Richard Padley is Managing Director of Semantico. He founded Semantico in 1999 to help publishers realise the full potential of internet technologies for delivering digital information services. Before this worked on book and electronic production at Macmillan from 1984-1999. His interest and evangelism for the world wide web lead to the ground breaking publication of the Grove Dictionary of Art online in 1997, followed by the Grove Online Dictionary of Opera in 1998. The work involved ranged from building content management systems through to running focus groups with academics and library professionals and creating and testing the information architecture models which later became de-facto standards for online reference. Richard has a BSc in Computer Science and lives in Brighton.
August 26, 2010 – 12:07 pm
The COUNTER project recently announced that vendors wishing to remain compliant to the code of practice for books and reference works must now undergo a mandatory annual audit. Previously an audit was only required after the first year of delivering the usage reports.
This will be good news for those librarians who are concerned that the figures [...]
Many publishers want to monetise their books and reference content by making these materials available online. And a common strategy to drive sales is to combine book and journal content within a single platform; synergies between different types of content should drive discovery and increase usage.
Some publishers choose to adapt an existing off-the-shelf journals platform [...]
April 30, 2010 – 10:03 am
The Future of Academic Book Publishing was a one-day seminar which provided a unique opportunity for those attending to consider both the present situation facing academic and scholarly publishers of all shapes and sizes, and the likely direction for the business of academic book publishing in the immediate future.
For those who [...]
The current explosion in interest around mobile devices such as the iPad and Kindle raises an interesting question for publishers. Is it best to create mobile specific websites to deliver content to smartphones, iPads or other mobile devices, or is it better to develop apps targeted at the iPhone, Android and other mobile platforms? In [...]
February 24, 2010 – 7:51 am
Should publishers sell books using Apple’s App Store or iBookstore?
Many publishers have started using the iPhone App Store as a channel to sell book content by packaging e-books as applications. There are currently 18,000 books in the App Store, and books are the fastest growing category of application in the store.
With the launch of the [...]
Semantico News
Richard Padley
Managing Director,
Semantico