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: How is Google Editions going to impact your publishing organization?

The Google Books Partner Program and Google Editions is growing and evolving at an astounding rate. Come hear keynote speaker Andrew Littell, strategic partner development manager for Google, share his insights and vision of Google Books Partner Program and Google Editions. He'll detail what publishers need to understand now and plan for the future.

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

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

RSuite User Conference: How a medical publisher convinced 1,000 authors to work in XML

Medical publishing giant Wolters Kluwer Health required a content management system for its highly profitable 5-Minute Clinical Consult series to streamline delivery of content to multiple output channels, facilitate re-use, automate workflow, etc. But here’s the rub---Wolters Kluwer Health actually has more than 1,000 authors and reviewers working in XML. Yes, that’s right! In this client spotlight, Mike Rosiak, lead content architect at Wolters Kluwer Health, details how subject matter experts stay focused on the content while kicking off an XML-first workflow. 

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

Looking for acceptance

When implementing a new or improved content management system, I find that many teams don't have time or the staff to perform what is known as "user acceptance testing (UAT)". But let's face it: end users are going to either accept or reject the system components eventually, and it's much less painful to get through this process in a controlled manner during the project than during production.

During project testing, participants expect to find bugs and issues. The development team is still available to fix the issues. The team can take disruptions in stride, since issues only disrupt testing, rather than production schedules. Failures are part of the normal process.

After the system is released into the wild, system end users who were not involved in the project start working and expectations are high: "This system has been released, so I’m assuming that everything works", they're thinking. Newly discovered issues are upsetting and disruptive to production schedules. The project developers may have been reassigned to other work already, and a team may need to wait for fixes, which exacerbates the problem.

So how do we balance the realities of resource constraints with the obvious need to test?

Let’s look at it in terms of quality. A generally accepted definition of quality is that something meets specifications ("is it what we ordered?") and is fit for use ("is it fast and intuitive?").

The UAT process runs in a tightly controlled environment and excels in proving methodically that all specifications have been met. It helps in answering the general questions "how will we know we're done?" and "how will we know we're successful?" This is ideal from a systems vendor or IT department perspective; because it allows a neat line to be drawn between the project and handoff. The project is nicely wrapped and packaged for delivery. For the end users, the disadvantage here is that everything rests on how well requirements were defined in the first place. It’s very easy to miss something that can cause trouble later on.

A team can also release a system as a beta version or as a pilot. Instead of a few people running dummy content through test scenarios, a sub-set of actual system users can move through an actual workflow using actual content. This approach helps the group move forward on their production schedules, while maintaining a relatively controlled environment. And, because it's a smaller set of users, the group's expectations can be set so that issues don't freak them out. Since the team is operating in a live environment, they can identify critical issues that may have been missed during the requirements gathering stage. A live environment is ideal for proving fitness for use.

However, it may not provide a very thorough quality check against the stated requirements, since there may be exceptions in the process that won't occur during the beta period, such as an end-of-quarter rollup, report, or content delivery. The pilot approach works only if the end to end process is sufficiently short enough to get through within project timeline and cost constraints. 

Ideally, we’ll use both approaches. At a minimum, it’s smart to spend some time with at least a couple of team members to take the system for a "test drive" assuming multiple roles, to ensure that all specifications have been met and the pilot period starts smoothly. Then following that with a pilot enables the end users to determine fitness for use.

I'm always looking for the right balance. What's your experience?

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.]

The Onion and Drupal - A not-so-funny lesson

Seth Gottlieb from <!-- content here --> tells the story of why The Onion customized open source CMS, Drupal and ultimately moved to Django for managing its web content. You can read that story here.

This lesson is the main reason I hear our RSuite architects chant "configure rather than customize" from the corners of the office.

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.

eMedia Professional Certification Program Raffle

Don't let anyone tell you there is no such thing as a free lunch...(in fact, we have them once a month at the office but I digress) or in this case...a free eMedia Professional Certification.

IDEAlliance just launched its eMedia Professional Certification (EMPC) program. This program is offered in four distinct blocks of courses. Each block comprises a series of webinars that covers a range of topics related to eMedia Publishing, including

• eMedia Workflows’ Impact on Organizational Structure and Partner Relationships
• Controlled Vocabularies, Taxonomies and Ontologies
• XML Under the Hood: What Everyone Should Know
• Which XML Workflow Really Works?
• Integrating DAM and Content Management

This program runs from March through November. All classes will be recorded so publishing professionals can join at any time. 

The entire session costs $1800 but Really Strategies is raffling off one free pass to any individual who provides the most compelling reason why he/she should win. Yes this is not at all scientific but that means you can be as creative as you want to be.

Either submit a comment below, including a valid email address so I can contact you OR send me an email with your contact information.

More info on the program is located here.