Publishing Industry: towards the void?
Pfeiffer
Consulting 2000
August 2000
What is happening?
The publishing industry is
currently based on technology that is over a decade
old - not very long for an industrial tool, but an
eternity in the digital realm
This means that the application
software and workflow structures in place are not at
all adapted to the challenges of the future
cross-media world
Many publishing operations are
questioning their current setup. While there is no
extreme urgency to change what works right now, in the
midterm it will be essential to find a new publishing
platform which will take the challenges of the online
world into account
Analysis
The publishing world is headed for the
what could be called the ‘second wave’ of Desktop
Publishing. During the first wave,
which started with the arrival of the Macintosh, desktop
page layout tools and Postscript, most publishing
companies converted their print production to computer
-based tools. Operations with complex workflow problems,
such as newspapers, moved to or continued to use
high-end editorial systems - but this currently concerns
only a fraction of the overall number of companies
involved in publishing.
Now the situation has evolved
considerably. Publishing is no longer only concerned
with producing printed pages, but is now about managing
content and adapting it to a variety of formats, ranging
from the printed page to WAP-enabled phones.
These are not the only challenges the
industry is facing. Even without considering the
cross-media aspect of things, hardware platforms are
evolving continuously, and so is the system software
necessary to use them. In addition, the Operating
Systems landscape is changing profoundly: Microsoft has
launched Windows 2000, and Apple is readying MacOS X. In
parallel, the tools which have been used to date are
mature, but are not necessarily adapted to today’s
challenges. Most publishing setups are based on software
applications which are over a decade old. To accompany
the evolution of hardware and operating system, it will
be necessary to rethink the software aspect of
publishing. And, increasingly, the ASP model of software
distribution is being discussed as a potential
alternative for today’s way of working.
In fact, during the first wave of
Desktop Publishing, things were (relatively) easy: you
had to find the right software package, solve the
problems linked to output, and then you were ready to
publish. Well, it wasn’t really that easy - but at
least it was much more straightforward than the
challenges technology managers in publishing houses are
facing today.
Conceptually speaking, it is not so
much of a problem. In fact, one vision of the future
wave of publishing has been the center of heated
discussions at technology events for a while: an
information-centric publishing model, where content
elements are stored in a central database, ready to be
adapted to a variety of output formats thanks to rich
data-encoding standards (mostly XML).
Of course, solutions of that kind
exist. In fact, one could argue that part of the problem
is that there are too many solutions. High-end system
vendors are competing with each other to get attention
for their costly and complex solutions. Low-end vendors
are scrambling to provide a simpler and less expensive
solution to the same problems. High-end systems are far
too complex for many publishing setups to implement.
Low-end solutions are somewhat simpler, but face the
problem of critical mass. While no one has a problem
with buying a software application from a small vendor,
buying a complete integrated system requires confidence
in the provider’s longevity and capacity to provide
mid-term development and support.
Compared to most desktop publishing
solutions in current use, what is required today is
exponentially more complex - and only a few vendors have
the sheer size to reassure anxious customers that they
will have the R&D resources necessary to follow the
evolution of the market.
Recommendations
The picture that emerges from this
analysis is not a reassuring one. What the market really
needs in the next year or two is something significantly
more complex than the solutions currently available from
mainstream software publishers such as Adobe or Quark.
However, just as now, only a fraction of the market will
be financially and technically able to support the
complex solutions from some of the big system
integrators (without even mentioning the fact that most
of these solutions, tailor-made for the newspaper
market, are not adaptable enough for a completely
web-centric publishing model).
And even though a number of publishing
companies may not feel directly concerned about the
issues bigger companies will be facing, the industry
needs to rally around one set of standards and
protocols. In short, publishers will need to support the
basics of cross-media publishing, even if they only
focus on print. The market needs to move on - the whole
of the market. But is it ready? Who will provide the
next generation solutions? How will they be implemented?
The development schedule for application software is
such that it will take years before the major
applications are fully converted to the emerging new
model and a viable new standard emerges.
The long and the short of it? Don’t
underestimate what is happening. The market is waking
up. Many of the bright minds in the industry are working
very hard to conceptualize what publishing will be like
tomorrow. For the time being there are far more
questions than answers - but then again, finding the
right questions is a major step towards gaining the
answers.
This Fall, Pfeiffer Consulting will
publish an in-depth report on publishing platforms for
the future. For suggestions, or If you would like to be
informed when the report becomes available, please click
here.
July 7,2000
©Pfeiffer
Consulting 2000
