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Never mind the content … (2)

25 September 2009 in Law publishing

Paul Graham, an essayist and successful entrepreneur, pens a very interesting piece on Post-Medium Publishing which is worth reading in full (hat tip John Naughton). He opens:

consumers never really were paying for content, and publishers weren’t really selling it either. If the content was what they were selling, why has the price of books or music or movies always depended mostly on the format? Why didn’t better content cost more?

We didn’t (don’t) buy fiction and non-fiction, we bought books; not news, but newspapers; not music and movies, but encased CDs and DVDs. Publishers play to our desire for better packaging and/or our perception that bigger and better packaged products are more valuable: hardcovers command a premium over paperbacks; DVD cases are larger than CD jewel cases. It’s easy to see this working in the mass market. But in business and professional markets, where there is a compelling need (rather than desire) for the content and/or a relative scarcity of content creators and publishers, the content:packaging value ratio increases.

So it is with law books. Lawyers need up-to-date reference texts; the market is small and there were hitherto relatively few authors willing to put the time in to creating content and relatively few publishers willing to invest in its dissemination. So law books have always been expensive – several times more than equivalently-packaged consumer books.

Enter the internet which has enlarged the market, enabled more authors and more publishers and driven the marginal cost of producing copies to near zero. What price content now? Has the emperor been denuded of his clothes?

The physical packaging has gone, but there is still a relative scarcity of good authors and good publishers – just because anyone can do it, does not mean that anyone can do it well. There is value in the packaging, but that packaging is about how content is edited, combined, organised and presented. Despite the physical apparel, that is what publishing has always been about.

Those are my thoughts. As to what forms these new packages will take, Paul concludes:

The reason I’ve been writing about existing forms is that I don’t know what new forms will appear. But though I can’t predict specific winners, I can offer a recipe for recognizing them. When you see something that’s taking advantage of new technology to give people something they want that they couldn’t have before, you’re probably looking at a winner. And when you see something that’s merely reacting to new technology in an attempt to preserve some existing source of revenue, you’re probably looking at a loser.

PS. More on content/packaging from Scott Karp.

Never mind the content, feel the packaging

18 August 2009 in Business, Publishing | 3 comments

So, Rupert Murdoch has declared that News International sites will all start charging for content by next summer. What he actually said was he was satisfied that News International could produce “significant revenues from the sale of digital delivery of newspaper content”, that “we intend to charge for all our news websites” and “make our content better and differentiate it from other people”.

He hasn’t got where he is by announcing his plans in advance and I don’t think this announcement is an exception. It signals an intention but says nothing about the plans. He talks broadly – as most commentators also do – of “content”, when he fully understands the substantial differences between news, comment, reviews, features, serialised fiction, crosswords, recipes, agony aunt columns, … And what does “charge for a website” mean? He knows that clumsy, broad paywalls are a non-starter.

For any pay-to-view charging system to succeed it’s going to have to be sophisticated in its pricing and completely painless for the user. The overwhelming consensus is that no-one’s going to pay for news which is abundant elsewhere and not sufficiently differentiable. Some argue that comment and analysis have sufficient value, but the only proven cases are for business-critical content (Wall Street Journal and Financial Times). The only one sure way you’re going to get people to pay to view is to provide content that is either unique or otherwise unavailable for free elsewhere.

But there’s another way to differentiate your content – to create value – and that’s in the packaging.

Back in 2001 News International introduced charges for its crossword on Times Online, with a £10 annual fee; that’s now not just crosswords online but the Crossword Club, giving access to more than 9,000 puzzles and a host of member benefits – for £4.95 a month or £12.95 a year. That may be generating small beer for the Times, but it is based on just a tiny fraction of the the Times’ content. There are plenty more examples like this where news sites are already generating revenue from their content – but most commentators seem completely blind to them.

There’s no end to the number of packages, large and small, that news publishers could dream up, serving particular niches, and most will have a far higher perceived value than the simple online delivery of their base content.

Blowing it

8 April 2009 in Publishing

Plenty to ponder about the future not just of the established news industry but also of other old media players in this post from Jeff Jarvis and the numerous comments:

You’ve had all that time to reinvent your products, services, and organizations for this new world, to take advantage of new opportunities and efficiencies, to retrain not only your staff but your readers and advertisers, to use the power of your megaphones while you still had it to build what would come next. But you didn’t. You blew it.

Not a problem

18 March 2009 in Law publishing | 6 comments

Clay Shirky eloquently states the problem facing the newspaper industry:

People committed to saving newspapers [are] demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.

With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves – the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public – has stopped being a problem.

With advertising revenues nosediving, proprietors are culling journalists to maintain profit margins but with no clear idea of how to make the web pay.

The need to find new business models that work in the digital age may be less urgent in other publishing sectors, but it is no less important. Many of the services offered by the incumbent law publishers were designed to meet needs that the web (of increasingly open and inter-connected information) is now better able to serve in new ways, and they have consequently been experiencing a steady decline in subscriptions as users opt for alternative, more appropriate, lower cost or free services.

Responses assume the old model still has relevance; some are misguided or even suicidal: pricing up existing services, developing more walled gardens, establishing me-too communities and diversifying away from their core competencies. For how much longer can they continue to ramp up prices to maintain profits? How long before free access not just to primary law sources and news, but also to quality guidance and commentary, seriously undermine the viability of their business? How long before they acknowledge that the 20th century law publishing model is broken?

They are putting on a brave face in the face of the storm, still reporting profits and professing confidence in their products. One wouldn’t expect otherwise. The problem is, as Shirky says, that publishing is no longer a problem. We are all publishers now.

The future law book is not a book

3 March 2009 in ebooks | 3 comments

Considering whether we were experiencing the beginning of the end of print, I ended my previous post with the prediction that the law text book would be the last print format left standing (after journals, law reports, looseleafs).

I stand by that. The printed (and bound) book is wonderful information package, designed 500 years ago and changed not a lot since then. We love books – their look, their feel, their portability, their associations. It will be a long, long time before they become an endangered species.

Even the law book will die slowly. But what would accelerate its decline? What is the future law book? Scott Vine and Jordan Furlong have offered their thoughts.

Scott loves books as above and sees the lawyer of the future carrying an e-book reader, holding all the texts (s)he might need but preserving the look and feel of the print versions.

But we know that law books are different. The law changes constantly and the book cannot much longer usefully continue to function as a staple form of reference. So Jordan adds a lot of spice to the future law book, envisaging:

a dynamic, full-scale legal knowledge portal – 24/7 Net-connected, automatically updated, linked to a community of writers and readers, plugged in to a collaborative legal knowledge world well beyond the written word

Sounds good, but, unless I misread him, he’s still talking about a book … with legs. Why would the digital future of the law book be the “book”. There are few law books that are designed to be read from cover to cover; they are reference books, generally dipped into to extract relatively small chunks of information. Authors and publishers are justly proud of the packages they produce, but we readers are not wedded to the law book in the same way.

So, in looking to the future, I ask myself questions like these: Is Wikipedia a book? Is Brittanica? How much longer will we want to shepherd our “own” libraries (think iPod with iTunes) if we can have serviced access to all libraries (check out Spotify)?

The answers lead me to this conclusion: the future of the law book is not the e-book and the platform is not the e-book reader. The web is the platform and if we put on the right pair of glasses we see the future of the law book already taking shape: it is all those web services that are not books and that do not try to replicate them. Soon we’ll be able to hook into that library with whatever device we fancy.

Update: Abracadabra! We now we have Kindle by iPhone but, unsurprisingly, it sucks for non-linear reading.

The end of print?

25 February 2009 in Law publishing | 6 comments

We’ve been here before and each time the answer is no. There’s too much in favour of print to bury it prematurely.

However, we know that particular types of print are under severe threat. The continuing decline of newsprint in particular is well documented.

But what of legal publications? Law journals, particularly the scholarly, look set for an early grave. According to a recent report on Law Review Circulation by Ross E. Davies of George Mason University School of Law, per Inside Higher Ed, the circulation of Harvard Law Review, for example, has declined from 8,760 in 1980 through 4,367 in 1998 to 2,610 in 2008. That’s a whopping 70% decline over the longer period and 40% in the last 10 years.

As if natural attrition wasn’t enough, Law Librarian Blog reports on the 11 February Durham Statement on Open Access to Legal Scholarship signed by a dozen leading US law profs who are actively calling for the end:

The undersigned believe that it will benefit legal education and improve the dissemination of legal scholarly information if law schools commit to making the legal scholarship they publish available in stable, open, digital formats in place of print. … If stable, open, digital formats are available, law schools should stop publishing law journals in print and law libraries should stop acquiring print law journals. We believe that, in addition to their other benefits, these changes are particularly timely in light of the financial challenges currently facing many law schools.

The current economic downturn will also spell the end for many other print publications that have been struggling to show a profit. In a recent poll the Law Librarian Blog found that 89% of respondent law librarians (42% law firm, 40% academic, 14% public) had already experienced or were expecting budget cuts averaging 10%. 82% of the cuts were expected to be applied to their collections budgets – implying an average collections cut of 7% or so. Given how the economy is tanking, that 7% cut looks highly optimistic to me.

And where are those cutbacks going to bite most? Where online equivalents are already paid for out of the budget or where free access materials might substitute, print will suffer severely. For me that says an acceleration in the decline of printed law reports, looseleaf encyclopedias and periodicals.

What will be left? Why the practice book, shorn of all appendices. That’s where the enduring value is.

Law publishing at the crossroads

25 November 2008 in Articles, Law publishing

First Published in the Solicitors Journal, November 2008. Also published in Legal Information Management Vol 9 No 3 2009.

In the current climate of increasingly rapid technological change and upheavals in the legal profession, are law firms’ legal information needs being adequately met by law publishers? And what does the future hold, particularly as we descend into severe economic recession?

The publishing revolution

I have been fortunate to have been involved at first hand in the entire modern publishing revolution. When I first started out in law publishing, authors produced copy on manual typewriters, editors used pens and literal cut and paste to hack it into shape, typesetters set the copy in movable lead type or “slugs” and made it up to page in print trays, and then the presses rolled. So there had not been much progress in 500 years!

Today, as an author and publisher myself, I mostly write in “the cloud” and when I hit “Publish” my posts or articles are automatically styled, made up to page and published instantly on the web, potentially to a global audience (blush!); they are distributed automatically to subscribers via RSS and some of those subscribers will perhaps (automatically again) repurpose and republish them elsewhere. That’s incredible publishing efficiency: all I do to achieve it is push a button!

But publishing is concerned with more than the production and distribution processes; it is about researching market needs, developing products and services to meet those needs and bringing those to market. Now the web – Web 2.0 in particular – has rewritten all the rules. All aspects of the publishing process are now more accessible to more people and that has redefined markets and the relationships between publishers and users. With Web 2.0 we are all publishers now. That poses substantial challenges for the dominant publishers, who are no longer master of all they survey and must now to a large extent reinvent themselves to maintain their leading position, and it offers substantial opportunities to the smaller incumbents and the rest of us who carry with us little baggage.

The law publishers

Fifteen short years ago one could easily identify “the law publishers” and just about count them on ones own digits. Those publishers almost all continue in business today, though with changes of ownership along the way. Then we had the long-established big two: Butterworths (now LexisNexis Butterworths, part of Reed) and Sweet & Maxwell (now part of Thomson Reuters and including Westlaw and Lawtel); we had other large publishers with substantial law lists like Longman Law, Tax & Finance (formerly part of Pearson, bought by Sweet & Maxwell), Kluwer and CCH (now both part of Kluwer); and we had a number of independents specialising in a particular area like ICLR (law reports), Jordans (company, but now with a broad list) and OUP Law (academic). Notably we also then had digital-only Context (now Justis), the only electronic publisher of any significance at the time apart from Lexis/Butterworths.

Then along came the web. We now have hundreds of publishers addressing the market: the big two are still dominant; but other niche players like PLC, Complinet and Emplaw have carved out a market; the other previously-established publishers all have web presences; innovative new web start-ups abound; and in the mix we also have a huge corpus of free primary law from OPSI, the Statute Law Database, BAILII and other sources and many thousands of law firms and individual lawyers who publish legal guidance and commentaries for free access on their websites.

This fragmentation of the market and increased competition forced the big two to change strategic direction around the turn of the millennium. LexisNexis and Thomson have now developed diverse portfolios of products for the legal profession largely through acquisition. LexisNexis has gone further in rationalising its business, selling off to Tottel Publishing in 2004 a large chunk of its book and journal lists which did not have sufficient online potential.

Meeting law firm needs

One might assume that, with the vast range of choice now available, law firms’ needs are being met. That’s certainly true in terms of quantity: never before has so much legal information been published by so many. And I don’t think we can gripe about product quality: standards amongst the commercial publishers remain high for all but the more dubious of start-ups. But as law publishing has become easier and web use more pervasive, so have users become more demanding.

At the top end, larger law firms’ needs largely dictate the strategic direction of the big two publishers, and those needs are ever more exacting. But throughout the market there are criticisms of the duo: of arrogance, unhealthy price maintenance and deficiencies in customer service. Meanwhile the newer and smaller players – more nimble and more responsive – go from strength to strength … until, often, purchased by one of the duo!

In a recent (early September) article in Information World Review, Tim Buckley Owen spoke to those on both sides about the alleged duopoly – imposing “rigidity and lack of creativity” – and the likely effects of the current economic downturn. With rather rose-tinted spectacles, Simon Drane, head of knowledge solutions at LexisNexis, saw that “as customers experience our new or improved products and better customer service, we are finding that the cost of the products and services they regard as fundamental to their business is less of a talking point.” But it’s crunch time; with budgets now being rapidly tightened, firms are scaling down subscriptions, choosing between the two major players and negotiating reductions in the cost of information – at a time when supplier costs are rising.

So much for the larger firm. The smaller firm simply cannot afford these headline legal information services and for them even stock-in-trade textbooks are moving out of reach, with looseleaf works and CD equivalents typically costing several hundred pounds a year to maintain and slimmer practice books (sometimes bundled with a “free” CD of documents) mostly priced in three figures too. Publishers’ prices for these products have typically been regularly increased by double the rate of inflation in recent years in a desperate attempt to maintain the bottom line, which short-termism is bound to hasten their end.

So the small and sole practitioner increasingly relies on free and low cost or supermarket-style web services to complement dwindling hard copy subscriptions or even to replace them entirely. And the larger firms – despite much larger budgets – are making similar choices.

Free services

According to the ABA’s annual Legal Technology Survey Report published in September 2008, based on responses from approximately 850 lawyers country-wide, the number of US lawyers using free online legal research services (89 per cent) has, for the first time, overtaken the number using for-fee services (87 per cent). That does not tell us how many rely on free services: where is no contractual obligation to provide a particular level of service, those that can afford to be discerning may well opt to continue to rely on paid-for services.

A good example of this is provided by the Statute Law Database. While this is a huge boon to many, it is not yet complete: a small number of Acts remain to be loaded and the effects of much recent legislation are not yet consolidated. There is also some anecdotal evidence that it is not entirely accurate. This may be as a result of its incompleteness, but even so, the impression it leaves with some is that it is currently unreliable. Together these two shortcomings are the killer for the larger firms and chambers with sufficient budget to subscribe to LexisNexis or Westlaw or a more specialist service such as Complinet: there is no question that the commercial services still prevail. However, for the smaller firm and the individual barrister, for whom the big two commercial services are not an option, the SLD is winning the day, albeit with reservations.

Many smaller firms will also increasingly rely on free web services to track and follow up on recent developments in their area of practice. A good example of such a service is Family Law Week which provides free access to all the latest family law news, judgments, analysis and legislation. Typical of such a service, content is provided free as revenue is generated through online CPD training and advertising.

The commercial law publishing incumbents are not going to wither any time soon from such competition, but the freeing up of legal information (through BAILII, the Statute Law Database and the public sector in general) will begin to have significant impact as the potential for leveraging and adding value to that information is better developed. At present LexisNexis and Westlaw win and retain business not just because they provide comprehensive access to up-to-date law, but because of their valuable added commentary and other features. Marry the increasing amount of independent commentary from the web with the free comprehensive and up-to-date source materials and they will start to hurt.

Web 2.0

Web 2.0 has revolutionised publishing. Technologies like blogs, wikis and RSS have made the publishing process so easy that countless millions are now publishers and yet more millions are contributors. And no longer is publishing simply about broadcasting a message one to many; with the facility for users to respond and contribute, publishing is also about engaging with users, conversing with them and eliciting their contributions.

Use of Web 2.0 is the norm for the new breed of small law publishers. The larger incumbents are finally responding: attempting to engage users through blogs and comment facilities for their articles; developing communities dedicated to specific practice areas, such as Company Law Forum from LexisNexis and MyComplinet from Complinet; and networking with student and other communities on social networks like Facebook. They are also belatedly widely offering RSS feeds – what I would regard as essential modern plumbing – to provide current awareness for many of their services.

But use of Web 2.0 services is still the exception rather than the rule amongst lawyers. According to the ABA survey (above), news websites (79 per cent) and email newsletters (59 per cent) continue to far outrank other media for receiving legal information such as intranets (30 per cent), blogs (27 per cent) and RSS feeds (10 per cent).

The Power of Information and the FreeLegalWeb

There has in the past 18 months been a sea change in the Government’s attitude to the provision of public sector information and the encouragement of user-generated services supporting government. In particular, the independent Power of Information Review recommended changes that have been substantially accepted by the Government, who, through the Power of Information Task Force are now committed to making this happen.

In the field of law we are fortunate that OPSI is both a member of the Taskforce, with responsibility to “encourage, inform, facilitate and reassure both departments and site creators”, and is also the body responsible for publishing legislation. OPSI is in the process of merging the OPSI legislation and SLD sites and developing a programming interface that will improve direct access to legislation down to the smallest fragment.

Encouraged by these developments and enthused by a vision similar to that articulated in 2006 by Richard Susskind, I recently initiated the FreeLegalWeb project which aims to “join up” free law and independent legal commentary on the web. Now shortlisted for the Task Force’s ShowUsABetterWay competition, the project should shortly be under way in earnest. Follow the blog for latest news and to see how you can contribute.

In praise of editors

29 October 2008 in Law publishing | 2 comments

In the The end of the story – as we know it in Guardian Media Jeff Jarvis republishes the argument in his earlier blog post that The building block of journalism is no longer the article.

Single posts, videos, Wikipedia entries or search results may be new building blocks of media, but we need order atop them. … We have many tools to work with now, first and foremost the link. … Still, we need magnetic poles to gather news around and organise it. If not the article or brand or the happy coincidence of links, then what? I think that the new unit of journalism needs to be the topic. …

I want a page, a site, a something that is created, curated, edited and discussed. It will include articles. But it’s also a blog that treats a topic as an ongoing and cumulative process of learning, digging, correcting, asking, answering. It’s a wiki that keeps a snapshot of the latest knowledge and background. It’s an aggregator that provides curated and annotated links to experts, coverage from elsewhere, a mix of opinion and source material. Finally, it’s a discussion that doesn’t just blather but tries to add value. It’s collaborative and distributed and open but organised.

Sounds to me like he’s calling for the application of skills that have been rather dismissed in the deluge of news and blogs that has so unsettled news publishers and journalists and the clever algorithms that automatically calculate relevance. Those who “create, curate and edit” something more substantial, cohesive and longer-lasting than a collection of relevant news stories are known as editors and publishers. There is immense value in the (human) evaluation, ordering, categorisation and improvement of “content” (formerly known as “publishing”) and only now that the web is seen as too messy are the Jeff Jarvises realising that. Google realises it too.

Are you being served?

27 October 2008 in Law publishing | 3 comments

I’ve been asked – and I ask you as I have some difficulty with the question: What are law firms’ needs when it comes to legal publishing? And to what extent are those needs being met by the legal publishing companies?

My difficulties with the question are twofold. Firstly, who and what are “legal publishing companies”? 15 years ago this was an easy one to answer, but now they range from the two giants to the smallest new web startup. We would automatically class LexisNexis and Thomson/Westlaw as “legal publishing” companies, but they are are more than that, with diverse portfolios of products for the legal profession; and at the other end of the scale, is every small player with a useful law-related web service a “legal publisher”?

My second problem is that law firms’ needs range from the requirements of the top 100 who largely dictate the strategic direction of the big two publishers, through to those of the sole practitioner who increasingly rely on free and low cost web services.

So I rather think I will have to limit myself to trying to answer the question, are your legal information needs being met? and to posing some more specific questions: Are you getting the legal information you need the way you want it and at an affordable price? Where are the (larger/trad) legal information publishers going wrong? What type of (smaller/new) services do you find more relevant to your needs? To what extent do you now rely on free legal information?

Answers please!

Not a plug for Lexis Web

17 October 2008 in Law publishing, Search | 7 comments

Tried out the (US) Lexis Web beta search engine yet? It indexes “important, legal-oriented Web content selected and validated by the LexisNexis editorial staff”, including

  • Governmental agency information (federal, state, local)
  • Informal commentary on legal issues (e.g., blogs specifically for lawyers and legal professionals)
  • General Web information about legal topics

At first it seems quite natty, with good, relevant result sets. Of course its US bias means it’s not that much use to us here, though it does index many UK blawgs.

You can filter the result set using the widgets on the left by Legal Topic, Subject, Geography, Industry, Citations, Companies, People and Keywords. Sound good? Well, it doesn’t seem to work that well in practice: eg under people, Obama, Bush and Blair seem to pop up a lot for my searches, and under Keywords, Cialis and Viagra! So more work is definitely needed there.

A complete no-no for me is that the linked pages are framed within the site.

You’ll have to check out the User Guide (PDF) to understand what’s going on.

And will it be free to use? Ominously “During the beta offer, we encourage you to use Lexis Web when you’re conducting a search for information, and all search activities will be available to you free of charge.”

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