Game Changer: ePublishing Software in the Hands of the Consumer, not the Publisher

Posted on May 8, 2013 by marina

A recent partnership between ePublishing software company Impelsys and DataLore, Inc.  turns digital publishing on its head. (…What else is new?) The two companies have partnered in order to offer customized, branded ebookstores to schools and universities across the Caribbean.

But instead of customizing its software solutions to publishers – Impelsys’ epublishing platform iPublishCentral offers warehousing, distribution, and marketing of e-content – the Caribbean project constitutes a shifts in focus – and power – from the publisher to the consumer. The design of the ebookstore, along with the business and accessibility models (Download-only? Cloud-based? ePub, Kindle, Mobi?) – not to mention the actual e-content that populates the digital shelves (Books? Articles? Chapters?  Teacher’s original content? “A-student” papers from ten years ago?) – are determined by the bookstore, not the publishers.

Here’s an example: if a university bookstore wanted to access two e-textbooks, one each from educational publishers Macmillan and McGraw Hill, previously the bookstore would purchase access to each book (or more likely, an entire collection of books) separately from each publisher. Perhaps the bookstore would purchase a subscription based on an IP range, so the ebooks were accessible in the bookstore’s computer lab, or in the university library. Or maybe the bookstore would purchase access to the books by a username and password combination, which they would then share with students and professors. In any case, the type of digital access a university bookstore could purchase ultimately depended on the business model offered by the publisher: the unique needs of that university bookstore and its constituency didn’t factor into the equation.

With this new project, both accessibility and the e-content selection itself are entirely determined by the bookstore and the particular needs of its customers. “Schools are looking to build e-content libraries that are both intrinsic to their curriculum, as well as offer a broad choice to students,” said Beverly Smith-Hinkson, CEO of DataLore Inc. “We quickly identified that streaming eBooks via a cloud-based eBook platform was the way forward.” It will be interesting to see how this affects the university and educational e-content market worldwide: what happens when the bookstore controls the business model instead of the publisher? And who’s next – the individual readers themselves?

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Why Does PI Matter?

Posted on April 30, 2013 by Laura Fillmore

In light of all the flurry of activity these days around the (re)selling of intangible digits, we might be wise to re-think the focus of our predominant, copy-based business model. In an economy of scarcity with tangible artifacts like hardcovers, if I give you my book, my hands become empty. Alternatively, in an economy of abundance, if I share my e-book with you, we all become richer in a way: not only do we both have the same e-book to discuss, but we may add more value to the book itself by virtue of sharing, discussing, and referring to it. It’s limiting to assume that the only value comes in the form of a user paying for a discrete thing, be it “e” or “p.”

Let’s take things one step further. Once a Pedagogical Interface (PI) surrounds a library of content, new business models may emerge based on monetization of measurable, incremental change on both sides of the reading equation – change in the users, as they demonstrably learn from the body of content (by accessing it through the PI, answering questions, taking tests, etc.), and change in the content itself as its evolving metadata chronicles the users’ thought paths, connections, and comments. Harnessing this new-age difference engine – a term coined by Charles Babbage, Victorian computer pioneer to describe a mechanical calculating engine – becomes the work of PI.

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Is that a Memex in your Pocket?

Posted on April 29, 2013 by marina

These days, with the ubiquity of mobile devices, it seems like we are living inside a kind of Memex. First envisioned by technology pioneer Vannevar Bush after World War II, a Memex is “a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility.” A digital contentsphere containing all and contributed to by all! Two big aspects of this new and burgeoning library beg for a solution — curation, past and  future. As far as the past goes, what is our plan for curation of the Memex’s contents (What portion of the globe’s recorded content gets put online? Why? Who can access it, and under what terms?)? Going forward, as traditional publishers compete with self publishers for mindshare, how do we avoid building a tower of self-published babble comprised of tweets, drafts, and posts, instead of books whose content was selected, refined, designed, and published by professionals? And not to sound too high and mighty about it, but what happens to Truth in the Age of Memex?

Consider the online Memex as a kind of truth machine in action this past week, during the Boston Marathon bombings. The bad guys, the good guys, the crowd, all used the Memex, both deliberately and inadvertently,  to publish the too-real drama, rife with evolving and self-correcting truths. Ultimately (we think) the perpetrators were discovered and hunted down thanks in no small part to Memex, and the pundits now start telling us what really happened.  Looks like John Milton had it right in his 1644 speech to the British Parliament, Areopagitica: A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing:

See the ingenuity of truth, who when she gets a free and willing hand, opens herself faster, than the pace of method and discourse can overtake her.

Our traditional publishing industry, if  it is to become master of the Memex, needs to shape the future of recorded civilization beyond simply surrendering yesterday’s static texts for scanning and selling. We are challenged to imagine and then codify the pace and method of discourse, and demonstrate its value through curation, past and future.

http://www.livinginternet.com/i/ii_bush.htm
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/
http://www.bartleby.com/3/3/2.html

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Corporate Content Grab: The Elsevier Edition

Posted on April 15, 2013 by marina

Just weeks after Amazon’s highly controversial acquisition of GoodReads, major scientific publisher Elsevier has pulled a similar content grab by purchasing Mendeley, a cloud-based social media platform featuring open source content provided by academics.

A detailed summary of the argument against Elsevier’s recent acquisition can be found at The Cost of Knowledge, but essentially, academics object to the purchase and monetization of what was once open source academic content. Elsevier stands to make significant profits from the information housed at Mendeley — and with no obligation to compensate the authors of that content. Further, Elsevier now has direct access to Mendeley users’ online reading habits and workflows — valuable information that can only further boost Elsevier’s bottom line, all without the users’ consent.

Both Amazon’s and Elsevier’s recent acquisitions demonstrate that as online communities grow and data accumulates, the monetary value of that community rises, which in turn exposes it to the claws of corporate greed. As users, we innocently participate in online communities that interest us, not realizing that our contributions — whether they be the generation of original content, or usage statistics of existing content — are for sale. This may be the beginning of the end of the open source movement: internet users are no longer individuals collaborating and exchanging information for the common good; they are rapidly and inadvertently becoming cogs in the corporate machine.

 

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