The State of Sourcing

Commented a respondent of our survey on ‘The Current State of Digital Content’. So,  how are things shaping up for digital formats, does everyone in the publishing industry feel the same way? Read on.

Changing the ‘format’ of content

The publishing industry has progressively been going digital. While selling digital content is recent, publishers have used digital production techniques/processes that are reliable, stable and efficient. Such processes, however, ended mostly in the creation of PDFs – that doubled as print ready files and/or a product that was to be sold digitally.

Continue reading ‘Device specific formats are horrible to support, and I hope they die!’ »

In August 2010, the attorney-general’s office in Connecticut, US began investigating pricing of digital content by Amazon and Apple – expressing concern over pricing agreements with publishers and its possible implications on consumers. The attorney-general’s office went on to find identical prices for titles distributed by Amazon, Apple, Borders and Barnes & Noble. So, what’s the deal with e-book pricing?

How do publishers price their digital content?

Continue reading ‘E-book prices set to drop’ »

On Monday, the 19th of November 2007, Amazon released its first generation Kindle – an event that shaped the digital market. Since then, large corporations such as Sony, Barnes and Noble, Google, and more recently Apple, have been giving the digital content market significant attention – adding credibility and more so, validating the digital market as a strong revenue source. It is this potential that is transforming the publishing industry today.

In the last few years, the publishing industry witnessed tremendous change – a change that centred around revenue and cost challenges. For publishers, the digital market presented a holistic solution – one that opened a channel of revenue with non-linear growth, while ensuring minimal costs of production & sales. Publishers worldwide are either producing digital content or are considering it as a service area.

Continue reading ‘Survey: The Current State of Digital Content’ »

Through much discussion and debate, the Apple iPad seems to have held its own, when it came to university implementation. Whether the goal was to enhance campus communication, replace textbooks, introduce new learning approaches in the classroom, or promote informal learning, the iPad seems to have clicked with higher education, in the first quarter of its release. We’re hearing of more and more faculty/depts. experimenting with ways to leverage the technology to suit their varied learning requirements, be it at law schools, medical schools, engineering students, or business related content/app development.

So what was the reaction from the corporate learning segment? Here’s a couple of noteworthy initiatives that have reached mainstream online discussion.

Continue reading ‘Why isn’t the corporate learning community excited about the iPad?’ »

A few days ago,  Seth Godin, marketing guru and best selling author, decided to part ways with his publisher, Portfolio, to self-publish. So, why did Seth decide to self-publish? And more importantly, how much money does he stand to make?

So, why did Seth decide to self-publish?

Continue reading ‘How much will Seth Godin earn by self-publishing?’ »

A question that has been playing on my mind for sometime. Authors and writers have depended on publishers for production, printing, distribution, marketing and promotion of their content. However, the rise of the digital market is challenging the traditional author-publisher relationship.

The traditional relationship between authors and publishers centered on the capital outlay required to create, print and sell books. Publishers would provide authors with advances, bear the expenses of producing, printing, distributing, marketing and promoting the books. Proceeds from the sales of the book were largely the publisher’s and a portion of it goes to the author as royalty. The value of the publisher, thus, centered on printing and selling the books.

Continue reading ‘Survey: Is self-publishing increasing?’ »

Google has the answer to a lot of questions we ask. And looks like it has the answer to this one too.

The company has been trying to digitize books through its Google Books initiative for a few years now, so it is surprising that they didn’t answer this question at the outset.

How did they do it?

Continue reading ‘Google this: Number of books in the world’ »

Digital is a place everyone seems to be going. Since Gutenberg’s modern press, printing presses across the world have churned out copious  amounts of content (estimates suggest printing revenues to be in excess of $ 1 trillion). To digitize all of it is a Herculean effort.

Continue reading ‘ReCAPTCHA-ing old books’ »

The comparisons between Apple iPad and this $35 ‘still unnamed’ mobile device are so unfair. The online buzz about this new product is almost deafening. Ever since the Indian government announced the launch of the ‘$35 m -device’ (lets call it that, since it does not have a name yet, and this anyway seems to be the most exciting ‘fact’ about it), discussions abound on its viability, price, wasted funds, its not-so-successful predecessors, apps that it can offer and its future. While debate on all of these is justified, some more thoughts:

Why is cost such a big issue?

Continue reading ‘Education at $35… Dreaming big?’ »

So I played devil’s advocate, while the rest of the learning world appreciated the leap forward with the Apple iPad. Having carefully evaluated the bad and the ugly (thanks to everyone on Linkedin/this blog who shared), there is definitely a need to look at everything good that’s coming out of the tablet industry, of relevance to the learning community.

A market-ready foolproof device the iPad still is not, but there are plenty of interesting ways it may be leveraged for learning at the workplace / university (or actually, outside of those places). In this post, I want to the cover the actual implementations being made by educators (I’ll cover corporate initiatives in my next post).  A great example is Rutgers University’s iPad marketing course that I blogged about earlier. There’s a lot of talk of how the iPad is a game changer, but how many universities are putting their money where their mouths are, and investing right away?

Continue reading ‘Top 5 University iPad initiatives’ »