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Category: Publishing & media (Page 34 of 53)

Google Releases Knol

Google announced that Knol is now open to everyone. They announced Knol back in December. Knols are authoritative articles about specific topics, written by people who know about those subjects. From their blog post:

The key principle behind Knol is authorship. Every knol will have an author (or group of authors) who put their name behind their content. It’s their knol, their voice, their opinion. We expect that there will be multiple knols on the same subject, and we think that is good. With Knol, we are introducing a new method for authors to work together that we call “moderated collaboration.”

With this feature, any reader can make suggested edits to a knol which the author may then choose to accept, reject, or modify before these contributions become visible to the public. This allows authors to accept suggestions from everyone in the world while remaining in control of their content. After all, their name is associated with it! Knols include strong community tools which allow for many modes of interaction between readers and authors. People can submit comments, rate, or write a review of a knol.

At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads from our AdSense program. If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with a revenue share from the proceeds of those ad placements. We are happy to announce an agreement with the New Yorker magazine which allows any author to add one cartoon per knol from the New Yorker’s extensive cartoon repository. Cartoons are an effective (and fun) way to make your point, even on the most serious topics. http://knol.google.com

Environment Concerns Hasten Digital Edition Adoption in B-to-B Publishing

Today I got one of those phone calls: someone from a call center representing a trade magazine, asking me to verify my contact information for their subscriber database and as proof that I’m an actual subscriber that they can include in their circulation numbers. You’ve undoubtedly gotten many of these. They are as much the banes of B-to-B publishers’ existence as they are annoying to subscribers.
I told the phone rep what I tell them all nowadays: I ask if they have a digital edition of their publication. If so, I ask them to switch me to it. If not, I ask them to cancel my subscription. I do this mainly as my tiny way to help the environment, as well as so that I can see what publishers are doing (or not) with digital edition technologies.
The phone rep on today’s call said that the magazine in question, KM World (published by Information Today Inc.), does not offer a digital edition but that he was going to ask whether I’d be interested in one. This shows that digital editions are on more B-to-B publishers’ radar screens.
Our market study of digital editions cites concern for the environment as one of the three primary factors driving growth in digital editions, particularly in B-to-B publishing (the others being lower costs and speed of delivery). Several publishers told us of their own environmental concerns as well as those of their customers and readers.
The routine subscription database update call that included a question about this is further evidence.
And yes, I also don’t like getting trade publications in print because I don’t want my office to be any more cluttered than it is already. Don’t you?

Adlib Software and LORENZ Life Sciences Sign OEM Agreement

Adlib Software and LORENZ Life Sciences announced that they have signed an OEM agreement. Under the terms of the agreement, LORENZ will license and embed Adlib’s ExpressConversion technology into future versions of LORENZ’s docuRender for MS-Word product. Adlib and LORENZ aim to eliminate submission quality concerns and automate and streamline regulatory publishing with submission-ready PDFs delivered through LORENZ’s docuBridge submission management solution. Many life sciences organizations attempt to build document conversion solutions in-house or use systems that are not suited to the rigors of the FDA eCTD (electronic Common Technical Documents) standard. Adlib and LORENZ can accommodate the large number (into the tens of thousands) and types of documents generated in today’s research environments, integrate the solution into an organization’s document workflow and provide the quality and compliance to meet any standard or regulation. http://www.lorenz.cc/, http://www.adlibsoftware.com

Polopoly and Protec Enter Technology Agreement

Swedish Polopoly and Spanish Protec, announced a technology agreement aimed at closely integrating the Polopoly Web Content Management technology with Protec’s editorial cross media platform. For Protec customers it will be easy to integrate the Milenium technology to Polopoly. Editors and journalists will be able to publish content in Milenium and from there distribute the same information through different digital channels. A journalist updating a text in Milenium will automatically have his or her text updated also in Polopoly and vice versa. Polopoly enables personalized services, such as local weather and search services, quick polls and user ratings of articles. Polopoly also offers an advanced community module, where user-generated content can be managed in co-ordination with other content. Polopoly’s features for Live Layout Management offers possibilities to create and edit web pages on the fly. Polopoly is entirely based on open standards to ensure platform independence and to simplify legacy systems integration. Protec offers with Milenium Cross Media an object oriented editorial production system built on media neutral software architecture and a multimedia CMS. Multiple use of content is enabled through connectivity features to centralized or within distributed newsroom configurations. Polopoly and Protec will be integrated using Polopoly’s integration framework. http://www.polopoly.com http://www.protecmedia.com

New Research Reports and New Report Home

Our Publishing Practice released a new report this week: Digital Magazine and Newspaper Editions – Growth, Trends, and Best Practices. This is an interesting study especially because it is not an area covered much, if at all, by other firms. Bill Rosenblatt, who co-authored the report with Steve Paxhia, blogged about the report yesterday. You can download the report at no charge from our new “Research Reports” page.

The new page will be the place to find a listing of our most current reports and studies. You can also find information there about Beyond Search: What to do When Your Enterprise Search System Doesn’t Work, by Stephen Arnold, which we released in April (and which is not free – but a great deal!).

We have 5 more reports in the works to be published in the next couple of months, and realized we needed a home for this new series of publications. While you can find most anything on our site with our Google custom search, we have reports going back to 1993, as well as many other types of publications, and thought a new home for current reports would make for a friendlier site.

Digital Editions Market Research

At yesterday’s Argyle Executive Forum Leadership in Media conference in NYC, I had an interesting exchange with John Suhler, founding partner and president of Veronis Suhler Stevenson, and one of the deans of media industry private equity. Suhler had just given a talk in which I was glad to hear him excoriate publishers for the lack of attention they pay to technology and digital media as part of their strategies.

After his talk, I compared figures from our just-released market study on Digital Editions with his own off-the-cuff statistics about digital revenue for publishers, and the results were rather revealing. Our study shows a large gap between the readership penetration of digital editions in consumer vs. B-to-B (vertical) publications – whereas digital B2B subscriptions have grown to 15% of overall subscriptions, the corresponding figure for consumer pubs is down to 1.4%.

Compare these subscription figures with Suhler’s figures for digital revenue: 12-13% in B-to-B vs. 2-3% for consumer publications. This suggests that although digital editions are becoming a much more important ingredient in B-to-B publishers’ product mix, they are not quite carrying their share of digital revenue; whereas in consumer media, they are carrying more than their share, perhaps as much as double their share.

Of course, the missing ingredient in this admittedly superficial comparison is costs. For B-to-B publishers, digital editions can provide revenues at lower costs than fancy websites with lots of interactive features. In another presentation at yesterday’s conference, Andrew Heyward of interactive consultancy Marketspace/Monitor Group showed several examples of elaborate interactive websites that consumer media brands like Sports Illustrated launched in order to engage their audiences. I said to him that although these websites looked very cool, they struck me as very expensive to build, non-scalable (compared to advertising platforms like those of Google or Yahoo), and ephemeral in their appeal. He didn’t disagree.

For consumer publishers, the message in the above statistics could be mixed. In our study, noted publishing technology visionary Peter Meirs of Time Inc. is bearish on digital editions for consumer media. The statistics suggest either that consumer publishers are now taking that pessimism too far and under-investing in digital editions or that they don’t see a great long-term future for them. Comparisons in statistics like the above in future years will determine which of these messages is the correct one.

Kindle Back in Stock

Amazon’s front page today is announcing that the Kindle is back in stock. They also provide a link to Jeff Bezos’ annual letter to Amazon shareholders, which is dedicated to his thoughts about the Kindle. Nothing earth shattering, though I do think he tries to get to the heart of the question about why someone would buy a Kindle when they already own both a Blackberry and a desktop or notebook computer. After the obligatory reference to Gutenberg, Bezos writes:
Lately, networked tools such as desktop computers, laptops, cell phones and PDAs have changed us too. They’ve shifted us more toward information snacking, and I would argue toward shorter attention spans. I value my BlackBerry–I’m convinced it makes me more productive–but I don’t want to read a three-hundred-page document on it. Nor do I want to read something hundreds of pages long on my desktop computer or my laptop. As I’ve already mentioned in this letter, people do more of what’s convenient and friction-free. If our tools make information snacking easier, we’ll shift more toward information snacking and away from long-form reading. Kindle is purpose-built for long-form reading. We hope Kindle and its successors may gradually and incrementally move us over years into a world with longer spans of attention, providing a counterbalance to the recent proliferation of info-snacking tools.
This is an interesting way to position Kindle or any eBook reader–the competition isn’t the other devices per se but the habits these other devices have accommodated. This is true, I suppose, but I still think that devices will emerge that support both kinds of information consumption–the short form and the long form. What’s missing in Kindle, interestingly, are some features that would make “information snacking” also possible–and useful. As David Guenette pointed out, the Kindle could have readily added MP3 support (“It has the ICs and jacks for playing MP3 files, but no playlist management, nor–absurdly enough, considering that Amazon is set up to sell things like music–any iTunes-like music downloading.”) Plus the idea of paying to read a blog that is otherwise free on the Web is just silly.
So we are still left with, as David calls it, the “additional device conundrum.” I have been using an eBook reader lately, and enjoying it, but there are limitations with that one and what I can read on it. I want to be able to read, at minimum, books, magazines, newspapers, blogs, general web sites, and a wide range of personal content including but not limited to Word, HTML, PDF, and XML formats. I want it to be brain-dead easy to download and access new content. As David points out, I also want multimedia. And I want a level of interactivity to include links, forms, and feedback. I want it to be cheap, powerful, and sturdy, and I want the reading experience to be superior to my notebook computer in terms of size, weight, portability, and readability. In other words, I want something like the Kindle in form factor that behaves much like a really good notebook computer.
Is that too much to ask?

MadCap

I’ve been intrigued by MadCap Software and their aggressive push into the documentation tools space. We just got an in-depth series of presentations on their products, and I certainly came away impressed. Mary Laplante is quoted in a related article over at EContent Magazine.

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