The Difference Engine in Digital Time:
Tools and Strategies for Selling Content on the Internet
Presented at
Association of American Publishers, Inc.
Professional/Scholarly Publishing Division
1997 Annual Conference
Washington D.C.
February 13, 1997
Copyright © 1996–2024 by Laura Fillmore; written permission required to reprint.
laura@obs.com
Table of Contents:
Introduction
OBS attended our first PSP conference three years ago, in 1994, when we
organized the first "Internet Room" for UMI. We got into the Internet
publishing business in 1992, with the publication of a book we conceived and
produced, "The Internet Companion: A Beginner's Guide to Global Networking"
by Tracy LaQuey and published by Addison-Wesley, the first trade book about
the Internet. Our web site was barely a year old at that time, and one of
the major features of the site was the "ABCs of Publishing URLs", a
comprehensive listing of all the publishers and bookstores active on the
Internet. It was one screen in length, and we updated it every couple of
weeks.
Back in 1994, we still thought of the Internet as a marketing mechanism and
a means to distribute books, and files for books --- hence our name, the
Online BookStore (OBS). We thought our business would come from selling
books and access to files for books, over the Net. At the PSP conference
in 1994, we introduced for sale by download the first "distributive" book,
Adrian Butash's hyperlinked "Bless this Food", published by Delacorte Press.
While paving the way for whole new publishing disciplines of online
marketing, link editing, and cybersales, "Bless This Food" indicated to us
that the future of the online publishing industry does not lie in
retrofitting product-based publishing models to the kinetic medium Internet
opens for us. Despite a significant amount of press attention and lots of
traffic, we sold only one copy of the distributive version of the book of
graces, to an entrepreneurial professor at Harvard Business School.
Three and four years ago, the name "Online BookStore" was a novel concept
that required explaining. As the name "online bookstore" became more generic
and publishers began to actively explore the Internet, it became clear to us
that the real publishing work in this medium was in building an architecture
that enables publishers to reveal, and readers to explore, on a massively
customized basis, the ideas and information contained within books and
journals. In 1995, we changed the name of our company from Online BookStore
to Open Book Systems, maintaining the acronym and the trademarked logo. In
so doing, we were accepting and beginning to explore the truth that a work
of art, a publication, is never complete as long as it is being perceived. A
book never ceases being published as long as readers are reading it.
And the best way for a publisher to publish in this medium is to give
publishers' employees the tools which enable them to continue to do the work
they are already doing --- online. Without a lot of cost and fuss, right
from their desktops, editors, marketers, and administrators can add to and
monitor their own web site, without the intermediation of experts, if given
the proper tools to do so. And so OBS began to create software.
Publishing the Process: A New Kind of Difference Engine
A book's fundamental ideas and applications evolve through use. Encoding the
architecture that allows for this evolution of thought over time becomes the
fundamental challenge to today's online publisher. By enabling construction
of and access to that kinetic thought stream, the publisher begins to
publish his own process. He makes available online a succession or cluster
of versions of a publication, from original idea through to the application
of the published work in the form of tests for readers. He becomes a
publisher of the flux of ideas, a publisher of changing states.
Harnessing the engines of change inside of a computer is a problem which
occupied the architect of the first computer, Charles Babbage, several
hundred years ago. His Difference Engine was tasked with calculating
differential equations, a job which seems simple in today's age of pocket
computers, and perhaps simpler still to publishers, who approach the world
of ever-more networked computers with digitized words and pictures in the
context of a rapidly changing marketplace, searching for a solution written
in black instead of red ink. There is no right answer to the equation, no
blueprint to follow.
Still, some comparisons between this first calculator of numbers and our own
publishing environment of the Internet may enlighten us. A mathematical
equation depicts a change in state; the numbers on the left side of the
equals sign, when put through the functions called for by the equation,
result in the product on the right side of the equals sign. Babbage's
machine attempted to automate and render repeatable the process of these
equations; the process, not the products of the equations, was the goal of
that early automation of thought.
The Synergy between Terrestrial and Cyber Publishing Tasks
If we extrapolate from the difference engine model to today's online
publishing environment, and think of the internetworked computing machine
as enabling us to automate, archive, and compare state changes, we might
begin to see new and commercially promising terrain for online publishing.
This terrain extends beyond the familiar boundaries of marketing existing
publications, and leads us towards the possibilities of using the Internet
to define and make accessible stages in the publishing process.
These stages may be assigned definition and value by virtue of the time and
attention put into them by authors, editors, marketers, and production
people --- time and attention by their own staffs, which publishers are
already paying salaries for. In working with publishers over the years, OBS
has built web sites and publishing software that enables publishers to use
the Internet as a kinetic publishing environment and to capitalize on the
income potential newly identified by the online computing environment. OBS
isn't selling a product, but rather enabling tools which enable them to
apply their skills and experience, the work they are already doing, to the
online environment. Capitalizing on the real-time internetworked
environment, and by making accessible the differing states in the
publication process to both inhouse staffs, and the readers which are the
source of revenue, we are beginning to discover profitable publishing on the
Internet, a profit which comes not from retrofitting a product-based
industry to the new medium, but rather from codifying the new and digital
business of knowledge transferal inside the engine of a the massively
customized thought machine.
In the knowledge management world, ideas contained in online publications
gain or lose value through the process of thought. When an acquiring editor
reads and accepts for peer review an article, that puts a certain value on
the submitted article. When an editor spends time thinking about and
critiquing an author's work, the author's work increases in value. By
properly typesetting or coding a manuscript so that it is attractive to its
readers, the compositor adds value to the publication. By applying market
knowledge and understanding to an author's work, the experienced marketer
further enhances the value of a publication. Each task means time spent
actively thinking about a publication, time and thought which in the
pre-networked world was behind the scenes at a publishing house, and went
largely unrecorded, unpublished, untransferrable to others involved in the
process.
In the old days, there were basically three states of a publication's life:
the manuscript, the print or contained publication, and the post-publication
applications --- with a great deal of time in between. Now, thanks to the
kinetic and codified architecture of Internet publishing, publishing those
differing states in the evolution of a publication can mean an enhanced
competitive position and new income streams for publishers, and a richer
information source for the reader.
The business of publishing the very process of publishing itself invites
publishers to redefine what their resources are, where to make their
investments in order to capitalize on the developing potentials of the
online marketplace of ideas. Successful publishers may soon discover that
their essential resources are defined not in terms of timber, paper, and
glue, or paying large sums to web builders and outside experts, but rather
in salaries and fees paid to humans to think about their publications, to
refine and market the publisher's main source of income, authors' ideas.
The internetworked machine makes such intellectual effort measurable,
definable, and deliverable. Online, the behind the scenes processes assume
front and center stage. The acquisitions editor who can respond the quickest
to trends and scientific developments online, will be able to attract more
authors to the house; the editors who do the best editing will may prove
inducements to authors to choose one publisher over another because of the
added value the publisher brings to the publishing process. The production
department doesn't labor anonymously for months on each book, behind closed
doors amid waxers and galleys and dummies, but instead assumes
responsibility for regularly posting the content state changes occurring
within the publishing house.
| - PART II - |
The Difference Engine in Digital Time:
Tools and Strategies for Selling Content on the Internet
Copyright © 1997–2024 by Laura Fillmore; written permission required to reprint.
laura@obs.com