The publishing industry is on the precipice of huge changes. Every aspect of delivering content is going digital, from the moment the author puts hands to keyboard to the moment the reader sees the published words.
Advancing technology drives many of these changes. In some cases, a company must adopt new technology to remain competitive or to remain compatible with the rest of the industry. In other cases, it is the end users who demand a change in the way information is delivered to them, as we see happening with mobile devices.
Most established industries adopt technology slowly. It isn't necessarily just a matter of being conservative; it is a matter of common sense. Integrating technology is an expensive process, and no one wants to spend a bunch of money until a clear winning strategy has been identified. The only thing worse than spending a lot of money to integrate new technology into your business is needing to do it over because you made the wrong choice initially (remember Betamax?).
To be on the bleeding edge, helping establish the standards that others will follow, your business has to be as much about developing technology as it is about your core industry. That is exactly why technical book publisher O'Reilly is leading the charge in applying technology to the publishing industry. They have a stake in both arenas. However, they are an anomaly.
When new technology emerges, it takes time to develop new standards for applying that technology to specific business applications. XML has been in common use for over a decade, and we still don't have a clear standard for document storage or authoring tools with which non-technical end users are comfortable. EPUB appears to be the winning document-storage standard at the moment, but that could change as technology seeps further into the full range of the publishing process and the true business requirements are discovered.
Unfortunately, the application of technology to specific industries has always been an expensive hit-and-miss process for several reasons. One reason is that technology evolves much more quickly than the businesses that use it. Right about the time you are content with your current solution, it is time to invest in redevelopment to remain competitive. Another reason is that business people and technology people have different, and often incompatible, goals. The techies want the latest and greatest, while the business wants a solution that solves business problems and delivers a good return on investment. This separation of goals is partly why something like 75% of all IT projects fail.
I believe the solution to these problems is to do something radical: find technical people who are willing to invest their energy into learning the business as well as the technology. The publishing industry needs technical people who are specifically interested in using their skills to apply technology to publishing. Sure, that is exactly what O'Rielly is doing, but the industry needs more of it. By definition, O'Reilly is solving O'Reilly's problems. At best, their developments will be a subset of what the industry needs, and at worst they will be too technology-focused to be readily applied in less technical environments.
We are starting to see some of the big players jump on board O'Reilly's StartWithXML initiative, which is a great step in the right direction. Additional stakeholders will infuse some much needed insight from the rest of the publishing industry. Over the next few years, we should see tools emerge that support the entire publishing workflow from authoring to delivery. How good those tools turn out to be depends largely on how good a job we do of making sure the solutions are about the business, not the technology.