You have to hand it to the organisers of The Digital Publishing & Advertising Conference (DPAC) http://www.dpaconference.com to be held this week in NY. My weekly reminders to register have turned into daily ones and so I think I know the event is on, and no, I will not be there.
Mind you, if I were able to attend I would be fascinated to hear from the speakers at the event to see what the say. I would not necessarily be one of the "converted" though as I have found that marketing the concept of digital print distribution is easy - there is almost nothing that you can say against it. Unfortunately the sales figures are still way below expectations. I believe there are only 2 areas that are really working - free stuff and adult content. There has been success with some publishers that dramatically scale back the price of their digital content and yet the sales ratios between print and digital are still only in single figures for the most popular titles (I bet that is not discussed!)
Here is an interesting development, one publisher I know is making available a digital version of its printed content it sells absolutely free. OK, the digital version may come out a couple weeks after the printed one, but the content is exactly the same (although the digital version may include some extra multimedia content). The reason? Their advertising revenue is moving so quickly away from print to the www that they see more value in the online version than the printed one. While there is a demand for print they will supply it, but they cannot wait for the digital world to take over. A brave new world?
If anyone reading this attended the conference, I would love to hear more about what you got out of it.
Monday, June 23, 2008
Thursday, June 5, 2008
Welcome!
With a background that encompasses both print publishing and technology, I have been spending quite a deal of my professional life recently examining how these areas interact and it is my belief that there are big changes afoot.
Strangely, it is not so much the march of technology that will be the catalyst for change, but the reliance of print publishing on the diminishing natural resources of paper and petrol for their existence. With higher production and distribution costs and increased competition from the Internet, many publishers are being forced to re-examine the fundamentals of their entire business model to survive in the 21st Century.
It is then not surprising that a large number of technology companies are investing large amounts of money into technologies that will help publishers bridge that gap.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)