Abstracts – April 23, 2012

The International Experience I | English

Context first revisited
Brian O'Leary, Magellan Media, USA

The way we think about publishing is unduly governed by the nature of the container – the physical book.  Although demand for digital content has grown substantially, publishers continue to treat digital formats as a derived or secondary use.  As a result, context is truncated or excluded, reducing the degree to which content can be discovered and consumed.  At the same time, content abundance places pressure on publishers to find new and more effective ways to market content products.  To address these several challenges, publishers need to revise their content workflows to ensure that they can develop and maintain context throughout the publishing process.


Disruptive Change
Michael Healy, Copyright Clearance Center, USA

coming soon ...


Online Trends – Authors, Metadata, Rights and Social Media
Peter Clifton, FiledBy, USA

New publishing models and discovery tools are impacting how authors can publish, promote and sell their work.  More distribution options, social media tools and support services exist and new ones are emerging all the time. These dynamics can greatly impact publishers, agents and authors as they re-tool to remain in step with changing times. This presentation highlights some trends that have surfaced over the past several years and explains metadata taxonomies that can improve discoverability.

Approaches and Perspectives | Lectures | German

Rowohlt Digitalbuch Plus – experiences with a new book format and perspectives for the future
Dr. Uwe Naumann, Rowohlt, D

A successful enriched e-book requires the interaction of technical possibilities with the presentation of the content. Only when the chain of publishing requirements, author's wishes, marketing strategy, production, content concepts, rights clearance, programming implementation, distribution channels, and the hopes and expectations of readers is closed, can success occur. Uwe Naumann reports on the experiences of the Rowohlt publishing house with its Digitalbuch Plus program and develops perspectives for future projects.

Approaches and Perspectives | Lectures | English

Social Media Impact
Prof. Tim Bruysten, richtwert, D

What is behind terms like "co-creation", "crowdsourcing" or "liquid democracy" for publishers and agencies? How can these companies develop strategically sensible business models on the basis of a market that is divided into an endless number of highly-dynamic networks? The presentation illuminates the actual situation and elaborates on concepts related to the change from "consumer goods" to "social products". The presentation "From identity management to social product" also shows that the development of product or communications campaigns is not sufficient and which challenges are imminent for those in the industry.


Change Management: How to reliably create innovative products
Ehrhardt F. Heinold, Heinold, Spiller & Partner, D

The creation and marketing of innovative products has become a survival factor for publishers. But many publishers are not positioned for this kind of innovation management: a market and customer-oriented approach, the development of new business models, reacting quickly to new technologies and new competitors, working in non-hierarchical project teams – all this requires an extensive process of change. In this workshop, the goals and methods of such a process will be discussed with reference to case studies.


Integrating “deGruyter Online” with the Publishing Back Office Software
Gregor Wolf, Klopotek, D / Christian Kohl, de Gruyter, D

Metadata has become more crucial than ever in the digital age. Only metadata makes your digital products stand out in the noise of thousands of digital portals, eBook-platforms, digital resellers and aggregators. We believe that metadata management in the back office and high quality metadata integration between systems is one of the most important tools to market and license products and generate sales in an increasingly complex electronic marketplace.
In this situation, we can identify the two key success factors as follows:
1. Data Quality. No publisher can afford any longer metadata that is spread over systems, that different departments edit the same data in different systems, and that the responsibility for quality and related workflows is unclear or ambiguous.
2. Electronic, automated Data Integration. With your content being more and more distributed on the Web, the electronic transfer of metadata becomes essential. Digital distributors simply rely on your electronically transferred metadata. Delays, incomplete or incorrect data, manual intervention, legacy exchange formats, and proprietary exchange protocols will become a growing issue, cost money and increase your time-to-market.
How to electronically link between a Publishing back office system and a Web front end system becomes particularly important if a Publisher’s entire product portfolio goes to the web. This case study shows how a diverse range of product types and business models are a) represented as catalogue items on the web, b) mapped between back office and web c) tied to the respective content, and d) made available through a single webshop, real-time integrated with the back office systems.
In the presentation, we will explain how the product setup for more than 20 new and innovative electronic, print, and bundled product types in the back office is modeled, how the new web portal links to the central back office product database, and how the web portal then visualizes the extensive product metadata.

Approaches and Perspectives | Workshops | German

Fiction and Semantics – approaches and options for research with end consumers
Sven-Volker Busch, picturesafe, D

Publishers have - particularly in the area of fiction - large amounts of material that is still barely tapped or is not prepared to be distributed in a granular form. Above all, this material is not prepared so that the target group (end consumer = reader ) can research it intuitively.
The workshop presents the spectrum of use for the available semantic tools and opens up the results of case studies in dedicated operating environments to discussion. With the data acquired, scenarios such as the use of a virtual salesperson for online shops become conceivable. The automatic construction of "tag clouds" (free keywords and relevant phrases), the automatic digitization and indexing of manuscripts for sale on e-publishing platforms (automatic summaries, classification) and an idea for a tool to simplify the preparation of marketing texts are among the tools presented in the workshop.

XML first teaches us to understand content better
Ulrike Borinski, Institut für Verbundstudien NRW, D

The self-study components of the combined study / vocational training program offered by the universities of applied sciences in North Rhine-Westphalia are supported with self-study materials, so-called study units. Approximately 3,000 study units are regularly revised and produced. The requirements of the process and the medium are expanding on the teaching side, so that it seems appropriate to base the production of the study units on XML.
What happens to a study unit when one structures it semantically with the XML tools and so begins to understand it as XML content?
A report on discoveries, transformations, and surprises.


Rowohlt Digitalbuch Plus – experiences with a new book format and perspectives for the future
Dr. Uwe Naumann, Rowohlt, D / Dr. Robert Galitz, Dölling & Galitz, D

A successful enriched e-book requires the interaction of technical possibilities with the presentation of the content. Only when the chain of publishing requirements, author's wishes, marketing strategy, production, content concepts, rights clearance, programming implementation, distribution channels, and the hopes and expectations of readers is closed, can success occur. Uwe Naumann reports on the experiences of the Rowohlt publishing house with its Digitalbuch Plus program and develops perspectives for future projects. (detailed discussion)

Approaches and Perspectives | Workshops | English

A Content Strategy for Publishing (Why you need one and how to get there)
Ingrid Goldstein, Oxford University Press, UK / Anna von Veh, Say Books, NZL

The publishing industry has already changed dramatically, but this is only the start of an accelerated, possibly exponential, rate of change. A continuously increasing range of new demands and business opportunities that are unknown today will arise in the short-, mid-, and long-term future. This goes together with a demand for increasingly individualized and customizable ‘mashed-up’ content.
This poses challenges to the traditional ‘single product’ means of creating books, whether these books are print or digital. Traditional hand-crafted processes are no longer sustainable; automated processes have become an essential requirement for publishers. Merely incorporating XML into our workflows, however, won’t solve the problem. Everything publishers do from hereon will depend on the effectiveness of their content strategy. We need to rethink the way we create, manage, publish, and deliver content, and for what purpose. Content needs to be understood as a resource in its own right, freed from output-based workflows, and user experience (UX) and context need to be at the heart of what we do.
In the past, the output format for books was print only, regardless of the genre or type. Print allows for one specific UX: reading on paper, while turning pages. Now we have digital output, which offers many more possibilities. Different types of content can now be connected with a wide variety of UX, for example: narrative fiction can be read in chapters while ‘turning’ digital pages of eBook readers; travel guides connect their route description to GPS devices, and dictionaries are incorporated in electronic reading devices, providing word definitions within texts at whatever cursor position they are needed.
Arguably, to enable our content to be useful to readers and profitable for ourselves, we need to create modular or component structured content that can be repurposed for all and every format and device. Device-independent, but context dependent, content conception, content creation and content delivery processes must be adopted. 
In this workshop we will elaborate on why a content strategy for publishing is crucial today and what steps we need to take to get there.


Authors, Metadata, Rights and Social Media
Peter Clifton, FiledBy, USA

New publishing models and discovery tools are impacting how authors can publish, promote and sell their work. More distribution options, social media tools and support services exist and new ones are emerging all the time. These dynamics can greatly impact publishers, agents and authors as they re-tool to remain in step with changing times. This presentation highlights some trends that have surfaced over the past several years and explains metadata taxonomies that can improve discoverability. (detailed discussion)

Innovative Publishing Prozesses | Lectures | German

Enterprise 2.0 – Redefinition der Wissensorganisation oder alter Wein in neuen Schläuchen?
Prof. Dr. Frank Schönefeld, T-Systems Multimedia Solutions, D

coming soon ...


Ungehobene (Daten)-Schätze in Verlagen
Aljoscha Walser, Narses, D

coming soon ...

Innovative Publishing Prozesses | Lectures | English

The BBC – Dynamic Semantic Publishing (TBC)
Jim Stock, UK / Mark Logic, USA

coming soon ...


Improvising madly – Agile workflows and integrated digital strategy
Anna von Veh, Say Books, NZL / Brian O'Leary, Magellan Media, USA

The concept of jazz -- structure, separation, integration and improvisation -- provides a way to think about the relationship between different elements in the organisation, the content itself, technology and creativity in the digital age.
The best jazz musicians have a deep knowledge of scales, and many of the best have had classical training. Embedded and tacit understanding of this structure allows them to be creative, to innovate, and to 'integrate' with other musicians to create new art forms through improvisation.
In a similar way, agile workflows can serve and inspire creativity and innovation in publishing.
Today, publishing needs to be both a science and an art. With the former, publishing companies will be able to compete in the world; organisations and content need to be agile in a fast-changing world. And with art and creativity, publishers will be able to differentiate themselves from each other and the content farms.
Let's improvise!

Abstracts – April 24, 2012