Mobile 'native' publishing: Why our concept of content must evolve in the post-PC era (O'Reilly @TOC)

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One reason that industry disruptions prove so vexing to market leaders is that disruptive waves simultaneously barrel through assumptions about customer needs, industry economics and operational best practices.

Consider the case of the motion picture business, an industry that was disrupted when the “talkie” — once derided as a costly gimmick — subsumed the silent picture in the 1920s.

The takeaway from the film industry’s transition is instructive. The talkie not only changed how movies were made and the economics of the business itself, but critically, it changed our concept of what a movie could be.

In doing so, it transformed the medium forever (The Speed of Sound by Scott Eyman is an excellent book on this topic).

Disrupted by digital

As we move toward a post-PC universe of 10 billion mobile devices, a similar disruption is playing out in the publishing business.

Print media is patient zero in the ongoing saga of “disrupted by digital,” an unstoppable force that has decimated one time toll road businesses like newspapers, and is threatening to squeeze out the last breaths of magazine and book publishers.

That this occurs at a time when physical bookstores are also under assault is hardly a coincidence given the tight links between publishers and bookstores on book distribution, discovery and monetization. The brutal reality is that when an industry is disrupted, the entire ecosystem feels the pain.

The rise of dynamic content services

So if publishing must evolve, what does this mean for publishers?

Most basically, it suggests that whereas static text and pictures define our current concept of publishing, in the mobile era, we need to think about what is being “published” as a native app that re-configures itself based upon the content being served. Logically, this type of system autonomously generates data.

This has significant ramifications for how such content is made, what it can do, and the underlying systems required for delivering and receiving the same.