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There are misunderstandings between publishers and librarians on the role of book lending systems.
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The community of users itself is an asset for the library that could be interesting for publishers.
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His strategy is working with three different communities: publishers, academic libraries and public libraries.
The 8th International Digital Distributors Meeting is organised once more by IPDA in collaboration with GSR Foundation within the umbrella of Readmagine. In this occasion the challenge proposed to the participants was to discuss how to ensure the positive pattern in book markets continues throughout the next few years. This idea was linked to the European approach of this edition and focused on the means to overcome some threatening trends that underlie those good results (namely, the bigger role of huge platforms such as Amazon).
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: Eric Brys, CEO of Cyberlibris.
The founder of Cyberlibris focused his brief presentation on the role of libraries as another chance for the publishing business and stressed the problems existing among the publishing business rooted on the mistrust of the use and role of the patrons in libraries and the economic balance of book lending systems.
Brys used several quotes that could exemplify this challenge regarding the role of community of library users from the perspective of publishers. One of them was by the CEO of Overdrive (Steve Potash) that could explain the issue: «We have witnessed pushback from a small segment in the publishing and bookselling community who do not fully appreciate the commercial upside for their commercial interests resulting from library digital lending collections».
Eric Brys has been developing an interesting system for the use of information generated by the library patrons as a means for recommendations and new searches. He said: “Let me be very clear. What makes a library bad is not its collections”. From his perspective, the community of users itself is an asset for the library and shared another quote by R. David Lankes in the same direction: «Bad libraries can have huge collections or small ones. Great libraries can also have large or small (or no) collections. However, bad libraries see the collection as the materials they buy and lease. Great libraries see the community itself as the collection. There is fantastic value in loads of books and reams of journal articles, but how much more rich and varied and powerful is the community itself?».
Also Cyberlibris con help to enhance local communities of users and build global thematic communities of users by working with users data.
At the beginning of his presentation Brys admitted that he decided to become an entrepreneur because as a teacher felt frustrated seeing how the students limited themselves to sticking to a book instead of accessing many other interesting books; that is why he created Cyberlibris 20 years ago with the idea of streaming with an unlimited subscription system. He explained that the company works with three different communities: publishers, academic libraries and public libraries and the users data is an asset based on network computation by pushing further the existing patron communities.
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.
