Mobile + Multimedia + Streaming = A New Paradigm and Opportunity
by
Darrell W. Gunter
If you ask most publishers of any content (books, journals, magazines, newspapers, etc.) if their content is mobile compliant, almost 100 percent of them will say yes. They would say that being mobile ready means being optimized for mobile, or to use one of the following formats; PDF, EPUB, or mobi. Well, there are many levels and definitions for anyone’s content as being ready for mobile. Each of the options above has their strengths and weaknesses, but most important is how their limitations affect the reader’s ability to have a full multimedia experience on a mobile device.
A good industry friend of mine, Max Riggsbee, the Chief Product Officer for Gadget Software, has studied the art of reading via mobile devices over the last few years. He developed a hypothesis around the best practices for publishers to present their content on mobile devices, establishing the following four rules:
- Rule 1: The user controls the medium. As mobile is the new medium, if users have a bad mobile experience, they won’t come back.
- Rule 2: Limit scrolling. Optimized mobile pages provide unlimited scrolling, which can be a challenge for any reader trying to manage his or her reading.
- Rule 3: Provide search functions. Readers want to search, find, discover, and read the content most important to them.
- Rule 4: The ability to send and receive notifications is important.
Since the launch of the smartphone in 2007, its capabilities have moved from simple texting and phone calls to managing our banking, streaming music, movies, videoconferences, and so on. The mobile device has emerged as the dominant medium for communication. ComScore has reported that mobile-device sales have surpassed 4.2 billion units globally, and mobile represents 58.7 percent of the overall media minutes between mobile, desktop, and tablet. One cannot dispute the data that smartphone technology has changed the world user community’s behavior. Kogan Page author Paul Armstrong’s book Disruptive Technologies provides a detailed definition and examples of the three key factors; technology, behavior, and data. The data shows us the path of the behavior and how technology has led the way.
Let’s take a look at each of the current reading options for the mobile, small-screen device.
The PDF is now a quarter century old. Established in 1993, it was born out of the PostScript page-description language. While the PDF serves several functions and acts as a very reliable container file that can be sent, received, and stored on multiple devices, it does not provide an optimum reading experience on a small-screen device. Even Phil Ydens of the PDF Association has admitted that the PDF is not the best format for such a device (watch his keynote talk from the 2015 PDF Technical Conference, available on YouTube). To read a PDF on a small-screen device, you have to do a lot of pinching and zooming and must move the PDF object around to read it in a linear fashion. Forget about having multimedia mobile features within the PDF.
EPUB
The beloved EPUB format has many advantages over the PDF, but it too has its limitations on the small-screen device.
There are some strict requirements for creating the archive for EPUB, and creating documents does take some prior knowledge. You must understand the syntax of XML and XHTML 1.1 as well as how to create a style sheet.
A user with the proper software can create a PDF document without any programming knowledge at all; however, with EPUB, you need to know the basics of the associated languages to build valid files (see https://www.lifewire.com/epub-vs-pdf-3467286). Just as important, the EPUB format does not make it easy to add multimedia functions to the environment.
mobi
The mobi format that Amazon uses for its book platform to provide the reader text-only material is pretty good; however, it has limitations. It lacks the multimedia features that smartphones provide to the user community.
A couple of years ago, Google recognized that mobile usage was surpassing desktop and tablet usage, and it wanted to ride the mobile wave. To stay in step with the dramatic increase of mobile usage, it established Google Accelerated Mobile Pages (Google AMPs). The Accelerated Mobile Pages Project is an open-source initiative that makes it easy for publishers to create mobile-friendly content once and have it load instantly everywhere.
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No matter what the content, the topic, the need, or the task, the reader wants to have a great, fulfilling experience. A student studying for an exam doesn’t have just a linear reading experience; he or she also has a nonlinear reading experience that allows him or her to study more effectively. This can be described as an efferent reading activity. It is so important for the student to be able to search, find, discover, and read the most pertinent information for a test, paper, or presentation, and the screen of a mobile device is most likely the first thing that a student uses to access desired content. The portable mobile device provides the user with many new opportunities to search, find, discover, and read content in places and at times that were not available pre-smartphone.
Let’s talk about usage. What type of usage stats are you currently getting from your mobile app? Are you able to determine any key threads that benefit your overall user community? What if your users had better features and capabilities? Would they spend more time with your content? In a recent Scroll.in article, the CEO of Hachette Group, Arnaud Nourry, stated that “the eBook is a stupid product: no creativity, no enhancement.” The current e-book offerings are flat, with no audio, no video, and no multimedia features. Imagine the joy of your user community when its flat reading experience is transformed into a full 3D reading experience.
Mr. Nourry also provides a history lesson about how the music business delayed going digital, allowing piracy to creep in and create a new level of disruption. We have seen piracy hit the scholarly publishing industry: SciHub has pirated millions of articles from it. To combat piracy, the music and movie industries have built new businesses around streaming. Why hasn’t the book publishing industry moved in this direction? The beautiful thing about streaming is that the content cannot be stolen.
Since the development and launch of the e-book, one must ask the question: Why hasn’t the industry moved to develop the e-book further and add bolder features that enhance the reader’s experience?
The other key topic that I want to present is “app sprawl.” Some publishers have launched an app for every book—and may have over a hundred apps. No reader is going to download hundreds of apps; this is too confusing—and they take up too much real estate on a smartphone. Imagine if a publisher had a hundred titles across five subject areas. In the current way of doing business, a company would actually create a hundred separate apps. This is very costly and time-consuming. Gadget Software has established a virtual-streaming publishing platform that provides the publisher with a single, branded LiveClient™ that can be downloaded from the app and Google Play Store. The LiveClient provides the publisher with a Channel and a vPub™ for each book, journal, magazine, and so on.
Users can traverse the Channels and vPubs with a single search. They can create playlists incorporating all of their search results from a variety of sources. Users can see the content they subscribe to—and also what they do not subscribe to, which creates a new merchandising opportunity. The branded LiveClient’s Channel and vPub structure provides the publisher an opportunity to unsilo its content and open up that treasure chest to each user. Imagine finding that jewel of content that supports your research or satisfies your itch for knowledge on a specific topic. Furthermore, this branded LiveClient structure allows the publisher to create its very own Disney World of content for its user community in a just-in-time and just-in-need capacity.
Now let me share a very important story about how the industry was slow to move to digital books.
In my 2014 article, “As Worlds Collide: New Trends and Disruptive Technologies,” published the journal Against the Grain I shared the story about the 2001 PSP symposium titled “The E-book: Crouching Dragon or Hidden Tiger?” Publishers and librarians actually debated the pros and cons of the e-book. This industry is very slow moving, and it required validated, published proof that a shift to a new medium such as digital books was acceptable.
The publishing executive who moved first in both categories was Derk Haank, who was then CEO of Elsevier. At a meeting in Japan, a library director asked Derk when Elsevier was going to load up the journal’s backfiles. Derk asked him how important this was to the library community, and the director said it was very important. Derk replied in his normal, very confident manner, “We will load them ASAP.” Without any hesitation, Derk informed the Elsevier team about his decision, and this ambitious project moved forward on his order. After Elsevier’s announcement, other publishers introduced their own backfile programs. When Derk moved over to Springer (now Springer Nature), one of his first initiatives was to digitize the entire book collection. By 2006, Springer had beaten the other scholarly publishers to the punch with its e-book program. These two anecdotes demonstrate our industry’s lethargy in moving into new technologies.
In sharing this history, I am working very hard to make the point that our scholarly publishing industry takes entirely too long to accept new innovations. Our goal should be to enhance and improve researchers’ experience, allowing them to increase their efficiency and effectiveness—which will, in turn, greatly benefit humanity. It is time for the publishing community to begin the process of innovation by first questioning the status quo of e-books and agreeing that we can (and should) do better for our reading community.
In summary, I would suggest the following seven laws for Being Truly Mobile:
1. Study your users’ behavior and ask yourself, “Are we really providing our user community the best mobile experience?”
2. Establish a mobile ambassador in your company as the town crier espousing the mobile gospel
3. Embrace mobile technology and understand that it is your user’s first screen for access to your content
4. Adopt a native mobile standard for your content that provides your user community a 360-degree multimedia experience
5. Get on the Google AMP wave to ensure that your user community benefits from faster-loading pages on its mobile devices
6. Establish performance metrics to gauge the success of your new, innovative mobile implementation
7. Don’t rest on your laurels—stay current on new developments and keep updating the services you provide to your user community
I guarantee that if you follow these seven laws of Being Truly Mobile, the enterprise value of your company will dramatically increase.
This blog was originally published June 5, 2018, via The Future of Publishing series is brought to you by Amnet in association with BISG (Book Industry Study Group, a leading book trade association for standardized best practices, research and information, and events)
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