At the end of the day it’s about story.

It doesn’t matter if it’s on the printed page, in an e-book, on an iPad or even on the back of a cereal packet – it’s a writer’s job to be read. And the corollary is that it’s a reader’s job to read.

Debates about page versus screen, shallow versus deep, these are distractions. So are the future versus the past, adapting versus stagnating.

Story is how we make sense of the world. We’re hardwired that way.

From xkcd…

All-girl, all-gothic, all-action. Did someone say transmedia?  LOL.

Dear Authors, Your Next Book Should be an App, Not an iBook is a great call to action from writer and media entrepreneur Cody Brown, who reflects on the way writers can and should adapt their creative practice to new platforms (because audiences sure as heck will)

If you, as an author, see the iPad as a place to ‘publish’ your next book, you are completely missing the point. What do you think would have happened if George Orwell had the iPad? Do you think he would have written for print then copy and pasted his story into the iBookstore? If this didn’t work out well, do you think he would have complained that there aren’t any serious-readers anymore? No. He would have looked at the medium, then blown our minds.

Read the whole piece at TechCrunch.

This video is now three years old and has been viewed more than 10 million times, yet it still remains one of the best videos about the web (and hence also about publishing, among other things) that I’ve ever seen:

Snow flurries in New York have forced me indoors and given me a chance to catch up on my notes from the 2010 O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing conference, which concluded yesterday after three turbo-charged days of conversation and ideas.

I’ll post detailed accounts of individual sessions, some of which are still pinging around inside my skull, but for now I thought it would be useful to provide a round-up of the big themes that asserted themselves again and again throughout the program.

1. Analytics
If I had only one word to capture the thinking expressed at TOC 2010, it would be analytics. Real-time sales data, customer data, author data, product data. In particular, socialgraphics (data which helps us understand social networks) and e-book analytics (data collected from ebook apps and platforms about reader preferences and behaviours) were strong focal points. Driving the interest in analytics is the idea that publishers will be able to know more about their readers and communities than ever before, and this knowledge has inherent value for their businesses, and for all stakeholders in the value chain. New services and tools are now emerging to enable sophisticated analytics and companies who can leverage them will gain a strategic advantage.

2. Metadata
Actually, I could as easily have said “standards”. Many presenters identified the awesome power of high-quality metadata ¹ for e-books, with potential gains in every area from workflow to  inventory management, marketing and even the development of new markets or revenue streams. Metadata goes hand in glove with analytics. It powers the tools that enable us to understand how the market is responding to our digital publishing efforts.  The problem is there is no clear standardization of e-book metadata, and its use is inconsistent and often incomplete. Standards are needed in the digital supply chain, but competing business needs and interests undermine standardization efforts.

3. Fresh thinking
Yeah, sounds like a hollow platitude right? And maybe I should come up with a better title for this theme, but this really was a recurrent theme of the conference. Sometimes it was a simple motif running through keynotes, such as Skip Prichard’s exhortation to not be constrained by self-imposed limitations. For me the most knockout presentations were about individuals and companies doing non-traditional things. Like Arthur Attwell, who drew attention to the unnoticed emerging markets in Africa that hunger after easy commercial licences to deliver book content to readers in ways we haven’t even imagined, or the Pragmatic Programmers who used their utter cluelessness about publishing to bring fresh thinking to workflow and customer service, building a nimble, efficient and highly profitable publishing enterprise. Ramy Habeeb, Peter Collingridge, Richard Nash, Andy Hunter, speaker after speaker who found  a market niche, a competitive advantage or an economic opportunitiy by thinking about publishing in a completely new way or from a non-traditional perspective.

For me this was the take-home message of Tools of Change. Many publishers were clearly just trying to keep up with the pace of change, trying to decide which formats/platforms/devices to support, or whether to develop an iPhone app, or how much to mess with their workflow, or how to price e-books. These are all now urgent decisions and I don’t envy companies who have get across all these issues and implement a business strategy while things are clearly still in flux.

But the shining examples of fresh thinking, of deep engagement with questions about what publishing is and what it is going to be, of commitment to not just toe-in-the water strategy by dive-in-fully-clothed new business models, convinced me these were the individuals and companies that would be setting the benchmark for us all to follow.

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So, um, haven’t posted to the blog for a while. Shut up, is why! Okay, I’ve been a bit busy working behind the curtain towards the launch of if:book Australia (coming soon!)

But, look over here! Shiny thing! Digital publishing conference! O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing, in fact! I’ll be tweeting TOC 2010 over the next three days, so set your Twitter client of choice to #toccon. I’ll also be updating notes to this blog as I go, so stay tuned for fresh content.

[By Wednesday you'll think this blog is oh so now, of course you will. Shut up.]

via BoingBoing – comic artist Lucy Knisley has posted a charming and eloquent defence of digital reading, in the form of a comic, on her blog ArtJournal. I adored this, but not quite as much as her 1980s re-imagining of Harry Potter, complete with David Bowie and a Neverending Story luck dragon.

I’m in South Korea for the Paju Bookcity Forum to speak about digital business models for publishing.

Paju Bookcity is a new industrial precinct built entirely around books and publishing. That, of course, is a dry factual statement. Instead I should have hooked you into my tale by saying that Paju Bookcity is a magical kingdom, created by a benevolent and wise leader who also happens to be a bookseller and librarian, where publishers toil daily with joy and care, and where books are the only true currency. I might also have begun by saying that Paju Bookcity is a festival of architecture and contemporary design where dozens of buildings showcase the absolute best that can be achieved by balancing ecological sustainability with beauty and function.

All three sentences are equally true.

Sadly, I’m forced to add a Flickr image here because I’m having trouble with my SD card and can’t upload the dozens of pictures I’ve taken of the precinct. Instead, if you can’t imagine it, you’ll have visit and see for yourself. It’s truly remarkable.

Well, the battle is over (for now). The Australian Government has today announced that current copyright legislation forbidding parallel importation of books will remain unchanged.

The Australian and Bookseller+Publisher have reported the news and the full statement from Dr Craig Emerson, Minister for Competition Policy and Consumer Affairs, can be found here.

I like Sophie Cunningham’s take-home message best:

The rise of e-culture, freemium models, copyleft and open content is already, for better or worse, exuding huge pressure on the local industry. No one has the answers to the many issue that arise and, in a time like this, writers and publishers need the energy and space to begin forging the way ahead, rather than just remaining passive. As Jeff Sparrow from Overland pointed out a while back, ‘we need to go on the offensive. Rather than simply saying, leave us alone, we have to articulate a vision of how we want literature to work.’ The decision today will, hopefully, give us room to do that – to move and experiment and take risks without the roof coming down over our heads. Link to Meanjin

Authors and publishers can count this as a victory, and independent booksellers will be spared increased price competition from retail chains and discount department stores. However, it’s been interesting to observe the Australian book industry tackle this issue over the past year and I’m left hoping we will have an increased appetite for improvements and innovation. Creating the industry structure you want is better, after all, than having one imposed upon you.