Taking full advantage of all of SIIA’s offerings, including those in other SIIA divisions, is a great way to maximize your membership benefits. The Content Division recently held a Brown Bag Lunch event, “Beyond eBooks: eReaders and Information Content Opportunities.” And although the session was not geared towards the education market, there was education industry representation (Kaplan) and discussion on topics that were industry-agnostic.
The link to view the recorded session is now live: http://bit.ly/SIIA_Beyond_eBooks
A main theme was a caution about being too focused on shiny new devices. Focus on your customers. All content providers want to deliver content how and where customers want it. But be careful about generalizations, even within the same market. Folks at Wolters Kluwer STM businesses, for example, discovered that Doctors access content VERY differently than Nurses do. (Doctors = mobile / Nurses = Desktop). Kaplan discovered that students actually like PAPER. Unlike the web where students are a click away from a “garden of temptations,” paper is free of distractions. Spending some time delving deeply into your customer’s habits and needs (Kaplan has several pilots going at once) will prevent development dollars from going into the wrong functionality.
Another recommendation was to be “nimble”. Easier said than done in a world of competing and complex approaches to content delivery. Though bets were on Open Source winning the battle, single standard has a lot to offer. For Educational Publishers, converting legacy content isn’t easy, or cheap. Especially if the same content has to be converted multiple times for different formats. (Hence the allure of standards!). But standards issues aside, certain educational content, unlike text-only content, has elements, like complex graphics or tables, that are not well suited for eReaders or Mobile devices. And educational concepts can’t always be disaggregated into neat $9.99 chunks of information. Developing new content that fully leverages interactive capabilities – let’s not even get into geospatial – has a host of training issues for those well-respected authors.. That stuff can’t just be slapped on at the end of a development process.
All that being said, the world is marching forward. FT and Foursquare announced a deal that will be interesting to watch. HTML5 is replacing flash. Zinio, an eBook and digital magazine platform, was ranked as a number 4 App. But with all the shiny new things swirling around, keep focused on your customer. Good advice for any industry.
The Content Division holds periodic Brown Bag Lunch sessions that are run from 11:30am – 1:30pm Eastern and can be attended virtually or in-person at the McGraw-Hill offices in New York City. A current list of upcoming events http://bit.ly/SIIA_Events for all SIIA Divisions is always available.
Written by Paula Maylahn for SIIA.