I went to the O´Reilly Conference TOC, Tools of Change for Publishing, to learn what publishers say about the new instant virtual world. What do they see as threats or/and challenges. Especially now in the time of the second coming of the e-book.

The publishers seem to be in the same – hopefully creative - confusion as libraries. “Everybody knows” that there is a change going on but the direction, the means, the methods and actions are not clear. In times of change it is a good idea to once in a while take a step back and view and review the battlefield before you take action. As somebody said; “being too early is being wrong”. In order to have any progress you of course have to try and break out from what you have always been doing but you want to keep those try outs within a controlled budget. That is, if you can´t fool some venture capitalists.

This kind of conference gives the opportunity to review what is happening. The main impression from the conference is that there are a lot of things going on but the conclusions are not yet in place.

-          What about the impact of e-books and e-book readers

-          What about DRM

-          What about learning from the music industry

-          What about digital storytelling

-          What about interactivity

-          What about using Twitter as a marketing tool

-          What about pricing models

-          What about the impact of mobiles

The best about the conference was that people have tried all of this and could tell about their experiences. Maybe some of the attending publishers could build their decisions on these experiences so we will be closing in on the conclusions?

I will here choose to tell about Pragmatic Programmers, LLC http://www.pragprog.com/, two programmers who decided to publish books without any experience in publishing.

They modelled a tagged input form for their authors which they call PML (something like simple xml). They then built software which they and their authors could use to process the document to be seen in PDF (and other formats) including multimedia material. The build process from document to a published electronic book is something like 30-60 seconds. All of this happens in the “cloud” so no worries about machine maintenance. They often choose to publish a “beta” of the text to get feedback from the readers. The readers seem happy to buy an unfinished book and engage in the process to make it as good as possible. But, of course, this is niche literature. The authors get 50% back of all income related to the book and they have authors with an income of 400 000$ (most have a lot less). The books have the increasingly popular “Social DRM”. At the bottom of the page the buyers name is imprinted. All the work around the virtual publishing space including the web shop is in the hands of the company. It is not until they decide to print the book that stores like Amazon get involved. No marketing has up till now been needed. They have been around for 5 or 6 years and I got the impression from what I described that they have chosen some radical steps which lowered their publishing costs substantially compared to traditional publishing houses. They refer their way of thinking and the processes to the software development theory of “agile development”. This is, by the way, also used in the Axiell Arena development.