Several years ago, when doomsayers were predicting that the digital boom would signal the inevitable demise of the publishing industry, few could have pictured the broad and varied landscape that constitutes modern day publishing. The advent of ebooks, the internet, mobile communication and social media are all playing their part in making the world of publishing infinitely more diverse, a land of new opportunities with business models and revenue streams to be exploited.
So if books are no longer all about paper, covers and binding, what has become of the publisher? What do you think has changed about the role of the publisher in recent years? Does being a publisher now require a spirit of innovation and experimentation that perhaps didn’t exist beforehand?
We want to know what you think. Please feel free to give us your thoughts and to discuss in the comment box below…
Join our group on LinkedIn
Publishers still have an important role to fulfil and one that remains largely unchanged. They will still spend significant time creating, marketing and distributing books and content regardless of format. Format is just packaging, but, to gain significant market share, publishers will need to fill this role and expand into a more innovative role.
Publishers who do innovate and think of themselves more like media companies than publishing companies will gain market share. They will need to innovate and think of their authors as brands that need to be built and launched rather than one-off products to create and ship. Publishers will need to create strong online presence for their brands/authors and build in some layers of social commence in order to monetise the marketing. In order to thrive, publishers need to think digital, which means multi-products and flexible business models, such as accommodating the concept of access rather than ownership.
You are right having an innovative approach to market ,create and be present on the web.
Had this not been important people like you and i would never think of joining a group like
publishing technology or future publishing.
Here i would also like to mention that creativity will always bloom in this time of info boom.
What the digital revolution has really done for publishing is to open up the possibility of new models and innovations. Jane is right that fundamental aspects of publishing remain the same but I disagree that the only change online publishing creates is to format. The possibility now exists for published material to be ‘alive’ ie, not static and fixed at a given moment in time but evolving, changing, mutating through time. I know this is a prospect many in the library community find deeply troubling but it remains a real possibility and one which has yet to be fully explored by publishers. Notions of a definitive text may ultimately have to be abandoned, as might (and this, I suspect, will be far more troubling to publishers themselves!) our inherited ideas of copyright and ownership of published material. The proliferation of wikis and other socially created content is already breaking down the concept of a single, definitive author and the ‘democratisation’ of content creation through blogs, tweets and other online media will further shift this balance.
Thinking digital, for publishers, is surely going to have to mean a whole lot more than just creating multi-media versions of books and marketing them online.
Publishers will need to learn to deal with a dis-intermediated world. That means getting to understand their end users, their behaviour and their preferences, before using that information to build websites and products that meet them. In other words, what I said here:
http://blog.publishingtechnology.com/digital-solutions/user-experience-leads-digital-world/
I really like Jane’s comment above: ‘publishers need to think digital, which means multi-products and flexible business models, such as accommodating the concept of access rather than ownership.’ – we certainly need to let go of the control. It is a difficult move to make, and often intitially costly, but unless we can compete with free online delivery we won’t maintain our market presence. New publishing models need to focus on giving away content, getting readers hooked and then using innovative means to capitalise on this. (advertising, extra subscription services, provision of work shops)