On the Waves of Change

Adobe guru Bill McCoy had some choice words for digital publishing fans this week:

"However, a sea-change is clearly under way. Google and Amazon are scanning books and making page-images available. Pirate eBooks are circulating, sometimes within hours of being published in print form. A new "digital generation" is clearly going to expect the option to read on screens. Other parts of the print publishing industry have moved more rapidly: Elsevier now makes over 50 percent of their academic journal revenue from digital subscriptions, and the trend to what they call ‘E-Only’ subscriptions is growing sharply, and in the tech sphere O’Reilly Safari appears to be doing quite well. Libraries are also acting as change agents, since digital distribution yields immense gains in efficiency and patron access; publishers realize that it’s unreasonable to expect to hold libraries back from going digital.

"As a result book publishers – across all segments – feel their hands are being forced and are preparing to make all of their content available digitally. They are absolutely afraid that their business models, indeed the whole industry, may well change in fundamentally disruptive ways, but it’s clear that the book business, like Hollywood, has collectively decided not to sit on the sidelines while Amazon, Google, piracy, and the Web do the disrupting. Their intentions are laid out in recent initiatives announced by Random House and HarperCollins, among others."

Case Studies Uploaded to Our Web site

If you’re looking for success stories for digital publishing with NXTbook, we’ve just uploaded six Case Studies. Visit digital magazine Case Studies here, digital collateral Case Studies here, travel collateral Case Studies here and digital catalog Case Studies here.

See the President’s PowerPoint Presentation!

OK, not that President. But our own Spencer Ewald was a keynote presenter at the Publishing Expo in the UK this week. If you couldn’t make it, though, feel free to download his presentation – full of some great examples of digital publishing success – here.

Nxtbook Welcomes University Business and District Administration to the Family

While kids around the country are thinking about getting out of school for the year, NXTbook Media is thrilled to be just getting into schools. This month marks the NXTbook debut for both University Business and District Administration magazines. We’re thrilled to have them on-board. The education market is prime territory for digital editions, and we’re looking forward to helping colleges, universities and other educational businesses find their Nxt solution in digital publishing.

Hardware Failure in Content Delivery Network

The content delivery network that we use to quickly deliver NXTbook pages all over the world, has informed us of a hardware failure on their master DNS server. Their systems have redundancies in place and are quickly switching over to a backup DNS server, but the hardware failure has caused a disruption in their content delivery services. This disruption will temporarily prevent some readers from being able to load NXTbook pages. We have been assured that this problem is temporary and will be resolved quickly. We apologize for this inconvenience.

Update:
The content delivery network has just reported that all DNS servers are again active. They expect full availability to be restored in 10 to 20 minutes.

Sneak Peak into Nxtbook Media Case Studies

Right now if you click on the Case Study pages of our website, you’re treated to the obligatory "Coming Soon" copy. But because you’re a faithful blog reader, you can be treated to some of these case studies before we post them to the website next week.

Digital Catalogs – Stretching Your Brand 

Travel Collateral – Six Figure Success 

Digital Collateral – Making an Impression

Travel Collateral – After Katrina

Digital Magazines – When the World is Your Audience

Thinking of a Vacation?

Most of our publications require subscriptions to view (many free, some not), but we’ll periodically be posting catalogs, magazines and collateral that are free of such restrictions. This week, we offer you the 2006 Official Vacation Planning Guide for San Diego.

You’re Going to Need a Bigger Platform

According to this report from AdAge, more than half of all marketers are planning on spending more for rich media advertisers in the coming year. This means that magazine publishers who previously would’ve had to watch this revenue disappear can now encourage the use of rich media advertising in their NXTbooks!

Today’s Term for the NEW Economy: The Force Multiplier

"The tectonic plates are moving beneath us," said Rob Gregory, group publisher at Dennis Publishing’s Maxim."There’s a term in the Marines called a force multiplier, If you’re putting print together with digital the right way, that’s the result," said Gregory.

For Maxim, which already operates a sprawling digital platform, multiplying print’s force meant making its May issue the inaugural "Maxim Mobile" edition. An editor’s letter in the issue, which goes on sale April 25, urges readers to consume the issue with cellphones in hand and to enter contests and submit content whenever they see a "Maxim Mobile" icon.

The article goes on to say that for the first year ever, the Web will collect more ad dollars than magazines. Publishers using NXTbook Media have the unique ability to collect both.

Miami Herald To Fully Embrace Digital Technology

In a memo to the Herald staff this week, Executive Editor Tom Fiedler wrote:

"Every job in the newsroom  — EVERY JOB  — is going to be redefined to include a Web responsibility and, if appropriate, radio. For news gatherers, this means posting everything we can as soon as we can. It means using the web site to its fullest potential for text, audio and video. We’ll come to appreciate that MiamiHerald.com is not an appendage of the newsroom; it’s a fundamental product of the newsroom."

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