Transcript Overview - Alexander Street Press

Opportunity in a time of economic crisis:
Crisis as Catalyst
Stephen Rhind-Tutt, President
Presented at CARLI
October 30th, 2009
Overview
• A small publisher’s response to the crisis
• Future and technology focus
• Tools for scenario planning
• Business perspective
• Practical examples
• I’m a publisher not a librarian
October 2008…
$$$$$
$
My favorite moment…
Emotional Reaction
ASP first reactions…
• We’re a small scholarly publisher
• Majority of our sales come from the United States
• Majority of our sales come from libraries
• We’d just finished our budgeting process…
• Reduce the number of new products in 2009
• Cut costs where possible
• Reduce travel
• Tactical initiatives
Tactical initiatives
Tactical initiatives…
• Jazz music library added free of charge
• 60,000 additional tracks of quality music
• Increase speed of launch
• Cross search tool
• Begin work on an iPhone version
Lower prices
Better value
Within a month or two we realized
this wasn’t enough…
Open Access
Pricing models
Collection Size
Collaboration
Work with competitors
Patron Needs
Library Needs
The environment
The environment
Survey was done before Google Books. Facebook and YouTube
just beginning. No Twitter. Wikipedia had 50% fewer articles…
Is the web going to improve?
By 2014 the web will contain…
• 90% of published works prior to 1923?
• Majority of works published to 2014?
• > 30 Billion pages of e-mail, phone logs, databases, blogs
and websites (currently 12 Billion)?
• > 50 Billion photographs (800m per month on Facebook)?
• > 40 Million pages of facsimiles of manuscripts?
• > 50 Million audio files?
• > 500 Million video files?
The future is clear enough to act on…
• Are search engines going to improve over the next 5 years?
• Will machine aided indexing get better or worse over the next 5 years?
• Is Google going to have more or fewer free e-books?
• Will Kindle devices and devices improve over time?
• Will Wikipedia become better or worse?
• Will tomorrow’s students be more or less media/web centric?
• Is the cost of space and storage going to increase or decrease?
• Will mobile devices become standard in education?
• Will distance learning grow or decrease in the future?
….and what does that mean for our organizations.
The Adoption Cycle…
Military Aircraft
1920s
1940s
Civil Airliners
Speed
Jet Engines
Freight and Transport Aircraft
Light planes
…works for information too.
Corporate libraries (Laptops, E-discovery)
Medical libraries (PDA reference works, patient records)
1988
Research & college libraries (Blackboard, iUniversity)
1940s
Mobility
Workflow
Integration
Public & School libraries (Moodle, iPhone)
June 2006
‘All technologies evolve and die…’
• Can’t be networked
• Single User
• Won’t improve over time
• No ‘computer consumption’
• No functionality
• Not hyper linked
• Small
• Manual
‘You fear loss of control.
The Web
Libraries?
But that has already happened.
Ride the wave.’
We cannot respond effectively
without changing paradigms.
We knew this before
It’s even more important now.
The economic crisis as catalyst
A different paradigm
• Use the crisis to focus the organization
• Are we serving our constituencies
better than everyone else?
• Decide on the best opportunities and
go for them.
• It’s easier to change in times of crisis
• People are more amenable to change
• Innovation springs from constraints
• ‘Necessity is the mother…etc’
Riding the wave…
Library
Tomorrow
Today
Vendor
Library
Vendor
?
?
?
Be of the web
Websites
Music
Newspapers
Primary Works
Monographs
Journals
How it played out at our company…
Defining the opportunity
• What can Alexander Street do that
• Society (patrons and librarians) need
• Saves librarians money
• Delivers huge value
• Adds value to Google, Wikipedia, YouTube etc…
• Is transformative
• Is relevant across many departments
• Is used by students at all levels
Trend correlation
Trend correlation
Video
Audio
Full-Text Books
Full-Text Journals
Directories
Stock & News
FT Court Cases
Catalogs, Abstract and Indexing databases
1966
1973
1984
1990
1997
2000
2005
15 times faster to read than to watch…
30 minutes of news
12 double spaced pages
5 minutes to read in depth
2 minutes to scan read
Better than YouTube, Google etc…?
Could we…?
• Streaming video collection
• 5,000 titles
• Newsreels, top documentaries,
primary footage
• Scholarly features
• In copyright material
• 400% improvement in productivity?
• Licensing challenges?
• Technology challenges?
Cross-check – if we could does it…
• Save librarians money?
(streaming vs. physical copies)
• Deliver real value?
1,200 titles < $1 per title per year
• Relevant across many departments?
(politics, history, area studies etc)
• High usage across many libraries?
(ARL, college, public)
Results
• Best selling product we’ve ever launched
• 2nd Best selling product we’ve ever launched
Video Encyclopedia of Human Behavior ?
Transformation
• See history as it happened
• View 3,000+ leading academics
• 3,000+ witnesses to history
• Explanations and enthusiasm
• Accessible in seconds
Once you get on the other side you can see more clearly…
Letting go…
Raise the threshold on new titles
Vs
Machine vs. Manual Indexing
• Indexing cost >$500k
• 100k pages
• Largely out of copyright content
• Indexing cost >$200k
• 600k pages
• All in copyright content
Applying skills in new disciplines
Humanities
Humanities & Social Sciences
Collaboration
Linking rather than duplication
• 100,000 pages of in copyright material
• Semantic indexing
• Dictionary of Social Movements
• Manuscript and previously unpublished
• Structured index to Google Books
Much
Better
Value
ASP Value
Google Value
• 30,000 pages of public domain texts
• Keyword search
• Rudimentary indexing
Summary
Option A…hold onto the old
Option B – embrace the new
# of
video
feeds
Source: Mefeedia, 7/09
“It is not necessary to change. Survival
is not mandatory.”
Attributed to W. Edwards Deming