Adobe Summit - Evangelists For Publishing

There were some interesting take-always from Monday's Adobe Summit. 

The Adobe $1.5B acquisition of Workfront was one of largest Adobe has made and in doing so, the company was placing a bet on simplified, structured collaboration on the one hand and content and marketing complexity on the other.  Adobe has recognized that managing and recording the content creation process is increasingly important within all organizations as much as achieving effective marketing. Managing artifacts, content items and other similar materials are, and will, continue to consume increasing amounts of staff time as content is deployed everywhere and where measurement of the impact and use of this content is critical.

Workfront is now the workflow solution within Adobe Experience Manager: Using this framework marketing managers connect strategy to execution and can ensure the business is driving to the desired outcomes as it deploys content and creates uniquely personalized experiences for consumers. As user experience is enhanced with more and more personalized content and a widening of the access points to content, the amount of activities and transactions around this messaging will massively increase as these experiences are pushed (or pulled) to consumers. Managing all this activity requires robust workflow and tools which is where Workfront inside Adobe Experience Manager realizes its strength.

Within Workfront, staff map out their marketing campaigns and assign responsibilities which may be completed in any of the Adobe applications. These tasks have approval processes and 'jobs' are routed for review, approval and publishing and each activity is logged in Workfront. As campaigns are executed, managers can review how the entire campaign came together and what the results were. Adobe is calling this the "marketing system of record - a unified solution for sharing ideas, managing content creation and automating complex processes".

While Adobe saw the value of Workfront as supporting marketing and creative functions, within Book publishing the Workfront solution has also been used by publishers to replace spreadsheets and other tools within the editorial and production processes. Even as a 'generic' workflow product,  WorkFront is a strong competitor to the software solutions provided by industry players. National Geographic and Royal Society of Chemistry are two publishers using Workfront. Since Adobe products are embedded in publishing we will likely see an increase in the number of Workfront deployments and this should worry the incumbent software players in our space.

The other interesting news item concerned data privacy. Here Adobe is betting that third-party cookies which store our activities on the internet as we visit websites will disappear (or at least will not be used to identify our traffic). A new concept named the 'consumer data platform' whereby product companies and marketeers build a closer relationship with consumers by better utilizing the first-party data they already own to establish a coherent brand experience. This is explained in a good post here

Where it gets interesting is the Adobe spin. At the event, Adobe suggested a capability to leverage information the customer has chosen to share so that personalized experiences can be created and delivered to the consumer. Adobe has enabled "Segment Match" capabilities which will allow brands with similar interests to share data and to build collaborative engagement and expand their reach with consumers who have cross-over interests. A good example of this would be a travel publisher and an airline. This is in early days and we will see how this develops but for publishers with a broad array of content the opportunities to build partnerships based on real data could be an opportunity too important to miss out on. Just another reason why Adobe, already embedded in publisher workflows could see more expansion within publishing.

For more information check out the Adobe Summit Video.

 

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Michael Cairns is a publishing and media executive with over 25 years experience in business strategy, operations and technology implementation.  He has served on several boards and advisory groups including the Association of American Publishers, Book Industry Study Group and the International ISBN organization.   Additionally, he has public and private company board experience.   He can be reached at michael.cairns@infomediapartners.com

PersonaNonData Magazine: Amazon++, Copyright, Shakespeare + Other Articles

More articles of interest from my flipboard magazine:

Articles:

• New Statesman: Should Books be Free?
• Billboard: Bandcamp changes the discussion about payments
  
• Vox: Amazon's Union
• UC/Elsevier Journal deal
• Dohle - RandomHouse: It's the best time ever
• WAPO: Want to Borrow that Book?
• Stratechery: Relentless Jeff Bezos

Plus an archive of many more of interest to media folks

 

Media Report (Vol 14, No 2): Pell Grants, Black Literature, Cancelling Shakespeare, American Dirt

Raising Pell: How Industry Support and Federal Grants Improve Prison Education (PND)

The Obama Administration recognized that a coordinated and organized approach from the Department of Education and Bureau of Prisons would improve prison education programs. In the years since, quality education programs – where they exist – remain concentrated and reach less than 10% of incarcerated individuals. Allowing Pell Grants to be used by this population is an important step; however, if educational programs are a hodge-podge of well-intentioned but uncoordinated initiatives, they will only ever be partially successful (if success means delivering an efficacious education program to all who seek it).

Black Kids and White dominated Literature: A Do It Yourself Model (The Conversation)

Although much of American children’s literature published near the turn of the last century – and even today – filters childhood through the eyes of white children, The Brownies’ Book gave African American children a platform to explore their lives, interests and aspirations. And it reinforced what 20th-century American literature scholar Katharine Capshaw has described as Du Bois’ “faith in the ability of young people to lead the race into the future.”

Most likely inspired by The Brownies’ Book, several Black weekly newspapers went on to create their own children’s sections. While the children’s publishing industry may have shut out Black voices and perspectives, the editors of these periodicals sought to fill the void by celebrating them, giving kids a platform to express themselves, connect with one another and indulge their curiosities.

Why are schools cancelling Shakespeare? (WAPO)

Why should students be forced to read Shakespeare, as some teachers on Twitter are wondering? Why, indeed? God forbid they should try to muddle through a sentence by Vladimir Nabokov, Jane Austen, Leo Tolstoy or, my high school favorite, William Faulkner. I loved Faulkner not because he was easy to read but because I had an unforgettable teacher whose passion shined light on the beauty and the sound and the fury of words.

Not that I’m a literary snob, mind you. I also read all of Harold Robbins’s trashy novels in junior high, much to the furrowed brow of my mother. One night, while I was reading “The Carpetbaggers” by flashlight under my covers, I overheard her say to my father: “Should we be letting her read those books?”

The Management Lessons in David Simon's Homicide (Strategy + Business)

What can we learn from this acute environment? For one, culture matters. The foundation of the work that gets done in the book is a powerful culture built on tradition and values, which the detectives transmit and reinforce in one another. It is a ferociously masculine culture, insular and to a great extent Catholic, expressed in gallows humor, and exalting duty and strength. Being a cop in Baltimore is so dangerous that a tradition has evolved for when someone returns to work after being shot in the line of duty: The officer gets to pick any assignment he’s qualified for.

As Simon demonstrates, this culture sustains the detectives in the face of nearly overwhelming challenges. But it can also be a problem. “Police-involved shootings” are investigated with an eye toward making potential problems go away. The culture also means that the advent of women as detectives is unwelcome to the men, even as they occasionally accept one.

The Implosion of America Dirt (NYMag).  It didn't stop it being one of the years biggest books,

On the publisher’s side, Miller and Don Weisberg, then the president of Macmillan, did most of the talking. The book’s editor, Amy Einhorn, was mostly silent. The executives expressed interest in the activists’ suggestions, but they also wanted to discuss the tone of the online discourse. Miller comes from a generation that prizes “civility,” one employee noted. “He could be accused of tone policing,” added another. Gurba, who had received a barrage of menacing emails since publishing her essay, was disturbed that Miller seemed to be “equating the criticism Jeanine was receiving with the death threats I was receiving,” she said. As Miller and Gurba began to argue over this, one Macmillan staff member blurted out that Cummins had never received any actual death threats. “Everybody just went dead silent,” Gurba recalled.

 Magazines are turning in to Books (CNN)

While many magazines have shrunk or folded in recent years, some publishers see opportunity in bookazines. They are less dependent on advertising — a once reliable source of revenue that continues to be eaten up by tech platforms like Facebook (FB) and Google (GOOG). The issues are big, sometimes exceeding 100 pages, but publishers can fill pages with stories and photos from their archives, making them less costly to produce. And they can seize on current trends like keto diets or cultural moments such as the passing of beloved celebrities and other public figures.

"To me, [bookazines] represent a really nice pandemic treat," said Aileen Gallagher, associate professor of magazine, news and digital journalism at Syracuse University. "We're all still stuck in our houses and the only place we're really going is the grocery store. It's like, 'Oh, here's this thing that will entertain me for a little while that I will invest $10 in.'"

 Digital subscriptions for content businesses are growing across the board (TheNewStatesman)

In a survey conducted for the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2020, 64 per cent of readers in the UK cited “distinctive journalism” as their primary reason for subscribing to any publication, and 35 per cent of those readers said that they subscribe for particular writers they like. This agrees with what our readers tell us about why they subscribe: for Stephen Bush, Anoosh Chakelian, Jeremy Cliffe, Emily Tamkin, Sarah Manavis and Ailbhe Rea, among many others.   

Our investments in technology and data journalism are paying off, as is our expansion into international coverage, led by Jeremy Cliffe. Our coverage of the US election in particular was widely praised for its insight and accuracy.

 More from my Flipboard magazine

MediaWeek Report (Vol 14, No 1): Book Prices, JK Rowling, African Comics, Digital Textbooks.

You might ask yourself: Why do books have prices printed on them? Marketplace

Why are books actually marked with a price on them? Music isn’t. Movies aren’t. Most retail items that I could think of that you would find at resellers aren’t in fact.

Textbooks in the digital age.  More on Cengage's digital textbook offering. (Boston Globe)

Textbook publishers had been trying to shift from paper to digital for years. Then along came the COVID-19 pandemic, giving many reluctant educators and students the nudge they needed to make the leap to online course materials. In Cengage’s case, digital sales now represent 68 percent of total revenue, up from 58 percent three years ago. About half of its sales are to college students, and digital represents 82 percent of the higher-ed revenue now for Cengage.

African comics and their growing market (The Economist)

Kugali is part of a small but vibrant industry. As in many areas of African popular culture, Nigerian brands are prominent; others include Comic Republic and Vortex Corp. But animators are thriving elsewhere, too. Afrocomix, an app for reading comics, was made by Leti Arts, a video-game developer based in Ghana and Kenya. In 2019 “Mama K’s Team 4”, written by Malenga Mulendema, a Zambian artist, and co-produced by a South African studio, became Netflix’s first African-made animated series. Etan Comics is the publisher of the first Ethiopian superhero comic books, “Jember” and “Hawi’’.

J.K. Rowling gets a profile in Vulture (NY Mag) and it isn't that flattering (Vulture)

One of the fans most devoted to Rowling’s exhaustive world building was a former Michigan school librarian named Steven Vander Ark. His website, The Harry Potter Lexicon, had won Rowling’s praise; it catalogued the minutiae of her books in such detail that she said she occasionally consulted it to fact-check her work as she wrote. In the months after the series concluded, Vander Ark contracted with a local publisher to turn his site into a print volume, and Rowling’s appreciation soured. Suing Vander Ark’s publishers for copyright infringement, she said, “I believe that this book constitutes the wholesale theft of 17 years of my hard work.”

Representing Vander Ark’s publisher, the executive director of Stanford Law School’s Fair Use Project pointed out that publishing companion guides to existing works was a practice that had been accepted “for hundreds of years.” But Neil Blair, one of Rowling’s agents, said that people who wished to produce such companions typically approached Rowling’s representatives first. Before publishing anything, they would seek her approval and make changes where requested; they would, in other words, “fall in line.” The judge ruled in Rowling’s favor, awarding $6,750 in damages. Vander Ark had broken down in tears as he testified, but after the trial, he avowed that he would always be a Harry Potter fan.

Many publishing folk take exception to any potential ex-trump officials getting book deals (Guardian)

Put together by the author Barry Lyga, the letter, which is continuing to add names, has been signed by bestselling writers including Celeste Ng, author of Little Fires Everywhere, Holly Black and Star Wars author Chuck Wendig. Titled “no book deals for traitors”, it opens by stating that the US “is where it is in part because publishing has chased the money and notoriety of some pretty sketchy people, and has granted those same people both the imprimatur of respectability and a lot of money through sweetheart book deals”.

More from my Flipboard magazine

MediaWeek Report (Vol 13, No 16): Big Mergers - Simon & Schuster, S&P Global, Copyrights & Libraries, Pearson

Bertelsmann buying Simon & Schuster.

No doubt you've read about this acquisition and here are some of the articles.  Many are taking 'it's the Amazon problem' approach:

In The Atlantic: The merger isn't the gravest danger to the business.

NYTimes: The biggest publisher is about to get bigger

The Economist: A biblio-behemoth 

The New Republic: Heading towards monopolistic singularity

In other big media merger news:

WSJ - S&P Global agrees to buy IHS Markit for $44Billion combing two of the largest data suppliers to wall street firms.

Also Benzinga - The merger of the two companies will create a financial data behemoth.

I'm sure that's fine. 

According to Fortune a new copyright champion has arrived from the Internet Archive.  Are publishers on board with this I ask?

For Bailey, the debate is personal. Growing up in an artistic family of modest means on Long Island, she never encountered the Internet until arriving at Brown University in 1995. There, Bailey made friends with a circle of creative types thrilled by the culture and community they discovered on web, from the music-sharing bazaar Napster to blogging platform LiveJournal.

"The Internet seemed like this amazing new thing to distribute knowledge and information," she recalls.

After college, Bailey landed in the midst of New York's cultural elite with a job as an executive assistant to a creative director at magazine giant Conde Naste. But she soon became disillusioned, concluding the publishing industry prioritized money over artistic ideals.

 (Yes, Nast is incorrectly spelled).

Speaking of Random House, here is a good obit of Harold Evans - The Economist

People looked pityingly on him now. That was unbearable, so he left for the United States and a teaching job. His second wife, Tina Brown, soon joined him as editor of Vanity Fair, and he too took up the pen again, editing US News & World Report and founding Condé Nast Traveller before becoming, in 1990, president of Random House. There the copy on his desk was by Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer, William Styron and Richard Nixon, as well as the businessmen, artists and poets he added to the list. The glittering Manhattan literary scene revolved around their garden brownstone, enjoyably so. America performed its reinventing magic, and in 1993 he became a citizen. Yet the country’s deepest effect on him had happened years before, when he visited on a Harkness fellowship in 1956. He was already in love with newspapers; with the smell of printer’s ink, and with Hollywood’s depiction of brave small-town newspapermen standing up to crooks. Papers in America might be slackly edited and poorly designed, but they showed a crusading desire for openness that was still rare in Britain.

Bookstores are struggling but rich folk are buying first editions (Bloomberg)

The market for extremely rare books has been healthy for years, dealers say, but quantifying its ups and downs is difficult, because “if you’re talking about a book with many comparables over time, you’ve missed the top of the market,” says Darren Sutherland, a specialist in Bonham’s rare books department in New York.

“It’s so anecdotal,” agrees Christina Geiger, the head of the books and manuscripts department at Christie’s New York. “Everything depends on the quality of the material.” 

Still, consensus among dealers is that the overall market has sustained itself even as the rest of retail has been thrown into turmoil, and that the peak of the market has soared past many participants’ expectations.

UK University staff urge probe into e-book pricing 'scandal' (BBC)

"It's a scandal. It's public money," she said. "Students are shocked when I tell them just how much it costs to get them their texts.

"People just assume we can get books for the prices they see on Amazon and Kindle. It just doesn't work like that for universities.

"The academic publishing business model is broken, and as you can see from the number of people who have signed the letter we think it is time for an investigation," she said.

Lectures are increasingly having to be designed around what texts are available and affordable, not what is best for learning, Ms Anderson said.

Pearson Creates New Direct-to-Consumer Division (Pearson)

Pearson, the world's leading learning company, today announces the creation of a new direct-to-consumer division as it looks to further strengthen its focus on building a direct relationship with learners around the world.

The new division will be co-led by two senior executives: Ishantha Lokuge joined Pearson from Shutterfly last year and now steps up to the role of Chief Global Product Officer and co-President, Direct-to-Consumer.

 As always, more in my flipboard magazine.

Pew Research into Digital Innovation 2030

A really interesting set of predictions expressing how digital innovation with change over the next ten years to 2030.  Pew interview/surveyed a set of digital experts and found,

A majority expect significant reforms aimed at correcting problems in democratic institutions and representation will take place in the next decade. Many say this will result in positive outcomes for the public good; others are less convinced.

The full article is worth a read but here are two snips of interest:

Digitial First Textbooks - My Interview with CCC's Beyond the Book

As print textbooks eventually do give way to courseware, industry analyst Michael Cairns says, college professors, administrators and students will appreciate an education delivered in 21st century models.  Listen to the Audio here

While it has long been foretold that the print textbook would disappear, the revolution has actually taken quite a bit longer than people anticipated.

As print textbooks eventually do give way to courseware, industry analyst Michael Cairns says, college professors, administrators and students will appreciate an education delivered in 21st century models.

“Textbooks served a tremendous benefit and purpose for the last 200 years or more and were quite useful in the marketplace,” he tells CCC’s Chris Kenneally.

“But when you see some of the ability to build in and make use of technology in the delivery of the content and the delivery of subjects, [you see that] students can have the opportunity to benefit from better products and more effective outcomes from the materials that they have access to through the classroom.”

The discussion was presented by the Textbook & Academic Authors Association as part of its special summer webinar series.

Alternatively, read the transcript of the interview here.

Aaron Perzanowski on The End of Ownership

From Youtube intro:

Recent shifts in technology, intellectual property and contract law, and marketplace behavior threaten to undermine the system of personal property that has structured our relationships with the objects we own for centuries. Ownership entails the rights to use, modify, lend, resell, and repair. But across a range of industries and products, manufacturers and retailers have deployed strategies that erode these basic expectations of ownership. Understanding these various tactics, how they depart from the traditional property paradigm, and why some have been embraced by consumers are all crucial in developing strategies to restore ownership in the digital economy.

Aaron Perzanowski teaches courses in intellectual property, telecommunications and innovation. Previously, he taught at Wayne State University Law School, as a lecturer at the University of California Berkeley School of Information, and as a visitor at the University of Notre Dame Law School. Prior to his teaching career, he served as the Microsoft Research Fellow at the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology and practiced law at Fenwick & West in Silicon Valley.

His research addresses topics ranging from digital copyright to deceptive advertising to creative norms within the tattoo industry. With Jason Schultz, he is the author of The End of Ownership: Personal Property in the Digital Economy (MIT Press 2016), which argues for retaining consumer property rights in a marketplace that increasingly threatens them. His book with Kate Darling, Creativity Without Law: Challenging the Assumptions of Intellectual Property (NYU Press 2017), explores the ways communities of creators operate outside of formal intellectual property law.

More info on this event here:
https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/lunc...

MediaWeek (Vol 5, No 50): MOOC Business Model, Popova Profile, Tim Cook, Printing 15th Century + More,

Wondering where the business model is for MOOCs? Some providers are now charging for access to student data (Chronicle):

On Tuesday, Coursera, which works with high-profile colleges to provide massive open online courses, or MOOC's, announced its employee-matching service, called Coursera Career Services. Some high-profile tech companies have already signed up—including Facebook and Twitter, according to a post on Coursera's blog, though officials would not disclose how much employers pay for the service. Only students who opt into the service will be included in the system that participating employers see, a detail stressed in an e-mail message that Coursera sent to its nearly two million past or present students on Tuesday.

Each college offering a course through Coursera is also given the chance to opt out of the service—meaning that if a college declines, then no students in its courses can participate in the matchmaking system.

"Some universities are still thinking it through, so not all have said yes," Andrew Ng, a co-founder of Coursera, said in an interview on Tuesday. "I don't think anyone said, 'No now and no in the future,'" he added. "This is a relatively uncontroversial business model that most of our university partners are excited about."

Udacity, another company that provides free online courses, offers a similar service. Udacity works directly with professors to offer courses, rather than signing agreements with colleges.

Profile of Maria Popova (Brain Pickings) in the NY Times:

She has faced criticism, of course. She has been dismissed as elitist and condescending. An initiative she helped start last spring, the Curator’s Code, which called for more respect and attribution in the Twittersphere, was harshly criticized. Ms. Popova responded in a blog post that began, “In times of turmoil, I often turn to one of my existential pillars of comfort: Albert Einstein’s ‘Ideas and Opinion.’ ” She ended with this thought: “There is a way to critique intelligently and respectfully, without eroding the validity of your disagreement. It boils down to manners.”

Old-fashioned, indeed.

As for her future, Ms. Popova said she had little interest in expanding her brand. “I get asked all the time, ‘How’s it going to scale?’ ‘What’s next?’ ” she said. “What I do is what I do, and I don’t think I’m ever going to change that.” The woman who rails against her contemporaries for turning their backs on old books said she had no interest in writing one. “That’s such an antiquated model of thinking,” she said. “Why would I want to write something that’s going to have the shelf life of a banana?”

Long interview with Tim Cook of Apple in Businessweek:

The key in the change that you’re referencing is my deep belief that collaboration is essential for innovation—and I didn’t just start believing that. I’ve always believed that. It’s always been a core belief at Apple. Steve very deeply believed this.

So the changes—it’s not a matter of going from no collaboration to collaboration. We have an enormous level of collaboration in Apple, but it’s a matter of taking it to another level. You look at what we are great at. There are many things. But the one thing we do, which I think no one else does, is integrate hardware, software, and services in such a way that most consumers begin to not differentiate anymore. They just care that the experience is fantastic.

So how do we keep doing that and keep taking it to an even higher level? You have to be an A-plus at collaboration. And so the changes that we made get us to a whole new level of collaboration. We’ve got services all in one place, and the guy that’s running that has incredible skills in services, has an incredible track record, and I’m confident will do fantastic things. Jony [Ive, senior vice president of industrial design], who I think has the best taste of anyone in the world and the best design skills, now has responsibility for the human interface. I mean, look at our products. (Cook reaches for his iPhone.) The face of this is the software, right? And the face of this iPad is the software. So it’s saying, Jony has done a remarkable job leading our hardware design, so let’s also have Jony responsible for the software and the look and feel of the software, not the underlying architecture and so forth, but the look and feel.

I don’t think there’s anybody in the world that has a better taste than he does. So I think he’s very special. He’s an original. We also placed Bob [Mansfield, senior vice president of technologies] in a position where he leads all of silicon and takes over all of the wireless stuff in the company. We had grown fairly quickly, and we had different wireless groups. We’ve got some really cool ideas, some very ambitious plans in this area. And so it places him leading all of that. Arguably there’s no finer engineering manager in the world. He is in a class by himself.

Some interesting ideas (relevant for books) on better magazine publishing for digital from Craig Mod:

A Subcompact Manifesto:

Subcompact Publishing tools are first and foremost straightforward.

They require few to no instructions.

They are easily understood on first blush.

The editorial and design decisions around them react to digital as a distribution and consumption space.

They are the result of dumping our publishing related technology on a table and asking ourselves — what are the core tools we can build with all this stuff?

They are, as it were, little N360s.

I propose Subcompact Publishing tools and editorial ethos begin (but not end) with the following qualities:
Small issue sizes (3-7 articles / issue)
Small file sizes
Digital-aware subscription prices
Fluid publishing schedule
Scroll (don’t paginate)
Clear navigation
HTML(ish) based
Touching the open web

Two interesting data modeling/visualization projects:

The expansion of Printing across Europe during the 15th century (The Atlantic):

Harvard's metaLAB is "dedicated to exploring and expanding the frontiers of networked culture in the arts and humanities," pursuing interdisciplinary research like this fascinating look at the spread of printing across Europe in the 1400s. Drawing on data from the university's library collections, the animation below maps the number and location of printed works by year. Watch it full screen in HD to see cities light up as the years scroll by in the lower left corner. Matthew Battles, a principal and senior researcher at metaLAB and past Atlantic contributor, describes the research and technology that went into the visualization in an interview below.

And Bombsite, a project that shows where bombs fell on London during the Blitz.

The Bomb Sight project is mapping the London WW2 bomb census between 7/10/1940 and 06/06/1941. Previously available only by viewing in the Reading Room at The National Archives, Bomb Sight is making the maps available to citizen researchers, academics and students. They will be able to explore where the bombs fell and to discover memories and photographs from the period.

The project has scanned original 1940s bomb census maps , geo-referenced the maps and digitally captured the geographical locations of all the falling bombs recorded on the original map. The data has then been integrated into 2 different types of applications:

And a good day in Sport:

Manchester United and a very exciting game (Guardian)

England Cricket win (Guardian)

AAUP Panel Meeting: Content Chunking and New Revenue

Several weeks ago I was invited to speak at the annual Association of American University Presses (AAUP) meeting on a panel discussing the ‘chunking’ of educational content.  My inclusion was appropriate given my current involvement with educational and academic publishing companies that are looking at ways to monetize the selection and packaging of ‘chunked’ content.  Increasingly, faculty and university administrators want more creative control over the material they assign their students with the added benefit of being better able to manage costs.  I would expect that publishers should want and also be able to take advantage of this.  The practice of ‘chunking’ content in education is not new and, in my own experience, I’ve seen large educational publishing companies create entirely new workflows around providing custom versions of their own materials to educators

In my discussion at AAUP, I focused less on my current work and and more on the trends I see in the marketplace overall.  I began my discussion by observing that ‘chunking’ in educational content is inevitable and inexorable.  As most publishers will admit, the process has been growing rapidly (often illegally) over the past 20 years but maybe largely uncounted in terms of value.  A comparison to the music world before iTunes is always referenced but ‘chunking’ has also been used in newspapers, journals and magazines, television and other media segments for many years.  Education is just late to the party.

Naturally, during any changing market sometimes the incumbent market participants can be disadvantaged; in education, because the market is so heavily concentrated on four large players, they have the most to lose when faculty and administrators’ decisions about content and pricing attain a broader scope.  Rather than choose one textbook and a package of assorted articles and textbook content, a faculty member may now effectively combine the two into a package that specifically matches their class objectives.  Now, rather than being the primary suppliers of content assigned, once-dominant textbook publishers may suddenly find themselves one source of many.

In other media segments, we have seen some price erosion as content has been disaggregated (from album to track, for example) and that is likely to occur in education as well.  It’s too early to tell whether this is good or bad but pricing is already a key factor to students, faculty and administrators; it’s easy to see how a faculty member would opt for affordability especially when coupled with greater latitude to choose content.  Currently, evidence suggests that 'chunked' prices are consistent with current ‘full book’ content but remains to be seen whether these prices will be pushed downwards in the future.

COPE is a concept many in the media industry (and consultants) have been touting for a long time: Create your Content Once but have the ability to Publish it Everywhere.  This is compatible with the practice of creating new xml based workflows so you can repurpose your content to fit differing circumstances, without having to rework it or reinvent new production processes.  Currently, most of the publishers we work with only have the ability to provide pdf files to us but, as more customers demand disaggregated or ‘chunked’ content, publishers will need to rebuild their workflows.  As a consequence, the market will also demand better meta-data to support the sale and distribution of this content and we are seeing publishers start to address both of these challenges.
(Note – at this point in my presentation, I referenced the size of the education market and the revenue associated with certain segments and titles using charts from PubTrack).

As I suggested above, we see the following as drivers to a more ‘chunked’ publishing environment:

• The need to more affordably manage the cost of education and materials
• The desire to provide more choice to faculty and educators in the selection of course content
• Provision of intuitive and flexible content creation processes
• Delivering sharing and collaboration across ‘networks’
• Migration to electronic delivery of content
• Growth of open-access and ‘free’ content
• Growing expectation for highly customizable solutions for publishers and institutions

Currently, text-based content is the focus of the custom model in education; however, multi-media (digital) content is often requested, used and produced.  At many universities, for example, faculty lectures are recorded and distributed, YouTube is considered an important resource and webchat, web demos and other interactive technologies are used extensively.  Importantly, we will begin to see our publishers provide digital elements like these for use by faculty in increasing numbers, and our platform has been built to accommodate the delivery of content in various formats.  We will soon be expanding our library accordingly.  These content additions will raise the complexity in delivering a solution to faculty that remains easy to use.  Given this increased complexity, our challenge will be search and discovery – delivering the precise content requested – for which we will rely on metadata supplied by publishers.  We hope publishers appreciate these shared challenges.

All-campus (or all-systems) approaches to addressing some of the drivers I note above are becoming more common.  At Indiana University (IU), they have established a campus-content platform through which faculty can choose and assign content while providing a consistent experience for students.  A key aspect of this implementation is that Indiana has entered into direct agreements with several publishers to host their content (with preferential pricing) on this platform.  In theory, the IU students benefit from the university’s negotiating power over the publishers, and many other universities view IU as a leader in this arena because of the way they have approached relations with publishers.

There are numerous other examples offering similar approaches to the management of content on campus including programs at MIT, the California State University (CSU) system, an initiative in Minnesota and several others.  CSU partnered with Cengage earlier this year and is seeking other similar publisher relationships.


In closing my comments at AAUP, I noted some market dynamics that indicate ‘chunking’ is already relevant.  In particular, permissions revenues (which have long been considered ‘found-money’) are growing at a far greater rate than overall revenues for many publishers.  I heard this repeatedly at AAUP indicating that my prediction that ‘permissions’ revenues will become a primary source of publisher revenues is already taking place.   Additionally, the four large education publishers have all beefed up their own custom publishing solutions – which, for the most part, operate as ‘closed-gardens’ – and have seen significant revenue growth because of their investments.  (Much of this may be substitution revenue).  In the future, I expect all publishers to either have their own custom platform and/or to participate in solutions provided by platform providers such as CoreSource, CourseSmart and VitalSource.

We believe the recent Georgia eReserves case gave impetus to digital solutions that can render content easily accessible and reasonably priced and I have seen an uptick in publishers seeking advice on this point.  The Georgia case made clear that publisher content is being used in disaggregated form by many educators across universities but, because there has not been a ‘marketplace’ (similar to iTunes), much of this content has been appropriated without due payment to the publisher.  Improvements to the clearance and permissions process have helped but the effort to “do-the-right-thing” still remains cumbersome.  As a result of this, it seems inevitable that there will be much more competition in providers offering platforms and solutions to publishers that can delivery content that maximizes this opportunity.

In conclusion, I hope we can first agree on a different term than ‘chunking’ since this implies that the material doesn’t have uniformity and/or pedagogical veracity of itself.  Perhaps because we are currently ‘chunking’ content that has been created as a component (not a stand-alone) and a component then ‘chunking’ may be appropriate now but not for the future.  In the future, faculty will want to find and assign (buy) individual items and thus your editorial processes (as a publisher) will need to be re-thought.  Often, it is not possible to anticipate how customers will use our products and in a disaggregated world these uses will explode.  We must provide them some basic building blocks and tools which, on a very basic level include, re-flowable content, descriptive details and information, metadata and keywords.   Some publishers are starting to develop this so don’t be left behind.

Here are the slides from this presentation:

Content Chunking and New Revenue from Michael Cairns

Texas Texts are Tainted

Gail Collins in the NY Review of Books on the influence of Texas and the selection of content in many educational textbooks. It's an old story but entertaining nevertheless.

The changes often seemed to be thrown out haphazardly, and to pass or fail on the basis of frequently opaque conclusions on the part of the swing members. In 2010, the board tossed out books by the late Bill Martin Jr., the author of Baby Bear, Baby Bear, What Do You See?, from a list of authors third-graders might want to study because someone mixed him up with Bill Martin, the author of Ethical Marxism.

The final product the board came up with called for a curriculum that would make sure that students studying economic issues of the late nineteenth century would not forget “the cattle industry boom” and that when they turned to social issues like labor, growth of the cities, and problems of immigrants they also take time to dwell on “the philanthropy of industrialists.” When it came to the Middle Ages, the board appeared to be down on any mention of the Crusades, an enterprise that tends to reflect badly on the Christian side of Christian–Islamic conflict. And when they got to the cold war era, the board wanted to be sure students would be able to “explain how Arab rejection of the State of Israel has led to ongoing conflict.” Later, they were supposed to study “Islamic fundamentalism and the subsequent use of terrorism by some of its adherents.” And that appeared to be pretty much all young people in Texas were going to be required to know about Arab nations and the world’s second-largest religion.

 Another post from a few years back (Post)

Predictions 2012: The Search for Attention

There’s little more to say about eBooks these days: The migration is now embedded into business operations across the industry. Yes, there remain some issues and problems day-to-day but it would seem that the issue of most concern to publishers for the past five years (trade particularly) is now subsumed under business operations as usual.  And that bores me.

Sure, we could argue about the future purpose and value of a publisher but most (if not all) the big trade houses are doing better now than they were three years ago and continue to sign the big authors and sell lots of units.  The amount of attention given to the self-publisher model is disproportionate to its viability as a solution better than that delivered wholesale by a traditional publisher. Yet, to some, the counter argument or disruptive solution is always more interesting and therefore garners more attention.  There will be more big success stories in self-publishing but the larger point isn’t about replacing the old model with the new—it’s more about incorporating the new model into the old.  Where self-publishing was derisively termed ‘vanity publishing’ 10 years ago, it could now be considered a vital component of a better, more efficient publishing industry.

This set of predictions was harder to conceive that those in prior years and I am not sure why that it is.  I’ve been going through this exercise since 2007 (the year I started this blog) and so went back over some of the things I suggested in years past.  For example, in 2007, I said:

• Several major US colleges will teach various social science courses entirely in simulation. The courses will not be taught in traditional lecture form but entirely within the software simulation.

Now, five years later, there have been some experiments in this area but my comment was uttered in a time when everyone was building a home in the simulation game world and, at the time, it seemed inevitable we would all be spending half our lives in SecondLife.  Clearly that never happened, and on the other hand, during 2011, I spent many weeks looking into the medical simulations ‘business’ which is very impressive and continues to push the boundaries of real simulation in education and training.  What’s important here is that simulations solve several business, operational and administrative issues for schools and hospitals which drives the business case for their adoption.  That might not have been the case for SecondLife (at least in a comprehensive sense).

The anticipated benefits of simulated learning will only be realized if they solve a business problem(s).  As I saw during my short research project, in medicine and especially nursing, there are very real addressable problems that simulations solve for educators and administrators.  Some of the simulations centers I visited are almost exact replicas of hospital wards and operating theatres.  It is quite incredible.  The money poured into hardware at these centers is significant (and growing) but the next big change in simulations training will be how traditional medical content is integrated into delivery in the simulations context.  No easy thing, but the merging of the practical and the theoretical is viewed as critical by educators and practitioners.  The medical segment is representative of how education publishing in particular still has significant challenges to address as their industry deals with changes in technology, delivery and performance measurement.

The following year (2008), I incorrectly predicted “McGraw-Hill will reorganize its business much as Thomson [Cengage] has done. MGH education could be sold to private equity.”  The impact of the sale of MGH in 2012 is unlikely to drastically change the publishing landscape in the short term, but there may be larger structural changes across the entire business that will be more interesting.  As we know, Apple is set to make an announcement soon which is rumored to be about educational publishing. If that’s true, it might stimulate some fundamental changes in education similar to the impact iTunes had on the music business.

Sticking with education, in 2009 I suggested that the Obama administration would make wholesale changes in education policy and become more ‘federalist’ in approach.  As some ‘celebrate’ the ten-year anniversary of ‘No Child Left Behind,’ the administration is pushing more (or allowing more) responsibility to the states for education policy while at the same time providing more assistance to ‘failing’ schools so they can improve.  If anything, the Obama administration may be more ‘activist’ with their assistance versus the prior administration and this policy (or set of policies) is likely to aid education publishers in the provision of the next generation of assessment tools, which will be oriented more toward remediation and intervention (and which I touched on in 2010).

Last year, I focused my prognostications on the concepts of curation and community: 

The growth of intimacy assumes that users will seek closer relationships with their core community of friends, workers or communities of interest in order to make decisions about the content they access, the products they use and the entertainment decisions they make. Book publishers, retailers and authors will need to understand how to actively participate in these communities without ‘marketing’ or ‘selling’ to them. Facebook is obviously the largest social community but, within Facebook, there are a myriad of smaller ‘communities’ and, within these communities, the web becomes highly personal. The relationships among the participants becomes ‘intimate’ in the sense that the participants share knowledge, information, even personal details that in a traditional selling or marketing environment would never be breeched by the vendor. The dynamic of selling becomes vastly different in this context and publishers must find a way to understand these new communities, the influencers that dictate behavior and the motivations that contribute to selling products (and services potentially).

I still believe the above to be a trend even though it hasn’t developed as quickly as we might have expected. I fully expect the concept to mature over the coming years.

Which suggests a lead-in to a theme for my 2012 predictions: Where 2011 was about the community providing a filter for its ‘members,’ 2012 will be more about the community helping focus/apportion the attention of its members.  In a screen-based entertainment world, publishers will struggle to assert their right to a user’s time against competition that includes every media option out there from games to TV to social networks.  This is different than the former paradigm because all media usage is rapidly migrating to tablet and applications-based consumption.  And this includes television.

With both major book retailers actively engaged in the tablet wars, it seems inevitable that tablets will be the predominant delivery mechanism for publishers’ content, including trade and education content.  So, if our content is delivered on these devices, how do we establish and hold the user’s attention in an environment where the user can skip from media to media with almost no friction whatsoever.

The answer to this question is partially reflected in last year’s post regarding community and curation.  The most significant challenge publishers will face is getting their content shared and linked to and powerful social network marketing programs will be at the center of this effort.  This doesn’t only apply to trade content--‘communities’ organized around ‘influencers’ such as academics/professors, institutions, specific courses, etc. will also drive the sharing and linking of educational publisher content.  For example, an individual interested in business entrepreneurship might ‘friend’ the Harvard class ‘Entrepreneurship 101’ and use the reading list to guide his or her personal reading.

Another key aspect of the quest for attention revolves around the metadata and the supplemental content publishers produce for all their content.  Most of this remains either dis- or un-organized.  A lack of depth and accuracy of meta-data is still a deficiency shared by most publishers, even as the need for more meta-data expands.  On the whole, publishers are probably getting further behind.  The thing that will help publishers win a larger share of attention will be multiple ‘entry points’ that enable the user to interact with their content and allow influencers to share and link to it.  Not only do meta-data files need to be robust and detailed, but users need to be able to easily find references, indexes, TOCs, links, etc. and reviews as well as alternate views of the content (audio, video, even perspectives).  Not only do these various elements provide ‘hooks’ which users can grab in multiple ways, they will also serve to build loyalty and authority for the content itself.  And this could ‘index’ the content so that it scores high-ranking positions when consumers seek the content you are selling.  Thus, the entire process feeds on itself.

Searching for Attention will represent a significant challenge for all content owners but particularly publishers, as content amalgamates via the tablet platform.  Not for nothing, I think I’d rather go on that journey with B&N and Amazon versus Apple or Google because at least they are booksellers.  Whether that’s enough remains to be seen.

Here are some additional trends to watch for over the next year or two:

• The MGH deal aside, there’s a good chance we will see additional movement in the ownership of segments of the education business.  Cengage will have little difficulty with their refinancing (doesn’t mean there won’t be any pain) but educational units on the periphery (medical, legal, etc.) may witness more consolidation in the coming year.
  
  
• With the ‘settling’ of eBook content and processes within many publishing houses, we’ll begin to see more experimentation from publishers especially with expanded definitions of traditional book content.  We’ll see eBook content – the ‘book’ part as a component of something that looks more like an issue of an online magazine.  Obviously, an ‘issue’ where the ‘book’ part is the focus but ancillary material (in the magazine sense the supporting articles) lend deeper meaning, context and even leads to obvious tie-ins and sequels.  Essentially, I think we will begin to see the beginnings of the renaissance of the ‘book’ that everyone has been moaning about.
  
  
• In an area that I am focused on, we will begin to see a rapid movement towards atomizing educational content.  Apple may well announce an educational publishing version of iTunes where content is such as chapters, cases and articles are sold in parts as songs are sold versus albums.  Watch for a painful realization about pricing.  The al a carte approach for content purchasing is something educators and institutions are looking for and initiatives similar to the iTunes model are being welcome because they empower people to make better choices.
  
  
• In sport, it will be a tight run thing at the top of the premiership this year but I still believe Manchester United will beat out Manchester City for the title.  England will come second in the medals table at the London Olympics.

Prior Predictions: 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007

MediaWeek (Vol 4, No 34): Content Management Systems, Student Knowledge, Textbook Rentals, Archives + More

Thinking of a content management system (or why yours doesn't work) then read this (AdAge):

BusinessWeek, however, is just one egregious example of an ugly truth: There’s no such thing as a CMS success story. At least, successes are elusive, which is a problem for anyone in media, as content management systems—the software used by writers, editors, and producers to create digital content for websites—have become as essential as oxygen.
“There’s nobody that can walk in the door for any price tag and say, ‘We have the solution,’” laments Time Inc. CIO Mitch Klaif. “If someone had a silver bullet, I don’t know if I’d have them shoot it at the sites or at me.”
Until recently, those dependent on websites—everyone from The Huffington Post to a Fortune 1,000 brand—had seen little change in the systems needed to build them, says Brian Alvey, CEO of CMS platform Crowd Fusion. “The only innovation in [the last] 15 years was blogging and blog platforms,” he adds.
Unfortunately for these companies, the onrush of social networking—part of a larger shift in which sites are moving from static Web pages to pages assembled on the fly in real time—has overwhelmed the abilities of CMS software. In Alvey’s view, most of those systems could barely handle the existing content mix they were producing, including blog posts, stories from print editions, photos, videos, and online polls. “The tools suck,” he says.

From Inside Higher Ed, "What Students Don't Know" (IHE):

The most alarming finding in the ERIAL studies was perhaps the most predictable: when it comes to finding and evaluating sources in the Internet age, students are downright lousy.
Only seven out of 30 students whom anthropologists observed at Illinois Wesleyan “conducted what a librarian might consider a reasonably well-executed search,” wrote Duke and Andrew Asher, an anthropology professor at Bucknell University, whom the Illinois consortium called in to lead the project.
Throughout the interviews, students mentioned Google 115 times -- more than twice as many times as any other database. The prevalence of Google in student research is well-documented, but the Illinois researchers found something they did not expect: students were not very good at using Google. They were basically clueless about the logic underlying how the search engine organizes and displays its results. Consequently, the students did not know how to build a search that would return good sources. (For instance, limiting a search to news articles, or querying specific databases such as Google Book Search or Google Scholar.)

The Heller Report takes a look at the business of Textbook rentals (Heller):

In the past two years, the post-secondary textbook rental market has exploded. Driven by the outcry over book prices, federal legislation, readily available pricing information on the Internet, and sophisticated web-based rental management platforms, old and new competitors are disrupting the $10 billion college textbook business. Book rental isn’t really a new phenomenon—a few college stores have been renting books since the Civil War. The National Association of College Stores (NACS) proclaimed fall 2010 as the “Year of the Rental.” Players include long-timers like Follett and Budgetext, institutional stores and fast-growing start-ups. BookRenter, started in 2008, netted $40 million from investors in a funding round this past February. Chegg, started in 2007, has raised $200+ million in venture capital and attracted senior management from Yahoo and Netflix. The same drivers are growing trade in used books, eBooks, and online instructional content. Rental is also driving new business models for sourcing and distributing educational materials that may carry the industry forward into digital. Having book inventory isn’t necessarily required—at least one high-flying firm, BookRenter, exists mainly as an online marketplace. Read on to see how this change in distribution is impacting the higher education market.

The economist suggests that the papers of literary folk don't necessarily need to be housed where they lived (Economist):

That should mean more writers can earn a pension by offloading their archives without seeking a foreign buyer. But does retaining writers’ collections really offer a broader cultural benefit? British libraries scrimp, save and appeal to lottery and charitable funds to buy collections, but cataloguing, the next stage, is also pricey, so some archives are inaccessible for years. The most important results of plundering authors’ stores are biographies, collated letters and literary criticism, which can be read anywhere. And even book-lovers may find musty papers harder to appreciate than, say, art by Titian (Italian) or van Dyck (Flemish), whose works have also been “saved” under this scheme.In any case, literary protectionism may have passed its peak. Authors increasingly use computers, rather than pens or typewriters: it is hard to say if a hard drive will conjure the same aura of fascination as a personal letter, says the British Library’s Rachel Foss. Electronic records should also be instantly replicable—all of which may rob literary archives of the magic and exclusivity that currently gives them their financial value.

Also from the Economist a look at vinyl record sales (Economist):

What is going on? Oliver Goss of Record Pressing, a San Francisco vinyl factory, says it is a mixture of convenience and beauty. Many vinyl records come with codes for downloading the album from the internet, making them more convenient than CDs. And fans like having something large and heavy to hold in their hands. Some think that half the records sold are not actually played.
Vinyl has a distinction factor, too. “It is just cooler than a download,” explains Steve Redmond, a spokesman for Britain’s annual Record Store Day. People used to buy bootleg CDs and Japanese imports containing music that none of their friends could get hold of. Now that almost every track is available free on music-streaming services like Spotify or on a pirate website, music fans need something else to boast about. That limited-edition 12-inch in translucent blue vinyl will do nicely.

Is the US Statistical Abstract now doomed (WaPo):

I am a devoted fan of the Stat Abstract. In four decades of reporting, I have grabbed it thousands of times to find a fact, tutor myself or answer a pressing question. Its figures are usually the start of a story, not the end. They suggest paths of inquiry, including the meaning and reliability of the statistics themselves (otherwise, they can mislead or tell false tales). The Stat Abstract has been a stalwart journalistic ally. With some interruptions, the government has published it since 1878.

No more. The Stat Abstract is headed for the chopping block. The 2012 edition, scheduled for publication later this year, will be the last, unless someone saves it.

From the twitter:

Vocational Schools Face Deep Cuts in Federal Funding: NYT

College One-Stop Shop: Chegg Buys Web Tutoring Service - Digits - WSJ

Librarian of Congress James Hadley Billington on leading the nation’s library - The Washington Post

McGraw-Hill retains investment bank to explore spinoff of its education division (NYT)

Beyond the Book: Curation Nation - Interview with Steven Rosenbaum

The tsunami of content we all face on a daily basis is an unmediated mess, so what do we do to mitigate that? Chris Kenneally interviews Steven Rosenbaum the author of Curation Nation go get to the bottom of it. Some excerpts below and here's the link to the Podcast:

People don’t want more information. They want less information properly organized so that you can help find what you’re looking for.
...
So it’s really as simple as this. The guy who I think in many ways figured this out earliest was Jeff Bezos at Amazon. If you look at Mechanical Turk and its history, what Bezos understood was there are certain things computers can’t do. And the history of Mechanical Turk is about one out of every couple hundred thumbnails on a book jacket or a CD were wrong. The CD would be the Rolling Stones and the thumbnail would be Cat Stevens and there wasn’t any way if the metadata was wrong in that thumbnail that a computer could look at the picture and look at the name and go, wait. Mismatch. Humans do that instantly and so the original launch of Mechanical Turk was to say, I’m going to pay people a very small amount of money to read the title of a book or a piece of music and look at the image and go, oh, good. That’s the proper image.

And so that ability to look at content selectively and creatively and say, you know, I’m going to build a site about Corvettes, but I don’t care about repairing Corvettes or restoring Corvettes. I just want great, cool pictures of Southern California, bright sunshine, beaches. Well, that’s very different than the New Jersey Corvette community. And so all of a sudden – Google would have you believe that if they just had more data, they could chop things up into the right boxes. But really what it comes down to is the job of a magazine editor or a book editor or a newspaper editor or a programmer at a television network is part science and part art, and the art part is the part that computers don’t do very well.
...

But I would argue, with all due respect to Mr. Keen, that he wants to be the one to define who a professional is. And in a world in which the tools are ubiquitous and we all have cell phones and we don’t need a printing press for a newspaper or a transmitter, we’re all going to make content and so what we’re beginning to see is a Web in which everybody is a publisher and increasingly what I want to do is narrow the number of places that I go to listen to the world. I want to kind of dial down this fire hose of information and say, you know, as opposed to listening to the AP feed unvarnished, what I really want to do is listen to my NPR station in New York and CNN and one other professional news organization and maybe Twitter for a different kind of filter. But I don’t necessarily want to be in a position where I’m drinking from the fire hose of data.

Here is the Podcast.

And you can buy it on Amazon.com.

Here is my series on content curation.

United Artists Redux

Repost From July 20, 2010. 

Given the excitement over Amanda Hocking and Barry Eisler. Amidst radical change forced on them by major advances in technology (largely out of their control), a small group of leading media producers have joined together to establish their own (insert word): broadcaster, publisher, studio, agency. Unlikely? Not now, because the functions that support these traditional media companies are increasingly becoming commoditised, enabling the creative producers (writers, authors, producers, etc.) to potentially collect more of the revenues generated from their creative output. While individual authors have gained some attention by 'going direct,' either by working through Amazon (J.A. Konrath) or direct to consumers via the iPad (Ryu Mirakami), it may be that traditional publishers have more to fear from groups of authors, editors and agents conspiring to establish their own media companies. 

These new companies would leverage the available low-cost 'back office' functions and the readily available supply-chain provision to dis-intermediate the traditional publishing monolith. In 1919, United Artists was formed by D. W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks. These four performers established United Artists to gain greater control over their own work and to produce other work they thought valuable. The four partners eventually hired an executive to run the operation who, in addition to signing new actors and producers to United Artists, also established a movie theater chain. 

United Artists was ultimately unsuccessful as the changes in the industry largely exceeded the ability of the partners to adapt. Yet this model resonates in an age where 'infrastructure' is becoming less important than author, character and content branding. 

If a similar group of content creators were to establish a new "United Artists" organization they wouldn't find it difficult to hire executives to act on their behalf to establish a new publishing organization. This new organization would be unencumbered by either the traditional publishing model or (more importantly) the cost structure of the business. These United Artists would sit atop an organization that would be largely supported by external third-party agreements with accounting firms, editorial and production services, distribution and fulfillment, etc. Important value-added services such as marketing, promotion, content rights and licensing - those functions that, by definition, worked closest to the content creators and added real value to the consumer experience would be full-time hires of United Artists. 

In discussing authors 'going direct,' there are frequent suggestions that this could become an avalanche with traditional publishers seeing their best and most profitable content producers leave the fold. This belies the difficulty of an author having to do all the nasty stuff the publisher does for them if they go it alone. However, what if the author became a partner in his or her own publishing company? Then, perhaps, the model changes and the options begin to look more appealing for the content producer and potentially problematic for the traditional publisher. 

Could recently reported news by Variety that Steve Ross had joined joined Abrams Artist Agency to provide "consulting services to a select list of clients" be an indication that PND isn't the first to revive the United Artists idea? 

See my post from last week about scale and infrastructure: The Baked Beans are Off.

Paul McCartney in the Cloud.

Paul McCartney once wrote about having his head in the clouds but reality is stranger than fiction and his management company just announced a deal with Hewlett Packard that calls for HP to build a private cloud that will digitize and deliver his expansive library of content and memorabilia.

From the press release:

McCartney has one of the most comprehensive libraries of any artist, much of which has never been viewed before. His library includes images, artwork, paintings, film and videos, as well as masters of some of the most popular songs ever written. Additionally, during his successful career, he has accumulated iconic imagery, including the cover artwork for the multimillion selling No. 1 album, "Band on the Run."

Under the agreement, HP will work closely with MPL to digitize the material and design and build a state-of-the-art content management system. McCartney's library will then be delivered through a private cloud environment. Portions of the library will be made available to fans so they can have a personal and unparalleled glimpse into McCartney's work.

"I've always been interested in creative ideas and new ways of reaching people, so this is a really exciting initiative for me," said McCartney. "I hope it will allow people who might be interested to access parts of our archives they might otherwise not be able to. I'm looking forward to working with HP on this project."

The agreement marks the first time that HP has collaborated with an artist in this way. In addition to changing how fans and artists will interact, the digitization of McCartney's library will help preserve the history of one of the world's most loved artists for future generations.

"Paul McCartney has always been a trendsetter in the music industry and HP has been at the forefront of technology innovation," said Tom Hogan, executive vice president, Sales, Marketing and Strategy, Enterprise Business, HP. "We are proud that he turned to HP as a trusted partner to help him preserve his legacy and set a new vision for the industry."

Could this be a trend?