The Medium is the Message
Publishing should be treated as a continual process, not a one-time event. Back in the day, when print was the only medium available, a book was regarded as a single entity, with inseparable parts. In a digital environment, the finished product may, over time, be less valuable than its individual parts.
A positive consequence of a publishing strategy derived from this perspective is the extended lifespan of a publication, both in its original form and in its various elements. Thanks to digital publishing and print on demand (POD), books no longer have to go “out of print”; they can be archived, accessed at any time in the future, and distributed more easily than ever before—and repurposed as the need or opportunity arises. We can now manage books and intellectual property with an eye toward keeping them in active circulation—either as a revised work, as part of a larger work, as a new book with a completely different design, or in a different format, such as a DVD, website, mobile device, or part of a larger database.
Case Study
Roger Rosen of Rosen Publishing, an independent educational publishing house, is convinced that in order to address shifting user needs, the same content needs to be available in all practical formats—print, e-book, or online databases. He believes that readers are still “experimenting with different formats” and publishers need to adapt their business models as customer preferences continue to evolve. From a business standpoint, he says that he can spread the cost of the original creative work over print and digital outputs, and reach more readers. In addition, he believes that digital products in particular can help solve the social problem of “equity of access.” His main market is school and public libraries, and digital content that is available through the library can be accessed remotely or from the building itself if users do not have their own devices. A library that has purchased unlimited access to a certain e-book, or that has subscribed to the same content in an online database, can now serve as many patrons as may be interested in the information without a time limitation or additional cost. The same content available only in printed book form might be “checked out” by one patron and therefore unavailable to the rest of the community.
Slicing and Dicing
The democratization of any content or data set depends on the accessibility of its smallest practical components. An entire 300-page book may have multiple uses, but its components—chapters, graphs, charts, etc.—may have more uses in more places. Publishers should think of intellectual property as “units” of information, or content that can be linked together and then unlinked in multiple ways. These units can be treated individually, in much the same way that an entire book can be, and then reused or licensed separately from its original context. Many content types can be repurposed and reconfigured from digital files. These files should use metadata to identify the various usable components. Text, maps, music, sound, images, video, animations, illustrations, and computer code are all types of content that can be successfully used and reused in whole or in part. By themselves, they have the potential to become revenue producing “intellectual property units” (IPUs), as digital content can be adapted to fit into the growing number and variety of devices that are used to transmit and obtain information—which we can expect to only increase in the future. Viewed in this way, the individual parts of a final product may comprise a publisher’s secondary currency.
