So, we’re finally done! It’s been a great experience for me, and a lot of the credit for that goes to all of you. The best part of the Ooligan experience, after all, is the freedom that we’re given to figure things out on our own, and a lot of the figuring out that happens is us helping each other. I remember a conversation with Dennis a year ago or so in which he said that when the program first started, the instructors needed to explain just about everything to the students. After a few years, though, a sort of collective pool of knowledge built up, and suddenly the instructors didn’t need to explain what things like BLADs or drop caps were, because everyone seemed to know already. That pool of knowledge comes from students teaching each other, which happens because of Ooligan—the work we do on the press teaches us at least as much as our classes do. So, thanks to all of you for helping to teach me so much.

So that’s the past. Mostly, I want to talk about the future. I know that when I talk to people about how I’m about to get a master’s in book publishing, the first reaction is “oh, that’s cool!” and the second is “so, what are you going to do with that?” There’s a lot of talk about the dire straits publishing is in and how the whole industry is going to fall apart because of ebooks, or the internet, or nobody reading any more. And there are all the layoffs happening in New York, and the occasional bankruptcy—all kinds of bad stuff out there to terrify the freshly-minted master of publishing. And it’s true; business models are collapsing and taking businesses with them.

The thing is, there are also a ton of new opportunities. Personally, I think this is the best time to be getting involved in publishing. The big houses are facing some trouble, it’s true, and nobody really knows what to make of the whole ebook market yet, but more and more books are being put out every year, and people are reading them. And they’re not just reading printed books; they’re reading on Kindles, on cell phones, on their shiny new iPads—all over the place, and in lots of different formats. And all of those formats are opportunities for us to use the skills that we’ve polished in our time at Ooligan. Ebooks need to be edited too, and a good designer can make ebook conversion a million times easier. And of course, ebooks need to be marketed well.

In some ways, the marketer’s job is going to be the most important in the years to come. More and more books are coming out, and most of those are being self-published. Ebooks creation is getting easier and easier, and even the Wall Street Journal is reporting that authors can make more money putting out ebooks on their own than going through a traditional publisher. Clearly, this is pretty good news for freelancers, because these ebooks and POD books will still need editors and designers. It’s also a great opportunity for publishers, though, because it gives us the opportunity to tell people which books, out of all the thousands that come out every day, they should read. If publishers can set themselves up as authorities in a particular niche, they can reap the rewards as people who like that niche try to figure out where to get the books they want. This is the trouble with a lot of the big New York houses; they don’t really have a niche, they just produce books.

Niche publishing is going to be the way of the future. This is going to mean smaller sales and less money—but if any of us decided to get into publishing for the money, well. . . that would be a mistake. It also means that we get to focus on what we really want to read; we get to publish what we think is good.

Social media let publishers reach out to readers more than ever before. It lets us get involved in conversations that readers are having and it lets us tell them what we like and what we think is good. The thing is, people don’t want to be advertised to on the Internet. We’ve all developed pretty fine-tuned bullshit detectors, and if we think someone online is just trying to get us to buy something, we tune them out pretty immediately. So we need to be genuine when we deal with readers.

So we focus on a niche we love, and publish the stuff that we love, and talk to readers (who we should start thinking of as friends, really) about the kind of stuff that fits in with the books we love. That sounds like a pretty good future to me, but it gets even better.

My prediction is that ebooks are going to continue to rise in popularity. If we’re lucky, they’ll take the place of the mass market paperback. But people will still want print editions of their favorite books—nice leather-bound hardcovers with two-color interiors, that sort of thing. And those are a lot more fun to design than yet another mass market paperback. So we get to publish the stuff we love, talk to readers (or friends) about the books we love, and have fun doing really cool editions of our favorite books.

New media platforms create even more opportunities for us. People are designing computer games, and creating transmedia platforms, and organizing alternate reality games, and all of those things require the kinds of skills that we’ve learned here. Anything with text needs a good editor, and anything with a story needs someone who can spot the places where the story bogs down. Designers will always be needed to make sure that things look nice, and marketers will always be needed to make sure that potential buyers know about products.

This is a great time to be getting into publishing. I can’t wait to see where it all goes.

So I sat down and came up with a PowerPoint presentation (that I never got to use, sadly enough) and threw together some of my thoughts, most of which were about XML. At Ooligan Press, the student-run press that makes the PSU publishing program the really amazing thing that it is, I’m the digital content manager. It’s somthing I pretty much jumped into based on interest rather than knowledge, but school is the time to do that sort of thing. So I went to TOC hoping to learn a lot about how to turn out digital content efficiently, and in particular about how to integrate XML into our workflow at Ooligan.

Well, the morning of the presentation I was told there would be a camera there. So, without further ado, here are links to a couple of videos of me rambling about XML and publishing:

XML, part 1

XML, part 2

and here’s a link to a search page showing all the videos.

Enjoy!

Well, a large part of it is that my old Motorola Razr was dying–slowly but surely. It was taking longer and longer for it to do anything, and I didn’t want to have my phone just spontaneously die on me one day. And then there was the recent news that Verizon was acting in a very shady way by sharing your customer info with their affiliates unless you actaully managed to read through pages of legalese to realize they were doing that and then waded through their Byzanitine online acount management system to find the place where you could opt out (Instructions for doing so have been thoughtfully posted by the great folks at BoingBoing).

I had some concerns about the G1, though. One of the chief ones is that the iPhone is the big phone platform for reading ebooks, and it makes a certain sense for me, interested as I am in ebooks and the future of publishing, for me to have one of those. On the other hand, I’m just not a big fan of Apple (yeah, I know); I think they’re too proprietary (for example, their new iPod Shuffle requires you to use Apple headphones), is basically what it comes down to–though I will certainly admit that their designs are impeccable, and their usability is top-notch.

The other concern I had with the G1 is that I’ve heard lots about their battery life, and none of it has been good. I don’t particularly want a smartphone if I have to carry a charger around with me all the time and keep a sharp eye out for spare outlets.

Fortunately for me, T-Mobile has a 14 day trial period, that applies for both the phone and the service. So if, in 14 days, I decide I really can’t deal with the battery life, then I can bite the bullet, grit my teeth, and make the move over to AT&T and the iPhone.

So far, though, the battery life has not been an issue. I’ve had the phone running for about 25 hours now, including downloading of apps, playing of games, some phone calls, lots of twitter, some texting, and all that, and while the phone is getting cranky and asking to be plugged in, the battery is still at 14%. That’s with 3G on the whole time, and bluetooth and wireless on for most of the time. GPS was off. I did take some advice I found online and downloaded an app called Power Manager, which is easy to use and seems to work well.

So, power worries seem to be unfounded, more or less–which is a relief. More about my new phone later, I’m sure.

I would have to disagree, though,  with all the people out there who say that the nimbleness of small publishers makes them ideally situated to take advantage of the possibilities of ebooks. The problem here is that we aren’t talking about new content–we’re talking about new delivery channels. These new delivery channels require some technical expertise to be able to work effectively with, let alone imaginatively. And that requires staff whose jobs are to check out new technologies and see how to do stuff with them; in short, it requires a research and development team.

Most small publishers that I know of barely scrape by. They make enough to pay the bills, pay themselves, and have enough left over to get started on another book or two, but that’s about it. There’s no money to fund research in a small publisher. I would guess that most small publishers out there don’t even have the money for an IT staff. What this means is that small publishers, by and large, are not the ones who are doing exciting new things with technology. Sure, there are some exceptions, but most of the innovative uses of technology are going to come from the big houses. Small presses who don’t have the technical know-how to develop new solutions on their own are going to follow the lead of the big houses.

If any publishers are nimble in regards to innovative uses of technology, it’s the mid-size to large houses; they’re the ones who have the staff to explore new options. It’s certainly quite possible for a small press to take advantage of digital technology and ebooks to do something really fascinating and new, but I would argue that most small publishers don’t have the resources to do so.  Small publishers may be more organizationally nimble, but that nimbleness doesn’t do much good wthout resources, either in the form of cash or in the form of on-board knowledge about digital technologies. If small publishers want to take advantage of their nimbleness, they need to acquire the knowledge to do so; they need to study online technologies, learn XML, maybe some basic web design, and try to understand what sorts of things are possible in this brave new world of digital publishing and what sort of things aren’t.

• Reading ebooks will become more and more popular, for many different reasons. Devices will become cheaper, prices of files will drop, people will be drawn  to the social aspects of online reading; all these things will conspire to make income from ebooks the lion’s share of revenue for most publishers.
• Print books will increase in price faster than they have been, and paperbacks will slowly start to die off as ebooks take their place. Eventually, mass market books will be put out entirely in ebook form. Printed books will become something you buy for books you really like–deluxe editions.
• Self publishing will become more common, as people find it easier and easier to get in touch with freelance editors and designers online, and then to sell their ebooks through a digital storefront like Amazon or Fictionwise.
• Small general trade publishers will struggle. The large houses will continue to attract the bulk of submissions, due mostly to their sales and marketing forces. Smaller houses, with their corresponding smaller marketing reach, will have to work hard to justify their existence.
• Small niche publishers will do quite well, as long as they are prepared to take advantage of the internet and the ease of communication the digital world brings. Niche markets will become increasingly important, and publishers who are seen to be responsible members of niche communities will derive great benefits from that.
• Big chain bookstores will falter. As ebooks become more and more common, people will have less and less interest in browsing through a warehouse store, when they could as easily do a quick search fr a particular topic or learn about a cool new title from friends on a social network.
• Independent, niche bookstores will rise from the ashes. As niches and micro-communities become more important, smaller stores that cater specifically to those niches will proliferate.

I’m sure this will be a post to look back on and laugh about in ten years or so; just about all predictions of the future are, after all. Still, it’s worth thinking about.

The other problem with DRM is that users hate it. As Doctorow said many times, all it does is make people feel like it’s okay to steal from you, because you’re a jerk. This is the primary reason that the music industry has belatedly moved away from DRM. Publishing is moving more slowly, to a large degree because electronic formats are a new thing for us, but we seem as an industry to be following in the footsteps of the music industry, determined to repeat their mistakes.

The difficulty with moving away from DRM is that the distributors get involves. Amazon, for example, refuses to let ebooks be sold for the Kindle without DRM. Publishers are left with a bit of a dilemma, then: Hold fast to principles and be denied a major market, or throw up your hands and say “fine”, and put DRM on your files?

Whew, it was quite a day–a good one, but a long one, and I have to admit to a certain amount of brain overload. Lots of fascinating details about XML and how to use it in publishing. The idea of using geospatial tagging in ebooks to produce books that can give different content is a pretty cool one, and DAISY also seems like a really worthwhile sort of thing–I’m all in favor of putting content out there in formats that might make things easier for blind, dyslexic, or visually impaired people.

About time for me to turn in, though–going to be another long but good one tomorrow, and the next day.

A final area of concern with giving away ebooks is that if Reader technology becomes so user-accepted that it becomes the dominant method for reading, won’t releasing ebooks for free in order to drive print sales be fairly pointless? Granted, this will probably not happen in the near future, but it may happen sometime in the next 20 years or so. If it does, I think publishers will have some serious rethinking to do, and will essentially have to reinvent the industry. If I’m lucky, I’ll get to be a part of that.

Introduction to XML for Publishers: Without a doubt. This one is key for me, since one of the things that I want to do in my time as Digital Content Manager is get Ooligan using XML.

XML in Practice: Formats, Tools, and Techniques: This is part two of the previous class.

The next morning, I’ll be listening to Bob Stein, mostly just to pass some time. Don’t tell him that though, okay?

Then comes Literature as a (Web) Service, which is right up my alley.

Cory Doctorow is next, and that should be great–he’s a fantastic author and has some really interesting things to say about intellectual property.

The course on the Google book search program is pretty much mandatory for me, particularly as it’s being given by a guy from Google who heads the Boston Book Search team.

After that, it’s still more fun with Google, this time from a bit more of a publisher’s perspective.

And then there’s lunch.

For the next section, I’m a little torn between going to the course on The Rise of Ebooks or the one on Adobe’s Digital Publishing tools. I’m leaning towards the former, as I’m worried the latter will mostly just be an infomercial, but we’ll see.

There’s a talk on how publishers can take advantage of mobile phones, then one that explores what the future will look like for publishers, and then the serious part of the day winds down with a reception. After that there are some informal roundtables and demos, and then it’s back to bed in Brooklyn.

The final day starts with a selection of keynotes, and then faces me with another choice: a Survey of Current E-Readers or Unleashing the Power of the Unbound Book? I lean towards the latter, as the former seems more utilitarian than inspirational. Plus, I’m of the opinion that dedicated ebook readers will not be around for too long, anyway, which means the stuff I would learn would be more short-term than not.

Lessons from a Book’s Simultaneous Publication in Print and on the Web is a hugely long title, but should still be a pretty interesting talk, so I’ll be checking that out.

My next choice is between a talk about retaining traditional publishing values in ebooks and one about wikibooks that anyone can edit. This one is a bit of a stumper; maybe I’ll flip a coin.

The final few classes are on success stories and failures in digital publishing, what you do with a site with massive readership, and a talk from the guy who started NaNoWriMo.

So yeah, that should be a pretty crazy few days. I’ll post some updates from the conference about the awesome stuff I learn, so stay tuned!

Pigs in Space!

I think the misguided focus of most publishers’ websites is due to people still, even 15 years after the rise of web commerce, not really understanding how to use the internet. It doesn’t fit neatly into the business models that people are used to, which means that the web becomes the problem of someone who’s mostly worried about other things. I imagine the general train of thought is essentially that the web is probably not the responsibility of editing, or acquisitions, or even design, and it’s surely not accounting’s problem, and since it deals with communication and ads and things, we might as well just make it marketing’s problem. Marketing grudgingly accepts this responsibility, shrugs, and move on, doing the same sorts of things online that they do offline: trying to sell books. They look around and see that pretty much everyone else is doing the same type of thing, and they look at Amazon and see how much potential for profit there is in connecting directly to readers, and they think “Well, that must be what we need to do.” So they carry on trying to sell books online.

The problem, of course, is that people don’t go to publisher’s websites to buy books. I have never bought a book from a publisher’s website, and as a student getting a master’s degree in publishing I’m probably far more likely to do so than a member of the general public. Before I started the publishing program here at PSU, the only reason I had been to any publishers’ websites was to look at submission guidelines. Since then, with one exception, it has been to evaluate the websites of other publishing companies. That one exception? Tor.com, which I visit frequently for their articles. Nevermind that that’s not Tor’s actual website–the point is, it’s the closest thing to a publisher’s website that I visit on anything resembling a regular basis. And while a lot of the site could be construed as advertising, since it mentions lots of books, and in particular Tor books, it’s not actually too common to find links to places where you can buy those books.

To me, this illustrates that direct-to-consumer sales are not likely to work out for publishers. People just don’t go to publisher websites to buy books, and it’s doubtful that they ever will. Perhaps if a consortium of publishers banded together and built a website that would distribute orders from customers to the appropriate publisher, it would work–but setting up that sort of thing would take a massive outlay of capital, something that is in disturbingly short supply right now. In addition, it may not work out to be worth it. In order to attract customers, after all, such a website would have to offer prices at or below those of Amazon and Barnes & Noble (and Borders, for however much longer they’re around), and Amazon has the available funds and the willingness to operate at a loss for years–something that most publishers probably can’t manage.

Ebooks are a slightly different matter, in that there’s no appreciable distribution cost, and no reason to not sell them through the website. That being said, people are still going to go to a wider distribution center when they try to buy things. That’s why malls work–people want to go one place where they can get a huge variety of things, not one tiny little store that sells one or two types of things.

The way for publishers to get readers to order from them directly is to offer something that they can’t get through a retailer–some facet of production that the retailer can’t offer or do anything about. Customizable POD books might do the trick–you order a book to certain specifications, and it gets printed up and shipped off to you. Maybe you want a certain weight of paper, or your eyes are going so you want to order the whole thing set in 14 point, or you want it in hardcover, in a slipcase, bound in purple silk (Which reminds me, I did actually visit a publisher’s website once; it was to pick out a Christmas present. Sadly, the company in question appears to no longer be, or at least to no longer have a web site. So perhaps the deluxe edition business isn’t all it’s cracked up to be).