Digital Academic Publishing

Emily recently attended a day conference for the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research entitled ‘Digital Academic Publishing’.  This was hosted by Birmingham City University.

The day included a talk from Intellect’s chairman, Masoud Yazdani, who felt the E-publishing situation was highly comparable to the situation faced recently by the music industry regarding the illegal downloading of music versus buying the file. Masoud felt that as publishers, we need to become more involved in the development of new delivery methods for our material before non-publishers introduce a new way of publishing that only benefits themselves and their readers.

The day also featured a talk from research student Rob Horrocks, who had recently interviewed a number of UK Publishers about their concerns for online publishing. The results from these interviews indicated concern regarding the expense of making old texts available electronically.  This refers mainly to purchase other fonts relative to other languages, which can prove expensive. He also mentioned the issue of producing these texts in so many different formats cause publishers to still favour the one style of PDF.   The reader however would ideally like features such as resizeability etc and the choice of the different formats, leaving the industry in a small stand off.

Other issues brought to light in the breakout talk sessions included  problems with references that are caused  by reflow ability (as this causes pages to be numbered differently on every device) and therefore questions the indexing of these files. This article explains the issue in better detail for those interested. Questions about creating online communities were voiced. Many attendees noted how difficult it was to create a thriving community from one book etc and to keep it alive and kicking, whereas existing communities can hold more social influence. It was mentioned that social media could be used to the publishers’ advantage i.e. companion sites with additional materials for texts, but online communities were the key to tapping into the pool of new opinion leaders.

One delegate posed the question that if the music industry now makes more money on items such as ring tones than single music tracks, what is the ring tone for the publishing industry?

One of the best answers to this question was the idea of modularisation. This involved publishers creating a new kind of product through the modularisation of their texts and then making extra materials available to purchase alongside the modulated materials. So in theory a customer could basically create their own resource/textbook. This idea of providing something different, so customers felt they weren’t just buying the same product online, was a key concept in the talks, suggesting this could be a path some publishers may go down.

NUP is always eager to find new ways of communicating with its customers.  Many questions have arisen from this excellent source of information and the industry must work hard to improve its interactivity sooner, rather than later. Something we will be keeping a close eye on.