The Future of Publishing

No matter what the content, the topic, the need, or the task, the reader wants to have a great, fulfilling experience. A student studying for an exam doesn’t have just a linear reading experience; he or she also has a nonlinear reading experience that allows him or her to study more effectively. This can be described as an efferent reading activity. It is so important for the student to be able to search, find, discover, and read the most pertinent information for a test, paper, or presentation, and the screen of a mobile device is most likely the first thing that a student uses to access desired content. The portable mobile device provides the user with many new opportunities to search, find, discover, and read content in places and at times that were not available pre-smartphone.

Let’s talk about usage. What type of usage stats are you currently getting from your mobile app? Are you able to determine any key threads that benefit your overall user community? What if your users had better features and capabilities? Would they spend more time with your content? In a recent Scroll.in article, the CEO of Hachette Group, Arnaud Nourry, stated that “the eBook is a stupid product: no creativity, no enhancement.” The current e-book offerings are flat, with no audio, no video, and no multimedia features. Imagine the joy of your user community when its flat reading experience is transformed into a full 3D reading experience.

Mr. Nourry also provides a historical lesson about how the music business delayed going digital, allowing piracy to creep in and create a new level of disruption. We have seen piracy hit the scholarly publishing industry: SciHub has pirated millions of articles from it. To combat piracy, the music and movie industries have built new businesses around streaming. Why hasn’t book publishing moved in this direction? The beautiful thing about streaming is that the content cannot be stolen.

Since the development and launch of the e-book, one must ask the question: Why hasn’t the industry moved to develop the e-book further and add bolder features that enhance the reader’s experience?

The other key topic that I want to present is “app sprawl.” Some publishers have launched an app for every book—and may have over a hundred apps. No reader is going to download hundreds of apps; this is too confusing—and they take up too much real estate on a smartphone. Imagine if a publisher had a hundred titles across five subject areas. In the current way of doing business, a company would actually create a hundred separate apps. This is very costly and time-consuming. Gadget Software has established a virtual-streaming publishing platform that provides the publisher with a single, branded LiveClient that can be downloaded from the app and Google Play Store. LiveClient provides the publisher with a Channel and a vPub for each book, journal, magazine, and so on.

Users can traverse the Channels and vPubs with a single search. They can create playlists incorporating all of their search results from a variety of sources. Users can see the content they subscribe to—and also what they do not subscribe to, which creates a new merchandising opportunity. The branded LiveClient’s Channel and vPub structure provides the publisher an opportunity to unsilo its content and open up that treasure chest to each user. Imagine finding that jewel of content that supports your research or satisfies your itch for knowledge on a specific topic. Furthermore, this branded LiveClient structure allows the publisher to create its very own Disney World of content for its user community in a just-in-time and just-in-need capacity.

Now let me share a very important story about how the industry was slow to move to digital books.

In my 2014 article, “As Worlds Collide: New Trends and Disruptive Technologies,” published the journal Against the Grain I shared the story about the 2001 PSP symposium titled “The E-book: Crouching Dragon or Hidden Tiger?” Publishers and librarians actually debated the pros and cons of the e-book. This industry is very slow moving, and it required validated, published proof that a shift to a new medium such as digital books was acceptable.

The publishing executive who moved first in both categories was Derk Haank, who was then CEO of Elsevier. At a meeting in Japan, a library director asked Derk when Elsevier was going to load up the journal’s backfiles. Derk asked him how important this was to the library community, and the director said it was very important. Derk replied in his normal, very confident manner, “We will load them ASAP.” Without any hesitation, Derk informed the Elsevier team about his decision, and this ambitious project moved forward on his order. After Elsevier’s announcement, other publishers introduced their own backfile programs. When Derk moved over to Springer (now Springer Nature), one of his first initiatives was to digitize the entire book collection. By 2006, Springer had beaten the other scholarly publishers to the punch with its e-book program. These two anecdotes demonstrate our industry’s lethargy in moving into new technologies.

In sharing this history, I am working very hard to make the point that our scholarly publishing industry takes entirely too long to accept new innovations. Our goal should be to enhance and improve researchers’ experience, allowing them to increase their efficiency and effectiveness—which will, in turn, greatly benefit humanity. It is time for the publishing community to begin the process of innovation by first questioning the status quo of e-books and agreeing that we can (and should) do better for our reading community.

In summary, I would suggest the following seven laws for Being Truly Mobile: