Digitized Content and Customization: A Perfect Marriage
As consumers continue to move more and more into the digitized world, content owners such as magazines, music and recording studios, and TV and radio companies, are scrambling to digitize their archived materials. But what is their main purpose for doing this? It can’t be solely to preserve the content in a medium that has a greater shelf life. One has to assume that digital distribution is playing a major role in how media companies are looking to monetize these treasured assets.
Almost every aspect of how we consume media and even communicate has gone digital. CD Players (although digital) have given way to MP3 players such as the iPod. Cars have GPS and navigation systems (I can’t remember the last time I bought a map) and many home phone users are switching to VoIP. Fortunately, people still find value in one medium that dates back centuries: the book. People still like to read books. For some reason the digital world has not completely devoured this form of media altogether. Book stores are still thriving while record stores are unfortunately being closed in droves.
Another phenomenon that has come to the media world by use of digital distribution involves user generated content and the customization of content delivery. People are now getting used to being able to receive the content that is relevant to them based on their personal preferences. All this brings me to believe that we at SharedBook are on to something. With our platform, media companies that have digitized their archived content - articles, photographs, etc. - can now allow their online users the ability to select the content that is most relevant to them and create a book. This will enable media companies with deep content to monetize their assets in a way that just wasn’t available or even economical before. Imagine going to your favorite media company that has the content you are interested in and being able to build a customized book from that information. Now that sounds like a perfect marriage to me.
