The Silverchair Interview:

Bill Trippe, Senior Analyst,

Gilbane Group

 

Silverchair: Tell us about what you do for Gilbane and for your own company, NewMillenium Publishing.

Bill Trippe: New Millennium is my consultancy, which I started in 1997, and which still accounts for a lot of my work with educational, trade, and association publishers.  My role at Gilbane is broader. As the lead analyst on the XML Technologies and Content Strategies practice, I work with end users but also work with vendors and investors, and also help Frank Gilbane with the conferences.  In both roles, the approach with end users is the same-to help them be successful with XML-based content management and publishing technology.

SC: How did you get your start in publishing and consulting?  Tell us about your background. Is consulting something you always wanted to do?

BT: I was actually on a trajectory to be an English professor, but realized that I didn't like teaching all that much.  I started out freelance writing for newspapers, and then spent a number of years in technical writing before I became a course developer for the publishing systems vendor Xyvision (now XyEnterprise).  That led me to get very involved with some of Xyvision's earliest SGML customers.  By the end of my stint with Xyvision, I knew I wanted to consult in the long run, but I had babies at home and traveling was becoming a burden, so I spent a few years with the publisher Houghton Mifflin, leading some SGML and later XML work there.  In 1997, I made the jump to full-time consulting.

SC: what did you learn during your days working with Xyvision that you apply to your work today?

BT: Well, the biggest thing I learned was that production counts. Especially then, Xyvision had a lot of commercial printers and type houses among their customers. Jobs were on press or waiting to go on press, so that software better keep running. It gave me a great appreciation for deadlines and for the pressure that production folks are constantly under.  The other thing I learned was more specific to my role in helping with early SGML customers. Even then, there were a lot of moving parts to the systems and software, and we were learning systems administration and software project management at times on the fly.  It didn't take long for chaos to reign.  I have this image of my hair bursting into flames almost every day.  I developed an appreciation for documentation and for more formal methodology that has stuck with me ever since.

SC: What are your thoughts on the current state of content management?  What advice would you give for a publisher currently trying to understand this space?

BT: I think this is just a great time to be in the market.  We have seen the XML content management market grow from a handful of relatively proprietary systems to a market today where there are many strong options both from vendors and from open source projects.  There are also hosted solutions-and very good ones at that-for customers who don't want to deal with the nuts and bolts of the technology themselves.

My best advice is to start not by looking at the market, but by looking at what business requirements you have. Are you looking to publish in more formats?  Do you have partners who would like to download and distribute your content themselves?  Some of the best projects I have been involved with are often the simplest in terms of technology. Consider the following two examples.

I had a society publisher switch to on-demand printing a couple of years ago for monographs.  An order from their web site now sends a message to their fulfillment center.  A little piece of XML triggers the monograph to be printed and also prints the packing slip and mailing label.  It probably took my client's programmer and their fulfillment center's programmer a week to conceive it, code it, and test it. The result, though, is huge savings in printing and storage.

Another example is a reference publisher who syndicates their content to dozens of customers. They used to send pretty complex XML files with no style sheet information, so their clients were always working too hard to take the content and publish it to their websites and devices. So my client turned the equation around by giving them very simplified XML and a "starter" style sheet that they could then customize to their specifications. The result is a much happier group of customers who can update and publish the content much, much faster.

SC: What is your favorite current technology, and why?

BT: At the risk of sounding too 2004 or something, I am still excited by blogs and RSS. They are both just so easy to do.  I quipped to an NFAIS audience a couple of years ago that the good news about blogs is that anyone can publish anything at any time, and the bad news is that they will. And there is a staggering amount of garbage out there, including really hateful and ignorant stuff. Having said that, though, it's clear that publishers and authors have begun to exploit blogs to their advantage. I love the group blog that OUP does, for example.  And there are wonderful authors who blog regularly. No matter your interest, you will find really good blogs out there now.

SC: How many blogs do you read regularly? What do you say to the people that there is "too much" information out there in the blogosphere?

BT: Well, I probably have 50 blogs in my RSS reader, but I only catch up on all of them maybe every two weeks or so.  I probably read about 10 nearly every day.  What do I say to the people who say there is too much information in the blogosphere? I say they are absolutely right.

SC: You wrote a book on Digital Rights Management. How did that come about?  What is the current state of DRM, and what current trends do you see happening now and into the future?  What should people know about DRM?

BT: The book came about when the editor, Chris Webb, from Wiley, reached out to a few of us who had done some consulting in the space.  The lead author was actually Bill Rosenblatt, who edits DRMWatch.com, and I really credit Chris and Bill with shaping the book as a whole. I wrote a good deal of the publishing-specific content, though, as I had clients who were implementing DRM and were thinking through some of the production flow and e-commerce aspects of it.

The current state of DRM is much as it was when we wrote the book almost six years ago-it continues to be the pushmepullyou of publishing technology. Publishers have the urge to lock everything down at the same moment they are afraid, and justifiably so, of alienating their customers.  It's interesting to me that publishers may have waited just long enough, though. If publishers have been eying the music industry as a guide, they have gone from locking everything down (and aggressively pursuing pirates) to now selling digital music DRM-free. Is this the final state though? I really don't know.

When asked by publishers about DRM, I usually suggest they balance the chance of alienating their customers with a realistic assessment of what their risk may be.  Is their content really of the type that would be pirated, and would significant loss result?  One of my clients, an association publisher, has a useful perspective on this. They worry about the "network copy" of their content, which they think of as someone posting a copy of their content on the Internet or a large Intranet. For the former problem, they do some things to monitor the Internet for rogue copies. The Intranet problem is trickier, but they feel they have good communication with their clients about this challenge.

Having said this, there will still be times where publishers decide they need to use DRM.  That same association publisher who worries about the network copy uses DRM for a product they sell directly to college students, for example.

SC: The fact that the DRM market is, as you say, relatively unchanged in about six years. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Does that mean it has reached maturity, or something else? What's an example of a really good DRM model that you've seen?

BT: Well, I think it's bad in the sense that, as someone noted, DRM is the best zero-billion-dollar software market they had ever seen.  Bill Rosenblatt used to keep a list of all the DRM companies that had been launched and had since died. I think he gave up when it reached about 40.  But there are signs of life.  At Gilbane, we are seeing adoption of DRM in enterprise applications like confidential and proprietary documents, government applications, and the like.  In other words, just because consumers don't like it doesn't mean it will never happen.  I think in some segments of publishing-where the value of the content is high and the risk of piracy is also high-DRM will take hold

I think the best models are the least intrusive ones. I have seen one PDF-based DRM system where the user just opens the PDF and kind of "signs in" to the PDF in the same way you sign into a website.

SC: Of all the things you do -- consulting, helping to organize meetings, public speaking, etc. Which do you enjoy the most, and why?

BT: I really do like the consulting best.  Publishing technology problems are fundamentally interesting and challenging to me, and no two projects are exactly alike. There is always some detail, some wrinkle, that makes a project new enough and challenging enough to keep my interest.