PUBLISHERS EXPLORE DIGITAL COMMERCE ON THE INTERNET

Carol Risher
Vice President for Copyright and New Technology
Association of American Publishers
JULY 17, 1997

In the 50's in the male-dominated executive suites of advertising agencies a popular phrase used when reviewing proposed ad campaigns was: "The consumer is not an idiot...she's your wife." The purpose of the phrase was to remind people not to lose sight of their audiences. This need to test the concept has led to the investment in focus groups - the practice of hiring "just plain folks" on whom to try a product or an idea - a form of reality check.

Bringing new technology to book publishers for me has been a constant process of reality checks. It's as if the industry is living by the motto "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." And as a $20 billion industry can attest - their experience with new media in the past has proven them out. Book publishers didn't have to invest in audio books. Others did the initial trials and came to the book publishers to license the content. They had a similar experience with CD-ROM. The technology sought out the publishers. The content, originally published in book form, was the ore to mine for the new media.

The promise of the Internet, however, seems to be affecting publishers in a different way. I'd like to share with you some things learned over the past three years of working with book publishers to explore the potential of the Internet and how they might be relevant to the participants in this meeting of the Electronic Payments Forum. I think you'll see why the book publishing industry represents a highly desirable test bed for electronic payment mechanisms and why publishing on the Internet is sure to become a reality.

Three years ago, the Board of Directors of the Association of American Publishers decided that one of the most important tasks for the AAP would be to solve the problem of copyright protection on the Internet . We formed a committee of high level strategic planners from the major publishing houses and did a quick base-line study. The purpose of the study was to determine what enabling technologies publishers needed before they would feel comfortable investing in wide-scale development of digital product for the Internet and to find out which of these technologies was already being developed?

The results of the study were fairly predictable -- different publishers had different needs, so there was no single answer. However, it was clear that copyright protection on the Internet would be achieved by a combination of three things - new business models, a legal framework, and technology. The study further found that AAP did not have to develop the technology itself because a lot of big, well-funded companies were already doing so, but they were not talking to publishers.

We addressed that problem by hosting four roundtables designed to enable the technology developers to meet with representatives of the major types of publishing--textbook, professional & scholarly publishing, and consumer fiction and non-fiction.

We first held some brainstorming sessions to design hypothetical potential electronic products and the problems associated with them so the developers could then apply their skills to solving the conceptualized problems.

The Trade Publishers decided to focus on "How to" and "reference books" for their hypothetical model. The complete books would remain viable print products, but there might be a new market over the Internet for excerpts, i.e., a travel book's section on a particular city in a given country might be downloaded before a trip, so the traveler could buy just the list of tourist attractions or restaurants in that city. A helpful hints book on fixing things around the house could offer just the section on repairing the stopped-up sink or the malfunctioning dish-washer. Such a model might need a micro-payment system and probably external servers. There was also a need to provide water-marking or some other means to permanently identify the source of the information.

The Higher Education decided to focus on the new market potential of offering the ancillary products and services developed in conjunction with textbooks, direct to students. However, they were concerned that students did not have credit cards, so they asked the technology companies to describe forms of digital cash and debit account tracking systems as a recognized part of any hypothetical business model.

The school division publishers knew that Internet delivery to schools might not be a short-term possibility because of the lack of infrastructure within the school buildings but their model envisioned study guides and special work-books and exercises offered to the student at home.

The Professional and Scholarly Publishers had more direct experience with online products, both electronic journals and online databases. Although they were more sophisticated about Internet publishing than the other groups, they had greater concerns because of their actual experience. They wanted a way to deal with unauthorized pass-along of digital content, and were not sanguine about new business models based on buying excerpts "by-the-drink". To explain, I use the example of my own predilection for buying dictionaries. I have at least one dictionary in every room of my house and in my car and in my office and I carry one with me. Even if I paid a significant fee for every word I've ever looked up it would not equal the investment I've made in buying those dictionaries. I willingly buy the dictionaries for the availability of all the words, even the ones I haven't yet looked up.

The Roundtables confirmed the extensive development work on copyright management systems and royalty and tracking systems and even electronic payment systems, but we recognized one prevailing need. No matter which task we addressed, there was a need to standardize the means of identifying the digital object, and no one was working on that need. We decided to devote our attention to develop such a standard system. We called this the Digital Object Identifier system (DOI) - and began a journey that is still unfolding but at a pace that is unbelievable even in Internet time.

We formed a committee composed of publishers who were already engaged in electronic publishing activities and with them we considered the special needs of the publishing industry. Because ownership of a copyrighted work may change over the life of the work - rights are transferred from author to publisher; publishers transfer copyrights to other publishers; rights revert to authors; and works are reused in multiple formats - the system had to handle the change in ownership. This meant that the ownership information would have to be stored somewhere removed from the object in a manner that could be updated. We decided that the DOI system would have three component parts (we call them the three "D's") - there had to be a dumb number (because any meaning such as owner of copyright would change with time) - there had to be a directory where the dumb number would be associated with a link to the third element - an external database where the terms and conditions and ownership information is maintained. The three D's - dumb number, directory, database - were all we knew, but we were ready to start.

We issued an RFP and decided in August 1996 to select a proposal submitted by the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI) that built on their Handle System technology. Working with CNRI, we decided on the structure of the dumb number. It would be a two part number where the first part, or prefix, would be a number assigned to the "naming authority" - the organization of entity approved to deposit DOIs into the system. The second part would be a suffix following any numbering scheme selected by the "naming authority." Once the number was assigned, it would cease to have meaning. The system would insure uniqueness. DOIs would be associated with URLs denoting the location of the informatioin about the content as determined by the DOI registrant.

On November 8 we were invited to present the concept at an international meeting hosted by the EU-sponsored "Imprimatur." This generated international interest. On February 13, 1997 we presented a mock-up of DOIs in use using existing web sites and existing electronic products - an online book, supplementary data sets (the x and y coordinates for a simple molecule), a modeling software plug-in, electronic journals with video clips as featured contributions, and a web site that is used to sell CD-ROM products.

Preparing for the demo was an important learning experience for everyone involved with the project. The six participating publishers had to decide which digital content to feature and how the DOI might be used in practice. They had to consider levels of granularity and what type of response screen should appear when a reader clicked on a DOI. We had to actually design screens that a user might see, and since the demonstration was done ìliveî we actually had to deposit DOIs in a directory. It also helped the Committee realize which procedures and forms were missing and needed to be developed. The demonstration showed the difference between DOIs and URLs. It also showed a change of ownership and how the DOI remained accurate.

After doing the demonstration, we made a videotape to permit publishers to consider the DOI as an enabling technology for their own digital content. This videotape has been sent to publishing organizations around the world. Immediately following the demonstration, work began on the prototype. The necessary online forms for registering and depositing DOIs were developed and in April the first group of participants began to use the system. They registered and received prefixes and passwords, and began to assign DOIs and deposit them in the system.

Simultaneously, the international publishing community issued a statement of support for the DOI system. Both the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers and the International Publishers Association distributed the statement to their membership. A joint STM-IPA committee will be hosting a demonstration of the DOI at the International Book Fair in Frankfurt, Germany in October. The interest in the system has been greater than ever anticipated. Other industries are also following the progress. To date, over a dozen organizations are registering DOIs for digital content including photographs, journal articles, tables of contents, pre-publication announcements, legal citations, software drivers, and individual poems and stories. Participants had been asked to identify 25 digital objects to which they would assign DOIs, but in the first month, a single publisher deposited over 60,000 using a batch mode. This inspired others to go beyond the 25.

This development work is constantly teaching everyone associated with it. One of the first things we learned is that we were solving a problem that we didnít even know existed. Naming things on the Internet today is place-based (we use web addresses linked to the server where the digital content is stored) and when you move the item you have to rename the location. The DOI is, in Internet parlance, a URN (a Uniform Resource Name) which is not place-based and will remain accurate regardless of how often the content is relocated. We also learned that participants have a lot of hard work to do even after they decide to use DOIs. They must decide on how to promote their digital content and how to make their customers aware of the DOIs. They must consider all the necessary parts of any new product launch including things such as new Internet-based electronic payment systems, if applicable.

The DOI system itself requires some attention to issues of concern to the Electronic Payments Forum as we decide how to accept payment for registering DOIs. If the entire system works on the Internet, it makes sense to accept payment in electronic format as well.

In the demo we considered how the DOI would work in practice and took existing digital products and added DOI screens. In the prototype we are building a live working system and to do so it must work for all the links in the product life cycle including copyright registration so part of our prototype is registering new digital products with the Copyright Office using the CORDS system that Mary Levering will explain.

The genesis for the AAP involvement in DOI is the need for Copyright Management on the Internet. So, the natural question asked is "what does the DOI do for copyright management?" In truth, by itself, the DOI is merely the identification system for the digital content, but because it is intended to be a standard, we envision it becoming a part of many copyright management systems now being developed. For instance, authenticity checks can be built around the DOI to insure that a document has not been tampered with. Privilege controls can be linked to a DOI - without the DOI, a customer cannot view, print, download or render a digital object. It can be used for tracking and royalty payment and inventory control and ordering and fulfillment and a host of other related copyright management tools. In fact, the WIPO treaty includes a protection against removal of Rights Management Information which the international publishing community sees as a protection against removing the DOI. So we are encouraging CMS development and plan to feature on our site creative implementations of the DOI in copyright management tools.

Another question that has come up is the governance of the DOI. Although AAP members began the work on this project, we did so as a catalyst and not to control it. We contemplate the formation of a DOI Foundation with broad cross-sectoral and international membership to manage the DOI as an inter-industry, international enabling tool. The music industry has already begun to consider using the DOI as the linking and switching system for their identifiers, and we are talking to other industries. The DOI is being put forward to ISO for consideration as an international standard with open architecture. We envision it as a truly universal system.

The prototype will let us do more testing of assumptions and relationships. The advantage of this approach is that it takes the DOI out of the realm of theory into the practical. It either works for publishers and others or it doesnít - if it doesnít it wonít be used, if it does, it helps us forge the tools to create a vibrant functioning healthy electronic marketplace. And in the process we are all learning how to respond to market needs. For the DOI system, the publishing industry is a perfect test bed. Itís variety of approaches and markets and product-types continue to challenge the developers. Building the DOI is a learning experience for all who are fortunate enough to be involved.

To witness our progress from the sidelines, visit our web site at http://www.doi.org. The trip is as important as reaching the destination. Join us for this ride.

Back to Top

Back to Previous Meetings