McGraw-Hill to Employ Digital 'Bar Codes'
McGraw-Hill Education and Content Directions Inc. have announced an agreement whereby McGraw-Hill Education will begin registering Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) across all of its major book publishing programs. The DOI is a system for identifying and exchanging intellectual property in the digital environment, similar to the UPC or bar code. The DOI uniquely identifies digital objects and provides a permanent link to the publisher, facilitating online transactions of all kinds, including e-commerce, rights management and digital distribution.
Registering DOIs will allow publishers to sell e-books, individual chapters and other innovative forms of content. It will also allow them to continue selling traditional, physical books. In addition, the DOI multilink facilitates the availability of free excerpts, exposure to book reviews, access to the publisher's catalog page for additional related information, and sales across a publisher's distribution chain regardless of format, all directly from within Adobe Acrobat eBook Reader or Microsoft Reader on the reader's PC.
Several online demonstrations are available at www.contentdirections.com and include multilinking directly from a book review in BusinessWeek to all services enabled by the publisher for that book, as well as linking from a bibliography entry within a PDF-based e-book to the Internet for more options. McGraw-Hill Education, New York, NY, (877) 833-5524, www.mcgraw-hill.com.
This article originally appeared in the 08/01/2002 issue of THE Journal.