…and the newest heavy hitters in the publishing world are the darlings of the Internet era: Jeff Bezos of Amazon and eBay’s Pierre Omidyar.
So riffs Ray Snoddy, UK journalist, author and media commentator, when asked by InPublishing to wax prescient on the state of the publishing industry 10 years from now.
Snoddy and others point to a future dominated by the user’s multi-channel experience, with printed materials still being accorded high status.
“The Guardian, unsurprisingly, was the first to go totally electronic and The Independent only prints at the weekends and on big occasions such as the recent coronation of King Charles,” muses Snoddy. “For most of the others, it still makes sense to print and distribute newspapers in the urban centres as premium products. Despite everyone having their own unique electronic communicators, some smarter than others, there are those prepared to pay a bit extra to turn paper pages.”
MMP Global Solutions’ Paul Johnson is less poetic, continuing to promote Big Data as the really big thing even a decade from now.
“Attribution modelling will have advanced beyond recognition, driving cross-selling capabilities, while personalising advert and content targeting and the merging of disparate databases into a single customer view across all channels will continue,” Johnson predicts, leaving the reader to wonder if it’s all about the data and the money (it is) instead of the reader’s experience in consuming content (as it should be).
We like Roger Pitt’s predictions, which combine the advantages of digital and data with the enhancement of the reader experience.
“There will be more emphasis than ever on reader engagement and interactivity with the product, and advances in the efficiencies of finishing technologies will have resulted in more prevalent use of the ‘specialist’ finishes that we employ now, such as glow in the dark and thermocromic inks, monogrammed foil-blocking, fragrance burst and face paint inks to name but a few,” says the managing director of Headley Brothers.
One thing is clear: it is up to us what the future brings. As leaders, innovators, publishers and creators of content, we have a huge opportunity to align our own business models for growth by keeping our end users in mind at all times. A future where this happens is one I’ll be happy to see.
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