Harper Collins, Digital Vaults and Search Engines
Victoria Barnsley, Chief Executive of Harper Collins spoke recently at London Business School’s media summit. The Bookseller covers the event.
Having worked for internet bank Egg for a good time it interests me the ways in which companies founded before the internet took hold approach adopting it and adapting to it; as it presents so many changes.
It’s great to see Harper Collins thinking about and investing in the internet and it’s clear from Victoria’s words that Google and Amazon have not gone unnoticed there, but they may still have some way to go in their planning.
Reading the Bookseller’s edited script for the speech I got off to a bad start with this:
Or, to put it as an author did recently: “The biggest threat we face isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity.”
Maybe I’m being petty, but if you’re talking about intellectual property and copyright and the relationships between authors, publishers and consumers wouldn’t it be nice to attribute the quote? Especially as it’s from a very well circulated USA Today interview with none other than Cory Doctorow.
Talking about the various online forums, chatrooms, email conversations and more that are happening between authors and their fans Victoria goes on to say:
Publishers must make sure they occupy this space. We can no longer see ourselves as simply the sellers of products–we need to muster all our creative talent so we can enhance, and manage, the relationships between authors and consumers as they interact in an online community.
Make sure they “occupy this space”? The de-centralised nature of the internet makes this concept very hard indeed. Most times, the successful spaces on the internet have been created by the community themselves. This applies as much to Flickr as it does to the more ubiquitous forums. These spaces have been created by the community in preference to using forums provided by large companies precisely because they don’t want the space to be “occupied”, nor do they want their relationships “managed”.
If Harper Collins “occupy” this space or that space the consumers will simply move to another space. If they continue to “occupy” spaces then the community will appoint moderators and administrators, “elected” quickly, simply and electronically by the forums themselves; with the rights to drop the publishers from the conversation (this is not conjecture, this is how public internet forums have always worked).
Victoria goes on to explain how Harper Collins will retain control over their content:
But we need to operate a firewall between the search-engines and our content, so that we can control its use and exploit its value for our authors.
Unfortunately this is a mistake Copyright enforcers (not usually the owners), often make. They fail to understand that this type of control does not work. The moment one electronic copy has left the “vault” the game is over and the cost of these systems is wasted. iTunes and the Apple AAC DRM formats have proved this recently and the release of “White Lillies Island” by Natalie Imbruglia, online, perfectly copied, before the release of the (copy-protected) CD is just one of a thousand high-profile examples.
But despite being locked away, safe from prying eyes, Harper Collins recognise the need to make their content searchable:
With this in mind HarperCollins Worldwide has announced plans to create a global digital warehouse for our titles, which search engines will be able to visit by means of an index. This will enable us to meet the demands of the digital age while retaining control of our own digital files and thereby our intellectual property.
I don’t know if Harper Collins understands what they’re suggesting here. Search Engines’ core competency is indexing – their level of objectivity, and thus the usefulness of their searches, is based on their ability to index content without the indexes being unduly influenced by marketers and promoters. What Harper Collins is asking the search engines to do is cede control over the indexing and trust the promoters of these books to index in an unbiased and appropriate way. Something many would suggest publishers are far from well placed to do.
While Victoria gives a passing mention to pay-per-view models, she doesn’t cover of any of the very interesting things other are doing. The Pragmatic Bookshelf, for example, where you can buy the book in Adobe’s PDF format, in print or both for a small premium.
In my mind this was obviously attempting to put Harper Collins right at the forefront of the game; and it may well, compared to other publishers. But it dates them much further back in their understanding of how online relationships are formed and “managed”.
But perhaps saddest of all is Victoria’s closing comment:
Our unique selling point has to be the linking of content and community, and somehow, we have to wrap this together with a viable business model.
What the internet facilitates, primarily, is the ability of content and community to link itself. If that’s all Harper Collins have got then they’re in for a tough time.
