Playstations, Persia, and Publishing

At long last your correspondent found a reason to go to London, albeit for work instead of play.  This year's Society of Young Publisher's Conference boasted the theme "Publishing on the World's Stage", and offered a refreshing look at issues such as translation, international digital publishing, and the things we can learn from related industries like video games.

It was purposefully high-level stuff, for a very important reason: as the new generation coming into publishing, there is a good chance the bodies behind the industry's top desks are going to be nowhere near as comfortable with the digital revolution.  One bookseller told us about her former marketing manager, who used to respond to every email in person -- he didn't know how to type one himself.  Meanwhile, HarperCollins is teaming up with Nintendo to sell classic (read: out-of-copyright) literature on Nintendo's DS console.  Not exactly your mother's novel, but this is what readers are becoming comfortable with.

A certain publisher of Arabic literature even explained his use of the digital revolution in terms of international issues.  He showed a slide drawing a five-mile radius around a publishing house in Cairo.  "That," he explained, "is the distribution range of a book for this publisher."  How can that be?  Because the infrastructure isn't there.  Publishers in developed countries rely so heavily on sophisticated delivery and fulfilment mechanisms that they're almost taken for granted.  Now, thanks to the internet, even a publisher smack in the middle of the desert can send an ebook to anywhere in the world with the click of a button.  (Getting people to want that work is a different story, but . . . baby steps.  Baby steps.)

There was a lot more I could say about the conference, but what I took away from it was this:  books are a resilient commodity.  Now that the panic has died down, most people are agreed that paperbacks will never go away.  Most people are also agreed that we can't stop at paperbacks.  As publishing evolves to allow more writing to be read in more ways, our sector is becoming more and more a rights business.  Exploiting those rights, and getting an author's work out to as many people as possible in as many ways as possible, is the way forward.  There might be some technical difficulty getting from here to there, but unlike with Nintendo there is no reset button.

Now, if you don't mind, I'm going to go play some Super Mario . . . I mean . . . read Shakespeare.