User:Marthambatalha/Magellan Media Partners

Magellan Media Partners
Magellan Media Partners is a management consulting firm founded by Brian O’Leary in 2003. Magellan’s clients are magazine, book and association publishers interested in improve content workflows across platforms and uses. The company also offers research, benchmarking and business planning services that help smaller and medium-sized publishers manage and grow their top- and bottom-line results.

Recent engagements include evaluating the cost and flexibility of setting up a dedicated print-on-demand service; aligning editorial and production processes to capitalize on a content-management investment; and planning a multi-year effort to digitize an organization’s intellectual property.

Research
Magellan principals work on a range of projects to better assess how media business challenges might be addressed. Among the research projects are an analysis of the impact of pirated content and free distribution on book sales, modeling cost-effective use of print-on-demand technology and why and how should publishers use XML.

Quantifying the impact of pirated content and free distribution on book sales – As digital content has become more available and more commonly distributed in book publishing, fears of piracy and lost sales have grown. The rise of peer-to-peer file sharing sites has likely amplified these fears. While the debate over the impact of “free” content has been at times heated, the discussions are more often than not characterized by a lack of hard data. To address this data gap, Magellan partnered with O’Reilly Media and Random House, to established ways to measure the benefit or cost of free distribution. Results suggested that freely available digital content coincides with greater paid sales. The research continues, with other publishers expected to join the test.

Modeling cost-effective use of print on demand technology – In 2006 Magellan joined with BookNet Canada to model the circumstances in which POD made sense as a production and distribution option for Canadian book publishers. The model analyzed the pricing matrices of several POD vendors, compared those manufactured prices to the total cost (printing plus inventory) of traditional technologies and identified annual demand scenarios below which POD was a more cost-effective option. Since that initial report, the model has been updated twice, and in 2008 two extensive presentations of the model were made at BookExpo Canada (June 2008) and for an O’Reilly Media webinar (December 2008). These presentations expand the model to address the U.S. market, explain how POD affects publishers’ decisions about press runs and keeping titles in print, and discuss the extent to which this technology can help publishers and perhaps writers better control every aspect of their true production costs.

Why and how should publishers use XML - Based on the results of six months of research, surveys, interviews and analysis, the StartwithXML project offered a clear argument for developing intellectual property as XML documents from the outset. Magellan Media was part of a four-consultant team whose members also included Mike Shatzkin (The Idea Logical Company), Laura Dawson (LJNDawson.com) and Ted Hill (THA Consulting). The research and analysis was documented in a 20,000-word research paper published in January 2009 by O’Reilly Media. The paper presented an argument for why an XML workflow makes sense for publishers, as well as an explanation of how content agility provides publishers with opportunities to grow revenues and better manage expenses. The paper’s “why” and “how” components also included recommendations on what publishers should consider when planning to adopt XML workflows.