Many aspiring writers get rejected by publishers. They pick themselves up and try again after having submitted drafts to multiple small and large publishers. Book publishing is an art form just like any other. One needs to be able to craft a perfectly imperfect story. However, editors are imperfect too. There should be more opportunities for writers to convert their thoughts and monetize them without anyone trying to block their talents. Books also go through digital standards like
Onix for publishing on demand. There needs to be more intelligent solutions in place that brings authors, publishers, and readers together. Readers also demand certain stories as trends and tastes change over time. A certain degree of sentiments also are held by readers in respect of how stories evolve. Self-publishing has also evolved into providing more freedom for authors. Ebooks is providing for new and bigger challenges for publishers. There are many ways in which intelligent agents, and for that matter, artificial intelligence could help in this digital age of publishing especially as the cloud garners such momentum. Stories take on many forms from news articles to books to even internet. Firstly, social media could be utilized to bring storytellers together to collaborate on the development of stories. Furthermore, there is even opportunity here for collaboratively building scripts for a movie or drama serial. An intelligent agent in this context could guide their storytelling ability in the right direction in such ways as adjusting plot lines, adding better starting/ending to a story, organization of chapters, and even the development of characters. The intelligent agent here could act as a live editor often providing ideas and guidance in the process. Once the joint collaborative effort is complete it could be published as an ebook or an escript and earnings shared between the contributors. However, it is not necessary to collaboratively build a story and many authors still want the level of total control. There could even be a marketplace for authors and publishers. One could use the web to create awareness of the book and even gather reviews during the process as well as after publication. One could even use the social media to learn the types of stories people really want to read. Authors can also pick on ideas and sentiments of what readers feel about their book or article. And, intelligent agents could be taken further as to develop pattern recognition on story formulas for a bestseller. Many people maintain diaries which could further add to the process of assimilation of thoughts and ideas for a story. In fact, the diary could take on the added role of an intelligent personal assistant that could provide additional services of organizing the day, thoughts, even at times of a writer's block. There is also a need here for a flexible reader/writer template that could add additional functionality for authors/readers in form of annotations, entity extraction, semantic understanding, thought bubbles, flexible notes, mind mapping, linking, drag and drop, grammar checking, spelling, machine translation, fact checking, dictation and other options. Reading and writing stories should be fun.
Crowdsourcing for content is another option which are utilized on sites like
Yahoo. However, such content needs to be quality assured, fact checked, and objective. Journalists should be able to sell stories on the open marketplace to news agencies. Intelligent agents could be used here as well to assist both journalists and readers. For readers, an intelligent agent could provide for an optimized summary of news articles, timeline of events, recommendations, and even personalization service for content. For journalists, an intelligent agent could provide recommendations on breaking news, fact checking, story tracking, optimization of headlines, and structure to a piece of story.
Content Advertising is also a very big factor here in reducing costs and providing further incentives. Back office functions already utilize more service-oriented and rules-driven on demand publishing systems which could be enhanced using linked data patterns. Involving everyone in the process from readers, writers, to publishers makes the publishing fun, more accessible, and a viable endeavor for all parties. Publishing is a fast, competitive, and challenging industry. There is much in the way of standardizations and progress in the area especially inspired from the perspective of intelligent agents which could be incorporated in the entire workflow and provide for more creative options as well as a source of enrichment to the publishing community.
