Issue #159 | Aug. 22, 2008 | by Bo Sacks

With the recent announcement that Esquire is using e-ink on their cover – a clever magazine cover gimmick for a 75th anniversary cover – some in the publishing industry reacted as if they were "selling out" to the digital age.

To be sure, e-ink is going to be something special. This cover will be underutilizing the true power and possibilities of e-ink, but what the heck? You have to start somewhere. And this year our industry starts here on the cover of Esquire with a flexible, magazine-bindable production of e-ink.

You may not call the new world of communication that RFID inhabits publishing – but both of our industries will be and certainly are becoming interconnected parts of The Information Distribution Business.

As an industry, we publishers are no strangers to mixing paper and digital. Believe me I know; I was partly responsible for the AOL onslaught of "on-serting" and inserting, first fragile plastic diskettes, and then CD's, into magazines. The computer and music sectors have been doing this for years.

Mixing RF with ink
Not only has dead-tree publishing merged with electronic information distribution via websites, before you know it we, too, will be using RF to communicate right within our publications, providing necessary readership and inventory data for an analog business never before thought possible.

E-ink or e-paper is special, in fact it is very special, and it is an integral part of the future of the magazine business. If we are going to have a big future, it is going to be digital. We will combine the ease of use of digital editions of magazines with the portability of brilliantly colored Wi-Fi connected e-paper, with a drastically lower carbon footprint than today and dramatically reduced manufacturing costs. What's not to like?

Publishers sell words and thoughts, not paper and printing. Printing ink on paper is not going to go away; it is also not going to be the dominant distribution vehicle of information. That information power will digitally reside elsewhere.

Indeed I am very upbeat about our industry, and I see a bright future for the industry and the people in it. But the industry is never going to be the way it was; hell, it is not even going to be the way it is! Our more future-thinking industry members are paying attention to how the future may bend, blend and re-form, in this information distribution business.

Our industry is radically changing. Some of my colleagues find that depressing. I do not. Change is an elixir, and should be treated that way. The possibilities of information distribution in the next few years will be nothing less than staggering. There is more reading material available now, to more people, than ever before in the combined history of man.

Turning the page data delivery
What were you doing five years ago? Are you doing the same thing now that you were doing then? I doubt it. What do you think you will be doing ten years from now? Do you think it is possible your job description and responsibilities might change? What might they be?

Our content processing and delivery technologies are growing exponentially. What used to take ten technologic years to advance now takes five, perhaps even less. No doubt your data processing and delivery technology is growing exponentially, too.

How much data does it take before it becomes content?

Perhaps you might try to think of the data your business uses, and needs, in a different way. Slow adopters, be they publishers or businesses afraid of an RFID investment, will suffer in the long run. The free market guarantees it.

The future is here now; it is just not widely distributed yet.

Information is our power. Just like RFID technology works from the knowledge that data is power. If real-time data is important to business decisions, how can other real-time content not be as valuable?

Recognize and maximize your information's value
Once writers needed quill pens to write. Many years later came fountain pens, then typewriters. Are words typed on my laptop, and distributed by electrons, any less important because of the method of delivery? I'm told a common future-view of our RFID brethren is how smart affinity cards will cause different electronic signage messages to be customized for each viewer. We call that on-demand publishing. I've already pointed out RF will deliver content to e-paper. Can anyone be so smug as to say that publishing and RFID have nothing in common?

I am bullish about the publishing industry because we own the content. I do not care how we distribute that content. Some of it will always be on paper and some will be distributed electronically. So what? The reading of the written word is what is most important, not the pathway to receiving them. The truth is those words are more important when they are as fresh as possible and only a few electronic minutes old.

You own your content, too (which you choose to call data). Are you making the best possible use of it? Take a word of advice from an old industry: don't spend much time worrying about the hardware while you should be busy figuring out whether RFID can give you the capability to publish some bestselling business decisions.

Bo Sacks, President and Publisher of Precision Media Group, is a leading publishing futurist and a much sought-after speaker at publishing conferences. His daily newsletters are free at Bosacks - Precision Media Group