Jesse Wiley on how a 200+ year-old company evolves with the econtent world

Thanks, Joe.

Sure. We've learned a lot, I think, and we'll continue to. In addition to the consumer brands, we also have a lot of long-running professional and academic brands, which obviously are different but also run into different considerations. And even in the trade book world, outside of the branded stuff, we kind of think of our authors and partners as brands in themselves, so we're always kind of thinking about that in the digital world. But I think we're definitely learning that some things that you do in the print world don't transfer over to the online or ebook world, and some of the things that you do now are totally different than what we've done in the past. One of the obvious things is, as bookstores become less and less of a channel, you don't have an opportunity to have your brand physically represented in a store the way it has been in the past. So when customers would go into a brick-and-mortar store, they'd look around, see on the shelf if you have a very distinct recognizable brand, find your book, and if they'd read the books before and had a good experience, they might right away recognize that brand. I think in the online world, you can do that to a certain extent, but it's definitely not the same. The other aspect is internal design and graphic challenges with ebooks. I think we're going through this transition stage where a lot of ebook designs, or design in general from the print world, is basically being crammed into the ebook format. I'm sure you've seen and other people have noticed a lot of complaints on that end. I think that's definitely a challenge, but it's also an opportunity because with the new kind of functionality that ebooks bring and ebook readers bring, we have an opportunity to do all these things that we never could before in terms of adding links, video, enhancements, and all that kind of stuff. So it's both a challenge and an opportunity. I think one of the other things is not just the ebook itself, but the kind of online shopping, which obviously affects print too, not just ebooks. The customer behavior changes driven by the way people find and discover books are having an impact too. And then of course, if you think about the brand less literally and more about the experience in general, I think the online world has created a place where consumers have a lot more power and input. They can knock your brand, they can promote your brand. So figuring out ways to both address concerns when customers have concerns and also encourage them to promote your brand when they appreciate it through things like social media and stuff like that are a big opportunity.

Right, right, exactly. Yeah, I can see that has changed a huge deal. You really have to be able to represent something in a thumbnail, which before, obviously when the customer gets the book they can see it in full size, but being able to notice it at that small of a size, you can see the print, the font sizes, and the text on cover is changing. Obviously the emphasis is more now just on that front cover versus the whole jacket.

Yeah, we've had a lot. Like a lot of publishers, there's been a huge increase lately. I can speak most about the Jossey-Bass and Pfeiffer imprints because I work most closely with those, but I think some of the stuff we're doing there is representative across the company, across the world, and also across the different publishing we do. This last fall we launched a product under our Pfeiffer imprint, which is for training and leadership development, called Pfeiffer Custom. Custom publishing has kind of been a theme across a bunch of different businesses. It's basically a platform that allows customers to customize their training using our content and adding their own, kind of designing their own curriculum, so to speak. We also have something similar in our higher education business, and we're now working across our businesses. With Jossey-Bass, we're putting content onto this custom publishing platform, creating special collections, which the outputs get delivered in both ebook and print, so it's kind of a hybrid world. We've also launched a series of community-focused websites. Community as in focusing on the different professional markets that we serve. We've got one that just launched a couple weeks ago actually called NonprofitCommunity.com. There's a lot of free content on there derived from our books or adapted from books, but also other content taken from other sites on the web. It's also leveraging our author networks and creating a place that's more like a destination and less like a catalog site, which you guys at O'Reilly are obviously familiar with and have been doing for years. We've also got tons of apps. As a company, we've got many hundreds—I can't even keep track anymore—of apps out there. I just got through working on a handful of marketing-focused apps that have free content adapted from our books. They've got lots of different social media tools created to help share content, different website feeds. These new websites we're creating, we're feeding content with RSS into the apps. We're also developing some assessment apps, mostly around leadership, which is a category for us. Apps that actually assess leaders and based on their scores, we'll give them advice on how to improve. Some of the other things we're doing include virtual events, not similar to this but more kind of scripted online events where we have products, not just marketing but more like a professional development experience, an online learning experience where we're bringing customers directly to our authors and helping them engage. They can ask questions, so there's presentation and answers. We've got a new business that we're building, it's already existing, where we do professional development for faculty at universities. We're developing a robust offering that has both some live stuff and some recorded stuff that will help academics do their jobs better. We've also got, speaking of brands, we've got franchises that we call them around big bestselling books that have developed into multiple product types. We've got something called The Leadership Challenge, which was a book first published 25 years ago, but we have a whole franchise of products around that. We've got a very robust online assessment, a web application, not an app, where it's a leadership assessment tool that's very built out with all different kinds of tools and different observers that can test you, and you get your scores aggregated. We've got all this data that we're collecting. We've also got an e-learning program, like an online course connected to that as well.

Yeah, it varies by market and customer type. Obviously the markets that are more adopting technology, we've got more going on, but that's representative. E-learning, apps, all the different ebook formats. We're doing enhanced ebooks, which don't seem to be taking off in a huge way yet, but obviously even this Christmas is going to be a big turning point for tablets and that kind of stuff.

Yeah, it's a challenge, but it's also an opportunity. Trying to stay flexible when you start to get bigger is always a challenge, so it's an ongoing thing. But in the middle of transition, it's harder. We're doing the things that I think will situate us to be around for a bit longer, at least. We're continually reorganizing our people and our businesses to adjust to the markets, which I think is essential. Things are changing so fast, you can't just expect what worked even a year ago to work tomorrow. I think aligning motivation for growth, especially digital, is good, and we're doing that by adapting our incentive plans for editors and stuff like that. Obviously investing in the technology itself, but also the supporting capabilities that make technology work, like project management, are important. We're also developing better feedback loops with customers, getting closer to customers in general. Even for a bigger company, that's just as important or even more so—being able to gather feedback and then react, develop, and adapt your projects as needed in a quick way. We're working a lot more on that. Those websites I mentioned will be a great tool for that, being able to actually gauge people on what their feelings are about the products and make adjustments.

Yeah, I definitely think a lot about it. It's a challenge. I'm a big fan of Clay as well—we actually just published his latest book—so I think his ideas are definitely pertinent to publishing. But like I said, this is a challenge for our industry, not just company by company. You guys are facing it too. I think the reality is that while there's still a decent print business, we still need to do both. In a way, the print success is funding the new business, so it's a balance. A lot of it has to do with balance and timing. When do you make that shift exactly? When do you give up on this type of product and invest in that type of product? It's an ongoing balance. Watching the cues in the market and customer behavior—obviously we're all watching this huge growth in ebooks, and at what point is that replacing print sales? There are certain places where it looks like it's on top. Timing that and paying close attention, so we're doing a lot of monitoring, I guess you would say. Another thing is learning to fail, which is not always an established concept in publishing. But in the technology world, as you know, innovation is built on doing pilots, testing, learning to fail, expecting to fail, and learning from both the successes and the failures. I mentioned incentives—changing incentives changes people's behavior, and you get a lot changed pretty quick. Developing capabilities—innovation is obviously idea creation, but there's also implementation. There's no shortage of good ideas; sometimes the challenge is implementing those good ideas. So we're definitely focused on developing those capabilities to implement good ideas, because that's where you really find out if they can work or not.

Right, and like I said, literally expect and plan to fail. We'll do these five pilots, and we know three of them won't work and two of them will. It's almost getting that philosophy down before you even start.

I think it's going to be very important. As we said, getting closer to customers is essential for any business, and especially for the publishing business now. Technology has enabled everyone to potentially sell in a way. It's a challenge as well with bigger companies, especially because we're still attached to our partners and our distributors, so it starts to be a balance. But I think there are ways to do both. You can go direct, but you can't completely go direct. We're in that transition phase. But I think it's essential to start developing ways to get close to your customers, get that feedback loop going, and develop those relationships, because that's what's going to keep us going forward.

Right, and that's the thing. It's getting that idea with the whole ecosystem that no one person necessarily owns the customer. So how do we share in that? How do we innovate together?

Yeah, it's an interesting one. A lot of people worry about it, but so far it hasn't worried me a lot. In fact, I think there definitely are some possibilities with self-publishing and challenges that it brings, but I think it's actually given us as publishers a way to reestablish our value proposition in a way. I've also seen us and other publishers benefiting from it. I know we've picked up a bunch of books and authors that have been self-published. They go to market, and once they get proven a little bit, we take them in and then build them up to a whole other level, so that's actually benefited us. I think we're looking into, and I've seen other people look at, actually selling self-publishing services. I think you can do that in custom publishing too, so it's actually getting us into that business to a certain extent ourselves. But in terms of proving our value, let's be honest, there's a lot of not-so-great self-published stuff out there too. There's definitely a good portion, or a decent portion, that is good, but with that there's a bunch of bad stuff. So it actually gives us the opportunity to show the value that we add in terms of curation, our editorial knowledge of things that we've done for years, for hundreds of years. But some people don't understand it, and when you start to compare it to some of the bad self-published stuff out there, people say, 'Wow, there really is a value here.' Even when it comes to things like copy editing, I've seen big differences.

I can see that. In terms of the custom publishing stuff we've done, a lot of it allows customers to add their own content. But I could see us working with other people where they could add other self-published content in a way. It gets tricky because you want to make sure your brand is strong, so you don't want to just accept anything. But there are ways to mash up content in different ways. If the customers are interested, there's an opportunity there.

Definitely an iPad. It's not that I think Kindle's not a good product, but I'm not really a fiction reader, and I haven't been a cover-to-cover type reader in a long time. I kind of got into e-reading with the first iPad. I'd already been reading a lot online obviously, but I love the first iPad and the second one too. My wife has a Nook Color, which I think is a great value for what it does. And I'm looking forward to seeing what Amazon comes out with in the fall.

Yeah, well, I use the Kindle apps on the Apple devices, so in a sense I use them that way, but not the actual hardware.

Yeah, a lot of things catch my eye. The reality is I actually tend to look a little bit more outside the industry than in, because I think a lot of the great innovation is going on there. Not only is great innovation, but it's really thinking about publishing completely different, not just what our traditional competitors are doing, but more what our competitors of the future are doing. So I try to look at that. One of the things that impressed me not that long ago was the Al Gore 'Our Choice' app, done by Push Pop Press. It really touched on the capabilities and functionality that an app can bring. I thought it was a very well-designed and executed product. I was kind of sad when they got bought by Facebook because it doesn't seem like they're going to continue doing that kind of work with publishers like us; it's probably going to be more something they develop for Facebook users, but we'll see. There's things like Wolfram Alpha that have been very impressive to me, and even further down that spectrum in terms of artificial intelligence, IBM's Watson, which is amazing. You wouldn't normally think of these as traditional digital publishing, but I think they're pretty interesting. Not to brag about our own stuff, but we have a really cool app that I use all the time called 'How to Cook Everything,' which is a brand to us almost, but it's a very functional cooking app that has all kinds of tools that go along with it. I like to cook, so I use that a lot. In terms of platforms, I mentioned the iPad, so the iOS software and the app stores and all that kind of stuff are great platforms. In terms of ebooks as a platform, I'm definitely looking forward to what ePub 3 might be able to bring in terms of functionality. The things you can do in apps are great, and I'd like to see that more in ebooks. I actually like the Safari Online platform that you guys are part of. I think that's a great model, a very user-friendly subscription service. One of the things I've noticed recently that really is a very cool platform that I think has a lot of potential for publishers is some of the Salesforce.com products. I was at the Dreamforce conference a couple weeks ago, and I've been using different products and services of theirs like Chatter and all the different CRM tools. I think this idea about getting closer to our customers is really important, and the kind of tools, services, and platform that they provide is an awesome way to really get close to your customers and obviously sell to them, but be able to have feedback loops as well.

Yeah, I think you're right. Scalability is definitely a big issue for us. Our margins aren't huge, so we have to be able to do stuff and do it at scale to make it viable. So that's a big challenge. But I think there are, I've seen and worked with a few different app developers who are basically creating publishing platform systems on the client side that allow you to publish at scale. Some of the challenges have to do with content management and how you create content upstream. I know we're thinking about digital first and things like that, actually creating the content almost in a different way up front and then publishing to all these different formats. Obviously that wouldn't make sense for every type of content, but I think the reality is that we have to do both and do many in different areas. We're not going to be able to just do one format; we have to figure out how to do multiple formats. And it gets back to your point about experimentation and learning from our mistakes.

I appreciate it, Joe. I love the TOC community. I go to the conferences and listen to the webcasts and all that. It's a great thing to have. Obviously we're all competitors in different ways, but I think we're all in this industry that's in transition together, and it's an exciting time. I think there are many ways for us to all work together to move the industry forward.

Thank you.