Thad McIlroy - The Future of Publishing

Live from New York: The Future of Book Publishing

In February of this year the O'Reilly fiefdom held its second "Tools of Change for Publishers" conference in New York City. Though the title of the conference suggests that it was not limited to book publishers, books were indeed the focus. Details from the conference have been slow to emerge in cogent form.

Steve Paxhia, my colleague at Gilbane, offers a thorough overview in the May 29, 2008 edition of The Seybold Report, but unfortunately access is limited only to subscribers ($499 per year for the online version). The conference site, linked above, now also offers many of the presentations and other coverage of the event.

I was pleased to find today equally thorough coverage in the July-August 2008 issue of The Futurist, fortunately available online without charge. Senior editor Patrick Tucker perhaps enjoys an advantage in his coverage not available to Steve Paxhia: he is not intimate with the publishing industry, and by the nature of his publication is more focused on "the futurist" perspective than the insider's perspective. As a result he makes an additional effort to contextualize his coverage of the presentations and highlights of the event.

The article struggles with the issues of balancing social media, new technology and the value of content in a very cogent fashion. Some of the ideas are familiar; others quite fresh and provocative.

Michael Crichton's 1993 Prediction of Mass-Media Extinction Now Looks on Target

More credit where credit is due: I was alerted to this provocative May 2008 column on Slate.com by Bob Sacks in his "'Heard on the Web' Media Intelligence newsletter.

Back in the prehistoric era, i.e. 1993, mega-bestselling author Michael Crichton wrote an article for Wired magazine called Mediasaurus. In the article he made several predictions, expanding from the premise stated in his first paragraph, "To my mind, it is likely that what we now understand as the mass media will be gone within ten years. Vanished, without a trace."

Jack Shafer, Slate's "editor at large," revisits those predictions with Crichton, as well as referencing his earlier visit with Crichton in the same subject in 2002. When challenged that as of 2002 his predictions appeared still far from accurate, Crichton responded: "I assume that nobody can predict the future well. But in this particular case, I doubt I'm wrong; it's just too early."

Crichton complains bitterly (as many other commentators have noted) that the decline of newspapers and television are not simply because of the Web alternative, but also the ever-decreasing quality of those media.

Shafer notes Crichton's belief that "it will take a media visionary…somebody like Ted Turner --to create the high-quality information service he foresaw in his 1993 essay. In addition to building the service, the visionary will also have to convince news consumers that they need it."