Really Strategies Blog

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.]

A Blueprint for Book Publishing Transformation

The Gilbane Group's web-based survey of book publishing professionals has just gone live.

The survey is one of the research mechanisms for Gilbane's upcoming study: A Blueprint for Book Publishing Transformation: Seven Essential Processes to Re-Invent Publishing.

The survey takes about 10-to-15 minutes to complete and seeks to gain a clearer picture of ebook and related digital publishing efforts underway among the full spectrum of book publishers.

All participants will have full access to the full-length study, which will be published in June.

This survey is for high- and mid-level book publishing professionals.

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.]

Three Webinars Publishers Should Attend

We are excited to announce the Really Strategies' Wednesday Webinar Series....

How to Make the Business Case for a CMS in Your Organization
February 17, 2010 | 2:00 to 3:00 PM EST
Publishers understand that content management is a pivotal piece in today's publishing environment. Yet budgeting for a CMS initiative can quickly scale to the point where executives question why they should stray from the status quo. In this free webinar, Barry Bealer, CEO of Really Strategies, will lead a panel of publishing professionals who will discuss how they made their business case and got executive buy-in for content management in their organizations.

Panelists include

• Anthony Barrera, Head of Internal Systems Development, Nature Publishing Group
• Allison Risko, VP, Learning Services, Kaplan EduNeering
• Mark Hoeber, Documentation Manager, Unica Corporation

>> Click here to register

DITA for Publishers: How Publishers Can Really Do XML
March 10, 2010 | 2:00 to 3:00 PM EST
DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) is an XML-based architecture for authoring, producing, and delivering information. Publishers are starting to take DITA seriously. And if they aren’t, they should be. This panel session will introduce DITA for publishers, the basic publishing-specific DITA components that are completely generic, and how DITA can really be the tool-set that launches publishers into the XML world.

In this free webinar DITA guru and contributor to the DITA specification, Eliot Kimber, senior solutions architect at Really Strategies, will present DITA for Publishers and provide details about his new community-based, open-source project: DITA For Publishers (dita4publishers.sourceforge.net).
>> Click here to register

How RSuite Helped The MIT Press Transform Its Publishing Operation
April 7, 2010 | 2:00 to 3:00 PM EST
The MIT Press publishes approximately 200 new books a year and over 40 journals. MIT Press has a major publishing presence in fields as diverse as architecture, social theory, economics, cognitive science, and computational science, as well as a long-term commitment to both design excellence and the efficient and creative use of new technologies. To maximize content re-use and to overhaul its entire publishing division, the MIT Press outlined a CMS strategy to lead its books and journals division into the new decade. RSuite along with complementary technologies were selected as the solution at MIT Press.
>> Click here to register

Waiting in [the virtual] line for your eBook

Simon and Schuster and Hachette recently announced that their eBook offering will only be available after the hardcover book has been on the market but prior to the paperback hitting book stores.  The Wall Street Journal reported on this recently and the article can be found here.

Once again we have a business model that is in direct conflict with what the consumer wants. Do you remember not all that long ago the issues in the music industry around buying a single song versus an entire album on-line?  This smells suspiciously similar and the consumer is the one losing out.

I completely understand the challenges publishers face regarding the price disparity between hardcover and electronic formats, but postponing the inevitable is not a customer focused organization.  Why not embrace the new business model and become the best eBook publisher?  That is easier said than done when an entire industry is setup for publishing and distribution of a physical book.

It remains to be seen the next step in this business model, but for now, get in the virtual line and wait your turn to purchase that eBook.

Liber Novus

The Red Book by Carl Gustav Jung

W.W. Norton just published this legendary text in late October and what an endeavor it was.

Check out the prepress work involved with this publication by clicking here.

"Journalism is the act. Newspapers are the artifact."

The past week was flush with conversation (ie, Tweets and blog comments) about Clay Shirky's rousing blog post Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable.

Read it. Read it in its entirety.

One comment on the post from Mark Bertils that won't leave my head is "Journalism is the act. Newspapers are the artifact."

I make a habit of looking up known definitions in the dictionary (and I do mean digital not the heavy tome I have here at my desk) because I find additional thought-provoking but commonly-known information. While reading the definitions of newspaper and newsprint I am reminded that the essence of the newspaper business is timeliness. Why were evening editions so popular in the 1950s and early 60s? For the same reasons that Twitter and RSS newsfeeds are so popular now. Timeliness.

I do lament the demise of print and I don't like seeing my Google news alerts on this topic competing with my spam folder in terms of volume. But I am heartened by the fact that journalism, reporting, writing, editing, authoring, these beautiful professions whose fundamental job is the exchange of thoughts from one mind to another, are not going away.

The eBook Challenge

Yes, it looks and sounds like a fun new game but it's actually quite a confusing landscape. And the image depicted here is a simplified version of starting points, formats, stores, readers, devices and their loose connections.

I'm still catching up from last week's Tools of Change for Publishing conference where the big takeaway was 2009 is the year of the ebook.

What I want to know is are publishers prepared? Which ebook format is best for you? Do you distribute to all devices or just one? How do ebooks fit into your multi-channel publishing workflow?

I can hardly wait for 2010 to see who comes out the winner. Stay tuned.

RSuite CMS provides loud and clear answer for Audible.com

We are often asked by publishers to describe the real business impact RSuite CMS has on our clients. Along with my previous post on Blood-Horse Publications, Audible.com is another client that has leveraged the power of RSuite to realize its business goals.

Audible, Inc., an Amazon.com, Inc. subsidiary, is the leading provider of premium digital spoken audio information and entertainment, on the Internet.

In early 2007 Audible.com launched an aggressive project to revamp their entire metadata program to better manage and process the metadata files they receive from their publishing partners.This program had the following business objectives to meet:

• Ensure error-free metadata by using publisher or publisher aggregators as the source of data, and by developing new tools to drive, search, browse, and publish to store functions off this sourced data.
• Ensure the ability to identify Audible products on partner sites by providing ISBNs that correspond to the downloadable digital binding with each product in feeds to partners, wherever and whenever possible.
• Reduce the occurrences of human error by automatically populating data into web site databases, from the sourced data.
• Improve findabilty, searchability, and marketability of products by standardizing keyword, category, authors, contributors, and publishers.
• Improve royalty systems by making contract entry a requirement for any product being pushed to an Audible site.

During a 4-week proof of concept (POC), RSuite was configured to prove out several use cases:

1. Leverage RSuite’s workflow tool to ingest ONIX feeds and audio files
2. Apply additional metadata (both manually and automatically)
3. Distribute the appropriate content packages to target delivery sites.

During this stage many business rules were also documented that were applicable to improving Audible's business opportunities. After a successful POC, Audible.com selected RSuite for its metadata and aggregation solution.

RSuite became the framework upon which Audible crafted solutions to meet all its requirements: workflow, business rules validation, content aggregation and delivery. In 6 months, RSuite was configured and implemented to become Audible's workflow tool, which enables seamless transfer of content from publisher feeds to web site-ready files.

Now after using RSuite for over a year, Audible has realized its goals of integrating a tool that would satisfy the business objectives and show a return on investment quickly. As Art Zegarek, director of data architecture told our team, “RSuite has become a very critical system very fast!" It is satisfying to know that RSuite is helping an aggregator such as Audible.com meet its business objectives every day.

Kindle 2.0 release on Monday...

New York Times blog says that Kindle 2.0 will be release on Monday.  That will be exciting for Tools of Change conference-goers.