BISG in the News

Whose Your DAD?

By Michael Cader (Publishers Lunch) -- At today's Book Industry Study Group (BISG) Making Information Pay Conference, consultant Mike Shatzkin of the Idea Logical Company officially previewed his lexicon of new acronyms to describe the growing herd of intermediaries who want to manage digital content for publishers (including large publishers themselves).

In Shatzkin's vision, just as nearly every publisher works with a physical distributor to bring their work to retail (and collect payment), the growing world of promotional and paid electronic content will require nearly everyone to have a companion digital distributor. Hence DADs--digital asset distributors.

As part of a research project that will be presented in a white paper and in conferences in New York and London this summer, Shatzkin and fellow consultant Mark Bide have identified at least 10 to 12 DADs (including Accenture, Bibliovault, CodeMantra; Donnelly; Harper/Libre Digital; Bookstore (Holtzbrinck/Macmillan); Ingram Digital; Random House; and Value Chain International...and then the podium blocked my view of the slide. And there are plenty of rumors of other potential players. (You can also imagine a clash of book-focused distributors with companies aiming to manage a larger set of digital content.)

Also on the new acronym map are DARs--digital asset recipients, ranging from Amazon/Google/Microsoft to MySpace to blogs. And publishers get an acronym of their own--DAPs (digital asset producers.)

As Shatzkin noted, this time last year, the idea of a digital distributor was "hardly on any radar screens." Now, the need to distribute promotional content all over the web, the variety of technologies employed to accomplish that, and the ever-rising hope of monetizing electronic content (in whole servings and small slices with our without ads, and so on) is driving the creation of these hopeful digital brokers. Longer term, of course "consolidation of digital distribution is logical."

Shatzkin was followed by sample DAD Christopher Hart from Random House, who gave an overview of some of the company's efforts and initiatives, and a practical perspective on the complexity of files and file needs within a big house and the multiplicity of options for using digital content online that the publisher wants to enable. "Suddenly when you have content online, you can do a lot of different things with it." The ideas come from in-house and from authors themselves, and Weber recognizes that there is no one way, but infinitely flexbile ways. "It's not about files anymore. It's a marketing effort" to provide "easy access to the content."

Hart underscored the company's broad efforts are "not a move against Google and Amazon" and it's "not about DRM, and not about e-books." It's about "having books in the internet conversation and it's about books versus every other media possible."

And in good quick sound bite to finish with, O'Reilly director of online marketing Allen Noren, who is still speaking, just noted: "We're competing against good enough [on the internet]. Good enough is what a lot of people will go for. We're also competing against free."

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