Bait 'n' Beer

I've had a couple of days to step back and wrap my brain around my observations and impressions from this week's Tools of Change Conference (www.toccon.com/toc2010) in New York.
 
A couple of preliminary thoughts: First, this is my fourth TOC (I've attended all of them) so I may be a little jaded. Second, we are in the midst of a bucketload of "Future of Publishing" conferences and there is an element of conference fatigue setting in There's some sense that a core group of players is acting as an echo chamber for each other's ideas on the future of publishing while the world spins merrily along. Edward Nawotka articulated this well in a Publishing Perspectives story today called "Are Publishing Conferences Creating an E-Book Elite?" (publishingperspectives.com/) and I share his sentiment.
 
More to the point, there were a few general thoughts and impressions I came away from TOC 2010 with:
 

1. There's not much new under the sun: In the 2 1/2 days I was there, I didn't see or hear anything startling or revolutionary that hasn't been discussed in other conferences or even at previous TOC's. Don't get me wrong, there were some terrific speakers and some interesting information conveyed, but the overall themes continue to be:(a) get to know your customers better and interact with them in a meaningful way; (b) make your titles discoverable with great metadata and SEO technology, (c) use the analytic tools available to you to analyze your publishing program and adjust as necessary, and (d) develop an XML workflow yourself or hire one of the many vendors to get your titles into shape to flow to multiple devices. Without diminishing the importance of any of those, they're hardly bold new ideas.
2. The law of small numbers is alive and well. As Dominique Raccah pointed out in her terrific presentation, we have lousy data in this industry. So I applaud anyone who's trying to get and use hard data to understand the industry and their individual businesses. (As an aside, there was precious little hard data presented throughout TOC.) Unfortunately, at TOC (and in the blogosphere) small data sets are being used to jump to very large and sweeping conclusions/generalizations. A small and unscientific sample of anything should not be extrapolated to anything more general without many caveats, yet several speakers and panels reached conclusions based on very weak statistical analysis. (I'm going to exempt Brian O'Leary and the Perseus team from this because both were careful to say that their samples were too small to draw conclusions.). It's great to share data to begin a conversation and a broader inquiry; it's less good to use it to advance a pre-determined agenda.
3. General trade publishers, apart from the Big Six and a few others, are still mostly sitting on the sidelines. In conversation after conversation at TOC and elsewhere, small to medium sized publishers have told me that they're still gun-shy about investing in a digital future in a meaningful way because of limited resources and because of fear of making the wrong bet on technology. Until the device, platform and format battles have sorted themselves out further, it's simply viewed as too risky to play. My personal feeling is that there are ways to position yourself to play irrespective of how these things shake out, but it's not an irrational fear on the part of publishers already under financial and other pressures.
4. We are not yet thinking broadly enough about enhanced ebooks. Although there was lots of enhanced ebook talk, most of the conversation I heard was around adding a few audio or video enhancements to text-based titles. This, to me, is the digital equivalent of packaging in a CD in the back of a print book, a practice that for most publishers (yes there are exceptions) has been a dismal failure. We need to bring in some gamers and film-makers to open our minds to the possibilities here. Jeff Gomez (of Starlight Runner) gave a keynote on Transmedia storytelling that hinted at the kinds of things that could be done within (and external to) the book. If the early enhanced digital books are poorly done, it could sink the entire opportunity.
5. NOBODY talked about how to make money on any of this stuff. I don't expect to see individual companies' numbers in a slide show and this isn't a meeting for CFO's. But somewhere along the way, we've all got to figure out if any of this will allow a publisher to earn a decent return on its investment. I'm pretty optimistic about a lot of things in digital publishing, but at this point, I think the risk/return relationship for publishers is way out of line (i.e., even if you are hugely successful with your digital program, you may not earn enough to justify the risk of implementing it).
6. We are provincial in our thinking. Ramy Habeeb of Kotobarabia blew everyone's doors off in his keynote on Wednesday describing the Arabic market and bringing home the fact that in the digital world, content is borderless. Most of us in publishing have not thought that way and it's an urgent matter we need to embrace. If there was an "aha!" moment for most of the audience at TOC 2010, that was it.

I hope this doesn't come across as too cynical. While there were a few low points (thanks for stopping by Ms Huffington), O'Reilly puts on a terrific conference and the speakers and panelists for the most part fulfilled their roles admirably. And there were some outstanding presentations (Liza Daly, Kirk Biglione, Brian O'Leary, Peter Collingridge and Brewster Kahle, among others, stood out for me). Particularly valuable to me are sessions, like Dominique Raccah's or Perseus Books' where real world experiences were shared in depth.
 
My concern, alluded to earlier, is that we're doing a lot of conferencing and seeing a lot of tools, but we're not as an industry making the changes we need to rapidly enough. It's time, as Tim O'Reilly said in his wrapup, for us to go back and do the dirty work that needs to be done to implement the changes we are able to now in order to get our authors the widest possible audience. That's not visionary at all...but it's the right advice and it's damned hard work.