Semantic welcomes Rhinegold Publishing
25 September 2008
Good news, we are really proud to welcome our latest client, Rhinegold Publishing, and their new Semantic designed website: www.rhinegold.co.uk.Rhinegold is a leading UK publisher for music and the performing arts. They produce specialist magazines for the music industry including Classical Music and Opera Now, as well as a large number of educational titles in music, drama and performing arts.
They represent a great coup for Semantic, and have really been an exemplary client. In return we have developed a full e-commerce, content-managed website that includes a product catalogue, magazine subscriptions, complex special offers, data capture, magazine micro-site, an order management system and more.
We hope you take a moment to look over the site. As ever, if you have any feedback on our work email us at incoming@semantic.co.uk.
Posted by Nick Warren at 9:40 AM
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Strategy for publishers
23 September 2008
Just recently something fairly unusual has happened... I've changed my mind about something :-)We work with a lot of publishers and I've always believed that their core product, the book, was reasonably safe in it's current form. Yes there would be digital nibbling round the edges, but by and large we would all continue to want the convenience, comfort and sheer damn friendliness of paper.
But I don't believe that any more. I think the days of paper are numbered.
Of course people will still read paper, but in five years time everyone over the age of about thirteen is going to have a device perfectly capable of reading online books... we'll call it a phone but really it's a computer... and it will be almost as powerful as the laptop I am typing on now. Then, as the digital reading tools get better, and the mobile phone generation* get older, people who want to read paper books will end up paying a premium for that privilege.
Within a few years we'll be at a point where digital reading (this isn't really about books) will have the platform penetration to reach a tipping point, and explode... and there aren't many places it won't touch.
Then there's the forthcoming killer app.
At some point Amazon (or someone) will launch a service that will allow subscribers to read as many digital books as they like for a fixed monthly fee. That's a killer service for digital reading and something which traditional publishing will not be able to answer.
You may say that reading digital books may never be as comfortable as reading paper... but that's missing the point. It doesn't have to be... it just has to be a better overall experience. Things like access to unlimited books, bookmarking, annotations, web links, sharing, embeded audio, video, and so on... will tip the balance in time. I think that's more a matter of when than if.
It's a clear threat to anyone in the paper business, but a phenomenal opportunity for anyone in the content business.
*Mobile phone generation. The one that came after us thirty-eight years olds... the one to whom reading onscreen is totally natural.
Posted by Nick Warren at 7:19 AM
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