Social Strategy1 President and Chief Intelligence Officer, Steve Ennen, spoke to an impressive audience and panel yesterday at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Los Angeles.
Steve, James Crawford (Engineering Director, Google Books), Bethlam Forsa (Executive Vice President, Global Product and Content Development, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), and Jane Friedman (Co-Founder and CEO, Open Road Integrated Media; former President and CEO, HarperCollins Publishers Worldwide) discussed “The Future of Print” with moderator Richard Sandler (Executive Vice President, Milken Family Foundation).
The general focus of the panel was around the financial impact that technology has on traditional print, and the convenience it delivers. Tablets and mobile devices are providing a clean fitting platform for magazines and periodicals, but they struggle with subscriptions sales (and renewals) because of social media networks’ abilities to break news instantaneously, and repeat news from a variety of sources.
James Crawford from Google Books, talked about how scanning books (over 2 trillion words) provided data and information for searches like “Book Quotes” that would have taken extensive periods of time scouring library books to find. Turning text into data allows us to discover more information without having purchase or rent several books each time you need to find something.
“They’ve (publishers) been selling books, these tangible objects. Now they are selling content, data, and education…..it gives you the potential for a relationship with those customers, which is far more valuable in the long term than just that one transaction. The ability to change comes from the ability to rethink where things are going and the ability to embrace technology with creativity, with marketing, and understand how to integrate those things in a very forward looking way. ” - Steve Ennen
“The traditional publishers are good publishers; they just are mired in an old fashioned model that they can’t break out of.” – Jane Friedman
The video of the panel is almost 80 minutes long but is worth the watch or listen if you are interested in the future or writing, publishing, sharing, and the technologies or advancements made by the industry. If you print materials for your business or are in the printing field, you need to listen to this.
