Predicting the Future of Education Publishing

Book Business interviewed several leaders in the publishing industry to discover what new trends will disrupt publishing in 2015. We featured those interviews in our December issue. Here we want to share the full interviews, which offer valuable insight on the future of the book business.

Following Sesha Bolisetty, VP of content management at John Wiley & Sons, shares his insights on the year to come in publishing.

Looking into your crystal ball, what "big picture" trends do you think will disrupt the book industry in coming years?
The answer might be different in various segments of the book industry but speaking from the educational publishing market perspective, the traditional model of a book being a collection of topics, chapters, and learning objectives is changing rapidly. Historically, textbooks were 700- or 800-page reading materials optimized for print formats. Going forward I believe textbooks will be defined as the primary organizing structure of learning materials delivered mostly through digital channels. We are moving toward creating personal learning experiences with emphasis on community and social learning.

What technology are you most excited about that is affecting or will affect the publishing industry?
Both adaptive and mobile technologies are driving rapid changes in the publishing industry. While publishers still need to work to better optimize content across various mobile devices, they have made significant progress in this direction. Crowdsourcing and collaborative authoring by various contributors located across the globe could become the mainstream way to author future educational content. I'm excited about the platforms and technologies that facilitate these new ways of developing great content and delivering it to our customers.

Is D2C book selling a viable revenue-generating strategy for publishers?
D2C in the education publishing world translates to D2S (Direct to Student). I believe this channel will become much more prominent for publishers to articulate the value proposition around the content and distribution technology they are building. It is very important for the end users of our content and solutions to have a solid understanding of what we do and how we are making a difference in solving their challenges. Within Wiley, we already have a solid D2S sales channel on Wiley.com but equally critical are the numerous partnerships we have with third party distributors. I believe both the approaches are equally critical. With D2S, one of the key objectives for us is to increase student awareness of our products and services, which they use on a day-to-day basis