Early in my business career I learned that coming up with an idea for a business venture was simple according to the entrepreneur who founded the company. Just give the customer what they are asking for. In those early years it was providing bibliographic reference data to the end user by distributing the data on CD-ROM. This put the information in the users hand so that they could search and discover the information without the cost and complexities of online database searching.
Similarly, the publishing industry is based on the tenet of anticipating and providing the users needs. While it has certainly has been and continues to be a successful business model, the needs of the user will never be completely met. Recently, customer publishing has emerged as another model for providing information to users. This form of publishing varies widely and does not have to involve print at all. The Wiley Custom Select product can be considered custom publishing because the user is gathering various chapters from Wiley books and combining this content into a new electronic package for distribution.
At the most recent SIIA conference a panel discussed customer publishing and what it means for the future. Ann Michael summarized some of the discussion on her Scholarly Kitchen blog post. Here is what some of the panelist think about the future of custom publishing:
Steve Alpern: “People know what they need and what they’re willing to pay for, and the better you can serve that need, the better it will be for your business.”
Matt Turner: “More people from the top down are talking about re-monetizing content – everything is personalized. It’s the overall trend for the future. The direction is being set that there is nothing but custom publishing.”
Skip Prichard: The upcoming “entitlement generation” is going to set customization as the trend. “Content has to be targeted directly to them. They expect you to know the paper they’re working on [and this expectation] will move from the student to the professional world.”
If it truly will be as Matt Turner puts it that there will be nothing but custom publishing, then my mentor year ago was correct. We need to give the customer what they are looking for. Custom Publishing may be the answer.
