The European project Möbius aims to modernize the European book publishing industry by remodelling the traditional value chains and business models, uncovering the prosumers potential and delivering new enriched media experiences. Möbius’ innovative applications consist of the Möbius Book (with a Player and a Creator app) and the Prosumer Intelligence Toolkit (PIT). The Player is an interactive mobile application for readers to consume immersive books. At the same time, the Creator allows authors to transform their own stories into immersive experiences via a web application. The PIT integrates and presents fanfiction insights as a data dashboard for publishers. These fanfiction insights collected from prosumer online fandom communities such as Archive of Our Own (AO3) aim to give publishers new insights about their IPs, popular genres, etc.

To test these innovative applications with users in a real life setting,  the consortium has engaged in co-creation sessions with its primary user groups (publishers, readers and writers). By applying this living lab approach, Möbius can ensure that the developed proof of concept is validated with and by the relevant user groups and fits their needs and expectations. This improves the go-to-market opportunities. Three distinct pilot phases were planned, as the figure below shows.

The piloting activities started with a preparation phase, focussing on the user requirements from different stakeholders based on their current practices, needs and expectations. This resulted in user requirements for the Player, Creator and PIT. Subsequently, the first pilot phase was held from January until March 2022. It aimed to discuss and improve the initial project designs of the Player, Creator and PIT through qualitative interviews, group discussions and co-creation workshops. It offered an ideal opportunity to understand better the end-users, their current practices, and the needs and bottlenecks they experience.

Pilot phase 1 provided the required feedback for the Möbius team’s technical partners to adapt the applications to users’ needs. With the necessary application adjustments, the Möbius team was ready to enter the second pilot phase. The Möbius second pilot phase was conducted between June 2022 and September 2022. During this period, feedback was gathered from relevant user groups for the Player, Creator, and PIT.

Different consortium partners conducted the tests for the three Möbius applications to even the workload and reach the desired user groups. The Möbius Team refined the first set of user requirements to help the project and its applications move to pilot phase 3a and 3b. Stay tuned to get a summary of the results from pilot phase 2.