Opinion: The ‘New’ Media Landscape: A View from the Grass
by Tim O'Reilly
Tim O'Reilly is the founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, Inc. The publisher of this magazine and the creator of the O'Reilly annual data and technology conference has been in publishing and computing since 1978. He has published or written nearly 500 books and spoken to tens of thousands of audiences in more than 140 countries. Find his website at http://oreilly.com.
Since the first Web-based publication at CERN in 1991, I've watched the Internet become the new landscape in which all information is created, stored, and disseminated. In its early days, "the Internet" meant just one Internet. It has grown and multiplied and is now an enormous ecosystem of many networks, many standards, and many companies, some of which are small, some of which are big, some of which are public and some of which are private, some of which are companies and some of which are nonprofit. And they're all interdependent.
As a developer, I see this new environment as a massive landscape for information. And the companies in this environment, like it or not, will need to adapt or die. The best companies will evolve over time to exploit these new possibilities and become something more than the mere providers of information.
How does this affect the publishing industry? We have to figure out how to apply the new knowledge in computer science and related fields to the publishing problem. Publishers, software publishers, and media publishers (I include book publishers in this category) in the United States, both large and small, still live in the industrial age. They are structured and organized around a set of processes that were developed for the industrial age. Publishers try to maximize economic efficiency and minimize cost, thereby meeting consumer demands. They buy and sell information as a commodity. And they sell products and services by the physical units in which the information is bound (printed books, CD-ROMs, DVD-ROMs, etc.).
As a result of this structure, publishers have a few things they can offer:
a high-quality product that can be stored and transported and sold;
an advertising-based business model; and
a set of costs.
The business model drives the creation and quality of the products and services, so the publisher also has a strong bias towards creating things that are consumable. The business model dictates the economics of the publisher's operations, and so content is important to the bottom line only in terms of its economic contribution (the most recent statistics I can find from the publishing industry suggest that for book publishers only 10 percent of revenue comes from direct sales of the books, by far the largest share being advertising sales). But to many publishers, the cost of materials is still very high. So most publishers choose to create media that is bound in materials that have a very high manufacturing cost.
If you look at traditional media as it existed just 10 years ago, you would see a massive amount of manual labor being applied to almost all aspects of content creation: writing, typesetting, page-design, graphic design, printing. These were creative fields, but they were also fields where very low-cost technologies were utilized. The technologies for the creation and editing of information have been improving for the past 50 years, but we still use the same processes and make most of the same mistakes that humans always make in new technologies. Publishers and media companies that have managed to preserve the "industrial" structure have resisted change; by and large, they haven't been as good at keeping up as their customers (and competitors) in the Internet age.
In my talks at conferences and in public forums, I have encouraged attendees to remember that it's hard to teach an old dog new tricks. That is to say, if we have a set of procedures for doing something, it will be hard to make those procedures obsolete if they have been in place for a long time. This applies even in computing, where procedures and workflows are still hard-wired into existing processes.
Today, most content is created on-line using tools that work a little differently from what editors have used to work with for the past century. Many publishers have been slow to understand the new realities. They still create content in the same ways that they've always created it, with no understanding of the potential for change and little appreciation of what this might mean for the future.
Some of the publishers are old, some of the publishers are new, and some of the publishers are both old and new. Publishers who create content in their own publishing plants — e-books, web-based applications, or anything other than books — tend to be old-fashioned. It's easier for these publishers to change their ways than it is for publishers that only create books. But there are many exceptions, such as HarperCollins, who have taken an active role in the development of new business models for their book publishing arm.
My vision of the "landscape" of the future
In the past five years, I've spoken at many events and met many people who are working to create new models for the delivery of information and new approaches to content distribution. A number of these people are from companies I've never heard of before. They are developing technologies, protocols, and formats for media distribution that have the potential to disrupt existing modes of information distribution.
Over the last few years, I've started talking about the "new landscape" in which we're creating information and making decisions. Most of the people I meet who work in publishing and media don't understand what I'm talking about. They've been so focused on making decisions about individual publishers or individual products that they can't see that there are much bigger changes coming for their industry.
The new landscape has an extremely low cost per unit and a huge amount of innovation. There are hundreds of technologies and dozens of companies working to deliver content to consumers, and even more working on technologies for content delivery to other devices. These technologies all compete with one another and evolve over time. I have spent the last year or two tracking the development of these technologies and identifying trends that I hope publishers will be able to utilize in the future.
We've seen changes before in technology. I remember when the World Wide Web was first announced in 1989, when I was working at Xerox, I asked one of my colleagues if he believed the Internet would become big and mainstream in the way it has. His answer was a very short, "No. It's dead." Today, I bet he would say that the Internet is even larger and more mainstream than he thought it would be.
In the next 10 years, new and different technologies will start appearing on a regular basis. It will be a difficult road. They will change some of the things we value most about books and publishing — our ability to preserve and protect content — but they will also provide more opportunity for the publishing industry than we can even imagine today.
At the same time, the number of different devices to which we can deliver our information is going to grow rapidly, and with it the need for a platform that serves as a common "landscape" for information. As this happens, I see a growing gap between these two worlds: the technology world where new systems and services are being developed and the publishing world that is struggling to redefine itself.
The new publishers will be those who embrace these new technologies and new opportunities in their business models. Traditional publishers who don't understand the changes happening around them will find themselves getting left behind, if they don't get out of the way.
Many people in the publishing industry, along with many others in the world, have a vision for the future. I see it this way: Most media is still sold through physical media, in printed books, and on CDs and DVDs.
This is a big change from the way that the publishing industry worked in the mid-90s. We are at the point now where it is still early in the digital world — just as it was at the end of the 90s when we saw a flurry of activity around Web technologies, but still no Web content was available and the web was really just about hyperlinks. It is likely that many will see another period of great change and disruption in the future.
For the most part, the current system worked well enough for me to earn a living for almost 20 years. The traditional publishing industry is going to experience many more transitions in its evolution as it goes through this period of change and disruption. The publishers who don't change their ways will find themselves struggling.
For me, there is a choice: Do nothing and wait and wait and wait, or try to understand what is happening and participate in the change. So we're here to create and to manage the future. The way we can do that is to accept that this new landscape we are creating is going to be very different from what we've seen in the past. The traditional model of media production is becoming less relevant every day. The new future will be defined by a new structure for media production, content delivery, and information.
Content delivery is changing
To understand this new landscape, let's examine one area of technology: content delivery. As is the case with most technologies, there are a lot of companies involved in making delivery systems, and each has its own particular reason for being there.
Today, content is delivered through three main channels: print on paper, audio-based delivery (audio CDs, e-books, or recorded music CDs), and delivery through Internet protocols (Web browser, Web-based email, video). Each of
