The Road Not Taken: from Frost to Jobs

Two roads diverged in a wood,  and I,  I took the one less traveled by,  And that has made all the difference.

(Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken) 

Have you ever read a poem or heard a song that really resonated within you? One that you could not forget or stop analyzing its meaning? One that you felt was almost written for you?

When I first read Robert Frost's The Road Not Taken, it did all that for me. It didn't compel me to always take the less traveled road, but it made me realize that choices, once taken, took on a life of their own. It compelled me to live a life where I avoided any and all what if's to the best of my ability. So if there was a boy who seemed to be interested but didn't have the courage to ask me out, I'd somehow force myself to start that conversation so that I wouldn't sit around thinking "what if." Conversely, if a relationship seemed to be headed nowhere, even if it hurt to do so, I'd start the conversation that was the beginning of the end. All to avoid the "what if" of lost opportunities or roads not taken.

As I grew up, this became more difficult so I modified my motto of avoiding what if's to staying true to myself at any given moment. At times this meant going out on a limb or making unpopular decisions, but if I couldn't see an alternative I could live with, then there was no other choice. I'd learned the difference between right and wrong and the boundaries of what was necessary--whether to succeed in business or in life--and what was wrong, under any and all circumstances. I make mistakes, but I try not to cross that line.

This is something I was raised with, and then took upon myself, so it's become so ingrained that I rarely think about it. But listening to Steve Jobs' Stanford Commencement speech, reminded me of why I took this upon myself, of why I was so adamant to avoid those what if's at first and the regrets later. He reminded me that we cannot "connect the dots going forward," so we must do what is right for us and have faith that all will work out. I think we can all use that reminder.

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” - Steve Jobs’ Stanford Commencement Address                                                                 

Migrating to Digital Publishing? Answers from the Experts

(The following article first appeared in Publishing Perspectives.)

I attended Publishers Launch: E-books for Everyone Else (presented by Publishers Launch Conferences and The Center for Publishing at New York University’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies) in the hopes of getting some answers to the questions I posed in my previous article, Migrating to Digital Publishing? The Six Key Questions to Ask. When I mentioned this to an industry friend at the event, his response “You have answers? I thought no one had any” was quite telling.

In addition to attending this event, I listened to a Digital Book World webcast on the same topic and spoke to several industry people who have first-hand experience on migrating content to digital.

And the truth is, there are very few “answers” everyone agrees to:

• Everyone agrees that with the constant developments in technology, it’s important to “future proof” your content as much as possible, and the current thinking is that an open-format, multiple-platform workflow, such as an XML workflow, is the way to go.
• More companies are using third-party suppliers to assist with this migration, both because they have the skill set to do so efficiently and to keep costs down. Whether you choose to use a third-party service or bring the skill set in-house, it’s still important to have people in-house with the understanding to intelligently interact, oversee, and assure the quality of the work from the third-party suppliers.
• Quality control is more important than ever. With multiple reading devices needing different outputs and tweaks, automation can only take it so far. Someone knowledgeable needs to review the files for formatting and other errors before they are released to the public.
• Metadata is more important than ever in the world of digital.

Below are some highlights from my interviews.

Michael Weinstein (most recently VP, Global Content and Media Production at Cengage Learning, and prior to that held VP positions at Oxford University Press, Pearson, Prentice Hall, and several others)

• If conversions can be automated, outsource them.
• Since don’t know what’s coming, be generic and build workflows/tagging that’s updatable: it doesn’t pay to build proprietary.

Andrea Colvin (Director, Publishing Operations at Open Road Media)

• Don’t skimp on any quality control, which most publishers do right in the print world.
• Learn the types of errors introduced by OCR and educate your proofreaders on these, creating guidelines and checklists to facilitate this.
• Have as many sets of eyes as possible looking something over to ensure that nothing has been missed, and review things at different stages for different things.
• Strive for “graceful degradation” of content: since EPUB is HTML-based it can gracefully degrade.
• “Reading is an immersive experience” and the publisher has to decide when to interrupt it and when this adds value.
• Test out different conversion partners to determine their strengths and weaknesses so you can choose the best partners for your projects. Also look for developers and different types of expertise depending on the type of the book.
• Important to have someone in-house with technical skills to go in and correct files plus have an editorial point of view.
• “Don’t split the branch of time” until it’s concluded: so print and e-files should be on same path until one goes to printer and the other to conversion house; this also allows everyone to learn best practices and makes edits easy to both parallel streams.

Pauline Ireland (Former Production and Design Director, Cambridge University Press)

• Best archive: keep a print copy of everything — you can always scan it; keep typesetting files, but be aware that proprietary typesetting systems have a limited shelf life.
• Small publishers should have robust relationships with service providers who can help them; many will be offshore, requiring time and effort upfront to get them to understand your workflows and to get it right. Go visit them and if possible; have staff on the ground at the suppliers (even for a limited period) since it’s a worthwhile investment.
• XML-preserving today’s content for an unknown future. XML allows you to do what you like and when you like with files; unless files are open-format, they won’t be usable in 10 years.
• Use conversion and content suppliers, but do have staff on-site who understand quality assurance (QA), workflows and managing suppliers; ideally they should have a background in publishing, not only technology.
• If scanning a hard copy for POD, you might as well use it for online/digital as well.
• Make the workflow for third-party rights a priority.

Cathy Felgar (Current Production Director, Academic and Professional, Cambridge University Press)

• Work on simultaneous e- and p-books. Challenges include third-party rights and non-XML workflows (e.g., LaTex files). Come to grips with third-party e-rights from contract stage, if possible.
• Use a CMS (CAMS) with XML parsing capabilities, which could be used for e-book conversions, too. Problem is, if standards change, conversion routines will have to be reconfigured.
• Future-proof content with XML or other well-structured file type so your files remain format agnostic.
• Decide what skills you want to keep in-house, which depends on size of organization: small companies should outsource; large companies can hire in-house talent.
• Taxonomy is important, and publishers need people with SEO knowledge, especially since indexing may disappear as keyword search becomes more dominant.

Overall, although every new “answer” — and new development — brings more questions with it, publishers and industry people are more aware of the viable options and the pros and cons for each choice made, as the Publishers Launch speakers demonstrated. Like much else in life, there is no one right answer for everyone, so just to stay aware, keep asking questions, and if you don’t succeed at first, try another option.

E-books for Everyone Else

(The following article first appeared in Publishing Perspectives.)

E-books for Everyone Else was the name of the Publishers Launch Conference, co-presented with NYU's Center of Publishing, that I attended on September 26th. You can check out the program at http://www.publisherslaunch.com/events/launch-new-york/program/.

I didn't know what to expect but I was pleasantly surprised. The room was crowded (and unfortunately freezing) and presentations ran the gamut from workflow to conversion to metadata to social media to distribution: something for everyone in the audience. They also tried a publishing version of "speed dating." Registrants were asked to pick the top 3 sponsors they wanted to learn more about and got about fifteen minutes with each. Mike Shatzkin would announce when it was time to move to your next speed date. I know that the sponsors I sat with had a blast and participants seemed to find it worthwhile as well.

So with an entire day of people speaking at me or with me, these are the things that stick out in my mind when I think back at the event:

• Thank the Lord quality control is being stressed. I'm embarrassed for our industry as a whole when I hear people complain about the crap e-book they bought. Not everything can be, or should be, automated and someone must look at the content--in each device to be used--before it's released to the public. 
• Metadata is more important than ever in the digital world. 
• Publishers still need to decide what to outsource and what to do themselves; the two big outsource options in the e-book world are conversion and distribution.
• With agents becoming publishers, and new digital and self-publishing options being introduced weekly, the traditional publishing lines are beyond blurred and it will be interesting to see what new relationships and business models evolve.
• Although we still don't have many answers regarding the future of publishing and e-books, we at least have more documented and thought-out options to better advise our decisions.
• With the new digital and self-publishing options, more books will be available than ever before.

Depending on your point of view, the above is either scary or exciting, but the one thing we can't argue is that publishing is far from dead. You can argue about the definition of publishing (or the what or who of publishing), but the industry is alive and kicking, bringing in fresh talent and being discussed by non-publishing people on a regular basis.

And more people reading and interested in publishing is definitely a good thing.

University Presses Stepping Up e-Book Efforts

(By Calvin Reid -- Publishers Weekly, 7/17/2009)

In separate announcements, a coalition of four university presses have received a planning grant to study the feasibility of a collaborative scholarly e-book program, and the University of Chicago Press announced a multi-faceted program to make 700 e-books available immediately.

A coalition of presses from New York University, Rutgers, Temple and the University of Pennsylvania, plan to use a planning grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to hire a technical consultant for a six-month study looking at the feasibility of a collaborative scholarly e-book publishing program. The new program will focus on studying the particular needs of university presses and their library partners. (A spokesperson for Temple Univ. press noted that TUP plans to immediately release 50 new e-books that are not a part of this announcement or coalition study.)

The coalition of presses plans to study how to bring together a wide variety of university presses of different sizes—a minimum of ten presses at launch—in an e-book publishing program that would launch with at least 10,000 e-book titles and add five to 10 new UPs each year over 5 years. According to the details of the grant, the new program would focus on the library market and then on supplying e-books to students as well as looking at variety of payment/delivery models—from purchase/subscription to rental models, bundling and POD.

Steve Maikowski, director of the NYU Press, is co-principal investigator on the grant along with Marlie Wasserman, director of Rutgers University Press. “This is a very ambitious planning grant and we are thankful to the Mellon Foundation for supporting the research,” Maikowski said.

For its part, the University of Chicago Press is well under way with its e-book program, announcing plans to partner with BiblioVault, a Chicago digital book repository, to immediately make 700 academic titles available in e-book form. The e-titles are available through the University of Chicago Press website and can be downloaded to a variety of laptops, desktops and mobile devices and read using Digital Editions, a free software reader available from Adobe.

Patti O’Shea, executive director of information systems at the Univ. of Chicago Press, said the press also plans to release more backlist e-book titles as well as begin simultaneous print and digital releases of its books. O’Shea said the press is offering a variety of purchase/rental options including “perpetual ownership at list price, 180-day ownership at about 50% off or 30-day owernship for $5.” O’Shea said the rental options were aimed at students and noted that using Digital Editions allows the e-books, “to be used on up to six unique devices registered to a single users. Readers can seamlessly transfer their e-books between different computers and e-book devices.”

Dean Bobaum, e-commerce and marketing manager at the press, said the press will continue to distribute e-books through vendors like Amazon and suppliers such as NetLibrary. However, Garrett Kiely, director of the Univ. of Chicago Press, said that seeing “big players like Sony and Google in the e-book game, “has lit a fire under academic presses,” to get into the e-book business.

My first e-textbook experience: Big disappointment from Pearson

(Teleread, By Ficbot)

I’ve just had my first e-textbook experience, and if this is what the future of e-books in education looks like, color me disappointed.

The course is an on-line summer credit offered by a somewhat local university. I have taken one such course every summer for the last three years to add various teachables to my teaching credentials, and in the past, the course has consisted of the following:

• A print textbook.
• An online forum with an organizer listing the schedule of readings, discussion questions for them, etc., and a message board to talk about them
• A “lecture” for each section of the course which could be read on-line or cut and pasted to a word file
• A section of Internet links to other websites or readings

This course had an “e-book” option where one could pay on a sliding scale to get a) a print book and “access” the e-version b) only a print book c) only the e-version “access.” I suppose the word ‘access’ should have clued me in that this was not a PDF or some-such, but I was just so excited not to have to deal with the clutter of a paper copy (and to save the $20 more plus shipping that the deluxe “e-book plus paper copy” would cost) that I didn’t investigate the situation more carefully.

I came to regret this. If the e-book system used by this course is any way becoming the “standard,” then e-books have no way of conquering the mainstream educational market.

The”’e-book” was compiled by a site called Pearson Educational Media. One can access the “e-book” by setting up an account with them and logging in. From here, I thought I would get a PDF, perhaps with a password, but what I instead got was a Macromedia Flashpaper document. There was no facility to download the text as a file so it could be read on a mobile device. There was no facility to cut and paste the text into a word processor to make your own file to read on a mobile device. You could not even use the arrow keys to read easily off the screen; you needed a mouse so you could move down the hand or click on the arrows. You could print the book to paper. That was the only real “functionality” you had beyond sitting in front of your computer and clicking with the mouse.

There were some other usability concerns. Our on-line postings to the message board required that we respond in such a way as to prove we had done the readings. But there was no cut and paste! So if you had the e-book open in one window and the message board open in another, and you wanted to quote a line or two, you would have to switch back and forth between the two windows and manually type in every word! It’s ridiculous. I still think cutting and pasting the whole shebang into Word so I could read it on my Sony is fair and should be permitted, but you could persuade me why this might not be allowed. But two lines, to put into my message board post? I can’t do that? Piracy of three-year-old journal articles from educational trade magazines is such an issue? Why even have an e-book if you have to type it in from scratch anyway?

Here was another issue: the search box. It seemed to work fine for standard text—plain, simple, less formatted stuff that seemed to come from textbook chapters. But it could not make sense of anything formatted (such as call-out boxes from scanned magazine articles) or anything that wasn’t just regular, basic text. One particularly vital chapter seemed to be scanned from an older book, and there was a lot of ’static’ on the page. The whole chapter was unreadable by the search function. Every time I wanted to refer to it, I had to manually scroll back and find what I was looking for. And of course, once I found it, I had to juggle two windows back and forth while I manually retyped whatever word or phrase I wanted…

So what did my $35 get me? “Access” to a website (for the duration of the course only) that pretty much lets me look, but not touch. No ability to download to my mobile device. No ability to cut and paste even two words from one browser window into another. Limited ability to search for parts I want read later, the usefulness dependent on whether the parts important to me have the fortune to be recognized by the program as actual words. And if I want to keep any of it after the course is done, only a print button and a pile of papers, just like in the old days. This is progress?

At minimum, we should have a PDF we can download and read off-line, and the ability when reading off the OC to copy/paste even in a limited way. Better still would be if they took the raw scans, run them through an OCR program and left us with text we could actually search and bookmark. I would not “buy” another textbook under a scheme such as the current one. I hate reading lengthy documents off a computer screen and need to be able to download it for off-line, off-computer use. And an e-book that a) requires you to print it in order to read it later b) does not let you copy even a snippet from one browser window to another c) only sometimes allows you to search through text as if they were actual words is barely an e-book at all.

Pearson Answers Schwarzenegger’s Call for E-Textbooks

(By Craig Morgan Teicher -- Publishers Weekly, 6/18/2009)

Last week, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed replacing school textbooks with e-books in order to help plug a state budget gap. Now, textbook giant Pearson has responded with digital content to supplement California’s programs in biology, chemistry, algebra 2, and geometry.

In a statement made recently, Schwarzenegger said, “Kids are feeling as comfortable with their electronic devices as I was with my pencils and crayons. So why are California’s school students still forced to lug around antiquated, heavy, expensive textbooks?” But easing the strain on students’ backs was not the Governor’s main reason for putting out a call to developers to create electronic textbooks. The current budget gap in the state is estimated at $28 billion.

Peter Cohen, Pearson’s CEO of North America school curriculum business, said, “We believe it is important to take these forward steps toward an online delivery system and we are supporting the Governor’s initiative, recognizing there are numerous challenges ahead for the education community to work through,” including “how we ensure that low income and disadvantaged students receive equal access to technology; how we address the needs of English language learners; and how we protect the intellectual property rights of content and technology creators to support future investment and innovation.”

According to the official Web site for California’s Free Digital Textbook Initiative, e-books must “approach or equal a full course of study and must be downloadable.” The site also offers instructions and links for publishers of e-books to submit books for consideration for use in California schools.

Pearson is the first major company to respond to Schwarzenegger’s initiative, which garnered an array of responses from the media, from speculation in the U.K. that others will imitate the project, to others who point out that e-books in school are not more environmentally friendly than print textbooks.

McGraw-Hill Education Announces Digital Initiative

Programs will cultivate critical thinking and teach students ways to use the Internet for problem-solving

By Lynn Andriani -- Publishers Weekly, 6/16/2009 8:04:00 AM

McGraw-Hill Education today announced the creation of its Center for Digital Innovation, a research and development center that will focus on bringing technology to elementary and secondary classrooms. The Center will be led by McGraw-Hill Education’s team of former teachers, engineers and software developers.

The Center, in Bothell, Wash., is developing digital platforms that are customized by state standards, district requirements, and individual teacher and student needs. The Center’s digital platforms will allow teachers to quickly assess a student’s proficiency level, so that teachers can alter their instruction based on the needs of each student. Programs will cultivate critical thinking and teach students ways to use the Internet for problem-solving.

Programs will address literacy, mathematics and science. Today, the Center launched two new products that will be available in August for the new school year: CINCH Project, a collection of Web 2.0 tools for collaborative learning projects, with a community-based Web site where teachers and students create digital profiles and participate in group activities; and Planet Turtle, a K-3 social network where children can interact with their peers by developing online animal-based character avatars and completing learning “challenges” that progress as their skills improve.

While college publishers are rapidly moving into digital publishing, there has been less activity at the elhi level, something MHE hopes to address with the Center. Terry McGraw, chairman, president and CEO of the McGraw-Hill Companies, said, “Our programs will be the first to create offerings based on how students use technology to bridge the gap between digital socialization and digital learning. This will help teachers, parents and students to unite around the goals of fostering growth and development; creating richer, more involved methods of learning; and more effectively addressing issues that arise.”

Google Promises Publishers (And Amazon) Will Sell E-Books In 2009

(paidcontent.org; By Staci D. Kramer - Sun 31 May 2009)

Nothing says we’re not a monopoly like trying to break up another perceived stranglehold. Google (NSDQ: GOOG) plans to enter the commercial e-book business this year—and, unlike Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN), apparently plays to let publishers set prices, according to The New York Times. The program would be separate from the recent book-scanning settlement. Piecing together conversations Google held with publishers at the BookExpo in New York with a presentation made by Tom Turvey, director of strategic partnerships at Google, the NYT reports:

—Publishers could set their own prices and probably would be allowed to charge as much as they do for hardcovers but Google would retain the right to lower “exorbitant” rates. Amazon sets its own prices, buying wholesale and taking a loss on some to keep the usual price for hardcover equivalents at $9.99

—Publishers still aren’t sure how the direct-to-consumer sales would work but Turvey told them the company is committed to making it happen by the end of 2009: “This time we mean it.”

—Readers would gain online access to digital titles but also would retain access offline through cached versions in browsers. (This sounds like a job for Google Gears, the sync manager which is not the most stable app in my experience. It’s the app most likely to crash in Google Chrome for me so far.)

—Access would not be limited to certain devices but would require internet access.

Motoko Rich goes pretty far for a news piece with the flat-out claim that Amazon “is seeking to control the e-book market.” Dominate, I can see, but control suggests the M word and Amazon isn’t close to that.

Publishers Participate in Espresso Book Machine Pilot Program

(Book Business Magazine, 4/24/09)

Lightning Source has launched an Espresso Book Machine (EBM) title pilot with OnDemand Books, the proprietor of the EBM.

Participating publishers in the pilot include John Wiley & Sons, Hachette Book Group, McGraw-Hill, Simon & Schuster, Clements Publishing, Cosimo, E-Reads, Bibliolife, Information Age Publishing, Macmillan, University of California Press and W.W. Norton. The pilot initially was offered to a small group of publishers that currently work with Lightning Source to enable them to enhance the availability of their titles at point-of-sale EBM locations.

Approximately 85,000 titles from these publishers will be available for purchase at EBM locations throughout the United States in May. Upon the completion of a successful pilot, publishers that print and distribute books with Lightning Source will have the option to participate in the EBM channel. According to Lightning Source, complete channel automation is expected in the first half of this year, and rollout of the program to publishers globally is expected to follow shortly thereafter.

"We see the Espresso Book Machine as an innovative and exciting way for publishers to get their books out into the market," says David Taylor, president of Lightning Source. "There is clearly a place for the in-store, print-on-demand model in the emerging landscape of globally distributed print. … In the times in which we are living, publishers need to be looking at every option to ensure that their books can be immediately available to people who want to buy them."

"OnDemand Books is delighted that the Espresso Book Machine is playing such a central role in a program that is blazing a trail to the future of book publishing," says Dane Neller, CEO of OnDemand Books. "With the book business facing dramatic changes and challenges, we believe the timing of the EBM couldn't be better. Publishers, retailers and libraries alike see the appeal of the machine that collapses the supply chain, boosts backlist sales, matches supply with demand, eliminates returns and powers new, high-growth sales channels for publishers."

How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write

(Wall Street Journal, 4/20/09, by Steve Johnson)

Every genuinely revolutionary technology implants some kind of "aha" moment in your memory -- the moment where you flip a switch and something magical happens, something that tells you in an instant that the rules have changed forever.

I still have vivid memories of many such moments: clicking on my first Web hyperlink in 1994 and instantly transporting to a page hosted on a server in Australia; using Google Earth to zoom in from space directly to the satellite image of my house; watching my 14-month-old master the page-flipping gesture on the iPhone's touch interface.

The latest such moment came courtesy of the Kindle, Amazon.com Inc.'s e-book reader. A few weeks after I bought the device, I was sitting alone in a restaurant in Austin, Texas, dutifully working my way through an e-book about business and technology, when I was hit with a sudden desire to read a novel. After a few taps on the Kindle, I was browsing the Amazon store, and within a minute or two I'd bought and downloaded Zadie Smith's novel "On Beauty." By the time the check arrived, I'd finished the first chapter.

I knew then that the book's migration to the digital realm would not be a simple matter of trading ink for pixels, but would likely change the way we read, write and sell books in profound ways. It will make it easier for us to buy books, but at the same time make it easier to stop reading them. It will expand the universe of books at our fingertips, and transform the solitary act of reading into something far more social. It will give writers and publishers the chance to sell more obscure books, but it may well end up undermining some of the core attributes that we have associated with book reading for more than 500 years.

There is great promise and opportunity in the digital-books revolution. The question is: Will we recognize the book itself when that revolution has run its course?

The Dark Matter

In our always-connected, everything-linked world, we sometimes forget that books are the dark matter of the information universe. While we now possess terabytes of data at our fingertips, we have nonetheless drifted further and further away from mankind's most valuable archive of knowledge: the tens of millions of books that have been published since Gutenberg's day.

That's because the modern infosphere is both organized and navigated through hyperlinked pages of digital text, with the most-linked pages rising to the top of Google Inc.'s all-powerful search-results page. This has led us toward some traditional forms of information, such as newspapers and magazines, as well as toward new forms, such as blogs and Wikipedia. But because books have largely been excluded from Google's index -- distant planets of unlinked analog text -- that vast trove of knowledge can't compete with its hyperlinked rivals.

But there is good reason to believe that this strange imbalance will prove to be a momentary blip, and that the blip's moment may be just about over. Credit goes to two key developments: the breakthrough success of Amazon's Kindle e-book reader, and the maturation of the Google Book Search service, which now offers close to 10 million titles, including many obscure and out-of-print works that Google has scanned. As a result, 2009 may well prove to be the most significant year in the evolution of the book since Gutenberg hammered out his original Bible.

If so, if the future is about to be rewritten, the big question becomes: How?

The World of Ideas

For starters, think about what happened because of the printing press: The ability to duplicate, and make permanent, ideas that were contained in books created a surge in innovation that the world had never seen before. Now, the ability to digitally search millions of books instantly will make finding all that information easier yet again. Expect ideas to proliferate -- and innovation to bloom -- just as it did in the centuries after Gutenberg.

Think about it. Before too long, you'll be able to create a kind of shadow version of your entire library, including every book you've ever read -- as a child, as a teenager, as a college student, as an adult. Every word in that library will be searchable. It is hard to overstate the impact that this kind of shift will have on scholarship. Entirely new forms of discovery will be possible. Imagine a software tool that scans through the bibliographies of the 20 books you've read on a specific topic, and comes up with the most-cited work in those bibliographies that you haven't encountered yet.

The Impulse Buy

The magic of that moment in Austin ("I'm in the mood for a novel -- oh, here's a novel right here in my hands!") also tells me that e-book readers are going to sell a lot of books, precisely because there's an impulse-buy quality to the devices that's quite unlike anything the publishing business has ever experienced before.

On another occasion, I managed to buy and download a book on a New York City subway train, during a brief two-stop stretch on an elevated platform.

Amazon's early data suggest that Kindle users buy significantly more books than they did before owning the device, and it's not hard to understand why: The bookstore is now following you around wherever you go. A friend mentions a book in passing, and instead of jotting down a reminder to pick it up next time you're at Barnes & Noble, you take out the Kindle and -- voilà! -- you own it.

My impulsive purchase of "On Beauty" has another element to it, though -- one that may not be as welcomed by authors. Specifically: I was in the middle of the other book, and in a matter of seconds, I left it for one of its competitors. The jump was triggered, in this case, by a sudden urge to read fiction, but it could have been triggered by something in the book I was originally reading: a direct quote or reference to another work, or some more indirect suggestion in the text.

In other words, an infinite bookstore at your fingertips is great news for book sales, and may be great news for the dissemination of knowledge, but not necessarily so great for that most finite of 21st-century resources: attention.

Because they have been largely walled off from the world of hypertext, print books have remained a kind of game preserve for the endangered species of linear, deep-focus reading. Online, you can click happily from blog post to email thread to online New Yorker article -- sampling, commenting and forwarding as you go. But when you sit down with an old-fashioned book in your hand, the medium works naturally against such distractions; it compels you to follow the thread, to stay engaged with a single narrative or argument.

Ahead of Amazon's quarterly results, Citi analyst Mark Mahaney says the company's growth potential is robust and explains why he upgraded his rating on the stock to buy. Stacey Delo reports. (April 20)

The Kindle in its current incarnation maintains some of that emphasis on linear focus; it has no dedicated client for email or texting, and its Web browser is buried in a subfolder for "experimental" projects. But Amazon has already released a version of the Kindle software for reading its e-books on an iPhone, which is much more conducive to all manner of distraction. No doubt future iterations of the Kindle and other e-book readers will make it just as easy to jump online to check your 401(k) performance as it is now to buy a copy of "On Beauty."

As a result, I fear that one of the great joys of book reading -- the total immersion in another world, or in the world of the author's ideas -- will be compromised. We all may read books the way we increasingly read magazines and newspapers: a little bit here, a little bit there.

You're Never Alone

Putting books online will also change how we find books -- and talk about them.

Now that books are finally entering the world of networked, digital text, they will undergo the same transformation that Web pages have experienced over the past 15 years. Blogs, remember, were once called "Web logs," cultivated by early digital pioneers who kept a record of information they found online, quoting and annotating as they browsed.

With books becoming part of this universe, "booklogs" will prosper, with readers taking inspiring or infuriating passages out of books and commenting on them in public. Google will begin indexing and ranking individual pages and paragraphs from books based on the online chatter about them. (As the writer and futurist Kevin Kelly says, "In the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages.") You'll read a puzzling passage from a novel and then instantly browse through dozens of comments from readers around the world, annotating, explaining or debating the passage's true meaning.

Think of it as a permanent, global book club. As you read, you will know that at any given moment, a conversation is available about the paragraph or even sentence you are reading. Nobody will read alone anymore. Reading books will go from being a fundamentally private activity -- a direct exchange between author and reader -- to a community event, with every isolated paragraph the launching pad for a conversation with strangers around the world.

This great flowering of annotating and indexing will alter the way we discover books, too. Web publishers have long recognized that "front doors" matter much less in the Google age, as visitors come directly to individual articles through search. Increasingly, readers will stumble across books through a particularly well-linked quote on page 157, instead of an interesting cover on display at the bookstore, or a review in the local paper.

Imagine every page of every book individually competing with every page of every other book that has ever been written, each of them commented on and indexed and ranked. The unity of the book will disperse into a multitude of pages and paragraphs vying for Google's attention.

In this world, citation will become as powerful a sales engine as promotion is today. An author will write an arresting description of Thomas Edison's controversial invention of the light bulb, and thanks to hundreds of inbound links from bookloggers quoting the passage, those pages will rise to the top of Google's results for anyone searching "invention of light bulb." Each day, Google will deposit a hundred potential book buyers on that page, eager for information about Edison's breakthrough. Those hundred readers might pale compared with the tens of thousands of prospective buyers an author gets from an NPR appearance, but that Google ranking doesn't fade away overnight. It becomes a kind of permanent annuity for the author.

Writing for Google

A world in which search attracts new book readers also will undoubtedly change the way books are written, just as the serial publishing schedule of Dickens's day led to the obligatory cliffhanger ending at the end of each installment. Writers and publishers will begin to think about how individual pages or chapters might rank in Google's results, crafting sections explicitly in the hopes that they will draw in that steady stream of search visitors.

Individual paragraphs will be accompanied by descriptive tags to orient potential searchers; chapter titles will be tested to determine how well they rank. Just as Web sites try to adjust their content to move as high as possible on the Google search results, so will authors and publishers try to adjust their books to move up the list.

What will this mean for the books themselves? Perhaps nothing more than a few strategically placed words or paragraphs. Perhaps entire books written with search engines in mind. We'll have to see.

(One geeky side note here: Before we can get too far in this new world, we need to have a technological standard for organizing digital books. We have the Web today because back in the early 1990s we agreed on a standard, machine-readable way of describing the location of a page: the URL.

But what's the equivalent for books? For centuries, we've had an explicit system for organizing print books in the form of page numbers and bibliographic info. All of that breaks down in this new digital world. The Kindle doesn't even have page numbers -- it has an entirely new system called "locations" because the pagination changes constantly based on the type size you choose to read. If you want to write a comment about page 32 of "On Beauty," what do you link to? The Kindle location? The Google Book Search page? This sounds like a question only a librarian would get excited about, but the truth is, until we figure out a standardized way to link to individual pages -- so that all the data associated with a specific passage from "On Beauty" point to the same location -- books are going to remain orphans in this new world.)

Paying Per Chapter?

The economics of digital books will likely change the conventions of reading and writing as well. Digital distribution makes it a simple matter to offer prospective buyers a "free sample" to entice them to purchase the whole thing. Many books offered for the Kindle, for instance, allow readers to download the first chapter free of charge. The "free sample" component of a book will become as conventional as jacket-flap copy and blurbs; authors will devise a host of stylistic and commercial techniques in crafting these giveaway sections, just as Dickens mastered the cliffhanger device almost two centuries before.

It's not hard to imagine, for instance, how introductions will be transformed in this new world. Right now, introductions are written with the assumption that people have already bought the book. That won't be the case in the future, when the introduction is given away. It will, no doubt, be written more to entice readers to buy the whole book.

Clearly, we are in store for the return of the cliffhanger.

For nonfiction and short-story collections, a la carte pricing will emerge, as it has in the marketplace for digital music. Readers will have the option to purchase a chapter for 99 cents, the same way they now buy an individual song on iTunes. The marketplace will start to reward modular books that can be intelligibly split into standalone chapters.

This fragmentation sounds unnerving -- yet another blow to the deep-focus linearity of the print-book tradition. Breaking the book into detachable parts may sell more books, but there are certain kinds of experiences and arguments that can only be conveyed by the steady, directed immersion that a 400-page book gives you. A playlist of the best chapters from "Middlemarch," "Gravity's Rainbow" and "Beloved" will never work the way a playlist of songs culled from different albums does today.

Yet that modular pricing system will have one interesting, and laudable, side effect: The online marketplace will have established an easy, one-click mechanism for purchasing small quantities of text.

Tellingly, the Kindle already includes blog and newspaper subscriptions that can be purchased in a matter of seconds.

Skeptics may ask why anyone would pay for something that was elsewhere available at no charge, but that's precisely what they said when Steve Jobs launched the iTunes Music Store, competing with the free offerings on Napster. We've seen how that turned out. If the Kindle payment architecture takes off, it may ultimately lead the way toward the standardized micropayment system whose nonexistence has caused so much turmoil in the news business -- a system many people wish had been built into the Web's original architecture, along with those standardized page locations.

We all know the story of how the information-wants-to-be-free ethos of the Web threatened the newspapers with extinction. Wouldn't it be ironic if books turned out to be their savior?

E-books, Tree-books, and On-demand Books

I was fortunate enough to attend this year's Publishing Business Conference and although much was discussed in the two-and-a-half days' worth of sessions I attended, there were a few themes that kept reappearing:

1. Traditional books--or "tree books"--and print is not disappearing anytime soon, but publishers should keep inventory and costs down, as well as acquire and market more wisely.
2. E-books may be on the rise, but given that they are currently such a small percentage of book sales, publishers should use them to complement, not replace, tree books: e-book sales are not currently cannibalizing tree book sales.
3. Since print is going nowhere anytime soon, more and more publishers are turning to print-on-demand and short-run digital as an alternative to the traditional offset model. And while the unit cost for these may still be higher than that of offset, the total cost is lower.
4. Inkjet technology will be the tipping point for POD by making color POD economically viable.

And although there were some bleak discussions of the current economic clime, there were hopeful predictions as well. Here's to the latter...

Customer's Choice

So publishers and distributors are finally coming to the realization that it's all about customer's having the option to choose, whether it's what platform they want to read content on...or apparently even what price to pay for that content.

• Baker & Taylor Unveils First Phase of Integrated Digital Media Distribution Platform

• Publisher Lets Customers Pay What They Want for Latest Title

And according to Mike Shatzkin's article Will You Recognize the Industry in 10 Years? this will extend to e-books not only having links, but moving photos...kind of like in the Harry Potter world.

So if e-books will have links to videos and the web, will TVs have links to the web and to pdfs of text? Why can't TVs be large e-book devices too that get synched up to the smaller portable device you take with you? But how does that work with a family and their separate devices?

And when do we stop being publishers and just become part of the larger entertainment business? And does it matter as long as we're still dealing with the words we love?

The ever-evolving world of "publishing"

Here are just two of the exciting developments that occurred this week in the ever-evolving world of publishing:

• Amazon Joins the iPhone App Market
• Nelson Makes Books Available in All Formats for One Price

Although personally I don't understand why Nelson is choosing to give content away free with their one-price model, unless it's to drive people to buy the print product, it's still exciting in that it shows how publishers are having to rethink the traditional pricing and manufacturing model we're all familiar with.

Although it's nearly impossible to predict the next evolution, do you have any theories? Please share.

E-bookstore Browsing?

With the Kindle 2 out and e-readers becoming more and more popular, I have been thinking more and more about the bookstore experience, and what I enjoy most about it: browsing. Most of the times when I enter a bookstore, it’s not with a particular book in mind, but with the desire to see what’s come out and if anything’s worth buying and adding to my ever-growing to-read-pile…and half of the times, I actually will buy something. How do I find these books? I first go the “new fiction” table and shelves, then walk around the fiction and sci-fi aisles and see if anything grabs my attention.

How can we translate this “bookstore browsing” to “e-bookstore browsing”? Amazon is already ahead of the curve with the features it offers on amazon.com, but have they made this available on their Kindle? What if when you wanted to buy another e-book, you could click on a feature which showed you the “covers” of the latest releases, and then can further filter by genre. If you like something, you could click on the cover and have the option of reading the “back cover copy,” the first chapter, or a random sampling.

Or does the Kindle or Sony E-Reader already do this? Since I don’t own one (I’ll explain in a bit why), I may be behind and this has already been done. So let me ask those of you who do own one: how does the e-reader browsing experience compare to the brick-and-mortar browsing experience? Which do you prefer, and why?

And the reason I don’t own an e-reader is very simple, and not related to any of the above: I’m an Orthodox Jew and would not be able to use the Kindle on the Sabbath or on any of the holidays, which is when I do most of my reading.

Books Unbound

(Wednesday, Jan. 21, 2009, By Lev Grossman)

Here's a literary parable for the 21st century. Lisa Genova, 38, was a health-care-industry consultant in Belmont, Mass., who wanted to be a novelist, but she couldn't get her book published for love or money. She had a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Harvard, but she couldn't get an agent. "I did what you're supposed to do," she says. "I queried literary agents. I went to writers' conferences and tried to network. I e-mailed editors. Nobody wanted it." So Genova paid $450 to a company called iUniverse and published her book, Still Alice, herself.

That was in 2007. By 2008 people were reading Still Alice. Not a lot of people, but a few, and those few were liking it. Genova wound up getting an agent after all--and an offer from Simon & Schuster of just over half a million dollars. Borders and Target chose it for their book clubs. Barnes & Noble made it a Discover pick. On Jan. 25, Still Alice will make its debut on the New York Times best-seller list at No. 5. "So this is extreme to extreme, right?" Genova says. "This time last year, I was selling the book out of the trunk of my car."

Something has changed, and it's not just the contents of Lisa Genova's trunk. We think of the novel as a transcendent, timeless thing, but it was shaped by the forces of money and technology just as much as by creative genius. Passing over a few classical and Far Eastern entries, the novel in its modern form really got rolling only in the early 18th century. This wasn't an accident, and it didn't happen because a bunch of writers like Defoe and Richardson and Fielding suddenly decided we should be reading long books about imaginary people. It happened as a result of an unprecedented configuration of financial and technological circumstances. New industrial printing techniques meant you could print lots of books cheaply; a modern capitalist marketplace had evolved in which you could sell them; and for the first time there was a large, increasingly literate, relatively well-off urban middle class to buy and read them. Once those conditions were in place, writers like Defoe and Richardson showed up to take advantage of them.

Fast-forward to the early 21st century: the publishing industry is in distress. Publishing houses--among them Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, HarperCollins, Doubleday and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt--are laying off staff left and right. Random House is in the midst of a drastic reorganization. Salaries are frozen across the industry. Whispers of bankruptcy are fluttering around Borders; Barnes & Noble just cut 100 jobs at its headquarters, a measure unprecedented in the company's history. Publishers Weekly (PW) predicts that 2009 will be "the worst year for publishing in decades."

A lot of headlines and blogs to the contrary, publishing isn't dying. But it is evolving, and so radically that we may hardly recognize it when it's done. Literature interprets the world, but it's also shaped by that world, and we're living through one of the greatest economic and technological transformations since--well, since the early 18th century. The novel won't stay the same: it has always been exquisitely sensitive to newness, hence the name. It's about to renew itself again, into something cheaper, wilder, trashier, more democratic and more deliriously fertile than ever.

What's the Matter with Publishing?

It isn't the audience. People are still reading. According to a National Endowment for the Arts study released on Jan. 12, literary reading by adults has actually increased 3.5% since 2002, the first such increase in 26 years. So that's not the problem. What is?

The economy, obviously. Plenty of businesses are hurting. And it doesn't help that new media like video games (sales up 19% in 2008!) are now competing with books for our entertainment hours and dollars. But publishing has deeper, more systemic problems, like the fact that its business model evolved during an earlier fiscal era. It's an antique, a financial coelacanth that dates back to the Depression.

Consider the advance system, whereby a publisher pays an author a nonreturnable up-front fee for a book. If the book doesn't "earn out," in the industry parlance, the publisher simply eats the cost. Another example: publishers sell books to bookstores on a consignment system, which means the stores can return unsold books to publishers for a full refund. Publishers suck up the shipping costs both ways, plus the expense of printing and then pulping the merchandise. "They print way more than they know they can sell, to kind of create a buzz, and then they end up taking half those books back," says Sara Nelson, editor in chief of PW. These systems were created to shift risk away from authors and bookstores and onto publishers. But risk is something the publishing industry is less and less able to bear.

If you think about it, shipping physical books back and forth across the country is starting to seem pretty 20th century. Novels are getting restless, shrugging off their expensive papery husks and transmigrating digitally into other forms. Devices like the Sony Reader and Amazon's Kindle have gained devoted followings. Google has scanned more than 7 million books into its online database; the plan is to scan them all, every single one, within 10 years. Writers podcast their books and post them, chapter by chapter, on blogs. Four of the five best-selling novels in Japan in 2007 belonged to an entirely new literary form called keitai shosetsu: novels written, and read, on cell phones. Compared with the time and cost of replicating a digital file and shipping it around the world--i.e., zero and nothing--printing books on paper feels a little Paleolithic.

And speaking of advances, books are also leaving behind another kind of paper: money. Those cell-phone novels are generally written by amateurs and posted on free community websites, by the hundreds of thousands, with no expectation of payment. For the first time in modern history, novels are becoming detached from dollars. They're circulating outside the economy that spawned them.

Cell-phone novels haven't caught on in the U.S.--yet--but we have something analogous: fan fiction, fan-written stories based on fictional worlds and characters borrowed from popular culture--Star Trek, Jane Austen, Twilight, you name it. There's a staggering amount of it online, enough to qualify it as a literary form in its own right. Fanfiction.net hosts 386,490 short stories, novels and novellas in its Harry Potter section alone.

No printing and shipping. No advances. Maybe publishing will survive after all! Then again, if you can have publishing without paper and without money, why not publishing without publishers?

Vanity of Vanities, All Is Vanity

When Genova had reached the end of her unsuccessful search, she told the last literary agent who rejected her, "I've had enough of this. I'm going to go self-publish it." "That was by e-mail," she says. "He picked up the phone and called me within five minutes and said, 'Don't do that. You will kill your writing career before it starts.'"

It's true: saying you were a self-published author used to be like saying you were a self-taught brain surgeon. But over the past couple of years, vanity publishing has become practically respectable. As the technical challenges have decreased--you can turn a Word document on your hard drive into a self-published novel on Amazon's Kindle store in about five minutes--so has the stigma. Giga-selling fantasist Christopher Paolini started as a self-published author. After Brunonia Barry self-published her novel The Lace Reader in 2007, William Morrow picked it up and gave her a two-book deal worth $2 million. The fact that William P. Young's The Shack was initially self-published hasn't stopped it from spending 34 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list.

Daniel Suarez, a software consultant in Los Angeles, sent his techno-thriller Daemon to 48 literary agents. No go. So he self-published instead. Bit by bit, bloggers got behind Daemon. Eventually Penguin noticed and bought it and a sequel for a sum in the high six figures. "I really see a future in doing that," Suarez says, "where agencies would monitor the performance of self-published books, in a sort of Darwinian selection process, and see what bubbles to the surface. I think of it as crowd-sourcing the manuscript-submission process."

Self-publishing has gone from being the last resort of the desperate and talentless to something more like out-of-town tryouts for theater or the farm system in baseball. It's the last ripple of the Web 2.0 vibe finally washing up on publishing's remote shores. After YouTube and Wikipedia, the idea of user-generated content just isn't that freaky anymore.

And there's actual demand for this stuff. In theory, publishers are gatekeepers: they filter literature so that only the best writing gets into print. But Genova and Barry and Suarez got filtered out, initially, which suggests that there are cultural sectors that conventional publishing isn't serving. We can read in the rise of self-publishing not only a technological revolution but also a quiet cultural one--an audience rising up to claim its right to act as a tastemaker too.

The Orchard and the Jungle

So if the economic and technological changes of the 18th century gave rise to the modern novel, what's the 21st century giving us? Well, we've gone from industrialized printing to electronic replication so cheap, fast and easy, it greases the skids of literary production to the point of frictionlessness. From a modern capitalist marketplace, we've moved to a postmodern, postcapitalist bazaar where money is increasingly optional. And in place of a newly minted literate middle class, we now have a global audience of billions, with a literacy rate of 82% and rising.

Put these pieces together, and the picture begins to resolve itself: more books, written and read by more people, often for little or no money, circulating in a wild diversity of forms, both physical and electronic, far outside the charmed circle of New York City's entrenched publishing culture. Old Publishing is stately, quality-controlled and relatively expensive. New Publishing is cheap, promiscuous and unconstrained by paper, money or institutional taste. If Old Publishing is, say, a tidy, well-maintained orchard, New Publishing is a riotous jungle: vast and trackless and chaotic, full of exquisite orchids and undiscovered treasures and a hell of a lot of noxious weeds.

Not that Old Publishing will disappear--for now, at least, it's certainly the best way for authors to get the money and status they need to survive--but it will live on in a radically altered, symbiotic form as the small, pointy peak of a mighty pyramid. If readers want to pay for the old-school premium package, they can get their literature the old-fashioned way: carefully selected and edited, and presented in a bespoke, art-directed paper package. But below that there will be a vast continuum of other options: quickie print-on-demand editions and electronic editions for digital devices, with a corresponding hierarchy of professional and amateur editorial selectiveness. (Unpaid amateur editors have already hit the world of fan fiction, where they're called beta readers.) The wide bottom of the pyramid will consist of a vast loamy layer of free, unedited, Web-only fiction, rated and ranked YouTube-style by the anonymous reading masses.

And what will that fiction look like? Like fan fiction, it will be ravenously referential and intertextual in ways that will strain copyright law to the breaking point. Novels will get longer--electronic books aren't bound by physical constraints--and they'll be patchable and updatable, like software. We'll see more novels doled out episodically, on the model of TV series or, for that matter, the serial novels of the 19th century. We can expect a literary culture of pleasure and immediate gratification. Reading on a screen speeds you up: you don't linger on the language; you just click through. We'll see less modernist-style difficulty and more romance-novel-style sentiment and high-speed-narrative throughput. Novels will compete to hook you in the first paragraph and then hang on for dear life.

None of this is good or bad; it just is. The books of the future may not meet all the conventional criteria for literary value that we have today, or any of them. But if that sounds alarming or tragic, go back and sample the righteous zeal with which people despised novels when they first arose. They thought novels were vulgar and immoral. And in a way they were, and that was what was great about them: they shocked and seduced people into new ways of thinking. These books will too. Somewhere out there is the self-publishing world's answer to Defoe, and he's probably selling books out of his trunk. But he won't be for long.

O'Reilly and XML

I was fortunate enough to attend O'Reilly's StartwithXML Conference at the McGraw-Hill Auditorium. The focus of the conference was how publishers can get on the xml bandwagon, with pointers from publishers already doing so.

Since PW posted a great article on the conference, I won't repeat what they've covered, but I will mention the few points that stand out in my mind:

1. To save costs, xml is only one of three necessary steps a publisher takes; the other two are offshoring and using standard, automated templates.
2. To have xml be the most useful, you need to start with an xml-first workflow--not an xml-last one--and this means that the authors and editors need to be trained in xml tagging and taxonomy.
3. The more "chunkable" and repurposable your content, the more important it is to get an xml-first workflow going.
4. XML allows easier updates and synchronicity of multiple files.
5. XML allows for simultaneous deliverables that can be adjusted to any medium since it is content-centric and design-agnostic.
   

Overall, it was great hearing how many publishers have embraced the new technology and realize that it's all about the content--and not its container--anymore.

The Terrible Burden of Destiny

(By Bob Sacks)

6 guidelines publishers need to consider while pondering their futures.

As we move forward in this economic recession, it is important to remember that while some processes may be slowed, others will continue to fling us forward and create both unexpected opportunities and, depending on your perspective, unfortunate struggles to simply survive. We are faced with, some might say, “the terrible burden of a digital destiny.” As an industry, we will adjust and adapt to the conditions at hand, not necessarily because we want to, but because we must.

The following is a series of guidelines or propositions that we must be aware of and be prepared to deal with as we move forward.

1. Advancements by the digital universe will never retreat, and will only improve and become more ubiquitous.
Digital publishing will continue to become a stronger platform that is easier and easier to use. The print-only world has not been able to hold its own, nor will it be able to do so against such formidable odds. If you can’t accept this as a truthful premise, you will continue to struggle with your own destiny.

2. Our competition has been totally redefined.
While our publishing competitors used to be easy to identify, today almost any company, group or individual can become a future competitor. New technologies empower this and enable it to be done anywhere on the planet. There is a new and increasingly lower threshold of entry, which means new competitors are in abundance. They can come from anywhere and will come from well below the radar screen. They will be online, global, fast-moving and smart.

3. Content remains important.
A critical concept to understand is that content is more important than the delivery vehicle. This is a new concept for publishers rooted in tree fibers. The digital delivery of news, information, instruction or fiction has just as much validity as pulp-delivered products, and in many cases it has more creditability—the creditability to be timely and immediately fact-checked for accuracy.

4. New revenue models are required.
The new technologies of information distribution offer endless options to reach a world full of future customers. The shipping cost to reach this global market is exactly the same as it is to reach the girl next door. This empowers a style of publishing that I call “universal niche”—an idea, concept or hobby enjoyed by a few on a global basis. Basically, the scale of the available readership redefines small as big.

5. Our audience will increasingly demand to be treated as individuals.
Despite the growing trend of individualism in society, mass media continues to offer the same message to everybody while new media opportunities have the power to offer individual content based on our uniqueness rather than our sameness. This concept combines very nicely with the power of citizen journalism. The “screenager” generation wants to be involved and take part in news reporting. They have grown into a generation that has the ability to be in touch with each other immediately at earlier and earlier ages. This from-birth experience is fostering a new generation of readers who are naturally adept with technology and comfortable with having virtual access to friends, family and the world at large.

6. Advertisers will demand accountability more than ever.
Advertisers increasingly want to reach their customers directly. They want a one-to-one relationship that heretofore was not possible.

Today, that kind of science is not only possible, but perhaps mandatory as a part of doing business. Simply put, digital media offers improved measures of success. Digital publishing has an increasingly important advantage of being able to measure the impact of advertisements, clicks, transactions, etc. As the economy goes through the current parabolic curve of dipping south, flattening out and then starting the climb to profitability again, publishers need to adapt to the inherent changes before them.

Will publishing survive? Definitively yes. Will it survive with the old-school business models of our fathers? Categorically no. Every aspect of publishing has to be reevaluated and reexamined against the digital criteria outlined above and be reconstituted as an advanced publishing formula for the 21st century. It is never going to be the way it was, and sure as the sky is blue, it is not going to be the way it is. Your future is in your hands.