The Future of Publishing

In about two weeks, I, along with a couple thousand or so of my closest friends, will be attending the 2013 Tools of Change for Publishing conference in New York. As you may have guessed, recently I’ve felt I haven’t had much to add to the digital publishing conversation. In many ways — while I know there has been exciting innovation — I’ve felt like we’ve been at a standstill. (Or, to misquote my friend Eoin Purcell, publishers feel like they have this whole digital thing sorted. Done and done.) Of course, if you’ve been paying attention (and I know […]

So what with this, that, and the other, Booksquare has been a bit quiet lately. The world of digital publishing has been amazingly active, and — oh! — filled with more rumors, speculation, and nonsense than even I can stomach*. Which means the important news gets buried as the digerati chase the next bright and shiny thing. I have been very much focused on Moving Forward. Which means thinking about how publishing can position itself for the next year, the next five years, the next ten years, heck, the next century. One thing I know for sure is that nobody

Months of anticipation. Weeks of preparing. Days of thinking. Hours of wondering. And that’s before the annual Tools of Change for Publishing Conference begins. Once the action starts, the mental rush is indescribable. It takes me days just to organize my thoughts, an entire year to wonder at how what I heard is playing out in the real world.* The container limits our imagination. TOC 2011, like the previous iterations of the conference (oh, can we return to San Jose, where the weather is delightfully mild?), was jam-packed with people, enthusiasm, and ideas**. You gotta love an event where the

As much as the idea of enhanced ebooks brings the sexy to publishing, it doesn’t really do much for most of the books published. Enhanced, enriched, transmedia, multimedia…these are ideas best applied to those properties that lend themselves to multimedia experience (or, ahem, the associated price tag). While many focus on the bright and shiny (and mostly unfulfilled) promised of apps and enhanced ebooks, the smart kids are looking at the power of social reading. And with the reading comes the book discussion. Social reading is normal reading. It’s how we already read in an offline world, and, yes, how

I, along with a hundred or so of my peers, spent last Thursday and Friday at a conference called Books in Browsers. As one who sat on the sidelines when the first iteration of this conference was held last year, I wasted no time in inviting myself to the event. I am still processing everything I heard and saw. Much of it aligned with what I think about when I look five years down the road; some it — and this is always the best part of a conference — made me sit back and say “Whoa! I really need

I think we all know what the publisher of today looks like. The hierarchy and positions have become comfortable, established. Sort of like really nice flannel pajamas. That’s not to say nothing ever evolves; I mean, who wears the same pair of pajamas forever? And, if you talk to publishing people, you know those flannel pajamas are threadbare in parts, have a few holes, yet remain too familiar to abandon. Now the analogy falls apart, mostly because while, sure, I can talk about pajamas with great authority, I’d rather talk about new jobs and new skills for 21st century (and

I’ve been thinking about the topic of the value of books a lot. Not for days. Not for months. Years. However, recently I’ve been angered by the implication that readers are cheap, that they won’t pay a proper price for books, that they don’t get it. Whatever it is. These assertions are not untrue. They are also not entirely accurate. Perspective is everything, nuance matters, and I have thoughts. Of course.

In yesterday’s post, Gina Frangello talked life as an indie author. Or, more specifically, life as an indie author who is also an indie publisher. She toured, she was paid (sort of), she got great press. She learned lessons. What happened next. As she says:

One of the best parts of my job is discovering what goes on in all corners of publishing. If you look beyond Manhattan, you see innovation, experimentation, and, yes, consternation as changes to the industry seem to happen every day. I am asking those who are involved in these ventures to share successes, failures, ideas, and how they are surviving in an industry that constantly seems to be experiencing death throes. It turns out there is far more optimism, pragmatism, and creativity than there are worries about the demise of the industry. Today and tomorrow, I am pleased to feature

If you are contract, royalties, or publishing geek, today (yesterday?) was an exciting day. Sort of like the bully saying “I’m gonna beat you up” every day until the scrawny kid picks a fight. All concepts relative. As promised, agent Andrew Wylie did what he said he would: “We will take our 700 clients, see what rights are not allocated to publishers, and establish a company on their behalf to license those e-book rights directly to someone like Google, Amazon.com, or Apple. It would be another business, set up on parallel tracks to the frontlist book business.”