Report from the Semantico Online Publishing Symposium on Mobile and Cross-platform Delivery

The inaugural Semantico Symposium was held recently in London to discuss implications of the shift to mobile for publishers and information providers. An invited audience of publishing industry leaders debated the issues under Chatham House rules, covering the following three themes:

• Devices and technology
• Business models
• Future strategy options

This was a stimulating event with a high calibre guest list, delegates attending from organisations including Oxford University Press, Nature Publishing Group, Macmillan Education, Wiley-Blackwell, CrossRef, CABI, BSI Group and the Institute of Engineering and Technology. To do justice to the discussion, we’re going to report it over a couple of blog posts, starting with initial theme of devices and technology (yes, it’s a partwork!).

Forget devices, focus on the underlying technology

If proof were needed that these are nervous times for publishers, just consider the case of Flash. Not only does Apple not support Flash technology on the iPhone or iPad, but the world’s most popular video-sharing site, YouTube (owned by Google), is quietly in the process of moving away from Flash video. In addition the emerging HTML5 standard, which aims to reduce the need for such proprietary plug-ins, looks likely to make it all but obsolete.  So will Flash die? Almost certainly, say the tech-heads.

This is appalling news for publishers with large amounts of legacy online content in Flash. It also serves as an example of one of the strongest themes to emerge from our Symposium, which is that publishers and information providers who hope to thrive (or at the very least survive) in the turbulent times ahead would be well-advised to disregard, to a certain extent, the hype and wow surrounding high-profile device launches like that of the iPad, and focus on the underlying technology issues in cross-platform delivery. That’s where the real uncertainty lies. Marvellous though they are, it’s not about the devices – but about the content, and the user’s experience of the content.

There is no denying that the iPhone has instituted something of a paradigm shift in the delivery of content, but notwithstanding this undoubted fact, a good deal of skepticism was evinced by our delegates about what is perhaps the most significant innovation to be introduced along with that device, the App Store.

A significant strand of opinion believes that an app is really not that much different from a mobile-optimised website. As far as the user is concerned there is little difference. In the not-too-distant future, it was predicted, you will download something you think is an app but you will actually be interacting with a website optimised for mobile use.

The iPad experience of web surfing (about 42% of our small but select sample had had hands-on experience of the device) might make us question whether we need apps at all, in the opinion of one delegate. Maybe what we need is not apps but better-designed, more mobile-friendly websites.

So far, so heretical

However, there is another strand of opinion. From the user’s point of view, the experience of using an app is utterly different from that of using a PC. One virtue of the app is that it does a very narrow, specific thing. Apps streamline our use of the internet and cut out – or at least reduce – much of the pain associated with PCs (e.g. constant downloads of plug-ins, patches and updates, the state of total war we have to live in with viruses, spyware and spam, etc.).

A website is always going to feel like a place you go to, to harvest a crop of information. In the case of an app, the crop is turned into biofuel: information becomes the petrol that gets your knowledge car from A to B – to a designated destination. A website might be a field of dreams (if you’ll excuse a criminally over-used film reference), but an app helps you actually do something.

These two points of view are not, in essence, irreconcilable. It’s a matter of perspective; of whether you are looking at things from the producer’s end of things or from the consumer’s. If you strip away the wow, yes, an app is no more than a website. But what produces the ‘wow’ is fantastic usability – and that’s a matter of primary importance for most end-users.

Search lags on mobile

… Which is not to say at all that the current generation of mobile devices together embody a giant leap forward for usability. In actual fact they can look like a bad step backwards.

In particular, search took a while to get established on the desktop internet, and to reach its current state of utility. By comparison, search on mobile is very slow at the moment, even on 3G networks. Also, it is not that easy to find the app you want: the discoverability of apps is not great. This situation is liable to get worse before it gets better, as apps and app stores proliferate.

A certain frustration is surely excusable for those who soldiered through the difficult early years of the millennium when publishers were just beginning to build their first sites, and had to cope with the teething troubles of the early web – only to see many of the same problems coming back to them in 2010. There is a new network, and it has yet to organize itself effectively.

Monitoring the Big Tech face-offs

Focusing on underlying technology and networks throws a deal of emphasis on the importance of monitoring and understanding what is going on with some of the major tech companies – and not solely because a few (particularly Amazon and Google) have forged themselves into the publishing value chain, where they are fast becoming almost unavoidable links. We mentioned Flash earlier, owned by Adobe, but there are others to consider as well.

Apple’s new prominence, which has come about largely as a result of the huge success of the iPhone, is beginning to foreground some of the ways it has of going about things that most annoy people. The dead hand of control that it exercises over what can and cannot be offered through the App Store – amounting to censorship – has led to comparisons with China. Will Google’s Android prove to be a viable Open Source alternative?

Apple has become the company to attack, and the company to position against.

Microsoft appears to be positioning against Apple with Windows 7 by placing emphasis on social networking. This is an important battleground if it really can be established as a point of difference. RIM’s Blackberry Curve phone has crossed over into the teenage market not only because it is a lot cheaper than an iPhone, but because it offers their young audience a more effective way of interacting with their online social networks. It is too easy to write off Microsoft and believe that the important dust-up nowadays is between Apple and Google, but there may well be life in the old dog yet – and Microsoft still has significant market share in mobile operating systems.

Publishers likewise dare not forget, in the age of the read/write web, that online publishing is not just about how the stuff gets delivered, but also about how it gets produced, edited, commented, redacted, peer-reviewed … etc., etc. Nowhere is this more true than in the field of academic publishing – because one of the central concerns of academic publishing is scholarly communication.

What this becomes is a debate about how we consume and produce information. Corporate positioning takes on a philosophical, even ideological aspect, the nuances of which publishers have to tune their ears to detect. The first task is to be aware.

Government unhelpful

Someone who seems to have a bit of a tin ear in this regard is the great clunking fist himself – if Gordon Brown can be held responsible for the controversial Digital Economy Bill which, at time of writing, is awaiting Royal Assent. There wasn’t much controversy here: instead it was roundly condemned as a piece of rushed and unworkable legislation that will, nevertheless, no doubt remain on the statute books for many years to come.

The debate continues

Tune in next time for a further report from the Symposium, as we move to discuss business models.