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An arm with a tattoo: "I was made for the library, not the classroom."

New Year’s Publishing Predictions, Resolutions

#32 be the change by the8rgrl
#32 be the change by the8rgrl

I’m not usually one for making predictions — the only thing I hate more than gurus and pundits are self-proclaimed futurists! — but I couldn’t pass up offering my two cents to Folio: for their 2010 round-up of magazine and media predictions:

Consolidation and debt restructuring will continue apace. More niche brands will focus on ‘communitizing’, with magazines becoming part of a larger ecosystem that will include virtual events and books, both print and electronic. Advertising will finally stabilize, but “growth” will mainly come from search and custom initiatives, including some ill-conceived “conversational marketing” programs that imagine Twitter as a viable hub. Digital magazines and mobile apps will be a bust for all but a few brands as the ROI fails to materialize. The Apple Tablet will be more horse than unicorn, becoming a major player in portable gaming but with minimal impact on publishing.

New Year’s resolutions have never been my thing, either, but in light of all of the negativity and DOOM! surrounding the “future of publishing”, I thought it would be fun to make a few public resolutions, if for no other reason than to see which ones I can stick with, and how long before I break the others.

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An arm with a tattoo: "I was made for the library, not the classroom."

Reflections on, Takeaways from #eBookSummit

mediabistro.com eBook Summit in New York by Mediabistro
mediabistro.com eBook Summit in New York by Mediabistro

“I suppose we could sum up this entire two-day conference under the headline ‘too early to tell.'”

–Steve Wasserman (Kneerim & Williams)

I attended MediaBistro’s eBook Summit this week and Wasserman’s summation is perfect; consumer book publishing is smack in the middle of the digital transition, and solid answers about how it will all play out are hard to come by. That doesn’t mean, of course, that there aren’t plenty of people willing to throw their two cents (and millions of VC dollars) into the conversation.

While ostensibly a competitive event with Digital Book World, my sense was that both the program and attendees were very different from ours — the former more theoretical and broader; the latter… well, just different, I’d say. There’s clearly room for both events, which I was actually glad to see, because I’m a fan of MediaBistro and I don’t want the wonderful Carmen Scheidel getting mad at me after we just became friends!

I live-tweeted both days of the Summit — Day 1 and Day 2 (sorry LiveJournal friends!) — and after cleansing my palette by reading more of the latest issue of Monocle (an absolutely beautiful example of what can and should be done only in print), here’s my top five takeaways:

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Stool, Sunlight by Voxphoto via Flickr

5 Things Books Should Learn From Magazines

Like my favorite writers, the magazines I truly value introduce me to new things, or show me new angles on the familiar, that I'd not have come across on my own. In my own series of posts for Folio: a few months back, I made the point that content + context = value, declaring that magazines that nail the equation will survive. That same math is also valid in the conversation about the future of books.

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An arm with a tattoo: "I was made for the library, not the classroom."

What’s the Curation Algorithm, Kenneth?

A disturbance in the Matrix - Tokyo, Japan by jamesjustin
A disturbance in the Matrix - Tokyo, Japan by jamesjustin

I was recently talking with a couple of researchers who observed that the most interesting science isn’t usually in the big name journals, but rather in the mid-tier or even lower-tier publications where really radical thinking and unusual results find their way into the literature. The big name journals are publishing on popular topics well along in the scientific literature. They’re important, but less interesting.

Curating out of the middle is a major opportunity for publishers and others in the information landscape. Repetition, presentation, prominence, and context all provide curatorial power.

—Kent Anderson, The Scholarly Kitchen

The concept of curation is a hot-button topic in publishing these days, often conjuring visions of the literary boogeyman: a faceless, soulless gatekeeper whose only job is to keep the riff-raff out of the Ivory Tower and off the bestseller lists.

It’s a frustrating meme, one of the pundit class’ many ill-conceived spins on the Kobayashi Maru, typically posited without any intention of offering a dramatic test of character.

My definition of curator is not at all like the anti-progress archivist Mike Cane prefers, but closer to that of a community organizer, a la Richard Nash’s vision of social publishing or Dan Holloway’s “Why not one of us?” call to arms.

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An arm with a tattoo: "I was made for the library, not the classroom."

Six People in My (Virtual) Neighborhood

Bottled Liquor Newsstand by Bill on Capitol Hill
Bottled Liquor Newsstand by Bill on Capitol Hill

This fervid desire for the Web bespeaks a longing so intense that it can only be understood as spiritual. A longing indicates that something is missing in our lives. What is missing is the sound of the human voice.

David Weinberger, The Cluetrain Manifesto

A year ago, I used to get most of my information from a variety of traditional and new media sources primarily via Google Reader. Now, loathe as I am to admit it, Twitter has replaced it as my primary aggregator, and the mix of sources is very different, too.

This past weekend, I did a major purge of my RSS feeds in Reader, clearing out more than 2/3rds of them (now down to 61 feeds), including some that were duplicates of Twitter feeds I follow, and many others I realized weren’t terribly essential when a hectic day found me hitting “Mark all as read” on 1,000+ items. But while Twitter is good for taking the pulse of the moment and flashes of conversation (or debate), I still look to blogs for more thoughtful insight and, increasingly, a sense of community.

I’ve noted before that Twitter is a great professional networking tool, more cocktail party than office, and the people I follow there are primarily in publishing and marketing, but there’s a specific subset of which I’ve become particularly fond: writers with great blogs.

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An arm with a tattoo: "I was made for the library, not the classroom."

Your Tools Don’t Matter (Or, Why I Love My Job!)

Hammer birds by andy castro
Hammer birds by andy castro

Why is it that with over 60 years of improvements in cameras, lens sharpness and film grain, resolution and dynamic range that no one has been able to equal what Ansel Adams did back in the 1940s?

Ken Rockwell, Your Camera Doesn’t Matter

First, disclosure: this post is primarily about the day job and is a total sales pitch for Digital Book World. If you follow me on Twitter, you’re probably already aware of my connection to it, but this is the first time I’m explicitly writing about it here.

As I’ve noted before, I’m very optimistic about the future of what I call the community service of publishing, and the underlying mission of Digital Book World is to get past the hype surrounding the digital toys du jour and provide real strategies for consumer publishers to transform their business models and thrive in the digital age. It’s not about eBooks or Twitter or any other tree in the forest–it’s about the fundamental strategies publishers need to profitably maximize their assets in the short term while developing and executing a digital strategy for the long-term.

I’m very excited about this Conference for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that I’m playing several roles, from Audience Development and Sponsorship Sales, to managing the DBW blog, to programming our series of free webinars that kicked off with last month’s The Truth About eBooks: Devices, Formats, Pirates (Oh, My!).

But the main reason I’m excited about it is so much simpler: I’m getting to work on something that I’m truly passionate about and fully believe in, and am in on the proverbial ground floor.

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