You cannot control your readers' content consumption behaviour

The first automobiles looked like horse carts. The qwerty keyboard layout (or azerty in France etc.) is derived from mechanical constraints of the first typewriters. Sometimes innovation happens gradually and we stick to the conventions.

At other times, innovation leaps ahead by an order of magnitude. You should generally not expect to see disruptive innovation originate with the established players in a field. Ross Mayfield points out that organisations should design themselves in ways that remove incentives to "perpetuate the status quo" (and I learnt a new word: heterarchy). Peter Merholz points us to a great example of adopting new technology while resisting innovation: Publishers who want to replicate the sensation of paging through a newspaper on a tablet PC. As Peter puts it, cell phones don't have rotary dials.

A business news organisation I have been speaking to in London is convinced that growth is to be sought in the area of chunking up, repurposing and syndicating their content. Their main concern is how to adapt their systems to allow their content to be disseminated through a variety of channels and how to make it scale to service large numbers of syndicatees. It is a good service to provide a limited number of pre-defined formats in which your content can be consumed. But as readers become more savvy they want the ability to decide how to have content delivered and presented. The innovation in this area is coming from three year old FeedBurner (another example of a grassroots technology making it into the enterprise).

The future of publishing is to be sought in the crossroads of open standards, tags and metadata and in-line markup, appropriate content licenses, scalable infrastructures provided by third parties and perhaps the development of a next-generation digital rights management that strikes a usable compromise between authors, publishers and readers (DRM 2.0?).

All organisations are publishers to an extent. Many individuals too. As the landscape is being flattened with respect to the technological barriers of making your content useful, a single important determinant remains: Quality. Now turn the page.