Peter Bowron, Group Managing Director:

In early 2006 at a retirement party, I heard a very well known publishing executive refer to the four pivotal moments in publishing history: the invention of the Caxton press in 1476, the invention of the novel in the 18th century, the invention of the paperback by Allen Lane in 1935 and the digital revolution of the 21st Century. He had no reason to exaggerate or to push the digital cause – he truly believed it was radically altering our industry as much as the previous three seismic shifts did.

Why, as Publishers, are we interested in digital content and digital media? There are several strands to this answer but the overriding theme is consumers.

The internet has changed the relationship between author, reader and content. A computer on its own is very dull and rather useless, but ubiquitous powerful computers plus the network that links them and their users has been and is a force of huge change.

Communication in general, the home and the workplace have been completely revolutionised by technology. In short consumers are acting differently in their leisure and work time and, most crucially, interacting with media differently. Publishers need to understand this digital consumer because the digital consumer is our consumer. We have to understand this behaviour, go where they are and do what they do.

We are digitising our content because we want to be able to market and sell our books to a consumer who has increasingly migrated to an online world. The on-line marketing and selling is of our existing paper books, or p-books as they are known by some, so we will be selling more of what we already sell but with a more targeted marketing approach. We will have all our content and our marketing materials in our digital archive ready to use, however we choose. Jacket files, video files, audio files, interviews, photographs, text etc are all archived.

Books are not as present around the web as music or video and we have to try to keep up. If video is the language of the web how should we interact with it? What is the industry’s answer to U-Tube? Do we use video as much as we should?

Marketing online our existing catalogue to an online consumer represents the most powerful opportunity presented by the digital revolution for publishers and retailers over the next few years; marketing via multiple means to an online, on-demand consumer. Wherever they spend time is where we should be trying to place books, opinions of books, samples of books etc. This will drive sales both online and in the high street.

Books need to be more visible through widgets, podcasts, blogs and promotional videos and audio – on the internet, in second life and other networks and on mobile phones where massive innovation is coming not far down the line.

With consumers behaving differently we need to expand the publishing model in whatever ways possible to connect with them. Consumers want experiences and not just things, consumers expect to be involved more and more, consumers expect to have a say, consumers expect everything to be available on demand, consumers expect everything to be online; if it isn’t on Google it can’t possibly exist! Consumers are not listening to us; they are listening to each other. The oft talked about holy grail - word of mouth - exists and lives on the web and in social networks; we can’t necessarily create it but we can facilitate it with rich and exciting content ensuring consumers see our product and are able to buy it at the click of a button or later in a shop. Social networks are so successful because they provide a quick and easy way for people to talk and express themselves. As you know they do this through setting up their own personal pages, linking to friends, posting pictures of themselves, their music collections, and increasingly their book collections. These networks make it easy and fun to meet new people. Books are present on social networks and consumers make book recommendations to each other using tools such as iRead on Facebook, but this can and will be much bigger than it currently is. We believe publishers need to work with this by providing marketing materials to help flesh out the presence of books.

Extract-widgets can be embedded on personal pages in many social networks bringing the book to life in these environments. These big community sites are complemented by niche communities that exist all over the web. Targeting such niche communities is a crucial element of the internet marketing of books.

Another reason for digitising our content is, of course, to enable us to sell digital content in whatever format the consumer might want it in the future. This could be online by the page or the chapter, or downloaded to an e-reader or - if an audio book - to an MP3 player. The mobile phone connected to mobile broadband networks throws up wonderful opportunities for on-demand, online viewing and reading.

So what are we digitising? Well, our new books have been held in digital format for the last four years as a matter of course but our backlist not so. We will have scanned 9,000 books by the end of 2008 and all will be held in our new archive that has been running since earlier in 2007.

We will have enabled our widget technology by early 2008. The widget is a portable mini application that can be embedded in any web page. Innovative features and functionality will make the widget a compelling addition to sites where book content is reviewed, discussed and purchased. Such sites will include blogs, social networking sites and retailers. The widget enables the user to browse sample content.

We will relaunch our e-book programme with 200-300 titles this year followed by many more next year. We have seen a lot of innovation in device development and that, coupled with sales in USA, have led us to believe that consumer interest will increase in 2008.