Next month’s Tools of Change for Publishing conference in New York includes a session on Wednesday morning that I want to highlight.
At 8:30 a.m. on February 15, Dianne Kennedy, Peter Meirs and John Dougherty are presenting an update on nextPub in a session titled “Bringing Magazines to Digital Distribution Channels“.
Kennedy works at IDEAlliance, an association dedicated to identifying best practices for efficient end-to-end digital media workflows. Meirs and Dougherty oversee technology initiatives at Time Inc. and Hearst, respectively. All are working on the nextPub specification.
Although the title and session description leave the impression that nextPub is just about magazines, it is not. The specification is valuable to any publisher interested in creating content that can be seamlessly transformed for distribution across a variety of digital reading devices.
That would mean pretty much any book or periodical publisher.
Much is made of differences between book and magazine publishing. However, when it comes to workflow, metadata and cross-platform presentation, I’ve found that many more similarities than differences.
The nextPub specification offers publishers an opportunity to streamline the delivery of any content to multiple devices. I encourage you to consider attending the session. If you’re registered, you can also post questions and comments on the session’s description page.
A bit of disclosure: When I worked at Time Inc., Peter Meirs was a colleague and remains a friend. On two engagements with Hachette’s magazine division (now largely part of Hearst), John Dougherty was a client. Neither of them was involved in the creation of this post.
