The UK Digital Publishing Scene

Peter Kilborn | 06/30/2008 | Digitization

There’s nothing particularly new about digital publishing – academic journal publishing has moved decisively from print to digital with comparatively little pain – but in the UK, as elsewhere at the moment, there is a big and persistent buzz about e-books and other forms of digital delivery.

Ironically much of the excitement is about using digital content to promote the sale of physical books: the various search inside programmes, jacket/cover images, widgets and other marketing collateral. In order to have such things available, however, it is necessary to have book content in digital form in the first place; and UK publishers have been on the whole ready to provide material to Google Book Search, Microsoft Live Search Books (while it lasted) and to Amazon.co.uk. All see benefit in having a degree of browsability available to online users to support physical sales. Some of the largest companies, however, – Random House, HarperCollins, Penguin, etc – have sought to keep control of their assets away from their powerful trading partners by setting up their own repositories of digital content.
This hugely expensive enterprise is also providing a way of storing digital content in a form which will allow a proliferation of repurposed products, either physical or digital. And that, of course, is the prize if and when e-books become a serious proposition.

The frustrating thing about the UK market in this regard is that we are still waiting for things to happen: Google are not trying to sell content; we don’t have the Kindle or a Sony E-Reader; practically no digital content is yet being traded. That doesn’t mean that there is not a huge amount of activity under way to prepare for what may happen in the future.

The big fear last year was that publishers, aided and abetted by Google, would seek to exclude booksellers from the sale of digital content by direct selling to the consumer. The UK Booksellers Association, ever defensive of booksellers’ place in the supply chain, has been very active, commissioning a series of reports and documents (available at http://www.booksellers.org.uk). However, the debate has moved on now and few believe that disintermediation is a serious threat: after all the company best placed to make digital sales is a bookseller (Amazon); and both Waterstone’s and Borders are in the process of setting up web sites which are certainly planned to feature e-books. Gardners, one of the two major general wholesalers, has set up a digital warehouse into which publishers can deposit their content; and their competitor Bertrams clearly has a similar project in its plans.

There is, however, general agreement that a plausible e-reader is an essential component of the market for e-books gaining critical mass. Kindle is not yet available in the UK and because of its wireless connectivity may not be unless a deal is struck with one of the UK mobile phone networks. This has not yet happened but presumably talks are under way. The Sony e-Reader is not yet available here either but there is speculation that it will be launched in the autumn, possibly in collaboration with Waterstone’s. It had previously been mentioned in connection with Borders (now only connected with the US company through a small minority stake), but Borders have recently announced that they will sell the iRex iLiad reader at £399, bundled with 50 classic out-of-copyright titles. Although this is the only dedicated e-reader on the market, obtaining additional digital content to read on it is by no means easy (not available from Borders, or from Waterstone’s or Amazon, but only from a handful of e-books sites not guaranteeing compatibility).

Compatibility is the matter of most concern. The decision taken by Amazon.com to sell only proprietary Kindle content has been widely interpreted in the UK as an attempt to dominate the market through a standards war (VHS v. Betamax). Almost everyone here (outside Amazon) would argue that the more interoperability of products and formats there is the better it will be for the growth of a mature e-book market.

To summarise, there is much talk and not much action here. The Publishers Association is organising two ‘digital summits’ primarily to address issues of copyright in digital content. Soon afterwards the Liaison Group of the Publishers and Booksellers Associations will be holding a meeting dedicated to digital issues. Book Industry Communication, the UK’s supply chain organisation, has set up a Digital Supply Chain Group which held a one-day workshop recently to discuss a range of contentious issues.

Chief among these at the moment is the question of identification of digital content. It has been generally taken for granted that e-books, like physical books, should be identified using ISBNs. The ISO ISBN standard says that each digital format traded should carry its own individual ISBN, exactly as various versions or formats of a physical product do. This position has been endorsed in a joint publication of Book Industry Communication and the Book Industry Study Group published in January. Not all publishers are persuaded, however, encouraged by the coincidental appearance of the generic .epub file format: apparently fearful of the number of ISBNs they might have to assign if they sell chapters or fragments of their titles, the cost of numbers (though most big publishers already own vast stocks of unused ISBNs rashly assigned when the system came into being), and the possibly burdensome impact on their systems, they have sought to assign a single ISBN to all digital manifestations and find other mechanisms to distinguish them in their own systems. Most of them have seem not to have thought through the consequences: that e-books sold through library intermediaries such as NetRead or MyiLibrary will need individual ISBNs by format if sales are to be correctly reported (this would raise the unwelcome possibility of intermediaries assigning ISBNs to publishers’ titles); and that assigning an ISBN to a source file such as .epub implies that the publisher has no interest in the form in which the product is sold after it has been sold to an intermediary for repurposing.

To conclude: while the marketplace remains so ill-defined there is very little advice which can be given to Canadian publishers with digital content to sell in the UK. Most for whom it is appropriate will already have established links with Ingram’s (formerly Coutts’) MyiLibrary and other intermediaries in the library market. Dawson Books are the latest UK entrant with their Dawsonera offering. In the consumer market, the situation might change very quickly if there were to be a disruptive intervention in the market by one of the global goliaths (Google, Amazon) or even a hardware provider, perhaps even an organisation with no connections to the book trade so far. But so far, the industry is just trying to be as prepared as it can be for something which doesn’t yet exist.

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Specifying Selecting and Implementing Digital Asset Management and Distribution Systems

Peter Kilborn | 06/06/2008 | Digitization

Seminar, Wednesday 4 June 2008

This seminar was organised by the UK Publishers Association’s Digital Publishing Forum in collaboration with the Centre for Publishing at University College London. It was attended by around 45 delegates from a wide spectrum of companies.

The seminar was introduced by Hugh Look and Sue Sparks, consultants with Rightscom, a London-based consultancy well-known in the media world. They emphasised that, against a background of growing complexity and proliferation of digital as well as physical products and a need to keep track not only of where assets were but also what rights and permissions attached to them, larger companies could no longer expect to depend on the memory or private systems operated by experienced individuals.

The distinction was emphasised between the so-called DADs (Digital Asset Distributors) and DAMs (Digital Asset Management systems), though the responsibilities of each are not clear-cut. Typically DAMs are internal to publishers and are used to store and track all the components of their titles, from the print-ready PDF to the individual source files which have been generated in the editorial, production and design processes, together with adequate metadata. By contrast, DADs are outward-facing, converting or massaging content in the DAM system ready for distribution to the marketplace.

Many publishers have been slow to commit themselves to either DAMs or DADs. This was attributed to concerns about cost and potential business disruption. Unlike many business investments there was very little history in the way of models adopted successfully elsewhere and few people around with the necessary skills or breadth of understanding.

There were three options for publishers: to start from scratch; to buy a core package and customise it; or to outsource the whole operation to a subcontractor. Before doing any of these, however, it was essential to identify existing assets and start building metadata to support them.

The first option (starting from scratch) can be expensive and painful, and a number of attempts to do so have failed. However, outsourcing does not take away any of the problems either: just as outsourcing physical distribution does not change anything in the way the core publishing functions operate, nor does outsourcing digital distribution to DADs. DADs as a supplier type are still in their infancy and their roots lie in a variety of places: typesetting or text conversion, printing, publishing itself or technical solution providers. Publishers should look for the most appropriate fit for their particular needs.

It was emphasised strongly that any move made in this direction, however, would inevitably involve some business re-engineering and consequently needed support and commitment from the very top of the business hierarchy

Andy Williams of Cambridge University Press was currently working with Rightscom on a DAM project. CUP had first embarked on such a project in 1996, though it was subsequently abandoned, but they have some experience in this area: they have set up a Content Services department and operated an XML repository since 2004. The current project was initiated in early 2007, would be going out to tender with suppliers later in the year, and was scheduled to go live in 2009.
So far much of the effort had gone into scoping the project: dividing responsibility between DAM and DAD, deciding whether to use the DAM as a storage vault or develop a full XML production workflow, establishing how both complete titles but also chapters and other components would be identified.

A key point was that all assets had rights attached and that meant that every title and all multiple components needed to be checked for copyright clearance. Rights were an integral part of all digital trading and awareness of their importance needed to be communicated to all parts of the business. Clear and accurate metadata was essential throughout the publishing process to enable content to be readily accessed.
It was obvious that CUP had embarked on an ambitious project which had a high risk attached. Andy Williams emphasised that it needed the assurance of support at the top level of management and of financial commitment; and a fairly radical re-engineering of many business processes.

Graham Bell presented the experience of HarperCollins and demonstrated the DAM system (North Plains Telescope Enterprise) which they had implemented. This had replaced very primitive manual systems of storage but was now a very effective business tool. All book components were stored, including print-ready PDFs and source files, with metadata both for the product and for the assets which it comprised. The system gathered files in logical groups and had a powerful search mechanism to enable users – subject to strict access controls – to find files quickly and easily. However, he warned that such a system needed to be built to allow for substantial growth as digital content increased in volume very rapidly.

The prime criterion for selecting a DAM supplier was stability and longevity. In the present state of development, all the focus was on putting things into a digital warehouse, whereas the benefit would not be apparent until it was used to extract content, perhaps some years in the future. And that was the problem: Graham concluded by saying that it was impossible to justify the investment using normal ROI criteria; but that it was a price that had to be paid to ensure companies’ survival in the coming years.

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