Q&A with Matt Turner, Mark Logic
Jinfo Blog

11th February 2010

By Nancy Davis Kho

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During January's Software & Information Industry Associations' Information Industry Summit (IIS - http://www.siia.net/iis/2010/), VIP Magazine had an opportunity to speak with publishers, technology vendors, and content buyers. A series of brief interviews explore innovation in the information industry and how publishers are working to meet the needs of today's enterprise content buyers. Matt Turner is a principal media consultant at Mark Logic and leads the design and development of information applications for customers including BusinessWeek, Simon &Schuster, McGraw-Hill Education, Cengage Learning, Ingram Digital, and Elsevier. Matt has authored numerous articles on XML products and publishing systems and has spoken at numerous conferences including the XML conference, OpenPublish, Seybold Seminars, and Documation. Matt has more than 14 years of experience in the implementation of leading edge content technologies and has worked with companies including Sony BMG Music Entertainment, the Sony Group Company's 550 Digital Media Ventures, and PC World Online. Matt's blog, “Discovering XQuery,” can be read at: http://xquery.typepad.com. VIP: LiveWire readers are typically information professionals managing content budgets; Mark Logic's customers are publishers who need to optimise the content for their end users. The panel discussion in which you participated at IIS, 'Where is the Money in Customized Publishing', defined custom publishing as a way for publishers to user existing content to reach new audiences. Because they are under so much budget pressure, one of the big topics for our audience is whether they can access content in a pay-as-you-go format. Do you see publishers being more open to pay per use approaches? MT: Yes. The granularity that Mark Logic enables lets publisher move pay-as-you-go, or even per page. The situations in which the user can go in and cherry-pick interesting information and then compile it into a new product, that’s a typical Mark Logic custom publishing approach. Those projects are pay-as-you go because it’s based on a usage model. NDK: Conventional wisdom says that as a publisher, offering pay-as-you-go when you could theoretically get a subscription sale is to be avoided at all costs. MT: It's true that when you have a subscription sale, you get the renewal revenue. But this is just really listening to your audience. The idea behind a lot of our customer publishing projects isn’t a replacement, it’s thought of as a separate revenue. We’ve done a lot of these projects in the education market and that’s one place where the custom publishing model represents an augmentation. You still have the big purchase of the books and you have this other granular market that didn’t exist before. I have to say about that, I assumed that when we first did custom publishing we’d walk in and publishers would say “Yeah, our print business is dying, we need to have better, flexible, digital,” but that’s not the answer I’ve gotten. It’s more about doing something that wasn’t possible before, so it’s new revenue. In some areas print business is dying, but in other areas it’s doing fine. VIP: Where are we on the spectrum of publishers embracing custom publishing? MT: We’re in the very beginning stage. It has to do with the mentality of creation. Now you get into authors, editors, and people who are planning projects, and what are they thinking about a piece of content. For some piece of content, it’s not really going to be that custom - for historical fiction, for example. But for people who have been writing content that has a potential for reuse, thinking about making the content media neutral is the first step. So I want to create my content, then I’m going to package it into a book and then I might package it for custom digital publishing, a product that’s pulled from multiple sources. VIP: So does it make sense for end users to be asking about custom publishing options from their vendors? MT: It’s really, really important if you're part of a targeted audience, like most B2B information is. A lot of those publishers have directories, a lot of them have marketplaces. Those are the kind of things that are meaningful to an audience and what I think we’re seeing people do is take the next step. A targeted audience wants to go the extra mile and use custom publisher content because it gives them an edge. For instance Congressional Quarterly (http://corporate.cq.com/wmspage.cfm?parm1=12) is a big customer of ours. Time and time again, they’ve been able to take the next step of really helping somebody do their job by providing targeted content at the right time, and they see much greater subscription rates for those kinds of products than they do for the ones that are just linear reading.

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