Publishing Content Reusability Chart from StartWithXML

The other day I was reading the report from the StartWithXML project by O'Reilly Media and IdeaLogical, and I encountered this chart which was so good I thought I'd have to share it here.

The chart shows different types of publisher content organized in a two dimension graph with potential for reuse on the X axis and content complexity on the Y axis.


I like the chart for a number of reasons:

• It smashes the myth that content reuse is only for long-lived STM or educational content.

• It reframes the debate from black & white to gray. Too many times, I've heard people say content type X is or isn't reusable. In reality, it's a matter of degree.

• It shows that certain types of non-STM, non-educational content are indeed highly reusable -- e.g., reference, tourism, and cooking.
  

The chart comes from the report, StartWithXML: Making the Case for Applying XML to a Publishing Workflow ($149), which is aimed primarily at "trade" (i.e., book) publishers and educating them on the benefits of XML. Historically, trade publishers have been laggards in embracing XML, perceiving both a lack of need and a lack of potential reuse.

Today, with e-books on the rise and the need to deliver book content in multiple e-book and non-traditional book (e.g., large print) formats, trade publishers are increasingly moving towards XML. But, they shouldn't be focused just on content delivery; they can be equally -- if not more -- focused on content repurposing and reuse.

Suppose you had a collection of travel guides which contained information on hotels and restaurants in a number of French cities. You should like XML because:

• You want to deliver content to multiple formats easily: print books, e-books, the web, iPhones, etc.
  

• You are already reusing content of necessity and would like to make changes only once. A great restaurant might be in both the Brittany and the Best French Restaurants guides and when its phone number changes, you want to change it only once (and approve those changes only once) in your contentbase.
  

• You want the opportunity to cherry-pick and/or slice-and-dice your content to create new products quickly. For example, you might grab the 20ish cities in which the 2009 Tour de France stops and create a Tour de France 2009 guide. Or, if you had recipe content, you might want to slice the recipes that require less than 30 minutes into a Quick Meals cookbook, or those with less than 500 calories into a Light Meals cookbook. Or, perhaps do both with Light Quick Meals or, while we're at it, Light Quick Vegan Meals or Light Quick Mediterranean Meals?
  

If you like the chart, you might well like the report, so go check it out. And if you don't want to pay $149 for the report, at least check out the rest of site, which has about 10 interesting and relevant presentations from people at companies like Hachette, Cengage, Ingram, and others embedded via SlideShare.