Episode 43: Beat Barblan on the Role of Bowker in the Industry

Beat Barblan is the General Manager of Bowker, the official ISBN agency for the United States and Australia. As a senior level publishing technology and international standards executive, Beat joins us on the BookSmarts Podcast to discuss Bowker’s evolving role in the publishing industry and their efforts to support authors and publishers, as well as the importance of metadata in book discoverability.

Bowker Identifier Services provides products, services, and resources to help authors publish, market, and sell their books. The U.S. ISBN Agency at Bowker also provides information and advice on the uses of the ISBN system to publishers, self-publishers, authors, and the book trade.

To learn more about Bowker or to get in touch with Beat, visit myidentifiers.com.

Transcript

Joshua Tallent
This week on the Booksmarts Podcast, I’m talking with Beat Barblan, who is the General Manager of Bowker and Beat and I have known each other for a long time, just kind of back and forth in the industry. Beat, thanks for joining me today.

Beat Barblan
Thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Joshua Tallent
Yeah, it’s great to have you. You have a pretty long history in publishing. But your job at Bowker is really important, of course, because Bowker is pretty integral to the work we do in the US in the publishing industry. So let’s talk a little bit about where Bowker is, what you guys are focusing on and kind of the changes you’ve been making over the last couple of years.

Beat Barblan
Yeah. So it’s usually when you tell somebody that you work for Bowker, the first thing that comes to mind is, oh, you’re the ISBN Agency, and you have that fabulous database of metadata, called Books In Print, which, of course, was true for a good part of our history. And it’s still true. We’re still the ISBN Agency for the US and Australia as well, actually. But I’d say in recent years, I’ve been at this particular job for 14 years at this point, 14 years. Yeah, seems like yesterday. And, you know, of course, a lot of things have changed in publishing over the past few decades, particularly with the advent of, you know, digital titles, digital books, and audiobooks, and self publishing has grown tremendously since I started. So to give you a bit of background, when I first started working here, what I noticed is a lot of people would come to us and say, hey, I’ve written the book, you know, I’m self publishing, and what else do I need to do. And many of these authors or self-publishers, were relatively new to publishing. They weren’t sure what needed to be done. I think they had a sense that something more needed to be done than writing the book and printing it or creating a digital title. And we remind him that all those things that a traditional publisher usually does still need to happen, you know, whether you publish on your own, or you have a hybrid model, all of those things still need to happen. You still need editorial help. You still need printing, if you want to print a book. You still need somebody to distribute your title. You need marketing. And so we started to get involved with doing these things. Early on, we decided we were not going to hire dozens and dozens of people to do all these things and create facilities, as others have done. But we started partnering with companies. So what that does is gives us the advantage of being able to sort of find best in breed. Sometimes we fail. Sometimes we have partnered with organizations, and then we decided that maybe not exactly a good fit for us or others have started and then they have stopped. But I think we were able to put together a group of partners worldwide that help us offer our customers everything they need. And that includes editorial help, design help, translation, reviews, press releases, distribution, marketing, websites, audiobooks, etc, etc. And we’re always sort of on the lookout for what else is needed and what else do people want. Audiobooks is a hard one to crack because audiobooks are expensive. Now, there are options using various degree using AI, but that has its own challenges and so we’re trying to navigate that very carefully, and making sure that everybody involved gets what they deserve. And that we’re not putting ourselves out there working with organizations that may not be reputable, and I think we’ve done a fine job doing that. But it’s been very exciting. So as of today, while we are still the ISBN Agency, we’re still the place you come for your ISBN. We’re still the place you come to give us your metadata, which then gets distributed and allows people to find your book. We have grown tremendously and I would say at this point, most of our effort goes into providing these other services and trying to really fine tune and figure out the best way to help publishers that come to us. And that is something that I’m very passionate about.

Joshua Tallent
Yeah, there’s a lot of people, obviously, that need help in the publishing world. And that doesn’t just include independent authors. It includes small publishers who were either just getting started or they’ve been around for a while, but they still don’t know how to fix that one problem they’re running into, or how to find a solution to an issue that is new to them, right? Because the industry is constantly changing. So it’s great that you guys are focusing some effort on helping people really understand what publishing is about and how to fix those problems. So what are you really passionate about? What do you think as an organization Bowker brings to the table? And what are those things that are most important to you on that front?

Beat Barblan
Yeah. So, you know, there is what I’m passionate about. I can’t speak for everybody in my company, but I think in general, we do share this. One of the things that I find very exciting. I mean, there was a time when a very limited number of people could have their books published and it was either people who are very talented or have important things to say or things that the world thought were important. Or people who had enough money to just pay somebody to print 1,000 books or however many books they wanted, and then distribute them. But for a lot of people, this was sort of off limits. It wasn’t really an option, right? And what I find is very exciting, perhaps what I find the most exciting, about self publishing or helping smaller presses get their books out is that if you’re a traditional publisher, if you’re a large publisher, you’re a business. You have to make decisions that make business sense, right? You have to make decisions that, so I’m gonna invest in this book, I need to sell a reasonable number of copies of it. But there are a certain number of topics that are of interest to enough people, and to a large enough number of people, that it’s worth investing all the things, the effort and the money, you need to create a title that you distribute. But with all the tools that we have at our disposal today, some of which were relatively inexpensive, and the possibility to distribute worldwide. I mean, we partnered with a company out of Italy that distributes in 60 countries. There’s no cost initially. You give your document and they will distribute it to all these various channels. And now your book is visible to all of these people around the world. What that has done is it has given people the opportunity to write a book and offer a book to the readers that may have a very small number of interested parties, right? But that doesn’t mean that the book is not important. It doesn’t mean that what these people have to say is not important. It just means that for whatever reason, traditional publishers have not seen it as an opportunity for them or even as a possibility for them. So we like to think of us as an organization that sort of levels the playing field. Now we don’t write the content, although we have, you know, we work with a company that helps with Editorial Services, and they’ll help you make the content you have written or make your ideas better. But we don’t write any of this. So the content is your content. But what we tried to promise our customers is that when we’re done with the process, they will have a book that, for all intents and purposes, is indistinguishable from a book that’s published by any other publishing company in this or other countries. And I think that is important, but I want to give everybody the opportunity to see what they have to say. And people write for a variety of reasons. When we start conversations with somebody. By the way, we actually do have a call center. You can call us and you can talk to people who are experts in their field and understand exactly what is needed. And it’s funny, you know, sidenote, people call us and they’re almost surprised that there’s a person on the other end. We have people we can talk to, and we want to continue to have that always. And because we want to understand, what is it that you’re trying to do? People write for all kinds of reasons. Some people write because they genuinely hope to, you know, generate revenue. They want to make a living writing. That’s their passion. That’s what they want to do. Other people write because they have this great family reunion coming up. And that’s a whole different, you know. That doesn’t mean that the book should be shabby, but there’s a different approach to it. And then there’s people who write because they’re professionals in one field or the other, you know, somebody is an expert in autism and wants to write a book presenting themselves as an expert and sharing important information with others. And so we try to understand that, first of all, why are you writing? And sometimes people have to stop and think, you know, I’m not exactly sure. And maybe there’s multiple reasons, right? And then we approach it from that perspective, what is your ultimate goal? Walk them through the process. Okay, so here are some of the things you need. And some people need a lot of help. And like you said, it’s not just people. We work with every publisher in the country, and that goes from Penguin Random House, to somebody who is writing a book on their own, because everybody has some needs. As you know, from talking to my colleague, Mary, recently, we had a whole project about Book2Look, the inside widget slash marketing tool that has been adopted by many of the large publishers because it helps them, and it helps retailers give people an opportunity to see what the book is like, an artistic an opportunity to share books. So there are so many areas where we can help individuals. But what I’m personally most passionate about is this aspect of giving everybody an opportunity. If you want your story to be told, and you want your story to be seen, then we help you. To give you a sort of, again, a bit of a side note, when my kids were younger, I’d go to these school plays, right? And some of them were great plays or musicals. And what I would always be upset about and I find sad is that kids put in all this effort to create a great play. They’re practicing. Their singing is fantastic. And then the audio is horrible. You can’t even understand what they’re saying, right? So if I translate that to the book world, I think you have a great story to tell, but you also have to present it in a certain way. It also has to be well written. It has to be grammatically correct. It has to be well done. This is especially true with audiobooks, right? Who wants to listen to an audiobook that is poorly narrated? So I want to give people that opportunity. You write a story; that’s on you. But we will help you create a final product that is as good as any other product that’s out there on the market.

Joshua Tallent
Yeah, there’s a lot of effort being done in that way. The IBPA, back when I was on the board many years ago, was even working on kind of standards in publishing. How to define what a well-published book looks like, and helping independent publishers who are trying to figure out how to get their books to that level to show that, okay, this is not just some, you know, guy in his garage, that’s creating a book and making it look like it was created in a garage. But even though it was created in the garage, it looks like it was created by a big corporate publisher. That standard, those standards of publishing should be available to everybody. And there’s an opportunity here to educate the industry about what those standards can be, and about what the opportunities are for them. So how does education come into this for Bowker? How are you guys engaging in kind of the education space, not just answering the phone and answering questions, but what do you think the opportunities are for educating the industry more about the standards?

Beat Barblan
They’re infinite. To be honest, as you’ve pointed out, because I’d add something else, when we first started, we were focused on the book itself, right? To make a book that looks great. But then, you know, then the follow up question to that is, okay, great. Now we got this great product, how does anybody know it exists? Does anybody even find it? Right? So you realize, well, it’s not just creating a book, it’s then also getting involved in marketing? How do we market this book? Where should the book appear? And how do we distribute it? And so you start getting involved, you know, so then you add on. Now we have a distributed department, we have a marketing department. We have somebody who does press releases, somebody who does all these other things that are also part of this entire process, right. But we do partner with organizations that provide education, that have anything from videos to courses that are at all levels for anything from beginners, to more advanced, the authors or publishers. I, of course, I’m very much involved in standards. My beginning in this world was through standards, you know, to be participating in ISO meetings and understanding the value of standards and how do you promote them. It’s an ongoing process and it’s also one that continues to evolve and change. And so we partner where we can with companies that provide educational material. We ourselves talk to people, we go to conferences, we do things like this, and we present ourselves, and we encourage people to ask questions. And that’s also, like I said, I’ve seen a huge difference just in the last 15 years, which in the grand scheme of things, that’s not a lot of time. But when I first started, people would literally come to us and say, well, I’ve written the book, and they come back a few weeks later, how come my book isn’t, you know, I’m not hearing anything. How come the checks aren’t coming in? Right? That has changed considerably. I would say that through a combination of books that have been published about it, lots of conferences about it, there are a lot of groups that, especially in the New York Metropolitan area. It’s not the only place but, of course, there’s a huge, there’s a plethora of opportunities to learn more about publishing. There are courses at colleges and universities that people can take. And we, of course, encourage everybody who is serious about this to do that. But also, in some cases, an author doesn’t want to do that, you know, so again, we’re at this point where you can do a lot, or you can do a little. You can say, look, you know, all I want to do is write. Here’s my, please do everything else. And we can do that. Or others say, well, no, actually, you know, my husband’s an editor, my wife’s an editor, or my cousin is a printer or does marketing and so there’s different levels. I’ve done it before, or hybrid publishers. I’ve already worked with traditional publishers. I’m very familiar with all of this. So we will get involved with whatever level but, you know, I’d encourage anyone who’s interested in publishing who is interested in the whole process. I wouldn’t even call it publishing; it’s really the, you know, I love this about the BISG; it’s the book industry. Because there are so many other aspects to it, that go into all kinds of different areas. And I think that’s where I would start. But, you know, if you do a search on how to publish on the internet, you will get a lot of hits. Some are better than others, but many are very good. It’s amazing. You’ll find people who have spent a lot of time providing, you know, YouTube videos that go through all the details of what are all the steps, or you can sign up in one of the courses that we offer through one of our partners.

Joshua Tallent
Yeah. So you talked a little bit about this. The kind of discoverability is a is a big key for books and making sure that the marketing is done Well, and making sure that that, that books don’t just get lost in the shuffle. And there’s more and more books being published every year, you probably know the numbers better than I do how many ISPs are being sold on a on a yearly basis are being being utilized on a yearly basis? So I’m curious, on the Discovery front, how do you at Bulker help publishers with discoverability? How do you help with? And when What are you thinking about in the future of discovery and recommendations and these kinds of things? Yeah.

Beat Barblan
Yeah, discovery is a huge question, right? I mean, I tell people, I said, look, just so you’re aware, I encourage people to write. I encourage people to publish their stories. I encourage people to do all that. But when people say I want to make a living being a writer, I point out that, this is probably going back 10 years ago or so. I was at an Author’s Guild meeting and it might have been the executive director who shared this. I think it’s Mary Ratzenberger, the name escapes me. It’s been a long time ago. And she said, you know, an author used to make $26,000 a year, 10 years ago, these are authors that you’ve heard about, that you may have, you may have read their books. And at this point, this is already going back 10 years, it’s more like 16,000. Right? So I tell people, look, you are competing against a lot of products. So you have one book, there are literally millions of books in the US and in the world more. And as translation is picking up this number, we’re only growing every market, right? There are already foreign markets that are complaining about the fact that there are all these English language books that are being sold in their market. But so what do we actually do about this? So obviously we have marketing services, we partnered with companies that do anything from direct marketing, to reviews, the press releases, to sell sheets, to whatever else, you may want. We have partnered very closely with Book2Look. I keep mentioning Book2Look because I do think this is probably one of our best products. And actually, one that is free to retailers, free to anybody other than publishers. Publishers own the content that goes into it. But when I think about it, if you think you want to market and you don’t have a marketing team. You’re a small publisher, or you’re an individual, and you can’t spend 10s of 1000s, or hundreds of 1000s or even millions of dollars publishing, marketing yourself and marketing your company. So here’s a tool that gives people an opportunity to look at the inside of your book to see what it’s gonna look like. Also, more importantly, perhaps, or equally importantly, it’s a way to share your book, right? So I’m in a family of readers. All of us reads. My kids read. My wife reads. My grandkids read. My mother-in-law is my favorite recommendation engine. Everything she tells me to read, I read. She’s wonderful. And so, you know, what this particular tool does, it gives you an opportunity to share with others. So I see a title that I like, I think this would be great. I take my little Book2Look widget, I put it on my Facebook page. Everybody who follows me on facebook sees it. I send it to all my friends. I send it an email. I put it on my web page. And so this is sort of a cheat. One of the reasons I got excited about it is because I realized, here’s a relatively inexpensive way for people to promote themselves. But the first thing I will say, and this is probably, this has not changed for as long as I’ve been involved in publishing is create good metadata. One of the things we do and have been doing for a very long time is we will take your metadata, we will clean it up, we will fix errors, we will add to it and we will distribute it to all under the sun so when somebody does a search for a book, they will find it. But what I tell people is look, think of metadata. You know, I use two examples, dating sites and real estate sites. You go on a dating site and you put in that I’m a middle aged, white man with still a lot of hair, a bit of a punch. Okay, that’s probably not likely to get a lot of hits for that. Now I add a picture, maybe even worse, I shouldn’t add a picture. But you know, I can add more things. Maybe I’ll talk about my hobbies. Maybe I’m talking about the fact that I like to travel. I like to read. I like classical music or that I like this, that or the other things. The more is in there, the more likely somebody will actually find me. So I travel a fair amount. I like to travel but I also travel professionally a lot and what I always like to do is find some book that’s set in the area where I go, and some years ago, I had to go to Moldova for an annual meeting of the ISBN Agency. And I was trying to find some book, preferably maybe a crime story, like a crime detective story set in Moldova. I have no doubt it exists. But unless somebody provided that bit of metadata, nobody’s going to find it, right? I laugh when I watch a movie on Netflix, and they say, oh, maybe you’d like to watch this and half the time I’m thinking, what? What ever made you think that I would like to watch this based on what I’ve watched, right? Just because two people like the same movie or the same book A doesn’t mean they’re gonna like book B, because maybe I like the book because the main character reminds me of my uncle. And maybe you like it because it’s set in Germany. Right? And so, if there’s one thing we tell everybody religiously, spend time on creating interesting metadata. There are obvious things, right? You have a cover. You have a good cover design, but obviously the title, the publisher, publication year, subject categorization, etc, etc. But anything else you can tell, tell me. When I think of real estate sites, for example, don’t just tell me that it is a house with four bedrooms and a nice garden. What does the school district and real estate agents do that now. What’s the school district? What is the crime rate? What are the job opportunities in the area? What is the availability of public transportation? Are there libraries in the vicinity. All these things, right? The more information you can give me about your book, the more likely is that when I do a search, and they say, hey, are there any crime stories set in Chisinau, Moldova in the 1940s? And if that information is available, I may find your book. But then there’s other things. So one of the things we also do, and this is a bit esoteric, if you will, we work with a company called Incubate that does an analysis of style. Not so much the content but the style, right? Because that’s another reason. There are authors that I would read anything they write, it doesn’t matter what the book is about. Ian McEwan is one of them. Whatever you write about, I’m going to read it because I like the way you write, right? I like that style. So if you can tell me a little bit about your style, and if I can do a search and say, I’d like a book that has this style, or has this trend. It starts very dramatic and it ends on the softer note. All of these things would help in discovery. I think discovery is going to be our biggest issue. Discovery and recommendation. I have yet to see, I have never seen a good recommendation engine. Like I said, my recommendation engine is my mother in law whose read every book that’s ever been written and remembers everything about them and knows me. And the trick, of course, for a good recommendation engine would be that you not only have to know the subject and everything the book is about, you also have to know me. So it’s going to be tricky, because I have to tell you something about me. So I have to be willing to disclose a bit of myself, right? And that’s where you start getting into, you know, I like the fact that Google tells me, hey, there was a Dunkin Donuts on a road. And I know you liked Dunkin Donuts, but that means that I had to sort of be willing to, you know, let people know this fact about myself. It’s going to be; I think it’s going to be fascinating. And I wonder what role AI may play in that sphere?

Joshua Tallent
Yeah, no, that makes a ton of sense. And yeah, and there’s a lot of concerns about how much data am I giving out to some faceless corporation that’s going to recommend some stuff to me, but, at the same time, you know, also be selling me stuff, then, you know, a bunch of other things. So yeah, that’s really interesting. And I agree, I think, obviously, metadata is the most important thing we have as a publisher. It’s it’s one of the most important non-people resources that a publisher has. If you can put effort into your metadata, you will have an impact on your sales. There’s been a ton of studies on that. And you can’t expect a recommendation engine to work off of nothing, whether that’s a search engine, just Amazon or Google search, or whatever else, or whether that’s an actual recommendation engine. So I’m curious, before I let you go here, I do have another question or two, and maybe we’ll go a little over our normal 20 minutes here. But I’m curious about. You mentioned earlier that Bowker has this Books in Print resources. So it’s a database of all the books that are all the book data that you receive. But you also mentioned that Bowker does some tweaking to the data that comes in so I’m curious about that. Because I know publishers sometimes don’t like that, right? Often don’t like that, because it’s a it’s a concern, right? It’s my data. I sent the data to you. Don’t change it. So I’m curious what your standards are. If a publisher is listening, and they’re curious about what is Bowker going to do, or potentially going to do, to the data that I’m providing in my Onyx feed to Bowkerr? How does that work on on the Bowker side?

Beat Barblan
Tweaking might have been a poorly chosen word on my part. I don’t want to say that if you tell us the book is about, you know, gardening that we’re going to change it to say, it’s really about cooking, because you talk a lot about potatoes and carrots and other things that are in the garden. We don’t do any of that. Maybe tweaking isn’t the right word. We will correct things that are obvious errors, like if your book, you know, if your price goes from $15 to $1,500, some flag will pop. I will say, I’m not the expert, I don’t work on Books in Print on a day to day basis. We do provide data and it gets analyzed and it gets reviewed and all of that. But what may happen to the data is that we get multiple feeds, right? We get feeds directly from publishers, but we also get feeds from other aggregators and so we will compare. There is a hierarchy. I recommend that if anybody has questions, they can come to us. And I will put them in touch with the person who can give them all the detailed information about specifically how to, because there’s algorithms involved and other sort of things that say, you know, if this price change comes in, then this supersedes this other price change. There obviously has to be very strict rules, because those are important changes. And not everything changes all the time and it’s not likely that the subject categorization will change every other week. So like I said, tweaking, it’s not that we go in and change the data. But we typically will add to it. We may add to it, for example, that the book has been mentioned in, there’s a media mention. Someplace in the media, this book has been mentioned. This is a book that was on Oprah, for example. That may not come in with the ONIX feed, but we may add something like that. So there are very clear rules, but I don’t want to speak out of turn and tell publishers things about their data that may not be accurate. But I’d be more than happy to, you know, anybody who has a question and we’ll put them in touch with the people who can give them very specific answers. Here’s exactly what happens to your data and what doesn’t happen to your data.

Joshua Tallent
That’s great. So you mentioned that your mother in law is your recommendation engine. And so what are the last few books that you’ve read? What are the what are the things that you’re consuming right now?

Beat Barblan
Yes. I love to read and I’m very Catholic, and Catholic as in eclectic in my tastes and like, you know, anything from history to, I was a philosophy major in college, in part because I couldn’t make my mind up as to what I wanted to study and within philosophy, I could study science, history, some linguistics and this and that. I recently finished The Last Chairlift which was a by John Irving. Large book and I, among other things, again, many reasons why people read the books they read. I like John Irving to begin with, but the book had a whole you know, a lot of it was set in Vermont where I spent a fair amount of my time. There are a lot of; there are a lot of parts of the book that I liked very much and and I like big books. I love books that I have a hard time laying in bed at night holding them up. It’s part of my sport, my exercise routine. I more recently finished Lessons by Ian McEwan.. I mentioned it before. I’d read anything he wrote because I love his style of writing. I love how how careful it he is in his writing. One thing I don’t like is sloppy writing. So I don’t like it when an author doesn’t take the time. If you’re going to talk about something, spend a little bit of time making sure it’s correct. You know, I remember when I read his book, I think it was Saturday, he has a recipe for a soup. For fish soup, I think it was a fish stew and you can tell this is actually how you make this. It’s not just randomly. He did spend enough time figuring out this is how this is actually done. I read a great book, because I had read something about it in The New York Times. It’s called the Pedro Paramo. It’s written by Juan Rulfo, Mexican writer, book was written in 1955. It’s considered by some including Boris, one of the greatest books ever written. It’s sort of the premise, and I’m not giving anything away, is the main character promises his mother on her deathbed that he would go and find his father in the village where his father lived. He gets there but he’s already dead. So it’s a dead but talking, you know, I wouldn’t call it a sci fi book. But it is, you know, you have to get into this mode of liking this sort of, it’s not exactly fantastic realism, but it’s along those lines, where you realize, oh, wait a minute, all these people are already dead then but it walks you through the story and him finding out about himself. And then another book I started reading because I read something about her is the autobiography of his daughter Duncan, the famous dancer. It’s fascinating for a whole bunch of other reasons. Again, like I said, there are very few things that don’t interest me. So I could tell I could spend my days reading one thing or the other. And I do try to read in more than one language also. As I get older, I want to try to keep my mind somewhat functioning, then that helps.

Joshua Tallent
Yeah, that’s great. Well, Beat, I appreciate your time. I know that there’s a lot of cool stuff happening at Bowker. I really appreciate you kind of walking us through some of the things that you’re passionate about and some of the things that you guys are working on. If people do have questions, how can they reach out and how can they be connected to what you’re doing at Bowker.

Beat Barblan
If they just go to myidentifiers.com. We have our phone numbers listed there. They can write to us by email. All information will be there. It’ll be easy to get in contact with us and they can talk to the people on the phone or they can send an email if they prefer. I’m happy to respond to any emails that come to me and you have my email address. I’m not afraid to say if I don’t know something or if I’m not 100% clear on it. If I don’t know enough of it, I’ll make sure that it gets gets to the right person.

Joshua Tallent
That’s great. Really appreciate it. Thanks for joining me today.

Beat Barblan
Well, thank you very much. It’s been a pleasure.

Joshua Tallent
That’s it for this episode of the Booksmarts Podcast. If you like what you’ve heard, please leave a review or rating in Apple podcasts or Spotify or wherever you’re listening to the podcast. And also, please share the podcast with your colleagues. If you have topic suggestions or feedback about the show, you can email me at Joshua@girebrandtech.com. Thanks for joining me and getting smarter about your books.