Publishing solutions from IXXUS - Digital Lunch with Carl Robinson
by Giorgia De Micheli
On Wed 21 February 2018, Carl Robinson, Senior Consultant at Ixxus, explained how to take on some of the issues that publishers face in building their digital strategies.
At Ixxus, Carl’s focus is on helping clients look at business visions, goals and strategies around their content and tooling to enable flexibility and readiness to meet the ever-changing demands of the digital market. He has worked for Pearson Education, Macmillan Education and Oxford University Press and understands the digital issues that publishers face.
In this lunchtime seminar, he focused on explaining how Ixxus approach publishers’ digital problems. He suggested that both the IT team and the publishing team should work together in order to solve the difficulties in order to maximize digital strategy.
What kind of problems do publishers face?
Content management: namely how to maximize the lifetime of the content used, how it is stored in the publishing houses and how to organize the content in order to find it quickly and effectively. Typical problems are the verticalization and fragmentation of the content and the isolation that it brings; the inconsistency between the different digital technologies (software, formats etc.) and the specifics of a product’s copyright.
He focused on the different aspects surrounding content: talking to people and understanding their needs. Specifically, it is crucial that someone understands the importance of organizing the content before any publishing format decision. The team at Ixxus looks at the process that should be used and the technology that might be adopted.
Furthermore, Carl illustrated how all these factors have inevitably important impacts on profitability. Sometimes, he explained, it is difficult to make a publisher understand that IT issues are actually business issues. The time that is required in finding content is money, and it can be quite a lot of money!
To summarize his views, Carl pointed out five main issues that every publisher should consider:
- How to store your content so that all can access it
- How to decorate your content (by link and metadata) to aid discoverabilty
- How to collaborate and create the content
- How to deliver and reach the content
- How to granularise the content for adapting it to different situations
Effective resolution of these five aspects ensure publishers are able to maximise the digital content strategy and gain positive revenue.
About the author of this article
Giorgia De Micheli is from Italy and has a first degree in Communication and Society. Since joining the MA at Brookes she has gained work experience with Sylvie Zannier Literary Scouting; she has worked at The FutureBook Conference and is a part-time bookseller for Blackwell's in Oxford.
Edited by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 26 Feb 2018 around 3pm
Last edited: 26 02 2018