what is digital publishing? brad scott digital publishing consulting kings college, london 23...
TRANSCRIPT
What is Digital Publishing?
Brad Scott
Digital Publishing Consulting
King’s College, London23 November 2009
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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
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Topics
Introduction Crowds and communities Product types and business models Creating digital products How publishers are changing Convergences Future and issues
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Brad Scott
1990-2001: Routledge: Digital publisher 2001-2008: Semantico: Account director 2008-present: Consulting
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Brad Scott
Digital publisher Project management, data, marketing plan
Arden Shakespeare Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals Projects with UK National Archives
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Brad Scott
Data consulting, project planning Oxford University Press Modern Language Association Wiley-Blackwell Cambridge University Press Taylor & Francis Palgrave Macmillan Brill NV
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Digital Publishing
Publishing: Making public Dissemination Communicating Not necessarily printed or written
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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
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Digital Publishing
Publishing conglomerates• Capitalist commoditization of 'content'
+ Digital technologies (especially the web)• Potential for democratic access, creation,
participation
= Tension
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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
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"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
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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
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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
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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
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Statistics
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Crowds and Communities
Open Source, Creative Commons Web 2.0 [2004]
• information sharing
• interoperability
• user-centered design
• collaboration
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Crowds and Communities
Web 2.0• web-based communities
• web applications
• social-networking sites
• video-sharing sites
• wikis
• blogs
• mashups
• folksonomies
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Crowds and Communities
Wikipedia “Quantity is no substitute for expertise” Open Feedback Publishing System (O’Reilly)
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Crowds and Communities
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Crowds and Communities
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Crowds and Communities
Conferences:
Text Encoding Initiative 12 Nov 2009
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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
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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)
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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
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Revenue generation
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Varieties of digital publishing
We are all digital publishers now
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Varieties of digital publishing
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Varieties of digital publishing
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Varieties of digital publishing
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Varieties of digital publishing
How to make sense of it all?
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Varieties of digital publishing
No single delivery method• Different services types/user technologies
Aggregators Ebooks Other digital services Mobiles/PDA Apps Print on Demand
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Varieties of digital publishing
Aggregators Low risk for licensing publishers Low return
Ovid (hundreds of journals, databases, books) CSA/ProQuest Credo (Xrefer) And Google...
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Varieties of digital publishing
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Varieties of digital publishing
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Varieties of digital publishing
Ebooks Books read using a portable device Books delivered as pdfs online (myiLibrary,
ebrary, Dawsonera or Cambridge Collections Online)
Any digital book content
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Varieties of digital publishing
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Varieties of digital publishing
Ebooks:
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Varieties of digital publishing
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
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Varieties of digital publishing
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
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Varieties of digital publishing
Ebook platforms Credo Reference
EBL
MyiLibrary
NetLibrary
ebrary
Dawsonera
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Varieties of digital publishing
Dawsonera PDF transformations,
slicing, encryption, watermarking
DRM ebook delivery platform
Flexible business rules
Metered usage
eCommerce integration
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Varieties of digital publishing
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Varieties of digital publishing
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Varieties of digital publishing
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Varieties of digital publishing
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Varieties of digital publishing
Audio content
Themed collection
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Varieties of digital publishing
Single platform: multiple sites
– ORO Core
– ORO Premium
– Syndication
– Digital Reference Shelf
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Varieties of digital publishing
Book + Multiple choice questions
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Varieties of digital publishing
User modifications
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Varieties of digital publishing
Linking
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Varieties of digital publishing
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Varieties of digital publishing
Apps
iPhone, Google’s Android OS, a Blackberry or other PDA
100,000 apps on iStore, 2bn downloads
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Varieties of digital publishing
Winged Chariot’s The Surprise (59p)
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Varieties of digital publishing
Augmented reality
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Varieties of digital publishing
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Varieties of digital publishing
Publishing platforms Atypon Ingenta Semantico iFactory xTF: California Digital Library in-house
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Varieties of digital publishing
Business models Subscription (individual, university) Pay per view Metered access Open Access Free/donations
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Delivering digital products
Data Hardware Site code Access control / Digital Rights Management Integration with other systems Discovery
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Delivering digital products
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
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Delivering digital products
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Delivering digital products
Data ALWAYS the biggest risk Metadata/classification Multimedia Statistics User-generated content
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Delivering digital products
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Delivering digital products
Access control Fundamental part of
online publishing infrastructure
Who/what/when
Credentials and identity management (Shibboleth)
Statistics (COUNTER, ICOLC)
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Delivering digital products
Integrating with other systems Order processing eCommerce Editorial workflow Royalties and financial Corporate website
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Delivering digital products
Discovery Google Yahoo Microsoft Federated search/Metasearch (Opensearch,
Z39.50) Metadata harvesting (OAI-PMH) Search Engine Optimisation
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Delivering digital products
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Delivering digital products
Process In-house or outsource? Project team Initial product conception Tendering Design phase Content creation Development/implementation Sales and marketing Post launch
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Delivering digital products
In-house or outsource What is required? Get advice Are skills available? Strategic planning: mixture of outsourcing and in-
house activities
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Delivering digital products
Project team Publisher
– Project sponsor– Marketing– Data/Production– Project manager
Developer– Account manager– Project manager– Lead developer
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Delivering digital products
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
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Delivering digital products
Tendering Request for Proposals (RPF) Vendors supply response Presentations and demonstrations Vendor selection
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Delivering digital products
Design phase Requirements gathering Deliverables
– Information architecture– User-focussed design– Specification– Costs– Schedule
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Delivering digital products
Content creation Incorporating digital content should fundamentally
alter the production process New content types: Quality Assurance (QA)
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Delivering digital products
Development/implementation Development contract
– Fixed price or time and materials– Deliverables– Site specification– Costs– Schedule– Hosting– Support– Change process
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Delivering digital products
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)
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Delivering digital products
Development /implementation
Wireframes and sitemap
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Delivering digital products
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Delivering digital products
Technical design
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Delivering digital products
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
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Delivering digital products
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
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Some challenges
Skill base Data User-centred design User-generated content and social networking Management Routes to market
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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
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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
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New skills and roles
Information architect Project manager Digital library sales manager User experience designer/tester Discoverability/SEO/taxonomist/ontologist Social media manager
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More numbers
UK turnover 2008
TurnoverVideo games £4.64 bnMusic and video £4.46 bnBooks £4.1 bn
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Convergences: games
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Convergences: games
Active participation Modding License model Film Opportunities for use in learning technology
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Convergences: games
Microsoft on unauthorised content on the Xbox:
“Let's assume we can't stop it. How are we going to manage it?”
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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
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Convergences
Conferences and exhibitions Libraries Humanities computing/digital humanities eLearning Participation (civic and unconferences) Journalism 2.0 Knowledge management TV and broadcasting
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Digital future
Current trends• Structured Data
• The Real-Time Web
• Personalization
• Mobile Web & Augmented Reality
• Internet of Things (objects connected to web)
• Virtual worlds
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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
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History
Ebooks as incunabula
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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
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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)
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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?
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Blogs and RSS
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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”
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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/