Digital Changing ‘Very Nature of the Book Itself’

February 24, 2012 | Rich Fahle | 

It used to be that being “digital” meant having a website and a social media presence. For book publishing companies today, being digital means having a business completely infused with new ways of thinking about editorial, production, distribution and, of course, marketing.
We caught up with James McQuivey, Ph.D., vice president and principal analyst at Forrester to hear about how publishing companies used to cope with digital changes in the publishing business and what they’re doing now.

“When publishers sit down and try to do this [digital], they suddenly realize, ‘oh, this isn’t just about marketing.’ …Go back to late 2010, early 2011, many of them thought, ‘oh, digital is a marketing channel or maybe a distribution channel.’ They didn’t understand that digital was a complete re-conceptualization of the whole product itself and the way that product comes to market.
“So they were really expecting that ‘we just have to get a website up and maybe a couple Twitter accounts and we’re done’ and bless ‘em for being so naïve. But they’re now in the middle of it, and they realize, ‘wait a minute, the very nature of the book itself, the path that we follow to make people aware of that book … has completely changed now and we don’t know what levers to push.’”

Full story and video link at Digital Book World