Sir Charles Chadwyck-Healey: Thank you Bill.

Ladies and gentlemen, first I'd like to say, as a member of the Marshall Aid Commemoration Commission, what a great pleasure and what a great privilege it is to be here participating in this symposium with so many distinguished Marshall Scholars.

Chadwyck-Healey, as Bill has just said, is a publisher. It sells academic and reference material to university libraries throughout the world. We've been doing this for 25 years. The University of Michigan happens to be one of our very best customers.

Our delivery media for the last 10 years have been CD-ROM and the Internet. But the Internet is so new that I think it's impossible today to observe it from any kind of historical perspective. So, what I want to do is just to comment on three very down-to-earth changes in the publishing business, in our small niche of the publishing business, which I've observed and which I believe are related to these, to the coming of these new media.

In the last four years, we've seen a total transformation of the U.S. academic library market. This is a market which consists of about 2,000 university and college libraries. And traditionally, they have always bought on their own from, directly from publishers such as ourselves, or through third parties, through dealers and vendors. Even the largest -- University of Michigan, Harvard, Stanford - has very little negotiating clout, and in the past has shown very little inclination to use it.

What we're experiencing now is the growth of library-buying consortia. These are buying groups which have been formed for one reason only, and that is to get better terms out of publishers. There are now, I believe, over a hundred consortia. Frankly, they divide and multiply like amoebae. Sometimes they're geographically related, like Ohiolink, which relates only to the state of Ohio; GALILEO, which is related to the state of Georgia. But, not always. One library can actually be a member of many different consortia.

It's a major shift in the customer/supplier relationship, which had existed in its old form for over a hundred years. It was of course a relationship which favored the supplier to a greater extent than it did the library. The size of the deals - the timing, which is often so important to a publisher, and the fact that the price to a group is negotiated - enables the librarian to become a true negotiator for the first time, and it is to me very interesting in that way, that librarians who have never shown any leaning towards this new role have taken it up so quickly and are actually so good at it.

I think it came about because of the whole question of distribution costs. Multiple copies of print or microform have a significant cost, so if you have to distribute a hundred copies, there is a lot of money locked up in those hundred copies. The cost of CD-ROMs, the cost of Internet access is nominal. The logic of this is that the libraries have understood the economics of this and have used it to put pressure on publishers for better deals, and the publishers have - you could say given in - but have responded. So in 1998, 60 to 70 percent of our business is actually with consortia, and I'm not sure that that is a particularly attractive business model, but it's certainly something that we are in the early, early evolution of.

There's another change that the Internet has brought about, and that is publisher relationships. Book publishers have always been somewhat isolated. They've tended to plow their own furrow and not go into joint ventures. This is changing now. It is really quite extraordinary, the extent to which, I would say, all publishers large and small are now talking to each other in a way that they've never done before. We are talking to publishers who we never would have dreamt of communicating with before. And I think again this is because publishers understand that with the Internet, it is the linking of information that is the power of the Internet. No one publisher can own or control all that information. You enhance the value of your own information by linking it to other people's. The business models under which these are done are of course quite new; they're only being explored now, and they are raising some very, very interesting issue about how companies can work together.

I want to end with my third point, the third change which we've observed - which was actually mentioned by somebody in the audience at yesterday's session - is the impact of the Internet on reference book and directory publishing. I think Dan Atkins responded to that last night as well. The catastrophic change that encyclopedia publishers experienced a few years ago, when Microsoft produced Encarta on CD-ROM and virtually gave it away, is beginning to happen to directory publishing as well.

What is a directory? A true directory is simply a listing of names and addresses with some additional information, which is usually rather compressed and attenuated to fit into a book. If each of those entities in a directory has its own Web site, which can contain as much information as it wants about that particular organization or even about that person, and those Web sites are linked by an index, a Web index, of which as you know there are many, do you really need a directory any longer? And I think we're going to see the wholesale demise of the paid-for directory business over the next five, maybe seven years. The same information is going to be up there on the Web. Much of it already is. It's probably going to be free and it may be paid for by Web advertising.

These are three brief, very down-to-earth examples which show how already, within two or three years of the Web being used by publishers like us, things are changing in a quieter, subtle way which I don't think could have been foreseen. The changes, I think, are going to become even more fundamental, and even more difficult to see. I think that the disturbance that we experienced 20 minutes ago, whatever the reasons behind it, really bring home to us how painful change can be if businesses are destroyed, if jobs are lost, if there is total restructuring in divisions of, say, the media industry, the publishing industry, through these new technologies. We can debate them. They make wonderful things to debate in an environment like this, fascinating things to write articles about. But when you actually come to a business which maybe has been going for 50 years and it disappears almost overnight because of changes in technology - for the people who are actually there, it's a very, very painful experience. Thank you.

William Janeway: Thank you, Sir Charles.