Librarians in Step at O'Reilly's Tools of Change

With faces aglow in the glare of a sea of laptops and BlackBerries®, a cadre of publishers, librarians, techies, and business suits pondered and predicted the future of publishing at the O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference in New York, February 11–13 [see also the TOC blog]. The emphasis was on publishers, but libraries also were the focus of several panels and could benefit from the advice on how to compete in the current online arena.

Unbeknownst to many of the publishers in the audience, many libraries nationwide have become digital publishers, just nonprofit ones. University of Michigan (UM) librarians Maria Bonn, Shana Kimball, and Jeremy Morse explained how they took the facility's digital collections and turned them into a (minimally) money-making venture.

The library was spurred by the impracticality of the typical publishing model, which, Morse said, “has problems for libraries.” Scholars use libraries to create content that publishers then sell back to the libraries at continually rising costs while library budgets remain flat—or worse.

Another factor is the changing face of university presses: “libraries are expected to lose money as efficiently as possible, but university presses pay their own way, so they've begun publishing more commercial books and raising prices on scholarly works,” said Morse.

Thus was born the Scholarly Publishing Office (SPO). UM was already digitizing older public domain titles for preservation purposes, said Bonn, SPO director. Books, she said, literally were crumbling. These preservation projects spawned a print-on-demand (POD) service, and the library now sells 9000 POD titles through Amazon.

To cut costs, Bonn advised creating partnerships with scholarly societies, university presses (where possible), and vendors for digitizing and POD services. Since the SPO generates very little profit, it offers alluring contracts, which allow authors to retain their rights for future purposes. “We're not in the business of selling, we're in the business of giving it away,” Bonn said.

The library also publishes the free Journal of Electronic Publishing and Philosophers' Imprint, both of which rely on volunteer editors and authors. Bonn claims scholars are more interested in disseminating their research quickly (some journals take up to four years to publish articles!) than they are in profits, which makes them prime partners for academic library publishers.

The Gadgetopia session focused less on mobile technology and gadgets than on creating content for the devices and on the end users themselves. The session was led by affiliates of Harvard Business School Press (HBSP), including Paul Michelman, director of content for harvardbusiness.org, Bill Damon, technologist for HBSP, and Tammy Erickson, of the Concours Institute and contributing blogger to harvardbusiness.org.

The session centered its discussion around the mobile-aware Generation Y and how to prepare for their information needs. Erickson noted research that found users “preferring texting and writing to talking” on mobile devices, even when charges applied to text as opposed to free voice calling.

She said the generation of users under age 30 think in terms of perpetual access to content and find the idea of carrying around static, accumulated knowledge unappealing (an idea also touched upon in a conference keynote address by SirsiDynix's Stephen Abram). In the social realm, Erickson said, “[Gen Yers] coordinate rather than schedule,” eschewing plans and instead relying on their mobile connectivity to make arrangements on the fly.

Shifting focus to the delivery mechanism for mobile content, Damon said that the hosting for their mobile.harvardbusiness.org platform costs roughly $6 a month, using a service called MoFuse. To generate the mobile content, HBSP aggregates the site's blog postings via XML piping. Michelman noted that most sites already have content ready for mobile browsing.

The main barrier, he said, is simply collecting and formatting it appropriately, a process that can be aided by tools like Yahoo! Pipes. “It's not expensive,” he said, “just scary.”

Ted Hill of THA Consulting pulled no punches, declaring that “digital marketing is no longer an option.” Only small and mid-sized publishers can reap the greatest benefits and profits through partnering with digital asset distributors (DAD). Large publishers have the means to be their own DAD.

The same ideas apply to libraries, although most of them have the advantage of being more tech-savvy than many businesses. Hill added that publishers must decide how deeply they really need to delve into digitizing their backlists or supporting all formats.

Hill further insisted that “web marketing is synergistic: the more presence your titles have out there, the more they'll be crawled, etc.” Ditto for libraries: if you want the public to use fully your assets other than books and DVDs, those assets must be visible on your homepage and your catalogs.

Brent Lewis, Harlequin Enterprises's Internet & Digital division director, discussed the romance publisher's highly successful ebook program, with 100 percent of its frontlist now digitized and priced significantly lower than print. He described a business model based not only on consumer feedback but also on their direct involvement. He advised the audience to build not just communities of customers but communities of readers and “take time to maintain a...dialog.”

Lewis also challenged the myth that “ebooks are for geeks only,” pointing to studies revealing women as the most avid ebook readers and romance the fastest-growing ebook genre. He also contends that there are at least six good reading devices on the market, all supported by publishers like Harlequin.