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The Supply Chain Specialists Meeting is a stalwart of the Frankfurt calendar: this year’s meeting was the 30th annual get-together for the often unsung people who work behind the scenes of publishing to ensure that everything ‘just works’.
Opening speaker Michael Cairns of Information Media Partners urged publishers to think outside their traditional business models. The essence of his presentation was: we should consider that all information is ‘published’ in some form; and that therefore all companies are ‘publishers’; but many companies are not good at publishing. Those who are established as publishers should use their experience in sorting and presenting information to assist sectors that have lots of information but need help to make that information useful, Cairns said.
The biggest news of the Supply Chain Meeting was the launch of two crucial new identifiers: ISTC and ISSN-L. International Standard Text Code, or ISTC, will be added to the ISBN; and the Linking ISSN (ISSN-L) will be added to serials. Both allow identification of a top-level ‘work’ to help to both aggregate and to differentiate between multiple formats and editions of the same basic ‘work’.
Michael Tamblyn of Book Net Canada enthused delegates with an energetic presentation on two Canadian initiatives into publishing forecasting; one a detailed project that aims to share information between retailers and publishers on sales patterns, and the other a ‘cheap and cheerful’ but so far very successful game of ‘fantasy publishing’ using real titles, which pits teams from across the book trade in a league to predict successes and failures in that season’s new releases.
Other speakers included David Taylor of Lightning Source, who described how print-on-demand can lead to a publishing model where ‘you only print the book after you know you’ve sold it’; and Dirk Wetzel of Klopotek, who is facing the challenges of getting the publishing world fluent in ONIX. ‘ONIX is a new language,’ he said. ‘The vocabulary is always increasing, the grammar is getting more sophisticated, but we need fluent, native ONIX “speakers”.’ Jesper Holm spoke about Denmark’s national aggregation scheme for e-books, which is a joint effort between the Danish national library, publishers and trade associations which is already providing e-book-only course-packs to university students (on a ‘buy or rent’ model) and is now working on deals with international publishers.
Other presentations included a comparative analysis of Nielsen BookScan data on the ‘long tail’ in the UK, US and Australia; a case-study of Byblos, an RFID-enabled bookshop in Portugal; and a look into the world of ‘XML ingestion’ from Martyn Daniels of Value Chain International, who encouraged delegates to move from workflows that digitise after a physical book is produced to ones that ‘move digitisation up the production stream’.
All the supply chain meeting presentations will soon be posted on the Editeur webite at http://www.editeur.org/ .
Many thanks to Australia’s Bookseller+Publisher for providing this report.
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