Publishing industry has moved across many major changes and is at the crossroads of customer centric trends which are going to impact deeply their traditional business model.

Digital or not digital: That’s not anymore the question Publishing is facing a change of its paradigm which goes beyond digital or not digital. As it has been highlighted by MediaIdeas, print will go from representing more than 75% of the magazine market’s value in 2008, to less than one third by 2020 (US periodical market).

The era of the Publish-eDitors! Readers want to get a role at the beginning of the value chain. They look for organizing information according to their area of interest and the environment in which they are going to read or use the information (home, office, commuting).

4 core dimensions live together and their efficient integration will drive the success of long-lasting players:

Multimedia sources of content
Content on demand based on areas of interest
Multi-level reading depending on the time available, the device used and the moment of the day
Credibility and transparency of information sources

I have identified examples which illustrate these dimensions:

- Paper.li: Reading tweets and Facebook comments as a newspaper

- Flipboard and Discover are iPad Apps which aggregate multimedia contents with a magazine look & feel. Slate is another interesting example.

- Personalized books or Travel guides with respectively Flattenme and Stay

- Net-a-Porter is an on-line luxury magazine with e-commerce features

Customization of content goes with diversification of information sources
In the meantime, the credibility and transparency of information sources will become even more important. That’s why news editors, institutions, press titles will have still a major role to play but balanced with key opinion leaders relevant for the subject covered. Wikileaks will trigger followers in many other different disciplines. It is likely that these opinion leaders will emerge from social networks.

- Underground Book Club relies on dedicated communities to review books  - Socialwhispers uses personal networks as a monetary value

Business models will move towards open source and added-value content Publishing companies are changing their business model from an top-down approach towards collaborating platform.

- Hip2b2 is an open source magazine for expanding scientific knowledge in South-African schools. Thumscribes is another platform for creating collaborative content.

- The publishing company McGraw Hill launched an on-line publishing platform for professors.

- Elsevier has launched in 2010 a new platform, SciVerse, to organize the on-line access to their scientific content (journals, articles and books). In the meantime, they propose a collaborative platform for developing specific applications related to this content.

I am convinced that the future will be made of a more customer centric approach where open-source content will challenge the pay-per-view content. The added value for established publishers will come from the credibility of their content’s integrity and their ability to innovate in order to propose new services and not access to content only.

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