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VISTA International has been working with publishers for more than 24 years, providing solutions and services, conducting research and participating in industry associations and forums. From these experiences VISTA launched author2reader(TM). The author2reader framework stresses integration, flexibility, adaptability, while at the same time offering publishers proven world-class solutions in key areas of the business such as information analysis, information management, and physical and digital fulfillment. Since the beginning of the 1990s, VISTA has continued to aggressively study the present and future trends of the publishing industry. The VISTA research program started in New York in 1992. Nicholas Negroponte, then director of the media laboratories at MIT, introduced a startled audience to the concepts he would later make famous in his book Being Digital. VISTA launched the acclaimed Publishing in the 21 st Century research program, from which much of our strategic direction has been shaped, in 1995. Through hundreds of interviews and questionnaires, and through the analysis of a renowned think-tank of consultants and commentators on the publishing industry, a picture of the future of publishing emerged that has challenged the most fundamental of our assumptions about publishing systems support. Our research and learning program has led directly to the launch of solutions such as author2reader™, VISTA's applications framework for the support of book and journal publishing in the 21 st century. For more information about VISTA, please visit our website at www. No part of this report may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without prior written permission of VISTA International. VISTA recognizes all trademarks, names and graphics referenced as belonging to their respective owners. Communication networks are changing our lives. Inexorably, day-by-day, technological convergence is creating the necessary infrastructure for a world where much of what book and journal publishers currently distribute in physical, print-on-paper form will be more effectively distributed digitally. We do not by this mean to imply that much of this content may not eventually end up as print on paper – just that the distribution will likely have taken place first. The thinking behind this paper can be encapsulated in two sentences from a paper in Harvard Business Review of December 1995. "Executives must pay attention to how their companies create value in both the physical world and the virtual world. But the processes for creating value are not the same in the …