What is Digital Publishing? Brad Scott Digital Publishing Consulting Kings College, London 23...

What is Digital Publishing?

Brad Scott

Digital Publishing Consulting

King’s College, London23 November 2009

www.brambletye-publishing.co.uk

Aims of this talk

To give broad overview of the shape of digital publishing

To illustrate the challenges facing publishers To indicate how the kinds of skills and roles are

changing as a consequence of digital publishing


Topics

Introduction Crowds and communities Product types and business models Creating digital products How publishers are changing Convergences Future and issues


Brad Scott

1990-2001: Routledge: Digital publisher 2001-2008: Semantico: Account director 2008-present: Consulting


Brad Scott

Digital publisher Project management, data, marketing plan

Arden Shakespeare Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals Projects with UK National Archives


Brad Scott

Data consulting, project planning Oxford University Press Modern Language Association Wiley-Blackwell Cambridge University Press Taylor & Francis Palgrave Macmillan Brill NV


Digital Publishing

Publishing: Making public Dissemination Communicating Not necessarily printed or written


Digital Publishing

digital publishing is "a different paradigm, a different set of relationships, a different way of doing business" ... publishers are still resisting giving the marketplace what it wants. "It's still a book business … and it needs to become a reader business."

Sara Lloyd (Macmillan), October 2009


Digital Publishing

Publishing conglomerates• Capitalist commoditization of 'content'

+ Digital technologies (especially the web)• Potential for democratic access, creation,

participation

= Tension


Digital Publishing

Web as “generative” environment• Freedom to create (and destroy)

Other technologies more limited• Potential for corporate control

Jonathan Zittrain The Future of the Internet 2008


"I have been increasingly convinced that the business model based on the printed monograph was not merely failing but broken. Why try to fight your way through this? Why try to remain in territory you know is doomed? Scholarly presses

will be primarily digital in a decade. Why not seize the opportunity to do it now?"

Phil Pochoda, director of University of Michigan Press


Digital Publishing

To a small publisher, the net looks like an unparalleled opportunity to find and fill real user needs, to talk directly with customers and to create information products that

serve them.

Tim O'Reilly, 1995


Digital Publishing

Sara Lloyd: key issues for publishers Online communication between author and

reader, and reader and reader is facilitated by publishers; and

Publishers need to work out how to do the job of entertaining and informing rather than how to transform printed books into digital books


Statistics

60% of publishers will have less than 10% of revenue from digital in 2009

In January 1994 there were 623 websites Facebook has 300 million active users Over 4bn mobile users


Statistics


Crowds and Communities

Open Source, Creative Commons Web 2.0 [2004]

• information sharing

• interoperability

• user-centered design

• collaboration



Web 2.0• web-based communities

• web applications

• social-networking sites

• video-sharing sites

• wikis

• blogs

• mashups

• folksonomies



Wikipedia “Quantity is no substitute for expertise” Open Feedback Publishing System (O’Reilly)



Conferences:

Text Encoding Initiative 12 Nov 2009


Objectives of digital strategy

Ensure financial stability Engage with customer via the media they want Separate commissioning and creation of

content from presentation Deliver and disseminate content faster Enable re-use of content Focus editorial resource on services rather than

products Streamline workflows


Revenue generation

Sell product outright Sell subscription Sell advertising space Syndicate content Give it away to support an (expensive) event Get authors to pay (or comment)


Revenue generation

Cory Doctorow With a Little Help• Self publishing

• Free for download and audio

• Lulu.com for hard copies

• + ask for donation

• Requires community support


Revenue generation


Varieties of digital publishing

We are all digital publishers now



How to make sense of it all?



No single delivery method• Different services types/user technologies

Aggregators Ebooks Other digital services Mobiles/PDA Apps Print on Demand



Aggregators Low risk for licensing publishers Low return

Ovid (hundreds of journals, databases, books) CSA/ProQuest Credo (Xrefer) And Google...



Ebooks Books read using a portable device Books delivered as pdfs online (myiLibrary,

ebrary, Dawsonera or Cambridge Collections Online)

Any digital book content



Ebooks:



Ebooks: Current readers not ideal for student or academic use

Formats: Adobe, epub, MS Lit, mobipocket, Kindle, BBeB, OEB, DX

Impact on print sales?

But, ebooks are no longer a nice to have



Ebook take-up

“Four percent of British have read an e-book”

US publishing net sales 2008 = $24.3 billion

US ebooks $113 million 2008 up 68.4% = 0.5% of turnover

T&F: 22,000 titles = 10% total turnover



Ebook platforms Credo Reference

EBL

MyiLibrary

NetLibrary

ebrary

Dawsonera



Dawsonera PDF transformations,

slicing, encryption, watermarking

DRM ebook delivery platform

Flexible business rules

Metered usage

eCommerce integration



Audio content

Themed collection



Single platform: multiple sites

– ORO Core

– ORO Premium

– Syndication

– Digital Reference Shelf



Book + Multiple choice questions



User modifications



Linking



Apps

iPhone, Google’s Android OS, a Blackberry or other PDA

100,000 apps on iStore, 2bn downloads



Winged Chariot’s The Surprise (59p)



Augmented reality



Publishing platforms Atypon Ingenta Semantico iFactory xTF: California Digital Library in-house



Business models Subscription (individual, university) Pay per view Metered access Open Access Free/donations


Delivering digital products

Data Hardware Site code Access control / Digital Rights Management Integration with other systems Discovery



Data• Articles/chapters/books

• Classification/taxonomy

• Metadata (publisher info / DOIs / SEO)

• Images/video/sound

• Exams and test data

• Statistics

• Button text etc (internationalised content)

• User-generated content



Data ALWAYS the biggest risk Metadata/classification Multimedia Statistics User-generated content



Access control Fundamental part of

online publishing infrastructure

Who/what/when

Credentials and identity management (Shibboleth)

Statistics (COUNTER, ICOLC)



Integrating with other systems Order processing eCommerce Editorial workflow Royalties and financial Corporate website



Discovery Google Yahoo Microsoft Federated search/Metasearch (Opensearch,

Z39.50) Metadata harvesting (OAI-PMH) Search Engine Optimisation



Process In-house or outsource? Project team Initial product conception Tendering Design phase Content creation Development/implementation Sales and marketing Post launch



In-house or outsource What is required? Get advice Are skills available? Strategic planning: mixture of outsourcing and in-

house activities



Project team Publisher

– Project sponsor– Marketing– Data/Production– Project manager

Developer– Account manager– Project manager– Lead developer



Initial planning Business goals Why online? Benefits Market analysis: different competitors compared

with print Data analysis, risk analysis, focus groups Business plan Rights Target platform: online; mobile; accessibility



Tendering Request for Proposals (RPF) Vendors supply response Presentations and demonstrations Vendor selection



Design phase Requirements gathering Deliverables

– Information architecture– User-focussed design– Specification– Costs– Schedule



Content creation Incorporating digital content should fundamentally

alter the production process New content types: Quality Assurance (QA)



Development/implementation Development contract

– Fixed price or time and materials– Deliverables– Site specification– Costs– Schedule– Hosting– Support– Change process



Development/implementation System design and planning

– Information architecture, User Interface (UI) design, graphic design, technical design

System implementation, deployment, testing– Iterative development, project management, User

Acceptance Testing (UAT)



Development /implementation

Wireframes and sitemap



Technical design



Development/implementation Iterative development

– Regular releases for early client visibility and feedback

– Converge on client requirements over development life-cycle

– Quality assessment at the core of development– Continuous measurement of project process and

quality– User testing throughout development



Sales and Marketing Maintain and update System support

• Dedicated support team to cope with availability issues both in and out of normal office hours

Site maintenance• New features, data revisions, enhancements and

bug fixes


Some challenges

Skill base Data User-centred design User-generated content and social networking Management Routes to market


Some questions

Does this move my business goal forward? What’s working? What’s not? Can I isolate things that aren’t working and

replace them with new experiments? What purpose is the content serving? How do I measure success?

From: Chris Brogan blog


Organisational issues

Managing all stakeholders across the business has proven challenging for digital decision makers

When it comes to management, the Digital Director role is becoming increasingly powerful.... The Digital Director is no longer subservient to the Editor or Marketing Director of the printed product.

Deloitte report, 2007


New skills and roles

Information architect Project manager Digital library sales manager User experience designer/tester Discoverability/SEO/taxonomist/ontologist Social media manager


More numbers

UK turnover 2008

TurnoverVideo games £4.64 bnMusic and video £4.46 bnBooks £4.1 bn


Convergences: games


Convergences: games

Active participation Modding License model Film Opportunities for use in learning technology


Convergences: games

Microsoft on unauthorised content on the Xbox:

“Let's assume we can't stop it. How are we going to manage it?”


Convergences: museums

Museum 2.0 + participatory museums Heritage sector is addressing:

• Planning and management

• Fund raising

• Understanding the audience

• Metadata - introduction and implementation

• Copyright and intellectual property

• Sustainability

• Financial issues

• Visual and image based resource creation and delivery

• Implementing digital resources

• Digital preservation


Convergences

Conferences and exhibitions Libraries Humanities computing/digital humanities eLearning Participation (civic and unconferences) Journalism 2.0 Knowledge management TV and broadcasting


Digital future

Current trends• Structured Data

• The Real-Time Web

• Personalization

• Mobile Web & Augmented Reality

• Internet of Things (objects connected to web)

• Virtual worlds


Digital future

In five years?• Dominated by Chinese-language content.

• Jump from app to app to app seamlessly.

• Distribution distinctions between TV, radio and the web will go away.

• Content will move towards more video.

• "Real time information is just as valuable as all the other information, we want it included in our search results....but how do we rank it?"

• Fundamental shift towards user-generated information; people will listen more to other people than to traditional sources. Learning how to rank that "is the great challenge of the age."

Google CEO Eric Schmidt


History

Ebooks as incunabula


Transitions in communications

What pointers are there from the past?

• From writing to print

–Gutenberg, Caxton...

–History of the Book

• From oral and memory to written Different literacies


Transitions in communications

If men learn [writing], it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows. (Plato, Phaedrus, 65)


Thoughts

Is publishing just about information and 'knowledge management'?

How much is it mediated via (mostly) male-designed and created technologies?

What can we learn from media and performance scholars?

If publishing function still exists in 50 years, what sort of organisations will control it?


Blogs and RSS


Blogs

Tools of Change for Publishing. http://toc.oreilly.com/

The Bookseller: http://www.thebookseller.com

STM: http://www.stm-assoc.org/

Black Plastic Glasses. Evan Schnittman, OUP Inc. http://www.blackplasticglasses.com/

Institute for the Future of the Book: http://www.futureofthebook.org/

Joe Wikert's Publishing 2020 Blog http://jwikert.typepad.com/

ReadWriteWeb: http://www.readwriteweb.com/ “a blog that provides analysis of web products and trends”


Other Information

Kasdorf, William E. (ed) The Columbia Guide to Digital Publishing 2003

Morville, Peter and Louis Rosenfeld Information Architecture for the World Wide Web 2006

Journal of Electronic Publishing (http://www.journalofelectronicpublishing.org/)

Information World Review

Online Information at Olympia (1-3 December) http://www.online-information.co.uk/


Thank you

[email protected]

What is Digital Publishing? Brad Scott Digital Publishing Consulting Kings College, London 23...

Documents

Transcript of What is Digital Publishing? Brad Scott Digital Publishing Consulting Kings College, London 23...