Academic publishing is an integral part of the education sector. Academic publishing is the bridge that connects students, teachers and institutions together. They are the mediums through which students get to become industry-ready, get hands on with their respective tools and techniques and develop the right skill sets to join the workforce.

As far as academic publishing is concerned, there are two aspects we would like to consider and cover for the purpose of our Digital Transformations In Education Sector Guide series:

• Educational products, which are apps or other learning devices and systems designed to assist students and teachers learn and teach better
• Academic content, which includes journals and textbooks

Over the last few years, there have been dynamic shifts in the academic publishing sector that are dictating newer challenges and threats to stakeholders and publishers. In this post, we would explore the diverse challenges academic publishers have been facing in terms of changing reading behaviour, mediums of accessing content, publishing guideline changes and more and recommend ideal solutions that could help business owners tackle the challenges seamlessly as well.

So, let's get started. But before that, we urge you to take a look at our previous posts on the challenges in diverse educational aspects and their realistic solutions. That will give you a broader idea of the purpose behind the series and help you resolve any other challenge that you might be overlooking currently.

Some Important Numbers on Academic Publishing

• The academic publishing market is currently growing at a CAGR of 12%.
• A growth of $1.28bn is anticipated in this sector by the year 2023.
• 60% of the growth in publishing is expected to stem from digital textbooks.
• According to a report in 2018, the US was the top publishing country in the world with over 481,000 paper contributions coming from the country.

Challenges Faced By Academic Publishers

If you notice, the world is in a bizarre transition phase currently, where several aspects in the education sector are still being worked on for ideal experiences and practices. While the internet is reaching several countries around the world as you read, it is also making classrooms more interactive in some countries.

This is a weird phase where we want to move to digital mediums but are stuck with age-old practices and teaching methodologies. We push digital content but have zero metrics or mechanisms to track impact. Though these are just mere fragments in the grander scheme of things, these give you an idea of what is happening in the real world as far as education and academic publishing is concerned.

To give you deeper insights, we have curated a few more challenges predominantly dominating the academic publishing spectrum. Let's look at what they are.

Privacy

Piracy is one of the biggest concerns in academic publishing. Online piracy has sort of rattled the publishing space as consumers tend to illegally download pirated copies of their preferred academic books from online sources and read them. Publications generate revenue through the sales of their books, part of which goes as royalty to the writer. When there is no revenue generated, neither the writer nor the publication manages to make money.

This concern also adds to the changing reading habits of people as most of these downloads are anonymous with no tracking mechanisms whatsoever.

Piracy happens because of two major reasons – when readers can't find their preferred academic content in their geographical location or when the price of a book is too unaffordable (because of the topics it deals with). Users find convenient alternatives online through leaked copies, pdf documents, excerpts, screenshots and other workarounds to get hands on with their books. A lot of readers even photocopy physical books at less expensive prices to prepare for exams or pursue other ambitions.

All these add to the challenges in publishing and reading today, making it invariably difficult for writers and publishers. 

Changing Reading Habits

Reading is essential to learn new concepts, assimilate new information, apply them on problems and prepare for the real world. Reading is what could take us to newer places right from wherever we are. All great innovations and inventions – from spotting planets to the invention of airplanes – have happened because of reading and reflecting.

However, the habit and practice of reading is in a tight spot as there have been several rifts over the last decade. When we say rifts or changes in reading habits, you could classify them into two types:

• changes in the practice of reading
• changes in the medium of reading

To give you an idea on both, understand that the average time spent by 15 year olds and older people on reading was close to 22.8 minutes. Cut to 2017, this number decreased to 16.8 minutes. Besides, 24% of the US adults have confessed that they haven't read a book in the last one year.

As far as reading mediums are concerned, there seems to be an influx of diverse ways to access content today. There are traditionally published academic books, there are eBooks and then there are audiobooks as well.

To throw in some numbers, people spent approximately $771mn on eBooks in 2018 in the US. While this appears good, the numbers actually declined from $800mn in 2017.

Audiobooks are the new trend in the publishing and reading segment, which is immensely supported by the younger generation. 48% of the listeners fall under the age category of 35 and less. 57% of the audiobook consumers read or listen from their homes and 32% of them read or listen from their cars.

Like we said, there is no proper inference or take away from any statistic you could find on the current reading habits. This is exactly what puts academic publishers in a soup, with no solid insight on what they should do to push their content and course materials in the market. Should they go for audio versions of their content? Should they publish only digital books? Or should they go for hybrid models? Questions like these and more are posing threats to several academic publishers out there.

Selecting The Right Target Audience

In publishing, everything boils down to target audience. The more publishers know about who their audience is, the better they could modify their content, the tone and language used, the complexity at which concepts need to be explained, their content's market positioning, pricing and more.

For instance, the concept of gravity could be explained in four different ways -

• to kindergarten students
• to high school students
• to graduate students
• and to those doing their PhDs

In that case, having an idea of the target audience decides how the content should be written. For kindergarten students, gravity could be something that prevents them from floating into space. But for those doing their masters or higher degrees, gravity could be theorems, derivations, complex quantum concepts and more.

So, publishers need to know their target audience. However, this is a major challenge today because of the lack of statistics and data on reading, market behaviour and trends. Offline ways are devoid of any metrics or parameters writers and professors would need to pen their work based on their experience and expertise. This is resulting in vague writing that ends up being ambiguous and less impactful.

Extreme Competition

For those of you who didn't know, academic publishing is a bubble in itself. There are more forces acting in this spectrum than what meets the eye. On one side, there are publishers who try to win over educational institutions such as universities, schools, language schools and more. And then there are writers who intend to get their publication or paper out as early as possible as well.

This competition results in a bombardment of books in the market, ultimately leaving students and teachers baffled on which one to prefer and which to refer. Competition also prioritizes on quantity over quality and time over credibility. Meaning, publishers race to get a book out on a topic that is only emerging to establish market presence. This only costs students in their learning experiences. And did we mention, this influences pricing as well?

Engage Your Readers

A lot of academic content out there lacks engagement in their language or tone today, making readers lose interest in them after a point. There are no concepts like real-time personalization, touchless interaction and more. Engagement is crucial in publishing and the lack of it gives rise to poor sales and pirated copies. 

Publish Your Book

Getting published is a tedious task. From an academic publishing perspective, it is tougher. A lot of factors like subject matter expertise, credibility of the writer, experience, plagiarism and more come into the picture. A lot of aspiring academic writers still await letters of approval from their preferred publications and sometimes wait for years before they even get to know if their proposal has been selected or rejected. This deprives the necessity of the topic under discussion and makes it irrelevant with the passage of time. The lack of online resources to get published stalls the aspirations of academic writers and experts.

Changing Landscapes to Technology

From a technical perspective, there are a lot of concerns adding to the challenges faced by academic publishers. With technical advancements comes a huge learning curve and with processes like automation, human augmentation, digitization, predictive analytics and more come into play, publishers indeed find it difficult to embrace them the right way without guidance. 

Are There Solutions To These Challenges?

Well, there are ample solutions to these challenges. And most of them are as simple as tech implementations and adoptions. Let's look at what they are individually.

Ecommerce Stores

eCommerce stores are an ideal solution to the problem of tackling changing reading habits. While there are rifts and changes in the reading space, what still remains constant is the habit of reading. So, regardless of whether consumers or students choose to read on their phone or order a paperback book, academic publishers can cater to both through eCommerce solutions.

For those of you who didn't know, the eCommerce industry is all set to become a $3.56tn industry by 2021. And if there is a good time to capitalize on that market space, it is now. Unlike traditional stores, eCommerce stores development for academic content allows you to generate data and insights on consumer behaviour. With this, you could get ideas on the books that sell, the topics that sell, the ones that don't, the underrated concepts, the ones with bad reviews, books with highest engagements and more.

And with these insights, the target audience can be refined for the next publication as well.

With that said, the eCommerce store that you intend to launch should be exhaustive. Meaning, you should set up one that sells all sorts of academic content online. From books on competitive exams to children's academic books. It is your inventory that would help you carve a niche for your brand in the market.

Educational Digital Publishing Platforms

A digital publishing platform is a solution that allows academic publishers to develop, sell and maintain their digital content through apps and tech-based solutions. These platforms allow publishers to create content across all reading devices such as Kindle, laptops, smartphones and more, across operating systems and more.

With such platforms, publishers can also distribute their content to reading mediums and even analyse the performances or patronage of their content.

Besides these, publishing platforms optimize the publishing process with their other features.

Digital Rights Management

When a particular piece of content is uploaded or published online, it is subject to not only consumption but duplication without permission as well. This is called piracy and costs the publishing industry close to $315mn every year. A publisher that uploads academic content online expects sales and readership in legal ways that ensure the business is sustainable in terms of revenue generation. But with piracy, that's not the case as books and content worth thousands of dollars can be downloaded for free anonymously.

But with publishing platforms, digital rights can be established and the publishing process can be made more airtight and secure. The platforms ensure the content is locked from duplication, screengrabs or printing, that the content is available for a limited period of time, limit the number of devices the content can be accessed from, offer separate copies for students and teachers and more.

Compliance

There are diverse industry standards such as LTI, QTI, TinCan and SCORM. When an academic content is published, it has to comply with these standards. With digital publishing platforms, such compliances can be seamlessly adhered to.

Content Store

A content store is similar to an eCommerce store but it differs in the fact that it is a bubble or a feature in a digital publishing platform. This content store can be accessed by students to download or read additional books or materials, get updates of existing content, access revised material and more. A content store is consistently upgraded for updated information.

Digital Interactive e-Textbook Platforms

Remember the concern on student engagement we discussed earlier? One of the major aspects here is that textbooks are linear and redundant and dull in their representations. Strictly academic, they have a purpose to educate and not entertain students. Though this is true, concepts like gamification and interactive learning can only optimize the learning experience of students and digital e-textbook platforms do just that.

With this, concepts can come alive in the form of visuals, graphics, charts, graphs, videos, audio tracks and more to offer an immersive learning experience to students. This helps in better retention of concepts and application of learning in real life.

Downloadable Software

The advancements in tech have given rise to several new opportunities that never existed before. Sometime back, we discussed how publishing new books and course materials is really difficult in the current space. But to offer an ideal solution, several downloadable software applications exist. With these, authors and publishers can upload their content and self-publish them as books, journals, course content and more and even turn them into a learning resource. This resource can be offered to deliver learning solutions.

These DIY solutions are simple and can help publishers and authors develop eBooks and digital content in minutes. 

Applications

Applications are the latest trends in the market today and they are not without influencing the education sector as well. Tons of academic publishers and companies are getting their mobile app development for their readers and students. These apps offer exclusive insights and features to students, acting as repositories of content, reference materials, journals and more. Besides, these apps come with a host of features like gamification, voice recognition, location-based services, interactive learning and more.

Case Study

Established in the 90s, MagicBox is a creation and distribution platform for digital content. Over the years, it has evolved into a cloud-based platform for K-12 and higher education learning through its seamless educational platform.

With MagicBox, students can experience features such as

• mobile access
• video conferencing and video-based assessments
• collaborative learning
• remote learning and more

The platform has worked with several leading education service providers across the world to offer tailor-made solutions to their unique challenges. Let's look at a couple of real world examples.

Gibb Smith Education

Gibb Smith came up with some really interesting challenges such as personalized reading, offline capability, migration of users to newer platforms, integration of features such as annotations, eCommerce stores, dictation and more. MagicBox delivered what was required through a custom platform that allowed Gibb Smith to distribute its content across all channels and operating systems seamlessly. All the demands were met and the features were integrated for their users to experience.

Future Of Academic Publishing

Academic publishing is witnessing this rare phase where it is dicey to forecast how the future would turn out to be. From our expertise and connections, we believe that the future of academic publishing will go completely digital in the coming years. Standalone publication apps and services will roll out and selective licencing and collaboration would happen among publishers and education institutions.

We are also forecasting a mechanism where academic publishers will opt for a Netflix style model for their academic content. Special learning centres with state-of-the-art facilities with respect to digital tech is also anticipated.

With the pandemic reiterating that remote learning is the future, academic publishers will come up with content and delivery mechanisms that are appropriate for this. Meaning, offline assessments and content availability, apps working under minimal internet connectivity requirements, video conferencing facilities, voice recognition, advanced artificial intelligence algorithms, dictation, digital boards and more.

Wrapping Up

So, what do you think? There is ample scope for revolutions in the academic publishing space, right?

It is after anticipating this that we urge you to take that wise decision of getting your own eLearning app developed today. eLearning app development is all about precision and understanding of requirements and that's exactly where we excel. From custom apps to full-fledged digital publishing solutions, we can get a tangible version of your idea out for your students. All you have to do is get in touch with us now.