Tools of Change - San Jose June 18-20th 2007

Between the 18th and 20th June 2007, O'Reilly are hosting the TOC (Tools of Change) Conference, in San Jose, California. The conference will explore the developments the web has brought to the often twee world of publishing, and will cover:

• New opportunities for publishers and ideas that could spark new business models
• Tech-enabled innovations in editorial, marketing and distribution
• Hidden impacts of technology on strategy, production, consumption and intellectual property
• Successful new publishing initiatives
• Best practices for working with Amazon, Google, Ingram and other big players

Exciting stuff. For O'Reilly, this is a convergence of the twin strands of our MO - the technology we write about and the medium we publish in, so it seems perfectly natural that we are the ones organising this conference. It's great to be part of a company that looks to the future as eagerly as we do - not uncritically, I might add, some changes are more desirable than others, some are appropriate and some less so. For every disruptive technology, there's always someone doing the disrupting and someone else being disrupted. In O'Reilly's case, we end up disrupting ourselves: for every new technology that we adopt, our existing publishing and businesses models have to be reshuffled and rejigged to accomodate it, and in some sense, this whole conference is a peon to the technology that kicks us up the backside. We are not immune to technology's disruption, and we're not blind to its downsides, so it is considered and heart-felt when we recommend that the book world needs to look at this stuff before the sand beneath their feet is washed out from under them by the tide rushing by: after all it could be our feet the sand is being washed from under if we're not careful.

A few weeks ago, a couple of related pieces appeared in the Guardian and the Independent. The former told of Google working with the Bodleian Library in Oxford, scanning the library's out of copyright books:

The library digitisation project involves universities in the US and Europe. It may be limited to out-of-copyright books in the UK at the moment, unlike in the US, but the company makes no secret of its ultimate aim: to scan every book ever published. "We think we can do it all inside 10 years," Marissa Mayer, a senior Google executive, told the New Yorker magazine recently. "It's mind-boggling to me, how close it is."

But this digitisation process hasn't gone down well with everyone:

But the digitisation initiatives have provoked an angry clash with authors. Google's founders are steeped in the ethos first articulated by hippy futurist Stewart Brand, that "information wants to be free". Their genius, of course, was to make millions of dollars from it anyway. For many authors, by contrast, copyright is everything. "It's their only freehold," says historian Antony Beevor, a former chair of the Society of Authors. "As soon as they start giving it away, they'll never get it back."

Their back catalogue is not, strictly speaking, their only freehold: they have the reputation they garner from their back catalogue, too, which is a related yet separate thing, and which is a currency in itself. Also, they have the material they will write in the future, which is another currency and another sizeable chunk of their freehold. It's these things that can open up opportunities to ancilliary income, from readings, film rights, newspaper articles, serialisation, writer-in-residencies, overseeing workshops, editorial work, collaborations with artists in other media, etc. These aren't insignificant. I doubt there are more than a handful of writers in Britain who make their living purely from book sales. Everyone else has to hustle in order to put bread on the table. This is not slumming it or abusing your muse, these can be creative challenges and they can be fun.

Tim O'Reilly, who will be speaking at TOC, and who is an author as well as a publisher, (and who obviously is ultimately my boss), posted this article on the O'Reilly Radar forwarding an Open Letter written by Kassia Krozser of Booksquare to the Publishers of this World, relating to South by Southwest:

South by Southwest, the interactive festival, is in full swing. Already, the panel sessions are cram-packed with innovators looking for the next Next Big Thing. Nay, many of the attendees at this year’s festival are already riding that wave that we call The Future. We have representatives from music, motion pictures, gaming, all manner of web technologies. We have content creators and producers and aggregators. We have those whose DIY genes overlap with corporate souls.

What we don’t have is a coterie of publishing house representatives. This is bad, dear publishers, very bad. What is happening on the ground in this fair city in Texas is what you will pay consultants big bucks to execute in two years. You, dear publishers, will be reacting to a menu of buzzwords and must-do action items that, we suspect, will make little to no sense, but you will be leaping into action regardless. Because you are told you must....
... There is much discussion on new ways to tell stories. What works and doesn’t work in today’s universe. Multi-format storytelling. Cross-platform storytelling. Mixing words and sounds and pictures to extend the story beyond the book. Mixing fiction and reality in the blogosphere and beyond. Story is very important this year at SXSWi.

It’s an idea that has been building for years. Mixed in with the idea of story is the idea of content ownership, especially in a collaborative or user-generated environment, combatting piracy in innovative ways (you could, if you were here dear publishers, learn that the gaming community is thinking hard on this issue and have creative thoughts on the matter), and building and retaining passionate audiences.

We are also hearing that there is a great clamoring for writers in this online world of the future. Everyone wants good writers, few can find them. It’s sort of like there are shoppers streaming into the market, but nary an item to buy.

I'm a novelist, a poet, and a songwriter, and this kind of talk is a rallying cry. But compare that to this article which appeared in the Independent the same week as the Guardian piece:

... the crisis meeting called by the ALCS at the British Library on Thursday ... some of the most distinguished names in British literature were there to discuss the plummeting income of authors and the copyright issues that threaten to make it worse. Some raged against Google's plans to make whole books available online for free. The poet Wendy Cope lamented the ease with which you can download her own works and those of other poets for free. The average author earns about £16,000, a third less than the national average wage, it is revealed. So what? They're doing what they love. But hidden behind that figure released by the Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS) is a grimmer truth: when you take away the superstars who are earning shedloads, the actual figure for the rest is closer to £4,000.

I have some questions about these figures - are there significantly more authors now than there were? Have bloggers been counted? How about unpublished authors who haven't finished their epic? Is it just writers who have been assigned an ISBN? - but that's beside the point. I don't want to be glib about a person's income: it's not pleasant when your living wage is threatened.

But as a writer myself, who doesn't make money from what I write - my last royalty cheque totaled £4.62, I really bring that average income down! - I guess I'm more representative of the average author than the people who attended the ALCS meeting. I write in the gaps in my life - on trains, weekends. I've bought more copies of my own book than everyone else put together, and I've gladly given them away in the hope that it triggers someone to read it, let alone rip it off! I release everything I write under a Creative Commons license. I want my stuff on Google - it's one of the marketing devices that technology has provided to help me find an audience. Pirate me, please, pirate me!

Joking aside, the fact is, I would never have got either of my two books through the ever more rigourous screening process of any major publishing house. The impact of technology is not the only agent of change in this scenario. Business pressures come to bear, too. Shareholders of the publishing houses demand ever more profit, meaning the publishers need more and more return on each title. Publishing programmes become divided into blockbusters and also-rans, and the also-rans are being dropped off the list. Book's marketing is being targeted at sure-fire sellers, which means titles with less obvious bestseller potential are not getting their fair share of publicity until they have proven their worth, which they can't really do until they have received publicity. Publisher's margins are being squeezed by booksellers who are also trying to provide adequate return for their shareholders, which means making more money off less and less stock, while the cost of retail space is going through the roof, and the booksellers are looking over their shoulder at Amazon and wondering why on earth someone would come into their shop to buy a book when it's on offer at such low prices online. And the publishers fight the pressures from Amazon to give better terms, but still glory in the scale of the non-returnable sales that come their way. Investment in Three for Two promotions, Endcaps and SNPs tighten margins further, net receipts become less and less impressive and consequently the author collects smaller and smaller royalties. So it's everyone for themselves, just as it ever was.

These are the realities of the book trade today, and I can't see it ever getting easier. But there are options out there, and that's where TOC comes in. The organisers, Sarah Milstein and her team, have put together a programme that highlights developments that can supplement the publishing industry, to help publishers and authors reach new audiences, to cope with these seismic changes. And as an example of how useful technology can be in spreading the word, if you're not in San Jose right now, there are always the Tools of Change news updates from the conference waiting online to be read, to be listened to, to be absorbed. This conference is not about destroying all you knew, it's about trying to help you smoothly transition from one business model to another. And you can guarantee the good people at O'Reilly - from editorial to the authors to sales - are going to be listening intently, because this affects us, too!