It is about a year since Barack Obama became the President of the United States of America. It was quite a moment when, in depths of this massive, financial crisis came someone who said he was going to make sense of the uncertain world and bring calm to the fast changing economic climate that people were experiencing. He was going to stem the unemployment, bring the disruption of credit crunch to a close and make good the blots on the country’s image.

And this week is going to be quite a week for the digital publishing industry which is in the face of disruptive change too. The big news is the supposed launch of Apple’s ‘iSlate’ tablet, e-reader device thingy, about which there has been a frenzy of speculation in the blogosphere for the last few weeks.

The speculation ranges from forecasts that it will change the book industry forever to a massive yawn about another over-hyped device which does not come up to expectations. Publishing executives around the world are trying to work out what the public wants and what they are willing to buy when it comes to eBooks, digital magazines and newspapers.

It has been far from clear until, perhaps, this week who was going to take the first step to produce the device which was going to capture the imagination of customers enough for them to buy it in droves. Has Apple done it with this device? Will they bring some certainty in an uncertain world? We will have to wait and see.

Secondly, there is the ‘Digital Book World’ conference taking place in New York on 26th and 27th this week, which is nicely positioned to coincide with the Apple ‘iSlate’ announcement. You can see from agenda that there is a shift taking place in an industry that has been dominated by large booksellers. Sessions include “Digital Tools: How the Sales and Marketing Process Is Changing” and “Selling Direct to the Consumer: What are the Best Practices for Publishers?” which not only show that the industry is dealing with a change in the form of the content they market but they way in which they sell it.

The challenges in publishing now and in the near future rely not only on what their customers are willing to buy, but the skills of the people within the industry. Production departments will start to shift into the IT team. Jill Ambroz at FolioMag writes clearly about how one company is dealing with this shift in skills. Journalists will have to become skilled in search engine optimisation. Editor will become multimedia specialists.

It’s no wonder that there is a tumult building about Apple’s new device. It has feels like there is a lot of hope resting on the ‘iSlate’ to bring some order to an uncertain world. And, rather like the expectation of a nation hoping that President Obama would bring change to the USA in a year, it will take more than one device to bring certainty to the publishing industry.

From our perspective, working in what is sometimes thought of as the less exciting world of educational publishing, we see what is going to be happening tomorrow with the next generations of the workforce. We design and develop digital book and magazine systems which teachers and children are using in their classrooms now. When the children come out of the education system in a few years time, eBooks and digital devices are likely to be the norm. Publishers now have the opportunity to create better experiences out of content than they have been able to do in the past with the advent of these new devices.

So, don’t just look to Apple for the answers to what is going to be big in publishing. Ask your children.

*Since writing this post there has been a huge amount of discussion and speculation about the launch today of Apple's iSlate. One particularly lucid article about the opportunity that this device presents to publishers was posted on 26th January by Jason Kincaid at TechCrunch.

Will Hawkins
New Business Director