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Evident truths
Boomers have a stake in the future of book publishing. We tend to like our books, the feel of their quaint paper pages and their bindings, hard or soft. May I gently wake you from your slumber? Things are changing.

If you want to be in the conversation that is core to the next evolution in books (and the many evolutions to follow that one), better get over to Rochester’s site, “three percent,” and read the excerpts of Sara Lloyd's article. Chad Post of "three percent," has gifted us with a digestible piece of Lloyd's very comprehensive article. Here's a slice of it.

Chad says, "Over the past week at The Digitalist, Sara Lloyd, Head of Digital Publishing at Pan Macmillan has been serializing her forthcoming Library Trends article on “how traditional publishers need to position themselves in the changing media flows of a networked era.”

"We will need to think much less about products and much more about content; we will need to think of ‘the book’ as a core or base structure but perhaps one with more porous edges than it has had before. We will need to work out how to position the book at the centre of a network rather than how to distribute it to the end of a chain. We will need to recognise that readers are also writers and opinion formers and that those operate online within and across networks. We will need to understand that parts of books reference parts of other books and that now the network of meaning can be woven together digitally in a very real way, between content published and hosted by entirely separate entities.

"Perhaps most radically, we will have to consider whether a primary focus on text is enough in a world of multimedia mash-ups. In other words, publishers will need to think entirely differently about the very nature of the book and, in parallel, about how to market and sell those ‘books’ in the context of a wired world. Crucially, we will need to work out how we can add value as publishers within a circular, networked environment.

"One of the key perception shifts that publishers need to make, then, is about the book as ‘product’. Whilst the book continues to be viewed as a definable object within covers, as a singular ‘unit’, publishers will continue to limit their role in its production and distribution, and this is a sure fire way for publishers to write themselves out of the future of content creation and dissemination."

Chad Post says he doesn't agree completely with Sara Lloyd's points, but he does agree that publishers in general are in the dark age, incapable of utilizing technology to meet today's challenges of readers and their books.

Newspapers need to innovate too
Newspapers fall in the same dark bin, and all these trusted old empires are going to have to shake off the armor, along with all its frivolous parts, and get on the innovation express train if they expect to survive.

For my part, I'm planning a series of book reviews I'll call "Is It Worth the Paper It's Printed On” and an e-guide offering criteria to determine what size a printed book should be, and how to accomplish the feat of publishing these small, worthy books.

I'll let you know when my next book comes out.