All tweeted out post the hectic but rewarding Publishing Business Conference & Expo which I attended on the twenty third of March. The delay in blogging can only be attributed to an even more hectic work schedule.

Coming back to the conference, the first thing that struck me was the crowd. They were not as technical as the one attending Tools of Change. Less number of twitterers. Perhaps 4 or 5 out of which two were Neelan Choksi from Stanza and Peter Balis from Wiley. Also, I was attending this conference after a gap of two years and noticed a substantial decrease in the number of attendees (only around 200 people attending the 2 keynote sessions). Most of the sessions were informative and engaging.

Part I saw Alex Blumberg and Adam Davidson from NPR talk about “Where is the Global Economy Header and What Does It Mean to YOU!” Touching upon the mortgage crisis, GDP and where the US stands with regard to its debt, the discussion was about the journey of the US economy and where it stands now. Another session by Alex and Adam, “Leading a Publishing Company Through Uncertain Times” was presented in conjunction with Don Pazour, CEO - Access Intelligence and David Steinberger, President & CEO - Perseus Books Group. A highly absorbing discussion, David spoke about how the digital publishing has changed the market from a pull market to a push market. He felt that a nimble company is the one that would survive and grow, leaving the others behind. A comment on whether people should risk trading brick and mortar dollars for internet dimes further lead to a discussion on the decline of independent bookstores.

The next session on “Your Digital Future: Are you Prepared” was good but a little long winded and was presented by Bob Sacks, Precision Media Group. He spoke more from the world of magazines rather than books.The summation of the presentation was that books were not changing, content was and what we need to consider was the importance of content, digital delivery, new revenue models and instant information. Having reached the tipping pint of print publishing, mediocre content cannot survive in today’s dynamic marketplace.

The session on e-Book forum were actually 3 discussions rolled into one. I took this out of the conference guide: Get a bird’s eye look at the e-book market at our first-ever E Book Forum, presented in conjunction with the International Digital Publishing Forum. This multipart program will feature data analysis on e-book sales, a close-up look at current and emerging technologies and the impact of epub standards on publishers, channels and devices. Plus, a don’t-miss discussion of publishers’ e-book initiatives and successes. Presented by Peter Balis, Director - Online Sales, John Wiley & Sons, Nick Bogaty, Sr. Business Development Manager - Digital Publishing, Adobe Systems, Neelan Choksi, Chief Operating Officer, Lexcycle, LLC, Michael Smith, Executive Director, IDPF, Malle Vallik, Director - Digital Content & Interactivity, Harlequin Enterprises and Walter Walker, Director - Publishing Services, codeMantra, LLC.

Impressive inputs from everyone. Peter spoke about Wiley’s workflow and how they use Epub which allow them to push content to their distributor for further conversion to other formats. Nick felt that it was more a business reason than a technical one for Amazon not to support epub. Neelan demonstrated the new version of Stanza and how it supported various eBook channels like Amazon and Fictionwise among others. Hachette spoke of the growth of business, $4.7 million in sales of eBooks in 2008 and commented that they were one of the few to announce such numbers. Malle felt that by giving free content, you attracted consumers to come back for more.

One very important thing that I almost left out. When they started discussing symantic searching, Stephen Rhind-Tutt of Alexander Street Press (somewhat of an expert database in certain areas), specifically spoke about their Civil War database. Apparently if you want to use only keywords you can just Google. However, if you want to search for specific information at a specific time and date you can use their data which they have compile for several resources thus enabling semantic searching.

On a concluding note I must say, there was a fantastic number of consultants at the show. Well…I guess that’s the result after a layoff.

So I’m finally back from a crazy month of conferences and meetings.  Met a lot of interesting publishing people – all facing similar challenges.

We were a gold sponsor of the TOC conference and we saw an incredible response from publishers and people from the industry in general. It just goes to prove that no matter what the market conditions are, publishers know that they must look and invest in technology and electronic offerings to stay current with market trends and how important it is to keep up with the rapidly changing industry. Maybe that’s why the Tools of Change conference was sold out whereas some other traditional meetings saw a significant decline in the number of attendees.  We also exhibited at PSP (Professional and Scholarly Publishing) where the attendance was off significantly from last year.  From what I have been reading, many meetings are struggling for attendance – but not so at TOC.  This gives you a clear indication of the focus in publishing - in this concerned market.

This year, I noticed that one of the most discussed topics at various conferences was “e-books” in its various configurations and forms.  Many of the presentations had lots of numbers and graphs depicting various upticks and trends in ebook sales. In one session on “E-Books: Business Models and Strategies”, gave the following numbers on electronics vs print… “In STM, estimates of digital revenue range from 15-30% of total book revenue; in higher education it’s up to 30%; and in reference it’s 60%.”  We can now see clearly that consumers are changing their reading habits.  Stanza, the new reader for the iPhone, boasted that since offering Stanza in Dec 2008, there have been over 1.5 million downloads of the reader and millions of more books downloaded to their iPhones.

Another hot topic at TOC was Twitter and how it has changed the way information is communicated and exchanged. There were lots of discussions on the Dos and Don’ts of Twitter and the most effective way of messaging and marketing on Twitter. Almost everybody at the TOC was online and twittering throughout the conference. ‘TOC’ was the most twittered topic for almost a week. Marketing on Twitter is a whole new deal. I too am becoming a tweeter on Twitter and I think that if you’re not at least putting your feet in the bird feeder, you’re missing out on a lot of information that could be useful to your future - no matter what area of publishing is your focus.

We were VERY pleased with all the enthusiasm and interest that we saw in iPublishCentral.  At the conference we announced that iPublishCentral registration rose above 150 publishers since launching at the Frankfurt Book Fair and from what I’m seeing – TOC is already helping that number soar.  We held a seminar at TOC: ‘Sparking a new e book revolution through a new self-serve model’ by Sameer Shariff, our CEO. We all attended some very interesting presentations too, and I thoroughly enjoyed sitting in on Tim O’Reilly’s presentation about “reasons to be excited” and Chris Brogan on ‘blogging and social media’. Nick Bilton presented on ‘the future of storytelling’ which was inspiring and Robert Stein’s focus on a publishers new responsibility “… to build and nurture vibrant communities for authors and tend to their readers” was an eye-opener for many publishers. The focus of building a community around your content is one that we have been conveying to market for a long time.

Throughout the conference, certainly there was a focus on how the market conditions are challenging, to say the least, and why it is especially important for publishers to dip their toes in the water and test out the ebook market with a low cost/low risk solution.  So when you think about it, there couldn’t have been a better time to have launched iPublishCentral since it provides low cost and time saving solutions to publishers.  Timing is everything.  Take a dip and tweet the market.

Let me know what you found most interesting at TOC.