Milia: Publishers Decline, Technology Advances
Herbert R. Lottman -- 2/23/98
Book people were hardly at the center of the galaxy at this year's Milia, held in Cannes, France, February 7-11. Yet publishers who bothered to make the trip learned much about their own future -- if only the perception of where the competition was likely to come from. They were the target of exhibitors offering art, photo and information archives, as well as know-how on setting up businesses on the good old Web or through still newer delivery systems such as digital TV.
American groups that had been very active at past Milias -- such as Time-Warner and Simon &Schuster -- were thin on the ground this time. S&S, which had one of the most impressive stands just two years earlier, showed only through its Dutch partner and distributor. Some American houses like Houghton Mifflin Interactive and Random Soft registered as participants without stands, working out of a message box.
Americans were of course the first to go into electronic publishing, and many had gotten out again before the rest of the world knew what it was all about. The evidence in Cannes suggested that the latecomers may have found some lessons in the disappointments of their American and British forebears. Among leading book companies with stands this year -- stands at least as impressive as that of Disney Interactive or scaled-down Dorling Kindersley -- were Italy's Mondadori and De Agostini, Spain's Anaya, Germany's Ravensburger, Sweden's Norstedts Rabén, Brazil's Melhoramentos.
For the first time, the Publishers Association of China was present on a collective stand with 18 companies presently involved in multimedia, a number of whom had brought representatives prepared to talk about the needs of their market. The European Educational Publishers Group (EEPG) ran a collective showing the projects of its members (including Heinemann Educational, Hachette, Dutch Meulenhoff and Swedish Natur och Kultur).
French Models
Among the strongest exhibitors were the French-perhaps to be expected in a show sited in their country. But it also seemed to reflect the inchmeal way publishers here have proceeded with their electronic publishing. For some clues as to how the French have kept afloat, PW talked with Agnès Touraine, president and CEO of Havas Interactive, the electronic publishing arm of the giant Havas communications group, France's largest book publishing combine by far. Everything Touraine d s is drawn from content developed inside the group. No games here, although the star product -- the Discoveries multimedia encyclopedia -- makes use of technologies developed for games.
After licensing Discoveries -- a 3-D tour of civilization from the cave paintings through successive centuries of art and culture -- to IBM and World Book in the U. S. and Bertelsmann in Germany, Touraine and her new partners put together what they call the Multimedia Consortium, unveiled in Cannes in the presence of Robert C. Martin, president of World Book School and Library Division; IBM Consumer Division general manager Bernie Rice; and Werner Ortner, president and publisher of reference books at the Bertelsmann book group. The plan is to pool multimedia assets that can be utilized in future projects of the participants and be licensed to third parties. Already in the first three months of activity, each of the three partners (IBM and World Book considered as a single entity) has produced a dozen 3-D subjects for themselves and their partners.
Alongside the giants, the family-controlled house of Gallimard, one of France's classic literary imprints, offers a different model -- perhaps an even more successful one considering the investment. As explained to PW by the house's managing director, Pierre Cohen-Tanugi, Gallimard began to develop its own multimedia under the wing of the house's existing editorial departments. In two years of activity, the house has completed only 10 products, half of them acquired from others. Gallimard has produced a state-of-the-art Web site inside the house, but farms out production of CD-ROMs. "Our market continues to rise," noted Cohen-Tanugi.
Cannes also gave electronic publishers a chance to catch up with French Hachette and American Grolier, which have undergone a number of transformations since the former acquired the latter. In recent years, Arnaud Lagardère, son and heir of group president Jean-Luc Lagardère, has been running Grolier out of Danbury, Conn., after building up Hachette's electronic publishing in France. Now meet Grolier Interactive Europe, which starting on March 1 unites all the group's multimedia activities; to head up the new entity, Arnaud Lagardère returns to Europe. One of his first decisions, it was announced in Cannes, is to set up an education pole linking the multimedia activities of Hachette Livre and the online educational services of Grolier Interactive -- to be called Hachette Multimedia Education.
Night Kitchen
"Frankfurt is about publishing, Milia is technology," so this year's show was summed up by media consultant Christian Spanik (who helped put together Frankfurt's electronics pavilion). And indeed the techies were everywhere, filing up space deserted by failed publishing ventures. In this corner, Intel, in that, Apple-each with a bevy of client companies prepared to show off their killer apps.
In an opening keynote, Intel's exec v-p Paul Otellini (mentioned as a possible successor to CEO Andrew Grove) introduced some of the products made possible by Intel "architecture." One was a fast-growing online extension of the Ticketmaster theater agency, another the Havas 3-D encyclopedia Discoveries (which Otellini kept referring to as a game). In its own corner, Apple sponsored a slew of small developers from Britain to Russia who were using Macs in new ventures both on- and off-line.
So what was a print publisher like Mo Cohen of Gingko Press (of Hamburg, Germany, and Corte Madera, Calif.) doing with a stand among all those flashing lights and squeaky sounds? He had signed up for a stand early to show a single book -- described as the ultimate book for Web users -- but the project wasn't ready at show time, and roaming the aisles, he came across the booth of Bob Stein, one of Milia's golden boys when he flew the Voyager Company's flag. Now Stein was back with some of the old Voyager crew in a brand-new venture called Night Kitchen, creator of authoring tools that just about anybody can use.
"I like to think that if we'd had tools like ours five years ago, book publishers would still be here," Stein explained when PW finally broke through the crowd to sit beside him. Up to now developing multimedia projects has been too expensive, too risky for anything but games and major projects for children. His new program, which he calls TK3, will allow practically anybody to assemble complex multimedia materials without a programmer, for delivery either over the Internet or on CD-ROM and DVD-ROM. If you understand the menu structure of a Mac or Windows, he promises, you can use TK3.
Stein was targeting small publishers like Gingko, as well as university presses and college professors. He shows a quote from Susan Saltrick, v-p of Addison Wesley Longman, who believes that Night Kitchen's innovation "will be the platform with which the next generation of college texts will be created."
Content Providers
The Milia fair now calls itself "The International Content Market for Interactive Media," and one could collect everything needed for a multimedia encyclopedia in a tour of the aisles -- with a stop at Sygma Keystone ("The World's Largest Online Digital Image Database"), say, across to France's National Museums for some art, or to the Bibliothèque Nationale for lots of digitized books. Actually, not everything was that serious at the 1998 Milia. Game producers proliferated, and games made all the noise, even if they provided most of the color.
It was as if to correct the balance that Milia's management, the Paris-based Reed Midem Organization, announced plans for the creation of still another annual event to add to its collection of media trade shows. The new baby will be called the World Education Market, and the first will be held in Vancouver, British Columbia, from May 24 to 27, 2000. Conceived to be a "one-stop shopping event" for all players, public or private, in all areas of education, the new fair hopes to attract participation from schools and colleges, development agencies; groups concerned with workplace training, distance learning and adult continuing education; and leaders in book and multimedia publishing, telecommunications, computer hardware and software.
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