One of the key issues when we think about the future of a European publishing business that is likely to succeed is dealing with the new behaviours of the audiences and the building or nurturing of communities as part of the business strategy. Usually when we talk about audiences and communities these elements are considered exclusively from the perspective of a marketing tool, but this session of Readmagine was designed to talk about the business opportunities and a way to better understand the market.
This session was moderated by Javier Celaya, a person who has an extensive experience in this publishing industry from the digital perspective. In this video you can follow the presentation by one of the three panellists:
- Luc Bourcier, who is the CEO of Izneo (France), an innovative digital graphic stories business which is number 1 in European markets.
- Fabrice Piault, editor-in-chief of Livres Hebdo, the most prestigious publishing magazine in French.
- Eric Brys, CEO of Cyberlibris, the pioneer of digital libraries predicated on streaming + subscription.
Celaya started the debate with a challenging question: Why do publishers resist to embrace these data, these business opportunities when you have been twenty years in the market trying to convince them? And from there Brys exposed his ideas about the feelings among some publishers that could think that the book lending means losing sales.
Bourcier referred to some obstacles for the engagement of potential readers due to the EU regulations and recognised that there are chances to replicate the Izneo’s experience with communities in other book categories different from comics. Izneo is the third platform for selling this kind of content in French speaking markets (after Amazon and Apple), so Bourcier acknowledged that they are successful by using specialisation and addressing a specific community of comic lovers. That is why Brys agreed that this platform is a perfect example of segmentation as a tool to leverage.
When Celaya asked if Frankfurt was a good platform for discoverability, Piault said that such an institution could be very important in terms of trust. But he also added that the discoverability is something that changed during the last years, because we entered in the age of recommendation.
Afterwards there was a very interesting debate with the speakers and the audience about the existing frictions between the concept of book lending and the chances for the publishers to address a market.
You can see the interesting conversation in this video.
Javier Celaya is the CEO and founder of Dosdoce.com, member of the Executive Board of the Digital Economy Association of Spain, as well as Head of the Institutional Relations Area at the Spanish Digital Publishing Association (ASELID). He is also Head of the Spanish Markets at Podimo, one of the leading European audiobook and podcasts subscription platforms.
Eric Briys is the co-founder of Cyberlibris, a French firm established in 2001. Cyberlibris is the pioneer of digital libraries predicated on streaming + subscription. Cyberlibris clients include business schools, universities, corporations, public libraries . Cyberlibris partners with 900 + publishing houses. One of his main topics of interest is how to use reading data and data visualization to enhance content discoverability.
Luc Bourcier is the CEO of Izneo, Europe’s leading digital comic platform. He has achieved most of his career in video games. In 1988, he launched the Sega brand in France and later managed regional subsidiaries of major international video games publisher : before joining Izneo, he was Vice President Publishing Southern Europe for Codemasters. Graduated from Audencia Business School he also holds a PhD from Celsa Paris Sorbonne and an MBA “Marketing and Commerce on Internet”. He joined Izneo when Fnac-Darty became a shareholder in Izneo in 2016.
Fabrice Piault, born 1959, is the Editor in Chief of the French Book Trade media Livres Hebdo, and a co-founder of the international Book Trade magazines network PubMagNet. Graduated in History and Political Sciences from the Panthéon-Sorbonne University, and in Journalism from the Centre de Formation des Journalistes (Paris), he started his career as a journalist at the Agency France Presse (AFP). Since he joined in 1987 Livres Hebdo
