Bait 'n' Beer

I spend a lot of time (Mrs. Linn says too much time) reading publishing trade magazines and newsletters, blogs, listservs, twitter feeds, and facebook pages about the current state of play in our industry and about where we are going from here. As you know, I don't put a lot of stock in bold predictions about the Future of Publishing (tm) so let's set that one aside for the moment.
 
If you listen...really listen...to the conversations about publishing you consistently hear long and passionate expositions, discussions and debates on a number of sexy topics, many of which, I would argue, are tangential to the success of most publishers. There's considerably less discussion on other topics that are more germane to both the present and the future.
 
In the former category, I'd include the following:

• Devices We are still obsessed with the next new shiny thing when in fact, devices will very shortly become commodities and platforms will be considerably more important. In addition, as "Books in Browsers" become more of a reality, I'd argue that the dedicated ereader will become about as relevant as a desk calculator. The new shiny toys are unlikely to pull us out of the fire.
• Enhanced ebooks With a few notable exceptions (Nosy Crow's wonderful interactive children's ebook apps come immediately to mind), enhanced ebooks, as my friend Guy LeCharles Gonzalez puts it, are 'a product in search of an audience'. Yet every major publisher (and many smaller publishers) are rushing to create the next great thing. Three questions--(1) Can you get enough enhancements into a work without creating a massive, unwieldy file size?  (2) Will people pay premium prices for the enhancements? (3) Why do we need an enhanced ebook when (in most cases) we can do so much more on the web with much greater reach and discoverability? My answers are no, no, and we don't.
• One-offs and Anecdata "The book is not dead because a certain pseudo children's bedtime book is selling like hotcakes." "The fact that The Elements sold hundreds of thousands of copies at $14.00 a copy proves you can earn out on enhanced ebooks." "I'll never pay more than $9.99 for a digital book so that's where the upper limit of pricing must be." Generalizing from one or two data points or from listening only to the echo chamber that is the publishing community is dangerous and possibly fatal.
• Transmedia is the next big thing and "We need to be like gaming companies". Really? That's a great plan if you're in the comics business but until someone explains to me how to develop and get paid for "cross platform storytelling" in most of the other categories of publishing, I remain skeptical.
• Amazon is the villain Sure, they can be heavy-handed and often play hardball when it's not necessary, but guess what? Your ultimate customers (readers) love them for price, convenience and breadth of selection. As someone who spent ten years living in a place where the closest bookstore was a two hour drive away, they brought me the world.) Think of them as your sometimes (okay, often) annoying partner, not your enemy.
• Do lots of experimenting and 'fail forward fast'. This is a popular meme and wonderful concept from the tech world that should work in principle except for the fact that most publishers have such limited resources that experiments are difficult to execute and that precious few publishers  can afford to fail at anything in this environment. For most, the job is balancing moving forward fast enough so as not to be left behind while not making a bad bet ("Let's do all apps from now on!") that could bring down the house. To paraphrase the old line, let others be the pioneers and take the arrows, then come along behind and settle the land.

These are a few of the things I hear all day every day that make me scratch my head.
 
In Part 2 of this exercise (coming in the next day or so) I'll get to the things I think we should be talking about and doing right now. Stay tuned.