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Category: Publishing & media (Page 45 of 53)

Meeting Customer Needs

January 3, 2007 / / 0 Comments

Welcome to the Gilbane Group’s new Blog on the Publishing Industry. Our team of Analyst/Consultants will be offering their thoughts a variety of topics including:

  • Opportunities and Challenges presented by new technology and media options
  • Key new technologies to watch in the coming year
  • Case studies demonstrating current best practices
  • News and commentary about Publishing Companies and their technology partners

Think of this Blog as a perpetual iteration of the Publishing Track at our Gilbane Conferences. To that end, we welcome your questions and encourage your comments…

At this year’s fall conference, the CEO of Art Plus Technology—Elizabeth Gooding—gave an excellent presentation concerning her firm’s approach to providing the customers of financial firms with improved statements and communications. She and her clients set very tough targets. The statements must be highly individualized, be attractive in both electronic and print formats, be produced in a timely fashion, and of course, cost less to produce. In meeting these goals, Elizabeth and her team found ways to break down long established practices that had become limiting factors in improving the delivery of information to customers.

What does this have to do with publishers in general? Most publishing enterprises have their own long established practices that have made them very successful through the years. We think that the publishers who will gain market share in the next decade are those who are most willing to re-examine those practices to enable new product offerings that will appeal to the demands of today’s customers. Over the next week or so, we’ll look at some examples of different strategies and tactics.

Adobe Delivers Acrobat Connect Product Line & Reader 8.0

December 6, 2006 /

Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) announced the immediate availability of the Adobe Acrobat Connect software product line for communicating and collaborating instantly through real-time, interactive web conferencing. The Acrobat Connect product line addresses online collaboration needs from casual to intensive web conferencing users. The entry-level Acrobat Connect hosted service provides users with essential collaboration tools, such as screen sharing, whiteboarding, chat, video conferencing, and audio conferencingall for unlimited usage for up to 15 participants for one low monthly fee. Additionally, with one-button “Start Meeting” access from Acrobat 8 and Adobe Reader 8 software, users can launch Acrobat Connect directly from a document to start collaborating immediately. The entire Acrobat family consists of Acrobat 8 Professional, Acrobat 8 Standard, Acrobat 8 Elements, Acrobat 3D Version 8, Acrobat Connect, and Acrobat Connect Professional. The Acrobat Connect hosted service is currently available as a free trial version through the end of the current calendar year. The commercial release of Acrobat Connect, initially available in English, is expected to be available in January 2007 for a subscription price of US$39 per month, or US$395 per year per personal meeting room. Acrobat Connect Professional is available in English, French, German, Japanese, and Korean, starting at US$15,000 depending on configuration, and is licensed on a named user, as well as concurrent port basis. Existing licensed customers of the Macromedia Breeze solution with up-to-date maintenance plans may be eligible for updates to Acrobat Connect Professional and new versions of the Adobe Connect servers. Adobe also released Reader 8, which features a new, streamlined interface with user customizable toolbars. Adobe Acrobat Professional users can now enable Adobe Reader users to fill and submit forms, save data and digitally sign documents. Adobe Reader 8 also has graphics processing unit (GPU) acceleration, which boosts performance when viewing graphics-intense PDF files, such as 3D content. A free trial version of Acrobat Connect Professional is available at http://www.adobe.com/go/tryconnectpro, http://www.adobe.com/go/getreader/

eBooks Return (again)

October 31, 2006 / / 0 Comments

In an October 27th entry on Dave Mainwaring’s Publishers’ SIG at www.printplanet.com/scripts/lyris.pl?enter=publishers-sig, someone named Chet Ensign wrote: “I have just read the press release at
Editions.html for Adobe’s beta release of Digital Editions. It is an eBook reader that uses PDF, XHTML, Flash and includes digital rights management support, subscriptions, ads, etc.

He continues: “I have not seen anything like a groundswell of excitement in publishing around eBooks so I don’t see this as a major development. In a review on ZDNet, Ryan Stewart wrote: “Users have been slow to take to eReader solutions, but I think technologies like the New York Times reader and Digital Editions are going to change that.” I don’t agree. I think people are not adopting ereaders because they add nothing new; they still just move print to the screen – where I personally just turn around and reprint so that I can read it in print. “What do others think? Is there more excitement around eBooks than I have been seeing?”

I wonder the same thing…

Somehow I think iPod when I read in Adobe PR of the new software:
“With native support for Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) as well as an XHTML-based reflow-centric publication format, Digital Editions delivers an engaging way to acquire, read, and manage content, including eBooks, digital magazines, digital newspapers and other digital publications. Initially available as a free public beta for Windows®, Digital Editions will support Macintosh systems as a universal binary application, Linux® platforms, as well as mobile phones and other embedded devices in future versions.”

I’ve always thought that the big problem with eBooks was/is the name, with the implicit connotation that we should be reading lightweight paperbacks on heavy digital readers… I now refer to ‘e-content’ rather than e-books. There’s a lot of digital information — most of it much shorter than book-length — that makes more sense to be consumed digitally than it does to be printed before consumption.

Somehow I also think about pending competition between Adobe and Microsoft on file formats, the long rumored battle of the PDF versus the XPS (although Wikipedia informs us: “XPS is viewed as a potential competitor to Adobe’s portable document format (PDF). XPS, however, is a static document format that does not include dynamic capabilities similar to those of PDF.”)

Microsoft doesn’t seem too hot on eBooks right now. Microsoft Reader was last updated in November, 2002 (the Tablet edition), although I was surprised to find today on the MSoft website: “Microsoft Reader Catalog of eBooks: search over 30000 free and retail ebooks, with direct links to downloading free content and samples…www.mslit.com/default.asp?mjr=FRE

However, looking more closely at the site, one finds that most of the eBooks are for sale, not free at all.

The International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF, formerly the Open eBook Forum), the trade organization that speaks for the eBook “industry” (if that is not too grand a term) reported earlier this year that eBook sales increased 23% in 2005. Not bad, until one realizes that this represents under $12 million in revenue, and that unit sales were flat. As in all things digital, the result led publishers to increase title output by 20%, year over year.

The Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia Library does offer 2100 free eBooks (old titles, out of copyright — http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/ebooks/)

Still, it turns out I hadn’t bothered installing Reader on this 6-month-old computer — I’m doing it now — to find out if I get any more pleasure out of reading Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities on a computer now than I did (not) four years ago (http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/ebooks/lit/DicTale.lit).

As my friend Crad Kilodney once wrote: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way — in short, it was a Monday.“

Thomson to sell Thomson Learning Division

October 26, 2006 / / 0 Comments

For several years Thomson Learning was my largest consulting customer, and while I have not worked closely with the group for several years, it would be inappropriate for me to analyse or comment. I just wish to note for the record, quoting directly and exclusively from Thomson’s own press release of October 25:

Thomson Announces Strategic Realignment of Operations; Company to Sell Education Businesses
Highly Focused Strategy On Electronic Solutions For Professionals Will Drive Growth And Enhance Shareholder Value

Strategic Realignment Highlights:

  • Thomson organizational realignment designed to focus on electronic workflow solutions strategy and drive operational efficiencies
  • Thomson to divest education assets: higher education, careers and library reference; corporate e-learning; and e-testing
  • Vice Chairman and Chief Operating Officer are appointed

Stamford, Conn. , 10/25/2006.  The Thomson Corporation (NYSE: TOC; TSX: TOC) today announced a realignment of operations to sharpen its strategic focus on providing electronic workflow solutions to business and professional markets and better position the company for future growth. As part of the realignment, which becomes effective January 1, 2007, Thomson intends to sell its Thomson Learning businesses, including those serving the higher education, careers, library reference, corporate e-learning and e-testing markets.

“These initiatives are part of the natural evolution of Thomson as we pursue our strategic vision,” said Richard J. Harrington, president and chief executive officer of Thomson. “The market has validated our strategy of providing workflow solutions to business and professional customers, and we will continue to build on our strengths, reframe our markets and exploit technological innovations.

“Thomson Learning is an excellent business, but it does not fit with our long-term strategic vision,” Mr. Harrington said. “After the sale of Thomson Learning, the vast majority of our sales will come from electronic products and services with recurring revenues that are currently growing at high rates. In addition, the sale will provide us with substantial resources to take advantage of opportunities to accelerate the development of our core businesses and explore adjacent markets that are consistent with our strategy.”

Thomson Learning Sale
“Thomson Learning has leading positions in higher education, global reference, e-testing and corporate training,” Mr. Harrington said. “This well-managed and profitable business consistently delivers above-market growth and is well positioned to pursue opportunities in the global markets it serves.”

Thomson expects the divestiture of the Thomson Learning businesses to encompass three independent sales processes, each on its own schedule.
(The press release continues with details of divestitutres and staff changes.)

And so it goes…How sad. Print is certainly becoming a dirty word!

What is Document Composition?

September 24, 2006 / / 1 Comment

Your definition of “document composition” will largely depend on your perspective.

A graphic designer might immediately think of Quark Express or Adobe InDesign. A desktop publisher could probably name various plug-ins to those environments or perhaps list database-publishing tools like Corel Ventura or Adobe PageMaker. If you are approaching this question from an operations, IT or print production perspective you have a much longer and more granular continuum of needs which can only be met with high volume composition software. In my work, I deal with both ends of the continuum from the graphic designer to the high-volume output specialist (see www.ArtPlusTechnology.com)

Composition products range in their ability to design documents from static to dynamic, and it can be generally stated that the more dynamic the document, the less fine control you have of layout, layering and color management. Beyond static page layout and database publishing tools are two categories of composition solution that begin to bring marketing, operations and IT needs together.

  • Variable Data Print (VDP): tools geared to one-to-one print marketing primarily targeted at print shops with digital presses

High Volume or Transactional Composition: the “big rigs.” These are the tools that use business rules to transform data into dynamic documents for a variety of print and electronic media.
The high-volume composition products did not start off with even a tip of the hat to marketing. The long-time leaders evolved from one of four major categories:

  • Report Writers – high volume sys out and other reports of which statements & transaction confirmations were once considered a part. Example Metavante CSF circa 1990
  • Typesetters or Page Layout – These products were focused on batch creation of forms documents that needed fine typographic control along with merged text. Example: Document Sciences Compuset (ne XICS) circa 1990
  • Assembly Tools – these tools were typically used in concert with page layout tools and provided the rules-based merge engine to bring together various forms and other resource to create policies, contracts and the like. Example: DocuCorp DocuMerge cira 1985
  • Correspondence – rule based correspondence generation often linked by a user interface to call-center or sales personnel. Example: Napersoft circa 1989. Major players who have been producing composition software since the early 1990’s or before include:

These days, many of the leaders are sunsetting their traditional products and launching new products that attempt to serve all four categories and drive output to both print and online channels. More and more, the desire to reach marketing users (and their budgets) is driving their product requirements.

Some of the key developments in the evolution of these products since the early 1990’s include the introduction of proportional fonts, data-driven graphics, graphical user interfaces (most of these tools did not have UI’s when first introduced), marketing campaign and message tools, post-processing tools for intelligent sorting and postal management. Some of the many tools that have established themselves in the market since the late 90’s include:

While these products are trying to serve broader audiences and layer more and more into their solutions, new players are emerging that go back to the approach of trying to do one thing well. Unfortunately, sometimes it’s not clear what that one thing is. With no slight to their products intended, I find it challenging to place tools like XMPie and PageFlex into the continuum above. There are many other products that are not listed here that are targeted to very specific document types or vertical industries. I will drill down on some of those in future entries.

Meanwhile, I would be interested in feedback on the products that you are most familiar with and how you categorize them.
Elizabeth

The Future of DITA

September 19, 2006 / / 1 Comment

DITA (which stands for “Darwin Information Typing Architecture”) is the hottest new technology in the technical publishing market. While still early in its adoption cycle, it has the potential to become the future de facto standard for not only technical publishing, but for all serious content management and dynamic publishing applications. Whether this happens, however, will depend on the vision and creativity of the DITA standards committee, DITA vendors and DITA consultants.

While IBM originally designed DITA for technical documentation, its benefits are potentially transferable to encyclopedias, journal articles, mutual fund prospectuses, insurance policies, retail catalogs, and many, many other applications. But will it really be flexible enough to meet these other needs?

At Flatirons Solutions we’ve been testing the boundaries of DITA’s extensibility, taking DITA out of its comfort zone and thereby creating some interesting proof points for its flexibility. So far, the results are very positive. Four specific applications illustrate this:

  • User personalized documentation – designed to support a variety of enterprise content libraries out of a single set of specializations, this application involved the use of 15 conditional processing attributes to drive dynamic production of personalized documents. An initial DocBook-based prototype was later re-designed for DITA.
  • Scholarly research database – this solution involved marrying DITA with the venerable Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), a nearly 20 year old scholarly markup standard originally written in SGML. DITA was used to split the historical material into searchable topics; TEI provided the rigorous scholarly markup and annotations.
  • Dynamic web publishing – designed for a large brokerage and business services firm, this application combines a single-source DITA-based authoring environment with an optimized dynamic processing pipeline that produces highly-personalized Web pages.
  • Commercial publishing – we are currently exploring the use of DITA for encyclopedia, journal, and textbook publishing, for clients who have traditionally focused on print, but who are now also moving to increasingly sophisticated electronic products.

Of course, in pushing the boundaries we’ve also found issues. A classic example is the restriction in DITA’s “task” specialization that each step in a procedure must begin with a simple declarative statement. To make it as readable as possible, the procedure cannot begin with a statement that includes a list or multiple paragraphs or a table or a note. But what do you do if your content breaks these rules? DITA’s answer is that you rewrite your content.

Rewriting content is not unreasonable if you accept that you’re moving to DITA in order to adopt industry best practices. However, what if you don’t agree that DITA’s built-in “best practices” are the only way to write good content? Or what if you have 500,000 pages of legacy content, all of which needto be rewritten before they can conform to DITA? Would you still consider it practical?

You can solve this by making up your own “task” specialization, bypassing the constraints of the built-in “task” model. That’s an advantage of DITA. But if you do that, you’re taking a risk that you won’t be able to leverage future vendor product features based on the standard “task” specialization. And in other cases, such as limitations in handling print publishing, workarounds can be harder to find.

DITA 1.1 has made great progress toward resolving some of these issues. To be truly extensible, however, I believe that future versions of DITA will need to:

  • Add more “out-of-the-box” specialization types which DITA vendors can build into their tools (for example, generic types for commercial publishing).
  • Further generalize the existing “out-of-the-box” specialization types (for example, allowing more flexibility in procedure steps).
  • Better handle packaging of content into published books, rather than focusing primarily on Web and Help output, and adapting this model for books.
  • Simplify the means to incorporate reusable content, handle “variables” within text, and link to related content.

At conferences I’ve heard it suggested that if people don’t want to obey DITA’s particular set of rules, they should consider using another standard. I’ve even heard people say that DITA doesn’t need to focus on book publishing because print is “old school.” In my opinion, this kind of parochial thinking needs to be seriously reconsidered.

Today, DITA stands at the crossroads. If it can be aggressively generalized and extended to meet the needs of commercial publishers, catalog and promotional content, and financial services and other vertical industry applications, then it has the chance to be “the” standard in XML-based dynamic publishing. If this doesn’t happen, DITA runs the risk of being relegated to a relatively elite technical publishing standard that’s only useful if you meet its particular set of assumptions and rules.

As an industry, which way will we go?

Look ahead a bit: here, here, and here.

Acrobat Still Suffering from Schizophrenia

September 19, 2006 / / 0 Comments

On Monday, in the wee hours of the night (my email was sent at 12:27 a.m.) Adobe emitted three short press releases announcing Acrobat 8. I’m a fan of Acrobat and PDF, so I always look forward to new versions of this ungainly but hugely-popular product. Sadly release #8, at first look-see, leaves me thoroughly unmoved.

The main press release captures the excitement behind the announcement: “The Acrobat 8 product line introduces several major innovations in the areas of document collaboration, PDF content reuse, PDF forms, packaging of multiple documents, and controlling sensitive information. For example, shared reviews put collaboration within the reach of virtually anyone with access to a shared network folder and Adobe Reader2. A participant in a shared review can see comments posted by others, track the status of the review, and work even when not connected – reducing duplicated work and enabling large groups to collaborate more efficiently. Acrobat 8 also enables PDF content to be exported into popular formats to enable reuse and repurposing of content.”

Most of these “innovations” are just “new and improved” old features.

If you’re looking for news, press release #2 is where to turn. Macromedia Breeze is now called Acrobat Connect, and will be available at a lower price-point and to smaller groups of users than the old not-so-gentle Breeze. This represents the first fruit of Adobe’s $3.4 billion acquisition of Macromedia. How do ya like them apples?
Press release #3 reveals that Adobe will continue to nurse Acrobat and PDF through its severe case of schizophrenia. Acrobat 8 ($449 by itself) will also be bundled into the awkwardly named Adobe Creative Suite 2.3 Premium edition ($1199). This is “to enable creative and print professionals to efficiently create, collaborate with, and automate output of Adobe PDF files.”

A few years back, Adobe came close to abandoning this group of PDF enthusiasts (and major buyers of Creative Suite). It realized the gross error of its ways at the 11th hour, and now makes sure to invite them for tea each time there’s something new happening with Acrobat. The features that appeal to “creative and print professionals” bear little resemblance to the features that appeal to the “knowledge workers,” who remain the big buyers of Acrobat itself. So while each group is told a slightly different story, Acrobat’s schizophrenia has not blocked its ever-growing popularity.

Also in press release #3 we find the second instance of the fruit-bearing acquisition. Not surprisingly, Adobe has decided to jettison the never-very-successful GoLive out of Creative Suite in favor of the incredibly successful Dreamweaver. Saving face, somewhat unconvincingly, we’re informed that “Adobe will continue to develop GoLive as a standalone product.” Right. That’s until Adobe finishes getting a little cash off the GoLive orphans as they make the switch (“upgrade”) to Dreamweaver.

The word on the street is that Creative Suite itself will be upgraded to V3 by early next year. Perhaps then the flaccid features of Acrobat 8 will start to make more sense. Or maybe some knowledge workers will acquire some knowledge, enough to tell us why this upgrade was released.

Digital Content: Federal Focus on Music

June 8, 2006 / / 0 Comments

There is an amendment being considered in the House of Representative to tackle the digital music phenomenon yet again. Called the “Section 115 Reform Act of 2006,” it focuses specifically on “licenses for digital uses of musical works.” Having gotten my 11 year old daughter her coveted iPod at the end of May, this caught my eye. The draft discussion is dated May 12.

According to Chris Lindquist over at the CIO Magazine blog, the bill “could make it necessary to acquire licenses for every digital copy of content, even cached, network, and RAM buffer reproductions.” Makes one wonder what bills may be in store for digital content in general, not just in the music industry…

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