Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Who cares about the digital supply chain?
It may seem a strange question to ask, but it reared its head at a meeting of our digital supply chain group this week. There's little doubt that, despite digitisation, extensive licensing of content and the resulting massive increases in digital sales, our industry still hasn't begun to concentrate on how it can be made more profitable. Why do we take the supply chain so much for granted, when with a bit of attention it can deliver substantial business efficiencies and cost savings?
The best opportunity for realising those savings, we were all agreed, was in embedding standardised sales reporting in the way we do business. It's something we've been talking about for a long time; and good progress has been made towards making available the tools to do it. Implementation, however, by publishers has been patchy to say the least. They continue to accept reports from the growing number of resellers in a huge variety of non-standard formats which have to be unpicked manually in order to be input (manually) into business systems. It's hard to quantify the cost of this activity, but it is clearly very high. It's also dangerous commercially because the correct payment of author royalties depends on it.
The publication of the Book Industry Study Group's policy statement on identification of digital products last month, endorsing the advice given by BIC and the International ISBN Agency that granular identification of digital products is essential to the proper operation of the supply chain, is a big step forward towards an industry-agreed strategy. Nevertheless, it comes late for those publishers who have already adopted differing policies, in the US certainly but here too. One has to wonder how many of them will be willing to change their existing practices to come into line with these recommendations. It's another case where the supply chain implications have not been properly thought through.
As we have remarked many times before, standards are usually a response to commercial pressures from trading partners. If it isn't clear - as in these cases - where the benefits lie from implementation of standards, they don't generally get adopted. If we had resellers among those trading partners who had the vision to see beyond short-term proprietary workarounds and were prepared to put pressure on publishers to work with them, there would be benefits all round.
It will probably happen, but it may be long haul.
Friday, January 13, 2012
All change at BIC
Most of you will have seen the announcement that Karina Luke will be taking over as Executive Director of BIC in April and will be joining us on 16 February. Karina has been a long-standing friend and supporter of BIC and we are delighted that she is coming on board. She brings with her from Penguin a familiarity with the digital landscape as well as a knowledge of conventional supply chain activity; and will be well placed to steer the tricky passage between the two.
It will be a big change for her and for BIC. I know that you will all wish her well and support her in maintaining and extending BIC's crucial role in the supply chain.
Thursday, December 15, 2011
Hope for the library sector?
The news that 34 organisations now hold e4libraries accreditation may not sound much but, in a year when most of the news about libraries has been bad, it has been very encouraging that progress has been made in so many places in cutting costs and improving library users' experiences. The e4libraries campaign has been based around the belief that investment in technology can go some way towards solving the funding issues for libraries and is a real alternative to closures or book stock reductions. The fact that the accredited libraries have gone on developing their EDI links, extended the use of RFID and self-service, bridged the notorious ravine which has separated libraries and their corporate finance systems, is an indication that investment does offer an alternative way forward.
If only there were more libraries which would come forward to apply for accreditation. Of the 34 organisations, just 23 are library authorities and academic libraries. If that is the number of libraries who are successfully tackling these issues, then the outlook is poor indeed.
Friday, December 9, 2011
Good news on digital identification
The publication of the Book Industry Study Group's policy statement on the identification of digital products this week is good news for the standards community - and, we hope, for the book trade in general. The document recognises the merit of the arguments put forward by the International ISBN Agency and consistently supported by BIC that granular identification - as granular as it needs to be for everyone in the supply chain, including consumers - is essential to ensure a robust supply chain for digital distribution and to avoid ambiguity.
It wasn't always certain that it would happen this way. It has taken four years since BIC and BISG collaborated on a white paper by Michael Holdsworth arguing for one ISBN for each digital format - and two years since BIC published its code of practice for the identification of e-books - for that policy to be formally endorsed in the US. Indeed, when BISG began the research programme eighteen months ago which has finally led to this publication, there was still very vocal opposition to it.
With this powerful ammunition now favouring a standard approach, it is profoundly to be hoped that those companies which have resisted the new policy will fall into line. BISG have bravely proposed that this should happen by the end of March 2012. It will be fascinating to see how this plays out.
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
What's happened to digital?
The last six months have seen a sea change in the publishing world's attitudes to digital products. That's not to say that e-books and digital delivery have in any way lost their momentum: sales continue to grow; new devices are launched; and new platforms and opportunities go on emerging. But much of the hype has gone away; and without it what are the more permanent lessons it has taught us about the future shape of the industry?
The best outcome is that publishers have learned that e-books are just one way of selling their content. Though they will continue to experiment with new digital formats, pricing models, apps and marketing techniques, most publishers have now established workflows which bring the e-book to market alongside the printed version. The catch-up of digitising backlist is probably mostly done.
But how much has the industry thought about what the impact of digital has been and is going to be in the future? How robust are the systems which have traditionally been used to manage printed book sales and which are now being pressed into service to manage the much more complex arrangements for selling e-books? How will rights and royalties systems cope with the growing volumes of transactions which the digital stage will create as licensing models become more prevalent? And how will managements make sense of all the inflows of data from multiple trading partners operating different business models? If digital grows as fast as it must if it is to contribute materially to revenues and profits, it is going to require a lot of change in the ways of doing business and the systems and processes which lie behind them.
