The Digital Content Market: Rushing Toward Fate

摘要

Like two freight trains rushing toward one another on the same track, two equally powerful forces are propelling the digital content marketplace speedily toward an abruptly altered state. And, as in the train example, something's going to hit the fan. Big time. "We expected it," says Allen Paschal, President of Gale Research. "But we didn't expect it to be quite this accelerated" The "it" in this case is the near-total transformation of the information resource industry from paper and bound documents to digital. The speed with which the content industry has turned digital is astonishing, even to the veterans like Paschal and Joe Reynolds, President and CEO of ProQuest Information and Learning, both of whom I spoke with at length for this introductory article. As for those dual forces shaping the new future of the market, we'll get to those in a minute.