Publishers: Is Your Digital Content Safe, Bent or Dead?

I recently met a Master Diver for the first time. Master Diver Hoera (aka George) Jacobs. Many Master Divers do relatively dangerous stuff and some of them die because of moments of carelessness, over-confidence, or just plain bad-luck.

We had a very long discussion about the training and dangers of deep sea diving. Getting in is easy.  Diving to just 30 metres is relatively straight-forward. Go past this and you are in very serious water. But of course the really important thing with deep diving is how you return to the surface from whatever depth your dive took you.

Safe, Bent or Dead

As I learnt in no uncertain terms, there are just three ways to come up from a deep sea dive: Safe, Bent or Dead. Bent refers to decompression sickness. Proper training, correct equipment and planned execution are the keys to safe diving. You need the right attitude and a partner if you are going to rise from the deadly depths consistently, correctly and safely time after time. If you need or want to do it again, do it right every time!

Safe, Bent or Dead Digital Content

However this is not a post on diving. As Hoera and I were discussing the various challenges and essential stay-alive rules involved in deep sea diving, the "Safe, Bent or Dead" statement instantly made me think about the various ways valuable publisher digital content is produced and managed; and what is the value of the content to the publisher after production is finished and formats are delivered.

All the tools, techniques, methods and approaches have to deliver the same formats for any specific production exercise. Some of them produce dead content, some bent content a few... safe content.

Safe, bent and dead digital content production tools, approaches and methods all generate the "required-NOW" print and e-book formats. However once the money has been spent and the formats delivered the question is was digital content ownership value created as well as a few "get-to-market-today" formats.

It's the production "how" that makes the publisher source production digital content safe, bent or dead. In 2014 publishers need to understand if they are only paying for production or if the same money is delivering them future business value.

Safe Content

Safe content means the production content is created in such a way that it can deliver any format or delivery package instantly and and can be used with little or no additional cost for any new purpose. Safe content handles all levels of content complexity for any specific genre and doesn't have to be "dumbed down" or "smarted up" for reading systems. There are no proprietary traps.

Content is safe when the first order of content management business is to ensure the content is produced in a system designed to make it safe, reusable and instantly ready for any and all format generation. This approach means a significant change to the tools and approach to content production. It means the right tools, training and significantly - change management.

After production safe content is immediately ready for the generation of any format (print, ebooks, apps, web apps, websites) plus other uses such as remix, interactive and rich media extentions all from the same digitized source. This means the content is produced in (X)HTML5 so it directly supports extensions such as Javascript, SVG/2, changing MathML,  WAI-ARIA and new things like the almost ready picture element. In safe content production systems all of this has to be built-in, and where appropriate for formats, applied automatically.

Multiple formats addressing the full range of reading system behaviours is easily addressed by tagging up and processing down rather than compromising the production content for a format d'jour. Formats come and go, correctly produced digital content is ready for anything and lasts forever.

This approach is particularly useful, and perhaps essential, for content with high value and multiple uses such as trade non-fiction, academic and education content.

Bent Content

Bent content means the content is reusable to some level but generally requires maintenance and considerable technical work to use it in new format or delivery contexts. It treats all content the same so depending on the genre some content is a little bent, other content is very bent. There are probably a number of semi-proprietary or custom traps to be wary of as well.

Publisher content is bent when it needs additional management, technical inputs, processing and constant quality review to produce multiple formats or use the content for any other purpose. The obvious example is "XML First" and "XML Last" production systems and their variants.

Custom XML DTD/Schemas have to be maintained on a continuous basis OR you compromise on tagging strategies. It always happens. This has been discussed at length in Avoid XML First Like the Plague (2013 )and Reviewing XML Options (2011).

There appears to be advantages in these approachs. On paper and in presentations it can sound exciting.. . The future use story sounds exciting until you try and use it. Then the maintenance costs kick in.

There are any number of presentations about workflows that try and integrate yesterdays tools into todays workflow because of worker change resistance. They are all about paying for a promise... that is seldom delivered.

Standard CMS systems are web content and not publisher content oriented. There is a significant difference between these two content zones. Both PDF and ebook production are largely treated as stand-alone and separate or extension tasks with significant processor development.

Dead Content

Dead content means the content cannot be reused after format production because of the tools, methods and proprietary internal layout model that is designed to create a single format.

Content is Dead after format when a production system encapsulates the content in a proprietary, desktop or format package.

• The content is bound in a proprietary format.
• It takes additional and human intervention to generated new formats.
• The content is not ready for different digital content business applications.
• Creating print and digital publications with significantly different features is probably impossible (a necessity with education content).
• New digital content requirements are not even slightly addressed.

If future editions, format support and reuse is not likely to be a requirement (as with much trade fiction and self-published books) producing dead content is not a significant issue. But publishers should be aware of the limitations of the production model. There is no content "escape free clause from dead on arrival production systems.

Proprietary Systems

The most obvious tool examples are InDesign/Quark. To create something new from the content requires the production process to pretty much start over. Publisher content is locked into a third party proprietary package that is completely out of your control. For example IDML (In Design Markup Language) is a serialization of the ID internal layout model and is force changed every 18 months to keep users "invested".

Most of the new digital content initiatives cannot be addresssed without extensive manual or custom processing of the arbitrary generated HTML outputs.

Direct to Formats

Open systems such as Calibre and Sigil are similar.  Even though these last two are XHTML tools, there is no controlled vocabulary foundation and a singlegenerated partial ebook format is what you get. Future or other use of the content is not an option.

Anyone who has been in Publishing for more than a few years knows that delivery formats like PDF, ePub, Mobi and others are where content goes to die. PDB was huge and died surviving only in the internals of the dreaded AZW (Mobi) format. Microsoft's LIT followed suite. OEB became ePub became ePub3, Mobi PRC became Kindle 7 (Mobi, AZW) then 8 (AZW3). The number of "solutions" for converting PDFs to fixed-layout ebooks is now in the dozens. Adobe have recently joined the gang. EPub3 fixed layout is now a PDF parody with a few bells and occassionally a whistle or two.

Outsourcing Format Production

Out-sourcing content production is another way to ensure your content is dead for all the reasons stated above. If a new format is required the costs are repeated and often escalated.

Why Do It?

People stay with the dead content production systems because of time investment and familiarity with the tools. The hope is dead content creation tools will somehow get there. Unfortunately the first principles of the content management say this will never happen. It never gets better than the core content production system. There is still a strong print-first mentality and many publishers don't regard their content as future valuable, or more pragmatically know it has very limited future value so dead on arrival is fine.

In Summary

Currently many publishers think ePub2/3, Kindle and Apps are going to last forever. However, as an example, the mind-blowing effect that Service Workers and Web Components will have on securely delivered off-line publisher content is only a short time away. The diversity of content delivery to consumers (outside trade fiction) is going to explode. It is inevitable because the options of today are buried in 15 year old technologies, and the emerging consumers want more.

There is no particular right or wrong in any production system if the only objective is to create todays formats. But it is important that publishers do understand the choice of production tools and methods significantly affect value and total cost of ownership content outcomes on the completion of production.

The safe, bent or dead content observations discussed here are based on building and using all of these content production systems for print and digital formats in all genres over 15 years. The diving metaphor may not be exact but does serve to illustrate the significant differences in content production methods. It's about what publishers need, not what they want!

Our experience has been watching millions of dollars ripped up and thrown away by publishers over the last 15 years producing dead and bent content. In many cases we have turned that dead and bent content into safe content (at a cost). That is why creating, delivering current AND future value content using the "safe" method is what we always do.

Infogrid Pacific are the first to accept that moving to a safe production method is non-trivial. But the outcomes are a significant increase in the value of the content, plus production cost savings (after the learning curve of course) and full readiness for the future.

Publishers owe it to themselves to understand the options, choices, benefits and business cost differences between safe, bent and dead content and make decisions based on that knowledge.

 

Posted by Richard Pipe

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