Content and Digital Asset Management

Over the last two week, Book Business ran the proverbial gauntlet of publishing industry trade shows, starting withe the Book Industry Study Group's Making Information Pay For Higher Ed on Thu., Feb. 7, at the Yale Club, then hitting the Book^2 Camp "unconference" on Sun., Feb. 10, at Workman Publishing, and, on Wed., Feb. 13, catching a day of O'Reilly's Tools of Change at the Marriott Marquis.

We’ll be running through them one by one this week. First up: BISG: Making Information Pay for Higher Ed Publishing

The Book Industry Study Group’s annual Making Information Pay for Higher Ed Publishing was a morning jam-packed with great information and expansive ideas on the state of higher ed publishing and what it might look like in the near to distant future.

The four terms of the day:
Shadow Library
Roll Your Own
MOOC
Autodidact

RSuite CMS a content management system for publishers, recently joined the Association of Educational Publishers (AEP) as an affiliate member. The AEP serves the diverse needs of the entire educational resource community, including publishers, content developers, IT professionals, service providers, researchers, instructors, and communication experts from around the world.

If we start to think of “books as data,” then the traditional publisher’s role starts to sound a lot like the role of providing an API: A publisher’s job is to manage how and when and under what circumstances people (readers) or other services (book stores, libraries, other?) access books (data).

We know what this job looks like in the old world of bound paper and bricks and mortar stores, and we’re pretty sure we understand it in a world of EPUB and Kindle.

But as we move into a primarily digital world…

The Publishing Business Conference & Expo, the nation's largest conference and expo for book, magazine and journal publishers, will take place September 23-25, 2013, at the New York Marriott Marquis Times Square. The Publishing Business Conference & Expo is produced each year by the Publishing Business Group and Book Business and Publishing Executive magazines.

This article will appear in the January issue of Book Business.

Mark Z. Danielewski, the author of mind-bending, paradigm-busting works House of Leaves and Only Revolutions, has made a career of turning the novel on its head. So it should come as no surprise that he’s attempting the same with ebooks.

The digital version of the Los Angeles-based author’s The Fifty Year Sword (Pantheon)—which in print features elaborate stitched illustrations—came out late last year and is neither a print replica nor a reflowable document. Rather, the fixed-layout epub takes the fastidiously constructed ghost story for grownups to another level, incorporating an original score and a collection of text effects that are triggered as the reader turns pages .

Michael Pietsch is Executive Vice President and Publisher of Little, Brown and Company. On April 1 he will step into the role of CEO of the Hachette Book Group. Here Pietsch shares some thoughts about his career with Book Business.

In 1987, the Federal Bureau of Investigation approached Columbia University librarian Paula Kaufman with a request: keep an eye out for commies.

She refused to cooperate with the bureau's "library awareness" program and her defiance helped spark a nationwide backlash against government snooping into Americans' reading habits. Even knowing the government might be watching, people realized, could change what you choose to read—and in turn alter what you think

Rick Marazzani believes readers should be able to share and discover e-books through their friends' personal libraries just like they do with print books. That's why he built Ownshelf.

Ownshelf, a free web service that launched in beta Friday, provides readers with a cloud storage platform to share e-books with friends and family. Think of it as a simpler Dropbox intended specifically for e-books, but with a social element built in to foster discovery.

Audubon, Pa.—November 29, 2012—RSuite CMS, a content management system for publishers, today announced the latest version of its software, RSuite 4. Combining a superior user experience with proven and secure content management provides publishers with the ability to use the best of today’s technologies to create, store, manage, transform, and deliver any content to any format.

RSuite CMS, powered by MarkLogic®, has been the software of choice for many of the world’s leading publishers. RSuite 4 offers a redesigned, more intuitive user experience to enable users to efficiently find and interact with their content with minimal effort. Improved usability is based on Nielsen’s Ten Usability Heuristics and manifested in action-oriented contextual menus, search-based content navigation, accordion-style search results, and a user interface (UI) with intentional color design. The new UI provides even greater productivity while dramatically reducing the learning curve.

Despite the fact that, as Cory Doctorow so aptly put it, no one has ever purchased anything because it came with DRM, an ever-slimming number of content providers insist on punishing paying customers with idiotic "anti-piracy" schemes. Combine this "malware" with digital distribution that sticks the end user with an unfavorable license rather than, say, an actual book, and you've got another ready-made disaster. The Consumerist has the details on yet another paying customer dealing with DRM stupidity. It starts off with this physical analogy.