It's said that if one has a hammer he sees nails everywhere. I also have an increasing tendency to see every business as process of obtaining/creating, managing, assembling and publishing information. And ilooking at he technological companies which make the headlines nowadays I feel being on the right track. Google? It's all about information discovery, ranking and presentation. Facebook? A gold mine of valuable information about people and connections. Apple? Oh yes it's about fancy hardware and nice shops, but the driver behind them is more and more iTunes, the AppStore and Lala. Maybe in the not so far future the most important asset will be the cloud based content services for Apple and the hardware only a platform for them. (Think on Android).
The trick is in the broad access to a large amount of information. And here is a problem which these companies manage very well. Namely to decide which information is really valuable and which of this is interesting for a particular user. There are several methods for that like page ranking, user profiling, tagging (by professionals or users).
Publishing information has been for long time the exclusive field of publishing houses and media companies. And now they are in crisis (not all of them). Why, what do they differently?
In my view the real difference is in the attitude. Publishers rather sell products while the aforementioned companies provide services. And it's a totally different way of thinking, where processes start to replace products. Effective processes which connects sources to customers allow a high level of automation and astonishing performance, providing the portable presentation, personalisation and ranking of content.
(Lesson 1: Focus on processes)
Publishers of the future will be content routers and assessors rather than content creators. Doing this they will have to break with the traditional definition of quality. Quality means now excellent and "proven" authors, reliable sources, careful editing, checking and producing. It's what a brand stands for. It's hard to give up this, and maybe just this is the key to the future. Google and Co can manage a level of quality for a huge amount of information, but can't provide the same reliability and credibility like e.g. BBC. for a ofoused set of information. (And it's true even for Wikipedia which is an Encyclopedia publisher with a large staff). Maybe a traditional publisher could use it high level content as a crystallisation point for other related information. Lesson 2: integration
Maybe in the future a book would be a set of several services. In the centre of it we have the book itself in electronic format, with live references to related information, access to author interviews, learning materials, community services, readers comments ...
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