The book, magazine and newspaper industries – already changed forever by earlier forms of digitisation – is set to further accelerate their march to a total digital future with instant conversion of content by packaging it into mobile apps.
Mobile content apps on tablets and smartphones represent the third wave of digitisation of the traditional print publishing industry – the first two being the Internet and personal computers; followed up by e-readers like Amazon’s Kindle.
What sparked this enduring digital revolution, and how has it played out over the years?
First wave
For many years, the biggest costs of publishing have been printing and the associated costs of storage and distribution. Thanks to these, only large publishers have had the volumes to serve niche markets profitably.
Then, in the nineties, the Web lowered barriers to entry for new, more agile publishers, offering low-cost online publishing channels. A decline in readers of newspapers and magazines ensued, driven by an inexorable wave of progress that pushed print periodicals further and further back by making it possible to access overseas content cheaper than printed and posted titles.
Admittedly, online publishing hasn’t made a clean sweep of publishing: Printed book and magazine aficionados retained nostalgia for printed works. Despite the innovation of ‘digital paper’, which made reading of PC screens easier to bear, readers never took to reading books on PCs. The main reason was the fact that PC books cannot truly emulate the book experience of ultra-portability.
Second wave
A decade after the arrival of the Internet, interest in digital has flared up anew in publishing circles, with new mobile digital formats bursting onto the scene – led by Amazon’s Kindle. Naturally, this resolved the portability issue, and heralded a similarly damaging disruption in publishing as the one brought about by the Internet.
But this second wave of digitisation has had its own problems. Standards remain fragmented, and new digital channels continue to emerge and converge, as can be seen in the next section below. Still, it became clear that digital is here to stay, and that leading publishers and book retailers are all embracing one or another form of digital standard – to grab market share in a changing industry, or merely survive.
Third wave
The next wave of disruptive change in publishing has been the continued ‘mobilising’ of digital content on multi-purpose computing devices, including smartphones and tablets. This wave of change represents a welcome move towards more widespread adoption of standards – albeit a new proprietary standard for reading e-books and magazines on the massively popular iPad.
Since then the market for mobile digital formats has taken off, with the iPad showing the most promise and the BlackBerry and Android standards following in its footsteps.
This third wave of change represented not only another instance of erosion of the print media and content space, but also an encroachment on other portable e-standards, and possibly a consolidation of standards – something that is usually indicative of maturation of a technological market.
It is also the first entry of a hardware player into the publishing fray –¥not just any hardware vendor either –the messianic Steve Jobs’s Apple Computer.
Benefits of third-wave iPad publishing
Once their content is converted to the iPad format, publishers of all stripes – new entrants and established giants – have an enormously valuable channel to market.
- Distribution of content is easy, as publishers upload new books or magazine editions to the Apply online store, where users download it.
- Since Apple offers a payment mechanism on its store, monetisation of content is sorted too.
- Readership analytics (also available in other forms of digital publishing tells publishers and authors much about reader preferences, which feeds back into future content creation.
Obstacles of digital mobile formats
But digital publishing remains a closed book to many print players today, as it presents a steep learning curve to those that don’t have the skills to convert their content into mobile e-formats.
Whether developing on EPUB, the iPad or its competitor tablets, publishers have had to commission lengthy and costly bespoke development to convert their catalogues into downloadable apps. While the bigger publishers have been able to absorb the high cost of this, it has been prohibitive to smaller publishers
Unfortunately for publishers of all sizes, iconic big multinational players are driving the digital revolution – Apple with its iPad, Amazon with the Kindle, and Google with Google Editions. Even more unfortunately, these are the world’s most famous technology companies (beyond their most obvious description – retailers, search engines and hardware vendors). Also, they’ve mastered the digital content world to such an extent that they’ve become the new guard of publishing, pushing the old guard to the wall.
Said old guard is being forced to catch up technologically, but struggling to do so, with various challenges to overcome. For one thing, the process of digitisation is not as simple as it should be – in fact it is quite challenging. A lot of publishers are being left behind. South African publishers in particular are lagging international efforts, and so a major opportunity is going begging for global distribution of local content with international relevance, such as national history, wildlife and travel.
There’s hope
But all is not lost. The software exists today to easily convert print-ready files into tablet apps, for distribution and monetisation via the Apple Store.
Using these tools, mobile developers with experience in the publishing industry offer turnkey conversion to tablet platforms without any further development required. Indeed, print-ready publishing files can be ‘app-lifted’ as a self-service option – something that is not possible on the EPUB format used by most e-readers.
If, like many publishers, you find yourself on the horns of a dilemma – knowing that e-publishing is the future but unable to take advantage of the opportunity, it is time to look for a developer with experience in developing mobile content for the publishing industry.
With an instant global audience you will never look back.
