JISC national e-books observatory project

I would like to share with you my highlights from the recent Tools of Change conference that I attended in New York at the end of February.

A core message of the conference was the need for organisations to know who their customers / users are and to connect and engage with them. Why? Because your customers control the destiny of your organisation. It is therefore critical to your success to know as much about them as you can. It is easy to assume that we know our users and what they want. Such was the case with publishers, aggregators and librarians in education until we provided some concrete evidence through the JISC national e-books observatory project. ‘Don’t assume you know your users, know your users’ was my message to the publishers that attended my presentation at the conference and I enjoyed testing their assumptions by quizzing them on the behaviours that we found out about in the Observatory. View my presentation with the quiz in.

Once you know who your users are and what they want, you should ‘focus on their needs relentlessly’ as Skip Pritchard of Ingram said during his keynote. Pritchard was a fabulous presenter and I urge you all to watch his presentation. Pritchard was very clear in the need for organisations to focus on what they do best and ‘to do it better than anyone else’. He talks about finding out what ‘your unique strategic value is’ and ‘limiting the variables’ so as not to paralyse customers with too many choices. In a period of such fast paced innovation in technology this is good advice for us all to consider.
The requirement to simplify was a strong theme of the conference; in fact I don’t think that I have heard the word so many times in three days. As organisations we all need to simplify to ensure that we can connect and engage our customers. In the Observatory project we saw that students were overwhelmed by the amount of information presented to them and the multitude of platforms on which they could access the content. In my presentation I talked about how students , who use tabs to consult multiple e-books and content at the same time, are forced to stop and think each time they look at a different platform. The fact that they have to think about navigation or how to zoom or how to print is disruptive to their thought processes as they have to re-frame their minds each time. Finding some commonality across platforms would help students and staff and essentially make them more intuitive to use. I encouraged the publishers present to really think about enhancing their platforms through user centric design, to hide the complicated stuff bring simplicity to the forefront. I am reminded here of one of the very intuitive and innovative platforms that I saw presented for trade e-books – Enhanced Editions. Peter Collingride summed up the idea of simplicity perfectly when he that just like when a reader of a print book doesn’t notice its interface, the interface for an e-book should be so intuitive that readers don’t notice it. Peter’s presentation was very impressive but what I enjoyed most was his call to action for publishers to collaborate to ensure that they keep up with the fast rate of change. Through collaboration, Peter said that publishers would have a better chance of innovating and therefore avoid the threat of disintermediation.

We all know that providing a good user experience is critical to customer retention and satisfaction. I was struck by the many presentations at the conference on why DRM is a major barrier to the user experience and why it is pointless. Now we all know that it is there to protect IPR and to stop piracy but in reality, does it really stop priracy when all you need is just one physical copy for piracy? This is one of the questions that Kirk Biglione of Oxford Media Works asked in his presentation. Kirk suggested that DRM is pointless, that it ‘often turns honest consumers into hackers’. This was something that I also talked about in my presentation but my focus was on the need to either remove DRM altogether or to ensure that DRM actually takes account of user behaviour rather than to dictate it.

The message of ‘simplify, connect and conquer’ is not just relevant to publishers and libraries but to us here in JISC Collections. The recent satisfaction surveys have been critical to us in identifying our’ unique strategic value’ and thinking about how we can ‘limit the variables’ and focus on our members needs relentlessly ‘whilst keeping a watchful eye on the ideas and activities that are going on in the periphery’ through our projects and studies.

My picks of presentations from the conference:

• Caren Milloy of JISC Collections – How students and academics use e-books
• Skip Pritchard of Ingram – Are e-books dead
• Peter Collingridge of Enhanced Editions – Enhancing the E-book
• William Paltry of Google – Law is not a business solution
• John Rand of RAND – The Future of E-textbooks
• Kirk Biglione of Oxford Media Works – DRM, Digital Content, and the Consumer Experience: More Lessons Learned from the Music Industry
• Brian O’Leary of Magellan Media – The Impact of P2P File Distribution on Paid Content Sales
• Angela Bole (Book Industry Study Group, Inc.), Kelly Gallagher (R R Bowker) – Understanding the Ebook Consumer: The Results of the BISG Consumer Survey
• Mike Hendrickson of O’Reilly Media – Twitter Scorecard for Publishers

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