What’s New at Open Book Systems

A publisher recently sought out our advice about “the value question” of offshore production opportunities. He is being courted by a company offering online publishing services at significantly less than the going stateside rate. His local vendor has built up trust with his staff and familiarity with his publications; this value is easy to appreciate but more difficult to quantify. “Where is the best business value for my company?” he asked. To reduce risk and maintain stability, he opted for a blended solution, continuing to rely on the local vendor for in-depth domain knowledge and information services, and experimenting with outsourcing for non-mission-critical tasks with clear specifications, like file tagging and conversion.

He also began to refocus his organizational vision to begin solving his publishing issues enterprise-wide, rather than on a project-by-project basis, by building an infrastructure that can automate repeat tasks across many projects. To facilitate this thinking, we set up a demo to show how adoption of an Open Source Framework solution could help streamline and centralize operations, and reduce costs, while leveraging the distinctly human attributes which “Hal” hasn’t demonstrated yet—knowledge, trust, and a sense of humor.

Following the Fair, we spent a day in Greece in search of the man with the keys to the icebox holding the 5,300-year-old Eismann or “Oetzi,” a mummy with perhaps the oldest intact human DNA on the planet, discovered in 1991 by tourists in a melting glacier in Tyrol, Austria, back when global warming wasn’t yet a household phrase. Oetzi died wearing a woven grass cloak, and shoes made partially of bearskin and grass and made with such sophistication that some are considering commercial production today. He carried a wooden backpack and some Bronze Age weaponry. Apparently his 57 tattoos were not so much decorative in nature as indicating an early form of acupuncture to address his physical ailments.

Back then, Oetzi seemed to us to be the perfect subject for an online publishing project, as interest in the ancient mountain climber crosses many disciplines—anthropology, biology, politics, medicine, climatology, ancient history, general trade—and can be explored in many media. In the early 90s, the Oetzi trail led to Innsbruck, where international scholars gathered around the mummy. He’s moved to Italy now, and many continue to research Oetzi, despite what some call a mummy’s curse (see the BBC’s coverage of the “curse”) that has claimed 7 of those close to Oetzi. Our own plans to pursue the project by contacting a doctor with a key to the icebox ran aground when we learned that Professor Friedrich Tiefenbrunner of Innsbruck had recently died. However, we hope someone out there will revive the idea.

On arriving in Frankfurt, Germany, for our 20th Frankfurt Book Fair, culture shock first manifested itself in the pocketbook. A $50 Travelers Check cashed in at the on-site bank returned 26 euros, enough for lunch and a postcard. Our apartment’s landlady requested cash up front. We haven’t experienced the dollar’s loss in value quite so much at home yet!

The balance has shifted in other ways as well. As part of the Digital Marketplace, we were one of three American companies among the more than 20 exhibitors, a major shift from earlier years, when U.S. companies had more prominent presence. After three solid days of manning the stand, one of us reported having had just one conversation with someone whose first language was English.

Building the online infrastructure is turning out to be a worldwide effort running on fast-forward! Much of the implementation work (such as software engineering and design, customization of open-source software, file conversion, search engine optimization, and customer support) is offered by relatively new players, many from the Subcontinent, offering substantial economies both in terms of hourly rate and in scale (four companies we spoke to each had approximately 400 employees and could turn a one-off customization into a new software feature with great speed and economy). The value of a lower hourly rate is hard to quantify in terms of amount and quality of work done, but clearly international production teams are becoming the norm.

In the online arena, the “content imperative”—the drive that ideas have to find and serve their readers in whatever medium possible—offers a new competitive arena for publishers where, increasingly, they share an infrastructure with which to publish their content. The Frankfurt market was hot for U.S. publishers selling content, particularly among medical and STM publishers we spoke to, who reported greatly increased sub rights and overseas licensing deals initiated by publishers and new, nontraditional e-publishing players.

Beyond the Fairgrounds, one of the biggest changes we noted: “No Smoking” signs have sprouted in airports and restaurants. In the Bahnhof, yellow boxes on the platforms indicate smoking zones between trains. In recent years, graffiti—once unheard of in Germany—has begun to mark some of the trains, which are not always as punctual as in earlier years.

We took one train out to Butzbach, where one of us spent childhood years on an Army base, and found the scores of buildings recently abandoned, yet in excellent repair, and guarded by occasional pairs of German police officers, as well as the occasional woman with a baby carriage. Along streets named after states—Texas, New Jersey, Massachusetts—the school and the PX sat behind padlocks and barbed wire. This fit into a postcard motif that was new this year: “Then and Now.” The “Then” shows Frankfurt in 1947, the bombed-out ruins in black and white; the “Now” shows new and strong Frankfurt in full color.

We have participated actively in the fair since 1992, when OBS brought the first Internet link to the Frankfurt Book Fair, and over the years have delivered papers and online projects there as well:

• “A Penny for your Thoughts: Copyright into Cogniright”
• “Internet Publishing in a Borderless Environment: Bookworms into Butterflies”
• We planned, built and implemented the world’s first “Internet Rights Auction (TIRA)” in cooperation with the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1996

Online publishing represents a qualitative change in publishing, not just another file format. It is changing the way we communicate, think, write, and do business. It remains to be determined how this sudden and mass migration of our recorded culture to an intangible, online environment will affect global literacy, the bedrock of the publishing industry. What does it mean for book publishing, for example, when people communicate by beaming photos and iPod tunes to one another, text messaging each other with their thumbs while driving a car, instead of giving undivided concentration, attention, and thought to the acts of reading and writing? OBS attends Frankfurt this year to learn how our peers worldwide are responding to our rapidly unfolding online metamorphosis, and to share what we have learned after 25 years of e-publishing.