Predicting the present

I have been asked to talk about some publishing scenarios for the future. We all know the danger in this – a couple years from now, someone will find this presentation and remind me how silly some of these predictions are. On the other hand, you cannot operate a business unless you are thinking about where the world is heading, so this is a risk that comes with the territory, even if it inevitably makes you look foolish. The unfortunate truth is that it is easier to predict what the future will not look like than what it will, which perhaps explains why for every futurist, we have hordes of debunkers. I will be focusing on four different scenarios. That number could be a lot bigger. We could, for example, get into a discussion of how K-12 textbooks increasingly will be integrated with enterprise learning management systems or how college instructors outside the elite institutions will have a diminishing role in the selection of the texts for their classes; or we could spend time on any number of other things (financial stringency of the mega-journals, anyone?), but I have chosen these four because they represent things that many of the organizations I have been working with have been thinking about. Change the organization and you change the conversation. So what are those four scenarios? They are: