Let’s Imagine

Michael Jensen | 10/13/2009

Let’s imagine the publishing environment, five years from now.

As I wrote in the last post, in just the last five years, we’ve seen the rise of Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, Google Books, ebooks 2.0, YouTube, Flash, massively multiplayer games, iPhones and apps, the institutionalization of open source and XML standards, and plenty, plenty more.

Let’s imagine five years ahead, and let’s think about how to position Canadian publishing optimally for that future. I invite supposition, theorizing, and even pull-from-the-air hypothesizing, in the comments.

It’s a fool’s game, predicting the future. And at the risk of becoming Moliere’s “knowledgeable fool” (“A knowledgeable fool is a greater fool than an ignorant fool”)—I’ve been trying to forecast the next five years for the last, oh, twenty years.

I’ve done all right, being mostly correct on the things that matter.
I’ve also been wrong (about how quickly micropayment systems would be accepted, for example), but on the main I’m not embarrassed by my past prognostications.

If the last five years brought us such incredible, surprising bounty, then what must the next five years bring? At base, we will have the compound-interest effect making a hockey-stick rise in terms of digital connectedness, making five years from now disruptively different.

Here’s a few of the things that seem clear:

* We’ll have 1000 to 10,000 times more documents available for free on the World Wide Web than we have today. Consequently, certified quality and substantiveness (as defined culturally and algorithmically) will be ever more cherished.

* Ubiquitous information: you will connect with the Web in a way that allows you constant access to “your world”—your library, your house, your friends, your virtual portable personalized digital reality. It can be presented on your phone, on your laptop, on hotel widescreen TVs, in library kiosks, in Starbucks and in Chapters.

* The distinction between “work” and “life” will have continued to dissolve; that said, avatars that pleasantly say “I’m off the grid until about 4:00” to anyone trying to contact you, will have become a signal of sanity.

* Micropayments will have finally become institutionalized (which I first erroneously predicted as a near-future inevitability in 1996 [Google “michael jensen” micropayments]). But by now (2014), tossing a digital dime or a virtual quarter into someone’s virtual hat, to access (or reward) something of value, will be trivial and accepted—in fact, the information economy will be turning to depend on these transactions.

* Increasing intersection between gameworlds and other virtual worlds (think frequent flyer miles as viable currency to buy a battle-axe in a medieval massively multiplayer online game) mean that APIs, digital transactions, automated access systems, and currency-neutral pricing models will be normalized.

* A functionally borderless digital environment predominates—in which tribes, communities, groups, causes, and the like wax and wane transnationally, based on brief, or enduring, interests. Think a potentially transitory, virtual association, the SESO, the “Society for the Exploration of Something or Other.” These communities accrue link/search collections of resources—for free and potentially for pay—that become “vertical aggregations of the community of knowledge” about the thing they’re interested in.

What should a publisher do in such a borderless, ubiquitous, always-on, micropayment world do?

* Design flexible systems that don’t depend on a particular format of sale.

* Design niche-based marketing systems that attend to communities of practice and interest.

* Presume that contractual agreements can be arranged which preclude any interruption between interested audience and intellectual content (the only question is who gets what share of what money).

* Engage in every rational vertical market who asks—presuming at least 50% share in digital nickels.

* Resign ourselves to a low price for an ebook (currently “$9.99” is the sweet spot) compared to a p-book—but make up for it in volume and lower distribution costs.

Let me be clear: we will have to do this AND continue to do what we’ve always done, during this transitional half-decade.

US and Canadian publishers will, in 2014, still be making at least a third of our income from print sales, and probably more than half. But an increasing (and obviously inevitably increasing) proportion of our sales will be digital, through a complicated compilation of micropayment aggregations via multiple vendors, single-chapters-for-a-dime sites, online specialist libraries, Google Libraries subscriptions, direct e-book sales, aggregation e-book sales, and open-access-leading-to-sales systems.

“Export” of Canadian ebooks will be technically trivial five years hence—*if* you’re ready as a publisher. “Ready” presumes that you have 20% to 40% of your entire list (or at least the last 10 years of your list) available in ebook format, and that you are flexible and adventuresome with your e-titles.

Think I’m crazy, or even just mistaken?

Write about it in the comments.

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