Exploring the transformation path of the publishing and media industry, what will AI bring to the publishing industry? These experts gathered together in the media | data | experts

In the digital age, how to promote the deep integration and development of the publishing and media industry, and build a new highland for publishing in the digital age? On August 17th, the Kaiming Publishing Media Forum and the 10th Shanghai Minjin Publishing Forum, hosted by the Central Committee of the Democratic Progressive Party, were held in Shanghai. The attending experts exchanged ideas around the theme of "practicing new development concepts and promoting high-quality development of the publishing and media industry", and jointly explored the "development questions" of the publishing industry in the new era.

Using technology as the engine

In the digital age, people's demand for reading has also shifted to online, and the cultural life of the people has higher demands, which puts higher demands on publishing products and services. The professional level of the publishing industry also urgently needs to be improved.

"Publishing is naturally adapted to digital production and networked dissemination," said Mao Wentao, Vice President of Shanghai Century Publishing Group. "Publishing is primarily based on text as the main tool, knowledge and ideas as the main object, and large-scale dissemination as the main goal. Naturally, it should be at the forefront of digitization."

In recent years, Century Publishing Group has solved the need for users to read online and search in a timely manner through screen keyword selection services, creating a new model for the digital transformation of traditional reference books. This model has been applied in nearly 40 Internet APPs such as WeChat Reading and Baidu Encyclopedia.

"As long as you encounter unfamiliar words, phrases, or sentences while reading, just select them on the screen and send a query request. Our specific platform can push the results to the user's terminal within 200 milliseconds." Mao Wentao said.

The relationship between data and AI has also become closer. Publishing data is not only content data, but also includes production and marketing data, reading behavior data, and other data based on cloud computing algorithms. AI based corpora are all knowledge data rooted in the content itself.

Chang Bo, General Manager of China Publishing Group, mentioned that the Ministry of Finance is about to introduce relevant management measures to treat data as an asset. Publishing units have a vast amount of high-quality content resources and genuine high-quality corpus resources. On the one hand, they can provide IP and data to large model manufacturers and participate in acquisition risks; On the other hand, data can also empower publishing companies in publishing, distribution, sales, and new business, achieving cost reduction and efficiency improvement.

Taking fusion as the path

In addition to technical support, the integration of all channels is also a necessary path for digital development. The trend of integrated publishing has swept across the entire publishing and media industry, from the popular "Three Body Problem" and "Wandering Earth" to ChatGPT, which relies on artificial intelligence.

Chang Bo introduced that as soon as passengers enter Daxing Airport, they can see the IP products of China Encyclopedia Publishing House. Currently, the National Cultural Park, Great Wall series, and Grand Canal series products have also been officially launched. "The core of integrated publishing is publishing, and integration is the path, which is to integrate other industrial forms or product forms with published content or resources, and achieve cross-border operations such as animation, games, cultural and creative industries, education, tourism, etc."

In fact, the media publishing industry has been exploring digital publishing for some time. But when it comes to how to push it forward, everyone has their own ideas and abilities. Looking at the trend of digital economy development in the past 20 years, it can be found that the platform economy occupies an important position. The digital publishing platform, relying on digital technology to reshape its distribution and sales space, has become an electronic marketplace for the exchange and consumption of various cultural products.

Chang Bo believes that "traffic is not only the lifeblood of platform survival, but also a barometer reflecting the market." Therefore, platform construction not only points to content technology, but also to traffic and channels.

The publisher needs to determine the creation direction, publishing cycle and distribution channel of content through traffic data analysis, study the "playing method" of traffic in different channels, and efficiently use online platforms such as websites, clients, and two micro end to "make Tiktok more powerful and Kwai faster". For high-quality IPs, we should follow the trend and guide them accordingly, gradually fading the boundaries between books, movies, TV dramas, and games, and making well-known IPs the entry point for core traffic.

But currently, it seems that there are still very few mature and competitive platforms built by traditional publishing units. Mao Wentao suggested that digital publishing platforms should not only have the editing ability of integrated media, but also have portal level user responsiveness and technology driven knowledge service capabilities. We need to strictly control the quality for users, filter out unreliable content information, and continuously aggregate high-quality content resources. Regardless, author resources and content value are still the core of the platform, and expanding the supply of high-quality content is a long-term achievement.