Gilbane Research Report - Digital Magazine Editions - (Page 22)

Digital Magazine and Newspaper Editions: Best Practice Cases Nstein Content Infrastructure and Digital Publishing Although many publishers use digital editions as exact or nearexact replicas of their print editions, a growing number are using them as a means of repurposing content dynamically and adding rich media to their publications. At present, digitaledition vendors are doing most of the work of producing such enhanced digital editions: publishers hand them the content, and they do the rest. This may work for some publications that only produce occasional content that is exclusive to their digital editions or that have few production resources devoted to digital editions. But as both users and advertisers become more accustomed to digital editions, the bar of functionality will be raised; they will both come to expect more dynamic content, more rich media, and more personalization. In other words, the line between digital editions and Web sites will become blurrier and blurrier. When this happens, it will be more important than ever for publishers to have a content infrastructure with the scalability to support multiple dynamic digital products. Among other things, this will require the use of XML to accommodate different ways of displaying content; demands for search and personalization will require the ability to generate a sufficient amount of high-quality, consistent metadata with minimal manual effort; and publishers will need tools to support multiple workflows with as much automation as possible in content assembly and production. The first wave of attempts to build enterprise-wide digital asset management (DAM) systems, roughly ten years ago, ended with only a few success stories. The reasons for this included the relative lack of ROI justifications that could be defined and the difficulty of getting multiple independent operating units to agree on requirements. As a result, many larger publishers now find themselves with large numbers of small department- or workgroup-level content management systems, which they have installed over the last several years to meet near-term needs. Currently, digital editions are an important driver for scalable and flexible content infrastructure, along with complex Web site management, syndication feeds, and so on. In addition, the movement of large publishers from public to private equity ownership has made it easier to justify investment in content infrastructure without having to meet the short-term ROI requirements that Wall Street analysts insist on. This has all led to a recent resurgence of interest in enterprise-level content management. Publishers are adopting three content infrastructure technologies in particular: pervasive XML, DAM, and automated metadata creation, also known as text mining. Although these three technologies have been available for some time as separate components or tools, recent technologies are bringing them all together — and ©2008 Gilbane Group, Inc. 22 http://gilbane.com http://gilbane.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Gilbane Research Report - Digital Magazine Editions

Gilbane Research Report - Digital Magazine Editions
Table of Contents
Introduction
Section One: The Data
Section Two: Best Practice Cases
Nxtbook
Bentley Systems
Graduate Prospects
Hearst
Information Today
Marine Log
Vendor Description
Section Three: Buyer’s Guide
Section Four: Visionaries
Section Five: Conclusions
The Authors
About the Gilbane Group, Inc.
Our Sponsors

Gilbane Research Report - Digital Magazine Editions