We have looked at three publishing markets in our Creative Destruction 7 Act Play series – STM (Scientific Technical Medical), Legal and Education). From an end user point of view they are very different. A lawyer won’t get much joy from a learned treatise on physics or a first grade Math book. But there are common threads from a business point of view and this may help entrepreneurs who are going after these markets.

Big Data Publishing

One defining characteristic of these markets is that there is a lot of data. Like a humungous, massive, ginormous amount of data.

Nobody is calling this “big data publishing” yet, as far as we can see. But it seems like a useful phrase. Ventures in the storage and data management space love big data as it sells a lot of boxes. So we see Big Data Workshops about the tools and tech. But the real value may be at the end user level and that is the domain of publishers.

Big Data Publishing is the opposite extreme from 140 character tweeting. (Although the sum total of all the tweets can be loaded into huge data sets and parsed for meaning). Big Data Publishing is different from most publishing where brevity is the essential feature to cater to the attention deficit crowd.

In this market you have attention. The key is to have the right data, the right facts.

4 Common Threads

1. The printed book is not the natural format. Novels and other stories are ideal for reading front to back in “lean back” mode. These big data markets are more suitable to “lean forward” media where you extract data and explore by linking and drilling down.

2. All three of these markets are under major cost pressure.

3. Yet despite the fact that digital data offers a better experience AND a lower cost, prices in these markets have been rising. These are markets dominated by a few big publishers. This cannot be sustainable and when digital economics kick in, prices may plummet.

4. These are all markets that matter to a wider community. So it is likely that we will see more government regulation driving for lower costs and more open access.

Opportunities For Entrepreneurs

These common threads indicate markets that are ripe for disruption. They are not the obvious markets. These are all in Act 2, when the old guard still dominate and change is visible only from a few straws blowing in the wind.

But this is the time when real entrepreneurs get started. The momentum riders wait until the markets are obvious before jumping on board.

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