On July 1st, Apple announced the availability of educational content for K-12 teachers. The content organized by State Agencies is provided mostly by higher-learning institutions and focuses on professional development. Today there are only eleven different agencies providing sites, with five of them based in the state of New Jersey.

The mix of content forms includes: PDF, video and audio. Some provide links to more digital content distribution platforms hosted by the content providers or thier partners.

In addition iTunes U provides many content providers with a centralized distribution location visited by millions of potential consumers each day. Other content creators are finding ways to provide educational content over the iTunes platform. Here is a sort list:

• WBGH
• American Public Media
• Open University
• Yale
• Stanford

So digital distribution platforms are springing up in all sorts of places these days. Does this new found delivery independance signal a serious challange to existing educational content providers?

Illustration ©jimbo www.okayboss.com

One of the things I enjoy the most about the movie The Wizard of OZ is the use of color in the transition from the farm life shown in black and white to the land of OZ. The stark differences in life styles and characters are revealed in a direct and simple way—with color!

In our Industry, it's interesting how quickly a discussion about change in publishing business models elicit's a mostly black & white discussion about the death of the printed book.

Perhaps, instead there is a more nuanced position, displaying a full spectrum of color?

Recently, Henry Blodget of the Alley Insider Blog offered advise on How to Save the Publishing Industry. Or perhaps at best stirred the debate. Given relatively flat growth over the last year in the Industry, his "Radical" suggestion: Reduce print distribution, increase digital distribution and lower the price of a digital book to about $5.00. The decrease in cost and increased availability will drive up demand and revenues. While an interesting proposition on the surface, most of the industry professionals who responded, immediately question the financials used by Henry.

Amusingly Tim O'Reilly offers, "whether or not you are right about low prices stimulating demand, your proposed P&L is pure fiction". And Jeff Gomez of Print is Dead states, "this all just goes to show what publishers are up against. I mean, do people really think — in the face of enormously changing consumer habits and online trends — that it’s that simple? We need to have ideas that do something other than just leave us and our authors with drastically reduced revenue."

While quickly viewing the other responses, two distinct groups of customers emerge: the Manics and the Passionates. The manics, like Blodget feel that book reading becomes a struggle to fill the minute fragments of time available or quickly reference content to be used for some other purpose. Low cost, easy access and rapid retrieval services mean more to this group than the Passionates.

The second group is passionate about books. They must possess books. Their homes and offices are full of them. This response best sums up the group's feelings: "People like me who can happily lose themselves in a book for two weeks are being replaced by people like Blodget who equate reading with skimming and start breaking out in hives if they have to follow one train of thought for more than a minute".

Tim O'Reilly wants everyone to know that, "the biggest challenges publishers face is to rethink what kind of products work online, and why. What job do their products do? How can that job be rethought so that online actually makes it better than the print version? Who needs your products, and how badly? If the audience is limited, high prices might be the answer? If the product is a commodity that needs to stand out from the crowd, getting viral distribution by fans, free might be the answer."

The genuine value in posts like Henry's and Jeff's is the direct feedback they provide from customers and professionals of the publishing industry. Following Tim's advice and using our samples from the blog post, we easily identify two distinct buyer personas: Manic and Passionate.

It is clear for the Manics that cost, relevance, retrieval and reference-ability are key traits of products that fulfill their needs. These needs and a commodity approach align well with digital distribution. While passionate buyers are more interested in possessing bound products. The bound products may have a limited release or come bundled which would carry a premium price structure. Perhaps under commodity and premium pricing structures publishers have the means to maximize profits in each vertical and underwrite the loses generated by product experimentation regardless of pricing structure.

As for me... I have books stacked from floor to ceiling in my apartment, lining my office walls and in crates stacked neatly away at a manhattan mini storage! What do you need from your publisher? How can they help you? My hope is that publishers quickly identify the need to build both authors and audiences equally by providing the core services each requires.

The Web is a dynamic and complex system. Combining people, technology and content in innovative and collaborative ways. While traditional publishers seek to monetize the Web in its 2.0 iteration, another mass of contributors are just trying to find a way to get their content out there.

The new mass of contributors are not constrained by the concerns of a traditional publisher. The key for the new mass contributor is interconnectivity. Social platforms such as Facebook, Digg, Del.icio.us, YouTube are giving the new mass not only the tools necessary to build connectivity and increase the size of their distribution networks but a collaborative platform to sufficiently develop new ideas into products which can be monetized.

Traditional publishers can develop the ability to leverage the tools of the social Web to develop monetized products. A good example of this is Chris Anderson's The Long Tail the original idea put forward in a blog and then developed over time into a print article in Wired Magazine and then ultimately a book. Of course the blog is still functioning with new contributions on a regular basis.

Another example is a new book by Charles Leadbeater, entitled 'We Think'. Leadbeater looks into mass innovation enabled through social web technologies all the while leveraging them to develop ideas for the book.

This book first caught my attention through a video on YouTube. The video was released in conjunction with the printed book. According to Leadbeater it's to help outline the intricate ideas presented in the book. But I suspect it also serves to advertise the book and continue to develop a social experience. For example, here I'm sharing it with you.

The video was uploaded on February 26th, 2008 and has over 60,000 views, 313 ratings and 285 comments 8 of which are other videos. It will be interesting to see how these translate into sales of the physical book.

In a recent Library Journal article on 'Community Publishing' Jill O'Neil, director of planning and communications for the National Federation of Advanced Information Services and Ben Vershbow, editorial director of the Institute for the Future of the Book, discuss the changing role of authorship, technology and success in 'Community Publishing'.

While acknowledging Wikipedia as an obvious success, they point out other emerging attempts such as Elsevier's Scirus, Nature Publishing Group's Nature Network and the Urban Dictionary. Which focus on organization, access and discussion as value-add services.

Jill's hunch is that, "economic leverage will eventually be found in the contexts surrounding texts, not in the texts themselves. Access to a high-quality discussion or supplementary, para-textual material, or quality filtering, or social services and infrastructures around texts".

Ben cautions publishers that it's not the technology that makes Wikipedia a success. He states that, "Wikipedia is a success in spite of its technology. The technology basically sucks".

He believes it's the complex social protocols, governance structures, use guidelines, role definitions, an inspiring mission and general usefulness—i.e. all the people stuff—that make it flourish.

So for publishers looking to implement a social-based digital product, they are advised to consider these first:

1. What can this tool or technology be used for?
2. Who, within the community being served, needs or uses this tool?
3. How does this tool or this content format fit into the workflow of the community? and finally
4. What are the costs and considerations of implementation?