Earlier today I attended the Publishers’ Association’s ‘Blue Skies and White Clouds’ event focusing on key issues that will shape publishers’ ebook and digital content strategies.

In a sector experiencing (positive) turbulence in both the technology and business models (to coin the phrase of Mark Carden who was on one of the discussion panels) it’s really encouraging to see such clarity of thought and appetite for change.

The message from the PA in advance was that the event – the latest in the series of ‘digital publishing fora’ organised by the PA – had become more popular than expected. In fact it had to be moved to a larger venue, and the reason for that was clear walking into the room. There was a high turnout of professionals from the book trade, all keen to hear and share opinions on the future of ebooks and digital content. There is no doubt that digital products represent an area of acute interest and are a key element in publishers’ future consumer propositions.

Represented in the speakers roster were major publishers – the likes of Random House, Pan Macmillan, Hachette, Bloomsbury, Taylor & Francis, HarperCollins all played key roles – but also consultants and suppliers to the sector like Ingrams, Adobe and Sony, those from other creative industries such as Simon Waldman (@waldo) of the Guardian and Bertrand Moullier of Narval, and consumer representatives – in particular the RNIB.

Key points

So what was the thrust of the morning? Sara Lloyd from Pan Mac summarised concisely in the final panel that consumers want to be at the centre of the equation with a quick and simple product experience, and that to achieve this the sector faces technology challenges (agreeing open standards, using ‘The Cloud’) and organisational challenges (coupling discrete innovation projects with more fundamental business transformation).

The latter point on transformation interested me, as it did @waldo in his keynote. The wider sector needs to see the bigger players changing their models and working practices in order to foster the market for the products so everyone can benefit. Is there the appetite for such change within large businesses during a time of technology shift and economic instability? I quizzed the panel during the Q&A and there was a distinct optimism…

Fionualla Duggan of Random House gave a useful viewpoint that US ebook successes have provided a good level of enthusiasm for the potential for the UK market, but also made a very sensible point that there needs also to be transformation within the overall infrastructure that supports publishers. We can’t expect publishers to do it all alone.

David Roth-Ey of HarperCollins and George Walkley of Hachette gave an equally useful, but different and more granular slant. They felt that transformation can and should be woven into the fabric of the entire business so everyone involved in making books thinks ‘digital’ in some way, shape or form in their daily work.

Great to hear such optimistic messages from digital advocates at leading publishers.

What else?

So any other ‘take-homes’? Well yes, lots, but I’ll try to be brief…

Keynotes

In the first keynote, Simon Waldman gave us many reasons to be excited about ‘creative disruption’, and used his experiences in the news sector as evidence. Destablising, yes. But ultimately just a different way of doing things, more effectively and for everyone’s benefit. And also inescapable if that’s where consumers want to go, so putting our heads in the sand is unlikely to prove a successful strategy.

In the second keynote we heard from Bertrand Moullier on the lessons learned by the movie biz, and how we might speculate about different revenue models. The overall message I got from this was – don’t rule anything out, do what works for the product and the market. He also made a really good point about how premium products can degrade fast and become discounted back catalogue items. The book trade should take note and seek to establish long-term content strategies around key products.

Consumer Experience

In the Consumer Experience panel session, Marek Vaygelt from YouGov seemed like he didn’t have ‘making friends’ on his agenda, but I don’t think he was looking to alienate the trade either. He was simply straight-talking as far as I could tell.  He claimed that the sector's market research could be improved and that devices are still the domain of the technology early adopters, which doesn’t yield mass market consumer experiences. Fair enough.

Tom Reynolds, author of “Blood, Sweat and Tea” advocated the goodwill and sales potential attached to a Creative Commons licence on content. This will go down well with those who feel content in general should be free, but I think more importantly this bears out the potential to use free content to enhance a commercial offering.

According to a colleague I chatted to after the event, Adobe clearly showed, to those ‘in the know’, that they are actively interested in conversations with publishers about more than strict DRM – social DRM and watermarking were mentioned as possibles. Personally, I definitely feel those latter areas hold a lot of appeal, for the right products and markets of course.

Richard Orme from RNIB discussed how digital content can have a very positive effect on accessibility for partially sighted and blind people, and that his organisation is very willing to work with the sector to advance this issue.

Supply Chain for Digital Products

Supply chain can be a bit of a dry subject, but it’s of crucial importance to digital content. This panel session held a lot for the audience. It was good to see it wasn’t just a sales pitch for the ePub standard (despite this being a perfectly good standard imho btw) with some of the pros and cons touched upon.

One notable point was made by Santiago de la Mora from Google, who brought the benefits of ‘The Cloud’ to the table, and the reach it can deliver. Mark Carden though was sure to make sense of what can seem an intangible notion by proposing there is no such thing as The Cloud; in reality it’s really just a network of brands, services and repositories. Technically correct, but not quite such a glamorous description, no?

I thought a particularly salient point from this session was given by Ben Drury, CEO & Founder of 7Digital, saying (and this is my précis) that a great way to combat piracy in supply is simply to offer a great product and service.

Good stuff, more please…

The PA, the digital directors group, and the contributors should be commended for organising and supporting such useful events for a sector in need of a common direction, and quality peer advice on how to progress in what is a new era for the content they provide. The PA obviously has its finger on the pulse of how they support their members and help to propagate market confidence in digital products.

Twitter hashtag: #paevents

My twitter ID: @danm605