This week’s Campus Marketplace has a nice article summarizing new legislation meant to regulate the sale of college textbooks– www.nacs.org/news/011907-legislation.asp. I’m not sure that the proposed legislation will do much to help students. This legislation could yield a bigger win by providing incentives for the College Publishing industry to focus upon furthering true cross media publishing initiatives and on developing alternate revenue models. The result would be lower priced product suites that would offer more utility and value for students. Of course, the win for publishers would be reduced used books and higher recurring revenues.
Category: Publishing & media (Page 44 of 53)
Oxford, UK , Boston, USA, and Melbourne, Australia —January 12th, 2007—Blackwell Publishing announced its newly redesigned online delivery platform, Blackwell Synergy (www.blackwell-synergy.com).
Blackwell Synergy enables its users to search 1 million articles from over 850 leading scholarly journals across the sciences, social sciences, humanities and medicine. The redesign provides easier navigation, faster loading times and improved access to tools for researchers, as well as meeting the latest accessibility standards (ADA section 508 and W3C’s WAI-AA).
The new Blackwell Synergy website retains all the essential benefits that researchers, librarians and authors value and uses the same URL structure. In addition to a new look and feel, features have been repositioned to highlight options more clearly to users and enable them to make best use of the suite of tools available such as most read and most cited articles, citation alerts, download to reference manager software, and the ability to email the article to a friend. Full-text online access to the journals on Blackwell Synergy is available at thousands of institutions worldwide.
Key site features for researchers include:
– clear search and browse functions and ability to search within other databases
– abstracts and sample issues free to all users
– many articles also free after a certain time or as open access through the OnlineOpen initiative
– HTML articles include embedded references, figures and tables
– OnlineEarly and OnlineAccepted articles available online before issue publication
– quick links to the most-downloaded and most-cited articles by journal
– reference links and citing article links allow users to follow the research
– export citations of articles directly into reference management software
– receive e-alerts for tables of contents, topic and author research alerts, citation alerts and OnlineEarly and OnlineAccepted alerts
– all e-alerts available as email or RSS newsfeeds
This release does a nice job of supporting new standards, passing information from articles to content management systems, and support of new RSS protocols. The Online early feature rewards publishers that have solid cross media publishing practices.
We marvelled when we saw the prestigious Encyclopedia Britannica usurped by Microsoft’s Encarta. It was a tribute to the clever utilization of multimedia and excellent marketing that leveraged Microsoft’s position in the software world. Given Microsoft’s incredible resources and market clout, it was assumed that the Encarta franchise would build and thrive to become the most heavily utilized fact resource. Therefore, it was even more shocking when Wikipedia burst onto the scene in 2001. And it’s continued evolution demonstrates that this project is no fluke. There are over 1.5 million articles and there are over 100 international versions. How is this possible? Is it simply because it is a free reference resource? I do not think so. Average consumers seem to have voted for breadth and currency over authority. More importantly, a large group of contributors and reviewers seem to feel a pride of ownership in the work of their collaboration. This phenomena has interesting implications for publishing firms.
Wikimedia now has a number of related projects including Wikibooks and Wikiversity. Wikibooks has generated 23,476 content modules for over 1000 topics in less than three years. Wikiversity is in its formative stages but plans to offer free course materials and may provide a platform for developing research topics into wikimongraphs.
It is sometimes difficult to get past the fact that all Wikimedia content is free to focus upon the powerful authoring metaphor that they have created and proliferated. These very same techniques could be used by commercial and corporate publishers. All School, College, and Professional publishers could use these techniques to refine and improve the quality of their publications. These techniques could enable publishers to keep their intellectual property much more current than is possible with today’s authoring approach. And the collaboration aspect could help learners and professionals grow by exchanging and debating ideas. In the corporate world, we need look no further than the communities established around Microsoft Sharepoint to see how valuable information can be rapidly developed and disseminated. These communities have relieved Microsoft of a tremendous support burden.
The Wiki modules are quite similar to open source code modules… More on this in a subsequent post…. Your comments are encouraged!!
Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) announced Adobe RoboHelp 6, a system to create, manage and publish software help systems, knowledge bases and documentation for desktop and Web-based applications. As a key element of Adobe’s technical communications product line-up, which includes Adobe FrameMaker, Adobe Captivate and Adobe Acrobat, RoboHelp 6 provides all the desktop functionality that authors need to create Help content, including table of contents, index, glossary, graphics, special effects and context-sensitive Help. Adobe RoboHelp Server 6, also introduced, provides server features that ensure the delivery of up-to-date online content, with real-time tracking of how end-users engage with the help system that provides feedback to Help publishers. With this release, Adobe has consolidated the Adobe RoboHelp product family into two choices – Adobe RoboHelp 6 for authoring and Adobe RoboHelp 6 Server for the delivery of online content. Users of RoboHelp 6 also benefit from the integration of Adobe Captivate 2 for improved workflow and more engaging content with simulations and demonstrations. In addition, users can automate the building of their help at a predetermined time using command line compilation. Conditional Table of Contents (TOC) allows for greater control and customization of table of contents. With User Defined Variables, changes can be made just once, but seen everywhere in Help. Updated Adobe RoboSource Control provides a source document and version control system for Windows and Web development for both individual users and collaborative teams. Adobe PDF creation generates support for hyperlinks & bookmarks and enables accessible PDFs. RoboHelp 6 and RoboHelp 6 Server are available for purchase for Windows 2000 and Windows XP. Support for Windows Vista will be added in 2007. The estimated street price for Adobe RoboHelp 6 is US$999 and US$1999 for Adobe RoboHelp 6 Server. Previous users of RoboHelp and RoboInfo can upgrade to Adobe RoboHelp 6 and RoboHelp Server 6 for an estimated street price of US$499 and US$999, respectively. http://www.adobe.com
One of the most important trends in technology over the past two years has been the emergence of Wikis. Like many newish technologies there is a lot of controversy and confusion about Wikis. To many people the word Wiki is linked primarily to the Wikipedia and to the other projects of Wikimedia. To others, Wiki technology is open source collaboration technology. And more recently, Wiki technology has been developed to provide easily installed, high value solutions to a number of enterprise level workflow problems. Over the next week or so, I’ll be writing entries on a number of key questions concerning Wikis and their role in the strategy for forward looking publishing organizations.
One of the themes that we’ll be stressing on this blog is cross-media publishing strategies and we’ll als be offering several sessions on this topic at the SanFrancisco Gilbane Conference in April. We’d like to hear your nominations for examples of products that started life in a traditional print format but have now evolved to successful product offerings with multiple media options. We’ll also like to know about successful new product offerings that were created in a media-neutral approach. To respond, please e-mail me Steve Paxhia at steve@gilbane.com.
Quark Inc. announced the release of QuarkXPress 7.1, the new Universal upgrade to the desktop design software. The latest upgrade adds performance enhancements, making the design software more responsive. Quark made performance improvements in several areas — including text selection, clipped images, and flattening features. Each feature has received a performance boost, resulting in faster production times. In addition, the Universal upgrade has provided performance improvements throughout the application. A fully functional 30-day evaluation version of QuarkXPress 7, including the new Universal release for Intel-based Macs, is available. To purchase or upgrade to QuarkXPress 7.1, visit the Quark Web site at http://www.quark.com/71update
Dick Harrington is the CEO of Thomson. During a December investor’s conference presentation, he clearly described Thomson’s future strategy. Their vision is to be the leading provider of workflow solutions to business and professional customers. Their goal is to develop “must-have” products with high utilization and renewal rates. I would assume that a recurring revenue model is also preferred. As they create technology to leverage their content, they find that they achieve greater leverage and higher margins. This is a very sound strategy.
His decision to divest Thomson Learning aside, it would seem that there are excellent opportunities awaiting College and Educational publishers who employ similar strategies. Students, professors, teachers, and parents could all benefit from tighter integration of enabling technology and multimedia including simulations with more traditional text based materials. Many publishers are already finding success with next generation products that offer customers their choice of media options combined with technology that helps this group of professionals do their jobs better. The key is to focus on customer needs and creating innovative new products rather than creating new media versions of existing products. These new products also have the potential to be licensed for specific terms and usages rather than be sold outright. This model would likely accelerate revenue growth and yield better margins.
We’ll strive to provide examples of successful ventures in later posts…
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