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John Murrell, in his Good Morning Silicon Valley blog says that the price of the Negroponte laptop (http://www.laptop.org/) has hit $176 (it keeps climbing!), but as he writes, "the bigger news (is) that it may run a version of Windows in addition to the customized Linux OS and open-source apps designed for it." (http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci_5757863)
The blog is here: http://www.svextra.com/blogs/gmsv/
There has been much speculation and lots of quick judgments on the Negroponte laptop project. I've found all of the articles and blogs I've seen to be so devoid of factual matter, while so packed with unsubstantiated opinion, that I've found it impossible to form any kind of judgment of my own on the topic.
Obviously addressing the huge problem of literacy in the third-world is essential to a bright future for publishing. Will this be part of the solution?
Read a truly excellent article here:
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/apr07/4985
It's that rara avis -- an article full of both technical, social and political insight, and extremely balanced in presenting its ideas and information. Fascinating and provocative.
Well, I’d have to say it was a very good conference. Attendance was up, San Francisco was sunny and warm, and I thought the sessions were very good.
I had the advantage/disadvantage of being one of the track chairs of the publishing track, which meant that I had to attend all six publishing sessions. I managed to catch the keynotes as well, which were jam-packed. But I’ll leave it to others to discuss the other tracks and sessions.
We tried to expand the publishing track this spring from a focus solely on automated publishing (we brought that topic down to one session). The subject is important, and very relevant to the rest of the Gilbane conference content, but we had the clear intention of making the publishing track much broader in scope than it had been before.
Steve Paxhia very kindly allowed me to lead off with what was really a dual session. I introduced my new web site: www.thefutureofpublishing.com, but also spoke more broadly on the subject. I’ve got a ton of material that I’m slowly loading onto the Web site, and nine years of research behind it.
We then moved to “Publishing Automation: What Can You Do Today?” and had three great speakers tackle the topic. OK, they were all book publishers, but each had a markedly different approach, and I decided, in the end, that listening to three approaches to a similar problem might be more interesting than three approaches to completely different challenges.
The topic “How Will Internet Communities and Collaboration Technologies Change Publishing Best Practices?” was a tough one, and Steve and his speakers handled it very well. This subject is so slippery. Do you need to create a community on your Web site? What is the ideal extent of collaboration? I was left with the clear sense that community and collaboration are essential to nearly all publishing Web sites.
We then featured two sessions on cross-media publishing strategies. Bill Rosenblatt is the expert. It struck me that there are still a lot of unanswered questions around cross-media publishing, but absolutely no question about the necessity and reality of this phenomenon — not only is it essential, but the tools are there today.
Bill Trippe wasn’t available to moderate “Publishing for International Audiences: Top Challenges and Best Practices” but he had selected two great speakers: Stéphane Dayras, technical services manager for Quark in Europe, and Ben Martin, senior analyst at Flatirons Solutions in Colorado. They were the perfect pairing. Stéphane introduced the topic broadly, and offered a true international perspective. Ben is “the scientist,” and showed extensive details of planning for this tough challenge. Most of the audience stayed behind for an extra half-hour.
Where do we go from here? I’d love to hear from attendees with suggestions. I think we still face a challenge effectively blending this publishing content into the broader Gilbane conference. But I think we’ve given it a home.
Nick Bogarty from the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) writes that the Open Publication Structure (OPS) 2.0 has been elevated for IDPF Member and Public Review. The review period will begin today and extend for 30 days ending on Wednesday, May 16th, 2007. The IDPF strongly encourages feedback from potential users, developers and others, whether IDPF members or not, for the sake of improving the interoperability and quality of IDPF work.
You can view the draft document here. Feedback on the draft specifications should be made by posting a reply to the forum topic, and sample OPS 2.0 files can be found for download here.
Last month,I had the privilege of being a guest lecturer at MIT for Howard Anderson and Peter Kurzina's Course entitled "Managing in Crisis". I prepared a case study about the current status of the College Publishing market. It included concerns about price pressures, used book competition, channel issues, new competitors and new media requirements, pending legislation about pricing practices, and the continued lack in the growth of unit sales.
The class was composed of 40 or so very bright students who did an excellent job analyzing the case. One student really captured the essence of the case when she said that it reminded her of the photography industry as the major players struggle with the transition from traditional film and paper products to digital photography.
While Kodak moments have long been associated with joyful celebrations, the aforementioned transition has been anything but a celebration. In fact, it is likely that this Kodak moment will come to exemplify the struggles of a powerful corporation as they strive and perhaps even fail due their inability to recognize the customer benefits, opportunities, and challenges associated with non-traditional types of photographic media.
Many publishers are struggling with their own "Kodak Moments". And I think that the transition issues are similar to the photography industry. First, Kodak seems to have been focused on the products that people had been buying for years and trying to preserve the advantages that their film and paper technologies provided. Like many of us who have had market leading products, they were arrogant about their technology, processes, market position and quality. While they clearly were aware of digital photography technology, they dismissed digital products because the image quality was significantly poorer. Then they concentrated on turning digital photos into traditional photos. It seems to met hat they missed
the potential in offering less expensive digital images that could easily be posted on the Internet or e-mailed to relatives.
For many years, publishers offerings have been closely related to technological developments in the Software and Printing industries. For example, software has enabled improvements in authoring, composition, and thereby lowered the costs of elegant or complex page designs. Printing Technology has made four color printing much more affordable and had made shorter print runs economical. These changes have been passed along to consumers of information. (While I understand that there are differences between the terms: content, information, and intellectual property, I will use the term information to subsume all three terms for purposes of brevity) In many cases, they have added value to the customer's experience but there are cases where formats were enhanced and color offered because they could be rather than because they were beneficial. In reality, I believe that the net result was that the size, format, and frequency of the traditional economical delivery unit EDU (my term) of information (a book, journal, or magazine) were modified by technology advances but the traditional media form has remained essentially the same for 100+ years.
The Internet has presented publishers with a radical paradigm shift ( I don't like the term either). All types of publishing entities have had to deal with changes in customer expectations that are easily as profound as those experienced by the Photography industry. They don't just want their information to be more timely and less expensive, they also want their information to concisely answer their questions and seamlessly integrate with their work flows or learning styles.
Perhaps the most significant change is the redefinition of the EDU. In the purely print era, there needed to be a certain mass of information to build a product that would be economical to print and sufficiently valuable to consumers to generate a profit. In manycases, it was assumed that relatively few information consumers would use all of the information that was presented in a single EDU. Rather, the scope of the information (or content) had to be broad enough to attract enough customers without being so broad as to make customers feel that they were procuring too much information that wasn't pertinent to their interests. Hence, we have witnessed a generation of books where authors and market researchers work closely together.
In the digital world, authors and publishers are potentially freed from the strictures of printing economies. Therefore, information currently found in textbooks, references, magazines and journals can be rendered as as short information objects or more comprehensive content modules. Or publishers can produce information objects or content modules that are not anticipated to ever take book form. The objects can be delivered in many ways including search engines such as Google. These new EDUs can be purchased or licenses separately or mixed and matched to create a course of instruction or a personal reference work. One benefit of these nimbler EDUs is that they blend nicely with software to offer increased value in the form of better instruction or more productive work flows.
The availability of these more compact EDUs will likely spawn many debates concerning academic traditions and learning methodologies that we have come to hold dear. It has long been the practice for students to read and master significant quantities of information with the expectation that many of the specific facts will fade from memory leaving a general understanding of the topic. And many people are considered well read because they have plowed through many traditional EDUs (Books) The question will be: Could one become well educated or well read by learning to explore topics of interest through smaller EDUs and/or what blend of contextual and specific information delivers the best and most productive intellectual outcome. There will be some interesting face-offs between technology enabled active exploration and discovery of information to allow students to pursue topics that they find interesting vs. the more structured mastery of a set of information presented in book form. Of course, it is not an either/or proposition as they methods must eventually be blended to enable meaningful knowledge acquisition.
The digital world has also created a demand for information that is developed and delivered as rapidly as possible. Where traditional publishers often justified their value by guaranteeing the accuracy and authority of their published information, many of today's information consumers are willing to trade authority for velocity of information and now rely upon other information consumers to tell them what information is the most accurate and useful. Individuals now actively participate in communities that generate and evaluate large quantities of information objects and content modules. The Wikipedia/media organization and the MERLOT community are excellent examples of communities that produce quality information modules.
While many information consumers may still prefer to consume their information in print form, they may now wish to print their own copies or to create and purchase custom versions produced by rapidly improving print on demand technology. To many publishers, the perfectly formatted page has become almost an art form. They consider those pages to have many of the same aesthetic values that Kodak attributed to images produced via their traditional film technologies. Because customers rarely have the choice of formats, it is difficult to gauge the value that they derive from "perfect pages" vs potentially less expensive simpler pages. Chip Pettibone of O'Reilly Publishing reported at the recent Gilbane Conference that when readers of e-books were offered the choice between a simple HTML design and a faithful rendition of the original book page, 50% chose the HTML version and that population seemed to be gaining in numbers. Because books and computer screens represent quite different form factors, the value of the perfect page can actually limit rather that enhance the effective presentation of information in digital formats. Therefore, rather than trying to maintain the integrity of the printed page, modern publishers are designing their content to be presented equally well in a variety of media forms. Publishers that cling to the page metaphor are putting their futures in jeopardy.
This paradigm shift is replete with challenges and opportunities. Many traditional reference products (including Microsoft's Encarta) have been decimated by new products created in the Internet Era. Newspapers and magazines have had to adapt to the challenges or multiple media environments by creating online products as they have seen their traditional readership dwindle. Journal publishers have had to derive new models to serve their subscriber base. Many categories of trade books now include websites with fancy multimedia elements and discussion groups. I think that some of the most exciting and interesting challenges and opportunities will be found in the world of educational publishing. As witnessed by the decisions of major publishing conglomerates to divest their educational publishing operations, the challenges of mastering the Internet paradigm shift are both daunting and expensive. To succeed, new generations of products will need to be built to take advantage of technology as opposed to being web versions of existing products. Business models will need to be revised and channel strategies re-engineered. One important outcome will be increased information accessibility for readers and learners with disabilities.
Over the next few years, the publishing industry will witness many Kodak moments.... Hopefully the majority will be the old fashioned Kodak moments of victory and celebration.
