Comments on: Game Over, Man — Has the Disruption of Publishing Already Occurred?

By: The Radical Patron – extreme thoughts on public libraries –

The Radical Patron – extreme thoughts on public libraries – — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 17:30:27 +0000

[...] posts this week on evolution, rejuvenation and inertia. New Pencils, New Crayons, Old Humans and Game Over, Man — Has the Disruption of Publishing Already Occurred? Both merit a close [...]

By: The e-Book Revolution — If At First You Don’t Succeed . . . « The Scholarly Kitchen

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 10:30:21 +0000

[...] always entertaining Fake Steve Jobs wrote a piece that was insightful in many ways (covered by Kent here), but which called for content that “incorporates dynamic elements (audio, video) with static [...]

By: O’Reilly Tools of Change, Frankfurt Edition « The Scholarly Kitchen

O’Reilly Tools of Change, Frankfurt Edition « The Scholarly Kitchen — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 10:51:37 +0000

[...] future might look like, realize it’s here, and begin doing major things in it. Lloyd believes (and I agree) that the revolution is here, it’s well along, it’s very sophisticated, it’s very commercial [...]

By: Kristen Fisher Ratan

Kristen Fisher Ratan — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 17:21:55 +0000

We’re seeing a lot of creativity coming from tech start-ups. Literally dozens of them seem to be trying to build their business on the backs of scholarly content. They see the value of the content, aren’t trying to duplicate that. They are creating services and e-commerce around it instead.

I think that high-quality, well-vetted content will remain of value and may, in fact, rise even more visibly to the top the more noise there is out there. But it is up to publishers to figure out new ways to package, disseminate and monetize. That’s where perhaps our creativity is most needed.

By: David Crotty

David Crotty — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 18:15:43 +0000

It should be noted that publishers (and other content creators) are entering the fray, if belatedly so. Hulu, owned by several television networks, has been wildly successful and has probably put a large dent in iTunes sales of television show episodes. Now comes word that several magazine publishers are creating their own service for selling digital subscriptions, cutting the Amazons and Apples out of the picture. The challenge for Hulu is to move to being a paid service. This new magazine venture faces the same hurdle and others, particularly:

They’ll have to create content consumers want to buy. The new product can’t simply be a digital version of the magazines they’re already printing: That’s already available on the Web, and consumers have shown almost no interest in paying for it, and advertisers haven’t fully embraced it either.

By: Ted Freeman

Ted Freeman — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 05:51:57 +0000

Well, it will be a tough nut, and so you have me there. I’m not suggesting that anyone–least of all me–knows how to manage the changes that are coming, or beginning to heat the water, to return to that metaphor. We all know that the current scholarly publishing system has very powerful and unwieldy momentum and strong resistors. Wilbanks would be the first to admit that. The point I wanted to make was that publishers have not been “disrupted” yet. Clearly they are still about journals, articles and books and other remnant architectures and systems of print, which are being replicated online. I’m being much less critical of that fact (which I understand the reasons for) than I am the notion that we have in any sense passed through the “disruption” represented by Internet-related technologies and come out on the other side. Far from it.

By: David Crotty

David Crotty — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 20:10:13 +0000

To be fair to publishers, it’s not like anyone else has found a way to sell those surrounding layers in any other fields as well. If you or Wilbanks can point to specific success stories that we can learn from, I’m sure most here would appreciate it.

By: Ted Freeman

Ted Freeman — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 19:12:53 +0000

John Wilbanks was a keynote at SSP’s IN conference last week, billed as the “new kind of conference” that was going to “provide a framework for approaching innovation in scholarly publishing.” Unless he was just window dressing, his message should be taken seriously by the publishers in attendance, because he addressed the real change that ultimately may parboil scholarly publishers before they realize it. What he said (what he has been saying in one way or another for years now) radically challenges current scholarly publishing practices: the journal, article, and book are no longer the relevant “containers” of science; the web itself has become the ultimate container, and publishers in that environment need to change their business models from certifying and marketing journals, articles and books—the “content layer”—to selling the value to be added to the “surrounding layers,” by facilitating the “integration, annotation, and federation” of scientific research, which is more than articles and books, is ultimately the dynamic online conversation and collaboration of scientists in whatever form it comes. That’s the big change, “the other side of the breach,” and publishers are nowhere near it yet.

By: Mark Lord

Mark Lord — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 16:09:14 +0000

I think it’s the job of publishers, especially STM publishers, to get creative. But unfortunately most publishers, as mentioned just want to fit old formats into new and resell them. I don’t think personally that we’ll be reading ebooks on mobile phones – they’re not the right device for that – I’ve tried and it’s inconvenient. But there’s lots of other ways of providing information that not the traditional flat file book model. We need to innovate and think about how customers may use the information we can provide to them. We have the resources and access to markets to do this if we can think laterally for a change.

By: David Smith

David Smith — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 16:05:18 +0000

They have one advantage over us and one advantage only. They can think on their feet.

This is what Steve Jobs originally said about Apps on the phone (In Jan 2007):
“You don’t want your phone to be an open platform,” meaning that anyone can write applications for it and potentially gum up the provider’s network, says Jobs. “You need it to work when you need it to work. Cingular doesn’t want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up.” (Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16566968/site/newsweek/page/3/print/1/displaymode/1098/)

Originally it was web browser type apps only. But they were very quick to spot the App opportunity and arrive at a solution that works. By the way every other pda/smartphone provider just totally failed at the job.

Agile thinking wins. That’s the basic take home message I think. Apple have taken to heart what General Patton said: “A good plan, violently executed today, is better than a perfect plan next week.”

I believe that was Ripley’s approach more or less.

These folks are not geniuses. Really. But they can monetize their byproducts and they never stop looking for ways to do so, and they are totally outward looking for opportunities to respond to.

You can learn how to develop a technology strategy. That’s not the problem. The culture of agile is the issue here. That’s the environmental factor that has changed. It’s an Agile World.

Evolving is the only answer.