Trends and the Future at Yale Publishing Course

Cards are exchanged, and sometimes hugs; goodbyes are said and promises of future conversations are made. It's the last day of Yale Publishing Course and we're ready to all get out there and implement all the things we've learned.

As we wrap up our week here, it's appropriate that we're looking into the future. It's been a wild couple of years; and if we had all gone to sleep two years ago and woken up today we wouldn't recognize the scene. Brian Napack of Macmillan asks us to consider what is a book, what is a magazine, how will we consume it? Readers of ebooks read up to three times more books than they did before they got their ereaders, and that is very good news again. As publishers we need to be creative and agile enough to take these trends and create revenue models that work.

Bruce Judson, Yale's Entrepreneur in Residence identifies some of the important things to understand about current trends: that the internet explodes everything into its smallest component parts (successful web entrepreneurs will look to what they can unbundle and integrate into easily-managed outsourced systems); the power moves from "studio" to "star" (successful authors will look to taking packaging and marketing decisions from the publisher); in times of crisis the cost of entertainment matters. What should publishers do? Collect names; sell online agressively; offer new business models that offer services a la carte to publishers are a few of the suggestions made.

Tom Turvey of Google adds his perspective on the new world of publishing, where Google will offer books that can be read on any device from anywhere in the world. The four trends that Google is leveraging are mobile, social, enterprise, and cloud-based apps. Mobile is growing 8 times faster than the PC internet; in fact, mobile IS the internet in some countries. Smartphones will outpace internet PCs in the next 2-3 years. Google will make sure that their books can be read on any of them.

Futurism is a shifting mix of probably grounded in the now and creative storytelling, and JB Labrune of MIT's Media Lab showed possibilities ranging from stackable cars, programmable brains, and other futures grounded in current possibility and exisitng in the world of the imagination.

That convergence, of what is and what might be, is what defines our world and our business; and by acquiring new knowledge and exchanging fresh ideas, we're that much more prepared to be part of what we are to becomes.

Linda Ruth is a co-founder of Exceptional Women in Publishing (www.ewip.org); she is blogging from Yale Publishing Course (http://publishing-course.yale.edu/).