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I took a break from the grind of startup world to spend Saturday on “a conversation about the future of books, writing, publishing, and the book business in the digital age”, held in the Faculty of Information Studies at University of Toronto, by BookCampTO. Structured as an unconference and organized by the BookOven folks, the day attracted some smart, interesting people from across the book business spectrum.

The sessions, “What Are Publishers For?” and “The Quagmire of International Copyright” appear at first unrelated. But copyright processes and management are in the publisher toolkit alongside sales and marketing as ways to generate maximum exposure and revenue for their authors’ works. With demand for e-books and e-content beginning to explode, two questions unify the sessions: how do current publishing tactics support or hinder the development of sales and, looking forward, what tactics should publishers adopt or modify?

With that in mind, I thought these functions most relevant:
* Selection: what content should enter the publishing pipeline, based on meeting research-identified market demand
* Aggregation: a common point of access to multiple titles. While hyper-enthusiasts may diligently seek out self-published titles, the majority of the market requires some form of value-added intermediary.
* Sales and marketing: the business of finding, creating and fulfilling demand, either directly or through channel partners
* Copyright: the security needed by publishers to invest in the risk and costs of the aforementioned activities

With digital content, digital sales, digital devices and a prevailing digital mindset, how well do these tactics suit modern publishing, and modern demand? Here’s a hint, the copyright session carried the term “quagmire.” Most people support copyright, to the extent that it supports the creation, dissemination and commercialization of content, and fair use for consumers. But where we’re technically able to send any file anywhere, anytime — and where copyright can be expressed as bundles of prices and permissions attached to those files (and used to drive more business) — the industry is restricted by structures intended to govern physical distribution. That’s problematic for publishing: it leads to content arbitrage, where consumers end up picking the lowest cost for the same piece of content (all too often, zero.)

The trick to all this, as I’ve written before, is to attach what the web does well (interactivity, community) to permissions that facilitate the use of content in those conditions. In other words, build selection, aggregation, sales & marketing, and copyright for the medium. The result of this will be, 1) unique publications crafted from reusable, permission-based building blocks and 2) immense and positive implications for publishers, authors and consumers.