Publishing ecosystems - opportunities and challenges of digital connectivity

Ecosystems abound in publishing. They are well established between the booktrade and publishers, agents and editors, suppliers and producers, self-publishers and publishing services. However, the digital environment increases the connectivity of systems to make ecosystems both very effective but also challenging to legacy systems of publishing. The emergent embedded nature of these systems means that publishers need to understand the technicalities to create new ecosystems or work within the systems evolving in the sectors they serve: whether they are using APIs to integrate into researcher’s workflow or recognize the business models used by different audiobook subscription services publishers need to understand the behaviours of different digital ecosystems.

This research will reflect on 3 case studies of ecosystems that have emerged: Amazon and its proprietary and interconnected operations and services for customers and authors; the academic research environments into which publishing has inserted itself; and self-publishing and the services that have arisen in order to support alternative reader/writer economies. It will explore the way these ecosystems connect, the impacts that can have and the closed nature of many of them. It examines the opportunities and the challenges they bring for publishers as they try to integrate with these evolving digital ecosystems.