Preparing for the Future

Changing the publishing infrastructure to meet new challenges

The extent of the change we’ll see in the next few years in trade publishing is beginning to be apparent. We no longer debate whether ebooks will ever take hold; we now all have our opinions about when the trade business will tip to 50% digital with less than half of publishers’ margins coming from print.

At the same time that the print component of revenue is falling, opportunities for digital revenues from sales and licenses of less than the whole book are rising. So publishers may shortly find themselves with organizations and overheads mismatched to their needs and opportunities. This is a multi-faceted problem and we’ve assembled a multi-faceted panel to discuss it.

James Long of Pan Macmillan is responsible for formulating his company’s view of what they need to have and do when sales of digital products are 50% of their business. Rick Joyce of Perseus is one of the leaders of his company’s efforts to provide a physical and digital backbone for companies that find their requirements have become “sub-scale”: too little print business to continue to support a distribution operation and not big enough or tech-adept enough to support their own digital infrastructure. And Sarah Faulder of Publishers Licensing Society has a front-row seat witnessing the growth of opportunities for licensing fragments and chunks and of what it costs publishers in lost opportunities that they don’t have all their rights easily accessible in databases. The discussion will be led by Mark Bide of EDItEUR and Rightscom, a publishing veteran who has been at the forefront of digital change in all content businesses for more than two decades.

Mark Bide
Executive Director, EDItEUR

Mark Bide is the Executive Director of EDItEUR, the global trade standards organisation for the book and journal supply chains which also provides a management service to the International ISBN Agency. EDItEUR is the maintenance agency for the ONIX metadata standards which are used all over the world. He is also the Project Director for the ACAP Project, and a Director of Rightscom, the specialist media consultancy based in London. He has worked in and around the publishing industry for nearly 40 years, having been a Director of the European subsidiaries of both CBS Publishing and John Wiley & Sons, and has a long-established interest and expertise in identifiers and metadata. He is a Visiting Professor of the University of the Arts London.

Sarah Faulder
CEO, Publishers Licensing Society (PLS)

Sarah Faulder was appointed Chief Executive of PLS in October 2010. She began her career as a solicitor specialising in copyright and was a partner at city law firm, Taylor Joynson Garrett, for 10 years. She moved into the music industry in 1997 when she was appointed Chief Executive of the Music Publishers Association.

Her later roles as Chargée de Mission at BIEM and CISAC, the Paris based umbrella organisations for collecting societies from all over the world, and as Public Affairs Director for PRS for Music, enabled her to build on her experience of collective management of rights.

Rick Joyce
Chief Marketing Officer, Perseus Book Group

Rick is the Chief Marketing Officer of the Perseus Books Group, involved in growth and digital strategy development. Rick is a co-creator of Constellation, the industry leading one-stop digital solution for independent publishers. He was the force behind the Book:The Sequel at BEA 2009, the pioneering transmedia sensation Cathy’s Book, and enhanced projects like JFK:50 Days and Roots: The Enhanced Edition. Rick is a veteran of 20+ years in media, as a partner at Accenture, VP of Marketing at ASCAP, and a consultant at Booz Allen. Rick has a Dartmouth BA, a Columbia MBA, a New School MFA, and 5 children.

James Long
Editorial Director, Digital, Pan Macmillan

James leads ebook publishing and web development at Pan Macmillan. He is responsible for integration of the digital publishing workflow and the creation of a web platform that delivers a new experience for consumers and new a new online capability for the business.