Publishing lessons from SXSW Interactive

Peter Miller, a publishing professional and used-bookstore owner, wrote about the SXSW Interactive festival in Austin, Texas, for Jacket Copy.

In Cory Doctorow's recent novel "Makers," a couple of punk geek tinkerers help reinvent society through repurposement. With a little startup capital they salvage trashed Dancing Elmo dolls to perform cute tricks in a Smart car and modify garden gnomes with gait-recognition software. But their coup de grace is to give Disney a run for its money by turning abandoned big box retail space into a fun house of the imagination, a crowd-sourced museum and a memory mashup.

Flying back to New York from Texas, it dawned on me that devotees of SXSWi never hated publishing or wanted us to roll over and die: They just wanted us to repurpose. This past weekend several publishing experts suggested how that repurposing might look. While last year's future of publishing panel met with hostility, this year the response was generally civil -- a major improvement.

SXSWi can feel that way sometimes. Float a trial balloon and hope the natives don't shoot. If my colleagues on that panel are correct -- and I have no reason to believe they are not -- publishing will be put through the media grinder in the next several years. Authors will become hybrids a little like the Elmo dolls. Picture Flannery O'Connor's head on Jessica Rabbit's body. Deluxe editions of "A Remembrance of Things Past" packaged with madelaine-scented cork. Faulkner's Snope family will have separate Twitter accounts.

If, as was suggested, New York publishers become more like L.A. film companies, expanding into an author's intellectual property, then it will happen at the big houses: Bertelsmann, Macmillan, Pearson, Hachette, Simon & Schuster, and Harper. Random House already has a film division to develop their backlist. What's stopping someone else from crossbreeding "On the Road" with manga? Video games with "Best Friends Forever"?

Since I have worked my entire career at midsized to smallish publishers, I can't help but feel a little remorseful about this projected future. I'm not being nostalgic before the fact or protective of my job. But I have to ask, when does a publishing house stop being a publishing house and morph into an entertainment agency?

Publishers are not above the rules of the marketplace. Publishing will survive -- in some form. Beware.

On my first day in Austin, I took a detour to the Center for American Studies to look through the old clip files of the defunct newspaper, the New York Herald-Tribune. I had contacted the center a week before and asked to see their archives -- called "morgues" -- for a few categories: burlesque, lost Manhattan taverns and radio.

Most of the radio folders were from the 1960s and, oddly enough, focused entirely on TV. But change TV to the Internet and this Jan. 2, 1966, piece could have been presented at SXSWi 2010:

A technological revolution is in the making which will touch off an explosion of wired and over-the-air services of many kinds into virtually every home. In the United States, commercial television, a booming billion-dollar advertising medium, will be swept out of its seemingly intransigent programming ways in the next decade. Scores, maybe hundreds, of new TV stations will crop up. More TV networks will be born. Recorded TV "programs" will be packaged in cartridges to be inserted in home playback machines. Color TV sets will range from hand-held sizes, possibly powered by the heat of the human hand, to eight-foot living-room picture screens. The world will be linked electronically by Early Bird-type synchronous satellites beaming TV to every corner of the globe. And, in the ultimate, all media may become one.

I slipped the newspaper article into its folder and sent it back into oblivion.

-- Peter Miller

Photo: SXSWi 2010 conventioneers on laptops. Credit: George Kelly via Flickr

At SXSWi: Jaron Lanier goes against the flow

Peter Miller, a publishing professional and used bookstore owner, wrote about the SXSW Interactive festival in Austin, Texas, for Jacket Copy.

There was no missing Jaron Lanier at SXSWi in Austin. He's one of the most revered legends in the tech and computer science community, a pioneer of the digital age who played a central role in developing virtual reality as a term, a concept and, well, a reality. And he's a physically imposing figure, a large man with long dreads playing on the Laotian instrument called a kaen.

But one on one, he's disarming. Lanier is all about shrinking the distance between people and challenging expectations. As an early adopter and booster of the Internet, it's easy to assume that SXSWi is his natural environment. Yet he looks and feels slightly out of place in its triumphant, depersonalized atmosphere. His new book, "You Are Not a Gadget," is a stern critique of the world he and his colleagues helped bring into existence. He offers up something not typically discussed at the Austin festival -- the darker side of Web 2.0.

He pulls few punches, going after Google, Facebook, Twitter, the noosphere, Wikipedia, Creative Commons, Silicon Valley. But these are mere symptoms of our true modern ailment: the hive mind. What pains Lanier more than anything else is that we squander the promise of the original World Wide Web. Instead we relinquish control and imagination to a few "monster sites" in the cloud.

It's that mindset that Lanier is trying to shake people out of with his book. To remind them that there is a choice between the Maoist freedom of open culture (give the music away so you can market the T-shirt) and Rupert Murdoch's imperial consumerism (pay you must, create you must not). Both options, Lanier argues, insult human potential and leave us all in the same position, impoverished "lumpen" -- marginal and disenfranchized.

The Internet was supposed to bring much more; Lanier says it's not too late to revive its creative potential, before social networks make us addicted to "followers" and Google gets rich off of our data. In his talk, he joked that today the National Security Agency could privatize and set up business as an ad agency. Lanier argues for a third way, inspired by the Internet's first visionary, Ted Nelson. Nelson created a proto-Web in 1960 called Xanadu that simplified the user's experience. One password and fee to enter the world, and one logical copy of each file, instead of the endless file sharing that clogs our bandwidth and cheapens the discourse.

I asked him if he was worried about the discourse at the festival and the reaction to his ideas. "Maybe two months ago before the book was officially out," he said, going on to say that he has been surprised by the "astonishingly warm reception" from the very community he criticizes.

I asked him about some of the publishing panel's predictions for the future, that authors will have to become better self-promoters and publishers Hollywood-style development offices. That unrelenting advertisement and pursuit of followers saddened Lanier a little bit. "Writing and thinking is not economically sustainable," he said. Authors may survive only through "long tail distribution," he mused. "But if it requires you to be a master politician, then your writing becomes political." He worries about the loss of individual voice with a crowd-sourced book, just another mash-up in a Wikipedia world where "everything loses meaning."

He found hope, though, in the panel's suggestion that publishers may finally make an end run around the traditional intermediaries of the business and reach out more directly to readers. For Lanier, everything comes down to human contact. His answer to my question about what role a publisher plays today shocked me enormously. "Even if no distribution function existed in publishing," he said, "there is value in their particulars as people."

When it was time for him to leave for his talk, a SXSWi escort gave him two placards for the podium, one with his name, the other with the Twitter hashtag. Lanier took the second one and put it to the side and ever so quietly (and politely) said: "I think I will ask the audience to shut down the tweeting during the discussion. I'd like them to try it as an experiment in alternate consciousness."

The escort said that was the first such request she was aware of at the festival. Then she smiled and looked relieved. "Good for you."

After three days and more than 24 hours of jargon, PowerPoint, and panel discussions, Jaron Lanier had suggested something no one else dared say in Austin: that this whole endeavor is nothing more than the people who create it. And then he asked all those people to quiet their offline conversations and engage with the people in the room.

-- Peter Miller

Photo: Jaron Lanier at SXSWi in Austin, Texas. Credit: Peter Miller

At SXSWi: A panel on the future of publishing

Peter Miller, a publishing professional and used bookstore owner, is blogging for Jacket Copy from the SXSW Interactive festival in Austin, Texas.

This morning I was chastised for suggesting that last year's publishing panel unearthed the depths of SXSWi's anger and resentment towards the book industry. She had been in the audience that day and watched our performance on stage: My "takeaway" was all wrong. The audience was just expressing their love for books in a different way. The opposite of love, I have heard more than one person utter around here, is indifference -- not hate. But as someone who earns his living as a publicist, I knew a PR disaster when I saw it.

This afternoon, the much-anticipated "Future of Publishing" panel filled a large ballroom of the Austin Hilton with twice as many listeners as last year. Kevin Smokler of BookTour.com moderated a very prepared panel of publishing experts: Pablo Defendini from Tor and Tor.com, Debbie Stier from HarperStudio, Matthew Cavner from the book-and-video company Vook, and Kassia Krozser from Booksquare. Rather than belaboring a question like, "Are publishers laying the roadwork of their own oblivion?," Smokler kept the discussion focused on concrete examples of progress within the industry and future opportunities that are closer than the audience might realize. By the size of the crowd that swarmed them afterward, they were a resounding success.

Apple's new iPad, pricing issues, licensing, transmedia, author self-promotion, print on demand, and the role of the editor were all touched upon during the hour allotted. There was little disagreement among the panelists about the brightness of publishing's future.

The fight between Macmillan and Amazon (which Defendini jokingly called "Macmillazonpocalypse") pointed out a disconnect between readers and publishers that has existed for too long. Traditionally publishers have viewed their audience as the professional buyers from bookstores -- Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Borders and independent booksellers. But publishers, Defendini said, "can't take the pulse of the readers" by giving over the authority to a intermediary like a retailer. Price shouldn't be dictated Macmillan or by Amazon but by the market; the next few months, as iPad enters the game, will be a fascinating and experimental period for pricing.

The role of the author would be forced to change radically: No more E.B. Whites tucked away in a Maine writer's shack. The new author, Krozser suggested a little scarily, "has to prove their worth" from now on. According to Stier, it is no longer acceptable for authors show up by themselves; instead they must come with their virtual "tribe." Authors will need to demonstrate a facility with social networking, or foster an ongoing relationship with the text that continues beyond the official publication, through crowd sourcing and customer feedback (imagine Thomas Pynchon adding chapters to "Gravity's Rainbow" as a premium to loyal fans).

And editors, too, can no longer view their red pencils as the only tool in the kit. They must start thinking of manuscripts or proposals as intellectual property, a kernel of an idea that could be launched into multiple formats. Publishers should stop emulating the old music industry and start picturing themselves as movie studios and books as film development. Max Perkins, meet David Selznick.

To a panelist they were all upbeat about this future, and the publishing figures in the audience shared that enthusiasm. Thomas Minkus, a vice president of marketing and sales for the Frankfurt Book Fair, loves the interplay of thought. SXSWi, he says, "is one of the most interesting conferences if you want to think about the future of publishing."

-- Peter Miller

Photo: A crowd is seen after the hourlong "Future of Publishing" panel at SXSWi. Credit: Peter Miller

At SXSWi: Dinosaurs vs. digital

Peter Miller, a publishing professional and used bookstore owner, is blogging for Jacket Copy from the SXSW Interactive festival in Austin, Texas.

On Sunday, talk of publishing was largely put aside as festival-goers, groggy from the lost hour of sleep, bore witness to self-congratulatory Media 2.0 discussions. The kind where representatives from Facebook or Gawker or CNN.com suggest that quality will always win out online and that Web communities are their own best policers. A New York Times columnist seated near me buried his chin into his chest as the debonair Pete Cashmore of Mashable cooed into the microphone: "If you are on the scene, you are a journalist."

I was disappointed when the promising-sounding panel "Blah Blah Blah: Why Words Won't Work" turned out not to be an indictment of print but a thinly veiled inspirational speech on visual problem-solving (and a subtle plug for the speaker's associated business book). But I began to understand what he meant about  society's over-verbalization. Dizzy from the SXSWi chatter about "ideation," "metrics," Google juice" and "content," I sought out more familiar pastures.

Surely the trade show would harbor publishers; we do relish a good exhibition room. But the only ones in evidence were tiny technical presses wedged between film bureaus and app developers. E-reader manufacturers and media conglomerates were noticeably absent. C-SPAN had its own booth, but not Mac or Kindle. More people were buzzing about Snooki than the pre-sales of the iPad.

I asked Ed Nawotka, an Austin resident and editor-in-chief of Publishing Perspectives, about the role books can play at an interactive conference. "It's a two-way street," he said. "SXSWi is finally acknowledging that the book business is an important sector." But publishers, he explained, have to go further and "talk the talk,"  because "if you don't, you are going to cede the business to the tech people.... Just give a damn. Don't not give a damn."

Will Monday's "Future of Publishing" panel deliver? Or will it just be more posturing? The toy dinosaur I picked up at the panel "Dinosaur to Digital: A Museum Convergence Success Story" will be on hand to find out.

-- Peter Miller in Austin

Photo credit: Peter Miller

At SXSWi: when publishing meets new media

Peter Miller, a publishing professional and used bookstore owner, is blogging for Jacket Copy from the SXSW Interactive festival in Austin, Texas.

At SXSWi on Saturday, I heard panelists state that publishing was now in the customer service business. These days, so much pressure is being brought to bear on authors and content providers to sell themselves that they can be made to feel like failures for not employing all the digital marketing tools at their disposal. Videos of lectures by AIDS researcher Hans Rosling get downloaded more often because Rosling knows how to entertain for the camera and the crowd, while oldsters like Nobel prize winner James Watson blows his chance by wandering around a TED conference stage scratching his head and muttering, "I thought there would be a podium" (the clip made the SXSWi crowd chuckle).

It was nice, then, to end the day with a panel of publishing experts who were neither reactionaries nor doom-sayers. The centerpiece of the New Publishing and Web Content panel was the Amanda Project from Fourth Story Media. An experiment in bridging the best aspects of Web and print, the site invites young women to contribute to an ongoing book series about a character named Amanda.

The project doesn't spell out the end of traditional book publishing as much as demonstrate another avenue. Lisa Holton, whose tenure in publishing often crossed over into new media, suggested that we should all take a step back from bashing publishers simply because they can't turn on a dime. Holton and her co-panelists (including Web design guru Jeffrey Zeldman) pointed out that the publishing process may seem unwieldy and redundant from the sidelines, but it holds tremendous intrinsic value beyond nostalgia. The world hasn't necessarily passed publishing by, it just has created multiple new intersecting markets. What's wrong with that?

In nearly any discussion of books these days, the argument usually devolves into either/or. Either the publishers get with the program or else. That "or else" can be a monotonous drum beat at SXSWi that drowns out genuine dialog. But for a moment, it felt in the convention center as if the attendees forgot what the program was or how it might be implemented. It felt like, briefly, all was forgiven.

-- Peter Miller

Photo: A SXSWi panel essential, the projector. Credit: Peter Miller

At SXSWi: Publishers are 'only innovative when they're desperate'

Peter Miller, a publishing professional and used bookstore owner, is blogging for Jacket Copy from the South by Southwest Interactive festival in Austin.

As the Can You Copyright a Tweet? panel was concluding at 1:30 p.m. today, it wasn't clear what the answer would be, or whether publishing would bring lawyers to bear on that kind of intellectual property.  However, the last questioner took a potshot that caught my attention, saying publishers were at heart “a slow-moving, retarded group of people.” Here was the kind of quote I couldn't pass up.

Waiting my turn to talk to the critic, I overheard other gems: “Publishers are square-dancing on a sinking ship.” Jason Scott is generous with those kinds of assessments and they didn't let up even after I told him of my role in the industry. "Book people," he said, "are slow, only innovative when they are desperate."

But I liked Jason. Whiskered, sporting a fedora and a sly grin, he is the kind of attendee conferences love to have. He's here because of his popular Twitter stream, Sockington, in which the travails of his cat, Sockington, are meted out 140 characters at a time.

Jason is very protective of “Socks” and swears he will never sell her out to promote a brand of kitty litter.  I asked if turning the stream into a book would be selling out -- a not so uncommon practice these days.  Not necessarily, but only if her fans demanded one, he explained. He polled his followers recently to investigate their openness, and many of them said they would buy a book if it is mostly photos of Socks, priced between $10 and $15. He has been approached by several agents and even offered a few thousand dollars (far more than he can make from Sockington-related T-shirts), but he still can't see the purpose.

Though Jason is not shy to share his opinions about publishing and books -- which he said are “codpieces” that don't reflect our times -- he is by no means anti-books. As we talked further, it turned out he was a “digital historian” who studies technologies that are on the brink of being forgotten, like the gaming industry of the 1980s, Web forums, and the soon to be unfashionable FTP. One would even peg him as a nostalgist.

Trying to define what he meant by a “sinking ship,” Jason explained that publishing can't admit that books are no longer the center of the conversation, but “just another voice in it.” He sees the expensive “sandstone buildings” housing these behemoths of editors, marketing, sales, and publicists tumbling down to be replaced by boutique houses like Taschen, which lavishes all sorts of print bells and whistles (glossy pages, special binding). They may charge $300 but deliver the quality you can't get in a tweet.

Maybe then he will let Socks sell out.

-- Peter Miller

At SXSWi: Could future J.D. Salingers learn from Mark Cuban?

Peter Miller, a publishing professional and used bookstore owner, is blogging for Jacket Copy from the SXSW Interactive festival in Austin, Texas.

SXSWi's opening day ended unceremoniously with a mass evacuation of the Austin Convention Center because of a pulled fire alarm. It took the steam out of the remaining panels, including the one I had been watching. Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, had been posturing with entrepreneurial smugness (he once wrote,"I have a whole lot more fun now. It doesn't suck to be rich.") about the gobs of money he was raking in from his startup HDNet, the first high-definition satellite network.

Will the authors who make it to SXSWi be savvy enough to work it HD-style, mugging for the flip cameras and tailoring their comments to 140 characters? Drinking on stage (as happened in Thursday's "How to Rawk SXSW") is celebrated and cheered. Try doing that at the annual book convention -- "How to Rawk BEA" -- and you would have a lot of sullen alcoholics bumming out the audience with tales of the publishing process.

In all the talk about the failure of publishers to get with the times, secondary questions arise. Can you turn a J.D. Salinger into a Mark Cuban? Can writers whose writing emerges from antisocial tendencies become social networkers? Should we encourage them to be more smug? Should we punish them if they don't?

The second day of SXSWi begins with promising panels, including "Why Keep Blogging?" and "Can You Copyright a Tweet?"

-- Peter Miller

Photo: at SXSWi in Austin, Texas. Credit: Peter Miller

How will publishing perform at SXSWi?

Pete Miller will be blogging for Jacket Copy from the SXSW Interactive festival in Austin, Texas; it begins Friday.

Last year I was invited to join a discussion at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival about the future of book publishing. An offshoot of the more famous music conference, SXSWi has built a sizable reputation of its own. Designers, programmers, futurists, bloggers and marketers convene each March to compare notes on new innovations, fresh uses of old technologies and the state of the community. They are consumed, to put it lightly, with the social implications of our digital future.

Unlike the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, SXSWi isn't, at its heart, a trade show. There is little or no corporate hoopla (yet). Attendees are here to foster debate and celebrate the do-it-yourself ethos. When it launches a product, it is usually of the grassroots, open-source wiki variety. Twitter broke out here -- something the festival is especially proud of.

The publishing panel was organized by colleagues of mine at Penguin publishers, and their invitation a kind of nod to my dual identity in the business. A bit of a rare bird, I work weekdays overseeing the publicity department for Bloomsbury, a midsized Manhattan publisher, and weekends behind the counter of a used bookshop I own in my Brooklyn neighborhood. While others would discuss the marketing and editorial and authorial aspects of the publishing process adapting to the digital upheaval, I would speak on behalf of the promotion and retailing of books.

SXSWi is as innovative and influential as Penguin is venerable and global. That I was asked to join a panel of other publishing executives and media experts (including their author, Clay Shirky) was in itself a peculiar decision. There were far more qualified strategists within the profession working for Penguin and other large publishers. I don't want to portray myself with false modesty as a boob in the woods, Pa Kettle touring a human genome lab. I have been in publishing for 20 years, long enough to straddle the two eras without being blindsided by change.

It turned out my role was not to explain what Bloomsbury was doing to face a paperless future, but to explain the industry challenges of promoting authors into a more disarrayed digital marketplace. Books are still around and will be so in multiple formats for the foreseeable future. How do we make readers aware of them if authority (a.k.a. book criticism) is slipping in the print media and migrating with middling success online? Is bottom-up social networking (a.k.a. consumer reviews) the only solution?

On the other hand, as a bookseller (albeit a low-wattage one) I suppose my comments would be judged with some sort of gravitas. I mean, reading is all about the end user. But can the bricks-and-mortar indie coexist with e-retailing? Shaky ground, indeed.

It isn't necessary to rehash the ensuing hijinks (I did that then), but let's just say we made a spectacularly bad impression. Perhaps it was the ambitious program name, “New Think for Old Publishers.” Perhaps it was the lack of a PowerPoint presentation instead of our single slide saying "The Internet is the largest group of people who care about reading and writing ever assembled in history. Now what?" Maybe it was the mere presence of “industry” types on stage, extolling the virtues of the publishing process to an audience of cool self-actualizers.

But as each of us cluelessly rattled on behind the comfort of our analog microphones, a flurry of keystrokes below were pounding out a parallel dialogue, one that was playing out live via Twitter feed across the lit-blogosphere and making my colleagues Back East blanch in embarrassment.

Was this a fair first impression? The playing field in Austin wasn't exactly level. We were labeled arrogant insiders, but new to the SXSWi scene we felt more like pimply teenagers on a prom date with a surly cheerleader.

Undeterred, publishers arrived back in New York bruised but better equipped for punishment. According to Kelly Leonard, executive director of online marketing for Hachette, it appears there are 20% to 30% more representatives from the industry converging on Austin. Last year she practically begged Hachette to let her attend. Now her retinue is five. Collectively, they are intent on demonstrating that publishers can adapt with the times, that we are not just music execs in tweed jackets.

This year, I am back in Austin to absorb the creative impulse celebrated at SXSWi and to enter the open dialogue about technology's relevant opportunities for the written word.

Yet I can't help but carry with me a seed of skepticism for that blind valedictory spirit. Jaron Lanier -- the acknowledged father of virtual reality and no slouch in the innovation department -- laments in his recent book "You Are Not a Gadget" that the open-source movement far too readily dismisses traditional media as dinosaurs. He calls it the "blaming the victim" syndrome; I call it the "I told you so" mentality.

For the next few days I will be looking for the kind of conversation that is about solutions and not about blame. My questions about the crowd and cloud publishing remain; hopefully this time I will find the answers.

-- Peter Miller

Photo: Austin, Texas. Credit: treasuresthouhast via Flickr