Multi-channel publishing

Every asset in every medium. Every medium in every mode.

This was the foundation of the workshop last night about multi-channel publishing. Most of the workshop was a presentation of XML, semantic tagging, and options for production workflow, with this foundation that justified all the rest coming 90 minutes in when the tech guy finally sat down.

For traditional book publishers, the likely mediums are print, audio, and electronic. Each medium can have several modes: print can appear in the mode of mass-market paperback or dust-jacketed hardback or reader-printed stack of loose paper; audio — cassette or CD or mp3 player or computer speakers; electronic — e-book reader or computer screen or iPhone. The different ways of accessing any given medium have increased tremendously, and this fragmentation of access creates both headaches and market opportunities for content producers. You might have to repackage your television show for DVD, but on the plus side you get to sell DVDs.

It can be difficult to figure out all the mediums and modes that any given asset can appear in, but that process can help you figure out what your assets are. A textbook, for example, is not just a unitary asset. It’s also a set of chapters that can have value separately in coursepacks. It’s also a set of lessons within each chapter that can be used in other textbooks. It’s also a set of exercises which can be used in assessments or workbooks, and terminology which can be used in flash cards or glossaries, and examples which can be turned into recordings for a language textbook, and images which can be turned into a slide show for an art history textbook, and many other ways of slicing and dicing your assets. I worked on a language textbook some years back, and figured out that the figures could be used for transparencies and the examples could be used for audio recordings. I got there by wondering what parts of the textbook could be used for transparencies and audio recordings, rather than wondering how I could reuse the figures and examples. That process of developing a multi-channel approach to the textbook was the trigger to seeing the figures and examples as assets apart from the textbook as a whole. Every asset in every medium isn’t just about taking advantage of every market opportunity. It’s about discovering new assets which can then be repurposed.

The same can be said of XML (or any tagging system based on content rather than appearance). The process of deciding on tags for each level of your content can help you realize that your cookbook is composed of recipes, and each recipe contains ingredient lists, and there could be interesting ways to reuse recipes or even ingredient lists. As long as you use tags better than Cengage Learning’s <float-chunk>, you can go through your set of tags to see possible new levels of assets. And who knows, maybe Apple will come out with a new iFloatChunk, in which case Cengage Learning is ready with assets they didn’t even know how they had.