Really Strategies Blog

A Blueprint for Book Publishing Transformation | a report from the Gilbane Group

Over the next few weeks, we're sharing snippets from "A Blueprint for Book Publishing Transformation: Seven Essential Processes to Re-Invent Publishing" by the Gilbane Group, a division of Outsell, Inc. The report truly is a must-read for book publishers but other types of publishers will also gain value from the trends and research the study has collected.

Today, we share the overview from the report:

It truly is a whole new world for book publishing. Publishers know this of course, as do their partners, vendors, and, of course, their booksellers. There are the obvious signs – the Kindles you see in friends’ hands and on the subway and the lines at the Apple store when the iPad was introduced. For industry observers, there are also the daily headlines about Google, Sony, Apple, and Amazon. PW Daily, the Monday-Friday e-mail blast from Publishers Weekly has e-book-related articles in almost every edition; we have counted more than one edition in the past year where every article was about e-books.

After the devastating economy of late 2008 and early 2009, book publishers are seeing more numbers that are positive. The revenues for digital publishing – and e-books specifically – are very strong and promise to continue to grow. Some segments of book publishing, including STM (scientific, technical, and medical) and professional, reached the digital revenue tipping point long ago. Some research from our Outsell colleagues, summarized later in this report, suggest other segments will start to tip in the next year or two.

These larger forces are creating significant pressure inside of book publishing. The goal of this study was to look at how publishers are adapting their traditional processes – many decades old and older – to adapt to digital publishing. Since these processes are usually aided by technology, the study took aim at the tools and systems publishers have been using and are starting to use.
The excitement of the marketplace is tempered by some of our analysis. While there are many bright spots – production and digital printing jump to mind – other process areas lag, are too nascent, or are waiting for industry standards and best practices to coalesce. What makes the landscape particularly challenging for book publishers is the rapid-fire addition of new channels and business models and the need to codify these models in their internal processes and systems even before they can fully evaluate how valuable some of these channels and models are.

Still the big picture for book publishers is very positive. The revenues are there, and growing. Readers are excited by the new devices and are demonstrating their excitement in fast-growing device and e-book sales. Publishers are moving ahead quickly across a broad front of process improvement and technology investment.

Our case studies point to some of the smartest bets publishers can make in the near- and medium-term. We expect that a look at these process areas in another year would show steady improvement in most areas and marked improvement in those areas tied most directly to revenue growth and e-book promotion.

Stay tuned for more information from this report or download your own copy here.

RSuite User Conference: Multi-Channel Publishing at the American Society for Training and Development

ASTD is making remarkable strides at improving its internal publishing workflow and content management with RSuite. In this spotlight session, Anthony Allen, director of digital media at ASTD, presents the workflow expansion framework he has developed to publish content for print outlets, the iPad, Kindle, Nook, and websites. He’ll show how RSuite enables ASTD to produce custom training material for sales staff within 1 hour.

Come join over 100 publishing executives at the RSuite CMS User Conference on October 20, 2010 in Philadelphia to hear more RSuite success stories and network with industry leaders - http://www.rsuitecms.com/2010userconf.htm

The Oxford University Press Licenses RSuite

  We are delighted to add the Oxford University Press to the RSuite customer list.

Oxford University Press (OUP) is using RSuite to transform its publishing operations. RSuite offers OUP the tools and the facility to automatically ingest and store content from its authors and other content suppliers. RSuite also allows the delivery of OUP content both manually and automatically to multiple targets in various formats. Examples of content delivery range from XML documents that are converted to Word and sent via email for editorial updates to batch delivery of XML and media files based on user selection and other criteria for web site updates.

[Full press release here.]

Flippin' the pay-per-page paradigm

DocZone's new licensing model offers publishers an innovative approach to content management.  Publishers receive full system capabilities for a group of editorial and production users, with access to all system features and only pay for final pages produced.

This means the cost of the system is carried by the current production budget. You pay for the pages you make, the FINAL pages you make:

• not for corrections or for corrected pages of any kind
• NO author alterations charges
• NO corrected pages charges

The entire automated publishing system, authoring tool, Content Management System, and pagination is paid for by composition charges alone. We figure, publishers pay for the pages anyway so why not get a free authoring/editing tool, a free CMS and output to PDF, EPUB , HTML and RTF all for the price of composition?

DocZone's flagship customer, The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group said,

"We saw tremendous opportunities for cost savings and improved turnaround time with DocZone. In our pilot testing with DocZone, we saw the time for PDF proofs drop from a week to just a few minutes. With the same amount of money as we have traditionally budgeted just for offshore composition services, we now have a complete content management and automated publishing environment."

Read more at Publishers Weekly.

See pay-per-page live by contacting us.

[Official press release here.]

Everything old is new again

eMedia Vitals has a nice post detailing some iPad FAQs for media companies. I had a chuckle reading the last Q:

So, is the iPad really a game-changer for publishers?

"The digital edition has always been an afterthought of the print edition,” says Rich Maggiotto, CEO of Zinio. “This is a distribution channel that forces you to think about designing for the medium.” And designing new business models as well.

I think it's funny that publishers have reached that point where they create, edit, and publish media-agnostic content only to find they're back full circle and should think about designing for the new medium (ie, iPad).

[read full post here]

Following is a great example of designing a magazine cover for the iPad. 

iPad Sunset Mag Cover Spec from Jesse Rosten on Vimeo.

"Journalism is the act. Newspapers are the artifact."

The past week was flush with conversation (ie, Tweets and blog comments) about Clay Shirky's rousing blog post Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable.

Read it. Read it in its entirety.

One comment on the post from Mark Bertils that won't leave my head is "Journalism is the act. Newspapers are the artifact."

I make a habit of looking up known definitions in the dictionary (and I do mean digital not the heavy tome I have here at my desk) because I find additional thought-provoking but commonly-known information. While reading the definitions of newspaper and newsprint I am reminded that the essence of the newspaper business is timeliness. Why were evening editions so popular in the 1950s and early 60s? For the same reasons that Twitter and RSS newsfeeds are so popular now. Timeliness.

I do lament the demise of print and I don't like seeing my Google news alerts on this topic competing with my spam folder in terms of volume. But I am heartened by the fact that journalism, reporting, writing, editing, authoring, these beautiful professions whose fundamental job is the exchange of thoughts from one mind to another, are not going away.

RSuite CMS provides loud and clear answer for Audible.com

We are often asked by publishers to describe the real business impact RSuite CMS has on our clients. Along with my previous post on Blood-Horse Publications, Audible.com is another client that has leveraged the power of RSuite to realize its business goals.

Audible, Inc., an Amazon.com, Inc. subsidiary, is the leading provider of premium digital spoken audio information and entertainment, on the Internet.

In early 2007 Audible.com launched an aggressive project to revamp their entire metadata program to better manage and process the metadata files they receive from their publishing partners.This program had the following business objectives to meet:

• Ensure error-free metadata by using publisher or publisher aggregators as the source of data, and by developing new tools to drive, search, browse, and publish to store functions off this sourced data.
• Ensure the ability to identify Audible products on partner sites by providing ISBNs that correspond to the downloadable digital binding with each product in feeds to partners, wherever and whenever possible.
• Reduce the occurrences of human error by automatically populating data into web site databases, from the sourced data.
• Improve findabilty, searchability, and marketability of products by standardizing keyword, category, authors, contributors, and publishers.
• Improve royalty systems by making contract entry a requirement for any product being pushed to an Audible site.

During a 4-week proof of concept (POC), RSuite was configured to prove out several use cases:

1. Leverage RSuite’s workflow tool to ingest ONIX feeds and audio files
2. Apply additional metadata (both manually and automatically)
3. Distribute the appropriate content packages to target delivery sites.

During this stage many business rules were also documented that were applicable to improving Audible's business opportunities. After a successful POC, Audible.com selected RSuite for its metadata and aggregation solution.

RSuite became the framework upon which Audible crafted solutions to meet all its requirements: workflow, business rules validation, content aggregation and delivery. In 6 months, RSuite was configured and implemented to become Audible's workflow tool, which enables seamless transfer of content from publisher feeds to web site-ready files.

Now after using RSuite for over a year, Audible has realized its goals of integrating a tool that would satisfy the business objectives and show a return on investment quickly. As Art Zegarek, director of data architecture told our team, “RSuite has become a very critical system very fast!" It is satisfying to know that RSuite is helping an aggregator such as Audible.com meet its business objectives every day.

What is the difference between RSuite CMS and MarkLogic Server?

Publishers often ask us “What’s the difference between RSuite CMS and MarkLogic Server." Great question!  The most straightforward answer is that RSuite is a content management application and MarkLogic Server is a database. It’s that simple.

MarkLogic Server is an incredibly powerful XML repository on top of which many publishers have built fantastic applications, O’Reilly’s Safari U, Elsevier, and Congressional Quarterly, to name a few. These custom built delivery applications are just one way MarkLogic Sever has been used.

RSuite CMS is also an application built on MarkLogic Server. RSuite CMS sits on top of MarkLogic Server to leverage the native XML repository (i.e., database) and search capabilities. Without a database, RSuite would not be able to run – just like a car needs an engine. However, without a chassis, steering wheel, electronics, etc., the engine would be of little use. Therefore, think of RSuite as the ignition system and think of MarkLogic Server as the engine. Both are very important to content management.

Investing in RSuite CMS: A four month ROI

I’ve been involved in technology well over 20 years now and in the information industry just over a decade. In that time I’ve seen my share of project successes and failures, but one thing I have never seen until now is a publisher actually get the ROI they were expecting out of their technology investment within the first year of implementation.

Blood-Horse Publications, a Kentucky-based publisher that is the definitive resource for thoroughbred information, licensed RSuite CMS in 2007. At our recent user conference, Luther Andal, Director of Technology for Blood-Horse, provided the following summary of their investment in RSuite:

• Evaluated (through a proof of concept) and launched RSuite CMS in less than 16 weeks
• Recognized significant revenue from the data feeds and editorial content that was aggregated by RSuite in an automated fashion, which in turn populated a subscription-based website and created and distributed a daily PDF product
• Reallocated two IT staff because of the efficiencies gained (saving over $100,000 of annual production costs)
• Realized an ROI in 4 months

That is pretty impressive if I say so myself. In these days of year-long projects that go off the track (I’m thinking train track here, not horse track), it is refreshing to see a publisher with a success story by keeping the project scope tight to meet a true business need. As a best practice that we promote, keeping the scope focused on meeting specific business objectives allows for the best possible success. Just ask Blood-Horse Publications who is now enjoying the capabilities of RSuite CMS as a core technology to their publishing operation.

Stay tuned for more RSuite success stories.

Why a CMS? why now?

Maybe you've got a gut feeling that it's time to buy a content management system.  Maybe you've  gotten a demo of one and gotten general buy-in from the team.  Now it's time to justify it financially. 

The first thing to keep in mind is that a CMS is a tool.  It is a tool that serves two purposes, so there are two angles that can be taken for justification.

First, and easiest, if most mundane, a CMS serves to wring out non-creative tasks from content development.  Think about how much time is wasted in content production: routing, tracking, moving, backing up, converting from one format to another, cutting and pasting, rekeying, etc., etc.  All of this takes time and an efficient publishing operation will reduce this work to a minimum by using a contemporary CMS so that more resources can be put into making the best content available.  If you produce a lot of content, then these numbers may surprise you once you pull them together. 

Ordinarily, publishers won't want to rock the boat with this stuff, it just causes angst and is hard for management to relate to hot topics in expanding market presence, competing with other publishing organizations, etc.  However, many publishers are feeling angst anyway, and have no choice at this point.  Profitability is a serious issue as is well known.  But more compelling, publishers are now feeling the weight of these non-productive tasks now that electronic distribution of content has expanded so dramatically - and along with it, manual production tasks.  Content must be agile, and this won't happen if production staff or offshore vendors have to touch every piece, every time.

Second, and much, much more interesting, a good CMS can put some forms of content distribution in reach that were never in reach before. In this sense, a CMS can be part of a new initiative to compete in the publishing market. For example, a traditional publisher may want to slice and dice their content to form specialized publications for niche customer segments.  A licensee might be willing to pay for certain topics of content, if it can be delivered in usable form.  In many cases, this was never seriously considered because it was never financially possible before - there would have been too much manual and editorial labor in finding and organizing appropirate content, and producing it in appropriate forms.  But today, with a native XML CMS like RSuite, this is financially possible.  And the first publishers to execute well will be able to create specialized demand and win customers.

Maybe you pay for your new CMS through ordinary savings, but take advantage of it by using it to develop new publication types.  Whatever your strategy, the technology is here, is now, and for the new generation of systems, particularly RSuite CMS installed on a Mark Logic repository, the technology actually works well enough to be cost effective.  We know this because our customers are starting to report savings and interesting new revenue stories to us.  All we can say, then, is: go for it!