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

Publishers must widen their frame of reference in order fully to understand the change in business models that taking their content online might necessitate – looking beyond traditional pricing models and text formats within their particular field of publishing.

This was one of the key finding of the inaugural Semantico Symposium, 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

It 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 reporting it over three blog posts. This post is on the theme of business models.

Business as usual?

Publishers putting their content online find a very different commercial environment from that which they are used to in offering their physical, print products. However in some respects, the issues with online are not always that unique, though publishers often need to look outside their own particular niches sometimes to see this – even where mobile is concerned.

One thing that is often held up as a major disruptor is the ‘freebie’ culture of the internet – the widespread expectation that information should be free; an attitude that is opportunistic in some quarters, profoundly ideological in others. Though there are obvious problems with this from a publisher’s point of view, the other side of the coin is that the interconnected, globalised nature of the web offers unprecedented reach for content that is easily discoverable and not sequestered behind a paywall. Mobile holds out the promise of intensifying this reach, since more people have mobile phones than computers. Free presents big opportunities as well as big threats.

How this trade-off between reach and revenue protection will work itself out is currently being watched with great interest in the news publishing market, with Murdoch’s Times Online leading the charge for keeping content behind the paywall. A wide variety of subscription models are being experimented with online, and mobile has slightly upped the ante here through the way it enables micro-payments (fairly seamlessly in the case of Apple). Apps are a micro-payment system, looked at from a certain point of view, and the fact that many apps are offered in both premium and free versions points towards a pricing model that will be familiar to many. Freemium/premium models, if they can be made to work, offer big opportunities for marketing, while safeguarding the value of core content – and in doing this many publishers will feel themselves on (reasonably) familiar ground.

As someone who has recently upgraded his shredder to a more industrial model partly to deal with the quantity of publisher offers that fall through the letterbox on a daily basis, I can testify to the many and various ways in which publishers deploy free and cut-price offers offline.

Free trials, forced free trials, freemium, premium, tiered subscription – all of these physical-world species of offer have their online equivalents in the age of the app; and seeing this point of similarity perhaps provides a more useful way of looking at the whole ‘free’ debate. In the end, it’s a case of plus ça change, perhaps.

Who pays?

One result of the internet’s ‘freebie’ culture, in consumer markets at least, has been a drive towards funding content in different ways, notably through advertising-driven models (Google being the most successful example, of course).

Clearly this is not going to wash in more specialized areas of publishing such as learned journals, but even there we have see something of a ferment, with the Open Access movement proposing a move to an ‘author pays’ model. Although this has failed to make serious inroads to date, nevertheless the issue of ‘who pays’ continues to be a live one in academic publishing, where many markets are three-cornered, involving institutions (or organisations) and end-users as well as authors. At least one of our symposium guests felt that in their view underlying market structures were not in revolution, despite changes in the way people pay for content: ‘basically, the same people end up paying.’

There’s no doubt that online does provide different ways to pay. It has enabled the Big Deal, still a dominant model in institutional sales, although coming under some pressure. Easier micropayments, and more sophisticated access management, hold the promise of a more varied and flexible future for pricing models – even though it is a future in which publishers are going to have to stay on their toes in order to protect the value of their content.

Greater convenience and sophistication in the way content is paid for may well be necessary, however, in order to cope with the way the content itself keeps threatening to transmogrify.

iPad and incunabula

Printed works in physical formats – be they monographs, journals, dictionaries or whatever – owe their form to purely physical constraints that do not obtain online. Why do we turn pages rather than unroll a scroll when we read a book? Because the codex, derived from the wax-covered tablet used by the Romans, supplanted the scroll sometime around the sixth century AD by virtue of its superior compactness, sturdiness, ease of reference and economy (i.e. it used both sides of the paper). On an electronic device, the choice to scroll or click to a new page is dictated only by latency, a restriction that is fast disappearing as bandwidth increases, so that eventually that choice will be a pure design decision.

As this point approaches, with the launch of the iPad, it seems likely that we are seeing new hybrids and evolutionary experiments in the form of text – the equivalent of incunabula.

Though e-books currently mimic the conventions of the printed book, it is not always so clear with other types of text how helpful it really is for a book to preserve its physical-world form. An educational textbook, for instance, looks a lot like a magazine. Would it make sense to format them as such when they end up on iPads? Similarly a learned journal can resemble a database in its essential form more than it does a magazine. With a proliferation of devices with which to access electronic information products, including smartphones, e-readers, touchscreen tablets, netbooks and the (now) old-fashioned desktop, will the device we buy end up being dictated by the type of content we want to access on it?

The choice also exists, with certain reference works, for example, to turn a book into a software application that answers specific questions or helps the user through a specific task in real time, such as diagnosing a medical condition – or finding the nearest Michelin star restaurant – or choosing the wheat crop to grow in a particular type of soil. In this new future, some books will really have very little reason to be books anymore.

New forms, new models

Clearly, new and changed content formats are likely to create a need for new pricing models, and by extension for new business models. But they also put pressure on the traditional fault lines that divide one niche of the publishing industry from another. It is a source of frustration for some ‘techies’ in the online publishing industry that these lines are still so rigidly drawn; that there is a monographs industry and a journals industry, for instance, and never the twain shall meet.

This seems all the more counter-productive as two things are clear from the discussion above. Firstly, that there is a lot to be learned from one area of publishing watching closely what is going on in another, since many of the issues being faced online are common ones for all information providers of whatever stamp. And secondly that the old divisions will increasingly lose meaning as terms like ‘monograph’ and ‘journal’ gradually become irrelevant to the way that information is presented and consumed online.

The debate continues

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