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On all levels—the content creation/origination itself, the burgeoning opportunities for digital platforms, and the tools that can be used to make licensing transactions more efficient—digital is transforming rights and licensing. The US-based Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) not only has a horizontal one-stop-shop website of its own but is now licensing a software module that can be fully integrated into book and magazine publishing websites, enabling publishers to automate the licensing process on a highly granular level—pages, articles, chapters, video, podcasts, pictures, blog posts, anything with a unique identifier can be processed by their software. They demonstrated it at the Book Fair on Wednesday, showing how The Economist magazine uses their software and brilliantly incorporates it in the “Share This” button—click and you’re offered the option to email a link, to add it to any social media and social bookmarking tool, and to license it.
Still in beta is Bookriff—it was not presented in the Book Fair programming, but the company principal Mark Scott was meeting with publishers to establish partnerships and I stopped by to talk to him. Effectively Bookriff allows publishers to upload chunks of content, most likely chapters and short stories, to a database. A users can then search the site for interesting chunks and create her own anthology which can then be submitted automatically to a print on demand facility. So it is a make-your-own-book service, perfect for travel books where you only need to buy those chapters you want for your itinerary, permitting the creation of custom readers for academic coursework, allowing non-profits to create premium products. (Publishers set their own licensing fees…)
While the CCC automation process is designed to improve the user experience for licensing small chunk so content, thereby incrementally improving that revenue stream due to speed and convenience and instant gratification; and Bookriff creates a revenue stream that simply never existed before, licensing for film and television offers the possibility of large lump single transaction—potentially enormously valuable, though the value has been known for a long time. Dark Horse Comics has always been at the forefront of of the publishing industry’s efforts to expand multimedia licensing. In a very candid and entertaining panel at the Comics-Zentrum, he and three comics artists—Eric Powell, Brett Weldele, and Robert Venditti discussed the win-win of book-to-film licensing. Many of the point raised in the conversation will be self-evident to the publishing folk reading this, so I won’t belabor them here, but what did feel noteworthy was that movie studios find comics particularly appealing because they supply more of the material needed to create a film—the comic cell structure matches the story-boarding film creators like to use and at least one production design aesthetic is already available for consideration.
With the music industry doing all it can to shift to a 360 degree revenue model in the face of collapsing consumer demand for their tradition revenue stream, it is clear that media companies are looking to find ways to more fully exploit the value of their intellectual property and by maximally exploiting all the forgoing, book publishers can make a start on expanding their revenue streams beyond the print book.
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