A thought provoking set of ideas from MIT's Sarah Scrafford, as found here:
What I like about Sarah's approach is that she avoids some of the more Utopian, airy/fairy leanings of typical digital-ed future predictions, and gets down to specifics. She's talking specifically about higher ed publishing, but many of the ideas are further reaching.
I recommend reading the whole thing, because I'm only going to report on points of personal interest here (ie the following is not representative of the original).
Highlights include:
* Data in the digital format requires the use of additional technology to access, read and modify. This technology may not be universally available due to constraints like cost, and even if available, may not be used by everyone because of training gaps and lack of accessibility.
Now why is that interesting? Because it shows a reversal of what publishers want: We want paid-for content distributed on free technologies that everyone understands. The technology of 'how to make a book' is basically free - you get some bits of paper and bung them together. And everyone knows how to use a book (apart, of course, from
this dude). We've never expected people to pay for paper - we expect them to pay for what's written on it, i.e. the content.
So, the way things are going is exactly the opposite of our business model.
Nuts.
Highlight 2:
* Lack of publishing format standards hinder the process of aggregating content from various sources, collating it and re-publishing only what you need.
Absolutely. Especially re. 'aggregation' - but I have a post on this ready for next week, so I won't extrapolate now. I would add, though, that as well as aggregating between sources we also need standards for aggregation within sources. Individual chapters of books, individual articles in journals, series of monographs... it's a long list that requires an extensible solution.
Highlight 3:
* Digital publishers must cope with opposition and resentment from the print industry which will certainly not relish the prospect of being driven out of business.
Now here I disagree, but only because this is a false dichotomy. The print publishers are all scrambling to become digital publishers, but no-one - even the exclusively-digital - has got a grip on how to long-term derive revenue from content yet. (Yet.)
Sarah goes on to identify benefits of going digital:
* The ability to modify content or just a part of it easily and at a considerably low cost. The same exercise with traditional books is a time consuming and costly affair.
In the case of academic textbooks, updated versions are where a significant fraction of income comes from - digital versioning may yet cost publishers more than it saves.
* Teachers can put together customized lessons depending on what they think their students are interested in rather than being forced to rely on one or two books alone.
This is 100% true if the teachers can find the content. That hurdle, unfortunately, is yet to be jumped (and is why I bang on about metadata & searchability all my life).
* Digital content takes up a fraction of the storage space that printed matter does, thus freeing up shelves and shelves of space.
And did we mention the dead trees? (NB counterpoint: All English repository libraries still keep books. Why? Because paper is still the most reliable technology available. Floppy disks from ten years ago are obsolete, but books from five hundred years ago still work just fine. Digital longevity - in the 'centuries' context - is still a Great Unknown.)
* There's no need to carry around books when you're travelling from place to place. If it's online, all you need is access to a computer and a fast Internet connection.
No... you also need server space. You need the cloud. You also need a particularly good bit of librarian software to find what you need (yes, even if you've found it before). And as the wonderful Bruce Sterling said (see 'patterns and collapse' on this blog + http://blog.wired.com/sterling/2009/03/what-bruce-ster.html), you can't make a platform out of the cloud. Platforms are solid - clouds aren't.
That's my two cents. But if you've made it this far, do yourself a favour and read the original as well.
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