Eoin Purcell
Rakes of predictions about the publishing trade this week
First, I expect more change driven by M & A activity in 2008. Second, as more companies bound by traditional publishing models migrate online and join those already there, the application of technology in our industry will accelerate. Third, we will see a ‘squeezing’ of the value-chain (from author to publisher to consumer) driven by publishers looking to build community models around content and authors.
# Kate Swann will leave WH Smith to head up HMV Group.
# The eventual Man Booker winner will be a huge commercial success, outselling the Richard & Judy titles for the year.
# Haruki Murakami will win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
# An online retailer will offer weekly free book downloads for customers.
# But Amazon Kindle will make no real difference to sales of e-books.
Web 2.0 integration
User-generated content, such as blogs, wikis, and forums (not to mention YouTube), is on a collision course with “professional” content, such as user assistance and documentation created by technical writers. The complaints about the amateurs butting in where they don’t belong must be painfully familiar to those who remember the rise of desktop publishing software and the destruction of the vast majority of the professional typesetting business.
My prediction for what it’s worth is:
1) that we will all (Publishers that is) be doing much more of this:
Hoping to figure it out soon
Eoin
Filed under: Publishing, Books, Media, Predictions, Publishing Companies
