Business models to monetize publishing in the digital era. At TOC, you’re as likely to run into media professionals, entrepreneurs and innovators as you are publishers, booksellers and others working in traditional publishing. This, in turn, makes the underlying themes as varying and diverse as the attendees. This is the third in a series, taking a look at five themes that permeated interviews, sessions and/or keynotes at this year’s show. The complete series will be posted here. As traditional publishing is more and more disrupted in the digital era and deeper and deeper discounts in digital publishing become the norm, big questions about revenues — and where they’ll come from — arise.
In a keynote address, Andrew Savikas, CEO at Safari Books Online, talked about lessons learned at Safari and why digital subscriptions and access models matter for publishers. Savikas talked about what ebook subscription models look like and with what kinds of books such models work best. Related: The rebirth of reading. UNIT4, a sleeping giant. This week I attended UNIT4's UK user conference as a paid speaker. I was more than glad to do so because it gave me the opportunity to help showcase customer success and innovation. The show lived up to my expectations and was one of the best user conferences I've attended in a very long time.
I'll explain why later. Anyhoo...UNIT4? Who? What? Keep with me on this one. Long story short, UNIT4, based out of the Netherlands is an ERP vendor that reported $555 million for 2010. I first came across CODA and Agresso around 1996-7 when they were independent companies. What I didn't know until this week is that in Sweden, they have 150,000 users in 170 separate organisations of which 150 are government bodies, running ERP in a single instance.
UNIT4 doesn't see that as anything special because it claims to have been running shared services for customers since 1998. One example of how this works comes from GO: What struck me in the conversations was the pragmatic nature of the deployments. The Rise of the New Groupthink. Making-Social-Media-Pay. Trends in the Living Networks | Ross Dawson on opportunities for business and society in a hyper-connected world. The Future of Journalism – by Ross Dawson | The Future of Journalism.