The State of the Industry
How would you describe the most successful medical publishers of the next five years?
They're going to have the ability to take a manuscript and, first of all, peer-review it very rapidly. They'll have electronic peer-review systems in place. This is already common for journal articles. An article comes in electronically, gets sent out for peer review electronically, comes back electronically, is edited electronically and is sent electronically right into print production. The article never sees paper until the journal is actually published.
This whole concept is going to carry over to books, so the amount of time and effort that has to go into the production processes will be much more efficient, inexpensive and handled online.
And, ultimately, the format of the publications of tomorrow could be online, wirelessly transmitted in a blog, or printed in a textbook or journal. I also think it is likely that we will even see some new methods of medical-information distribution coming to the forefront within the next three or four years that we haven't even begun to touch on or think about.
If you have a cell phone, you can access the Internet. And if you can access the information, why couldn't you project that information onto a screen for a presentation, print it out on your wireless printer, or transfer it to a CD right from your handheld device? We will always need and have printed material, but I think there's going to be a whole new dynamic in terms of handheld technology—what we can access and what we can do with it once we access it.
If I'm attending a medical conference, and I want to verify that what a presenter is saying jives with the latest medical information available, I could look it up, right there on my PDA or cell phone, and compare it to what is being said. Technology people love medical publishers and practitioners because we'll spend money galore to buy the latest piece of hardware.