STM publishing: between cooperation and confrontation

Yesterday I commemorated the 20th anniversary of the company C-CONTENT. While ruffling through their press folder, I discovered a lecture of by Dr Karl-Peter Winters (photograph) about the future of the German Publishing Industry: Between Cooperation and Confrontation. Mr Winters is managing Director of Dr. Otto Schmidt Publishing Group and President of the Publishers Committee of the German Publishers and Booksellers Association.

I think Mr Winters, who is very familiar with the German publishing market, is really grappling for solutions in the global publishing market. Despite implying the German Publishing Industry he hardly mentions any detail about the German market, except that the largest bookseller in Germany is Amazon.com with a turn-over of 600 million euro and that the biggest German publishing group – newspaper publishers aside – Bertelsmann/Springer is only half as big as Wolters Kluwer. For the rest he is dabbling with the global STM market making some interesting observations.

Mr Winters observes that the structure of the market is changing as larger publishers (Top 20) grew twice as fast as the other publishers in 2006. The most influential factor affecting the publishing industry is technological development. He basically poses that publishers who mange to use the technological possibilities at all levels – in communication, production and marketing – are most likely to survive.

But the technological infrastructure is not the only factor which will help the publisher survive. While it is possible to earn now money with digital content, the question remains whether this will be possible in the future. Especially copyright law will be a major factor in STM publishing with scientific authors campaigning to have all scientific texts available on the internet free of charge.

Mr Winters arrives at these five theses.
“1.Content alone is no longer a guarantee of business success. Equally important are competence in technology, understanding of the internet’s legality, the user’s mentality and usage habits. Whoever thinks like the new generation, can do business with them. Whoever thinks like the internet elite, is also able to do business in the internet.
2. The direct contact with customers, the utilization of user behaviour and customer wishes is crucial for successful electronic products. The better you know your customers, the more able your are to create products for them.
3. Not every content is successful in the internet, information and news are mostly free of charge. Content only sells in connection with convenience – professional users need to simplify their work and save time.
4. Filtering and rating content is a critical service of publishers who have to stem and channel the flood of information. Publishers can only sell successfully what is important.
5. Publishers are only successful if they cooperate at all levels like standards, platforms, links, etc.”

It is clear from the presentation that the future of STM publishing is difficult to forecast , regardless whether this is for the German or global market. As Mr Winters says: “Scientific publishing will change, most certainly not to the delight of Reed Elsevier. Search engines and platforms (Google, Amazon, eBay) will become competitors of publishers – with regard to printing on demand and the second hand book business, Amazon is a competitor already.”

You can download the presentation as pdf.

Blog Posting Number: 806

Tags: STM publisher

From CD-ROM manufacturer to search engine service provider

While I was in Brussels, I missed a historical event. The Dutch company C-Content celebrated its 20 years of existence. I would have loved to be present at the celebration to congratulate Matt Moayedi, the founder and CEO of the company.

Matt (in the middle), a charming man of Iranian origin, I met, I guess, in 1986 when he was working for GE Plastics in The Netherlands and was diving into the new product of audio and data compact discs. The production of audio CDs had become routine by that time and GE Plastics delivered the base material for the production process. But in 1986 he was exploring the market of CD-ROM production. The first pilot CD-ROMs had been produced.

At that time I was working in a company which had the production of electronic publishing as its objective. The company was one of the first companies promoting SGML and sold amongst others a US content management system and CD-ROM services. We used several packages of retrieval software such as Status, a retrieval package developed in the nuclear industry as a mainframe package and scaled down for CD-ROM, Dataware and a home grown package.

By 1987 Matt Moyaedi was involved in setting up a CD-ROM production plant, Europe Optical Disk. And from the beginning he combined production of the physical CD-ROMs with the software production. But he soon understood that these two activities were incompatible and he founded CD-Europe; with the name he made immediately clear what he saw as his working area. One of his first clients was the bio-medical division of Elsevier, which was still an independent international publisher. In the first period he also picked up orders from the Dutch Government’s Printing Office Sdu. (Of course much to the chagrin of the company I was working for).

The company CD-Europe, which changed its name later to C-CONTENT was successful (contrary to the company I was working for). It got orders from the European Publication Office of the European Commission, successfully turning print publications such as the Tenders electronic daily (TED) in CD-ROMs. But by the time internet came around C-CONTENT took a good look at the business and decided that the retrieval package he had was not only meant for CD-ROMs, but could also work in an internet environment So the company developed for example the product eXtrect® or extensible retrieval technology. Based on XML, browser technology and supported by Unicode for the indexing and presentation of documents, the company was able to produce multi-lingual databases for internet access.

But with Google coming up, C-CONTENT had to look for a niche in the market in order to exploit the retrieval software. And it found a real niche in combining a search engine with various legal sources and offering this service to lawyers and accountants, government departments and non-profit organizations. In the Netherlands the company operates now the service Rechtsorde in the legal sector. This company is the middle man between publishers and the clients.

And the vision on the future is clear for Matt. His company will develop expert systems. These systems will yield a more precise result from a search by analyzing content and using support facilities such as domain specific thesauri, classification, relevance ranking and language support. But the founder of C-CONTENT also recognizes that it is the publisher who keeps editorial control.

Matt Moayedi went from CD-ROM manufacturer to a search engine service provider in 20 years. And I am sure he and his company still have a bright future ahead.

Blog Posting Number: 805

Tags: CD-ROM, search engine, expert system