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| Somewhere Else, Michael Cairns |
Publishing gets more focused, builds community and seeks
new technology experiments. These are
some of the themes I contemplate in this year’s predictions post.
Slimming:
More and more publishers will narrow their focus both in
terms of their product lines and their operations. In education, publishers with broad-based
publishing programs will be at a disadvantage to those who go deep within
select disciplines. Look for more
consolidation which ties product directed at particular subject areas and
disciplines. This concentration will create
the scale publishers need in order to invest in and deliver additional
services, content and other products to particularly interested
communities. For example, a company’s corporate
strategy will be directed at becoming the only provider of business management,
accounting and financial management textbooks and materials for the higher-ed
market. To a large degree, the health
education market is already structured this way.
In back-office operations, publishers will seek to farm
out non-core operations to third-party providers. Likely candidates for outsourcing will be IT
infrastructure, accounting and finance, and warehouse operations. Core activities remaining in house will
include editorial, production and content management. These functions will become increasingly
dominated by a “product management” philosophy similar to the way packaged
software products are managed. As a result,
the definition of ‘product’ will be expanded beyond the delivery of a single textbook
title to one which encompasses community development, gaming, life-long
learning and other potential new products and services.
Community:
LinkedIn is the ultimate business community. Or is it?
For the development of expert communities and market places of interest,
LinkedIn is a very poor solutions. Increasingly
content owners, educational and academic publishers and corporations are
recognizing that the development and nurturing of communities of interest
facilitates deep relationships with the content owner and the promulgation of
new membership-driven revenue models.
Interestingly, some membership associations which historically relied on
revenue from journal sales are facing declines in that source of revenue. As a result, they have been forced to reevaluate
the way they engage with membership in order to boost and/or expand their
revenue base. Zapnito is one solution
which enables the establishment of expert communities centered around a core
set of interests or subject areas. Similar
solutions enable and facilitate new models for engagement and revenue growth.
“Legacy” publishers with strong branded content
“franchises” will also seek to build services, credentialing, community
engagement and other similar products defined by their deep content
inventories. Think about the For Dummies Expert Knowledge Market where
the platform enables credentialed practitioners to offer services and expertise
across the spectrum of Dummies content. For Dummies becomes a marketplace of
products and services. The same model may apply for more ‘traditional’
educational content such as test prep (Kaplan) and business and accounting
management.
Just do it myself:
We’ve all been aware of the maker culture where people
use new technology to expand their DIY capabilities. Within the science and academic communities,
we are starting to see the publication of not only data and result sets
associated with experiments but also the research models themselves, which
encourages scientists and lay people to conduct their own
experimentation(s). How this trend will
impact publishers is difficult to discern at this point; but publishers which
encourage and facilitate this deeper interaction with the method behind and
results of research content will have an advantage in building relationships
with their target markets.
Increasingly, lay researchers have access to powerful
tools and techniques for building their own models and conducting their own research. As a result, non-academic researchers have discovered
new planets and conducted their own local environmental research projects thanks
to technology and tools formally available only to better-funded
‘experts’. It is possible there will arise
from this an explosion of new and well-conducted research, the distribution of
which could be facilitated by publisher platforms. Obviously, the idea of research conducted by
lay practitioners will alarm many but, perhaps, we are on the cusp of a
revolution in academic research which could mirror the demise of Encyclopedia
Britannica vis-Ã -vis Wikipedia.
I hear voices:
Siri scares me and my Echo is usually turned off. Sometimes Alexa will say something apropos of
nothing. Who’s listening? It’s not for me (yet), but voice-activated
applications and products are the fastest growing segment of the consumer
technology market. They were all the
rage at CES this year; so much so that a voice-activated toilet gained Kanye-like
PR exposure. At $5,000, flushing was
never so expensive.
Voice activation is the front-end of an artificial intelligence
revolution and these smart voice-activated devices will increasingly dominate
our homes and work environments.
Serving up our favorite content may become one of the primary functions
of these devices and any publishing company lacking an Alexa development team
building ‘skills’ into their products may be missing the boat. (See the above section on Dummies ‘how to’
guides).
Audio delivery of content must be optimized within
editorial production workflows. Think
how much fun it’s been to do this for eBook formats! Not only that, we can only guess at the
manner in which users will seek material when they do it verbally versus
‘manually’. This is going to require
some amount of experimentation and research.
For example, when we search for things currently we often receive visual
clues during the process. Think about
searching the TV listings on your television or scanning a list of search
results on Google. In a verbal-oriented
world, we will miss these clues so what will replace them?
An AI bot could
have written this:
Several high-profile content producers are using
artificial intelligence to create content at a sophisticated level. For example, Sports Illustrated has a tool
named Arkadium which can create infographics from scratch and the Associated
Press has used “Automated Insights” to create stories from the results of
games. As these types of tools are fine-tuned
and improved, they will also mimic the editorial ‘voice’ of the publications in
question.
It is only a matter of time before publishers implement
AI bots and tools to create content typically produced by authors and editors (if
they aren’t already).
However, across all industries, AI is likely to have a
material impact on back-office, repetitive and non-value-added tasks. Tasks like file formatting, data clean-up,
document mark-ups and accounting functions like cash application and royalties
audits will be taken over by AI bots in the short term. These bots mimic employees’ activities and execute
tasks more quickly and with more accuracy.
Staff are freed up to conduct more value-added activities. AI is already being built into many
application software products. For
example, publishers are looking for CMS products to offer/enable intelligent
content optimization and repackaging which uses user analytics to make
recommendations on content selection and delivery.
Some other thoughts on trends for the coming year:
- Wired magazine profiled an augmented reality app developed by IKEA. (Ikea’s AR kit) Their objective is to sell more furniture and what better way to do that than to be able to see the furniture in your own home? And the NY Times is experimenting. There should be many similar AR experiments going on in publishing.
- Podcasting is still growing and growing. Pod listeners have doubled over the last two years and publishers are getting into the act. Macmillan is launching its “Case Closed” mystery Podcast. And, of note, this format has successfully thrown up a whole new range of Pod casting personalities and stars looking for book deals.
- I think quiz books will be the next coloring book craze.
- Mergers & Acquisitions: We’ve already started to see M&A activity heat up in the past 3-4 months and I see that continuing. There will be further consolidation in educational publishing, a shake out in EdTech and perhaps some consolidation in the publisher software market.
- Germany will win the World Cup (again).
2017: Predictions 2017: Subscribe To Me
2016: Predictions 2016: Education, China, Platforms and Blockchain.
2013: Predictions 2013: The Death of the Middle Man
2012: Predictions 2012: The Search for Attention
2011: Predictions 2011: The Growth of Intimacy
2010: Predictions 2010: Cloudy With A Chance of Alarm
2009: Predictions 2009: Death and Resurrection:
2008: Predictions 2008
2007: Predictions 2007
2007-2013: My Big Book of Posts & Predictions on Slideshare
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