The Future of Digital Publishing: Going Back to Hieroglyphics

Since the first hieroglyphics emerged in 4000 BC, communicators have constantly looked for ways to disseminate their work to a larger audience at a faster pace. One of the largest technological innovations to speed up the process was the printing press. Mainstream adoption came with the Gutenberg-style hand operated press in the 1600s. With 240 impressions per hour and everything printed on paper, the art of publishing spread quickly through Europe. Almost 150 years later, the industrial revolution sped up the process even more to 2,400 impressions per hour. Then, almost two centuries later, the advent of the personal computer and the internet took the world of publishing to a completely new level.

These revolutionary technologies brought the ability to quickly and cheaply produce published content as well as a way to distribute that content without any physical barriers. Mobile devices and social networks accelerated the distribution of information even more in the years to come. We are now finally reaching a point where the focus is shifting back to the content. Just as it was 6,000 years ago with hieroglyphics, publishing is all about how much information can be presented with brevity, be visually appealing, and captivate a target audience. Today the barriers to entry for publishers are so low that anyone can produce content and there is no discrepancy between the speed that someone can produce an article or the cost to produce it. This equalizer has increased the competition for publishers and drives them to focus on captivating rather than disseminating. The future of digital publishing will harness new technologies and move towards a more dynamic and customized experience for readers.

What does this mean for an individual reader? A reader’s experience should have content – including advertisements – that adjusts specifically to them (age, gender, location, lifestyle, interests and relationships). Harnessing demographic data from social networks and using purchase history to create an interconnected web of products (Internet of Things) can give insight to what people care about all in one place. Companies like Flipboard have done a great job in aggregating publications, but with the user data obtained from the content should evolve without any input or setup.

Recently my TV broke, and while searching for a new model the thought occurred to me: “why can’t you get a message on your smart watch that connects you to an article with a list of the top 10 TVs based on a price range that you could afford?” If this was possible, with just a few taps, the TV could be on its way. A lot of work is still needed to reach such an interconnected state but we are not that far off.

The future of digital publishing will call for a change in the traditional publishing structure. In order to be a dynamic content provider, publishers must have a constant flow of visual and editorial work that caters to different groups of people and pushed to one place. There is no individual publisher that can create that sort of content. Partnerships will need to be put in place so that content can flow to one location, then parceled out by reader. Major publishing houses such as Conde Nast and American Media Inc. have a wide range of publications and may only need to form a few partnerships to stream this content. Bloggers tend to have one specific focus and will need to create a more expansive network to create a best in class provider so readers do not have to search across multiple sites.

Relying heavily on external services will also benefit publishers in the future as technologies become more sophisticated. Many publishers have already started integrating with third parties so that they can focus on their core competency of content. The future will bring an even larger array of devices that publications must optimize to gather reader information while still being visually engaging. General blogging sites can easily run across multiple devices but the strong visual designs originally created for a desktop/laptop do not always translate to mobile devices. Magazine publishers end up having to create separate layouts for each device for each issue. In the future a single published article will be configured to automatically run on the device that a reader is viewing it from. Data aggregators will monitor what content is distributed and viewed, and then revert data back to publishers so that they can refine their work.

The future of digital publishing will bring about new partnerships, heavier use of third party technologies and greater experiences for readers with dynamic and customized content that can be accessed from anywhere on any device. To stay relevant and loyal to its audience, digital publishers will need to maximize their knowledge of their audience so that they are better able to cater to them. A large amount of infrastructure needs to be put in place before this point but the foundation is already being set.

The Future of Digital Publishing: Going Back to Hieroglyphics