Some Reflections on the Future of the Book

Over the years, there's been a lot of talk about the Future of the Book. But depending on who talks about it,  "the future of the book" actually takes on different meanings. For instance, when publishers talk about it, what they really mean is "the future of publishing."

Last Monday and Tuesday, I was fortunate enough to attend The Future of the Book conference, organized by the National Book Development Board, the Book Development Association of the Philippines, the Filipinas Heritage Library, and Vibal Foundation. The seminar was held to help publishers deal with all of the challenges to publishing these days, brought about by new technologies and new modes of reading. Of course, I speak about the perennial and almost trite question: Do ebooks spell the end of books? I made it a point to be there, as a writer and editor for one of the publishing houses, but more importantly, as a reader, consumer, and book enthusiast.

The seminar was fantastic, and I qualify fantastic seminars as those from which I learn a lot. For that, I do congratulate the organizers, especially in their selection of speakers. I truly learned a lot from the conference, both from the speakers themselves and from the general reaction of the crowd. From the speakers, I learned of new business models and, more importantly, whether these work. From the crowd, I learned prevailing attitudes. Truth be told, I was more interested in the prevailing attitudes.

Let me go over the highlights of the conference first:

• From J. Kirby Best of Lightning Source, I learned that publishers can just concentrate on the content, and leave the printing and distribution to other entities, who can also produce the content in any format that the reader wants (print, the different ebook formats, etc.) and ship it to wherever the reader needs it. 
• Eric Frank of Flat World Knowledge blew my mind. His business model is born out of the desire to make college textbooks cheaper for students. So, his company posts textbooks online, which the teacher can remix, reorganize, add to, edit, etc., in order to come up with a customized textbook for the course, and which students can get in any format they want at a much, much cheaper price. They can even read the customized textbook for free online.
• Ms. Owen from Pearson Ed discussed copyright, which some people find boring, but I kind of like. Hey, did you know that there are works that might be under copyright in the US, but aren't under copyright anymore if we decide to use it here in the Philippines? Yeah, I finally clarified all that by listening to her.
• About the main thing I remember from Mr. Boughton of Cambridge Press is that Cambridge means quality and that their whole tech division is actually in our country.
• Then there was Dr. Joel Thierstein, who talked about Connexions, which seems more revolutionary than Flat World Knowledge, because Connexions gives everything--all textbook chapters and learning resources--away for free. Everything. And they have so much content on their site.

During the second day, the talks that stuck most were the following:

Charles Tan and Carl Javier who discussed the ereading experience; Paolo Chikiamco and Angelo Suarez who talked about independent publishing in the digital world; Dr. Dina Ocampo, Dr. Isagani Cruz, and Dr. Thierstein again, who discussed reading in the 21st century; and Gege Sugue, the founder of our awesome book club, Flips Flipping Pages, who gave an excellent talk on social networking for the bookish. She was joined by Joey Alarilla from Yahoo! Philippines, who essentially explained that it wasn't really the about the technology alone--but how the technology was changing the reading experience into something more social. Then, there was more discussion of copyright, and finally, the conference ended with the closing Keynote from book historian Dr. May Jurilla, my former professor and the one I blame for getting me interested in publishing.:) 

Making a historian give the closing speech on a conference entitled "The Future of the Book" might sound strange, but it actually made perfect sense. May gave perspective to the changing technologies involving reading across the millenia. Basically, her point was that technologies may change, but aren't really completely replaced. Plus the fact that when one talks about the future of the "book," then we may as well expand what we mean by the term "book," and not just refer to it as the physical object.

Now, what did I learn from the prevailing attitudes of the audience?

Let me situate myself: before I was a writer and editor, I was an English teacher, with a strong preference for reading and literature. But way before that, I was, am, and will always be a reader. So much so that I eventually joined a social networking site dedicated to books, joined a book club through that social networking site, had nerdy talks with other book nerds, started this book blog because talking just wasn't enough that I had to write about books, filled up my Google reader with subscriptions to book blogs, publishers' websites, and other book news sites, and follow all of these same people at Twitter. If you're a book blogger or if you're just reading this, chances are you've done all or most of those things. Where reading before was solitary, now it's become more community-based through the social networks.

And because of these social networks, I'm guessing that you, like me, get to know a lot of the trends and discussions in the book world. For instance, I doubt the debate between ebook vs. book is new to you. Some of you might have even have enough of this pointless debate, like Bookavore who came up with this ebook drinking game because of exasperation. There's a very good chance you've heard of the espresso book machine from months before, when the news was still new. Or that you know certain authors have announced that they would publish to ebooks directly and the consequent reaction of the publishing world.

In other words, I'm saying that you, we--the consumers, the readers--have certain behaviors now and possess certain knowledge about the book world. And all of that information about our behaviors and what we know is readily available to anyone who will frequent the sites, be it social or news, that book lovers frequent. So how come some of the things that were mentioned in the conference--things that would definitely not be news to a reader--were news to people whom you'd expect would know, given the nature of their job? Like the espresso book machine. Or like the presence of book social networks like Shelfari or Goodreads, and the book groups in them, such as FFP and the Filipino Group. Or book blogs and what we do with them and through them. 

You can tell it's news to people whenever one of these things is shown in a presentation and there's a gasp or an excited twitter (with a small t) from the crowd. Of course, it's not news to those who're often online. Then again, the ones who are often online aren't really the gatekeepers of the industry. So, it seems there's a big gap between what publishers know or where they are and what the consumers know or where we are.

For instance, when Flat World Knowledge presented the idea of a textbook that a user can remix and reorganize, there was some kerfuffle because some claimed that no textbook author would allow his/her work to be posted online for the purpose of remixing. I thought about that a bit, and I said to myself: Why not? I would. I could make money out of it, too, if I wanted, using Eric Frank's business model. Then I went around and asked people I knew whether they'd be willing to do that, because I thought: Hey, if people blog, thus freely post content online for other people to reference or modify, how far a step is free remixable textbooks from that? Everyone I asked (yes, they were experienced social media users) said they didn't see any problem with letting someone else remix their work, as long as they were cited.

This is the gap. Some gatekeepers can't see how it can happen; consumers are already there.

The indie publishers in the conference also expressed similar sentiments, most likely because they were readers, too, and familiar with all the readers’ social networks. They, at least, leverage the social networks and readers a bit more, do word-of-mouth advertising, and hand-to-hand selling. For instance, I contacted Carl through his blog and asked him if I could buy his newly released self-published book, The Kobayashi Maru of Love, at the conference. He sold me and my friend a copy right out of his bag.:) But, there are also some revolutionaries or future-savvy people in the bigger publishing houses. For instance, Vee Press of Vibal Foundation is going to launch 200 ebook titles during this year's Manila Intermational Book Fair, of which Carl's Kobayashi book is one. There's a long way to go, but this is a start.

In other words, as one who is a virtual neophyte to the publishing industry, I was fascinated to learn technicalities and such. But as a veteran consumer of the products of publishing industries, I wish there were more discourse between publishers and readers, both for trade and for educational publishers. The relationship can be mutually beneficial. 

I think Gege summed it up quite nicely in the last part of her presentation, where she mentions what we readers would want publishers to do: Teach us. Listen to us. Give back to us. (Ge, I know I forgot something in your summary, so just give me a verbal nudge.) Of course, if the publishers give back to us, we'd prefer it in books. That’s the only real currency book lovers know.;-D

In all seriousness, though, there are so many things that our local publishers and readers can do for each other, and I think we've barely scratched the surface. Like this overly long post of mine. It may have a small impact, but if it leads a publisher or writer closer to the readers, or if it makes a reader take the initiative to communicate with a publisher to tell them where we are, then that's something already, and the future of the book, no matter what form it takes, is more assured.