I’m from New York: show me

updated to add the missing link.

Sarah at GalleyCat writes about Google’s one-day conference—”Unbound:Advanced Book Publishing in a Digital World“—from which she came away suitably impressed, and for good reason.

Four speakers at the event, Chris Anderson, Seth Godin, Cory Doctorow, and David Warlock, chairman of Electronic Publishing Services Ltd., do in fact understand the key to the future of the book publishing industry, as a report in DM News suggests.

Here’s Anderson:

“Giving away free electronic versions of a book is the smart way to distribute content,” said Chris Andersen, editor-in-chief at Wired Magazine and author of The Long Tail.

“The Web site for Wired doesn’t cannibalize the magazine, it just distributes the message to a potentially infinite amount of people at no cost,” he said. “It doesn’t take away from sales, because the whole experience of reading long articles with glossy paper and good design is different than reading a blog.”

He cited statistics from Nielsen in which 172,000 book titles were published in 2005, and only 6 percent of these titles sold more than 5,000 copies. With this in mind, he said that publishers should focus marketing efforts in tapping into many segmented markets of readership.

Mr. Andersen suggested that giving away books is a way to gain visibility and that visibility would lead to higher book sales, as he did with his book, “The Long Tail,” through the Wired.com blog. Having a consumer read a free book that he or she downloaded on the Internet is worth the value of sales generated by word of mouth marketing when that reader recommends the book to friends, he said.

Here is Godin:

Seth Godin, author of “Small is the New Big,” echoed Mr. Anderson’s sentiment, calling books the souvenir of the idea. He gave away 2 million copies of his book on his Web site, but still remains in the top 5 on Amazon.com. He attributed this to the power of marketing through word of mouth.

“If an advertiser spreads the word through the grapevine, consumers will spread the message to their friends,” Mr. Godin said. “It’s like handing the megaphone to people and letting them talk for the product.”

He also suggested that download-to-own publishing is an up-and-coming channel that saves publishers the cost of production and distribution, and that this should be reflected in the price. He used Bill Clinton’s memoirs as an example of a title that while running for $30 in print, should run for $3 in the download version, because the profits are still there and the cost of production is zero.

Here is Doctorow:

“Electronic books are social, and social activity around a book is a key way to selling books,” Mr. Doctorow said.

Interestingly, he took the creative commons licensing option even further in developing nations, where he said that anyone could download or use his book in any way they liked. He figured that by getting his name out there, he would be marketing himself to emerging nations. So when students from these nations come to the West to work and study, he would already have their attention. Thus when they make enough money, they’ll buy his books.

The key being to create a name, and encourage people to buy books, an act itself not increasingly popular these days.

“People don’t read books,” Mr. Doctorow said. “Books should be first-class citizens online, and book search will help this. Book search should work like Web search and one company should not control it.”

Here’s Warlock:

According to David Warlock, chairman at Electronic Publishing Services Ltd., the power of the user will dictate the future of the publishing industry.

Mr. Warlock said there are three segments in today’s publishing world – printed works, print-on-demand and inventive entertainment – in which authors create personas through multimedia channels, all of which are marketed by search, social communities both on and offline and workflow. Publishers should be able to leverage these channels to create books that users will engage.

“We’re not living in discreet product worlds or distributed worlds,” Mr. Warlock said. “We’re in a world where users can connect things otherwise unconnected.”

The book publishing industry was represented at this event by:

Michael Holdsworth, Formerly Managing Director, Cambridge University Press
Christoph Chesher, Group Sales Director, Taylor & Francis
Matt Leavy, Executive Vice President, Pearson
Carolyn Pittis, Senior V.P., Global Marketing Strategy & Operations, HarperCollins
Paul Manning, Vice President, Book Sales, Springer
Dan Weiss, Publisher, SparkNotes/Barnes & Noble

Sarah reports their contribution thus:

various publishers, from Pearson to Springer to Taylor & Francis to HarperCollins, described how they were getting in on the digital publishing front. HC, with its digital warehouse and niche-specific sites like Avon FanLit and HarperTeen Lit, clearly have a sense of what direction they want to move in to control their book holdings,

I’m from the cold canyons of New York, goddamnit. Don’t keep telling me that publishers are moving toward the digital future when all they appear to be doing is creating digital “imprints” aimed at teenagers. Just don’t tell me anymore that the publishing industry—which doesn’t even understand the present, which hasn’t even tried to enter the blogosphere, for example—is facing the future. Because that is a big fat fucking lie, and it hurts the industry immeasurably.

Here is a group that is forging ahead into the future of book publishing—a group that is about to release books simultaneously in five different platforms.

Here is a man who is forging ahead into the future of book publishing.

Here is an enterprise that is busy creating the future of book publishing.

And those are just a few of the people who are thinking about books in the traditional way, as discrete entities in themselves. There are also the folks who want to enable people, through social networks and digital technology, to reimagine, mash up, or otherwise “unbundle” books (see this discussion and others at BuzzMachine).

I am grateful to the GalleyCats for following and reporting on publishing the industry, and in particular for their boosting books and writers and the things that are important to those of us who remain book lovers.

I just wish they’d stop boosting and covering for a technologically retarded—and thus ossified—industry.