusal, control of vendors, etc. But they’ll probably be looser w/the purse strings.” He also emphasizes that it IS a good time to start a business – development is cheaper, lot of talent available right now, NYC in particular is a really great resource for tech-enabled businesses.”

Tom: “VC’s have incredible value but they also sharpen their knives during a downturn in the economy” – “get a good lawyer”

A good Q&A – “give it away vs. subscriptions?”

Tom: “The premium services where you give away enough as a carrot to attract people to take a light subscription – Dow Jones is toying with it, and smaller companies have been doing that quite well, you do a hybrid of SEO and attract people and then upsell through a really good website. It’s a great way to introduce your brand.”

Discussion of auto parts database companies – selling into auto aftermarket – where repair shops can hook up with distributors. “An Amazon for autos” – and getting paid on a commission basis from the sales.

Q; “What have you been seeing in the angels market? Because I’ve been seeing offers drop by 50%.” Ed: Try to find people who really understand what you do – they will take more of a leap because they “get it”. But in general, that’s probably true.

Joel: “A lot also depends on whether or not Obama appoints this technology czar – I think everybody in the tech industry understands the damage that Sarbanes-Oxley has done.” Ed: “May lead to a lot of opportunities – new regulation may lead to a new set of solutions.” Joel: “Compliance companies.”

Tom: “Keep doing things like this.”

2:02

It’s getting cold in here and no matter how hard I try, I cannot create a network connection by sheer willpower.

Larry Schwartz gives us a rundown of other companies who have given previews at SIIA. It gets no warmer. Nor networkier.

I have to say, though, slides filled with logos definitely draw the eye. These all seem vaguely familiar, but I don’t really know them.

Larry’s kinda doing a “where are they now?” thing.

2:09

RSuite/Really is the first presentation in the preview series. Barry Bealer drives.

“It’s no longer about the document, folks.” He continues to emphasize re-use and scalability. ROI in months. He brings up Audible – I was consulting to Audible as they were licensing RSuite. Increased through-put by 100% - what he does not mention is that the data cleanup involved in that effort was responsible for a 38% increase in sales over the previous quarter.

His 5 minutes is up. Good ending!

Q&A was cute and short.

2:18

Arity Corporation – Peter Gabel, President.

“Faster, Better, Smarter, Cheaper Research” – how to plow through all the information out there in record time. “Expressway” is Arity’s product. Looks like many libraries’ federated search programs. Incorporating community content.

Clients include Elsevier, Wolters Kluwer, and…um…Chick-fil-a. (CHIK-FIL-A?)

Q: “How do you make money?” Via products that bootstrap development. Licensing, Saas service, business blowback, various models.

Q: “What content do you use?” Evasive maneuvers! Kinda Palin-esque response: “All of them” emphasis on the quality of their search rather than the quality of content that’s being searched.

They need to know more about libraries – doesn’t seem much different from library federated searches.

Q: “Your secret sauce is tagging – have you introduced a taxonomy?” A: “It’s more than tagging. We have the only commercial-quality implementation of EL++ - a reasoning platform.” “Do you own a spark plug?” (Actually, no. I am spark-plug-free.) Emphasis on relationships that tie things together and deliver the right answer. Need to talk more w/him.

2:29

It is freezing in here. Inside View is up. Alberto.

InsideView – aggregates social network info that analyzes it for relevance, and distributes to bberries, websites, Oracle, Salesforce.com, CRM apps, etc. Contact info, small bio, etc. For CRMs.

Customers – Ariba, IBM, etc.

Ends a minute early. Questions pretty standard. All Alberto’s answers start out: “Good question.” He also gets most of his news via Facebook and Twitter. And coins a new term - “Socialprise” – social media incorporated into the enterprise.

MixedInk – Vanessa Scanfeld

Founded at Cornell – politics-based. A community organizes, people participate, and they all agree on the final version of their message. Example: Slate’s People’s Inaugural Address. Ratings, user input, etc. Mashups of previously-written text – tracking authorship.

Just got word that a colleague of mine at MH was laid off. Oooooh. Literally even as we speak kinda thing.

Q for Vanessa: What’s the ROI? In fact, useful for product specs, etc. – a lot of ideas, maybe geographically dispersed, where the final text is what matters.

Q: “Why the hesitation around collaboration?” Not so much of a hesitation around collaboration – she’s got a hesitant style.

Prolifiq – Jeff Gaus –

Saas, enterprise content/large organizations. Content at the fingertips of the sales people. Getty Images uses it to sell photos. Corbis/ONYX uses it to go after expired licenses. Cisco. Medical device space – Atricure. IBM.

Q: “Is it a product or a feature?” This kind of question is an indication of one of two things: Either your presentation failed, or the person in the audience didn’t get it.

Q: “How do you determine the effectiveness of the content?” An algorithm. Oooooh.

Q: “How do you make money?” “Classic Saas model – butts in the seats licensing.”

Refreshments and networking – well, that was lovely – must remember to BRING MY BUSINESS CARDS tomorrow (D’oh!)

SBTV – Susan Wilson Solovic, CEO – did she work in radio or TV?

Small Business Daily Newscast – events calendar, video content, podcasts, internet radio – Suze Orman, et al

She calls herself the “Suze Orman of small business” – okay, that is unfortunate. 96% direct traffic, 13K viewers per day.

Ad-supported content.

Working on a massive SEO project. Hampered by the fact that search engines for a long time didn’t track video.

Adgregate – Henry Wong, CEO

Had to miss this one.

Associated Content – Andrew Snyder

Syndicates content and shares ad revenue. Now creating original custom content.

Oh, no, content as a way to get people to buy things! Zappo’s! Um, we did this at Barnes & Noble and the program was terminated because IT DIDN'T MOVE ANY BOOKS. And we lost a ton of $ in licensing fees.

Professionally-reviewed content – as opposed to crowd-sourced content generation.

Questions: “How labor-intensive is the quality?” Very.

Content is work-for-hire – so they own it.

Q: Competitors? The usual answer – there is nobody doing what we do right now. Their differentiator – they deliver content both on their sites, as well as to other sites.

Q: Video content? About 10% of their content is video.

Q: How do you vet 200K contributors? 2000 submissions every day – Because they are paid, they can vet them. Both tech- and human-reviewed. Not telling how, exactly.

Management CV – Renny Ponvert ()

Oh dear. The cold meds have kicked in. I hardly understand this one.

Apparently they have a database of CEOs, where they rate them and segment them. And create textual commentary.

CellJournalism – Parker Polidor

Local media outlets. License to local outlets – user generated content – from cell phones, Bberries, etc.

Platform. Local media rec’s images. Media outlets have to monetize this somehow.

40 clients. Business model – setup fee, then license platform.

Q: “Do you do consulting, advising companies on how to leverage community content?” “Kinda. We have best practices.”

Q; “What about rights/permissions” – local media outlets provide their own terms of service.

Roger Ehrenberg – Managing Partner, IA Capital Partners – Keynote

Failures are the topic of the keynote. “How to ‘Fail Successfully’” in other words. Using his own experience.

Using his own experience at several different companies.

“Showing a unified face” is different from “having a single vision”

Managed a team not used to interacting with customers – oy! Not customer-centric!

Got hyped early on. Raised a bunch of money, but had no idea how to even spend it.

Too much money – didn’t need to make revenues. He’s almost speechless with the irony.

Persistence. Not letting failure “get” to you. Not letting it demoralize you.

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Posted by Laura Dawson , January 27, 09, 9:48 AM , comments(0) , permalink ,

Also

Shelf Awareness has had a bit of back-and-forth on the Kindle lately. MJ Rose, the "Reincarnationist" author, had a piece lauding the Kindle and describing getting a HarperCollins title before the print version was out. Today, Margot Sage-EL, an indie bookstore owner, wrote in a piece called "Leveling the E-Playing Field" that she was a bit taken aback by Rose's description of her local bookstore being too "out of the way", extolling the Kindle's convenience, and also upset that Harper had released the ebook version of the book before the print version.

So she wrote to Harper and they apologized, saying that the early Kindle release had actually been a mistake.

It kind of makes me sad to watch this, actually. I love independent bookstores - hell, I love B&N stores as well. But it's not that the playing field isn't level. It's a different field altogether.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I love the convenience of the Kindle. I love not HAVING to go out in the cold for my books - and to get them instantly without waiting for the mail to bring them. There is no way print can compete with that - no way at all.

That said, there are certain books I prefer to have in print than on the Kindle. Anything in the "Dummies" series, for example - that format is far more readable on paper than it is in reflowable text. Recently, my colleague Brian O'Leary recommended the book Slide:ology for our StartwithXML Forum - I would not want that book on my Kindle. It relies too heavily on graphics, and the points it makes would be lost on a Kindle. Diet books - with their charts and the pages you want to keep referring to - work much better in print. Inspirational books that are heavily formatted with call-outs - not so great for the Kindle.

So bookstores - indie or no - don't have to worry about those sorts of books; it'll be quite a while before Amazon and Apple figure out a way around those. But straight text - the bulk of most books - has found a friend in the ebook format. And rather than getting upset about it, it's probably time for bookshops to start figuring out how they're going to grapple with that.

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Posted by Laura Dawson , January 21, 09, 10:29 AM , comments(0) , permalink ,

Kindle Notes

I've been trying to enjoy my Kindle but the problem I've been having lately is that the more I read...the less there is to read.

My daughter and I are reading the Inkheart series. She finished the first book, handed it over to me while she started the second, but she's only halfway through the second and I'm ready for it now. So I wanted to download the books for my Kindle. Not possible. Not available (yet).

Infinite Jest - still not available.

A Janet Evanovich Between-the-Numbers Stephanie Plum mystery was available briefly for $22.98 (???? - it's like 100 pages!). Then the price dropped to $16.97. (Still too expensive - and it's not like the Stephanie Plum novels are getting better and better - Evanovich is clearly not that interested in writing them anymore.) Then the book dropped off the Kindle site altogether. Last night I found it again...for $9.99.

Jane Haddam's substantial backlist - most of it is still not available.

I'm sure much of it is a rights issue - when those contracts were negotiated, ebooks were not a hot ticket. Tracking down old contracts which are probably in off-site storge somewhere - how do you prioritize? how do you triage? how many subrights assistants and interns can you put on that task? - can't be easy, and then poring through each of them to discover which allow for "electronic rights" (always the first item we crossed off at Doubleday) is a hassle.

But it would be nice to know that this is on the radar. It would be nice to hear from publishers that they are doing this. I want to read. I just don't want to haul the books around, or pile them up in my apartment.

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Posted by Laura Dawson , January 21, 09, 10:17 AM , comments(1) , permalink ,

Back to business

All right, the fuss is over, Michelle's outfits were perfect (nice, fitted, not over the top), Obama did the bump, and we can all settle down now. BTW, here's the inaugural address formatted for the Kindle.

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Posted by Laura Dawson , January 21, 09, 10:14 AM , comments(0) , permalink ,

No blogging today

I have a lot to say but it can wait. I'll be tweeting the Inauguration instead. This is too important.

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Posted by Laura Dawson , January 20, 09, 9:36 AM , comments(0) , permalink ,

Inaugural Tag Cloud

The Times has a really great feature where they've loaded all the Inaugural Addresses into a database and generated a tag cloud for them. It rocks!!!! Go play and see how times have changed (or not).

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Posted by Laura Dawson , January 19, 09, 1:38 PM , comments(0) , permalink ,

B&N lays off 100

B&N announced this afternoon that it laid off 100 members of its corporate staff. My own sources tell me several .com buyers as well as brick-and-mortar IT staff were affected. BusinessWeek reports that these staffers will get 12 months of health benefits as well as career counseling and outplacement services. While Steve Riggio says that it's the first time in the history of B&N a layoff has happened, this is not QUITE true - B&N.com laid off 350 folks in 2001, and while at the time B&N.com was a separate company from B&N, (a) that made no sense and everybody knew it (b) B&N owned 50% of B&N.com. (The other 50% was owned by Bertelesmann.)

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Posted by Laura Dawson , January 14, 09, 10:15 PM , comments(1) , permalink ,

When In Doubt, Stick The Chapter Up On Your Website

Author Mark Ebner has written a book about sex scandals and blackmail in Hollywood - and as you can imagine, there are a number of lubricious details. However, Simon & Schuster, the publisher, was not confident in one particular chapter and excluded it from the printed book. So Ebner has posted that chapter on his own website, according to Gawker:

The author, who has three books under his belt, clearly hopes the giveaway will drive sales of the printed product: His free chapter ends with a plug for the book and a link to the Amazon listing.

That might appease Ebner's publisher, but who knows if it will work. Readers might just decide they don't need to explore Hollywood's underbelly further after seeing the worst of the worst.

Of course, it may be that the "worst of the worst" is actually in the print version and the reason S&S couldn't publish this particular chapter is because there was no way to vet it properly. Anyway, it'll be interesting to see if this drives sales.

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Posted by Laura Dawson , January 12, 09, 8:16 AM , comments(0) , permalink ,

Pershing Square Dumps BN Stock

Pershing Square Capital liquidated its BN stock, according to a regulatory filing made on Friday - Pershing Square owned 11.8% of the company. Forbes reports:

It is unclear whether the billionaire activist investor believes that Barnes & Nobles has taken a turn for the worse, or if he, like many money managers, is being slammed with redemptions and must exit positions even as the market sinks to new lows. A spokesperson for Pershing Square refused to comment.

Of course, Ron Burkle and Yucaipa picked up 8.3% of BN over the course of last month. And BN is a hell of a lot less troubled than Borders, who "issued 5.2 million stock warrants to Pershing Square Capital, already its largest investor, under an agreement that required it to do so if it failed to by a buyer."

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Posted by Laura Dawson , January 12, 09, 8:10 AM , comments(0) , permalink ,

Epstein's Autopsy at Daily Beast

An autopsy implies a death, and Jason Epstein gives his pronouncement over at the Daily Beast:

The business as it exists cannot survive, but in the miraculous way such things happen, a shining future is at hand. The 500-year-old Gutenberg system in which copy is delivered to a printer who ships inventory to a publisher’s warehouse from which it is consigned to bookshops is being displaced by the combined impact of digitization and the Internet, whose vast implications for the existing supply chain have yet to be fully exploited or perhaps grasped by today’s industry. In theory, every book ever published in whatever language can now be stored and delivered in digital form as cheaply and quickly as e-mail to be downloaded onto a variety of devices from dedicated readers, to more versatile handheld devices and to free standing machines that quickly and cheaply print and bind a selected title on demand wherever electricity and Internet connectivity exist.

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Posted by Laura Dawson , January 8, 09, 9:24 AM , comments(0) , permalink ,

McGraw-Hill Education cuts 215

Even educational publishing is feeling the pinch as school districts and colleges reduce orders. I can't tell from any of the reports where the layoffs are coming from (Higher Ed, K-12), and none of my colleagues (I'm consulting to MH right now) has been affected.

But MH is an interesting company. It owns Standard & Poors (which was not doing well last year and has just hired an ombudsman this year), some trade magazines (another sector that's not doing well at all), and a construction business (and we know that construction is tanking these days). The educational division is pretty much carrying the rest of the company right now.

So for there to be layoffs in that area, MH has to have been hit pretty hard by the declining economy.

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Posted by Laura Dawson , January 8, 09, 9:11 AM , comments(1) , permalink ,

Borders Death Spiral Continues

They can't find a buyer. They've sold stores abroad. Their stock has been threatened with de-listing because of its low value. And now...they've replaced George Jones, their CEO, with Ron Marshall - and replaced their CFO and Executive VP as well.

Marshall is apparently a turnaround artist, but if he can turn this one around, he's a miracle worker. MediaBistro has the details.

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Posted by Laura Dawson , January 6, 09, 8:51 AM , comments(0) , permalink ,

Kassia Nails It Again

Kassia is all kinds of awesome in this post on her Booksquare blog. The jackhammering on the street just outside my window is the perfect accompaniment to her message:

When the ScrollMotion App and titles and prices were announced, I had one question for the publishers involved: are you on crack? Seriously, what were you smoking in that meeting? I know, I know, you want to control the market, you want to control prices, you want…what? To, oh, maybe sell some books? The hardcover price of our poor example book, according to Amazon, of . The Iceberg edition is $27.99.

Are you trying to kill the market? Are you trying to be funny? Do you truly think outrageous prices are the way to bring in new, younger readers? Do you think we’re stupid?

Thank you.

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Posted by Laura Dawson , January 5, 09, 1:54 PM , comments(0) , permalink ,

The Times Purchases a Clue, Used

The Times has an article about Google Book Search post-agreement with the AAP and Author's Guild. Mostly it's about the joys of searching through old or obscure books with Google, with a few trepidatious comments thrown in, like this one:

Some librarians privately expressed fears that Google might charge high prices for subscriptions to the book database as it grows. Although nonprofit groups like the Open Content Alliance are building their own digital collections, no other significant private-sector competitors are in the business.

Or this one:

Some scholars worry that Google users are more likely to search for narrow information than to read at length. “I have to say that I think pedagogically and in terms of the advancement of scholarship, I have a concern that people will be encouraged to use books in this very fragmentary way,” said Alice Prochaska, university librarian at Yale.

I'm beginning to think there's a formula to these types of articles: Software Giant (Amazon/Google) does things with books, oooooh we're all a little nervous, maybe it will be okay, cute final anecdote (in this case from "Twilight"...the movie version, weirdly).

As Richard Curtis put it so eloquently in the blog post I referred to previously:

Feeling sheepish about helping to fatten Amazon's [or Google's - LD] bank account? Time to get over it....We have far greater fish to fry, like how our poor dear broken old publishing industry is going to go on producing new books.

Bingo. Time to wake the hell up.

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Posted by Laura Dawson , January 4, 09, 10:27 PM , comments(0) , permalink ,

Used Book Angst? "Get Over It," says Richard Curtis

Great post from Richard Curtis in his E-Reads blog - a response to the NYTimes's article on the used book market:

As I say, it's a little late to lament the ceding of the used-book business to Amazon. The game is pretty much over. Jeff Bezos, the company's founder, beams with pride about the centralization of a process that, for all its serendipitous delights, was chaotic, labor- and real estate-intensive, and frequently just plain crazy. To hear him tell it, Amazon is rescuing a dying business and bringing service and professionalism to it, to say nothing of increasing literacy. Reading Bezos's defense of the practice - written six years ago - is a little like listening to Mephistopheles praising the virtues of immortality. But you have to pay the Devil his due, and I think we should.

Honestly, nobody's come up with a better model. Until publishers can go through all their contract files and get electronic rights for their backlist titles (ha, that was the first set of rights we crossed off the contract in my days as an editorial assistant at Doubleday - we didn't even know what electronic rights were back then), and then charge (repeatedly) by the download, Amazon's got this one sewn up. And even if publishers were to do all of that...Amazon's got the Kindle.

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Posted by Laura Dawson , January 4, 09, 10:16 PM , comments(1) , permalink ,

MAC!!!

I have purchased a MacBook and I love it. It feels silly not having had it all this time. I love how it recognizes all the stuff I plug into it - external hard drives, iPods, printers, mice, all the stuff that my PC would complain about.

Perhaps it will make me a better blogger.

That said...only 8 more days till the StartWithXML Forum!!! I am so excited! If you have not signed up now, go go go and do so! Otherwise you will miss really substantial conversation and presentations that will really affect the way you're doing business this year. Print is hardly dead, but it's not getting any more alive, either.

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Posted by Laura Dawson , January 4, 09, 9:50 PM , comments(0) , permalink ,

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