The eve of disruption: TISP project now starts work

How many opportunities does digital technology give to publishing? Perhaps more than we can now imagine. Where is ICT industry going? Maybe where we can't see at present. Which are the possible outcomes of of the meeting between content providers and technology providers? We shall discover them. The European project TISP (Technologies and Innovation for Smart Publishing) means to promote this dialogue, by stimulating the exchange of data and knowledge between publishers and ICT companies, hoping that new synergies and business models will born.
Started in January 2013 with an expected duration of three years, TISP is based on a consortium of 25 organizations from 12 countries, under the coordination of Aie, Associazione italiana editori. The consortium is composed by the umbrella organizations of the two sectors involved, the Federation of European Publishers and DigitalEurope, the organizers of the three world most important book fairs, Bologna Children’s Book Fair, Frankfurt Book Fair and London Book Fair, sixteen national trade associations and four research institutes.
The two main objectives of the project are fostering business innovation, through sharing experiences, analysis of market trends, study of business cases, and elaborating political recommendations to sustain growth and innovation. To this end, several professional meetings will be organized (at least four each year) in occasion of the most important trade events in the two domains, and further networking activities will go on through online meetings, teleconferences, and the setup of a LinkedIn group. The information and data so gathered will be elaborated and published in a web resource, the «TISP smart book».
After the end of the start up phase, the first occasion to feed the dialogue between the two communities has been Editech: the international conference about new technologies in publishing with the title Sailing against the tide. Publishing in disrupting times, held on June the 20th at Palazzo Reale in Milan. The day before the conference, the partners representatives met for the TISP kick off meeting: at AIE premises they defined the guidelines and operational steps for the implementationof the project. In particular, during the meeting the dates for next TISP events until spring 2014 were fixed and topics to deal with in these occasions were decided: the next one will be held during the Frankfurt Book Fair and will focus on e-commerce and e-book distribution. Other events will follow: a seminar on new markets possibilities during Liber, the Madrid book fair in October; a networking session about the opportunities given by Horizon 2020 to publishers during the event ICT 2013 promoted by the European Commission in November in Vilnius; on December, when the annual conference held by the research institute iMinds takes place in Bruxelles, a seminar about HTML5, ePub3 and new standards. For spring 2014 meetings during the Bologna Children Book Fair and the London Book Fair are foreseen, focusing respectively on cross-media story telling in children publishing and on e-skills for publishers.
During the kick off meeting the partners defined also the key features of the smart book, an online resource which will gather all the materials produced by the TISP network making it available for consultation, and agreed on the strategies for internal network communication, in consideration of the final objective of elaborating policy recommendations addressed to European Institutions and policy makers in general.
The hope is that in the next three years publishers and ICT providers will learn to know each others and will elaborate together innovative products and services in a disruptive way, which means, as James McQuivey said during Editech, not by doing the same things in a different way, but by deeply changing operative models.