Digital Publishing as a Platform

A New Platform

After talking with Steve Kobrin about Wharton Digital Press (WDP), it really got me thinking about what this could mean as a platform. More specifically, what are the areas of "experimentation" that may be worth trying.

Some Experiment Ideas

Hardware design: Since Kindle last much longer than iPad, but iPad can do the razzle-dazzle graphics, what makes for a better consumption experience and what are the trade-off's. It would be interesting to see if there are logical segmentation in terms of who would find which device "better" under what circumstances. And, most importantly, why.

Hardware business-model: since majority of cost comes from physical distribution, a national news-media firm is thinking about giving subscribers fancy tablet to cut cost over the mid/long term. A major financial firm is thinking about giving their bankers tablets as a way to eliminate the $10k average spend per year per banker in printing. With PoD, printing and distribution may not be a pain point for WDP per se, but this could be an opportunity to explore alliance with organizations who may be interested in providing subsidized hardware.

Software: interactivity is clearly one of the major benefits of going digital. It would be interesting to explore what are the key aspects that are important to readers and authors. The result could be fed into a process to create a framework/suit that makes the process easier in the creation chain.

Immersive relationship: with the hardware and content having interactivity through sensors and data trail, this is the first time that a publisher/author can have an on-going relationship with the readership. How should this work? For example, with the machines understanding what readers prefer in actual consumption, this could provide a venue for recommendation not unlike what Netflix Challenge has done but for reading.

For readers: I take a lot of notes when reading. Until now, this has been a very cumbersome process especially for retrieving specific detail and consolidating across volumes. Some sort of vault would be nice. Better yet, a way to automate cross referencing as I search for past notes would be sweet.

I could go on. This is going to be an interesting space to watch in the years to come.