Welcome to the Metadata Millennium: A Complete Overview of What Metadata Can Do for Publishers
Getting Granular: Using Metadata To Reinvent Content
I mentioned that publishers still tend to think of their books as products, but increasingly they're coming to think of them as resources. Some publishers are getting added value out of their content by "slicing and dicing," taking portions from various books and creating a new product. (An example: taking all the recipes for potatoes out of a list of already-published cookbooks and creating a potato cookbook.) Textbook publishers have been doing this for a long time, creating "coursepacks." Another technique is subsetting: getting mileage out of a big book by publishing parts of it as smaller books. Some books are beginning to be sold by the chapter, or chapters issued as short ebooks. Reference, technical, and STM publishers get value by aggregating, creating an online subject-specific portal, and selling access by subscription, or even by selling the content "by the chunk."
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