search

publishinginnovations / teams

teams for innovation report project
0 stars 1 forks source link

Team reports: May 3 #9

Open jeffreybarry opened 5 years ago

jeffreybarry commented 5 years ago

Respond with your team reports for this week.

raula21 commented 5 years ago

Team Report #2 As the industry analysis team, we hope to continue to further our knowledge of the publishing industry by continuing to research and analyze the industry. In doing so, we hope to continue to articulate our knowledge to the class so that we can make the best ebooks possible. Over the past week, our team has learned a lot more about the publishing industry. Foremost, the publishing industry is a $27 billion industry with the five largest publishers being Penguin Random House, Hatchette Livre, Springer Nature, Scholastic, and WIley. However, as the publishing industry continues to innovate, it is becoming increasingly competitive. Similar to what Wolfgang Blau said in the Conde Nast Video, it is not all about money but rather also creativity and deciding what to focus on. One of the greatest trends within the industry is the rise of self-publishers and their increasing ability to compete with publishing companies. Technological advancements such as an abundance of available information and social have allowed individuals to gain immense exposure to successes in the industry and market themselves very easily. From our research, the sectors poised for the greatest growth are the children’s book industry and the education industry. However, in the past year the adult non-fiction sector experienced significant growth.

In examining this industry, we have been searching for growth opportunities and ways to innovate. One of the greatest trends in this industry is in the increasing popularity with audiobooks, with audiobook downloads up almost 30% last year (Forbes). Some other top innovations being pursued include improvements in the self-publishing industry such as quality control software or subscription-based readership services. Innovations that stood out to us were advances that enhance readers’ experiences. In analyzing ebooks and online publishing, users love elements such as peer reviews and the ability to transfer comments and annotations across devices and people. Some innovations that we think would be very beneficial to the industry include the development of interactive books. We believe this could revolutionize the education industry by improving readers’ visualizations and conceptual understandings of readings as well as offering reader specific problems. In publishing our ebooks, they foremost need to be error-free and attractive, but should also seek to enhance the reader experience.

An improved peer review processes and servers that would allow authors to communicate to readers and evoke discussions is an advancement in the ebook industry that is feasible and desired by the market. Shenandoah Editor Beth Staples explained that if a better more effective Word “track changes” software were to be developed it would be highly successful, so we hope to look more into this market gap next week.

Furthermore, what we hope to accomplish next week is a deeper dive into how desirable and feasible these innovations are, and whether not the market is going to want them in 10- 15 years. Another aspect that we hope to accomplish is to create a concrete presentation of the ebook industry and our findings, so we can explain to the other teams our analysis and help them in their efforts. For example, our research into what types of ebooks are in demand right now could help the design team create an attractive ebook.

The challenges we face is narrowing down the directions and fields we look into, the ebook market shows extreme promise in a diverse set of sectors. Our challenge will be to determine what sectors are most stable and profitable in the future. We won't have all the information to determine what sector is going to be the most successful in 10-15 years, so we will have to make a judgment call on what area of the ebook industry we should focus on based off of our research and input from other teams.

We are excited to have our whole team back together and to begin finalizing our analysis of the ebook industry. We look forward to helping out other teams with our analysis and hearing their inputs and feedback!

daytonconklin commented 5 years ago

For the quality control team, we are continuing to discuss and research the qualities that make for a good eBook. This week in class, we all worked on uploading and cleaning up the text from the Shenandoah Literary magazine articles on Sigil. In addition to the standards that make an eBook successful and pleasing to read that we previously discussed in our last team report, what we did on Sigil also made us realize that there are more in depth standards that must be met. When cleaning up the text in Sigil, we had to delete many things that were present on the Shenandoah website that would not make sense to have in the final eBook. For example, some of the readings contained background colors, colored borders surrounding the text, images, and hyperlinks. When we are reviewing our classmates’ eBook, we want to ensure that the text has been sufficiently cleaned with no distracting colors or images on the page. In addition, it is important that each of the articles be consistent with respect to their style, colors, font, font size, and other things that might appear inconsistent. This can all be taken care of in Sigil, but it might be easy for our classmates to accidentally overlook an inconstancy throughout the three articles, which is why we have discussed that we will make sure that not only the text is thoroughly cleaned, but the cleaning itself remains consistent. If our team can ensure this is done in addition to what we previously stated what we will also be looking for, the final eBook products should all meet the standards of what makes a quality eBook.

brueggemanw21 commented 5 years ago

William Brueggeman, Brendan Dugan, McLean Fonvielle Team Report

For our team report this week we are focusing on the platform GitHub. Using GitHub allows groups to communicate with each other, as well as within the group more efficiently. By using issues we have already been able to create discussion questions and forums where each student can see what others are confused about or what they are trying to learn. This can be used with groups as a way of communicating. As each group progresses in their specific role in the project, we are seeking to use GitHub to allow them to transfer their information to us so that we can document and make sure everyone is on the right path with the correct information. Within GitHub we have explored the project board feature which allows us to organize notes and goals of other teams. Wiki’s are a built in way of Github that allows us to document more effectively. Using README documents will allow us to communicate what the project's goals are and what to do to fix them. As groups get further along in their processes in the next week we are seeking to sit down with them in class and understand a deeper knowledge of their individual roles so that we can come up with a better way to organize and keep teams on track to finish their development.

changj19 commented 5 years ago

Christian Hanna, Jesse Chang DCI-175 | Coding Team | Team Report No. 2 Professor J. Barry 5/03/2019

The coding team is focused on learning the EPUB file structure, and coding standards for HTML/XHTML/CSS within EPUBS files. We've compiled a list of resources on these topics and have them listed below:

  1. EPUB Content Documents 3.0.1 | This document, EPUB Content Documents 3.0.1, defines profiles of HTML5, SVG, and CSS for use in the context of EPUB Publications. (This anchor will bring you directly to a section on EPUB navigation & how a Table of Contents should be formatted)

  2. This IDPF Link contains a table of EPUB samples and this IDPF link features a matrix of features that can be found in the forementioned examples. These resources are especially useful for seeing what can be done with/in an EPUB as well as how to do it.

We are researching the best dimensions for images to aid the design team in creating cover images for the eBooks, and can work with the quality control team in reviewing the code (/code formatting / organization) in our class' eBooks.

As a class, we should be publishing EPUB 3.0 eBooks, and not EPUB 2.0 eBooks. This is because EPUB 3.0 brings improvements, is more feature rich, and allows for better semantics. EPUB 3.0 brings:

Sigil defaults to publishing in EPUB 2.0. Our class as a whole should to set it to publish in EPUB 3.0. Sigil -> Preferences -> General Settings -> "Create New or Empty Epub as:" [x] Version 3.

clevelande19 commented 5 years ago

Editorial and Strategic Communications Team Report, Week 2 Emily Cleveland and Emma Thai Earlier this week, our team read and organized the works everyone chose from Shenandoah into 18 ebooks based on category. We also consulted Shenandoah for more pieces so that each category could have enough content: poem-heavy categories, for instance, needed more pieces than fiction-heavy categories, so it was necessary to supplement other class members’ piece selections with these additions. These categories varied from author, form of writing, and theme. Each class member chose which ebook they prefer to edit for their individual project. This week, we don’t have an official assignment because there is currently no content to edit. Once people begin working on their ebooks next week, we will begin editing and reviewing them along with the quality control team. One thing to consider now is what ways we might consider advertising and making the eBooks and final report accessible to the public. It will be important as we get closer to the end of the term and the spring term festival that we work closely with other teams, namely the design team, to consider aesthetic aspects of the presentation, such as poster/booth design, etc. Looking forward to the last week, we will be doing final edits on everyone’s ebooks as well as the innovation reports due Tuesday of that week. It will be important that we not only ensure that each individual report makes sense and is free of errors but also that each report fits in with the others into a cohesive larger report. One of the biggest challenges we are currently facing is simply time management. The very nature of our team’s process--editorial--requires completed work from others before we can proceed with our own. Throughout this week, for example, after creating the 18 categories for other teams, there has been little work we can do now while waiting for more content from other teams. During the final week, however, we will have little time and quite a bit of work: editing and piecing together the final report.

halfant99 commented 5 years ago

Quality Control Team, Week 2 While the QC team's job is mainly for the last week of the e-book production, we have been examining various e-books and have looked for things that make an e-book interesting, eye-catching, and overall successful. Some of the things we've discovered is that the content of an e-book should drive the design of the front cover of the e-book. When the front cover looks appealing, there's a greater chance that someone will buy/read that particular book. Another interesting aspect that makes e-books successful, is a generally minimalistic design throughout the book. When it's easy for someone to read an e-book, the greater the chance is that the book will be successful. When playing with fonts, font-sizes, etc., it's important to note that you should always choose a font that is easy on the eye. The font size should allow for approximately 250-300 words to fit on each page of an e-book. Throughout the next week, our team will continue evaluating e-books and further look into what makes an e-book good. The most challenging part of this will be determining what exactly our standards are for an e-book to be considered good.