Waiting for Bezos — My Reaction to BookNet Canada Technology Forum 2008
The BNC Technology Forum 2008: Harnessing Digital Opportunity has wrapped. Morgan Cowie is catching her breath over at the BookNet blog. The Quill covered Tamblyn doing his Rich-Uncle-Pennybags-thing for the book-monopoly launch. Now what? Is the industry any closer to understanding, let alone harnessing, digital opportunities?
A Good Start but a Long Way to Go
I think digital is still a morass for most publishers. Houses have started future-proofing their catalog by adopting a universal digital format. I think most houses, in their marketing and publicity efforts, have also started poking readers directly. Baby steps but important and worthy ones.
But to state the problem openly — no one is making any money. I would be surprised if any house makes more than 2% from their digital portfolios. Hardly worth worrying over. Yet, no one is making money yet.
Are the Opportunities Where we Think They are?
The digital puzzle is an economic puzzle. There are the obvious questions: what are the emerging markets? How do you prepare? When do you act? But there is a bigger, and harder question to answer as well — how have the economics themselves changed? What if, when the monetary opportunities show themselves, they are no longer sufficient to support your business? How do you monetize the attention economy? How do you scale one-to-one marketing? How do you stay relevant in the content creation process? These are the things that would keep me up at night.
Follow Beat the Trend
If the first step in solving a problem is identifying the problem — I don’t know if we are there yet. Digital content — at half the price of printed content — demands a new business model. There wasn’t a lot of business-model talk at this year’s conference. The expectations of the digital consumer — be fast, be open, be equal — are hard to reconcile with publishing culture. There wasn’t a lot of talk of becoming leaner, faster, and more open. We are a business in transition, but there wasn’t a lot of talk of transitioning business. Having spent the day with industry’s best and brightest I feel we remain vulnerable to a music-label-like comeuppance. What if the money being made is not being made by us? Hopefully the New York honchos have a plan. Hopefully the Kindle will show up in Canada soon.
Raves
- Free wi-fi at the venue. Sweet.
- The two tracks — customer facing and behind the scenes infrastructure — well played
- Pubfight — a pretty cool idea when you think about it. Bravo.
- The BookNet staff — always friendly. Great moderators.
Rants
- Registration — a word doc sent via email — was a little dodgy.
- The audio of the sessions is pretty brutal. No real excuse when you are sourcing directly off the sound board.
- No organized back channel — a tech conference with no back channel, wtf?
- Where are the lessons learned from other industries?
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