 Hi, I've been told I'm one of the few presenters, if not the only one who doesn't have any slides today Which I like to see as a bit of a personal winning off process, but I don't know might talk to stereotypes about book publishers I'm the associate publisher at Bridget Williams books an independent publisher based in Wellington Our director Bridget Williams has been publishing award-winning complex nonfiction for over 30 years now And our list includes works by Claudia Orange, Judith Binney, Tony Valentine, Jane Kelsey and Lloyd Gearing These books are high-investment works often heavily illustrated, peer-reviewed, intensively edited, with stringent print production values and always produced in close collaboration with authors, editors, proofreaders indexes and the wider book trade As the digital lead at BWB, I'm now responsible for taking these works into a digital space This means a major retro conversion project including titles stretching back to pre-PDF and in design days Along with the creation of an in-house XHTML workflow A recurring issue for me throughout this work has been value the value of e-books for scholarly use The technical value of the industry's processes and standards the commercial value of these works and Ultimately the long-term cultural value of this digital shift I expect for many of you, e-books are today identified with a lack of value Most e-books remain monolithic text dumps exchanged across the web as containers devoid of any connectivity Despite various initiatives, the industry remains beholden to Amazon's Moby format, a format derived from HTML 3.2 So yes, e-book development often appears to exist in a world 15 years behind the web These proprietary technologies are adequate for plain text genre fiction, but are simply unsatisfactory for complex non-fiction works As a result, some non-fiction publishers have been guilty of treating digital as supplementary to print issuing works with redacted images misused formats poor metadata and little or no quality assurance Next generation formats notably EPUB 3 and Amazon's KFA have been rolled out and tethered to elements of HTML 5 and CSS 3 But adoption of these is proving painfully slow In fact, there are growing concerns that EPUB 3 as the open standard might never be fully implemented In this siloed world, publishers are effectively held hostage to the whims of the various reading systems such as iBooks and Adobe digital editions I'm always struck by how discussions of e-book limitations often focus on formats devices or DRM when it's usually the actual reading system where the problems originate A major recent industry initiative in the US designed to kickstart implementation of EPUB 3 saw various components of the standard notably scripting effectively redacted in order to reach a lowest common denominator that will work across a meaningful number of reading systems Against this background you'll understand our excitement in recently developing pop-up footnotes for our forthcoming titles on iBooks Because yes, in e-book development, we still party like it's 1999 Despite these limitations, however, we place substantial value on our digital program at BWB This means a heavy long-term investment running across high quality conversion work building an in-house workflow and content management system archiving and preservation developing digital style guides and then lots of traditional publishing things like recontracting, proofing, quality assurance and permissions and lots and lots of permissions Over time, this investment is allowing us to turn into a hybrid publisher one that is working from a largely non-proprietary XHTML base able to transform our works into one of the many digital and print formats that the world is forcing upon us And we only expect this world to get messier EPUB 3, for example, means we're now nearing a state where we have to develop one file for each major vendor one to upload to Apple, one to upload to Kobo and so on This investment has also allowed us this year to launch a short-formed digital first imprint called BWB text But this heavy investment has come at a time when the commercial value of e-books is declining Amazon in particular both incentivizes and places significant pressure on publishers to price their e-books below US $10 Entering a new work on their system increasingly reminds me of an inverted Ryanair website where every step triggers a pop-up or a trap door designed to price your work at US $2.99 or less Substantial data now illustrates few readers today are willing to pay above US $12 for an e-book irrespective of genre This blindness to genre presents a crucial challenge as captured in a striking recent estimate that non-fiction e-books in the UK will make up 13% of non-fiction unit sales in 2014 but just 6.5% of total value This equation challenges the expectation that all publishing will migrate easily to digital forms especially serious non-fiction works requiring substantial pre-press investment Over time it's an equation that potentially challenges the commercial sustainability not margin's commercial sustainability of some significant high investment publishing outside the world of genre fiction As print sales globally continue their long-term decline across scholarly non-fiction the value in the compensating digital models is not yet there In other words digital today is asymmetric in its effects e-books are not only being devalued commercially the value of publishers is being questioned notably by the rise of open access As many of you will know, open access originated with journal publishing and is the practice of and importantly belief in providing unrestricted access to scholarly works via the internet especially those that have benefited from public funding The rationale for this in relation to journals has some reasonable grounds and is a wholly separate issue but the movement is now on the radar of book publishers or at least it should be because it is showing signs of moving into monographs and full academic book publishing The value of publishers is often lost in these discussions some open access proponents dismiss publishers as gatekeepers rendered irrelevant by the internet and internationally the industry to date has been poor and articulating any response This is a big complex issue but what I would observe in relation to books is that we're all committed to access that is a given it is the factoring in of the means of production especially for complex non-fiction works that alters how that access is framed and the terms under which it can be meaningfully sustained So there is at times a skepticism of the value of the publishing industry itself a sense that the web has atomized publishing that to publish is but to push a button and we can all be publishers now Without doubt there are interesting opportunities for new entrants only just the other week I was reading about a range of collaborations emerging in the US between university presses and libraries but what needs to be kept very clear here is the distinction between having the capacity to publish and the actual craft of publishing a process that is time consuming intensive hard work sometimes tedious often expensive and always risky Holding this distinction in mind one part of the answer to building value into e-books and yes, aiding the sustainability of future non-fiction publishing in this country rests with the institutions many of you work for For example, we're extremely grateful for those libraries, galleries and museums that have accommodated our request for digital licensing especially across our backlist conversions we're particularly grateful because we have carefully framed the terms of our requests to look forward to a new connected world of web e-books from books and browsers through to aggregated digital works that create new pathways to our authors and narratives it allows us as an independent New Zealand publisher to disseminate and present your collections in new ways it aids the sustainability of future non-fiction publishing and for readers it helps build a new sense of value for digital scholarship and reading online granting us permission to include a photograph in a nasty Moby e-book is, we hope, simply the first step towards a richer conversation about how we can deepen the connections between our works and your collections I'm not talking here of augmenting the book necessarily I'm a skeptic of enhanced e-books and of anything that detracts from reading as a cognitive immersive act but instead simple, scalable and sustainable connections things that add meaningfully to the reading and scholarly experience online from identifying shared metadata and permalinking standards through to other ideas from much smarter minds than my own ultimately collaborating with New Zealand publishers sets the scene for the sorts of connectivity and interoperability that e-book world desperately needs because I'm increasingly convinced that New Zealand publishers need to look to our own institutions the galleries, libraries, museums and Wellington's web developers not Apple, Amazon or Adobe if we are to move beyond the text dumps the containers and the closed off colourless worlds we have with e-books today Thank you very much