Really Strategies Blog

Should educational publishers be learning a lesson from the music industry?

The huge popularity of iTunes and other downloadable Music services has shown that there is a huge appetite for buying individual songs rather than full CDs. All too often a couple of great songs are padded out with less distinguished numbers to fit the established format and price point of the market, CDs that sell in stores for $10-$20.

Could there be an analogous situation emerging in the Educational Publishing market?

Thinking back to my college days, I remember buying multiple expensive textbooks for a course, with the professor only using a couple of chapters from each. Now I see the emergence of technologies that let college professors be the equivalent of DJ's for educational material, allowing them to easily custom publish their own textbooks exactly tailored to their course syllabus. One such site is O'Reilly Media's SafariU beta site, which lets a professor assemble his/her own customized coursebook (rather than textbook) from articles, chapters of multiple books and original content he/she has created and uploaded, and then custom publish it via the web, with short run printing and delivery to the college bookstore shelf in a matter of days. It also provides a Learning Object Exchange that will allow educators to share the electronic syllabi that they create. The recent Gilbane WhitePaper, The Reality of Web 2.0: O’Reilly Media’s SafariU Leads by Example by Leonor Ciarlone, provides an excellent overview of what O'Reilly is doing in this space, and the market forces behind it.

O'Reilly's focus is on IT textbooks and reference materials, but this is a model that can certainly be applied to other educational publishing domains. These custom textbooks can be delivered either as print-on-demand physical books or as eBooks, that could be part of an electronic bookshelf or be incorporated into a Learning Management System environment.

Will the 600 page, $90+ textbook as we now know it become a dinosaur even more rapidly than the music CD? There will certainly still be cases where the traditional textbook makes sense, but there will also be many cases where it does not. It will be critical for educational publishers - and educators - to fully understand the costs and benefits of both the traditional textbook and the tailored coursebook approaches, and learn where each model is best applied.

In any case, here's an interesting question to ponder: Is a custom coursebook the educational equivalent of a music play list?

Is the custom coursebook that can be created on SafariU really any different than the iMix play lists that customers create on iTunes, which can be purchased in their entirety or in part by other customers? In some ways they are exactly the same, but in other ways they are quite different. Answer this question for yourself, and share your thoughts!

Borrowing a phrase from the abovementioned Gilbane report, one thing is for certain: It's time to think outside the book!.

Page composition for the times

For some time now, I’ve been playing with the hypothesis that we may be in some stage of a revolution in print publishing that could be equivalent to the desktop publishing revolution 20 years ago. 

Clearly there is an acceleration of demand for content on the Internet that is in the process of reshaping the media world – including the dramatically growing popularity of blogging, podcasting, and so on, along with the increasing demand for online versions of traditional print content such as magazines, newspapers, reference materials, textbooks, and so on.  What does this mean for print content?  It seems safe to say that it is in the process of slowly weakening its value.

But meanwhile, in some places competition has taken print content to the edge of the possible – a trend that tends to increase its value.  School textbooks in the US, for example, have become tremendously appealing visually, and the trend toward state and district level customization is also working to increase its value.  Furthermore, print manufacturing technology continues to meet these demands: note the foil holograms on some covers these days, as well as new manufacturing technologies like Xerox’s iGen3 – which can help improve the cost effectiveness of manufacturing and distribution of short run customized print.  But does this occasional trend toward increasing the value of print content offset the weakening trend of the Internet technologies?   Or is it simply the logical conclusion and swan song of the desktop publishing revolution?

As new generations of internet users grow up, the digital natives now in our colleges, and internet technologies proliferate, it seems hard to imagine that print will retain its edge in the end.

Current best practices for simultaneous print and web publishing are for print to be developed first and then pushed to the web through the use of XML.  This reflects today’s valuing of print content as being greater than web content.  It now seems more and more likely that within a few years we may see a long-time industry prediction come true: the development of web content first, that is then pushed to print.  The point where this happens may be when a majority of publishing customers find more value in online content than print content.  An article in the January 21, 2006 edition of the Economist suggests that investors may also be seeing this trend, as big media company stock has been in decline even with solid earnings.  (Note also in this edition of the Economist some very interesting articles on management of knowledge workers).

This slow transition is a challenging time for print publishers of any kind.  While the changes to business models are difficult, there are also plenty of challenges within print editorial and production.  For forward thinking print development groups, it may be wise to begin transforming their practices and cultures now.  Developers of composition tools, such as Adobe and Quark will need to accelerate their work in supporting XML and other technologies, such as workflow management systems, will need to mature more quickly in order to help publishers effectively manage costs during print’s slow decline.

Customization in some segments has the effect of increasing the overall content production effort to reach the same audience.  Aside from the obvious cost pressure to increase composition staff (managed in many cases by moving production offshore), customization puts additional pressure on production management resources – whether retained or outsourced along with composition.  Management of page composition using long established practices and tools can break down with the additional stress of growing customization, which adds further cost pressures.  It is clear that composition-related tools (and staff) need to be increasingly savvy in process management to succeed with the complexities of print customization.

So does this mean that the freewheeling, page-is-king days of desktop publishing are being replaced by continual improvement process exercises and cost conscious days of a post desktop publishing era?  Is this a revolution in the works?  Whether revolution is the right word or not, change does seem to be either happening or on the horizon.

SSP technology seminar highlights

This past Tuesday (11/8/05) I had the opportunity to co-moderate a Society for Scholarly Publishing Technology Seminar in Philadelphia.  Topics ranged from technology trends to project management to content management.  Some of the highlights of this seminar included:

Emphasis on having a project champion – presenters and attendees all agreed that the most important area of focus to ensure a successful technology project at a publisher is to have a project champion who is at an executive level.  Several key people at a tactical level must also be identified and retained for the project, but without a senior level project champion who can make timely critical decisions and move the project forward, a project may meander and not have the necessary focus.

Online journal review adoption – to my surprise, some statistics from a study conducted by Ware and Ulrich showed that only 21% of professional journals have implemented an online peer review system.  The adoption rate among scientific journals was slightly higher at 35%.

Aligning business strategy and technology goals – Evan Schnittman from Oxford University Press presented their strategy of moving from product dependent systems to an open and scalable platform.  This approach will allow Oxford to more quickly change to meet business drivers.  What a refreshing presentation.  Understanding business drivers and how to apply the right technology is what all publishers strive to do, but it is much easier said than done.  It appears that Oxford has done it.

Content Management (David versus Goliath) – Bob Braughler from Materials Research Society presented their recent move to a new web content management system and Patti Ward from Wolters Kluwer Health presented their implementation of Documentum.  While one presentation was web CMS focused and the other document focused, it was clear that both projects had similar success factors:  clear deliverables, clear lines of communication, project managers set expectations with senior management, an outside consulting vendor specializing in content management was retained.

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.

Extracting XML from designed pages is easier, but not always easy

I recently gave a training session on the XML capabilities of Adobe InDesign and InCopy. There's lots to say on this topic, but this particular session brought home two points about the process of getting rich and correctly structured XML out of manually laid out pages.

First, the technology (for InDesign, at least) is getting really good. In the case of InDesign CS2, there are still plenty of things that should be automated or made easier, such as:

• Inserting page numbers for exported elements
• Creating drop-down lists for assigning attribute values
• Including items from master pages in the content for all the pages in which they are presented
• Associating a graphic or inset that is outside the main text flow with a particular location in the text
• Including XMP metadata for images and documents in the XML export

But, at this point, technology is no longer the primary obstacle to extracting content from designed pages, and there's reason to believe that Adobe, at least, will continue to make its tools even better.

Second, for some types of content, it can be genuinely difficult to distinguish between design elements that are only about print design, and design elements that are actually content that should be preserved in the XML. This conundrum is especially apparent in elementary school textbooks, for which a lot of effort goes into determining how graphical elements and text can be combined to better communicate ideas to kids (and better keep their attention). In such layouts there is rarely a single or even primary text flow that can be exported. Instead, there are many little bits of text, graphics, and other elements placed all over the page. Does the publisher really want to throw away all that thought and expertise when publishing electronically? Probably not. It would be much better to be able to present the information as it was originally laid out. But do they need more than a PDF or image of the page to create the digital products that will keep them competitive in the future? Almost certainly. And that's a challenge that's yet to be solved for most educational publishers.