Blue Skies Conference

I spent this morning at the Publishers Association’s Blue Skies and White Clouds: Ebook Strategies for 2010 and Beyond conference, which was full of extremely interesting views and opinions — some of which I’ve tried to summarise below.

The first keynote speaker, Simon Waldman of Guardian Media Group, gave an overview of the changing media landscape, looking at four disruptive forces: the nature of the Internet, new entrants and entrepreneurs (whose actions look destructive to sectoral incumbents but who actually create value), the proliferation of technology, and consumers’ desires — which Waldman commented could be ‘exponentially satisfied’ online. On this last point, I was particularly taken with his truism that information does not want to be free, it’s consumers who want it to be free (or cheap).

Waldman also addressed the question of organisational change, and the idea that businesses need to move from innovating at the edges to transforming the core of their operations, a process which requires committed leaders, supportive owners, a healthy balance sheet, a smart attitude to cannibalisation and a range of staff (‘firestarters, rock stars and fixers’).

Bertrand Moullier from Narval Media struck a slightly more downbeat note in his keynote, which looked at the experience of the film industry. Moullier acknowledged that the industry has a glowing record of technophobia, from the end of silent cinema through the postwar boom in television, to Jack Valenti’s infamous comment that ‘the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone’.

Moullier looked in detail at a number of the new commercial models for film, characterised by a compressed and widened distribution chain, more control to the consumer, and product differentiated by price not time. His conclusion was that the newer business models have not proved themselves sustainable, and that income was not enough to support new film-making.

The first panel, moderated by David Roth-Ey of HarperCollins, looked at what the consumer experience could be in a future ebook environment. Marek Vaygelt presented findings from YouGov’s research in this area. Richard Orme from the RNIB talked about the benefits ebooks offer in terms of accessibility to the visually impaired. Jonathan Ferman presented Adobe’s vision of itself as an ‘ecosystem enabler’ — the company is increasingly looking to more flexible, social DRM, and Ferman suggested that consumers shouldn’t have to think about it, it should just work. Finally, author Tom Reynolds talked about his experience publishing via a DRM-free, Creative Commons-licensed route, and suggested that publishers will sell service not content.

Mark Majurey from Taylor & Francis ran the second panel, on the future supply chain, which was introduced by Mark Carden. Richard Palk from Sony and Ruth Jones from Ingram both highlighted the success of epub, though Jones expressed the view that for academic publishing, epub was not fit for purpose. Ben Drury from Seven Digital talked about the experience of the music industry, especially around DRM and copyright infringement. Google’s Santiago de la Mora outlined the additional reach which could be achieved through publishing in the cloud, something which concerned Mark Carden who pointed out that there’s no such thing as ‘the cloud’, only services and brands (see also Mark’s comment below for context on this beyond my very brief summary). Carden highlighted the opportunity in reducing the friction between want/buy/read, and suggested that whilst sales might decrease by value on an individual transaction basis, the overall volume could increase enough to offset this.

Finally, Sara Lloyd led a panel of digital publishers which included Fionnuala Duggan, Stephanie Duncan, David Roth-Ey, Mark Majurey and myself, which answered questions from the floor and identified some of the key themes from the day for the PA to pursue, including communications, business transformation, consumer insight and standards.

All in all it was a varied and thought-provoking morning, and thanks and congratulations to Alicia Wise and the PA for putting it together.