Entries tagged with “databases” from Tools of Change for Publishing
CEOs Must Have API Literacy
Peter Brantley
September 23, 2008
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With the release of the expanded Google Book Search application programming interface (API) presenting new opportunities and decisions for publishers, Adam Hodgin argues for API-literate CEOs:
Why does it matter whether your CEO knows what an API is? It matters because publishers (and newspaper owners, TV networks, film studios, content makers of all shapes) are not going to allow Google (YouTube, he she or ItTube, or anybody else) to manage and define the API which has access to their content. Having, or buying into, allying with, the API's which manage and accesses your content may be the key decision for media companies in the next decade. Either your CEO knows what an API is, and can find out how, in strategic terms, to negotiate Google's, Amazon's, Facebook's and Apple's, or he/she needs to be a media genius who does it by gut instinct (Rupert Murdoch is the only one of those that I can think of and he is the wrong side of 70). The heads of Random House, Conde Nast, Elsevier, Cengage, Hachette and Pearson really ought to have an intuition about the way their business can develop an API to the servers which are hosting all their content. I wonder if any of them do?
Visualizing the Advantages of StartWithXML
Mike Shatzkin
September 22, 2008
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Here are two ways to think about why a StartWithXML workflow can be important and valuable:
1. Until very recently, we lived in a world where the book was the sun and everything else orbited around it. Now the CONTENT, the IP, is the sun, and the book is relegated to one of the satellite bodies (still often the biggest, but it is a lot different to be Jupiter than it is to be the sun!) When what is at the "core" is different, the processes to create it have to change.
2. A StartwithXML workflow effectively makes the content file into a database. Just about any information relevant to the book, or any piece of the book, can be associated to the content in an XML file, just as it can in a database. Up until now, this has been seen primarily as a tool for production: the database holding information about document structure that translates into the presentation in each iteration. But the capability applies just as well to rights data, marketing data, or fragment identification.
Can these things be accomplished in other ways? Almost certainly, yes, but XML has the advantage of being an accepted standard, and although it may (will) require some dialog between entities sharing it, using XML is the fastest way to enable machines to talk to machines about anything related to a book's content.
Survey Results: Students Rely on Digital Tools for Research
Mac Slocum
June 25, 2008
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Results from Ebrary's 2008 Global Student E-Book Survey show that students working on research projects use digital reference tools more often than print materials. From Publishers Weekly:
Respondents say they use Google and other search engines as well as e-books more than print books for research assignments; online encyclopedias and Wikipedia are only slightly less used than print books, according to the survey. Print books, however, are deemed the most trustworthy sources, as well as far better for cover-to-cover reading.
Post-survey analysis included in the Ebrary report notes a gap between the resources students trust and the resources they use:
While four of the top five trusted resources are print, four of the top five resources students reported using are electronic (Google, e-books, e-reference, and Wikipedia). Students will use whatever information resource most efficiently gets the assignment done within acceptable parameters for the desired grade.
Sorting through Layers of Copyright
Peter Brantley
April 30, 2008
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John Mark Ockerbloom writes about the discrepancies between organizational policies toward copyright and database policies:
The AAA [American Anthropological Association] relies on JSTOR for providing its older issues online. JSTOR has the American Anthropologist back-run going to the very first issues in 1888, but it won’t actually give me access to the articles in the public domain issues unless I use my institution’s subscription. (And even then, JSTOR’s standard terms and conditions, which institutions normally agree to when they subscribe, prohibit downloading and redistributing full issues, whether or not they’re copyrighted.) It would be nice if JSTOR’s policies were liberalized for their public domain content, but at least AAA has acknowledged that their articles can be reproduced once obtained by legitimate means.
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