Forward-thinking editors, however, demand freedom to reuse and repurpose content in innovative, high value ways, especially on mobile devices.

Even well into the digital age, publishers have persisted in maintaining processes that confine their businesses to a specific format (usually, the book) and to a single business model. Forward-thinking editors, however, demand freedom to reuse and repurpose content in innovative, high value ways, especially on mobile devices.

BookExpo 2018 - Content Liberation Panel

At BookExpo last month, a panel discussion – The Content Liberation Movement – identified the digital transformation accelerators that can help editors and executives break down the barriers. Featured guests were Ganessan Paramanathan, who serves as Evangelist and Solutions Architect at Alfresco, an enterprise open-source software company focused on driving the convergence of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and Business Process Management (BPM) to advance the flow of digital business; Maxwell Riggsbee, the co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Gadget Software, a virtual publishing technology that atomizes, enhances and streams book, manual and journal content to smartphones; and Renee Swank, Sr. Director, Copyright Clearance Center.

“A lot of publishers [are] burdened by the old ways of continuing to publish in a very print-based workflow – still creating print first, focusing on print-first review processes and content creation process, thinking about their content very linearly, and creating front-to-back books,” Swank told CCC’s Chris Kenneally, who moderated the discussion.

“I think that gets in the way of being able to open and liberate your content, where you contextualize your content, where you can allow people to search in different ways,” she explained. “Instead of creating a front-to-back book or a front-to-back set of content that’s really about a particular product – the approach should be about creating more granular pieces of content that can be mixed and matched and enriched, whether that might be for a web platform or a mobile device.”

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