Ian Grant

Solid textbooks packed into desks with lids, in rows, facing the front – such was the political vision for education set out by Elizabeth Truss and Nick Gibb at the BESA/EPC educational business conference in London last Monday.   The muddled banalities of the opening and closing remarks contrasted with the thought-provoking presentations of practitioners in 21st-century schools and publishing houses.

Two sessions struck me particularly and they both demonstrated innovative practice in action.   The first was a piece by William Edwards School in Grays Essex.    Stephen Munday, Headteacher, and two of his colleagues described a two-year transformation which required a fundamental change of approach and teaching culture.   We saw what was admittedly a promotional video, with smiling pupils busily writing on the wipe-clean walls, sitting in groups on carpeted floors with agile teachers, all under the benevolent eyes of multi-directional projectors and and online imagery beamed to the walls.   The vigour in the school, and in the team who presented to the conference, was evident, as was the improvement in results generated by the transformation in approach.   One school, one set of circumstances, not a prescription – but admirable.

The second was the description of a mini-MOOC, developed and published by Cambridge University Press in conjunction with OCR, an exam board.   The concept – 100 online lessons to teach the new computing curriculum, with formative assessment elements incorporated into the material – is straightforward.   Surprising to publishers is that CUP plans to make it available globally at no charge.  ‘How is it financed?    What is the business model?’  Helen Cunningham, CUP’s International Education Publishing Director, clarified that OCR had provided funding for the project, and that CUP was hoping for greater visibility in the UK school market, for customer and usage data from the global custom base for the product and for the opportunity to upsell paid-for material to the new customer base.   The difficulty of persuading markets to pay for some material, whilst receiving other material free, was not lost on anyone in the room.

The sense of business prospects in the room was more optimistic than not, although the complexities of the school market in England and Wales and the challenges of creating, publicising, assessing and purchasing material to support teaching and learning were very evident in the questions and discussions.    Listening to the political remarks was like reading speech bubbles from a cartoon version of the matter of the day.

Moving picture, text, still photography, sound, further reading – all in a carefully designed wrapper that signals itself to a particular audience: some interesting examples have popped up in the last week.

I owe these two to Steve Dearden, of The Writing Squad.    One is a piece of journalism from the New York Times, describing in film, stills, sound and text the journalist’s visit to a hulk sitting on a Filipino atoll, with a skeleton crew, making a statement of  territorial claim.   Chinese fishing boats steam slowly to and fro a few hundred metres away.   The piece is graphic, atmospheric, clear and telling, particularly in these days when B-52 bombers are testing Chinese claims over islands just a little northwards in the sea between China and Japan.

The second is a more self-consciously filmic piece about the parallel lives of President Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald, by National Geographic .   Although it is more complex and a bit arty, it does convey in an unusual way the telling contrast in the journey of the two men towards a single point in history.

Both use a scroll as the means of working through the storyline, making a connection in my mind with very ancient ways of narrative publishing.

The opportunities for a new creative wave as we explore these mixed media pieces are immense, in journalism, storytelling and education.

‘The stories, they stay the same, how the stories pass from author to reader, well that is still in flux’, says Andrew Rhomberg, of Digital Book World [1], about creative industry management in publishing.  The FutureBook conference in London last week was a good example of this.   Trade book publishing is still very clear about the distinction between the medium and the message, but the consumers and the users are not.   In fact, consumers are using the advancing medium – computer, tablet, smartphone – as the message and saying to each other – look what we can do, look how we can do it.

At Futurebook, Andre Breedt from Nielsen had some of the most telling things to say, as he extrapolated the trend of usage to show that most of the younger generation of users of devices were increasingly playing games, instant messaging and calling each other; other uses were falling away, with reading book-type things falling away most swiftly.   That may be because the form is unsuited to ‘book’ readership, or that as people get older they may choose to read more of certain types of books on devices.    The anxiety induced by this apparent trend was evident in the discussion of the dominance of Amazon in the customer base of trade publishers, so much so that there were calls for government action to make life more ‘fair’.

However, Jonathan Glasspool from Bloomsbury Academic was clear about the profitability and growth of the long-established digital channels of distribution and the editorial workflows in the higher education market.   Alison Palgrave, from Palgrave Macmillan, emphasized the flexibility and pace of her new imprint, listening carefully to her audience and publishing in online or POD outputs according to users’ personal and momentary needs.    Both emphasised the significance of knowing and reaching their customers directly.

The consumer publishers have great difficulty doing this, because knowing who and where your readers are, particularly if they buy through intermediaries, is tricky.   Readers’ Digest and Time-Life used to know through their colossal, and for decades hugely successful, efforts to create mailing lists via magazine publishing and customer acquisition through direct marketing.    (They didn’t make it across the digital chasm – why?)    Janet Meadowcraft gave a very interesting presentation on a successful social media campaign in a magazine/book crossover for a particular craft interest consumer group, which demonstrated very clearly that concentrated and knowledgeable hard work, not necessarily expensive, can deliver a sustainable and loyal audience and readership.

From the Big Ideas session, focus and pace were key themes.   Such qualities are utterly valuable, but hardly startling – yet they are fundamental.   Add concentration and fiercely dedicated curation – see Meadowcraft – and the business of publishing can continue to play its role in the marketplace of the world’s public discourse.   But the atomization of the business, very ably characterised by Mike Shatzkin in his blog earlier this year, was clear at FutureBook.    It is the atomization of consumer publishing that was clear.    To stay in business (over the medium term), consumer publishers will have to become smarter and faster; the mighty audiences in scientific, technical, medical, legal and educational publishing are increasingly well served.