NEW - Digital Directions: Your Digital DNA

• Chunking of content, an editorial process that breaks up the content into parts, that can be licensed, distributed, combined and used in new ways.

• Creating descriptive metadata. While this sounds technical, it really is not—no more so than compiling catalog information, albeit in a more structured fashion. Metadata allows the content to be distributed, discovered and used by specific communities and marketing channel partners.

• Creation and management of device-specific book-design style sheets that allow the product experience to be consistent across a variety of delivery platforms.

• Rights clearance to enable the delivery of content in a variety of formats, devices and combinations.

Editorial. Marketing. Design. Rights clearance. These are core activities, electronic or otherwise, that should remain within the publishing organization. Publishing organizations that do not directly manage how their content is chunked, tagged and designed will relinquish control of the quality of their digital offerings and the ways in which they can be marketed. They also will relinquish this control—and therefore control of the marketplace—to other parties that understand the strategic value of these functions.

Publishing organizations need to take overall responsibility for digital asset management. Their future may depend upon it.

How then to avail ourselves of the advantages of digital asset service providers and not commoditize ourselves out of existence? It can be done and, I think, must be done in order for us to realize our digital opportunities economically.

Not every task needs to be performed in-house, but some of them do. More importantly, publishers need to take overall responsibility and have an understanding of how to effectively work with digital assets.

Like many, I don’t believe the physical book is going away anytime soon. It is a great content delivery vehicle. However, we must treat digital files with the same reverence as cloth-bound volumes. Digital assets are the DNA of our content—DNA that can be expressed in a variety of ways: physical book, e-book, within online services, delivered via RSS feeds, and so on. Asset management is all about the stewardship of the digital DNA. And it is a core function of the publishing organization.