The next big DEVELOPMENTS IN PAPERLESS TECHNOLOGY By Nicholas Kleanthous, Head of Demand Generation, YUDU What’s next for digital publishing?
Mobile devices of various kinds are now an established part of the consumer electronic marketplace. With smartphone growth slowing, this prompts the question of what it all means for digital publishing and how digital publishers can excite readers and clients in a mature marketplace.
Five years ago, when the iPad was first announced, many tech commentators asserted, as many science fiction authors predicted and even IBM did in the 1960s, that technology was going to spell the end of paper and print.
The impact of mobile devices and their worldwide growth has obviously panned out somewhat differently; whilst tablets have spurred consumption of written content in some ways, nobody is predicting the death of print and paper anymore.
Before asking the question what’s next, let’s take a look at where we are now. As mentioned, a good portion of written material is now consumed on mobile devices of various kinds, to accommodate these new devices, digital publishers have produced innovative solutions; Magazine apps, News Aggregators like Flipboard and most obviously, reflowable and interactive eBooks.
Many of these attempt to combine the fluidity of digital content (JSON feeds, embedded video, interactive content) with more traditional, page-turning PDF conversions, and this sort of approach has become a mainstay of the digital magazine market.
It’s important to remember however, that apps and eBooks are only one side of the equation. Browser-based content
constitutes an overwhelming majority of what digital users consume in terms of the written word and in recent years, browsers have become increasingly powerful, able to do things with scripts that previously required plugins like Flash. This trend, along with the fact that browser-based content is becoming ever-more mobile friendly thanks to CSS, will help to maintain the primacy of the browser on tablets for the bulk of written content. Apps will be
reserved for specialist or extremely well-known brands and published content that places a premium on the experience and level of functionality that only purpose- built apps can deliver.
The consumer is therefore well accustomed to new forms of paperless technology, but what about the corporate space? Larger enterprises have been operating managed device or bring-your-own-device schemes for many years, which incorporate tablets and smartphones, and as a result smartphones and increasingly tablets, have become permanent fixtures in most offices. This has, in turn, driven the growth of enterprise applications, many of them multi- platform, and allowing for individual or collaborative editing across platforms, a particularly famous example being Dropbox.
Finally, educational content, most obviously textbooks, have become standard-fare for most educational publishers and colleges. This is mostly in the form of complementary digital content that sits alongside the print version, illustrating the general trend of the past few years, to see digitally published content as a partner to print, not a competitor.
The general trend across all of these verticals is of Page 20 A Digital Jersey
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