Book Publishing:
The Web, CD-ROM and other Digital Dreams
A Getty-wide seminar sponsored by Getty
Trust Publications and The Getty Information Institute. February 27, 1997, 9:00
A.M. to 4:00 P.M. at the Getty Center Auditorium.
This was the first event ever held in the
new Getty Center Auditorium.
Hosted by
Richard Kinney, Director of Getty Trust
Publications
and
Ben
Howell Davis, Manager, Communications, Getty Information Institute
Published to
Bits: The New Media, Ben Howell Davis, Getty Information Institute
Information
products and services are designed with computers, produced with computers,
tested with computers, marketed with computers, archived as computer files, and
sold via computer networks. The marriage of desk-top publishing and networked
resources may have created a new medium - one that challenges all our notions
of the page
Publishing to
bits means the digital page can be called upon to "perform" in new
and startling ways. The use of CD ROMs has already created a new way of
"binding" electronic information. The World Wide Web can be viewed as
a vast and evolving kind of distributed "digital pre-press" that can
be employed as an end product, advertising, promotion, or collaborative
environment. A "page" on the Web can contain movies, sounds, and
interactive space as well as text that is linked across the globe to other
pages. This is the explosion of digital bits, the New Media.
Digital
publishing is something new. Content acted upon by software creates information
architecture and information architecture is a performance medium. It allows
content to be integrated with interactive software so that the end result is
"published" - it performs for a public, a public of one or of
millions. New Media is recombinant media, capable of transforming and transmitting
new forms by combining old ones, inventing new ones, and allowing the
"reader" to modify them. Publishing is fundamentally about knowing
and telling. Publishing to bits allows the potential to create new media, new
ways to understand, more interesting ways to communicate, to move in the
direction of balance, and to get a sense of future possibilities.
Sandra
Whisler, University of California Press
Whisler’s
remarks centered on issues of transitioning from a traditional book publishing
university press to the demands of digital publication and communication. She
noted the requirement of upgrading hardware and software and peopleware on a
regular and more-frequent-than-one-would-like basis. This aspect of digital
publishing is an on-going
problem that
requires some degree of centralization and constant attention. The positive
side to it is that publishing becomes more vital, a communication with an
expanding audience that keeps authors and audience more closely associated. It
requires an attitude shift from the old notions of producing single volumes to
"value added" publications that exist in print, on the Internet, and
in updatable forms. The strategy at the University of California Press Web site
is that information may be searched for free, samples of publications are free,
table of contents are free but on-line full text is available by paid
subscription or by site licensing. This is a new model for publication and the
Press is experimenting and having some success in this area.
Whisler also
pointed that the weaknesses of an organization are exacerbated by technology.
That "work-arounds" do not work and are not acceptable in the
electronic information environment. Everything is visible and processes that
could be hidden or delayed encounter the notion of "modified
consensus" as an approval process. This "modified consensus"
refers to the fact that information can be moved and accessed very rapidly and
to keep the electronic engine running smoothly processes that were once slow
and cumbersome like editorial approval now must be done democratically and at a
faster rate. Whisler added that " the demons are in the details" for
electronic publishing in reference to the ability of electronic information to
be revised and perfected endlessly.
In the long
term view of coming to grips with full digital electronic publishing, an
organization has almost complete reorganization issues to face that may seem
totally insurmountable. In the short term, the learning curve and production
shifts must be born by the organization to try and keep pace. The long and
short term issues can both appear to be counter-productive in the University
Press situation, but to do nothing is sure disaster according to Whisler. The
situation boils down to expediency vs. value added in digital publishing so
that choices must be made carefully. For instance, there are many critical
areas of publishing that cannot afford digital "multimedia"
treatments but some effort has to be made to begin at least a thought process
that will be able to take advantage of affordable solutions as they become
available in a technological realm that changes daily.
Barbara
Burn, MET, Splendors of China CD ROM
Burn outlined
the process of producing museum exhibition CD ROM’s by using small, in house
production teams that were centralized as a resource for the Museum at large.
Rather than contract the production to out-of-house vendors the Met has chosen
to create and keep a small group of multimedia developers and editors on staff.
To keep production costs down, the CD ROM formats are kept simple and elegant.
They maintain quality in the reproduction of images but sacrifice bells and
whistles in programming. They treat digital projects like the CD ROM of the
Splendors of China as a focused publishing project that aims to produce a
product for sale as part of the exhibition. This market driven approach brings
the product to completion in order to meet an anticipated demand. In the case
of the Splendors of China CD ROM, it has sold over 15,000 copies.
Michael
Jensen, Pricing Considerations and Content-driven Pricing Models for Electronic
Publications
Johns
Hopkins University Press
Johns Hopkins
University Press publishes forty on-line journals and two full-text, on-line
major reference works. Michael Jensen cleared up several myths about digital
publishing: Electronic publishing is cheaper than print, electronic publishing
is easier than print, and that anyone knows what to expect in the digital
economy. Electronic publishing can be just as, or more expensive that print
publications based on what kind of multimedia treatment the material is given.
Electronic publishing is not easier than traditional print because there are so
many options available in the digital realm. And finally, digital publishing is
evolving as it is being understood, which makes it very difficult to know
exactly what the best choices are at any given moment. Nevertheless, digital
publishing is here to stay and must be participated in.
Jensen made the
astute observation that digital publishing is "content without the
container". There is no thing, like a bound book, but rather the contents
of the book exist as material to be accessed. In other words, the issue is how
to make the material accessible, not how many units of it can be distributed.
Pricing determinants therefore are the presentational demands of the material,
production demands, the scope of services that the material may support, how
long those services need to be maintained, the anticipated uses of the
material, and the breadth of the audience or market it is targeted at.
Michael Jensen
raised the notion that eighteen months as a long-range planning timeframe was
very important for an electronic publication. It was the amount of time to
synchronize the pricing determinants with possible shifts in the market. Jensen
also pointed out how important it is to integrate information and used the
Getty as an example of how integrating the information resources of the various
entities would leverage the power of those information resources as publication
materials.
He outlined a
variety of cost-recovery models for digital publications including:
Jensen noted
that older perspectives for publishing with be valuable only temporarily for
the next 2-3 years. These include pricing based on the old models that
calculate units of information (books), individual foraging, individual choice,
libraries as holders/disseminators on campus, "Ownership", royalties
as we know them, marketing/promotion as primary means of stimulating sales, and
the whole idea of fundamental container-based frameworks like the packaging of
paper books.
He also
outlined "transitional" strategies for going between the
container-based and purely content-based pricing, between unit sale and sale of
access, between Intemet-as-phenomena and Internet-as-phone, and between 400
years of certainty and a chaotic future of uncertainty. These transitional
strategies included Providing individual and institutional access to electronic
materials, developing knowledgeable staff, developing digitized content,
attending to digital access tools, recognize that dual purchase of print and
electronic will be the "norm", and attending to development of
digital accounting standards.
Jensen raised
the idea that revolutionary change was very near in the form of
"micropayments". These could be charges for digital information that
could start as small as .02 of a cent , would be a very swift debit/credit
transaction at very low transaction cost-- 1/ 10 cent and up, depending on
security, volume, speed, and be done by automated systems (shrinkwrapped
transaction systems). The reason for the sense of inevitability was that too
much money was involved not to have this happen. His examples included the
popularity of transaction programs like Quicken, Access/Filemaker, Moore's law,
L.L. Bean, Ticketmaster, and Visa/MC. Micropayments would be necessary in
a" disintermediated" system, a system that was direct to the consumer
via electronic delivery. Thus Micropayments + disintermediation = revolution
because content was separated from container, demand would set price, and
intermediaries were not necessary--perhaps still optimal, but not required.
Current
price/costs are dependent on transaction costs (cost of handling payments) plus
intermediation (cost of shipping, storage, markup, promotion, advertising,human
storage) plus production costs (idea into presentation: editings,
markup/typesetting, server). In Jensen’s scenario, transaction costs will drop
to virtually nothing w/in 5 years based on the reality that half your current
telephone bill is billing costs and micropayments will allow instantaneous
payment thus taking the billing costs out of the charge, and then when
databases provide human-free billing the phone bill will drop even further. In
the new micropayment option transaction and intermediation costs plummet,
prices become dictated by the nature of publisher, author, and content almost
exclusively. In the micropayment world there will be:
Jensen
concluded by positing that the "possible becomes the required very fast
online". His evidence for this included the rapid demand for hypertextual
links, active graphics, full motion video, and sound on the Web. If
microroyalties are possible then they will be demanded. Jensen said that
micropayments will come. What are we going to do about it? The content, the audience,
the demand, the author's demands, the ongoing costs, everything becomes a
variable, which vary among individual sales. What are our responsibilities?
What are our opportunities?
The new demands
on the publisher will be: