David Worlock, chief research fellow at Outsell kicked off this mornings e-Publishing Innovation Forum. 15 years after birth of the web, change is endemic in our systems, the only stability we have in our industry is that change will happen. A world of collaboration is vital to us, and if nothing else, delegates needed to get energised said Worlock.

Following shortly after, the opening keynote was presented by Vin Crosbie from consultancy Digital Deliverance. His presentation, thriving in the digital age: threats and opportunities for digital publishing was a thorough examination on the state of the publishing industry, how it got to where it is and where it’s going.

Crosbie highlighted how much has changed since 1908, a million horses in the streets of London for example, ask someone from then if that would ever change and they may well have asked you how else everyone would get around. How does publishing in 2008 compare? Information supplied through print has worked fantastically since Gutenberg first invented the first printing press after all.

Crosbie argued that traditional media still follows the analogue practice this is largely based on two factors. Information is traditionally supplied based on;

1) Stories of greatest common interest
2) Stories about what editor thinks other people should be hearing about

Traditionally this was the only way to get information out to the masses and it worked, but only up to a point, not all the information ever got out there. That may sound fairly obvious stuff but it gave a nice grounding to a key question we may not consider enough – why have 1.3bn people gone online?

That figure is also expected to grow to 3.3bn or thereabouts – half the human population. Crosbie says this is because the internet and web can offer both relevant and personal information to the individual – and this is pertinent for publishing.

You could be forgiven for thining that the way forward is just by pushing all that content online instead, not so says Crosbie, believing that the websites of traditional media save their companies.

Just think of the myriad of genre-specific TV stations that have exploded since the 70’s, the 80’s saw a similar explosion of specialist magazines while the 90’s heralded the internet. There was/is a deluge of information. That surplus has meant that people want to be far pickier.

If that is state of things, how should publishers adapt? Mass customisation apparently and that is driven directly by the user, hunting and gathering as Crosbie says.

There is a huge opportunity for creating a delivery system that is able to provide that highly specialist information. Crosbie cited the Telegraph’s experiment last year which emailed a thousand readers a unique, specialised to their interests PDF, last year.

Citing newspaper circulation figures in the US, Crosbie highlighted that for every lost print subscriber; it takes 20 to 50 online users to make up the lost revenue. The current business model isn’t working.

Crosbie left us with some thoughts to mull over

1) Information has to be good enough but not perfect, so long as it’s out there
2) Brand is no defence, it doesn’t matter as much to people anymore
3) The siloing of information will end, information wants to be free and that means collaborating with competitors.

This isn’t to say that mass media no longer has a place; people will want to know about the big stories of the day, the weather too. However Crosbie says that we have to accept that the reader now has far more control. This shift has meant that the value of content has gone down, but this also means that content is now much more affordable to more people than it ever was before. And perhaps that is what future opportunities will come from. 

More later…