Pedalling away on the exercise bike in the hotel gym here in New York I found myself watching this on the TV. Somehow it captures my frequent sufferings at the hands of mobile technology.
New York is looking great in beautiful May weather and the Flatiron Building which houses most of our US-based colleagues is looking close to its best after much renovation.
The only problem is that city appears to be overrun by British publishers. For instance, I bumped into sixteen visitors in the Palgrave Macmillan offices from small Northern British independent publishers such as Carcanet Press here to learn more about the American market and to visit Book Expo America ('Where the world gathers to get a great READ on the industry' - yuk). It was an intelligent and lively bunch of committed publishers but I found myself wondering (in a disgusted of Tonbridge Wells sort of way) why the North-West Regional Development Agency was spending British taxpayers' money on subsidising these very competent publishing people to discover America. It's a strange old world.
The other large and visible contingent comes from Google who are, as ever, telling the publishing industry and the world at large how lucky we are to be helped by them. There is an excellent piece about the recently-launched Google Universal in the latest Outsell newsletter (terrible branding for what used to be the clearly-labelled Electronic Publishing News). Here are the last two paragraphs for a flavour and a warning to publishers.
And in this lies the opportunity for other search engines and publishers as well. Google´s apparent abandonment of a vertical approach appears to open a door for others who are working on honing down their results to address a narrower field of content – be it based on subject, content type, or locale. But complacency here is not advised. Google will be applying the full force of its engineering to hone algorithms to decipher this vertical intent all from one screen. The opportunity for others to gain new users is now, before these results are improved significantly enough to keep some narrower audiences from looking around.
Yet amid this short term opportunity is perhaps an even greater threat. What Google´s new universal search provides is ultimately a platform for aggregating disparate pieces of information and displaying them in a unified view tailored to an individual´s unique needs. In short, it plants the seeds for Google to become an agile publisher and one that is able to cross nearly every type of content and medium. And it gets worse. With this change, searchers are now being exposed to pay-per-click (PPC) advertisements alongside web results that include video and news. This is a significant development as previous concerns over Google´s approach to copyright were largely quieted because the company did not run display ads along those sites like News and YouTube which caused the most concern. That line was quietly crossed last week by monetizing all web content – regardless of copyright - and the debate will now rest entirely on the definition of fair use. If publishers do not act aggressively now, they may soon be faced with a very large direct competitor able to monetize content it does not pay to produce.