Publishing Success with Digital First Publishing
While the paperless world imagined by George Pake in 1975 is still to emerge, digital first publishing has steadily evolved, creating a radical disruption of business as usual for the publishing industry. Innovations in technology, decreased cost in publishing and purchase, and user demand for multimedia and immediate gratification are greatly responsible for the rise of digital first (Gutenberg, 2018; Filigheddu, 2018).
As the world moved from the static world of print to all things digital, publishers tried to cope in basically three ways.
- Making print products digital
- Publishing print books with supplemental digital products
- Publishing print and digital products in parallel
Stanford University Press and the Evolution to Digital First
Gutenberg’s digital first blog reminds us why education publishers adopted the new paradigm: “…textbook sales have decreased dramatically in recent years. This, in turn, has had a tremendously negative impact on publishers’ profits, in many instances turning them into substantial losses” (Gutenberg, 2018). The Stanford University Press was one of the first houses to create digital first publications. In 2016, Alan Harvey at Stanford University Press announced he wanted to “break the box of publishing.” His goal was to start publishing digital only projects that featured assets such as interactive maps, audio narration, photography. Quickly his publishing team recognized that creating digital first content called for a creation and review process that incorporated at a minimum the following requirements:- Content validity
- Interface and navigation
- Accessibility
- Discoverability
- Visual and audio aesthetics
Complexity of Digital First Content Development Workflow
In the past, the content development workflow centered around an ongoing search for new authors; a cycle for popular authors that required creating first editions and then next books; and a cycle for textbooks wherein authors created first edition and then new editions to supplant the old. For digital first content, the workflow can begin in several ways: a search for open content and an international search for a collaborative team of writers, artists, UX designers, technologists, audio specialists, musicians, programmers, and project managers. Up front, publishers must be ready to provide templates, standards, branding as well as tools for content management, authoring, archiving, tracking, and more. Digital workflow follows roughly this process:- Conceptualization of learning medium ( epub, media, animation, AR/VR, App, virtual lab etc)
- Storyboarding and Visual Design
- Design Assets authoring/creation
- Review and revise assets
- Publish assets to digital and conversion to print
- Distribute assets to multi channel delivery
- Archive assets or put through cycle again
