Thursday, December 1, 2011
IRI: was it worth it?
BIC spent the better part of a decade working out the detail of the Industry Returns Initiative proposed by KPMG in the late 90s; and with OUP adopting it a month or so ago it has now probably gone about as far as it is going towards a universal UK standard. Although implementation was much slower than anyone envisaged at the outset, it has been a real success story for our industry: the first and only place anywhere in the world where the returns problem has been rationalised and controlled.
It is ironic that the point when the vast majority of books were sold within the IRI terms coincided with a decline in book sales and the possibility that through digital substitution returns will in due course be a thing of the past; but even so I doubt if any of the organisations which have invested in IRI has any regrets about doing so. It has become part of the supply chain fabric and a recognised contributor to lowered distribution costs.
I also doubt whether any of the participants has ever done the sums to establish how great those savings have been. In a perfect world, analysis of before and after costs would have been carried out; and the numbers made widely available. Unfortunately supply chain investment doesn't work like that.
Major investments lurk in IT budgets and sometimes they come out at the top. Sometimes, as with IRI, there is some peer pressure (or retailer pressure) to accelerate the process. The mix of carrot and stick has to be just right to get things done.
There are two good current examples of how this works (or doesn't work). Digital sales reporting in its present chaotic form is costing the industry a fortune, but sadly no one is working out how big that fortune is. If they did, they might realise that with the standard tools ready and waiting there was a big saving to be made. Unfortunately this is a case where there is little or no retailer pressure (yet).
Migration to ONIX 3.0, which the UK ONIX Group has been considering this week, is another. Specifically built to enable the description of digital products and at the impatient request of the digital community, ONIX 3.0 remains largely unused: no justifiable return on the investment from publishers' perspective; no pressure from the digital resellers. Some publishers are resorting to a policy of ONIX 3.0 for digital while retaining ONIX 2.1 for books. So much for a single product information standard.
If the industry doesn't measure cost and benefit, it can never understand the rationale for investment. But if it had not been far-sighted enough in the past to invest in the future, as with IRI and a host of other projects, it would be simply incapable of managing the complexities of today's supply chain.
Monday, November 7, 2011
Good start to our training programme
We have recently completed our first season of training courses: three one-day sessions on Metadata and ONIX, BIC EDI standards, and ONIX and XML, held in collaboration with the Publishing Training Centre. For a first attempt, we are delighted with the results. Two of the courses were sold out, the other nearly so; and the feedback from the delegates was almost universally positive. I hope we shall be rerunning the three courses, taking any constructive suggestions for change on board, in the first half of the new year.
We didn't know how successful they would be. In fact the initial response to them was disappointingly slow, but perhaps that isn't so surprising given the harsh times and the fact that they won't have been allowed for in anyone's training budgets. What we did know, however, was that no one else was offering training on these quite specific subjects; and it is all the better, therefore, to be able to report that a gap in the market for training has been usefully filled.
We would welcome any suggestions for future training courses in the supply chain area; and we would also be open to running onsite courses for individual companies if the demand exists. Just get in touch.
Tuesday, November 1, 2011
IBIC categories coming next year
We have just announced the planned launch of IBIC for next October. IBIC is the name we have adopted for a new multilingual version of the BIC standard subject categories, on which we have been working for the past few months.
Readers of this blog will know how important we believe it is that there should be convergence among the many subject schemes which are in use around the world. IBIC may only be a small step, but it has powerful support, notably from the Spanish Publishers Association and the Italian, German and Swedish book trades and from the Arab world. At the meeting in Frankfurt where the broad structure of the new scheme was agreed, we also had representatives from Norway, Portugal and the Netherlands. We hope to have direct input to the new scheme from all these countries and more.
The BIC scheme, like its North American equivalent, was grounded in a very different book trade environment from the one we have now. It was directly aimed at the UK and was unashamedly UK-centric. We believe that the geographical and other local qualifiers which are an intrinsic part of the scheme will help us to create the local variances which an international scheme requires whilst retaining the existing structure of BIC for the main subject codes. It may be necessary to make some small changes to the subject codes themselves, but we don't think this will cause a great deal of disruption for existing users in the UK.
We now operate in a global book market and, increasingly, a digital one. We believe this calls for a global and multilingual subject scheme to serve the needs both of resellers for online display and of consumers as they seek to discover content. We therefore see IBIC as being a first step in this direction; and at another meeting in Frankfurt we gave outline agreement to collaborate with the Book Industry Study Group in the US on a research project to explore how consumers discover what they seek and the role played by existing and possible future subject taxonomies. We are very much looking forward to this collaboration.
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
Our new web site
As you can see, we have redesigned the BIC web site. We hope you will like it and quickly find your way around it. In fact the overall structure of the site is unchanged, as it seems to be serving its primary purpose well.
We would welcome any comments or suggestions.
Tuesday, October 4, 2011
Another Frankfurt
I'm afraid the blog has been in abeyance too long. The main event - and preoccupation - of the past month or so has been the moving of the BIC office. We are now installed in the CILIP building on the corner of Store Street and Ridgmount Street in the heart of Bloomsbury, and very convenient and central it is proving after twenty years in the wilds of North London.
The next challenge is Frankfurt, always an important diary date for meetings with members and with the international standards community. One of the most important events will be a meeting to progress the planned international version of the BIC standard subject categories. This will be a truly international meeting, with representatives from Spain, Italy, Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands, Norway and the Arab world, all of whom are interested in being involved with this work; and we hope for an important outcome.
That apart, we shall hope to see many of our members in the book fair.
