"Times and Sunday Times websites to start charging from June"


http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/mar/26/times-website-paywall

The issue of definition

It is time to come back to the origin of my research and to have a look at the concept of Mass Customization. I will give a general introduction to the concept before going into specifics again.

Mass Customization evolved out of the post-Fordism movement, which is part of Postmodernism. The concept of Mass Customization is a movement away from producing standardized products as it is the case in Mass Production.

Mass Customization aims to combine craft production of customized goods and mass production of low-priced goods. However, the literature of Mass Customization emphasizes that this concept only works, if it is supported by new technologies and ways of communication.

Mass Customization has been discussed since 1987 and until today the definitions of Mass Customization vary between authors.
Tseng and Jiao defined Mass Customization in 2001 as corresponding to

the technologies and systems to deliver goods and services that meet individual customers’ needs with near mass production efficiency. (Piller, 2004)

Gilmore and Pine define the term through their ‘Four Faces of Mass Customization’ quite broadly, whereas Paul Zipkin would offer a more narrow definition of the concept. This lack of conceptual boundaries is according to Piller (2004) the reason why Mass Customization has not really taken off yet, but is rather a way of doing business for a more innovative group of firms.

There is also a grey area where it is difficult to distinguish between variety of Mass Production and Mass Customization.
This becomes obvious when comparing Gilmore and Pine’s Adaptive Approach and Paul Zipkin’s paper on the 'Limits of Mass Customization'. It becomes apparent that Zipkin’s configurable product as a form of Mass Production is what Gilmore and Pine would call the Adaptive Approach, which is one face in the ‘Four Faces of Mass Customization’.

In more recent articles by Piller this change from Mass Production to Mass Customization is represented as a process rather than an 'idealized state' that has to be achieved. Most importantly he identifies different capabilities that a company has to develop and continuously improve on in order to mass customize.

In my last blog entry I wrote about how new businesses try to reduce the cost of college textbooks. One way of reducing the price is through digitizing books. But with the digitization of books the question arises: What is the content worth to us? The recent events in the Music and Film Industry show that people have quite different ideas about this. Henry Porter wrote in his blog about the Publishing Industry (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/feb/07/henry-porter-publishing-ebooks) that authors usually keep less than 5% of the book’s share. The crucial question for my research is, whether this is the same in the textbook market. The college textbook market is different than the market for novels as textbooks are usually much more expensive. The necessity of lowering the price for textbooks may be an argument for cheaper eBooks. EBooks do not need to be printed and therefore material is saved. Furthermore, eBooks do not need to be stored in large quantity, which saves stock keeping costs. And the third point is that eBooks are easily and without any cost distributed through the internet. However, textbook publishers still have to invest into developing and reviewing the content of textbooks, whether they come as eBooks or physical copies.

It is understandable that authors have joined Macmillan in the fight against Amazon’s price control, but at the same time they and the readers are most affected by this struggle. Macmillan has demanded that the price of eBooks should be matched to physical books. This could be a move against the decline in the use of books, but it would eliminate a potential way of reducing the cost of textbooks through digitisation. However, one crucial point of Mass Customization is to lower prices through Mass Production, while producing customized goods. Therefore, if a student would be able to customize a book by putting together the chapters from a number of books that are relevant for his/her studies, this student would save money by buying only one book that includes all relevant chapters. The price would therefore have to be fixed on individual chapters rather than the book itself.

Therefore, it is not so important that the price of the single textbook is as low as possible or that the eBook is cheaper than the printed copy. The main point is that through Mass Customization the student could save money.

Today I read an article by Thad McIlroy on Educational Publishing (http://www.thefutureofpublishing.com/industries/the_future_of_educational_publishing.html).
I knew that there is an issue with the pricing of textbooks, but I was unaware that in the US prices for a college textbook are even higher than here in Ireland. There also seem to be differences in the way colleges are making books available to their students through their libraries. A common problem is that sometimes books arrive in the library when the course is close to finishing (which is mostly, because publishers are too slow in meeting their customer’s demand) or only a few copies are available to too many students. The biggest issue is that lecturers are deciding which books to use and students have no influence on price decisions. Often these lecturers receive free copies from the publishers. On the other hand lecturers sometimes refrain from asking students to buy course books, because they are aware of their high prices and they know that they might only use one or two chapters of a book anyway.
In McIlroy’s article he goes on to describe start-up companies that are trying to be creative in offering free books online or reducing the price of printed books. One of those is the US-based company Flat World Knowledge (http://www.flatworldknowledge.com/). They have a selection of course books in their online catalogue, which can be viewed for free or downloaded. They also offer print-on-demand copies, audio books and even single chapters of the books, which are much cheaper than the original from large publishing houses. And the company does not break any law by doing so, ‘it commissions new textbooks from well-established authors, and offers them as free electronic downloads’ (McIlroy, 2009).
This development shows that it is time for publishers to change their way of doing business. I think that Mass Customization could help publishers to sell their textbooks. It would be beneficial to students as it would lower the cost of textbooks. It would also be valuable to lecturers, who could select their course material from different textbooks, which might suit their teaching needs more, instead of advising students to buy a number of different books that they would not use much. However, the digitization of books does also need to be considered, but I will come back to this issue later.

I have also chosen the publishing industry for my research, because it is facing major changes through the digitization of books. However, eBooks have not yet replaced physical books and they will not likely do so within the next decade. Thinking about it, it is difficult to imagine a future without books. The development of eBooks has been embraced by some and the lower cost of eBooks could work as an incentive for buyers. On the other hand, many people still prefer the qualities of using a physical copy of a book.
However, the development of technologies in the publishing industry and other industries can mean convenience for us, the consumers. One might imagine the time and money that could be saved by putting together one’s personal version of a college textbook instead of having to look for and buy a number of different books. This could be a time when the software makes it easy to find straight away the chapters that we are looking for in an online catalogue and automatically creates a book. And when digital printing technology makes it possible that our book is printed for us on the spot. This would not only be convenient for us, but it would also save publishers money on distribution and stock-keeping. This is what the printing of textbooks might look like in the future.
My research is also engaging with the issue of digital books, but I mainly want to explore what Mass Customization means today within the context of the publishing industry.
Mass Customization of college textbooks could be beneficial to students and lecturers alike.
Newspapers and magazines are already customized, why not college textbooks as well? In my research I want to explore these questions and issues.

This blog was created to present whatever I encounter throughout my research, as long as it is relevant to my topic. I want to explore the concept of Mass Customization within the publishing industry. At the same time I also need to be aware of the technological changes, especially the digitization process within the publishing industry. This blog could also function as a bulletin board to post articles about the progress in Mass Customization and the publishing industry, which might help to keep track of the continuous changes.