E-books
FEATURE Chris Bennett, head of library sales, Oxford University Press (OUP), giving his personal perspective on the issues O
UP sees an e-book as a static, electronic version of a print book. We try to be as format agnostic as possible and make these available to a wide range of channels. However, what we are much more interested in is more sophisticated XML-based content. We are working towards an XML- first publishing process and are building sophisticated delivery architecture to support this.
For our e-book distribution channels we are DRM agnostic within reason. We don’t support exclusive and intrusive DRM. We do have controls to deal with, for example, abuse via robots, but there are no barriers to downloading PDFs when you need to, although we do see the need for different DRM measures for different types of content.
My view is that, in the future, the publishing services element is going to become more important. It is not going to be enough to
just create an e-book to sustain business. Our Oxford Handbooks were very successful print products and also exist online. This year we are transforming them to an article-based service. Articles will be commissioned for the platform. There won’t be a book initially, but a collection of articles in a subject area that could then produce a book. It is the responsibility of our distributors to protect our standard e-books. We distribute to them DRM free and they need to put appropriate mechanisms in place. We are very careful about how we choose distributors and wouldn’t choose one who didn’t have robust piracy protection in place.
I predict that the industry is going to move away from traditional ideas of books or journals towards publishing content for an online audience. Content plus service will give us the flexibility we need to deliver in future. Meanwhile, there is still some demand for
print, which can even be driven by digital delivery under certain circumstances. All the functionality that sits around the content is increasing. We are not going to abandon the idea that content is at the heart of what we do, but in order to compete we have to be more creative.
The most important thing to get right is metadata management. We have done an enormous amount of work on standardising this internally to facilitate discoverability. We created the Oxford Index, our own federated search engine, capable of crawling other publisher content too. Our metadata work has opened up considerable commercial opportunities. We are also delivering our metadata to the library community via trusted third-party providers. Content must be ‘born digital’ in the future.
We have to get to this point quickly in order to survive the pressure that global brands are placing on the industry. We could take some lessons from the big commercial players, household names who are clearly prepared to take risks now for bigger commercial gains later.
ALPSP International Conference and Awards Dinner 2012
11–13 September 2012 • The Belfry, Wishaw, Sutton Coldfield, West Midlands, B76 9PR, UK “... a perfect balance of knowledge and networking”
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The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers Shaping the Future of Learned and Professional Publishing
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APR/MAY 2012 Research Information
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