Technology Why the Skyscape, Unbound, MedWizards title preceding the PDA book (ex: Harrison's)

[BlondeCookie]

I'm not certain if I understand this correctly, but companies like Skyscape, Unbound Medicine, & Medical Wizards are all retailers selling medical PDA software. So, why are they advertising the product with their business name preceeding the book. For ex: you would purchase a Skyscape Harrison's Manual on PDA or an Unbound Medicine's Harrison's Manual on PDA. That's weird. I mean, what do these retailers have in the production of the book or software anyway? It's like buying something from a bookstore like Amazon and the bookstore calling the book, "Amazon's Harrison's Manual etc etc."

---

Members don't see this ad.

 

[spinosum]

Of course there are differences. Skyscape put in the hard effort to re-organize the whole Harrison texts (or any other medical book contents) into a PDA-friendly format, so that we can view it in our PDA, with those tabs for different categories and sections. Imagine having the whole Harrison texts from page 1 to 2000 in a scroll format -- how are u going to search and read with ease?

Furthermore, Skyscape includes the smARTlink™ technology (so that we can easily cross link with other clinical and drug prescription products from Skyscape to provide a powerful integrated source of clinical information) which is invaluable when you have more than one medical softwares in your PDA.

So can you see the point now? The books sold at the Amazon etc. are the original and actual hard cover (or paper-back) textbooks, just like those you get from the book stores. Whereas the Skyscape or Unbound Medicine PDA softwares are NOT paper-back books! 🙂

 

[BlondeCookie]

So, if that is the case then why doesn't the publisher (eg, McGraw-Hill Professional Publishing who publishes Harrison's) just put the book format into electronic format for the PDA? Seems like they would have the resources and monetary incentive to do so. Skyscape and Unbound must make a killing doing this. They don't even have any publishing costs!

 

[medmarkco]

Using a similar line of logic, think of it this way - a baseball is a baseball, right? Doesn't matter if Cy Young, Nolan Ryan, Roger Clemens, or I throw the ball... same exact ball, so same end result, right? Don't I wish!

Same for digital delivery of published content. By agreement, the content remains the same, but the delivery is different. Unbound and Skyscape both adjust the presentation and navigation to make the content easier to use. They pay the publisher to license the content, and then pay software engineers and tech support people to deliver and support it. The publishers have tried digitizing their content themselves and found out writing software code isn't as easy as it seems. That's why they partner with software companies. If it was as easy as converting to PDF and shipping the product out the door, you would be right. However, PDFs aren't user friendly when trying to quickly look up highly integrated information. Personally I'd rather use a book if that were the case. But the digital versions are far from PDFs.

So you're right, there is a business model for making the information instantly available anywhere/anytime. However, if you want real riches... learn to throw a baseball! 😀