McGraw-Hill's Digital Design: "Beyond the Book".(McGraw-Hill Inc.'s approach to electronic publishing as set forth by vice-president Ted Nardin)(Interview)

THE MCGRAW-HILL Companies' approach to e-publishing involves a new approach to publishing itself. As Ted Nardin, group vice-president, describes it, "We want to get beyond the 'book model' with e-publishing and e-books. That is, beyond selling one book, at a low price, to one customer, with whom you do not have an ongoing relationship."

Challenging as the change in business model may be, the effort is based on the company's many years of success with business, database and STM publishing. "We've been involved with digital publishing since the 1980s, long before the Internet or the World Wide Web," Nardin noted. In that period, the company had its first "big epiphanies" about the enormous potential of digital technology to transform the publishing industry. "In a sense," Nardin explained, "this is part of our genetic structure, part of the basic McGraw-Hill vision that was articulated by [then president] Joe Dionne." Nardin was quick to observe, "We still haven't achieved the big dream--where you develop content once, as a single digital file, for whatever use, and that's it. Although we are getting there--for example, authors of 300 of our trade business books are writing to a pre-coded template to facilitate digital purposing."

Just as the 1950S were the crucible for the social changes of the following decade, the experience with CD-ROM in the late 1980s and early 1990s set the stage (for better and worse) for publishers' response to the Internet, Companies rushed to CD-ROM enthusiastically, without analyzing customer need or the realities of the retail channels, and ended up losing millions of dollars. "They woke tip one morning," Nardin recalled, "realizing, 'Oh, my Cod, we have to face UP to this,' initiating waves of layoffs. It was an all-or-nothing approach."

McGraw-Hill has taken a measured approach based on the vision that there are a variety of ways to bring content to the customer. One of the company's successful CD-ROMs has been Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine. "It's clear that CDROM was an interim technology," Nardin explained, "but it laid the foundation for what is going on today, for what steps you have to take to create digital product. In fact, without the experiences and the expense of conversion and digitization, such as moving to SGML in order to create those early CD-ROMs, we would now be facing millions and millions of dollars of cost--costs which other companies are suddenly now facing in order to start their electronic publishing programs. Both Harrison's and the equally well-known Encyclopedia of Science Technology have existed as SGML files for the last seven years.

The 20-volume encyclopedia, which had been revised every five years, was launched online last spring as Access Science (www.accessScience.com) and is now updated essentially every clay Along with all the original print matter--over 7,000 articles--the online version incorporates 60,000 article-to-article hot links, 1,500 Internet links, as well as an electronic "suggestion box" for users, be they librarians or individual customers.

"One of the beauties of online product," Nardin said, "is how much you learn. In the past, we would revise the encyclopedia and put it on the market for librarians and others, and not really know who used it or how they used it. Now, we are collecting more information than we know what to do with: zip codes, e-mail addresses, as well as an exact understanding of what is being looked at. It was no surprise to us that biomedical pages are the most popular. The surprise was ...