After years of working on electronic products big and small, here are some talking points for an in-house electronic workshop, aimed at helping you to develop your business and take the plunge into e-commerce and e-product.
Is the electronic future about books or content?
Is the electronic future about books or content?
1. At the macro level, selling electronic products to institutions can involve selling collections. The more collections you have — the more bites you can offer — the more revenue can be derived from your list. Building collections is about identifying and building subject strength. Competitive advantage may come from ?completeness?. That?s something independents excel at. How many ways can your list be carved up, what segments can be marketed as discrete, branded sets? But what are the gaps in your list, too, and can you fill them?
2. Think about what you are really selling? Subject collections, integrated individual works, or ?knowledge objects? — fragments below the level of the book. Are you selling ebooks (finished products) or electronic content (access privileges, databases, aggregations, corpora etc)? Perhaps the right answer for your business lies in selling fragments below the level of the book? You might sell chapters, sections and subsections. Are you selling the cookbook or the recipe? Making the shift from building and managing books to building and managing content may transform how you structure your business, how it works and how it can develop.
3. At the micro level, how can customers get at nuggets in your list? How can you split a book up, can your products be broken down, disassembled? What impact will it have on how you produce things in the future? How will you let people know what lies within the book, is text searching intelligent enough? What might be the learning outcomes? What kind of descriptive material is needed to identify fragments and should you identify them, or let customers decide on which pieces they can purchase? How do customers discover your bank of content? How do they interrogate it, locate and choose what they want?
4. If fragments are they way forward for your business, how would they be assembled and delivered to your customers? Can customers make decisions about building their own aggregations of texts and other content? What if the customer says, ?Give me everything you have on Crohn?s disease?? or ?What do you have on 17th Century French costume?? or ?Can I have a new chapter of this thriller sent to my phone every day?? How would you provide such a service? More importantly how would you market and charge for such a service?
5. Do you have enough stuff to make this bit of your business work? Do these pieces add up to some form of content equity in a genre, subject or author? Are you facing the need to sell your fragments to a larger aggregator? Can you partner, collaborate, and share the costs of development, spreading the risk? Will you license content usage rather than sell rights to digital blobs? Can you provide a platform for delivering content to consumers?
6. How will production within your business match these new demands? Do you need new suppliers? Do the old workflows suit this new way of thinking about your business? For example, let?s say indexing is an important feature of some work, and historically this is best done at the end of the workflow when this product (ISBN) is stable and complete, is it now more important to begin indexing the work at the beginning of the workflow to know what?s in the digital asset and to consider multiple deliverables of the content (many ISBNs)? Perhaps your new workflows will invert some processes in your business. You may restructure how content is gathered, stored, and identified.
7. Is the key business issue to sell assets to consumers or to exchange assets with other content providers in order to assemble the final product or deliverable service? Are you building the seats or assembling the cars? How does this affect your business, is it more important to freely exchange and standardise content or build proprietary expertise and add value and depth of knowledge within your products, in order to gain competitive advantage.
8. How will customers actually want this stuff? A simple RSS feed, some HTML in a Web page? Will a ?dumb? PDF work? Will an indexed and linked PDF work? Do you need to get below this level and jump into some form of mark-up language like XML? Will you provide this stuff pre-packaged or create it on the hoof? How will content be converted?
9. If you choose a mark-up language, whose XML would work for you? Do you have some equity in the mark-up language? Should you invest in an existing standard, or build your own? Whichever route you choose, what are the desired outputs, what do you have to support as transformations, conversions, reworking? Do you need to create ONIX metadata? Open eBook XHTML? TEI? DocBook? Dublin Core? Selling content means selling intelligence and it?s hard to sell intelligence if there?s none in your business system. Once you make a decision, where will you keep all this stuff and how will you and your customers get at it? Who will manage it?
10. Finally, what needs to be done in editorial? How are works being commissioned? Is there a new business context in shifting from commissioning books to commissioning content? Are we commissioning works as integrated wholes, or gathering the pieces? How will you coordinate the inputs of your authors? How much technical expertise is there in your author base? What tools will authors need to give you what you want? What will be the cost of not providing tools and guidelines? Do your editors have the technical skills, insight and business context to drive things forward for you? Get the inputs right to drive costs down and maximise the range of possible outputs.
tags: electronic?product, xml, corpora, list?development
