Publishers need to diversify and compete head-on with other media

The Bookseller.com reporting
Publishers need to diversify and compete head-on with other media in order to deflect the 'one-screen' effect of tablet devices, a panel discussion at the World e-Reading Congress declared.
The session sought to answer the question: "Can e-reading win the war against Angry Birds?" Jonathan Glasspool, managing director of Bloomsbury Academic and Professional, said the battle had already been lost. "Sales of book content have stayed static over the past few years. But if we have lost it, what can we do about it?" Glasspool's answer was that publishers should diversify their earning streams away from the volatile world of bestsellers, towards the exploitation of Intellectual Property (IP) and that they should think of themselves as being in the service business. He said: "Increasingly we make money not through book publishing, but through exploiting IP and helping other people exploit it."
...Sara Lloyd, digital director at Pan Macmillan, said she did not feel gloomy at all, and questioned whether they were simply addressing the wrong question. Lloyd said: "Publishers have been really good at evolving, we just been constrained by book covers, but we can now evolve further, the only difference now is that we won't always make things that look like books."
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