Another data point for the growth of the eBook market comes from data released from Amazon.com:

“Amazon.com customers now purchase more Kindle books than hardcover books–astonishing when you consider that we’ve been selling hardcover books for 15 years, and Kindle books for 33 months,” according to Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos.

And Kindle eBook sales are accelerating:

• Over the past 3 months Amazon has sold 143 Kindle eBooks for every 100 hardcover books
• Over the past month, Amazon has sold 180 Kindle eBooks for every 100 hardcover books
• Amazon sold more than three times as many Kindle eBooks in the first half of 2010 as in the first half of 2009
• The Association of American Publishers’ (AAP) latest data reports that e-book sales grew 163 percent in the month of May and 207 percent year-to-date through May. Kindle book sales in May and year-to-date through May exceeded those growth rates.

This is across Amazon.com’s entire U.S. book business and includes sales of hardcover books where there is no Kindle edition. Free Kindle books are excluded and if included would make the numbers even higher. What’s interesting is that this is with a relatively modest book inventory: 630,000 eBooks, with an additional 1.8 million out-of-copyright e-books made available for free.  It also clearly coincides with the growth in sales of the Kindle itself — device unit sales accelerated each month in the second quarter–both on a sequential month-over-month basis and on a year-over-year basis.  (Unlike Apple, Amazon still won’t disclose exactly how many Kindles have been sold.  Isn’t it about time they did?)  It stands to reason, more people with the device… more eBook sales. However it is outpacing hardcovers. And one would think there are many more people available to buy hardcovers than eBooks.  It hasn’t yet outsold paperbacks, which may be the larger of the three types of books.

Publishers are still highly selective in publishing eBook titles because they still lack the infrastructure to quickly and easily put out all books as both hardcover and eBooks.  There are many more books that could potentially be e-published, especially if they had better eBook publishing and distribution processes.  It illustrates both just how far the industry has come, and just how fare it is from getting to “long-tail” eBook publishing.

The continued rapid growth of eBooks is further underscored by the AAPs year-to-date data for eBooks sales:  The 13 submitting publishers to that category currently comprise 8.48 % of the total trade books market, compared to 2.89% percent for the same period last year — triple the growth of last year and nearing double digits — a marker for the industry that there is real money to be made in eBook, and companies that lack an eBook strategy could miss out on this increasingly significant revenue stream.

It is interesting to note that, compared to last year, people are purchasing more books, period.  Perhaps it is a sign of the improving economy, or perhaps it is an indication that people (especially adults) are reading more in general. The data is unclear on the reason.  What is clear is that eBooks continue to grow in popularity, and are unquestionably here to stay.

One of the biggest challenges facing brands as social media platforms continue to evolve is that of brand consistency.  In the “old” world, marketers defined messaging and images they felt were most representative of their brand.   On the social internet, the community defines the message and may begin to define the images.  How do Digital Asset Management (DAM) systems fit into this?  They are the central repository for a company’s digital media assets.

As companies intentionally reach out to their communities for input, this input will come in many formats. Brands may invite consumers to create new tag lines.   It may come as pictures of users with the product.  It may come in the form of home video extolling product benefits.  Consumer brands are actively seeking user generated content, partly to attract attention to the brand, partly to gain low/no cost re-usable content and partly to test the waters.

Platforms such as YouTube, Flickr and Vimeo are growing outlets for company created content but also for brand requested user generated content.  This user generated content may not comply with corporate defined brand image.  How do brands address this?  Or by ‘crowd sourcing” content, do brands give up control of brand identity?  The goal for many marketing teams is to create content that can be repurposed across multiple distribution channels and create tighter bonds with their customers.  Regardless of their intent, how do companies manage and repurpose user generated assets?

DAM systems can help companies manage these assets.   Any DAM solution provides the ability to define the ontology and taxonomy of digital assets.  It is possible to create additional categories which identify the assets as user generated, associated with a specific campaign or of certain image quality. DAM systems may also begin to incorporate social concepts such as the tag cloud, which shows the tags associated with specific assets.  They could also incorporate features such as reviews & comments, helping marketing departments identify the most popular or useful content.

A digital asset management system cannot control a company’s brand, but it can help that company manage the digital media assets related to the brand.  The system provides the company with a tool to review, assess, edit and manage assets with the intent to determine the asset’s alignment with brand image.  It then enables companies to extend their brand across multiple channels (i.e., mobile, internet, print, TV, etc.) through re-use and re-purpose of the selected asset(s).  Bottom line, digital asset management systems will have to integrate and manage professionally produced assets as well as those imported from social platforms.

In this world of all things social, there is a lot of focus on making existing platforms social.  As an example, there have been many discussions about social CRM.  While salesforce.com is considered to be social, traditional systems (i.e., Oracle) are not.  A simple definition of social CRM is “having a discussion when, where and how the customer wants it.”  Coming from a world of digital media, should we be talking about Social Digital Asset Management systems? Should users be able to access or provide digital assets when, where and how they want?   Is this an oxymoron or redundant?  Let’s review what functions a DAM system performs.

DAM systems evolved to address the challenges facing organizations who manage a variety of digital assets.  In an enterprise business, these assets would traditionally be managed by the marketing department.  They would include corporate logos & images.  If anyone outside of the marketing department needed these images, for any reason, they needed to go through the marketing department to gain access to these assets.  This could be a slow process with many bottlenecks.

Digital Asset Management systems evolved to provide a central repository for digital assets.  As these assets have evolved beyond static images into rich media assets incorporating audio and video, DAM systems became more elegant in how they addressed issues of tagging, metadata, taxonomy, ontology and overall semantics.  DAM systems, by necessity, must be easily integrated with other systems such as editing, transcoding, storage, digital rights and distribution.

Today, DAM systems are accessible by users across the enterprise, whenever they want.  Marketing may own the responsibility for establishing a corporate wide policy for tagging, metadata, etc., but groups such as sales, engineering, product management have access to the company’s digital media assets.  There is still separation between producers and consumers.  Does providing access make the system social?  Or does it become social when those same groups can become producers and contribute their own content and assets?

Perhaps a DAM system with the ability to annotate, rank and comment on these assets makes it social within the enterprise.  Or, perhaps it’s the option for online, interactive communication that facilitates effective collaboration.  System features now enable uses to rank assets or for managers to understand how many times an asset is viewed partly or in full, DAM systems provide intelligence and elements of social platforms.  DAM systems continue to evolve and incorporate features that feel social.  Perhaps they are as these capabilities are core components of many social sites and platforms.

The ability for a DAM system to accept and manage user generated content (UGC) is increasingly important.  If companies recognize the social web as a relevant content distribution outlet, they may also need to consider it as a source of content input.  The DAM system can become more social by enabling content upload and the assignment of relevant tags, metadata by establishing and automating a standard taxonomy and ontology.  Thus the DAM enables users to access all digital media assets for the company, when, where and how they like.

I was recently asked:

Is there anything you can share about how the file management needs differ from the way a publisher use a DAM?  I would think there would be a lot more transfers of very files (i.e. high resolution print-ready PDFs) and much, much less internal activity involving small files (i.e. photos, production files, etc.)

In general, yes, printers are working with and transferring large print-ready files.  Some of these can be hundreds of megabytes in size and so there can be significant concern in working with clients around bandwidth and the time it takes to send and upload the file.  However, internally on a local network, the size of the file is less of an issue.  But in general they tend to work with whole files and less frequently with the individual pieces — unless they’re doing specific touch up and color correction work on individual assets contained in the final work.

However, in some cases, printers provide DAM as a service to their clients.  They manage the assets on behalf of the client, providing browser-based access to not just the final print ready files, but in some cases the QuarkXPress or Adobe InDesign layouts, and both the hi- and low-res components (e.g., photos, graphics, images, fonts, etc.).  In this way, DAM allows them to offer additional or “value-added” services to their clients.

Publishers are a bit different.  They generally use DAM as an internal repository to maintain all of the elements in the publication (e.g., magazine or book), as well as the layout file, and the finished work.  So they are often working with both the large and the smaller files.   However it can vary across publishers. In some cases, a DAM is used as an integral part of the editorial process – where work in progress, all the individual components as well as the layouts and versions of both are kept.  Others may use DAM primarily for storage and distribution management of finished works.  Some use it for both.

Note that “Publishers” may also be either magazine or book publishers.  Magazine publishers typically have a broader range of content than book publishers (so far… but this is changing too) as they often have both print and Web versions of their content, have needs to support both workflows (which are different), and may have exclusive content for the web or mobile devices (e.g., video, audio, and other rich media hanging around) that is updated more frequently. The DAM provides a common repository for feeding both kinds of workflows, for grouping and categorizing related content, for finding other relevant assets that could be used in a developing story, and for distributing to both a web content management system (Web CMS) as well as to individuals, partners, channels, video streaming servers or mobile distribution platforms.

As well, for magazines in particular, they may be working with purchased or rights-controlled images, so managing the expiration and use of them in a publication or publications is critical.  Using an image out of its purchased rights can be extremely costly.  So the DAM helps in a way that printers typically don’t use it. In summary, publishing use is potentially a broader set of use cases, media types, workflows and file sizes (e.g. working with large video files… at least the initial master versions before they’re reformatted or transcoded for distribution).

Book publishers are typically working with a more limited range of content — photos, images, graphics, and fonts.  Now, as eBooks begin to incorporate more interactivity, the book publishing workflows and asset management challenges move towards those of magazine, web publishing and potentially “interactive applications”, and will require working with and managing a broader range of file types, components and workflows.

Lastly, note that print and publishing workflows vary a bit as well.  Print may use the assets in touchup, color correction and other pre-press workflows, perhaps with some limited review and approval with the client.  Publishers often use it in creative as well as review and approval workflows, and distribution workflows — which may embargo information until a set date and release it directly to particular people, partners or distribution channels (including to web sites and direct mobile devices).  It can be used this way too for print and eBooks books, where the distribution processes may include direct to the consumer and more frequent updates.

Feel free to keep the questions coming.

Global marketing is a challenge, regardless of the size of the company. In order to communicate with your customers and prospect you have to have the right content, in the right format, where the customer or prospect wants to consume it. The “right content” means that the pictures, text, videos, audio, messaging and more are appropriate for each region, geography, demographic or culture, and device. In regulated industries, like pharmaceutical and medical devices, it also has to comply with various regulations. Even within a country such as here in the US, how do you make sure that you’re marketing snow shovels in winter in New England while you’re marketing swimsuits and golf clubs in Florida and Arizona?

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After spending a week in Las Vegas at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Show it’s clear that the demand for managing video – often referred to as “Media Asset Management” (MAM) and for managing all kinds of digital files “Digital Asset Management” (DAM) — has grown substantially in the past year.

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Apparently Wiley has released an eReader comparison tool intended to allow buyers to compare the right reader for the right person. This is novel and perhaps needed, but it seems to me to miss an important point: Content.

Sure you can compare the devices based on what features they have, whether they are color or black and white, wireless or not, can read the book to you or allow you to read in the dark.

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