The Future of Publishing

Worldwide magazines and newspapers are struggling to find new business models to retain marketshare in a rapidly changing market. With the rise of Social Media, news spreads around the globe at lightning speed with traditional media often being late or ‘boring’ as bloggers and smartphone-using witnesses provide live content on the spot. Among early adopters of technology an often heared complaint is that traditional media are becoming old fashioned, archaic institutions, who do not understand the modern age of technology. Also, booksales are declining everywhere and many fear our youth is growing up to be illiterate.

Is it time to stop the press?

There will always be a demand for stories. It is just the way in which they are presented that will change. Not just because we see eBooks on the rise and we all have to get ourselves an iPad, that’s just the start.  The educational industry faces the same challenges. Bruce Springsteen once wrote “We learned more from a three-minute record than we ever learned in school.” Various international studies show that most learning is done outside school hours by students. More management skills are gained by leading Warcraft guilds than through courses at school. The WiFi generation is growing up handling multiple information streams, ordering them by peer review principles, sifting knowledge from more resources than presented by their teacher, who’s role is no longer to be the knowledge authority but should become the information broker and coach to sort and evaluate the knowlegde absorbed by his students.

At this point in time it’s hip to have an app for your store of course, but the question is what the added value is. Mobile advocates keep stressing the importance of having an app or be outdated. Undeniably, the future of publishing is through mobile content as there are already more mobile connections than landline internet connections. Under no circumstance is ‘just having an app’ the answer to this growing demand. The purpose is not to go mobile, mobile is just a carrier for your content. The purpose is to bring richer media to the user.

In newspapers and magazines it is not about bringing the same content to the web, but richer content. When the printed version has an article with pictures, it is useless to create a mobile skin just to present the same. The mobile apps should diverge the content through location based services, bringing the relevant news to my position, provide multiple datastreams with background stories and streaming media to support the articles. But that is now.

 I can imagine the industry will change completely over the next 50 years – maybe not as far as nano-tech driven books as described in Neil Stephenson’s ‘the Diamond Age’, but it’s going to get full multimedia and Augmented Reality soon. By LBS (location based services) it can point out the spots mentioned in books – and if I own those books even show the relevant passages, but it could also offer me related (multimedia) info on the books I own, like press releases, interviews, artist impressions and 3D AR representations of the scenes. Mobile platforms are winning over paper distribution now, but within a few decades the carriers of choice will be smart clothing, like the Philips skin project.

As a genuine bookworm I’ve got a pretty extensive collection of bookshelves and I’ve tried a few times to catalogue them (to keep track of the books I lend to frends that tend to never return them) with various degrees of success. Now, if I had an app, that includes a barcode scanner, I could catalogue my book collection –in the cloud so I can access it anywhere - . With the current trends of rfid and cloud computing I can imagine we’ll go to a scenario in which we purchase all sorts of things and store the receipts, warranties and manuals in a personal cloud for insurance reasons etc, so it would be nice to hook this library with Amazon keeping track of the total purchase value of my collection and the value of ‘used books’ to see if I have purchased a gem by happenstance, or just in case I want to get rid of a bad piece of writing. If I purchase a physical book at Amazon, I should be able to access the ebook version for free (or very low cost) to take with me on flights, holidays or just because my printed version is falling apart. With all the books coming up, and my once in a year stop at Amazon I really have to search a lot to see if any new titles by my favorite authors have arrived, so if I mark authors as favorites, or just because I own like 5+ books of them I’d like to receive a push notification if a new title is released or when I can preorder a new one.

Instead of the current trend to protect normal content through paid services, publishing companies should embrace technological trends to create next generation content.