Bright—Dim?

With changing roles for publishers brought on by advances in technology for self-publishing, digital distribution, print-on-demand and affordable desktop software for creation, how is an overcrowded market place a real opportunity for traditional publishers?

In his post The Future for publishers, Paul Watson recommends publisher's:

1. Find opportunities in providing instant relevancy and reputation for content creators;
2. Develop and provide access to an audience for creators;
   
3. Actively engage with niche communities;
4. Focus on editorial aspects;
5. Enhance the online presence of authors and creators by developing complex "web sites" to support all aspects of communication, selling and supporting a creator's audience;
6. Spend significantly less on mass marketing.
   

The key for publishers in all of this is still artist and content development. This existed as a core competency for publishing since its origins. Publishers should leverage new technologies to reach and grow audiences and creators proportionally. What heavy machinery once allowed few to produce for many, now technology allows the many to produce for many.

No matter which model generates the most revenue, to effectively leverage new technologies, publishers must mind their digital content supply chains. To simplify, we'll divide the content supply chain into three core elements: Create, Organize and Deliver. This helps to identify the areas where publishers can target their efforts.

Simplified Digital Content Supply Chain


For each of the core elements publishers can analyze three supporting aspects: People, Content and Technology. These three aspects are not mutually exclusive and it's important to be mindful of all three while focusing on any one. By first looking at the people, their procedures and processes, the content acted upon and the technologies utilized publishers will gain insights into where new technologies, people and even content can emerge to support new business models.

People, Content, Technology Supporting the Digital Content Supply Chain


While analyzing the content supply chain look for opportunities to leverage the strengths of your two key aspects: People and Technology. Certain supply chain activities such as creation and acquisition which fall under the create element are more tacit and involve a higher degree of interaction. These activities are people intensive and require a great deal of skill. And certain activities such as content classification or syndication which fall under the organize and deliver elements respectively are repetitive, time consuming and lend themselves to heavy automation. Often publishers mismatch activities to resources resulting in a degradation of benefits from the implemented technologies.

People vs. Technology Intensive


So not only do publishers need to find sustainable new business models for digital distribution, they need to free resources to focus on value-added people-intensive activities like creation, acquisition, marketing and communication and leverage technological innovation to increase organization, distribution channels and accessibility for audiences to find and use their content.

Thirty minute video from the TOC 2008 Conference featuring Kathy Sierra, author of creating passionate users blog. Kathy and Tim discuss her approach to product development. It's centered on helping users to achieve an "I RULE" experience and leads to a non-traditional approach to product forms.

Here are a couple of quotes from the video:

1. Tim O'Rielly: "What our customers care about is much larger than us."
2. Kathy Sierra: "Shift focus from product to what people can do with the product."
   
3. Kathy Sierra: "What if we can reduce our customer's fear and guilt about learning something new?"
   

WHAT IF:

1. Publishers shift focus from the product to what people can do with the product?
2. Focus was on the user's experience?
3. Traditional book forms were remade?
   

Can new product forms increase our ability to focus on the user? What do you think?

Distribution—platforms

Moving forward with our background on the three major challenges, we began with monetization of digital content and moved on to digital content forms and we wrap up with distribution.

Attracting new customers while effectively aligning their consumption [behavioral] patterns with products is a key aspect of the new distribution models. To add value, digital distribution must widen the field of customers and shorten their search time for products.

For our purposes we'll look at distribution from three tightly coupled perspectives.

1. Models—Partners/Aggregators
2. Approaches—Push, Pull, Engage
   
3. Platforms—Software

Today's challenges, Tomorrow's opportunities

Models

For traditional print publishers, digital distribution models often parallel existing networks. Their main choices are partners or aggregators. Partners differ from aggregators in that product marketing is a core focus versus content syndication.

Take for example, Amazon which utilizes a consignment model on traditional print products for sale and distribution. With this same model, they stand ready to except PDF formats for the Upgrade or BookSurge forms and they prefer HTML for the Kindle form. While Amazon.com is a feature-rich platform focused on aligning prospective audiences with desired products and simplifying the distribution process.

Depending on the publishing vertical there are a multitude of potential partners and aggregators waiting to assist with digital distribution such as Google, Microsoft, Zinio, Lightening Source, Ingenta, Highwire, LibreDigital, and even Ingram.

With the continuing emergence of third-party service providers, publishers no longer need to shoulder the burden of establishing and maintaining the necessary technological support structures for digital distribution.

For those publishers who have invested in this infrastructure most of these service providers support co-distribution directly from the publisher or other web-based entities increasing the number of channels to reach potential customers.

Approaches

Three core approaches have emerged for content distribution. Each attempting to attract customers with a mix of content types and digital forms.

Push—Focused on centralized consumption patterns. Publishers push forms to a central location [a website] requiring customers to locate and review every time content is desired.

Pull—Focused on personalized consumption patterns exemplified by newsletters, RSS, SMS or IM digital forms. Users opt-in to receive forms on a scheduled or ad-hoc basis via local or personal platforms.

Engage—Focused on value-add consumption patterns. Usually found in blog, wiki and application-based digital forms. Platforms provide value-added feature sets that compliment product forms.

Platforms

Platforms are the underlying structures that support all models and approaches. Typically they exist as a collection of software and hardware.

Software packages offered by partners are regularly aligned with a particular approach. For example, while Kindle may appear as a new platform for the distribution and consumption of content with its anytime, anywhere aspect of access, its approach is still push—a multitude of static forms, waiting infinitely for someone to desire them, seek them out and acquire them.

We are developing a growing list of content distribution platforms. Please review and contribute. In our next installment we look more closely at these technologies.

With an abundance of partners, aggregators, approaches and technology, information overload or saturation easily leads to customer frustration. Is more the best approach? Disney's Bob Igar states, "technology is good, it allows brands to distribute more broadly, and to be more relevant in the marketplace. However you have to keep the consumer in mind and use technology to do that."

Next...

With major companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, Apple and Google ready to help publishers, the unauthorized duplication of content remains a central roadblock to digital distribution for most publishers. Early efforts on digital rights management (DRM) are even more confounded by today's aspects of media convergence and its cadre of devices.

In our next series of installments we begin to look at the different digital formats used across the new digital frontiers, service providers and platforms. We highlight aspects such as excepted digital formats, co-delivery and DRM.

Creation/Conversion—digital forms

So far in our background on the three main challenges for digital distribution, the proceeding installments focused on revenue model challenges.

The second main challenge for content providers focuses on content or product forms—shapes the content takes from traditional print (magazines, books, newspapers, journals, catalogs) to new digital (blogs, wikis, emails, video casts, games, podcasts, applications or even tweets) forms.

Today's challenges, Tomorrow's opportunities

From a manufacturing point of view the challenges along the road to digital distribution first appear straightforward—as a conversion challenge. However, they quickly blossom into a creative opportunity with ramifications for business models too.

As things stand today a multitude of formats crowd the market and complicate decisions. Merging the creation of traditional print distribution formats with PDF and XML to leverage additional channels adds layers of complexity to editorial and production processes.

Some publishers attempt to overcome this complexity by building specialized teams to handle the new channels. Thus adding silos to mostly vertical businesses, farther complicating coordination and reducing the effects of digital distribution's core benefits.

With new product forms and digital formats, publishers have plenty of options for growth in the breadth of their product lines. The Internet's native ability for disintermediation easily expands the spectrum of delivery channels and forms for traditional print publishers.

Observe the significant increase in the availability of multi-function devices such as Apple's iPhone, other SmartPhones or Amazon's Kindle. Traditional print publishers are confronting the possibility of digital content distribution in new product forms such as Podcasting or video casting. In effect encouraging a digital media convergence as evidenced in the BBC's recently launched multi-media newsroom. Combine these with an ever expending worldwide broadband penetration and rise in reader-centric digital information product forms such as blogs, wikis, emails, and it seems that most print publisher's traditional-form centric approach to creation/acquisition will need adjustment.

It will be essential for traditional publishers to successfully separate brand and form, quickly adapt to newer reader-centric approaches. And learn to align content, form and delivery with customer consumption [behavioral] patterns.

In part 5 we take a more in depth look at digital formats, devices and supporting technologies. You can preview and add to our growing list of digital distribution resources.

Next...

During our next installment we look at the final main challenge: Distribution. With a variety of revenue models available, how do the multiple product forms flow to your audience?