Four stories surfaced in the last week or so that suggest some answers to that nagging question in our industry: What is the Future of Publishing?

Squint, and you might see the vague outlines of what magazines and books may turn into in this increasingly multi-platform world.

1. The Industry Standard is back—with an online betting pool.

The magazine that
chronicled the Internet explosion and then fizzled along with it in 2001 has been reborn, not in print but on the Web only. Its centerpiece is a prediction market, using ersatz “Standard Dollars,” that aims to tap the wisdom of the Standard’s crowd of expert readers and commentators.

If the market becomes a reliable trend-spotter for the tech industry, this could be a killer app. True, that’s a big “if.” Whatever happens, we think it’s a creative attempt at an online extension for a brand that many believed had petered out. (Check out PPX, another magazine-related prediction market, at Popular Science’s site; it covers “the future of science and technology.” Simon & Schuster set up its own market, Media Predict, to spot ideas for books, recordings, and other media products that are likely to succeed; we wrote about it last year.)

More details on the Industry Standard’s market and comments from Derek Butcher, vice president and general manager, are at Tech Crunch and the New York Times.

2. Here comes a unified, multi-platform book delivery system.

Writing about Amazon’s plans to purchase Audible, Brad Stone at Bits thinks this is a real possibility:

“How about a service that allows you to seamlessly switch from reading a book on your digital device to listening to the same book read aloud as you get in the car, or if your eyes are tired, or if you simply want to hear a crucial scene acted out? And then switch back to the printed page?”

3. Cell phones are reading magazines.

Wired, Billboard, and Car and Driver have all recently published bar codes within the pages of their magazines in an effort to kick start their “mobile initiatives.” Why? It’s much easier to get cell phone users to tune in to related material if they don’t have to manually type in those pesky Web addresses. Car and Driver’s efforts are among the most ambitious so far, as Joanna Pettas reports at FolioMag.com:

“Car and Driver published more than 400 barcodes in its annual Buyer’s
Guide in late December. Each car in the guide had a corresponding
barcode linking to a microsite with pictures, reviews and a link to the
full road test…”

4. And now, a platform to publish physical objects.

Three-dimensional printers—something in the neighborhood of Star Trek’s transporter or replicator—have been used for a while now by aerospace and race car engineers, doctors, and artists. So reports materials scientist Mark
Miodownik in the Independent.

As the technology continues to grow more sophisticated, it’s not hard to envision the emergence of companies that enable their customers to “print out” a whole variety of physical objects: call them 3-D publishers. All right, maybe you have to squint a little harder to see it. But that’s what they told Gutenberg, isn’t it?