Bait 'n' Beer

Last week I attended the Book Indsustry Study Group's www.bisg.org/ annual "Making Information Pay" conference  in New York. As usual, it was a good program with fearless prognostications from Mike Shatzkin, some surprising survey results showing at least some publishing industry participants apparently in denial about the change that has happened and is ongoing in our business, and several indusry players describing what they're doing in their own businesses. You can read Publishers Weekly's account here: tinyurl.com/2eq7c9a and there are other summaries around the web.
 
Afterward, I enjoyed a long lunch and  conversation with my friends and spiritual advisors (and two of the smartest people I know), Laura Dawson of ljndawson.com  and Brian O'Leary of  magellanmediapartners.com/.We talked for a while about the presentations, which were uniformly good, and about the fact that there wasn't a lot of new news (not surprising given the recent Future of Publishing conference glut and the constant chatter in the blogosphere and twitterverse about anything resembling news). Then Laura said something that was really insightful.
 

She asked (approximately), "When are we going to be able to go to meetings like this and not hear about someone beginning to use an XML workflow, setting up a Digital Asset Management system or getting their metadata organized properly without its being treated as something unusual and remarkable?"
 
And she was dead on (as usual). She and Brian, among others, have been talking about these things for years, urging publishers to take this stuff seriously and position themselves as favorably as possible for the future. It's been "change or die" for a long time and many are just getting around to implementing the beginnings of the changes necessary to make their content as valuable as possible across as many platforms as possible. That actually doing it is still viewed as remarkable is remarkable in itself.
 
Now we learn that The Big Money (a sister publication of Slate) will be putting on yet another Future of Publishing conference in June (untethered.thebigmoney.com/), this one about publishing in the "tablet era". (In a related development, apparently there is such a thing as the tablet era.) But here's the thing: You don't publish for a device or even an era. If you publish properly and do the (what should be) unremarkable things like using an XML workflow, a good Digital Asset Managment platform and if you are diligent about tagging and providing proper and consistent metadata, you don't care what device's era it is.
 
We're spending too much time trying to be remarkable and running from fad to fad. Assuming you have quality content (and if you don't, you're sunk anyway) it's the unglamorous stuff you have to sweat over that ultimately will sort out the winners from the losers.