John Shaw

Look at the publishing news these days and you'll read as much about devices as you do about books. There are new families of Kindles, Kobos and Nooks on the block; Google's Nexus 7 is outselling the Kindle Fire; Microsoft is betting big on its Surface tablet; oh, and maybe you've heard about an iPad mini coming 'round the bend? And let's not even get into the wild world of smartphones. Point is, while the printed book was once a platform unto itself, now the ways people read "books," and the devices they read on, are expanding.

It used to be you really only had one distribution platform: The print version. In fact, back then it would have been redundant to call it "the print version." There was only one version. Now that we're living in the much ballyhooed four-screen world—TV, computer, smart phone, tablet/ereader—it's really no longer efficient or feasible to create for print and then backtrack to get your products into digital streams.

Join Book Business magazine and an all-star lineup of publishing experts THIS THURSDAY for a FREE webinar called Build Your Bottom Line with Strategic Content Management.

Learn from Bill Kasdorf, Vice President/Principal Consultant, Apex Content Solutions; John Shaw, Executive Director, Publishing Technologies, SAGE Publications; Anthony Allen, Digital Architect, ASTD, about strategies for boosting efficiency, expanding product offerings, speeding time to market and, yes, bolstering your digital revenue—while lessening your dependence on shrinking print revenue streams— by employing a CMS that gives you more control over your most vital asset: you content.

On Thursday, July 12, 2 p.m. ET, join Bill Kasdorf, Vice President/Principal Consultant, Apex Content Solutions; John Shaw, Executive Director, Publishing Technologies, SAGE Publications; Anthony Allen, Digital Architect, ASTD; and Brian Howard, Editor-in-Chief, Book Business for a free, one-hour webinar on building your bottom line with strategic content management, and how this technology can help transition your revenue from print to digital.

While only the most severe of futurists predict print's total demise, most publishers have accepted that digital products need to be a slice of their revenue mix, and a growing slice at that.

Yet it's one thing to recognize that change must happen; it's quite another to enact that change, especially when you can't exactly hit pause on your business while you reconfigure your workflow, to say nothing of tackling that massive backlist.

That's why many publishers are turning to the wide world of service providers who make it their business to help publishers solve digital content and digital transition issues.