Today’s rate of change is the slowest we will see in our lifetimes. In fact, now may be the first time we civilized humans live and work in an environment that is growing in size, breadth, and complexity, at an exponential rate of change. Thank you, Internet! The publishing conundrum : How to rapidly re-engineer yesterday’s products and workflows and keep on top of business?

Using standards-based digital workflows, we can continue to deliver content as print products (books!), while inspiring new life into it by chunking, XML-tagging, surrounding it with semantically rich metadata,  and structuring it for recombination and re-purposing by tomorrow’s readers and thinkers. Successful publishers will focus less on digital business opportunities in “walled gardens” of content and device-specific solutions, and more on devising business models for the infinite arena of ubiquitous computing, where content, like air being breathed, is constantly changing.