The Saturday Evening Post is moving back to its hometown in the second quarter of 2013. The iconic magazine started in 1821 with roots dating back to Benjamin Franklin's The Pennsylvania Gazette, which was first published in 1728. At one point The Saturday Evening Post was the most widely circulated weekly magazine in America.

Perhaps best remembered with images from Norman Rockwell dancing through Americans' collective heads. The Post published stories, poetry, and essays by a dazzling number of great Americans:

• Ray Bradbury
• Kurt Vonnegut
• Sinclair Lewis
• Carl Sandburg
• Edgar Allan Poe
• William Faulkner
• F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Dorothy Parker
• Jack London
• the list goes on

RSI Content Solutions, a content management solutions provider to the publishing industry, has been named to the EContent 100 list for the 2nd year in a row. Now in its 12th year, this list of companies that matter most in the digital content industry is hand selected by EContent Magazine’s judges who are experts in the digital content industry. Additional companies on the list include Amazon, Apple, Facebook, LinkedIn, O'Reilly Media, and others.

“Submissions for this year's EContent 100 list were better than ever, and consequently our judges had their work cut out for them,” stated Theresa Cramer, editor, EContent.  “What truly makes a company successful in the digital world? That's the question we set out to answer with this year's EContent 100 list.”

RSI provides content management software to traditional publishers, media companies, and technical documentation teams. Its enterprise software solution, RSuite CMS, serves many global publishers and has become a trusted content management system.  RSuite CMS has proven to reduce the time to market for new product development by more than 50%, deliver packages of content in a fully automated fashion to licensees, and reduce content conversion budgets through multi-channel publishing.

 “It brings us great joy to be honored along with the other distinguished companies who are shaping the industry,” explained Barry Bealer, CEO and co-founder of RSI Content Solutions. “Our staff puts great effort and dedication to support publishers and media companies as they navigate the digital landscape and discover ways to not only survive but also thrive during this exciting time.”

To learn more about RSI and how organizations like Oxford University Press, Elsevier Health Science, LexisNexis Pacific, and many others use RSuite CMS and see the latest features of the software, please visit www.rsicms.com.

RSuite 4. New Look. Proven Engine.

Today, the newest version of RSuite CMS has been announced and we can't wait for publishers to experience all the new features and tools. RSuite 4 offers a redesigned, more intuitive user experience with action-oriented contextual menus, search-based content navigation, accordion-style search results, and a user interface (UI) with intentional color design. In fact we've found that the new UI provides greater productivity among editorial and production groups while drastically reducing the learning curve. This means your team will reap the benefits of contet management faster than ever.

“With RSuite 4, we’ve coupled a great user experience with very powerful content management. The unified search and browse experience helps users contend with large volumes of content and assets. This version of RSuite will make content management approachable to a wider range of users---marketing, new product development, and sales. This will further expand the opportunity for our customers to get even more value out of their investment in content management. We continue to focus our efforts to enable publishers to implement a strategy for multi-channel products readily adaptable to future market-driven needs.”  ---Christopher Hill, vice president of product management at RSI Content Solutions.

Read more about the latest features or schedule a personal demo today.

RSI Content Solutions and Data Conversion Laboratory have surveyed and collected input on the state of technology adoption and digital revenue metrics from publishing and media organizations. Join us for a webinar on December 6 as the survey results are revealed and analyzed by Barry Bealer, CEO and co-founder of RSI Content Solutions, and Mark Gross, CEO of Data Conversion Laboratory. 

Don't miss Barry and Mark's insight and perspective on 

• How publishers are approaching the digital landscape to benefit customers
• How organizations recognize increased revenue from multi-channel publishing
• What you can do to achieve greater revenue from digital products in 2013

Webinar Details | 2012 Publishers' Survey Results

Title: Reality Check: The Truth from the Publishers' Perspective

Date: Thursday, December 6, 2012

Time: 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM EST

Space is limited.
Reserve your webinar seat now at:
https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/198740406

Audible Inc., an Amazon.com, Inc. subsidiary (NASDAQ:AMZN),  was founded in 1995 by Donald Katz. The company invented and commercialized the first digital audio player in 1997, 4 years before the introduction of the iPod. One of the few startups to survive the dot-com bust, Audible was designed to be a destination and a daily literary service for serious readers who wish they could read more—and for the huge population of would-be serious readers who don’t have the time to read what they want or need to read.

The company introduced one of the first digital audio players in 1997. The following year it published a Web site from which audio files in its proprietary .aa format could be downloaded. Today, Audible is the Internet's leading provider of spoken audio, entertainment, information, and educational programming. Audible is the exclusive provider of audiobooks to all Apple's iTunes Music Stores worldwide.

How to Increase Revenue?

In 2007, Audible saw an opportunity to improve sales if it could easily identify and share its products in the Internet space and provide open APIs to allow partners to easily integrate with Audible. A solid metadata foundation was the critical component to achieve these goals.

Content Management to Improve Workflow, Metadata, Content Distribution

RSuite CMS was selected to manage metadata used to create Audible's online product catalog. RSuite's metadata management and customizable user interfaces and APIs offered Audible the tools needed to effectively manage content and support workflow functionality. Audible completed a successful proof-of-concept project with RSuite CMS in which several use cases were identified. During this stage many business rules were also documented that were applicable to improving Audible's business opportunities. Audible worked with RSuite's developers to configure and deploy RSuite CMS after installation.

RSuite CMS became the framework upon which Audible crafted solutions to meet all its requirements: workflow, business rules validation, content aggregation and delivery, publisher feeds, audit trail, and product prototyping. In 6 months, Audible configured and implemented RSuite CMS to become both the database of record for its metadata content and its workflow tool that enables seamless transfer of content from publisher feeds to web site-ready files.

 "RSuite has become a very critical system very fast!" 

--Art Zegarek, Director of Data Architecture, Audible, Inc.

How Can Content Management Help Your Organization?

RSuite CMS is used to by the world's leading publishers to create, store, manage, and deliver content. Contact us to learn how publishers are using RSuite CMS to deliver content to licensing channels, automate ebook production, streamline common editorial and production tasks, and much more.

Most publishing companies have one of those folks on staff who is intimate with the content. Someone who knows all the images that were used in a previous edition or which drug monographs couldn't fit into the printed product in time for publication. I used to be one of those people..ask me the ghost words embedded in Tabers' Cyclopedic Dictionary, 18th edition*. Even with a photographic memory, today's proliferation of content makes this skill nearly impossible. I also like to bring up the lottery scenario risk: "what happens if Jim in Production wins the lottery and all that knowledge leaves your organization?"

To effectively manage content, organizations need a handle on what they have. Publishers using a Word document system simply can't be agile in today's environment. Think about a document sitting on some file server, with all its attendant assets—images, charts, chapters and paragraphs—buried within it, and the only way to know what content is in there is for someone in your organization to remember that it’s there.

Without enriching your assets with metadata and storing them in a repository that allows you to search and find content relating to a specific topic—say, tennis elbow or the Higgs boson—you could be duplicating work recreating assets you already own, wasting time searching for those assets, and missing huge revenue opportunities to sell content granularly as a custom bundle or a focused derivative e-product.

At this year’s MarkLogic World conference, Nature Publishing Group (an RSuite CMS customer) presented an explanation of how they support what I would call ‘virtual journals’. There are very specific segments of the scientific world that would not possibly justify the creation of a full-blown journal, but when you start to realize, ‘Hey, we have this very large repository of existing journals with some articles across all of them that appeal to this market, and if we gather these articles up from all these other journals, we’ve got enough content to be of interest to this marketplace.’ Suddenly you have the option to create an online-only product (for example) with very low internal costs that is of specific interest to this niche market that previously was too small to be worth going after. It’s a long-tail concept but without applying metadata consistently and systematically this simply couldn't happen.

Metadata isn't magic and it really isn't all that complicated---you need the proper tools, workflow, and people in your organization. And once you have that set up, the fun begins---new product development, automated distribution to new licensing channels, multi-channel output.

Download our latest white paper and learn how publishers are increasing revenue with strategic content management, including metatadata enrichment. The free white paper includes two case studies from Human Kinetics Publishers and Elsevier Health Science.

Download Now

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*While I no longer work at that publishing company, I won't ever tell!

Educational publisher Triumph Learning knew that digital products would be the ticket to offering great products to its customers as well as being in a position to compete against some of the larger educational publishers in the industry. But to bring digital products to market, it was understood that step one was centralizing content.

Chief business development officer, Robert Methven, shares how in just 1 year Triumph Learning has been able to centralize, inventory, and reuse more than 25 years' of assets to create "Readiness for the Common Core." 

We now have a whole new business line that may generate tens of millions of dollars for us based off of being able to leverage our assets that we put into CMS that we now converted and delivered into a new product offering. A year ago we didn’t even have that idea on our product roadmap.

Get started on content management

1. Centralize your content

2. Inventory and understand your assets

3. Develop new digital products quickly

4. Refine digital products based on customer feedback

During Hurricane Sandy this week I doubt I was the only east coast reader concerned about how I would read when the electricity went out. My Kindle and iPad were charged but I knew the iPad wouldn't last long if faced with days of lost power. My trusty Kindle would serve me well but my aggregated news on Flipboard would be missed. Power outage gave me a glimmer of hope that I could catch up on some long-form journalism in its print form (New Yorker) and plan my holiday menu (Bon Appetit). I chuckled thinking how my friend who is adamant about reading print only was not wasting mental energy on this internal discussion. Powered with candles and print, he was prepared for a lovely time. 

At a time when major publishers are selecting "digital only" as a solution to plummenting subscriptions and ad sales, the devil is in the details. Electric outages are an obvious problem and real concern if your business delivers exclusively to digital products. There's also the issue of ad revenue in the digital sphere compared with print. Data from PricewaterhouseCoopers illustrate that ad revenue from digital products will double from 2011 to 2016 and print will experience small growth. But the dollar value from print ads eclipses digital:

Now combine competition into this story. Looking at Newsweek's decision to go digital only in 2013 is somewhat shortsighted when you consider all the online competition competing for smaller digital advertising dollars. 

Digital only is not the golden ticket....yet. Publishers (media, trade, educational, STM, legal) still need a strong print presence both for the obvious reasons (national electric power grid, customer demographics) and the other obvious reasons (ad revenue, customer demographics!).

We've been conducting a year-long survey with publishers and media organizations to assess digital revenue metrics along with technology adoption decisions. So far, the majority of our respondents indicate that digital revenue is exceeding print revenue. 

Does this mean these publishers are creating more digital products than print products? That answer is still to be determined. We also ask publishers to indicate all the outputs expected to be a focus in the future. At the moment both print and ebooks are tied with 88.9% of respondents indicating that print and digital books are important. Web products have a slight increase at 91.1%.

Our big takeaway from the preliminary results to the 2012 publishers' survey do indicate something we've maintained for years. No matter your revenue streams from published products, a single-source multi-channel publishing process is key to satisfying customers along with the bottom line.

As you're cleaning up from the hurricane and recharging your electronic devices think about how your organization is setting itself up and share your input. We'll reveal all the results to this survey in an upcoming webinar in December. 

Let us know the devilish details that your organization faces.

Epson America offers an extensive array of award-winning image capture and image output products for the consumer, photographic, business, and graphic arts markets. Epson chose DocZone DITA, a SaaS-based XML component content management system designed for technical documentation teams, to move themselves from unstructured content to structured content for publication in multiple output types, author content at topic level instead of document level, store the content in a CMS for easy reuse and change tracking, and much more.

Join us on November 8th, 2012 at 2pm EST to ask any questions you may have as well as to learn about Epson America and how their workflow has changed due to using DocZone.

Webinar: Wednesday, October 24, 2012

1:00 PM - 2:00 PM EDT

The premise of all publishing organizations is to provide quality content in a format that customers desire. Ask any copy editor about house style and you can anticipate a lengthy and thoughtful response. Authors too expect nothing but perfection when transforming intellectual property into a print or digital product. So how do successful publishing organizations blend automation into workflows without sacrificing quality? In this webinar, we’ll reveal some interesting truths around quality control and provide tips that you can bring back to your office.

Join panelists Mike Edson and John Corkery from the DETI Group.

Register here