Conflict And Integration - Research On China 's Digital Publishing Industry Chain

In recent years, Digital publishing industry had a rapid development in China, and coursed a tremendous impact on traditional publishing. Compared with traditional publishing, digital publishing, a new revolution in the publishing industry, has many technical advantages that can be said a green publication. Especially in the past three years, the view of the popularity of digital products and services of it and the annual report of the digital publishing industry presents the trend is accelerating. However, compared with foreign advanced countries, the digital publishing still exist many problems, such as irrational structure and lack of profit model. There are various contradictions and conflicts among the industry chain. Thus the industry chain integration is to be solved.Digital publishing is a relatively new subject. Thus its development and definition has no a unified and wholly recognized formulation. Thus, the first chapter of this paper briefly describes what digital publishing is, with what characteristics and advantages as a new publishing form. Next, from the industry point of view, I descript the rapid growth of its output value, and analyze the presence of the digital publishing industry, in which the structure is not balanced, lack of profit model, and fragile industrial chain. Among them, industry chain is not only a systemic problem, but also a core issue. During elaborating and thinking, I usually refer to the basic theory of industrial chain in economy and management science, and reasonably apply it to our current chain of digital publishing industry research. What is more, by reference to the traditional publishing industry chain analysis, I think the digital publishing industry chain include:content providers (mainly traditional publishing units), digital publishers (platform managers), telecom operators, hardware providers, consumers (readers/users), and several other secondary units, which show the sections of industrial chain are more diversified, the industrial process updates and has a higher degree of integration of medias.I believe that, the parts of the digital publishing industry chain are the most fundamental section of the industrial chain. If we want in-depth research of conflicts and integration of the industry chain, we must enter the inside of each section to examine them clearly. As a matter of fact, this approach is also consistent with the basic analysis method and logic of industry chain in general. Thus, the second chapter examines their situation and problems faced, therefore laid the foundation for the next chapter concentrating on the conflicts and contradictions among them. At present, digital publishers became the backbone to promote the development of the digital publishing industry in the chain, but facing shortage of content; the terminal hardware suppliers are also take a very favorable position by virtue of a variety of terminal equipment, but foreign competition and price wars make them miserable; traditional publishing units seems to be rather indifferent, for which, digital publishing process can be described as " loud thunder, little rain"; consumers(readers/user), obviously, present the reading and consumption style changes, as well as consumption imbalances between institutional and individual users.Diversification of digital publishing body means that interests diversified. Thus conflicts and contradictions in the industry chain will be inevitable. Specifically, these conflicts and contradictions firstly manifested between the content and platform. Apparently, traditional publishing units are the largest content controller, compared with the platform generally controlled by digital publishers. On the one hand, traditional publishing units need cooperation with the platform, but cannot get a reasonable share. On the other hand, because of the lack of sufficient resources, digital publishers have to expand to upstream and playing several roles at the same time. These eventually lead to the fragmentation of digital publishing industry chain, bad competing, lack of deep cooperation, and the overall constraints of the benign development of the industry chain. Secondly, due to the new concepts of copyright and copyright protection digital publishing induced, there are also full of conflicts and contradictions among consumers, digital publishers, content owners, as well as digital publishers internal. They have new interest and demands of their own. As a result, this also led to many large-scale litigation cases.The conflicts and contradictions among the industry chain restricted the healthy development of the industry. Thus, the need for integration is urgent. In the basic theory of the industry chain integration, it is both an academic issue and a practical approach, including connecting and extending the chain, vertical integration, horizontal integration. Obviously, these theories and approaches have a general illumination for the integration of digital publishing industry chain. Therefore, in the fourth chapter, I elaborate these universal theories firstly. And as for digital publishing, the integration will be a systematic project, mainly including integration of content, channel, capital, as well as industrial union and industrial clustering. For an example, I give an account of the world largest digital publishing giant-Amazon’s development process and its successful integration.According to basic theories of industry chain, different enterprises (or units) take different functions according to their specific advantages and conditions. In retrospect of the digital publishing industry development, the integration is also led by different sections of the industry chain in china, showing a variety of integration models. This paper argues these integration models are not only result of continuous exploration and attempt under specific conditions, implying the collective wisdom of the industry and the academic circles, but also a result of the combined effect of our specific policy, industry basis, technology level and other forces. Therefore, through this summary and analysis, we can more clearly understand the characteristics of the development of digital publishing industry in china as well as its advantages and disadvantages. So, in this chapter, the paper focuses on commentary and analysis of several typical integration models with cases, which mainly includes the following four modes:1, Integration model led by the traditional publishing units;2Integration model led by technique operators; Integration model led by hardware manufacturers;4, Integration model led by telecom operators. And in the last chapter, through comparing these models, we can see that effective industry chain integration model is not only one. Different industry chain sections under specific conditions, such as its prominent advantage in one of the core factors of production, or market share or expand capacity, are likely to become the leader of the industry chain, and thus forming different types of power structure and distribution patterns in the industry chain.