A Most Optimistic Unconference: Publishers, Libraries, and Independent Bookstores at Digital Book World 2012

January 29, 2012 By Heather McCormack

If you’re lucky, at every conference there’s a revealing unconference going on inside of it. This was very much the case with Digital Book World 2012, which drew the usual cliques of publishers, authors, agents, entrepreneurs, editors, and marketers last week to New York. As at the 2011 show, keynotes, studies, and panels about international markets, metadata, ebooks, and DRM attracted large audiences. Amazon and Barnes & Noble reaffirmed their power (and rivalry) as manufacturers of dedicated e-readers and quasi-discovery centers and publishers.
Yet I sensed a markedly different psychology among the Big Six suits that has thus far gone unreported and wasn’t spoken of out loud near me during the show. Although a bit crooked-shouldered after suffering another year of disintermediation beatings by Kindle, these professionals are seeing straighter—and farther down the workflow. The damaging fear-induced myopia that took over publishing with the rise of ebooks in 2009 seems to be waning.
Four, even two years ago, dropping the term ecosystem was not a cool thing to do in the rarified corners of the culture business, the equivalent of conjuring a dirty hippie genie at a cocktail party. At Digital Book World, however, I heard more than one CEO use it, along with independent booksellers, it must be noted. The word, of course, encapsulates what librarians and library advocates have long argued for in the digital wars—capitalism that supports anyone with a stake in information and encourages fluid tiers of access. Or, if you will, a most beatific “United Nations of Reading,” to quote Eric Hellman, who was inspired last fall by Brian O’Leary’s excellent Books in Browers presentation, “The Opportunity in Abundance.”
Forget the supreme logic of leveraging your partners, or even your supposed competitors when you are dependent on the whims of a relatively small consumer base. The all-important data to buy into a new, bigger picture is compelling. At Digital Book World, Verso Media presented the findings of its 2011 Survey of Book-Buying Behavior. It reported that there are 70 million “avid book-buyers” in America and that they exhibit “split purchasing behavior.” In other words, they patronize online retailers, chain bricks-and-mortars, and local independent bookstores. This finding led the Verso team to recommend that publishers maintain and nurture “a diversified retail ecosystem [emphasis added]…because it mirrors consumers’ preferences.”
Attendees did not talk up libraries as a bona fide sales channel, despite OverDrive’s laudable efforts last summer to convert library catalog browsing to sales, and that’s fine by me because libraries serve a much more valuable function. The buzz word of Digital Book World 2012, discovery is being vaunted as that crucial bit of foreplay in the reader-book relationship (sorry, new metaphor). As communion cannot happen without a meeting ground, authorities ranging from Oren Teicher, CEO of the American Booksellers Association, to Ruth Liebmann, Random House VP director of account marketing, stressed the inestimable worth of a physical space for encountering just the right bit of textual stimulation.
Read Heather's full piece at Library Journal.