Bait 'n' Beer

I've been reading lots of bloggers', pundits' and other industry particpants' and observers' publishing predictions for 2012. Some very exciting things are said to be forthcoming (or at least hoped for) for the coming 12-24 months. Some may actually happen.
 
While we have the usual crop of device announcements and predictions about what Amazon, Apple, Google, Kobo, Barnes and Noble and other content purveyors will or won't do, there's also a lot of talk about new business models built around such things as new forms of discovery and recommendations, subscription-rental-lending, direct-to-consumer, and self-publishing and marketing platforms. See such entities as Small Demons and JellyBooks, 24Symbols and ExpressReads, (still to be launched) Bookish, and Penguin's BookCountry, respectively, as examples of new entrants in these categories.
 
There will be others from both start-ups and from established publishers. I think that's exciting since we have to find new approaches to rebuilding the traditional system.
 
While we're making product and service predictions though, let's not forget that we'll need lots of new systems, software, infrastructure and yes (in many cases) people to make these things work properly.
 
For example, it's great to have new discovery tools, but for better or worse, actual book sales (both print and digital) still rely on identifiers and other metadata to facilitate an actual transaction. Subscriptions and rentals require the ability not only to ingest and display titles and the accompanying metadata, but also to serve content in multiple formats, to interface with accounting and royalty systems and to provide a data mining tools for publishers, among other things.
 
Direct-to-consumer businesses, both on the sales side and on the self-publishing side require skills not typically found in book publishing businesses, including customer acquisition, understanding the lifetime value of customers/users, customer service and the ability to deal with many small transactions rather than a relative handful of larger orders from more traditional wholesale and retail customers.

This is to say nothing of workflow, title management, content management and new distribution systems upgrades that most publishers require in the new environment.
 
All of these are do-able, but none is easy, and they all require a level of attention to detail combined with scalability that makes for a daunting task for long-overlooked operations groups within publishing companies. Some of these can be outsourced but even so, investment and close supervision are required.
 
This is why my big prediction for 2012 is called 'Revenge of the Plumbers', the nerds, geeks and dirty-fingernail men and women who make things work behind the scenes so that the shiny new products and services the public sees work when customers come a'calling. They'll be the heroes, even if largely unrecognized, this year. Publishers overlook them at their risk.