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Package
Deal: How Personal Publishing Can Transform Content
Packaging |
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15
September 2003 |
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In a week that saw the
RiAA's lawsuit against downloaders unfolding and
Barnes & Noble pulling out of eBook distribution, many
publishers and distributors seem to be struggling with how
to confront the power of personal publishing's impact on
their business models. You cannot wish personal
publishing's power away, nor can you ignore that its power
is really only just beginning to have significant impact on
both the publishing industry and professionals in the
institutions that they serve. Smart publishing companies
will embrace personal publishing technologies aggressively
and learn how to make content valuable because of, and not
in spite of, individual publishing capabilities. |
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Enough already with the
RIAA lawsuit against music downloaders, please. As we
mentioned in
our earlier news analysis on this topic, you cannot succeed
in a marketplace by treating its preferred consumption habits
as criminal. The simple fact is that mainstream publishers were
asleep at the wheel when it came to considering new personal
publishing technology that flew in the face of established
business models. It doesn't look good on quarterly reports to
say that your whole distribution network is about to be trashed
by some uppity teenagers who figured out over a couple of
late-night pizzas that individuals were extremely efficient
content distribution channels, so no doubt the recording
industry throught it best to ignore the whole mess as long as
the stock analysts are happy with what they saw in the numbers
- that is, until the facts caught up with them. Personal
publishing is here to stay, and needs to be confronted not as
an enemy technology but as a factual presence that well-meaning
clients embrace.
There was more head-in-the-sand market
management methodology by Barnes & Noble last week, when
they
announced that they were pulling out of the eBooks
marketplace. Not profitable, expensive to support - there were
a number of reasonable explanations that could be used to
explain this maneuver to the satisfaction of investors. But
none of them really address the underlying fact that they are
unwilling to invest to make themselves a technology leader in
this arena. Having played catch-up with
Amazon to their
satisfaction, perhaps they're willing to let others pioneer in
this arena while they concentrate on building relationships
with clients through coffee shops, chocolates and other
tangible bookstore benefits. Providing dominant physical
outlets will be of limited use, though, when people have been
able to establish virtual relationships around a new electronic
medium for books that thrives on audiences onpassing items from
one person to another, unless they reposition their stores as
print-(and-burn)-on-demand outlets..
In institutional markets, many of these barriers to accepting publishing
technology are less
dominant, in large part because institutional publishers have
been using electronic distribution for many years. But even in
the institutional arena, few publishers have been able to
leverage personal publishing channels successfully. In finance,
companies such as Reuters and Bloomberg have long enabled
personal communications between securities traders via their
information networks, but even in this arena premium content
distribution via networks of individuals is largely an
afterthought. Premium content sales for professionals are still executed largely
at the institutional level. But be it via file sharing,
weblogs, content management tools, collaboration software,
instant messaging, or simple email attachments, individuals are
now empowered with affordable publishing technologies that place
content in useful contexts with amazing efficiency.
So as much as physical distribution history blinds the consumer
content industry to these issues, the history of electronic
content distribution at the institutional level tends to blind
these players from the role of individuals as content
distributors. It's seen more as residual income that can be
recouped at the institutional level via services such as
Copyright
Clearance Center than as a primary channel.
The future points clearly towards the
need for premium content publishers to confront strongly and
comprehensively the role of individuals as consumers,
publishers and distributors of content. A glimpse of this
future can be found in
IBM's recently revealed "Socializer" project, in which Big
Blue has rigged up a prototype environment that enables a
person equipped with a wireless device to visit an office and
discover content automatically that is available to them at
that location, as well as to allow these visitors to share
content with their guests with equal ease. In such an
environment, the ability to exploit someone's knowledge and
enthusiasm regarding premium content to which they have rights
will be paramount to spreading its adoption and consumption in
contexts that matter most to people - the ones that are likely
to lead to business via the social relationships that are
fostered via these collaborative content-sharing tools.
Professional publishers are struggling to
keep up with content creation and distribution technologies
that have revolutionized the way in which individuals and
institutions can communicate with one another. They no longer
dominate distribution technology, and yet most publishers'
business models are based on the premise that they can somehow
dominate the technology. Given the advanced state of most
emerging publishing technologies that don't presume their
dominance it's impossible for them to spend their way into the
lead. At best most premium content distributors hope to shape
emerging standards and to partner effectively with leading
technology players.
Yet the arena of personal publishing
offers premium publishers an ideal environment in which to
re-establish superior value packaging for their products and
services. If content organization and distribution is no longer
a distinct and clearly profitable advantage in the marketplace,
then publishers need to place more emphasis on how content
objects are being distributed to and by individuals- how they
can adapt to individuals' needs, how they can be amended and
amplified by their individual owners, how they can conform to
the social contexts in which their owners find themselves,
how they can adapt automatically to specific devices in which
they are being used.
Capabilities such as Web services, in
which a combination of content and active functionality are
distributed together in a way that can have them adapt to a
users' needs, are network-oriented ways of looking at this
problem. But at some point content objects need to become
untethered from their network source and to take on lives of
their own to be fully valuable. Being able to allow individuals
using those objects to manipulate and use them as full-featured
objects "off-network", or to enable the individual to transfer
them seamlessly from one network environment to another, is the
key to sustainable value in packaging premium publications.
Hiding from the publishing power of individuals will not make
this requirement any smaller; embracing their power and
enabling it in new and valuable ways will make the future of
professional publishing far brighter than may be imagined in
these challenging days.
-
John Blossom
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