A Book Publisher's Manifesto for the Twenty-first Century: How Traditional Publishers Can Position Themselves in the Changing Media Flows of a Networked Era

In this challenging call to arms, Sara Lloyd, head of digital publishing at the United Kingdom trade publishing house, Pan Macmillan, explores whether there will be a role for publishers in a digital future and discusses the radical changes in culture and approach publishers will need to make if they are to evolve quickly enough to embrace the change from a linear content creation and delivery chain in which a publisher’s role is definitive and fixed, to a circular, networked, Web-based one. This is a broad-ranging piece including coverage of the creative directions in which content creation and delivery might develop, new ways in which publishers will need to engage with authors, readers, and other distributors in the content creation chain and the interface between publishers and nontraditional competitors emerging in the digital marketplace. Print sales are falling. According to the National Endowment for the Arts’ 2007 report To Read or Not to Read, both reading standards and voluntary reading rates of traditional print material among young people are falling. Textbook publishers are fighting for sales, campaigning to alert students to the necessity of using their products. Hardback fiction has almost gone the way of the dinosaur. The open access debate rages on. Publishers and retailers have consolidated. More and more books are produced, but there is less and less choice on the high street. Leisure time is transferring away from books and reading, away from television even, to the Web; to social networking sites, blogs, instant messaging, video and music file sharing sites. The attention economy is shrinking, fast. Academic research is—for many students—all about search. Let’s face it, for most students,