After the iPad launched in 2010, technology-based startups began to dominate publishing events, conference agendas, and water cooler conversations about what’s next in publishing. The trend was most evident in the children’s and education publishing segments, where startups such as Mee Genius, Magic Town, Scholastic’s Storia, and News Corp’s Amplify worked to create a new era of technology-based publishing.

Five years later, the technology is still here, but apps and highly interactive platforms have made only limited progress in reaching the children’s and education markets. Lorraine Shanley, founder of Market Partners International, observes, “Many of the new launches are disappearing or morphing into platforms that serve a niche.”

Why have things changed so little in a post-tablet world? Shanley suggests that in the consumer realm, significant competition played a role: “Apps are expensive to develop, and they have to compete against many other low-priced or free products, some already branded. It makes a higher-price offer hard to sell to parents.”

Children’s publishing remains a market in which a significant number of books are given as gifts. Bolstered by a healthy hand-me-down market, sales of print formats in the children’s market have actually increased in the last few years. “E-book technology can’t yet compete with a printed picture book,” Shanley adds.

Shanley also notes the impact of recent pushback against using (or overusing) tablets at an early age. “Companies like Nosy Crow started doing sophisticated interactive stories for tablets years ago, but they have evolved into a successful book publisher that is an occasional app developer.”

Adam Lerner, CEO of Lerner Publishing, thinks the technology-focused startups tried to solve the wrong problem. Lerner argues that for most of them, content was secondary: “It’s not about becoming a media company. Effective use of interactive technology is about literacy and reading.”

Eric Huang, development director for Made in Me and a speaker at this week’s Global Kids Connect Conference, endorsed this perspective: “Digital books that have too much interactivity distract from the reading experience. Part of the reason why Me Books has worked is that it taps into existing consumer behaviors of families reading bedtime stories together.”

Shanley says, “Two different worlds are colliding: education and edu-tainment.” She adds, “Publishers probably dodged a fair number of bullets by not investing in many of these online ventures.”

Still, some investments have been made. Companies such as Capstone and Lerner have actively embraced technology as a way to provide classrooms and school libraries with cost-effective access to a wide range of fiction and nonfiction content. The publishers position their solutions as ways to promote literacy.

According to Lerner, “Technology in schools is gaining traction when it solves a problem.” He uses BrainHive, a Lerner division focused on the classroom market, as an example. The platform supports multiple instructional strategies, giving schools a tool to improve literacy. In Lerner’s view, it also builds digital literacy and stamina, a useful skill in districts where the use of online testing is growing.

Developing proprietary platforms makes the most sense in institutional settings, such as education. Publishers looking to sell digital content in the children’s market can take advantage of a number of options, many of them global. Rana DiOrio of Little Pickle Press sees “platforms all over the world that are ravenous for publisher content.”

Among those, she counts Epic, FunTuse, Humble Bundle, PlayKids, and Reading Rainbow. DiOrio is also interested in Hummingbird Digital Media, a white-label online retailer that American West Books announced this summer, which has the goal of giving booksellers and other companies the opportunity to sell e-books and digital audio directly to consumers.

Smaller publishers can also partner with a technology company or a larger publisher that has created an appropriate solution. Loyola Press, which publishes a trade line and supplemental materials for the K–8 Catholic school market, went the partnership route to deliver its programs in digital formats. Loyola director of marketing Judine O’Shea says that the publisher “looked for a technology partner that was friendly for us to use and widely understood.” She added, “In the parish market, Loyola needed a solution that both professional and nonprofessional staff could use.”

O’Shea notes, “Technology is an extension or enhancement for us.” Two of its K–8 programs are now fully available in digital formats, with some extensions (games, assessment modules, lesson planning, and the like) available throughout the line. Although O’Shea feels that Loyola is not far enough along to have data in hand that confirms what works, she says, “We’ll continue to extend where it makes sense for us to do so.”

The conversation with O’Shea also highlighted a challenge for existing publishers looking to convert from print to a blended (print-plus-digital) model: when an assessment module is added to an existing workbook, open-ended questions sometimes fall by the wayside.

Digital tools may be seen as weakening rigorous programs by making the content more scripted and quantifiable. The challenge can be overcome, but with the tools and formats that have only been in production for a few years, best practices are still evolving.

O’Shea feels the market is adapting, although not always uniformly. “If you’re not a professionally trained teacher, the shifts could be daunting. On the other hand, if you’re digitally native, these things are not as big a deal.”

If technology on its own is not what’s next in children’s and education publishing, both Little Pickle Press and Made in Me are a window to what might be on the horizon. Increasingly, publishing may become a means to an end, with the ends being an evolving landscape of partners.

DiOrio described how Little Pickle is currently working on a number of partnerships between for-profit brands that “embrace a social mission” and nonprofits whose efforts fit well with a given company’s social interests. In one instance, Little Pickle is partnering with the Great Kindness Challenge to donate copies of one of its titles, What Does It Mean to Be Kind?, to 16,000 schools.

The campaign, scheduled for Jan. 25–29, 2016, is a school week devoted to “performing as many acts of kindness as possible, choosing from a 50-item checklist.” Digital technologies make it possible to cost-effectively publish and share a discussion guide for teachers to use during that period.

“There are so many high-quality companies out there. Publishers can help them build community in support of a cause and give them favorable visibility for doing so,” DiOrio adds.

A similar story comes from Made in Me, whose Eric Huang recalls “partnering with big brands with a lot of consumer traffic.” Huang explains, “We give away free digital books via brand partners like McDonald’s and Save the Children. In order to redeem the free digital books, consumers have to download our Me Books app and give us their email details.”

Both DiOrio and Huang emphasize that there are multiple ways to create content partnerships, and that their approaches continue to evolve. Speaking about the partnership model, DiOrio says, “You always have to experiment.” In a similar vein, Huang notes, “The big thing we’ve learned from Made in Me is to be flexible.”

As digital technologies lower both costs and barriers to entry, the question to answer remains, What are the best ways to use these tools as a means to an end? The answer may be found in partnerships, new purpose-driven alliances, and a willingness to challenge existing content forms to help make readers aware of and engaged with published work.