New technologies have always brought new challenges even as they solve old problems. The 21st century is seeing a revolution in scientific, technical and medical publishing. The stage was set a few years ago, when publishers began migrating their content to the online environment, in parallel with continued print publication, first journals, then books. Initially, the premise was still that the print product was primary and the electronic version just a way of reaching a larger audience. As new functionality was introduced, expectations were raised and content now has to be much more than an electronic version of a printed page: it must include easy cross-referencing both internally within a document and to external sources, without regard to the owner or publisher of those sources; it must accommodate audiovisual material; and all this must be done rapidly and seamlessly.

But the target has already moved further away: the real challenge now is to deliver the interactivity that will be expected from the generation that communicates through MySpace and Facebook. How do we maintain the status of the textbook when students look for answers on Wikipedia? Who will read a journal paper describing a particular gene when they can log into GenBank? What is the role of the clinical reference work when doctors carry PDAs loaded with guidelines and treatment algorithms? The publishing house that successfully answers these questions will be the one that survives to face the challenges of the next decade.