Monthly Archives: November 2012

About Paperight, Content, Personal

Interning at Paperight (and some aspects of the early months thereafter)

In the beginning was a prayer. Joining Paperight for me was a matter of divine providence. By this I guess mean to disclose that I am a Muslim and by that I mean to say I believe in God, in the world of things unseen, in forces, in the coming together of processes going on out there in the universe for little me down here on earth as a response to a request for guidance in times of change, growth and confusion. Nowadays such talk is unfashionable, I know, and certainly not in connection to professional/career paths, but this is what – after all the theorising, the political, social, and economic analyses have been done and after the thinking, the emotions and sensations have had their sway – this is what for me everything always settles down to.

here I am,  staring at a poster that I immediately know without a doubt to be the firebird’s feather, beckoning me to pick it up and follow the trail of adventure

So. It’s Ramadan. August 2012. I’m praying the Maghrib (evening) prayer at the Leslie Social Science Building at UCT in congregation with about a hundred other Muslims on campus just after breaking fast. At the very moment that the prayer is over – I mean the very second that the prayer is done – my eyes fall on a poster on one of the building’s columns directly in my line of vision. Something – but what? – tells me that that poster I am looking at will tell me of the place I will now work, if I choose to follow through. All week, all month, for months perhaps, and each passing day with growing intensity, I’ve known that I need to leave the academy in order to pursue a vaguely defined dream of being a publisher or to work in a sphere engaged with promoting a ‘reading culture’ (whatever that means) in South Africa. But where to begin? Where exactly can I learn the most? For months I review various publishing houses to which I can offer myself as an intern or an entry level professional but nothing quite seems right for the kind of work I would like to do. So. Dear God, Dear God. And a few days later, here I am,  staring at a poster that I immediately know without a doubt to be the firebird’s feather, beckoning me to pick it up and follow the trail of adventure leading either to success or total destruction and sometimes both; there is just no way of knowing unless you pick it up and see where it leads. Ramadan is an auspicious time, I remind myself. So I pick up the feather and email team@paperight.com.

internships-poster

2.

I loved its philosophy, its grand vision, the work it was doing. I felt like I was working for a publishing NGO of some kind (‘social enterprise’ was a term I was still to learn) and I really liked that, the company’s strong desire to address social issues as part of business strategy.

I joined the Paperight team in September 2012 as an intern working three days a week. I could not work the whole week because I was unable to fulfill my personal responsibilities on an intern’s stipend. This was an arrangement I negotiated because I really wanted to work at this company. I loved its philosophy, its grand vision, the work it was doing. I felt like I was working for a publishing NGO of some kind (‘social enterprise’ was a term I was still to learn) and I really liked that, the company’s strong desire to address social issues as part of business strategy. Moreover, I immediately liked everyone already working for the company, something that has always been a huge factor in where I choose to work.

During my internship my main task was to wrap my head around the updating and maintenance of the metadata, on- and off-line, after having been slowly prepared for the task by Tarryn, the Content Manager. In those early days, Tarryn generally gave me small, mostly writing and editing related tasks (correcting special characters in the metadata, writing up long and short descriptions for newly prepared Paperight editions, editing or cleaning up the publisher metadata) before increasing my responsibilities to working on the website by making changes online and doing content tagging.

When I joined the Paperight team I felt, looked and behaved like a poncy old man and one area where this was most evident was with my relationship (or lack thereof) with technology of any kind. We just did not get along, technology and I, and our relationship had been mutually laid to rest months or years before joining the Paperight team. Not a small problem if you are working for an innovative technology startup company, needless to say. Set up a Skype account for office communication (Easy). Log onto the Paperight wikipage (Companies can have their own, private, wiki pages?). Massive spreadsheets – on Open Office (instead of Microsoft – which is what I knew when I knew these things). Google Documents (Hello, stranger). Google Chrome or at least Firefox (Ain’t nobody got time for Internet Explorer up in here). Open a Dropbox account. Sync your computer with Dropbox. Computer won’t sync. Try again. It won’t sync. Register on Trello. Do you have Thunderbird or Safari? (Say, what?) And that was just the beginning – the easy part, really. WordPress, HeidiSQL, CamStudio, Tampermonkey, Sigil, this, that. Never had to download so many programs before and try figure out what they do. My laptop could not deal – it did what my mind refused to do: slowed down and then crashed. I think, to varying degrees, various people on the team were surprised to learn that such technological illiteracy was possible in one human being before.

Anyway, punctuating my introduction to all this were training sessions that Paperight offered to all interns on various issues related to our work and the publishing industry in general. These sessions were offered by the senior Paperight staff to incoming staff and the sessions, and they went on even after I became a full member of the team months later. Some of the sessions I signed up for were:

  • Introduction to publishing (Tarryn)
  • Introduction to copyright (Tarryn)
  • Introduction to business finance (Dezre)
  • Introduction to sales (Yazeed)
  • Metadata and SEO (Tarryn and Nick)
  • Document processing (Tarryn)
  • Introductions to HTML, CSS and WordPress (Arthur)

This is not an exhaustive list. Training at Paperight never ended. Right up to the last week of my being at Paperight, a year six months later (March 2014) I was still sitting in on Paperight training session on Personal Finance. This was just the nature of how things worked here – I felt, to the very end, that I was learning and never quite sure how much, if anything, I could say I knew, even though I felt expansive and knew that I was leaving heavier than when I came in.

3.

When my contract as a Paperight intern came to an end at the end of November 2012 I was offered a full time position as part of the Content Team. I was a happy, nameless child with no designation (and some serious image issues): my business card simply read ‘Oscar Masinyana – Content Team’ and at the back had a photo of me taken by Nick that everyone at the office besides myself thought was a lovely photo of me. I was given functional authority over certain domains within the Content unit relative to my strengths (content curation, metadata maintenance), and only much later was I eventually given a title of Reading Communities Manager (with a new business card and a better photo). But now I’m rushing ahead.

Design, Marketing

Nick becomes Head of Communications, and the start of PR

I stayed on at Paperight after the end of my two-month internship, which surprised me as I wasn’t expecting to prove myself indispensable. Initially, we weren’t too sure what my title would be. We bandied around “Resident Storyteller”, “PR Head” and other things, until one day, on the phone to the Cape Argus, I improvised that I was the “Head of Communications”. That stuck, and so my job profile was built around that. My functional authority for this time, from May 2012 until roughly August 2013 was to:

  • Plan and execute external communications strategies
  • Create design and copy that sets us apart
  • Build our archive of media assets

My functional authority was rather easy to fulfill for the first few months. My weekly routine included designing a poster, completing a few blog posts and trying to put together a media list. I found I wasn’t terribly good or tenacious at putting together a media list, so it came in good time when Arthur delivered a talk at TEDxCapeTown and got the attention of a PR agency, Atmosphere, who wanted to work with us.

We went to a meeting in their plush offices at King James in Woodstock, and although it was a fruitful meeting, we simply didn’t have the budget to work with them. They recommended that we get in touch with Nicole Sochen, the founder of al dente PR, who would be more in line with our budget.

At about the same time we were invited to attend the second round of the SAB Innovation Awards. As Arthur’s wife Michelle was due to deliver their child at the same time as the SAB workshop and adjudication in Kyalami, I traveled by myself to attend. There was some stiff competition. Luckily, Arthur managed to come up for the last day and aided me with the presentation to the judges. We, unfortunately, did not make it to the final six, but we were informed in November that we had won a seed grant of R100 000. We finally had the money to put together, we thought, a sustainable PR strategy.

Marketing, Sales

Signage, photos, and a great school contact

In our efforts to produce positive stories from communities that need them most, we decided to sponsor Paperight-branded signage for small copy shops. The aim was to help them attract more business to their stores by increasing their visibility and creating some publicity around the project.

paperight_minuteman-press_press-photo_20131113An entrepreneur from Mdanstane in the Eastern Cape was featured in a Daily Dispatch article. We had hired a PR consultant to assist us with our publicity and to learn from her. A photo shoot was organised at Minuteman Press Cape Town for stock photos. I arranged for my younger sister and her friends to wear their school uniforms and drove them to the venue. The stock photos gave some of our design work a more professional quality.

In November I was also contacted and met with Mr. Cader Tregonning, the principal at Pelican Park High School. Mr. Tregonning had recently been appointed as head of the school and had a vision for turning it into an academically competitive school. He heard about Paperight and wanted to have Exam Packs printed for all his matric students the following year. Mr. Tregonning was so determined to have past exams for his learners that he added it into the budget which is given to all the parents, in order that they be prepared financially for the following year.

Content

Creating more of our own content

One of the great results of the book fair was insight into how other South African publishing-related startups operate behind the scenes. I spent much of my time at the fair with the Snapplify crew, and discovered that they use Base as a CRM tool.  On my return from the fair, I started using Base to track publisher follow-ups. There was some initial set-up work required: I had to migrate my contacts database and conversation histories from the wiki and email, but it made tracking follow ups much easier. On going follow-ups with very long lead times on actions (especially when waiting on a publisher’s in house legal team, for example) could be put on the backburner, without the risk of having these fall through the cracks.

I spent most of the month following up on new and existing relationships, particularly with Random House Struik, and Nali’Bali/Praesa. In ongoing content work, I briefed Nick on covers for GetSmarter and e-Classroom material, and continued to work on the processing of those files. Philippa started at Paperight on the 19th of November, so I also managed her training and induction.

The idea was that an anthology would be a great way to raise awareness about Paperight among learners, and would help us build useful relationships with teachers which we could build off of to increase sales of supplementary study material.

November 2013 was also the month we decided to run with the idea of the Paperight Young Writers’ Anthology. We came up with the concept while we were deciding that it might be good for us to start creating our own content for Paperight. The matric exam packs, our other main project of content creation was selling well, and publishers were signing agreements slower than we needed for a fast growth in sales. The idea was that an anthology would be a great way to raise awareness about Paperight among learners, and would help us build useful relationships with teachers which we could build off of to increase sales of supplementary study material. I had a meeting with Biblionef, about their database of schools. We were hoping that we could make use of this to inform schools about the Paperight Young Writers’ Anthology. As it turned out, their database was completely offline, and would have proved complicated and time consuming to sift through. Instead, Oscar drew together a database from scratch, using online resources.

Publisher registrations

  • Osiame Molefe (19/11/2012)
  • Fiona Ingram (22/11/2012)
  • Random House Struik (22/11/2012)
Tech

Roadmap, Dec 2012 to Feb 2013

We’re going to be focusing on:

  • Marketing and PR: Promote the Young Writers Anthology into the new school year, secure ongoing media coverage from active PR (several leads already in place with major magazines), and run a few narrowly targeted promotion campaigns in partnership with copy shops and publishers
  • Software: Complete phase-2 development of paperight.com, including important improvements to UI based on user feedback and refined messaging, and more document automation to speed up the addition of new content
  • Revenue: A risky but important move coming in Jan: we’re going to start charging outlets a small service fee for most our content that used to be free. This will be to test potential self-sustainability revenue models and measure outlet expectations.
  • Outlet feedback loops: A key focus we’ve neglected is active outlet surveys, triaging and acting on the feedback. These surveys and action in response will be a major focus for the next three months.
  • Partner projects: We’ll publish a beta version of our Guide for UNISA students in partnership with Together We Pass; make the most of a promotional partnership with national reading campaign Nal’ibali.
Content, Marketing

New experiments shipped

From September to November we’ve put together a number of new experiments in product mix and marketing.

It’ll be interesting and hopefully valuable to see what works.

We also got out of the office a bit:

We learned a lot of hard lessons about how and now not to describe Paperight to consumers. This and other feedback and experience in October led us to completely overhaul our messaging … and our marketing focus, shifting from pushing ‘Paperight’ to pushing our outlets and backgrounding Paperight.

  • 24 Sep 2012: Well-received panel discussion titled “The Future of the Book” at the excellent Open Book Festival in Cape Town
  • 11 Oct 2012: Our comms manager Nick was on national TV show ‘Hectic Nine 9’, and wrote it up on our blog. Here’s the video. It didn’t go as planned. We learned a lot of hard lessons about how and now not to describe Paperight to consumers. This and other feedback and experience in October led us to completely overhaul our messaging (from standard pitches to site UI) and our marketing focus, shifting from pushing ‘Paperight’ to pushing our outlets and backgrounding Paperight. (More on that in a separate post.)
  • 15 Oct 2012: Content manager Tarryn attended the Frankfurt Book Fair. Here’s her blog post about it.
  • 7 Nov 2012: We announced our Paperight Young Writers Anthology: a collection of writing and illustration by high-school learners to be published on Paperight in 2013
  • 20 Nov 2012: I spoke at the Owl Club, a most venerable institution. Here’s the text of my talk.

A number of people have been talking about us. Some highlights:

About Paperight, Building business, Marketing

Messaging is a hard, winding journey

Sometimes a strategy emerges without you choosing it, because when you set out you didn’t know you had options. That’s how Paperight’s approach to growth and marketing emerged over the last few years. With hindsight, I can summarise this strategy as:

  • create a web brand (cool domain, slick website, friendly blog and social media, tech coverage) that consumers recognise and seek out.
  • use that brand recognition to attract consumers to Paperight outlets.
  • use that consumer-attraction to sign up more outlets.

To do this, we called Paperight a ‘website that turns any printer into a bookstore’, an ‘online library that copy shops use to print books for customers’, and other phrases that described Paperight as a website with downloadable content.

We kept describing the tool, but not the product. To the consumer, the product is a print-out from a local copy shop. To a copy shop, Paperight is a movement, a network of forward-thinking copy shop owners.

The fatal flaw here was that this required us to build brand recognition among consumers for a product that didn’t exist in their world yet. In other words: how could we get consumers to love Paperight before their local copy shop, which they already recognise, is using it? And worse, how could we attract low-income consumers to a web brand, when they spend no time on the web? To a consumer, Paperight is not a website. Describing Paperight as a website is like describing car repair as a spanner. We kept describing the tool, but not the product. To the consumer, the product is a print-out from a local copy shop. To a copy shop, Paperight is a movement, a network of forward-thinking copy shop owners.

Our mistaken approach was holding us back, but we didn’t have enough distance from it to realise that we had other options. I was obsessed with focusing on Paperight as a website. But I knew something was wrong, so I was looking for alternatives. Three key moments were Nick’s appearance on Hectic Nine 9, a misleading article in the Daily Dispatch about us, and Ben Maxwell’s sage session at the Nov 2012 Shuttleworth Foundation Gathering.

While preparing for Hectic Nine 9, whose audience is mostly teens, we realised that sending teens to paperight.com wouldn’t work. We needed to send them to outlets. We did NOT want them arriving at paperight.com and treating it like an ebook store (the interface doesn’t work as an ebook store, and our print-optimised PDFs make for terrible ebooks). But we weren’t allowed to mention brand names on air, like our major copy shop chain Jetline. So we decided to send the audience to a mobile-optimised, consumer-focused site at m.paperight.com. The problem was that when Nick got to the recording, the presenter and producer had other ideas. They were only interested in asking Nick about entrepreneurship, insisted on referring to Nick as the founder of Paperight (which is not a big problem, except that it made Nick uncomfortable), and then showed paperight.com and not m.paperight.com on screen during the interview.

The experience highlighted a few things:

  1. We didn’t have a concise, clear enough message that could cut through what the presenter had in mind about Paperight. Our approach was too broad and fuzzy, so the presenter went with what she thought already.
  2. A mobile site at m.paperight.com cannot be different in look and functionality from paperight.com, because (a) consumers will go to paperight.com by default anyway, and (b) users expect mobile sites to be essentially the same in purpose to their desktop parents.
  3. The whole notion of appealing directly to consumers was flawed because we don’t want them coming to our site. We want them going to our outlets.

Somehow, we had got completely the wrong message to the journalist. We briefly blamed her for being sloppy, but realised soon that it was our fault.

Shortly afterwards, the Daily Dispatch published an article about Paperight that described us explicitly as a site that matrics could use to download exam papers. There was barely a reference to copy shops. To make it worse, the article lightly criticised Paperight for being useful only to matrics who were wealthy enough to have Internet access. Somehow, we had got completely the wrong message to the journalist. We briefly blamed her for being sloppy, but realised soon that it was our fault. We simply weren’t being clear or focused enough in our messaging.

I also realised we (every member of our team) didn’t *love* copy shops enough. If we didn’t truly love them, we wouldn’t be able to create a tribe

We had to put our outlets first in everything. Our messaging, our elevator pitches, our promotional material, and most importantly, our minds. It was after Ben Maxwell emphasised to me the importance of creating in our messaging and on our site a sense of belonging (to a movement) for copy shops that I also realised we (every member of our team) didn’t love copy shops enough. If we didn’t truly love them, we wouldn’t be able to create a tribe, a sense that we were joining them in a grand march of progress.

Importantly, this meant we had to remove all references to our website and to ourselves as an online business or service from our messaging, especially any messaging that consumers might see. What would we replace it with? A movement, a network, a revolution.

Right now, our new messaging is built around the phrase, ‘Paperight is a network of independent print-on-demand bookstores’. If someone asks how we deliver content, we say we do it with a website.

The Daily Dispatch agreed to run a follow-up story with the ‘correct’ information. That story ran a few weeks later (see below, 14 Nov 2012), and is an example of the kind of thing we believe will work much better going forward.

Content

Project 9: Frankfurt Book Fair 2012: closing report

Aim: Develop contacts and build team expertise by sending content manager to the world’s biggest publishing trade fair.

General report-back

Tarryn’s trip to Frankfurt was very productive in terms of building relationships and learning more about the international publishing industry. Her full report is attached at the end of this document.

Objectives achieved

Actions taken:

  • Travel to Frankfurt, attend the fair, meeting rightsholders and attending seminars.
  • Upon her return, Tarryn presented to the team, wrote up a report on what she learned, and put in place action points to follow up on the content leads she generated.

As planned, this has had a positive effect on Paperight’s effectiveness with publishers, and helped a  lot with the even more successful trip to the London Book Fair in 2013.

Objectives not achieved

We believe we met all our objectives.

Measures of success

Before: “We expect: Tarryn’s confidence and ability to correspond with international publishers is greater, and this rubs off on the team. We’ll learn as an organisation whether the investment in these kinds of trips is worth it, and what we need to do differently in future to increase that value.”

After: This definitely happened.

Before: “We would like: To see publishers abroad adding content to Paperight within weeks of meeting Tarryn at the fair. To see lessons learned from the trip directly affecting (or affirming) the way we approach publishers from day to day, from social messaging to direct pitches.”

After: No publishers put content on Paperight in the weeks immediately following the fair. During 2013, five of the publishers that Tarryn met in Frankfurt have signed up and put content on Paperight (Modjaji Books, Do Sustainability, O’Reilly Media, SelfMadeHero and Random House Struik). It was only after a second meeting at the London Book Fair that this happened (except for O’Reilly, who signed up after our win at Tools of Change in February). We’ve learned that signing up established publishers takes months and usually at least two meetings at trade fairs.

Lessons learned from the trip have directly affected and affirmed the ways we approach publishers.

Before: “We would love to see: We’d love Tarryn to be invited back at part of the Frankfurt Invitation Programme. (Arthur was on this in 2009, an excellent intro and training programme sponsored entirely by the fair, to bring young publishing people from developing countries to the fair. Arthur will set up a meeting for Tarryn with the organisers.)”

After: In 2013 the Invitation Programme did not accept applications from South Africa, seeking applications from elsewhere. We’re told applications will be open to South Africans again in 2014.

Budget

Original budget: R23680

Actual spend: R17180.35

Returned to pool: R6499.65

 

 

Item Budget Actual Return to Pool Comments
Flight 12000 10055 1945
Hotel 7200 2376 4824
Trains and Taxis 1000 1165.25 -165.25
Food 1980 2021.58 -41.58
Fair Registration 700 700.50 -0.50
Visa 800 832. -62
TOTAL 23680 17180.33 6499.67

 

Outputs and deliverables

A detailed report of meetings and seminars attended, and feedback from discussions about Paperight and related ventures in the industry: see Tarryn’s report attached below.

Learnings

The most important learning is that attending trade fairs on a consistent basis, and meeting with publishers there, is critical to building relationships that lead to distribution deals.

In addition, from Tarryn’s report:

  • “Having a stall ties you down as one team member has to constantly stay there. It also does not necessarily provide a strong ROI, as the people who we want to talk to are not usually going to be the ones walking up to stands.
  • Obviously, having more than one team member working the floor allows you to cover much much more ground – especially when these efforts are targeted and coordinated. The Snapplify team was able to generate 5x the leads that I was.
  • It is important to have a ‘hit list’ of publishers/people that you want to target, so you know who your big fish are. I did this to some extent, but could have done it better. I think this task is simpler when you have a clear idea of what the fair looks like, and who will be there, as well as a focused strategy around the leads you want to generate and nurture. This is something that I will work on for next year/time.
  • Info sheets would be useful to leave with publishers who you are talking to for the first time. A number of people actually asked me if I had an info sheet for them, especially towards the end when everything is mixing together in your brain, or when the decision makers have left and the minions cannot convey the ideas properly.”

Exit/Sustainability/Viability

We will definitely attend future trade fairs, and will need to fund each of these case by case. The DTI provides some funding towards this, and we will use project funding where necessary too.

Conclusion

Great trip, an important learning experience that has had a positive effect on the team and our business.

Next steps

We’re planning for the next trip already.

Frankfurt Book Fair 2012: Feedback Report.

I attended the 2012 Frankfurt Book Fair with the mandate of developing publisher relationships and sourcing content leads for Paperight.

I attended seminars, workshops, and panel discussions given by industry professionals and leaders, with a view to learning more about the inner workings of the publishing industry. I was also able to get a sense for where the industry is, and where it sees itself moving in the future – particularly with regards to developments in the digital sector.

The publishers with whom I met broadly fell into three categories:

  • Those who are already making their material available on Paperight (in order to build upon an existing working relationship).
  • Those who we have already contacted about Paperight, and who are keen, but who have not officially provided us with material or signed contracts (in order to ‘close the deal’, and foster trust).
  • Those who are hearing about Paperight for the first time (in order to build contacts and establish relationships with potential rightsholders).

The following report offers a synopsis of the sessions I attended, a breakdown of discussions with publishers (as well as a schedule of follow ups to be completed), and some lessons learned for getting the most out of the fair in the future.

Seminars/Panel Discussions Attended

Data Insights with Bowker:

The seminar, given by Bowker’s Director of Client Solutions James Howitt, sought to answer the question of “how social media and social networks are changing the ways that readers discuss books” using data gathered through specific research studies run by Bowker for its clients.

The study monitored 6000 customers each month, taking account of their demographics, book choices, retailer choices, book awareness, and favoured formats. The numbers that resulted from the research were interesting, showing a reading population of around 49% in the US, with “power buyers” who purchase multiple titles accounting for more than half of the total book sales occurring. The numbers also show an increase in the purchase of ebooks in the US, with 25% of all books sold being consumed in digital form.

The downfall of the research is it’s incompleteness, only having been conducted in geographic areas and amongst populations that were of direct commercial significance to the Bowker client. Despite the limited relevancy of the findings in a South African/African context, the principles behind the project – namely of understanding who your user is and how they are becoming aware of your product – are applicable to marketing efforts. Bowker found that the primary influencer of people’s book buying behaviour was personal recommendation, noting that if one is able to identify and harness this, then one is able to achieve an “influence multiplier”.

Also fascinating was the finding that the readers of different genres obtain these recommendations from different sources. Romance readers, for example, receive these from blogs or via general web-browsing, while mystery readers will obtain recommendations from fan pages or forums to which they subscribe. [YA literature is often recommended via blogs, YouTube, and GoodReads – usually a combination of all three].

The team has conducted similar research in Canada, the UK, and Australia. Here he notes that they found that reading/buying behaviours were similar over different territories, but that there were significant differences in the genres that were favoured in those territories.

Lessons Learned in Digital Publishing:

The panel, hosted by Richard Mollet (CEO of the Publishing Association), consisted of Richard Charkin (Executive Director, Bloomsbury), Matt Hanbury (CEO, Murdoch Books), and George Lossius (CEO, Publishing Technology). Tasked with the job of considering what lessons we’ve learnt after 10 years of digital, they began on a positive note. “This industry has adapted remarkably… academic publishing is now 90% digital, with trade at 20 % and rising quickly”, Charkin said. “What we have not done is adapt our printing  systems to the new world”, Charkin noted that book printing remains complicated, with 24 handlings of a book existing between manufacture and purchase. What he asserted right from the get-go was the necessity of applying the lessons learned from digital to the core business of print” [an angle which may be relevant for marketing Paperight].

The other panelists lamented the external influences (and influencers) which have altered the ways in which content is delivered to the market. Lossius, while noting that digital giants like Amazon, as well as innovation and development of communications technology in general, has meant that more people can more easily access the books that they want, commented that the danger is that publishers have allowed themselves to be easily governed by big players. Hanbury agreed, saying that in encountering the digital world, devices have captivated the consumer market to the extent that the device becomes more important than the content. This power is what results in publishers massively slashing prices in deals with Amazon and Apple.

In light of Kindle’s domination of the market, the panel was asked their views on the successes of alternatives in the future. To this Lossius responded that while Amazon is successful now, their closed business models will be their downfall.

Other Coverage:

Book Fair Blog: http://bit.ly/TxLaKt

Publishing Perspectives: http://bit.ly/XxvLhB

Publisher’s Weekly: http://bit.ly/PeIzdb

A Comprehensive Approach to Mobile Learning – A Professional Solution:

Centering around the notion that “mobility is in our natures”, the education expert giving this talk began with the argument that humans are used to moving and inherently adaptable to change. Students, she noted, find standard education systems boring, and with the increased consumption of digital media (80% of US Students have smart phones) technology can change this.

Her view is that education practices need to be adapted to take account of the way that students interact with media. Lessons need to be shorter, she argues, due to the fact that attention spans are short, and repetitions, as well as breaks between these are important.

Yet merely “refreshing” teaching practices using new media, is not sufficiently “comprehensive” in my opinion to warrant the title of the session. She focused only on tablet and smartphone classroom integration in the US, with no insights given to mobility and education in developing and emerging economies.

The State of Piracy in a Post MegaUpload World:

Given by an organisation calling themselves “Guardian for Books”, the session covered a service that they offer as a complement to DRM by allowing for added protection of copyright material. Their presentation played into the fears of all the publishers present, and their argument was that the only way to combat “continuous piracy” is with “continuous disruption” (where disruption is a takedown notice).

A highly unimaginative and closed minded approach to piracy and the potential solutions. The only interesting thing that he mentioned was that after Mega Upload was taken down, P2P downloads increased by 30%.

Metadata Goes Global:

This was a fantastic 3 hour workshop on metadata as a tool for publishers, given by industry leaders Laura Dawson (Bowker), and Brian O’Leary (Magellan Media Partners). My ticket was complimentary, despite a hefty $300 price tag, because the key speaker (Laura Dawson) is a Paperight champion.

The workshop was divided into 3 segments:

Getting metadata right
1. Where are we today?
  • Currently metadata is an incredibly labour intensive, manual process – especially for publishers.
  • It requires constant re-inspection “downstream”.
  • It can often be inconsistent, and is difficult to revise or update.

Vendors today are not necessarily booksellers, which means that the rules change. To back up these three points, Laura goes through a research case study they conducted over 10 retailers/vendors, to see how quickly metadata updates occur after it is disseminated.

The findings showed that the industry standard was for updates to occur within 2-5 business days (at leading retailers). They also found that certain types of data were updated more frequently than others. In order of update frequency: Page count, price, subtitle, description, on sale date, publication date, author (the later two data types hardly ever get updated).

2. What needs to change in the current system?

These delays are a result of systemic problems in the way that metadata is created, and can be averted if clear communication is occurring between retailers and publishers as to what format the metadata should be provided in, and how to optimise metadata workflow in order to reduce the problems created by the ‘lag’ (i.e: duplicates of small updates/overwriting of more complete data).

  • The system is not built for speed.
  • Most updates only take place in week 2.
  • The problems and delays are not for lack of trying, but as a result of time-consuming workflow processes.
  • There is the potential that this could get worse with new entrants to the market. New sites do not create complete and relevant data, which means the waters are further muddied.
3. How do we get ready?

Process recommendations:

  • Use “book in hand” (physical product) to gather local inhouse feedback.
  • Strengthen sender-recipients feedback loops (i.e: clearly communicate with publishers).
  • Ensure that there are shared definitions for core fields.
  • Articulate when updates occur, and what gets updated (and what doesn’t) to the sender.
  • Discuss what metadata is changed, added, and deleted.

Future-proofing metadata:

  • Collaborate to automate data workflows and compress cycle times (take some of the work out of it).
  • Prepare for more frequent updates (marketing metadata – awards etc.)
  • Harmonise print and digital metadata workflows.
  • Better manage the use of style tags (either limit, or eliminate them). Not all retailers can deal with the HTML styling, so be sure to provide data as text only.
4. What might we be missing?

Context (metadata) rules on the next plateau.

  • Increasingly open, accessible, interoperable.
  • Using context to promote discovery: It’s easy to publish a book (there are currently 32+ million in print) so you need to be able to differentiate your product.
  • Readers need to be given tools that help them manage abundance.

What is the next plateau? (Three trends we may be missing out on)

  • Global (effectively visible everywhere)
    • Online access makes every book visible, but many (most) markets can see and not buy. This makes consumers frustrated and can lead to piracy.
    • Readers don’t understand things like territorial rights. This is an outdated concept which delay the time to market and results in lost sales.
    • Pricing needs to make sense in a specific territory/market.
    • Digital customers are being alienated when they have to wait for content to be made available to them.
    • New delivery options are becoming increasingly important: DRM free formats, subscription based models, component or short-format sales, and pay-as-you-go rights.
  • Integrated metadata (tied to the product it describes)
    • The value of metadata is in how closely it is tied to the product it describes. This is already an issue in digital product sales (where the metadata is created after the fact and thus not as integrated.
    • There is a growing issue with rights sales, where the people doing the sales are not also doing the metadata.
    • Without integrated, granular metadata, this can result in a nightmare when trying to sell components.
    • While epub3 has a great metadata component, publishers are reluctant to use it because they do not want the metadata to be locked in a file (as it changes so regularly). They prefer to edit a feed, even though this does not aid discoverability.
  • Evolutionary (continual revision and capturing of metadata)
    • Increasingly metadata supports how consumers find books. Recipients of the data (e.g: retailers) contribute much of the metadata after publication: awards, prizes, “bestseller” status, endorsements, book tour data, refined reading and grade levels, as well as marketing collateral.
    • It is important to monitor chatter on social media and book specific platforms, and to know what’s being said about a book, and then use that metadata as an opportunity for discovery.
    • The key is complete, relevant, and consistent metadata, including cover images, and enhanced with analytics and SEO.
Making metadata effective

There are four different kinds of metadata (bibliographic, commercial, transactional, and merchandising), and these come from many different sources. In order to make each of these effective in their specific role, we need to be using them as keys for discovery.

  • ISBN numbers are prioritized by Google. Similarly the soon to be adopted ISTC and ISNI numbers will also be given authority.
  • Search algorithms also prioritize BIC and BISAC categories, as well as Amazon keywords/categories. It is important here to use 3-5 of these keywords, in order of relevance/importance for the best results.
  • SEO and  Adwords Keywords tools are incredibly useful.
  • Price changes are frequent and incredibly important. Make sure that these updates are happening timeously.
  • It is also important to describe your book’s relationship to other books, films, comparative works, other formats (and use the opportunity to highlight why yours is better).
  • Have a metadata repository where teams creating each of the different kinds of metadata listed above can edit and adapt the metadata so that you maintain a relevant and up to date record.
What can Paperight do with this?
  • As we grow, we need to make sure that metadata updates of existing content is occurring within 2-5 days of receiving updated data from the publisher.
  • We need to communicate clearly with publishers so that they can provide us with data in a format which is appropriate for Paperight. We try to make it simpler for them, but this makes it time-consuming for us and means that metadata updates take far too long.
  • Paperight staff book reviews could be added to the metadata for a book. The more of the books we read ourselves, the better our descriptive metadata will be.
  • Metadata descriptions need to be compiled from a variety of sources, and honed carefully (i.e: complete, relevant, and consistent metadata, including cover images, and enhanced with analytics and SEO).
  • ISBN, ISTC, and ISNI numbers, as well as BIC and BISAC categories should be prioritized. Keywords describing the book should be provided in order of relevance or importance.
  • “Related titles” should be provided, and connections between content items made.
  • Metadata repository.

Paperight – Publishers Discussions

[Redacted because this section contains others’ confidential business information]

Other potential leads:

  • US Embassy – See conversations with Matthew Utterback, he mentioned that they could be a good lead Africa as they do not currently have a strong distribution network for that material.
  • Unisa Press – Attempted to set a meeting with them, but was unable to connect due to conflicting schedules. I did however get the contact details for Elna Harmse (Director), and Andrew Joseph (Managing Editor: Journals), which we can use to set up a meeting to pitch Paperight in the future.
  • Higher Education Press – These are publishers of Chinese-language educational materials.  I was around when Snapplify chatted to them about creating Snapplify apps for their material. She then asked them if they also do “print-on-demand” solutions, at which point I jumped in and said that Paperight did. I have her contact details, and will send additional information regarding Paperight.

Feedback/Take-aways:

  • Having a stall ties you down as one team member has to constantly stay there. It also does not necessarily provide a strong ROI, as the people who we want to talk to are not usually going to be the ones walking up to stands.
  • Obviously, having more than one team member working the floor allows you to cover much much more ground – especially when these efforts are targeted and coordinated. The Snapplify team was able to generate 5x the leads that I was.
  • It is important to have a ‘hit list’ of publishers/people that you want to target, so you know who your big fish are. I did this to some extent, but could have done it better. I think this task is simpler when you have a clear idea of what the fair looks like, and who will be there, as well as a focused strategy around the leads you want to generate and nurture. This is something that I will work on for next year/time.
  • Info sheets would be useful to leave with publishers who you are talking to for the first time. A number of people actually asked me if I had an info sheet for them, especially towards the end when everything is mixing together in your brain, or when the decision makers have left and the minions cannot convey the ideas properly.