Content Matters

Buying and Selling eContent Day Two opened with a keynote by Elsevier Vice Chair Y.S. Chi.  Y.S., formerly Chairman of Random House Asia and President and CEO of Ingram Book holdings, joined  Elsevier a year ago, to head global academic and customer relations.

Y.S. spoke of how it’s very difficult to be a publisher today.  He described how we need to redefine publishing, where the primary function is to “quickly get right information to the right person in the right context” and where the new role of the publisher is as market maker (“to know and honor user needs”).

As a frame of reference, Y.S. compared the impact of the Internet to the invention of the printing press.  As with the printing press, the web has led to content explosion, new communities and the democratization of knowledge.  Today’s “uber publishers” can adapt faster, providing deeper communities and do a better job of filtering content.

The opportunities for publishers are threefold:
1. Filter for quality: while incumbents can leverage your brand for trusted content, that won’t last, so publishers need to do a better job filtering.  Filtering must be matched to the user needs: for medical content a top-down editorial model is probably best, while the wisdom of crowds is great for movie reviews.
2. Enhance productivity: the productivity of knowledge workers continues to fall; publishers must embed content into users workflow to make them more productive (as ES has done with Science Direct, Scirus and Scopus)
3. Nurture networks to develop compelling communities.  But, communities must be the “gotta go” type, creating a visceral response from users when they visit. 

In closing, the “uber publisher” must stay attuned to user needs and experiment and learn.  There are many user needs, which translate to many business models.