The future of the publishing industry

The future of the publishing industry? Hmm.

Thanks first of all to the organisers of the IC Tomorrow session at the BMA this morning. A quick-fire series of entrepreneurs had eight minutes to present their propositions, where possible reserving two minutes for Q&A so there was no room for slacking. Pitches were straight to the point – this is what we do, this is why, this is what we need, to an audience of representatives from smaller publishing houses and literary agencies, and a minority of observers such as myself.

It would be great to say that the offerings were diverse, but they weren’t, not really. All acknowledged the multi-device, digital, collaborative world we’re moving towards, and most showed facets of products and services that exist already – “Spotify for eBooks” said one tweet, “MMORPG for education” said another. One was build around sharing goals with peers; another, getting new authors to market and disintermediating traditional publishers. Each inspired feelings of recognition, rather than any Dragon’s Den-esque “I wish I’d thought of that.”

That’s not to say the offerings weren’t innovative in themselves. By their nature they were combinations of features and functions that are yet to exist in the UK mass market at least. The ability to search online literary databases from a Kindle for example, or to rent eBooks, or to build communities of readers, each is new in its own way, even if it replicates capabilities already proven elsewhere.

However, perhaps this fact is as much an indictment of the state of publishing, as it is an illustration of what could be possible. The fact that eBooks are hitting their own tornado of interest only partially masks the inherent flaws in the system – the lack of an agreed eBook standard between Amazon and everybody else, for example.

[I know from personal experience that this is adding unnecessary cost into the content production process. My single, uncorroborated data point is that it costs roughly half as much again to format a book to meet both standards; discussions today confirmed that this process is not something that can be left to automation. In other words, as things stand, manual intervention is necessary. Not only does this cause additional overheads, it also means that valuable skills are being used inefficiently. It’s the publishing equivalent of re-keying.]

So what should innovation look like? As things stand we’ve got two points of reference. As described above, one involves the replication of what’s happening in other parts of the media industry, and there’s clearly mileage to be had even if it’s in terms of catching up and making incremental progress. The other is no more or less than digitisation – again, it is difficult to see this as more than just catch-up. Let’s face it, mass-market digital music has been around for 25 years or more so we really shouldn’t get too flushed with excitement about mass-market digital books.

Both of these developments are necessary, but I believe we will come to see them as getting to the starting gates of innovation, in what is currently known as the publishing industry.

We started to see signs of this in one of the presentations, the final one as it happened, which came from an organization called Space Bar Interactive. In the presentation, a digitized book was recognized as one element of an interaction between the content creator and the content consumer: while an important element, it was subordinate to the interaction as a whole. We are perhaps seeing a similar phenomenon with the likes of JK Rowling’s launch of an interactive web site, which brings together elements of the original (printed) books, the films and additional content, all to create a more rounded – dare I use the word – experience.

The state of the industry begs the question, what would pre-Gutenberg storytellers, educators and journal-ists make of the abundance of tools and capabilities now available? Difficult to say but I believe they would see print as just one tool, probably inferior to direct interaction. They might favour the podcast for example, using print only as a way of archiving. Or perhaps those who preferred putting pen to paper might still do so, nonetheless profiting from the many different ways that ‘paper’ could now be transmitted to their readership.

All options were, are and will remain valid, but the difference is their relative position in the hierarchy of publishing mechanisms we have currently. Print holds the number one slot in the hearts and minds of publishers, even if digital books are currently outselling print copies by two to one on Amazon. That’s not to say they are wrong: just as face to face interaction will never be outmoded, nor will the human desire to have a more tactile reading experience.

The only inaccuracy is the idea that one will supersede the other as king of the hill: print is currently there by nature of the fact that there was no other option, and digital will win for a while merely on the strength of pent-up demand. In the future, the winners will be those who make the right choices about content, formats and media choices based on the needs, desires and contexts of their audiences, and not on some arbitrary “we’ve always done it that way,” or “it’s the future, get with the program” meme.

The bottom line is that there is plenty of innovation to be had – but first we need to work through the stage where we believe we are innovating, when in fact we are only catching up. As a final point, it didn’t go unnoticed on Twitter that most of the people in the room were using pads, that is, pen and paper, to take notes on what the presenters were saying. While this could be seen as a comment on how quickly (or otherwise) the publishing industry is adapting to new technologies, there is a wider point: that no single mechanism will ever be suitable for all needs. Technologists and publishers alike would be wise to take note.