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Objects of Desire: Publishing Digital
Objects Nears a Turning Point for Business Publishers |
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1 November 2004 |
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As Adobe Systems Inc. and Yahoo! announce an alliance to
merge desktop search tools with Adobe's document packaging
capabilities the era of sophisticated digital objects as
destination content residing on our local hard drives is
arriving. Digital objects in the consumer realm are
becoming widely accepted, but they lag in the circles of
publishers serving professional markets. This is not likely
to be the case forever, especially as tools like Adobe
Acrobat make it increasingly easy to consume, personalize
and redistribute rights-protected content in valuable
forms. Many major business-oriented publishers were caught
flat-footed at the dawn of the Web era: who will have the
fallen arches as the era of digital objects emerges? |
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Adobe
Systems Inc. has carved out an interesting niche for itself in
the world of publishing with its Portable Document Format (PDF)
files generated and displayed by Adobe Acrobat software. PDFs
are used ubiquitously for transferring and storing content in a
print-ready format that won't get bungled easily, a de facto
standard that rivals Web browsers in some ways for acceptance
by today's content users. So it was with some interest
that we noted the
announcement of a new alliance between Adobe and Yahoo! to
provide an array of combined tools and services to leverage one
another's audiences in mutual battles with Microsoft and Google.
Some of the items that this new alliance is fleshing out
include a Yahoo!-branded search toolbar in Acrobat that will
allow users to search for Web content from within Acrobat and
to create PDFs out of Web content with a single click. It's
probably a long time before people will give up their Internet
Explorer or Firefox browsers to thumb around the Web in Acrobat
for casual content, but it's an indication that some major
players are putting out increasingly heavy bets in favor of a
new breed of tools managing content in the form of digital
objects.
Publishers have been puttering around
with digital objects on a number of fronts, from downloadable
magazines and newspapers for Zinio and NewsStand readers to
rights-protected eBooks for Acrobat to a flowering of legal
music downloads. For the most part, though, publishers serving
professional markets continue to view electronic content as
stuff that's delivered via a screen interface from some remote
location where the "real" technology lives and delivering
relatively dumb versions of that content to their audiences for
printing or storage. XML formatting, workflow tools and Web
services provide some local value-add capability, but for the
most part today's electronic publishers don't spend much time
thinking about how individual items of content collected by
individuals in their audiences can have a life of their own
beyond traditional content containers such as reprints, books
or magazines.
In the meantime Adobe has premised its
content strategy on the "thing-ness" of content being a central
component of its future value, leveraging the powerful and
sophisticated technology at the fingertips of today's content
users. Collecting, annotating, repurposing and repackaging
content in containers such as PDF-format documents that can be
rights-protected provides highly personalized and localized
value that can be redistributed by users to specific audiences
with amplified value. Add in functionality into these digital
objects that can be manipulated by the user and you have
content that can have a valuable life of its own, a true
personal library of capabilities. Seen in the light of desktop
search initiatives by Google, Yahoo! and other major vendors to
make locally stored content as easy to find and use as
Web-enabled content it becomes clear that enabling content
objects on user platforms is the frontier that publishers must
push towards as quickly as possible.
Adobe is not the only player in the
digital objects packaging game for text-oriented content, but
its growing experience with eBooks on a variety of desktop and
mobile platforms gives them a strong position from which to
work with premium content in personal content consuming and
publishing environments. So far most publishers and aggregators
have missed out on this environment for professionally-oriented
content, but that can be expected to change. Here are a few
items to consider as this object-oriented content environment
unfolds:
- Moving from static workflows to dynamic, reusable
objects. Many publishing efforts in the B2B arena today
that embrace technology tend to provide single-purpose
software or Web interfaces to support specific workflows into
which a publisher's content is integrated. Lock the client to
the workflow and they're locked to the content, the theory
goes. As more content from more sources moves towards users'
desktops, though, there will be a trend away from
desktop workflow applications that lock in a publisher's
content towards workflow applications that can take advantage
of locally stored digital objects form multiple sources with
content and functionality. In the long run digital objects
will allow publishers more value-add market penetration more
quickly and effectively through any number of clever users
armed with a wide variety of applications.
- Rights management is no longer just a consumer toy.
As digital content in the professional arena moves more
towards objects stored locally, publishers will find
themselves more attuned to digital rights management than
they have been up to now. In the era of
The New Aggregation, monetization flows to content that
can be placed in as many useful contexts as possible.
Allowing users to determine those contexts is an essential
part of finding that level of value - and rights management
is a key component of that equation. If you're a publisher
serving professional markets without a rights management
strategy, in two years it will be like being a publisher
without a Web strategy in the early dot-com era.
- Consider how your content supports client audits.
One of the most difficult things for companies to understand
is the context in which content was being used at a
particular point in time. Having content that stores its
historical digital context as a part of its personality is
something that most organizations will want to retain - and
not in a publisher's database. Institutionally-oriented DRM
tools such as Sealed Media support these kinds of audits
effectively for institutional content objects, but there's no
real equivalent yet for publisher-supplied content.
Self-auditing, self-archiving content will be a key value
point in this new environment.
With these amplified content
characteristics being provided mostly by technology and portal
companies, clearly the publishers and traditional aggregators
are missing out on much of the fun - and future profits. A
generation ago premium publishers took their profits from
well-crafted books that could stand as valued additions to
one's library shelves. Today's value in content objects is
found on the multi-gigabyte drives residing in everyday
information appliances. Different containers, different venues,
same game: provide immediate and long-lasting value in easily
reused and shared packages. Adobe and Yahoo! seem to be on to
this: why not you?
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John Blossom
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