Book: A Futurist's Manifesto

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Distribution Everywhere (Andrew Savikas)

Andrew Savikas is the CEO of Safari Books Online, VP Digital Initiatives at O’Reilly Media, and is on the Board of Directors of the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF). You can find Andrew on Twitter at: @andrewsavikas.

Distributing (in) the Future

Publishers working to understand the changing distribution landscape must formulate a strategic response that both responds to the present reality and provides the flexibility to adapt to multiple possible futures. There are two fundamental aspects to the changing nature of publishing: changes to the form of what’s created and consumed, and changes to the format in which the content still created in traditional forms is produced and distributed (developed, packaged, and sold). This chapter focuses on the format side of the equation, so let’s first define the form component so we can put it to the side.

By form I mean the character of the content—what length is it, what style is it presented in, and does it use text, animation, video, or some combination of the three? Examples of content forms are articles, movies, plays, games, songs, essays, and of course books. Kevin Kelly defines the form of the book nicely: “A book is a self-contained story, argument or body of knowledge that takes more than an hour to read. A book is complete in the sense that it contains its own beginning, middle, and end.” Nothing about the physical (or virtual) container for that book, its price, or ...