30/05/06

BEA snippets

So, clearly, I wasn’t there, but have been trying to piece together some of the highlights from this year’s BEA.

First up, I can’t find anything on the ‘future of publishing‘ talk given by Amazon’s Greg Greeley. However, I did manage to find Nigel Beal’s awful, awful interview with Greg (what is it with this guy and his inability to interview smart people?) where anything interesting is obscured by Beale’s own agenda.

I had thought having listened to him interview Stephen Page, and then Google’s Tom Turvey that his was just a disingenious style. But I was wrong - the guy is a painfully bad interview. Not sure I can yet bring myself to listen to him with Jamie Byng.

However, other reports of good sessions at BEA include HP’s ex-CEO Carly Fiorina on the publishing industry’s future:

echnology has changed the way we live, communicate and think. She used the example of digital photography to highlight this point, noting how, five years ago, the notion of zapping digital images among gadgets like cell phones and PDAs (which went from nonexistent to ubiquitous over a similar stretch of time) would have seemed impossible. She said that, ultimately, “technology is transforming every industry and it can be resisted, but it can’t be stopped.”

and

that, on the distribution front, the more avenues businesses use to get their product to market, usually the better.

Ultimately Fiorina left the crowd with a vague, but no less valuable, insight: most companies fail because they’re unwilling to take risks. The question with all industries, she said, is: “Will they disintegrate, fade graciously or reinvent themselves courageously?” Clearly, publishing may not know how to do the latter but, as Fiorina also pointed out, they’re certainly not alone in this.

More on Fiorina (and predicting the future via William Rhys-Mogg) from GOB here

It was noted, for instance, that Microsoft have started inviting publishers to submit titles for scanning and indexing; this operation goes under the name of Windows Live Search/Windows Live. And it appears to be another version, shall we say, of the Google Print project, which has caused so much discussion and anxiety.

My guess: at the end of the next 15 years or so, we shall see the establishment of at least one online library which will give massive access to knowledge, in book form, on a scale hardly imagined so far — even in the nightmares of the Authors Guild and similar organisations, which seems to regard the prospect as something similar to the return of the Black Death.

Carly Fiorina, former CEO of Hewlett Packard, told the assembled troops that the book business remains stuck in an old paradigm. Change will come, and resistance is futile. ‘Everything I know about business and technology after 25 years tells me that businesses that resist technology inevitably fail.’

On a personal note, Fiorina referred to her own forthcoming book Tough Choices and commented that the time involved in writing a book and getting it into circulation is ‘quite stunning.’ And she added that it was ‘horrifying’ that she had to keep dealing with marked-up ‘physical pieces of paper when I did the book electronically.’

Poor old Carly. She was probably dealing with people who’ve only just got to grips with email. (And yesterday I recommended to a friend that he should approach a leading UK agent, only to find that said agent’s web site stated firmly that he does not — absolutely not — accept electronic submissions or email enquiries.)

The AP reporter at BEA, Hillel Italie, said that attendees fell into three groups: those anxious for change, those who accept it, and those who resist. John Updike was among the resisters, referring to the ‘grisly scenario’ of electronic books.

Chris Anderson was at the BEA, talking about the long tail. Perhaps more interesting now, since we already know a lot about the long tail, was his idea that beta testing of material through online drafts, presented for public comment, is essential if you are to polish a (non-fiction) book to the point where it will be a success.

Away from the BEA, Lynne Scanlon has some scathing (as usual) things to say about the present mind-set of publishers and makes some predictions of her own. E.g.

For the world at large, the digital Universal Library [as envisaged by Google, Microsoft, and others] will rescue long-neglected, long-lost, and long-forgotten books: that’s good.
As a result of the impending business-model implosion, the inflexible, traditional publishing industry will be sidelined: that’s their personal problem.
Authors will now have the opportunity to capitalize on having written a book, rather than being forced to rely exclusively on paltry royalties: that will be reward enough, and those rewards can be enormous.
As free online publishing spreads and The Universal Library grows, the author who writes a book with the primary goal of selling tens of thousands of copies is going to find a smaller and smaller paying audience. But writing books has its rewards, even if not one copy of the book is sold.
Perhaps ignoring the traditional publishing companies as they skip merrily along their own well-trod path to who knows where is the best approach.
Self-publish right now online, and reap some of those rewards that are just out there ready to be discovered.
Well that’s bold, and brave. And so here’s my own (entirely useless) prediction for today:

The book business will change, in ways which cannot now be foreseen. And when they do, we shall look back and see that they were obvious, and inevitable. If only we’d been paying attention.

And another expert on Carly - which at least provdes a quote

“What I see is an industry that has embraced and gone through much change, consolidation for sure. An industry that is controlled still in great measure by physical processes and analog content. An industry where there is a lot of understandable angst about traditional business models, and lot of effort being expended to protect those traditional business models.”

Fiorina warned that resistance is futile. “Everything I know about business and technology after 25 years tells me that businesses that resist technology inevitably fail.”

On the flip side, there are some juicy comments about Carly from people claiming to have worked with her.

Then there was the whole Updike / Abbie Hoffman Scan this Book episode. Don’t you just hate the NYT for its gatekeeper? Full article is here. And the Washington post follows.

Posted by Peter Collingridge in Future of the book, Publishing.