Publishing->Participation

“Publishing->Participation,” This was just one entry in a chart comparing Old Media and New Media in the book, Now is Gone: A Primer on New Media for Executives and Entrepreneurs by Geoff Livingston and Brian Solis. But coming on the heels of the AEP Summit: “Publishing in the World of Free,” it seemed to suggest some concepts worth exploring. What could this mean in the context of educational academic publishing? And what keeps me, and I’m sure many others in the industry up at night, is what does this look like as a business model?

I don’t have a specific answer of course, but I think that an overall goal is to preserve the value of the publishers’ role— identifying and providing access to high quality information while filtering out inaccurate or poorly presented information—while at the same time creating a model that is not tied to selling fixed units of information.
This is suggestive of some changes the industry has been discussing and pursuing with varied enthusiasm, such as unbundling and micropayments, but it also suggests a social aspect that needs to be explored.

Increasingly, those who are seen as experts in their subject areas are not authors of “the definitive book on the subject”, they are the bloggers and twitterers who answer questions or share their insights on a daily or hourly basis, in short, who demonstrate their expertise in real time.

Daily immersion in the living intellectual life of their customers and peers on the part of a publisher’s authors and editors is going to be a necessary aspect of the move to a participation model. It doesn’t mean that all information has to be free; conversation needs to be free, hints and advice need to be free, but people will still pay for detailed, well-structured information from a source they trust (many bloggers are selling books). That trust, however, has to be built not on reputation but on demonstrating one’s knowledge. And the context those conversations provide is important; unbundling content and making it available online is essentially just a version of the web we have now.

So what are we talking about—does a publisher become a big, global, digital reference desk? Yes, I think, to some degree. But the librarians need to come out from behind their desks and ask questions as well as answer them, and the library needs to have unlimited interlibrary loans. Another key to our new “Wikinomic” world is openness and collaboration. If I am an expert in a particular field I probably know not only of some great content I have authored with my publisher, but also of information by my peers that is published elsewhere. We need a model that would allow and encourage an expert to point someone to both pieces of information and for the creator and publishers of this information to be compensated. Maybe we need an agreed-upon micropayment standard for the industry as well as something like a commission structure for the source of the referral – think affiliate networks.

The book, Wikinomics, by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams provides many examples of struggling companies in moribund industries such as mining that reinvented themselves into profitable juggernauts by rethinking their businesses in the context of participation and collaboration.

And in that spirit, I’ll end my piece here. No closure. No conclusion. An open question for discussion and collaboration.