The digital r/evolution: disruptive technology and its impact on Australian educational publishing

© 2011 Jocelyn HargraveMy research investigates the impact of digital technology on the Australian educational publishing sector, working within the framework of Clayton M. Christensen’s theory of disruptive technology. Disruptive technologies have been crucial to shaping publishing history. Paradoxically, while each of the technologies—specifically, the evolution of papermaking in Europe from the late thirteenth century, Gutenberg’s printing press and type casting from metal in the fifteenth century, lithographic offset printing in the twentieth century and digital printing in the twenty-first century—has, in its singularity, been indeed revolutionary in nature; together, they have served their role in the evolution of the publishing industry. Simply put, the present publishing industry would not be where it is without them. I argue, with reference to case studies, that multinational companies are potentially at risk of engineering their own demise if they continue to adhere to their traditional business practices in the digital age—namely, employing the print–distribution model and catering to their customers’ present requirements with sustaining technology. Such practices provide smaller, independent publishers with opportunities to prosper and regain market share in the present concentrated, globalised environment dominated by multinationals