Philip Ruppel, president of McGraw-Hill Professional, notes five trends he says will change the publishing industry.
- Enhanced E-Books Are Coming and Will Only Get Better
- The Device War Is Nearly Over
- The $9.99 E-Book Won’t Last Forever
- The Contextual Upsell Will be a Business Model to Watch
- Publisher Editing and Design Will Be More Important Than Ever
I think there’s a lot of wishful thinking going on here, especially regarding “enhanced e-books” and “contextual upsell”. I remember back when the Web was new, there was a lot of talk about hypertext being the future of fiction. Readers would follow links through a text and read the book in an order unique to them. I read a couple of experimental works of that sort, but frankly it didn’t pan out.
At about the same time, CD-ROMs were all the rage: amazing interactive multi-media content on CD-ROM was going to replace printed books. That didn’t pan out either. Books are still books. And I like that; I don’t particular want my books to be applications.
Good memory, Will. Are you saying hypertext fiction is dead? I’ve been considering a storyline for a hypertext piece.