According to new data from the Book Industry Study Group presented at DBW2013, e-book buying behaviour has remained steady for some time while sales of print books have started to level off after years of decreases.

A consensus is also emerging around the preferred e-reading device. Sixty percent of the publishing executives surveyed by Forrester Research believe that tablets will emerge as the ideal e-reading device; 45% already believe dedicated e-readers will soon be irrelevant. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt president Gary Gentel pointed out the ramifications of these findings: Tablets put readers just one click away from anything else besides an e-book. “We have to make sure whatever we put in that tablet will hold people’s attention,” Gentel said.

Touted as one of the largest gatherings of senior-level digital publishing executives anywhere, DBW offers a “big picture” perspective on digital publishing. Conference Chair Mike Shatzkin outlined five key areas publishers should be watching: the Penguin/Random merger and business models likely to come from it; the growth of vertical publishers; the shift from title-centric marketing to audience-centric marketing; the trifurcation of publishing into adult, children’s and illustrated publishing; and finally the new markets and sales opportunities offered by globalization.

Over two days of conferences and workshops covered a wide ranging agenda including topics such as the evolving state of book discovery and e-book retail, building customer networks through social media, the decline of the physical bookstore and the continuing power of technology to transform how publishers do business.

A round up of conference coverage, including paid on-demand video of presentations, is available on the Digital Book World website at www.digitalbookworld.com/2013/publishing-a-complex-future.

The Canada Stand was back to its full size of nearly 300 m² and filled to overflowing with a total of 56 publishers represented. In all, 51 publishers reserved or shared display and meeting space on the stand and another five chose the pied-à-terre option. All reported positive and productive meetings with their foreign counterparts. This year, Livres Canada Books introduced two new initiatives to better serve publishers on the Canada Stand, the first being high-speed Internet access via a password-protected wireless network on the stand. The second new initiative was a consolidated shipping pilot project for publishers unable to meet the minimum weight requirements established by freight forwarder Panalpina. Publishers exhibiting on the Canada Stand were also greeted with exhibitor welcome kits, containing items which proved to be useful during booth set-up.

Turkey’s international profile in publishing has risen dramatically since Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006. Its large and diverse publishing industry is worth approximately 1.5 billion dollars. Turkey has over 8,000 registered publishers, who published over 43,000 titles in 2011. Retail sales of imported titles topped 107 million dollars last year. Turkey’s literacy rate is above 85% and its population young (the median age is 28.8) and connected: there are 27 million Internet users and 65 million cellular phones in Turkey. With Turkey slated to be the focus of the 2013 London Book Fair, the time is right to take a closer look at this growing market.

Summing up the atmosphere of the day-long event, author and industry commentator Nick Harkaway noted that “the FutureBook Conference had an air of possibility about it.” Pottermore CEO Charlie Redmayne set the tone in his keynote address. Saying there had been too much negativity in the industry, Redmayne noted that publishers were now in a dream position of having multiple retailers to sell their e-books through.

There was a palpable air of excitement at FutureBook. Commentator and journalist Porter Anderson, always highly visible at these events, sums up the mood this way: “The room bustles with what might be the ragged nervous energy of the long struggle to understand this new post-digital era — but it also might be hope. As if smart heads on the European side of the Atlantic had done some good homework in studying what has happened in the US. As if they’d learned from some Stateside mistakes, or at least would like to.”

If “Retweets” are any measure, perhaps the most controversial comment of the day was made by Sourcebooks CEO Dominique Raccah: “If all you are doing is putting text files on a Kindle, your days are numbered. That’s not publishing.” Raccah’s point was that publishing is more than just a sales engine, and digital is more than just a new marketplace.

The talks at FutureBook ranged across a number of topics, including the future of the publisher and of the editorial product, pricing strategies, using data to shape marketing, transformations in the academic market, direct-to-consumer sales, the changing role of agents, and developments in markets outside of the UK and the US. The Bookseller’s Philip Jones has compiled links to coverage of the conference on the FutureBook blog.