Publishing Predictions 2018: Somewhere Else

Publishing gets more focused, builds community and seeks new technology experiments. These are some of the themes I contemplate in this year’s predictions post.

Slimming:

More and more publishers will narrow their focus both in terms of their product lines and their operations. In education, publishers with broad-based publishing programs will be at a disadvantage to those who go deep within select disciplines.  Look for more consolidation which ties product directed at particular subject areas and disciplines.  This concentration will create the scale publishers need in order to invest in and deliver additional services, content and other products to particularly interested communities. For example, a company’s corporate strategy will be directed at becoming the only provider of business management, accounting and financial management textbooks and materials for the higher-ed market. To a large degree, the health education market is already structured this way.

In back-office operations, publishers will seek to farm out non-core operations to third-party providers. Likely candidates for outsourcing will be IT infrastructure, accounting and finance, and warehouse operations. Core activities remaining in house will include editorial, production and content management.  These functions will become increasingly dominated by a “product management” philosophy similar to the way packaged software products are managed. As a result, the definition of ‘product’ will be expanded beyond the delivery of a single textbook title to one which encompasses community development, gaming, life-long learning and other potential new products and services. 

Community:

LinkedIn is the ultimate business community. Or is it?  For the development of expert communities and market places of interest, LinkedIn is a very poor solutions. Increasingly content owners, educational and academic publishers and corporations are recognizing that the development and nurturing of communities of interest facilitates deep relationships with the content owner and the promulgation of new membership-driven revenue models.  Interestingly, some membership associations which historically relied on revenue from journal sales are facing declines in that source of revenue. As a result, they have been forced to reevaluate the way they engage with membership in order to boost and/or expand their revenue base. Zapnito is one solution which enables the establishment of expert communities centered around a core set of interests or subject areas. Similar solutions enable and facilitate new models for engagement and revenue growth.

“Legacy” publishers with strong branded content “franchises” will also seek to build services, credentialing, community engagement and other similar products defined by their deep content inventories. Think about the For Dummies Expert Knowledge Market where the platform enables credentialed practitioners to offer services and expertise across the spectrum of Dummies content. For Dummies becomes a marketplace of products and services. The same model may apply for more ‘traditional’ educational content such as test prep (Kaplan) and business and accounting management.

Just do it myself:

We’ve all been aware of the maker culture where people use new technology to expand their DIY capabilities. Within the science and academic communities, we are starting to see the publication of not only data and result sets associated with experiments but also the research models themselves, which encourages scientists and lay people to conduct their own experimentation(s). How this trend will impact publishers is difficult to discern at this point; but publishers which encourage and facilitate this deeper interaction with the method behind and results of research content will have an advantage in building relationships with their target markets.

Increasingly, lay researchers have access to powerful tools and techniques for building their own models and conducting their own research. As a result, non-academic researchers have discovered new planets and conducted their own local environmental research projects thanks to technology and tools formally available only to better-funded ‘experts’. It is possible there will arise from this an explosion of new and well-conducted research, the distribution of which could be facilitated by publisher platforms. Obviously, the idea of research conducted by lay practitioners will alarm many but, perhaps, we are on the cusp of a revolution in academic research which could mirror the demise of Encyclopedia Britannica vis-à-vis Wikipedia. 

I hear voices:

Siri scares me and my Echo is usually turned off. Sometimes Alexa will say something apropos of nothing.  Who’s listening?  It’s not for me (yet), but voice-activated applications and products are the fastest growing segment of the consumer technology market. They were all the rage at CES this year; so much so that a voice-activated toilet gained Kanye-like PR exposure. At $5,000, flushing was never so expensive.

Voice activation is the front-end of an artificial intelligence revolution and these smart voice-activated devices will increasingly dominate our homes and work environments.  Serving up our favorite content may become one of the primary functions of these devices and any publishing company lacking an Alexa development team building ‘skills’ into their products may be missing the boat. (See the above section on Dummies ‘how to’ guides).

Audio delivery of content must be optimized within editorial production workflows. Think how much fun it’s been to do this for eBook formats! Not only that, we can only guess at the manner in which users will seek material when they do it verbally versus ‘manually’. This is going to require some amount of experimentation and research. For example, when we search for things currently we often receive visual clues during the process. Think about searching the TV listings on your television or scanning a list of search results on Google. In a verbal-oriented world, we will miss these clues so what will replace them?

An AI bot could have written this:

Several high-profile content producers are using artificial intelligence to create content at a sophisticated level. For example, Sports Illustrated has a tool named Arkadium which can create infographics from scratch and the Associated Press has used “Automated Insights” to create stories from the results of games. As these types of tools are fine-tuned and improved, they will also mimic the editorial ‘voice’ of the publications in question.

It is only a matter of time before publishers implement AI bots and tools to create content typically produced by authors and editors (if they aren’t already).

However, across all industries, AI is likely to have a material impact on back-office, repetitive and non-value-added tasks. Tasks like file formatting, data clean-up, document mark-ups and accounting functions like cash application and royalties audits will be taken over by AI bots in the short term. These bots mimic employees’ activities and execute tasks more quickly and with more accuracy. Staff are freed up to conduct more value-added activities. AI is already being built into many application software products.  For example, publishers are looking for CMS products to offer/enable intelligent content optimization and repackaging which uses user analytics to make recommendations on content selection and delivery.

Some other thoughts on trends for the coming year:

• Wired magazine profiled an augmented reality app developed by IKEA. (Ikea’s AR kit)  Their objective is to sell more furniture and what better way to do that than to be able to see the furniture in your own home? And the NY Times is experimenting. There should be many similar AR experiments going on in publishing.
• Podcasting is still growing and growing. Pod listeners have doubled over the last two years and publishers are getting into the act.  Macmillan is launching its “Case Closed” mystery Podcast. And, of note, this format has successfully thrown up a whole new range of Podcasting personalities and stars looking for book deals.
•  I think quiz books will be the next coloring book craze.
•  Mergers & Acquisitions: We’ve already started to see M&A activity heat up in the past 3-4 months and I see that continuing.  There will be further consolidation in educational publishing, a shake out in EdTech and perhaps some consolidation in the publisher software market.
• Germany will win the World Cup (again).

Enjoy that? Here are my predictions from past years:

• 2017: Predictions 2017: Subscribe To Me
• 2016: Predictions 2016: Education, China, Platforms and Blockchain.
• 2013: Predictions 2013: The Death of the Middle Man
• 2012: Predictions 2012: The Search for Attention
• 2011: Predictions 2011: The Growth of Intimacy
• 2010: Predictions 2010: Cloudy With A Chance of Alarm
• 2009: Predictions 2009: Death and Resurrection:
• 2008: Predictions 2008
• 2007: Predictions 2007
• 2007-2013: My Big Book of Posts & Predictions on Slideshare

Michael Cairns has served as CEO and President of several technology and content-centric business supporting global media publishers, retailers and service providers. He can be reached at [email protected] and is interested in executive management and consulting (Digital Prism), board and/or advisory positions. He blogs at personanondata.com