A Baker’s Dozen

Michael Jensen | 10/07/2009 | Digitization

Over the next five to six months I’ll be posting some musings on the nature and status of the digital and print marketplace, down here in the States—as well as some musings on the changing nature of the publishing marketplace overall, as we move into a chaotic second decade of the 21st century.

It was just five years ago that Google Book Search (then Google Print) terrified publishers. Four years ago, blogs moved into the mainstream, cell phones became cheap devices, and YouTube arrived on the scene.

In just the last three years, we’ve seen the rise of Twitter, the massive expansion of Facebook, and the establishment of open standards for epubs.

In just the last *two years,* we’ve watched the arrival of the Kindle, the Sony e-book reader, and other reading devices, with excitement and with trepidation.

Trepidation because we’ve also watched the downward spiral of newspapers, the transformation of the music industry’s business models, the decline of the independent bookstore, and a radical disruption in what we believed to be fundamentals of our economy.

What’s a publisher to do?

I don’t have “The Answer,” because we’re moving into a richly complex world of publishing biodiversity, of microniches, vertical markets, specialty collections, micromarketing to micromarkets, and much more.

What works for a publisher like mine won’t necessarily work for a publisher like yours; the marketing for this book won’t necessarily work for that book.

That was always true, when you get right down to it—but after 20+ years in publishing, I can honestly say that the signs of a “new marketplace” have never been so clear.

So what I’ll be doing in the following months is posting a series of meditations on how societal, economic, and environmental pressures are changing the publishing marketplace. I’ll explore how the changing habits of US consumers may indicate new opportunities, and investigate some specific examples. I’ll postulate some possible near-future scenarios. I’ll frame some discussions regarding the US marketplace for Canadian products.

I’ll be looking for engagement and comment from the thoughtful among you (that means *you*).

Since nobody has “The Answer,” I’m hopeful that with the AECB’s new website and blog, this community can grow into a conversation around these topics—because the more we can help each other understand the problems and the possibilities, the better we’ll all do, in the new information economy.

As a New Canadian (I became a permanent resident two years ago), I’ve got a dog in this fight—that is, I want to be sure that Canadian publishers prosper in the digital information economy, because I’ll be part of it.

We’ve got a rocky and complex road ahead of us in the next five to ten years—as new habits, new technologies, new environmental threats, new borderlessness, and new presumptions about the world unfold. I hope that the work we do now, in discussions amongst ourselves, can help devise sensible strategies to prepare for it.

I’ll not call for online discussion yet—that will begin with the next post—but please prepare yourself: I hope in the months ahead to have robust discussions about our visions of the future of Canadian publishing, the future of publishing in general, and the future that we will call “the present” in the years ahead.

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