Emerging Trends in Publication Industry
Publishing industry of yesteryears consisted of developing content and selling them as books, journals etc. The customer had two choices either to buy it or not buy it. They did not have the opportunity to check the contents of the book / chapters of the book for a limited time before buying it or for that matter buying only a portion of the book. The publishers at maximum had variants like paper back, hard cover, soft cover with minor price difference to cater to different segments of customers. The business processes of a publisher were mainly related to Sourcing content, Printing the content and selling books / journals from warehouse.
However with the advent of digital age the changes began to take place and the books needed to be electronic books rather than those bulky print editions. Customers loved to have 12 CDs of Encyclopedia Britannica rather than 12 odd volumes; Customers wanted to have books in electronic format available over the net so that it could be downloaded to their PCs this was the era of digital / electronic commerce. This demanded the modification of the existing business processes and it was a shift in the format of the content being sold and change in the medium of sale, it was no more print but it was electronic. This electronic format however introduced a few new challenges to the publishers in the domain of security, it was not that books were not copied previously but electronic format of a book was easy to be moved from one person to another, making copies and circulating was cheap and easy hence came new buzzwords DRM (Digital Rights Management). The advent of new business processes mean the supporting IT infrastructure had to change, the ERP packages need to be upgraded from selling hard copies to CD, from one time counter sale to a sale over the internet, to ensure that the book sold over net is not being copied and distributed etc. The changes did not stop here now the customers of electronic age are far more demanding they wanted personalization as in wanting to read the book in a particular device from Amazon kindle to Nook to various other e readers, Customers want to create their own books as in take 3 chapters from one book 2 from another and so on, Limited time access to the electronic book i.e. not wanting to buy the entire book but read it only or a week and pay a fee, Universities buying access and proving access to multiple students for a limited time to a content over the net. The above scenarios are few new scenarios which need to be addressed during any ERP implementation for any publication house. In terms of Oracle Application EBS support the normal Order to Cash cycle supported by Order Management, Inventory etc. needs to be extended along with other modules like Service Contracts to cater to the different scenario's as mentioned above
