Reexamining Content for the Global Marketplace

by Michael Ross
SVP, Education General Manager, Encyclopaedia Britannica

There are two strategic objectives that publishers must have as priorities today if they are going to stay competitive in this global and digital publishing environment. First, they must be able to take advantage of the cost savings that are available to them by having all of their assets in a standard digital format. Second, they must make specific editorial accommodations to ensure that their content is as suitable as possible for the global marketplace.

These are significant activities that require a frame of mind, skills, and processes that may not be in place currently in the typical publishing operation. Fortunately, there are some basic guidelines that can be followed that will significantly increase any publisher’s ability to become more efficient in producing products and better prepared to meet the challenges of a global publishing community.

Let’s look at these guidelines and identify the key milestones along the road to meeting these objectives.

Traditional and Nontraditional Cost Savings

Publishers are under a lot of pressure to save money due to lower margins, particularly from print products; fewer funding sources, especially in the school and library market; and the new imperative to build—sometimes from scratch—technology competence in designing and running websites and internal network systems. These are large challenges, for both the small and big company, and they are going to be with us for a while. But to remain competitive, publishers must become low-cost producers. They must find ways to cut costs without cutting corners and, at the same time, take advantage of the various technologies and resources that have become available and matured over the past five years. Most important, publishers must find a long-term solution to maximizing resources and leveraging their assets.

All publishers, whether their revenue comes primarily from print or from digital products, must have their assets in the most flexible, standard digital format. This means that everything should be in XML, not just in a desktop publishing application (such as InDesign or Quark). In addition, content assets (text, images, audio and video files, rights information) should be in a content management system (CMS) so they can be easily located and shared (with a prepress house, media producer, or printer) via an FTP site. Internal and external personnel, whether they are designers, editors, programmers, or printers, must be able to have easy, independent access to the digital files so that they can work on them 24/7, if necessary, regardless of where they are located.

By making sure that content lives in an accessible digital environment, the publisher can take advantage of various publishing services all around the world. For example, indexers working in India, animators in Korea, illustrators in the Czech Republic, or printers in Malaysia can all bid on providing publishing services if files are accessible in a usable digital format. With 21st Century-knowledge workers available worldwide, publishers can seek the best quality results for the best price and in the quickest time frame without the traditional constraints of being in a certain location.

It’s more than likely that all newly generated content will be in an acceptable format and will be usable by developers anywhere in the world. But it’s also more than likely that the publisher’s legacy content resides in a variety of formats (some of them obsolesced) and that they will need to be converted if they are to have a “second life.” It’s important, in order to be able to repurpose content, to convert existing content to the same standard digital formats that are being used to create new products and to have this content indexed and retrievable from the same CMS. Having a single system that enables information professionals to review, access, and retrieve assets is critical to taking advantage of as many cost- and time-saving options as possible.

Today, publishers need to examine the ways in which they perform every step in the development process, assess how well they are being performed, and determine which steps are candidates for being done in a better way—perhaps by someone who can perform the job cheaper, faster, and better in a location that hadn’t been considered before. This should include all publishing tasks, including content creation, editing, print or web design, illustration, indexing, coding, and storage—not just prepress and printing.

Publishers also have to think about distributing their products in more than one format and in more than one channel, each with its own P&L objectives and each new version contributing an increasingly greater margin than its predecessor. The axiom “Create once, sell twice” has never been more important or easier than it is today. However, this is achievable only if all content is created in the proper formats.

Developing Appealing International Content

To make their content as attractive as possible to as large an audience as possible, publishers need to think about the specific requirements of other markets. Or, at the very least, they need to allow for the possibility that other markets will want to make changes in their content in order to maximize its marketability. If the content has been prepared appropriately—digitally, as described above, as only the first step—foreign publishers can consider adapting the content for their local markets with some success and take advantage of the original development. The adaptation may be as simple as a translation, but it also may include changing the format and adding content.

To be properly prepared, publishers must go beyond the baseline technical requirements. The content itself has to be as “international” as possible. This means that if the content is seen as too “American,” or “too parochial,” either in its editorial focus or its graphic representation, it may not be attractive to foreign markets. Even though overseas publishers are aware that some changes will always be necessary, if the product is too steeped in a single culture, the effort to localize it may not be worth the effort.

Assuming that the nature of the content is acceptable and that sufficient thought has been given to making the product adaptable, there is also the issue of intellectual property rights (IP). Today, because of how fast information travels, everyone is more concerned than ever that licensed content comes clear of all rights to not only publish the content in another market, but to adapt it, change it, and publish it in any format—print or electronic, including mobile or “future” formats. Because of the multiple formats in which companies are actively publishing today, including those that may not have yet been anticipated, IP rights have to be much broader than they were in the past.

Again, even if publishers are aware of the broader issues surrounding IP rights (such as the need to address new economic models as well as formats) and are creating or acquiring new content that meets these criteria, it is possible—likely, in fact—that legacy content was not created or acquired with this flexibility in mind. Often, new products are developed that combine new and repurposed content, which means that older licensing agreements may have to be scrutinized and perhaps renegotiated to meet the criteria of new publishing paradigms.

In order to meet the needs of the global marketplace, publishers may have to adjust the ways in which they are structured and make internal resource changes that will allow them to address these challenges proactively. It’s unlikely that publishers will be able to take advantage of these global opportunities without substantial changes in the way they perform their current tasks or the ways in which they think about marketing their products.

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Michael N. Ross is the Senior Vice President, Education General Manager, at Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., where he heads worldwide electronic and print publishing. Prior to joining Britannica in 2002, he was the Executive Vice President and Publisher of World Book, Inc. He began his publishing career as an editor for Time-Life Books and worked for three years in their Tokyo bureau. Ross has contributed to several industry publications and is frequently invited to speak at international conferences. He is also the author of “Publishing Without Boundaries: How to Think, Work, and Win in the Global Marketplace,” published by AEP. He has a B.A., summa cum laude, from the University of Minnesota, an M.A. from Brandeis University, and a certificate from Stanford University’s Advanced Management College.