Richard Fisher comes to talk about Adding Value to content

Last week we were privileged to welcome Richard Fisher, Managing Director of Academic and Professional at Cambridge University Press, who came to talk to us about adding value to books.  Richard is a great speaker, who engages directly with the audience, and he made us all think about the value we place upon content in different formats.  How much would we pay for a book as a physical thing?  How much if that was an ebook?  Would we care if the physical book had the ebook thrown in for free?  What makes people spend money?  Why should we pay for anything?
He talked about the Big Three - Amazon, Google and Apple - and made us aware of the dangers of the digital age in terms of the risk of losing content through the loss of the technologial platforms that support it.  The growth of ebooks is startling at the moment, but the real challenge is how to keep sales trajectories going beyond the current bumpy take-off of the e-markets.  Richard stressed the need to keep up to date, recommending blogs like The Scholarly Kitchen and Mike Shatzin's The Shatzin Files.   A great session, leaving us all with much to mull over.....