EMBLEMATIC E V E N T S

Amid the flux, it is hard to spot major trends in the making. This column is designed to flag them early by focusing on the small, tangible phenomena that signal their existence.

New Members of the Publishing Fraternity May Change the Way

We Do Things

Paul D. Doebler

The Event: IBM announces that it is publishing six books for lay readers on the use of personal computers and that it is d i s t r i b u t i n g them t h r o u g h R a n d o m House. The company plans to publish 20 or so computer titles per year.

The Implications: IBM'S announcement, which came at the most recent American Booksel lers Assoc ia t ion conven t ion , hardly seemed earthshaking news. The bloom left the computer book boom two years ago. And IBM's move to publish its own books is not a "first ' --IBM joins a growing list of corporations that were publishing before.

What is news--or should be--is that the growing list has once again been aug- mented. It's a lot bigger now than most people realize, and it represents just one tendril of a major publishing movement that lives outside the established media in- dus t r ies of n e w s p a p e r s , magaz ines , books, newsletters, radio/TV, commercial

Paul D. Doebler works with the Xerox Systems Group as manager, Documentation Consulting Services.

data bases, etc. Over the next ten to thirty years, that movement will exert funda- mental forces for change in the way pub- lishing operates.

The best name anyone has coined for it so far is "corporate publishing," although this is a misnomer. It refers to all of the publications that businesses produce, and all of the publishing activity that goes into supporting their publication. The mis- nomer lies in the fact that corporations are not alone in this publishing activity--also included by most definers of the field are governments and not-for-profit institu- tions, who swell this field to gargantuan proportions.

The experts--who cannot measure its size today--argue over how big it is. One of the more reasonable cases can be made for a size at least equal to all of the com- mercial media industries put together-- perhaps $60 billion to $80 billion in pub- lishing activity when calculated as if it were a separate industry. U.S. Census data indicate (and most everyone agrees) that it is growing faster than the media

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industries and has been doing so for a couple of decades, maybe longer.

In one sense, "corporate publishing" is not new; it's been there all along. These organizations have produced publications for many years. They just haven't recog- nized that they were publishing or under- stood the process. Now it's rapidly gaining recognition because:

�9 A crisis is growing in product education. Increasingly the new products we buy today incorporate high technology. Everything from cars and microwave ovens to electronic office systems and jet planes has computer technology buried in it. We cannot operate any of it without extensive instructions; the instruction sheet or pamphlet of yes- teryear has become a full-blown book today. So badly are these publications done that we often cannot operate our new products from the instructions they contain. Lack of decent "docu- mentation" from personal computer manufacturers was a major cause of the phenomenal boom in commercial computer books a few years ago. American business is gradually em- barking on a vast effort to deal with this issue. This movement is beginning first in the computer and business sys- tems industries, but it is seeping out to other fields as well where effective communication with customers is fast becoming a major competitive bat- tleground. The role of product docu- mentation is rising in the strategic marketing mix.

�9 New publishing technology requires bet- ter understanding. Today most people in corporate publishing look first to technology as the source of publishing improvement. They may try some technology or they may simply watch and puzzle over what to do. Either way, they eventually conclude there is something more to this publishing

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business than technology. Most peo- ple are still caught up in the tech- nology-fascination stage. However, "desktop" publishing is creating the first mass breakthrough. Because any- one can now create typographic pages (bad as well as good) on the same per- sonal computer, people are being forced to look at typographic consid- erations to understand why the next guy gets better results than they do. Leaders in corporate publishing have moved beyond this stage to tackle the entire publishing process, from orig- inal writing, editing and composition through printing and distribution. They are pursuing quality standards and procedures in all of these areas.

Publishing is the central process of the "information age." Although we've all heard for years that we live in the "in- formation age," descriptions of it have remained passive. Information some- how comes from its creators, is stored, and is disseminated. But what makes it happen? That process is publishing. Publishing is where people conceive, research, write, edit, design, illustrate, compose, print, distribute, display, present information. Publishing is the process that moves information. That's why corporate, governmental, and in- stitutional publishers are discovering the publishing process--it is a critical key to competitive advantage and suc- cess in the "information age."

And that's why we find IBM and many other corporations getting into book and magazine publishing as well as product document publishing. Once into publish- ing as a conscious, planned effort, why stop with one set of media when other media do certain things much better? After all, the central theory of publishing in the "information age" is that a pub- lisher should focus on the audience (mar- ket) and serve it with whatever means

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(including media) apply. This has broken down media boundaries in commercial publishing industries. Corporate pub- lishers have far less tradition to overcome in this respect.

So commercial publishers can expect much more publishing activity from so- called non-publisher sources. What will it mean?

Actually, anyone who recalls the last twenty years will realize we've already had a lot of outsiders join the publishing fraternity. The information storage and retrieval movement of the 1960s became the on-line data base industry of today; it impacted certain reference publications adversely, but it also created new oppor- tunities for publishers and newcomers alike. As long ago as the early 1970s, Ortho entered the gardening publication field, generating as much or more furor as IBM's recent decision to publish commer- cial books. Other high-tech companies have also found their way to publishing markets through various publishing chan- nels. This will probably mean as many ups as downs for commercial publishers in the future as there were in the past-- some will hurt, but the swifter afoot will profit.

One dimension of the current move- ment, however, breaks with the past. Cor- porate publishers simply cannot operate the same way commercial publishers can--by the "seat of the pants" Corporate publishers must shape up thousands of people in a very short time, driven by competition; they will have to create for- mal training and education where it does not now exist. Corporate publishers must establish consistency and control in their operations for thousands of people across thousands of miles; they will have to de- velop formal standards and processes where none now exist.

In other words, corporate publishers must bring a disciplined order to the pub- lishing process that commercial publishers have so far succeeded in avoiding. As they do this over the next five to ten years, the cutting edge of publishing leadership will shift in the direction of corporate publish- ing. Commercial publishers will find themselves reaching to keep up with new techniques and thinking that are coming from outside their ranks, from organiza- tions able to do it all themselves if others do not wish to join them. Again, the faint- of-heart will find life unsettling, but op- portunity seekers will find plenty of exhil- aration in the new era.