In order to understand the decisions that publishers face with regard to developing digital businesses it is important to have a basic level of understanding about the technology involved. It is useful to see how the technology has developed and what the key building blocks are for publishing products as it can explain some of the reasons why the industry has developed in a certain way. It is also helpful to understand some of the basics behind the technology as it can impact on digital strategies in different ways. It can make it clearer why certain aspects of digital publishing cost what they do, something that is often questioned.
This part of the book therefore outlines the main technical aspects of digital production and digital products. It explains the evolution of some of the main technologies that are key to the creation and distribution of digital products today, showing how this history has influenced the way these products work. It also looks at some of the current technological developments that may well be key to newer digital products, as well as drivers for the industry and its structure for the future.
This part is not very technical but should provide enough information for the non-specialist to understand the basic components of the digital publishing environment. It selects those developments most useful when considering the way the industry is moving in terms of digital products. It does not go into detail about the way the technology works. However, by putting some of the main technical issues into the publishing context it aims to provide a useful starting point for the rest of the book.
A framework for the growth of digitisation in publishing
Thompson, in Books in the Digital Age,1 explores four stages of development in the digitisation of publishing:
- operating systems and control
- digital production methods
- customer and marketing initiatives
- digital products.
The first refers to the operating systems that publishers introduced to allow for the management of different operations from stock control to sales records. The second stage covers the development of the manipulation of content, moving towards digital production methods. While to some extent these developments took place concurrently, the key point is that these production systems became much more integral to the operation of most publishing houses at this point in time. The third stage focuses on the proliferation of sales and marketing activity that could be clearly observed in the late 1990s and early 2000s as the web began to be fully exploited, both in terms of the growth of online retail and for marketing and advertising through websites and online catalogues; this has continued to develop with the growth of social media for marketing purposes.
Thompson then identifies the fourth stage as the production of digital products themselves, the delivery of digital content in a digital environment. Again it is important to see that while digital products existed (early reference works, for instance, had been available in digital format for some time), the impact is only now being felt more significantly. Digital content development is continuing to evolve within the web environment, with the application of social media to source and curate content, and the growth of self-publishing opportunities.
It is useful to bear this model in mind when examining the key technical developments of the last decades. This part will not deal with all these areas, but rather will focus on the technologies enabling management of the content (and its output into print products) and then track the development of digital platforms that could be used to deliver the content digitally. It is important to remember that technologies at every point are moving at different speeds. Increased processing capacity, broadband strength, mobile networks, new authoring tools, storage capacity, data protection are all driving changes in the development of the digital environment for publishers. Publishing needs all sorts of technology from authentication to compression, not just digital outputs and workflow systems. However, we will not consider every aspect of technological change, important though these are, but rather focus on those primarily to do with the development of the content in order to produce digital products.
1 Thompson, John. Books in the Digital Age. Polity, 2005: 312.