With 120 attendees from the book industry, educational publishing and the public sector, the seventh annual Seminar on Publishing in the 21st Century, sponsored by the University of Virginia and the Library of Congress, covered the progress made by professional and trade publishers adapting their businesses to the Internet. The conference was held last month at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
Keynoter John Kilcullen, CEO of Hungry Minds Inc., led off, addressing, as did much of the conference, the transformation of the industry attendant upon the realization of two-way communication between author/publisher and reader made possible by the Internet.
"For 11 years," Kilcullen told his audience, "IDG Books had no customers—only nameless, faceless buyers." But after studying customer surveys, combined with feedback from IDG's online efforts (Dummies Answer Network, Frommers.com, CliffNotes.com), he found that while 95% of IDG's readers said they were "somewhat satisfied" or "very satisfied," and 18% had bought five or more IDG titles, there was still a large untapped market seeking answers that weren't in books. "These people weren't 'learning' in the traditional sense," he explained, "but they had an insatiable curiosity, they had hungry minds. All their reading was about personal enrichment and professional development." Thus, his company abandoned one of the best-known brand names in technical publishing to serve these Hungry Minds. "The end game is to own the customer," he concluded. "And mind share precedes market share. So we said, 'Let's acquire what sells, not sell what we've acquired.'
"Exploring "How the Internet Has Changed Publishing," the consensus was "not enough." Bob Bolick, v-p/new business development for McGraw-Hill's professional publishing division, quipped, "In the backoffice, it hasn't. For the big publishers, SGML still stands for "Sounds Good, Maybe Later." The big houses are so wedded to their ways, he said, that it will take years for them to integrate editorial, accounting and logistics processes into a coherent vision of the business.
Tim O'Reilly concurred: "There just isn't support for XML/SGML in the tools—there is no good editing environment, there aren't other design tools. The vendors [of the publishing tools] must get religion, too."
In a panel called "The Promise of Distance Learning," Bob Christie, CEO of Thomson Learning, defined the first big payoff for electronic delivery of texts: higher education at much lower cost. "Distance education is critical," he declared. "There just aren't enough classrooms in the world. More than half of college students don't buy new textbooks—most buy used books, but many just get texts from the library, or do without."
Supporting Christie was Michael Moh, a principal of ThinkEquity Partners, an investment company for educational technology. "More than 21% of U.S. citizens have a university-level degree," he said, "compared to 3% of Chinese citizens, and 4% of Indians. Singapore has 400,000 students on its distance-learning Web site."
Pricing of e-books was a hot topic, as always, and Tim O'Reilly offered an interesting observation regarding Napster: "Music has been free on the radio for 50 years," he noted. "So have the basic TV channels. Cable TV is a subscription service, like an Internet service provider—and the best of the premium Web sites, like the premium channels 0n cable TV, will be able to charge more, above the ISP's fee. But it has to be worthwhile programming. People will pay for perceived value."
Is there an audience for e-books? David Seaman, head of the University of Virginia Library's Electronic Text Center, has served up 2.2 million e-books from the university's library in Microsoft Reader and HTML formats since August. Christopher Warnock, founder of ebrary, put it succinctly: "Subscription, pay-per-view, ad-supported—online publishing will only succeed when there are many business models, and publishers and users can choose the appropriate model for their needs."
