2010 Trends

I have been reading with great interest over the past few months blog posts predicting the future of publishing, even it's demise. While the dire predictions may be over the top, the industry is definitely changing. As I look forward into 2010, there are certainly conversations in publishing that are driving these changes.

Digital publishing is making a large impact on publishing. In the academic and STM space, electronic sales are now surpassing print sales. Both the ARL and ACRL report that crossing of the electronic/print paths has been happening for the past few years. As academic institutions have been faced with decreased funding and tight budgets, the best alternative has been to move towards electronic resources that have been generally under priced. Now as the demand for these eResources has increased, there will be price implications moving forward. In an excellent post by Kent Anderson, he points out that we are in the middle of a revolution:

And there is no going back. We’re in the midst of a revolution of distribution, manufacturing, and information presentation and utilization. It’s a digital revolution. It’s a revolution that now dominates the purchasing and strategic frameworks for demand and supply.

As this digital revolution continues in the STM space both authors and publishers now have the capability to add value to the digital content especially in terms of making the meaning of the content more discoverable through the use of Semantic Publishing. Enhancing the meaning of content through semantics was just not possible in the print world.

In 2010 we will see more of the huge growth in the sale of eBooks. While these sales represent a small percentage of overall book sales, there is steep growth in this area and it is taking the place of print books. As for the demise of the publishing, Steve Haber, the president of Sony's Digital Reading Business, has a post titled The Death of Print Doesn't Have to Mean the Death of Publishing. He points out:

There are some similarities between where the publishing industry is today and where the music industry was when it entered the digital age. When we transitioned from LPs and cassette tapes to CDs and MP3s; music did not die - vinyl and magnetic tape formats did.

He concludes that the shift from print to eBook doesn't mean that publishing will go away just as when we went from film to digital, pictures did not go away.

Semantic Publishing

For the most part searching for information on the web consists of relying on the search engine to find the occurrence of the words we type in the search box. This will certainly bring back a large quantity of documents, but whether or not the documents are useful is another matter. This has been the case since very early in the online information age when we librarians went to great lengths to professionally come up with search strategies that gave the user as many valid documents as possible.

Just because we search for documents that have a certain set of search terms doesn't at all mean that the meaning of retrieved documents will be anywhere close to what we intended. Semantic Publishing refers to an emerging practice of enriching documents with anything that makes the meaning of a document clearer to the search engine. Additionally, if a document's meaning is more discoverable, similar documents can be integrated with others providing reliably linked information from a search.

A number of STM publishers are making efforts in several areas to create on-line journals that are semantically enriched. An excellent example of this is the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). In order to facilitate the discovery of an article, NEJM routinely adds semantic XML markup in the text to increase the understanding of the underlying meaning. Additionally, NEJM routinely explores methods for semantic publishing at their Journal's Beta Site. This includes the use of supplementary material with the articles including audio, video, images, and creative ways to link material.

The benefits of semantic publishing will enable the new semantic web. This vision of the semantic web was described by Tim Berners-Lee in 1999 as:

I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize.

With efforts such as with the New England Journal of Medicine, this vision is closer to reality.

eMagazine Next Year

In my last post I suggested that magazine and newspaper content isn't the best fit for the current generation of eContent readers such as a Kindle. The structure of a book and it's intended use suggest a much different user interface than for a magazine or newspaper which are typically approached in a greater browse mode than for a book. Time, Inc. this week released a demonstration of what Sports Illustrated will look like in full-color, with an interactive user experience. Some predict that the device is the new Apple tablet.

eContent Readers

For the past 20 years, I have witnessed the evolution and growth in the distribution of electronic content. For the first ten years this centered primarily around the aggregation of full-text scholarly journal content and it also included a few early efforts in creating electronic editions of books. Growth of the scholarly journal content has continued to grow with the monumental efforts of primary and secondary publishers in addition to major universities and consortia. Off-shore data conversion vendors have made these digitization efforts affordable and have now partnered with publishers to digitize most of the major newspaper back files. Research in libraries today looks very different from 20 years ago aided by the ability access all of this content on the web.

Unfortunately, accessing electronic book content has not progressed in the same manner. Ten years ago the first attempts at eBooks began and we have all seen the starts and stops along the way with countless readers. It appears that the latest manifestations of readers are now catching on and will continue to grow allowing better functionality and more content. This generation of eReaders attempts to handle magazine and newspaper content in addition to books, but nobody is satisfied with the way this serial content works today. Efforts are now underway to create standards around how to display newspaper and magazine content along with advertising.

I look forward to the day when I can read my books, search the journal literature, read my magazines, and browse the morning paper all on one device. Given the recent explosion in the current adoption of eContent it is likely this day will come.