Speculating on Publishing's Future

Mike Shatzkin's article, Will You Recognize the Industry in 10 Years?, makes THE AUTHOR'S WAY think about a grander future for the "book" and for "publishing". Mr. Shatzkin, founder and CEO of The Idea Logical Co. (IdeaLog.com), describes a future for the book in which:

... media consumption will take place by people choosing from a wide variety of screen configurations, the way they have always chosen from a wide variety of printed formats. That is, you'll pick up one kind of screen/device to read a memo you're working on, another one to look at the work of your favorite photographer, and pull a rolled-up one out of your back pocket to read a book or newspaper on the subway or at the beach. And those don't include the ones on your walls for a movie, or for a piece of art.

Certainly speculating on a future of multiple screens doesn't entirely gibe with users' current disaffection with carrying a cell phone or smart phone, iPod, PDA, e-reader, compact camera, netbook, and so forth. The weight of multiple devices and the scrambled power cords and peripherals for these devices weighs us down. And the dizzying array of choices only paralyzes us further. [Barry Schwarz's The Paradox of Choice could convince us that perhaps we face an illusion of choice, as well.] Let's not envision a future in which we carry even more mobile devices.

Why not consider that this evolution will probably force people to purchase only two multi-purpose devices, as we have in computing--one fixed and and the other portable? Beyond that, there will be brands and features to select from, unless some iPod-like device innovates far ahead of the competition. How will they evolve? And what will that mean for publishing?

It seems clear that the lines are blurring among delivery systems for various media. With an iPod, for example, the consumer can now listen to music and podcasts, watch video, read books, and display photographs. Purchasing those media and manipulating them, however, takes a computer. Smart phones, with their emphasis on calls and email, continue to expand into photography, office applications, and music. But the killer, does-it-all portable appliance both shines and suffers from the small form factor. Enter the dedicated e-reader, with wireless access and rudimentary web browser (e.g., Amazon Kindle 2 or iRex digital readers, all of which have wireless capabilities). While too large to fit into a pocket, the expansion of capability appears to be only one generation away. The K2 already provides a text-to-speech (which has created quite the uproar with the Authors' Guild), access to portal-based email systems through its web browser, online purchasing through Whispernet, and a battery that lasts for days if not weeks, pushing digital technology further toward the obvious: the hybrid all-in-one. The iRex models already have touch screens and can read Microsoft Office documents and email. Can color be far behind? Tablet PC, anyone?

What does the push toward the all-in-one killer device have to do with publishing? Plenty. With demand rising for electronic books, newspapers, magazines, and even blogs, publishers understand that change has come. Two things seem blurry: what the market will bear, and how new business models will alter traditional publishing.

Digital technology of some sort is already pressuring publishers, with experiments by many houses. Take, as one example, Daniel Gross' book, Dumb Money: How Our Greatest Financial Minds Bankrupted the Nation, which was released as an e-book months before the physical volume was made available. Gross noted that the decision to release as an "e-book exclusive" was made, in part, to decrease time to market for a very timely book, last fall. The volume, published by Free Press, an imprint of Simon & Shuster, sold "in the thousands". Not bad for material only available to e-readers (including the iPhone). The publisher notes that the time for change is past the point of inevitability. It's matter of how and when digital books will see an upsurge (although when, may have been January, as I noted in an earlier post).

But isn't the Free Press' "e-book exclusive" experiment just a toe-in-the-water approach? Why not think larger than small experiments with single books? Why not wonder about Vook and experiments like it? In other words, if distribution of content IS the change, why not consider completely new ways of delivering it, integrating books, audio, video, games, web and hyperlinking, and social networking, along with local information (think Craigslist)? Make these devices capable of synchrony over the wireless cloud, with enough security to allow us to purchase and even interact with our financial institutions. Now we're talking about the future of publishing! We carry only what we wish (perhaps a handful of books, a day's worth of music, a movie or our favorite television shows, the French lesson we've been working on), and swap them out when we need to, no matter where we are. And we can unburden ourselves and our homes from storing all this physical media.

Proprietary formats for content will hinder, not help, these developments. Standards will be required. And before you recoil from this idea, think of the nascent world wide web, built on a simple mark-up language, with meager graphics capabilities in the 1990s. How far we've come.

Let's ponder the potential, if only from the perspective of the customer. On-demand: Anything that can be delivered digitally.

Such an idea could change the delivery of education as well as publishing. Who doesn't want to lessen the weight on the shoulders of the young? Or will we have to wait until they replace the old guard?