Really Strategies Blog

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.

Certified Content Rights Manager (CCRM) Course

Yesterday I had the good fortune to take part in the SIIA's Certified Content Rights Manager Course. I've long been interested in copyright issues and permissions and am glad to see an organization like the SIIA offer a certification course on this topic. The course covers copyright law, infringement, and content licenses and then delves into managing and maintaining a content rights management plan within your organization.

Content rights management is a relatively new concept and term, although the protection of intellectual property certainly is not (see Constitution of the United States, Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8). I believe that most companies obey copyright law and would not intentionally pirate content or break a license agreement. But I also believe that some employees might not consider some of their actions as copyright infringement:

• sharing passwords
• emailing
• peer-to-peer software
• DRM circumvention

Employers should be pro-active with content rights management. It's important to remember that employers are responsible for employees' actions and  ignorance is not a valid excuse. I've heard people claim that the fair use doctrine will cover "negligible" acts (though there is little that is negligible with the activities listed above). But it's risky to think that  fair use can be used as a defense in any business context. And only a judge can determine fair use after a copyright suit has been brought to trial.

Two slides in the presentation particularly illustrate the financial costs associated with copyright infringement (click on images to enlarge):

The SIIA actively enforces corporate anti-piracy and offers a great list of FAQs that every president and CEO should take a minute to read. Also interesting are three high-profile  legal cases involving copyright infringement within an organization:

• Lowry's Reports, Inc. v. Legg Mason, Inc.
• American Geophysical Union v. Texaco, Inc.
• Wall Data Inc. V. Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department

Educating employees about content rights and taking the time to conduct a copyright inventory should be on everyone's to-do list this year.

Click here to learn more or register for the class. 

Microsoft and OCA, content formats for digital libraries

If you haven't heard, Microsoft has joined with the Open Content Alliance (OCA). The OCA is the creation of Yahoo and the nonprofit Internet Archive, and Microsoft's participation is drawing more attention to how the OCA's efforts to digitize content contrast with Google's. This week CNET published an article that nicely articulates the differences in approach. The OCA has taken a less contentious route than Google by limiting their effort to those works that are in the public domain, unless the copyright owner has given permission that they be included. (While you're reading the CNET story, check out the cool "Big Picture" feature on their site. It provides a graphical means to navigate CNET content by several different subject areas. Think "Semantic Web".)

I haven't found much information about the digital content format to be used by Google or OCA. Adobe is part of OCA, and at least some OCA content will be stored as PDF (with fulltext in the background for search?). OCA will also be gathering multimedia content as well as print sources. If you go to the Google Print site, you'll see that book pages appear to be captured as images. It would be especially interesting to know what kind of metadata is (and isn't) being captured by both groups. For example, it seems obvious that the Google system doesn't "know" when two books are actually the same classic (say, Shakespeare's Macbeth) published by different publishers. (And I'm not suggesting it makes business sense for Google to capture this information.) In fact, if you search for "Shakespeare Macbeth" on the site, you get more than 32,000 results, and the versions of the play Macbeth don't all float to the top - a book on Kurosawa is in position 5 (today). While to a particular reader this might not matter too much, it certainly will be of interest to the publisher. (Simon and Schuster's Macbeth is in position #1, but Kessinger's doesn't show up until the 3rd page of results.) Can the publisher influence this in any way? Should they be able to?

Trusting in Google

There are two side-by-side opinion columns on Google's Print Library project in today's Washington Post. For those of you unfamiliar with this topic, these are a good introduction.

The first is by Mary Sue Coleman, president of the University of Michigan. UM's and several other major libraries are working with Google to make massive numbers of books available online by scanning them and making them searchable through Google. Amid protest over copyright concerns, two libraries - Oxford University's and the New York Public Library - have reacted by refusing to allow books still under copyright to be included. Coleman argues that this and the copyright concern in general is shortsighted and essentially outweighed by the value of making information broadly available to anyone anywhere with an internet connection.

It's hard to argue with how valuable that access could be to us all, but Coleman really didn't address what's at the heart of the protest by publishers and authors: That their intellectual property will be stored digitally by a private company that will make decisions about what it thinks it should and can legally do with the information, and that the copyright holders will have limited input to those decisions. That's the point picked up in the second article by Nick Taylor, an author and President of the Authors Guild.

The legal bottom line in all of this seems to be the question of what constitutes fair use of copyrighted material on the Web. Unfortunately, neither of these articles give much detail on this topic. Right now, Google is saying that it will show only a small excerpt of a copyrighted book along with a link to buy it or find it in a library. Is that legal fair use? Is the digitization and indexing itself legal fair use? Hopefully the Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers (AAP), and other lawsuits will result in an answer to that question that we can all live with. This month the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) published a copyright analysis that provides some insight to how this might all work out. The summary? "In sum, under the Ninth Circuit’s analysis in Kelly, Google’s Print Library Project satisfies the requirements of the fair use doctrine."

The other question, of course, is whether this is good for copyright holders. It's clearly a loss of control over their content and the channels through which it is available. Google makes money through ad revenues just by telling users that there's a book available that matches their search, and copyright holders don't get any of that revenue. But, the program also digitizes books that might otherwise never have made it online, and is a free experiment in seeing how well (or poorly) the new channel works for the publisher/author. It also seems inevitable that this type of challenge to the models and business relationships would take place. Unlike what happened with digital music, here it's happening under the auspices of a single, public company with whom copyright holders can expect to have a reasonable dialog, even if that dialog is sometimes settled through lawsuits. Imagine how much worse it would have been if the experiment waited a few more years when scanning and OCRing technology are even cheaper - all of us might have scanned in our books and started sharing them through the equivalent of the old Napster. That's a nice problem not to have.

Using RSS without knowing it

I saw on the Gilbane Report Blog mention of the Yahoo! white paper entitled "RSS - Crossing into the Mainstream."  It is an interesting (and brief) report analyzing the awareness and use of RSS.

One of the main points in the paper is that although RSS is heavily used, a good majority of users don't know what RSS is or know how to use the little orange RSS or XML buttons found on many web sites.  Even those who do know what RSS is "prefer to access RSS feeds via user-friendly, browser-based experiences (e.g., My Yahoo!, Firefox, My MSN.)"   The paper states "The use of RSS in web sites is becoming more common, but very few Internet users are aware of it". 

I - and I'll assume you sometimes act the same way  - sometimes forget that we are not the typical internet or technology user.  Why should the web user need to know what RSS or XML are?  Do they need to know what a PHP page is to use it?    That's the trick for technologists: take a very effective technology, like RSS, and make it very useful to the audience without requiring that audience to understand the technology.   The report concludes with "[Internet users] need a simple interface where they can choose the information and content that interests them.  This is where personalized start pages and browser-based experiences can help move RSS into the mainstream."