DV24001 Digital Publishing Platforms V01 240524

The only way to appreciate a new digital solution is either to be the developer of one or the user of one. You cannot voice opinions on these digital solutions until you have developed, used and experienced them. So in my case my DMB Publishing entity gives me the opportunity to experience all the trends and developments in the digital publishing industry.

There has always been a dimension to DMB Publishing which has been focussed upon technology. It is about communicating through different technologies which has evolved from hand written parchments to printed books to digital books. So information has been communicated using different technological capabilities. Now we are in the digital paradigm we have never had so many different ways to communicate. From emails to text to posts to blogging to podcasts to video to live streaming. From webinars to slideshows to digital books to presentations to websites. Websites go from personal to ecommerce to shared interest to content repositories. If you consider each of these as a channel of communication then the scope has become endless and is constantly evolving. So as a publisher what channels should you be looking to use. With the internet under constant dynamic change where can you as a publisher anchor yourself to get some foundations and stability?

With my own recent experiences of dismantling ZigZag Digital Associates where I have cancelled and dismantled all the associated websites it brings home to you how fickle is the internet. The word fickle translates to indecisive, inconsistent, changeable, capricious, erratic and unpredictable. Yes the internet is all of these things. In the case of ZigZag all these active resources we had developed and depended upon were now no longer available over the internet. For those that choose to have some dependency on them they no longer existed. Sadly the reason for the dismantling was not financial since it would have been relatively cheap to continue their hosting. It was the loss of the expertise to look after and develop them that was the major problem. My business partner, George Szubinski, suddenly died of Covid-19 in April 2020 and he had all the technical knowledge and capabilities. Paying someone to provide these services would have not been possible or practical. So big lesson is technological solutions depend upon specific people with specific skills. As an intense user of the internet I am amazed by the number of excellent resources I find and use only to see them disappear or to suddenly stand still with no new updates. The term “fickle” is too polite a description. Even the large corporations can leave you high and dry. Their changes of strategic direction can overnight leaving you abandoned with data loss and capability loss. The “Open Systems” arena can be a lot worse with their failure to adhere to sound principles often down to severe cost or volunteer resource availability. In every case the lack of suitable support mechanisms exasperating the frustrations of trying to get the “monster” to work. So why would anyone want to build on these ever shifting sands? Well you have no choice but there are strategies you can adopt that allow you to chart your journey through his nightmare. These strategies can be built upon quite a logical basis. So let us look at these strategies. Although my “lens” is from a publishing perspective many of the principles are the same whether it is any digital solution supporting any manufacturing, any production, any services, any marketing, any sales, any distribution, any media and in fact anything in the digital domain.

So let us here consider an important architecture. It is simply a case of understanding the digital “stack” like a layered cake made up of different tiers. As a digital publisher you must understand this tier structure. You do not have to be an expert in the tiers but you going to make better decisions by understanding them.

Tier 1	Datacentre (Hardware Owners)	Amazon Google Microsoft Facebook IBM
Tier 2	Foundation Software Database Workflow Programming Artificial Intelligence	IBM Microsoft Open Systems
Tier 3	User Devices Hardware Software	Apple Samsung iOS (Apple) Android
Tier 4	Standards	Kindle (Amazon) EPUB
Tier 5	Applications	WordPress Blogspot Facebook LinkedIn Twitter (X) ChatGPT