Key Trends in

Cross Media
Publishing
Steve Paxhia
Director- Publishing
Practice
The Gilbane Group

Bill Rosenblatt
Senior Analyst
The Gilbane Group
About Gilbane Group
• Consulting and market research firm
• New research initiatives on various aspects
of digital publishing
• Collaboration
• Beyond the E-Book - Cross-Media Publishing
Strategies
• Digital Magazine and Newspapers
• Enterprise Rights Management

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Outline
• Research Study Highlights
• Digital Magazines and Newspapers
• Collaboration
• Cross-Media Publishing
• Strategic Trends in Cross-Media Publishing
• Search and Discovery
• E-Books and Devices
• Content Infrastructure
• Conclusions

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Strong Growth in Digital
Periodicals Key Statistics

• Number of titles and page views grew

better than 40%
• The number of pages read and the average
length of sessions grew more than 100%
• The number of links clicked grew than
100%
• Number of Unique readers grew more than
150%

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Industry projecting significant growth

• All vendors projecting growth between 30-

50% in all categories this year and next
• Growth is expected to continue in new
titles, new digital readers, and time per
session
• The rate of active linking is strong and is
expected to get even stronger

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Trends
• Digital editions and websites becoming
complementary
• Search becoming an important reason for
preferring digital environment
• Prediction- more publications will offer archiving
• Prediction- Publications will begin to work
together to allow their readers to find more
information on topics of keen interest

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Collaboration and Community in
Book Publishing

• Already an important force in Reference

Publishing
• Learning Communities in Higher Ed
• Note Sharing and online interactions with faculty
growing very rapidly
• Café Scribe, VitalSource
• Merlot, Digital Marketplace
• Digital Initiatives growing in K-12
• Curriki
• SAP Netweaver Forum
• Near-Time O’Reilly
• Libre Digital Mash-ups

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Collaboration Data Summary
120%

100% 100%
100%
currently using
rate very effective
80%
73% 74%

65%
58%
60%
55%
51% 50% 50% 49% 49% 51%
48%

43% 42%
39%
40% 36% 36% 37%

25% 24%
20%
18%
18%
20%
14%
11% 10% 9%
5%

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Trends
• Collaboration and community technology
being deployed to connect customers with
the publication and with each other…
• Advertisers report being happy with the
creative avenues being provided by digital
advertising and also like the measurability
and rapid feedback

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Search & Discovery Trends
• The Discovery Paradox
• Professionally selected, edited, produced content
generally not findable online
• Leads users to “good enough” free alternatives
(Wikipedia)
• SEO
• Constant expense, black art
• Arms race with diminishing returns
• Limited impact anyway

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Search & Discovery: Rights
• Key obstacle in solving Discovery Paradox
• Not the same thing as “DRM”
• Hugely complex problem
• Solutions can be expensive, disruptive
• Many publishers still in denial
• Solutions
• Technical (ACAP, text fingerprinting)
• Ad hoc licensing
• Litigation

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Search & Discovery
Predictions

• Text fingerprinting will drive licensing deals

• Web crawling, recognition of publishers’ content
on websites
• Standards face long road ahead
• Little incentive for search engines to play
• Incentives will come from search startups that
want to index premium content
• Rights Information Management will grow
and help
• Publishers build rights information databases
• Use to inform automated licensing arrangements

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E-Books
Lessons from Music Industry

• Fragmented device market

• Amazon Kindle could become iPod of publishing,
but…
• Fragmentation impedes growth
• Device makers try for lock-in
• Proprietary DRM exacerbates this
• Economic incentives need to be aligned
• Customers want to share
• Needs to be much easier
• Cannot be done without device maker cooperation

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Cross-Media Infrastructure
• CMI 1.0
• Install centralized content management
system
• (that’s it… hope it works… usually fails)
• CMI 2.0
• Federated technology infrastructure
• 80/20 rule on enterprise-level functionality
• Investment in process, organization, and
skill changes
• Content creation treated independently
from output format (not just XML…)

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CMI Example:

• Before:
• Consumer Reports magazine editorial staff
• Ad hoc repurposing for books, website
• Very limited product set
• Media Neutral initiative
• Reorganization of editorial by subject matter
• Publication groups become “customers” of
editorial groups
• Cross-media content development the norm, not
the exception
• Technology mostly unchanged
• After:
• New product development much easier
• A thousand online flowers bloom
• Next up: technology, now that processes
and organization are in place!
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Cross-Media Infrastructure
Predictions
• Growing awareness of product
planning
• Product/feature plans drive requirements
• No more “build it and they will come”
• Editorial will lead the way
• Processes, organization, skills first
• Technology close second
• Metadata problem taken more
seriously
• “MLS” skill set
• Taxonomies
• Tools and processes
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Prediction
• Publishers will soon seek to be involved in
the reader’s complete information cycle
• Browse
• Search in context
• Link to related data
• Present new information based on algorithms
that analyze past information consumption
• Use Geography data to present more pertinent
info

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Giving Readers the Best Choices

• Paper and Digital

• Functionality that fits the media
• New products for New readers
• Communities that work
• Business models that fit the product and
media

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