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.
2 comments:
Digital publishing is here to stay. Neither will the print media die, not at least in the foreseeable future. However, a substantial market share of the print media will be taken over by digital publishing.
Gouri:
I agree. I have been involved in Digital Publishing, in one form or another my entire career. It's only until recently that digital is starting to have a significant impact on the print. As we tried to introduce digital to traditional reference print publishers 15 years ago, they were very hesitant, but now have fully embraced the possibilities and are flourishing.
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