Digital Book World members have shown their passion and enthusiasm for digital publishing again and again. But one of the most common questions we get from community members is how to share the knowledge our members glean through live WEBcasts, Roundtables, and our annual conference with their coworkers. That’s why we’ve made it easier than ever to educate your direct reports, your department, or your entire house at once, with corporate membership packages in 5, 10, and 20 licenses.

Here’s five ideas for how you can use Corporate Membership package right now in your house or agency:

1. Have your high level staff catch up on the New Workflows for Editorial and Production WEBcast, then meet to discuss its implications for your house.
2. Ask your department to check out Ebooks’ Real Impact on the Book Publishing Market: 2009 – 2011 WEBcast and have each of your staffers share the most important trends in digital.
3. Share individual panel audio/video from Digital Book World Conference 2011 sessions with your direct reports so you can collectively compile the key takeaways. Here’s a short sample of one of those sessions, Data and Practices to Help Publishers Optimize Ebook Sales, with Russ Grandinetti of Amazon:
    

4. Ensure your skills stay up to the minute by securing your staff’s access to all the audio and video at DBW 2012 as soon as it’s uploaded.
5. Be sure your office has all the tips and tricks they need from our Free Member Download section. So far, we’ve added an Ebook Formatting Checklist and an SEO Checklist and we’ll have more coming.

Of course, while there’s a big benefit, there’s also a big discount involved. If you buy a package of 5, you save $100 over an equivalent number of individual memberships. At 10, you save $240. And when you purchase 20 memberships, you’ll save $680, or roughly the equivalent of seven free licenses.

Corporate membership in Digital Book World lets you share insight, information, and digital education with your staff. With a 5, 10, or 20 membership package, you can ensure your entire department keeps their skills ahead of the curve. We’re glad that we now have a new way for the community to evangelize the digital work they’re doing in house and spread new skills for publishers.

Have questions about the new corporate membership options? Feel free to shoot me an email at matt.mullin@fwmedia.com. I’m happy to walk you through the setup steps or help you figure out which corporate membership is right for your house.

From the interview:

I think that it’s all about the content anyhow. Right now, you can see that there are online companies now that are getting into content because they’re worried about content. The fact that we still have things that people want to read, I think, is going to still be our major advantage.

And I think you can do both. My job as the CEO is not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

So we still have 80 percent of our volume, 85 percent, whatever it is, is still print. And that’s turning on the lights and paying my salary and paying for our booth [at BEA]. So we can’t just devote all our attention to ebooks, and the way that some of the mainstream media is representing ebooks, it’s like it’s 100 percent of the business all of a sudden, and it isn’t. And it certainly, I think, will never be 100 percent of the business….

A joint production of Digital Book World and Astral Road Brand Media: http://www.astralroad.com/. Founded by Rich Fahle, Astral Road Media is a full-service digital media agency, providing content strategy, design, video production, and other creative forms of social outreach for authors and content creators of all types.

By Scott Walker, President, Brain Candy, LLC

Multimedia. Crossmedia. Social media. Transmedia.

Our increasingly mediated world is playing havoc with the old analog rules but has yet to fully reveal the new digital ones. Digital piracy and changing consumer behaviors aren’t helping as companies attempt to construct long-term strategy with limited short-term visibility. Having seen the music and movie industries struggle (and ultimately fail) to cope with disintermediation (cutting out the “middle man,” so to speak), e-piracy, and shifts in consumer expectations, how can publishers negotiate their way to new revenue streams without sacrificing existing ones?

The good news, in my humble opinion, is there’s more than one answer to that question. Some are already here, while others have yet to be discovered, but the answers are emerging.

Here’s the bad news: the way forward isn’t going to be a one-size-fits-all silver bullet. Publishers – indeed, writers and agents, too – have multiple challenges facing them today. Further, solutions will require time to identify and implement them and even more time to have their benefits realized.

Over a series of posts, I’m going to explore one of those opportunities to create new, long-term, and sometimes sustainable revenue streams: value co-creation with customers.

Business scholar C.K. Prahalad explored this topic from various perspectives over the past decade or so, with the culmination of his research being the book, The New Age of Innovation. This book proposes two basic tenets: “value is based on unique, personalized experiences of consumers” and “no firm is big enough in scope and scale to satisfy the experiences of one consumer at a time.” Prahalad then identifies three transformations happening in business today:

• Companies are shifting from selling products to selling services (products are still in the mix, but consumers find value from the services instead of the products).
• Companies are shifting from having transactional relationships with consumers (one-time or isolated interactions) to having service relationships with them (a series of ongoing interactions).
• Companies are finding their business-to-business and business-to-consumer models merging together.

Prahalad goes on to explain how companies should begin to build global networks of resources to support these kinds of customized value, but let’s focus just on these points. He proposes that:

Value for consumers will take the shape of products wrapped in services, and companies will create this value by establishing networks of resources they need to generate the kinds of unique, personal experiences consumers are increasingly demanding.

At the recent LA Games Conference, I heard the phrase “the game as service” more than a few times. Game distributors understand that selling commoditized game titles that are self-contained units of content is no longer sufficient to compete for consumers’ time and attention. Anyone who has taken a look at Xbox Live understands it’s about far more than shooting aliens or racing cars around a virtual track. It’s about layering a social context on top of the game, which enhances the game content. The result is a more expansive, richer experience.

And that’s ultimately where I think we’re headed: experience-driven offerings (value) co-constructed in resource networks (co-creation).

Traditional business models involve a chain of interconnecting parties, with the last link in the chain being a customer passively consuming a product. It’s a one-way monologue of value transition.

However, emerging business models involve a network of parties, with no clear endpoint. Consumers become active participants, creating an ongoing conversation of value creation and consumption.

How might this apply to publishing?

Up to now, the common perspective of publishers has been to view themselves as the link in the transaction chain between authors and distributors. In most cases, this one-way chain of production still holds true: secure rights to a book (often via an agent), work with the author to produce that book, sell that book to as many distribution points as possible. Repeat.

Increasingly, however, the ability to link to other entities in non-traditional ways is presenting publishers with some interesting choices. For example, the direct-to-consumer market is a nascent but rapidly growing opportunity. More important is the realization that there are multiple ways to market to consumers and monetize content.

But I caution against viewing this shift as simply a way to extract dollars directly from consumers. In fact, I’m suggesting something more akin to viewing consumers as a valid and reliable partner in the overall publishing industry.

I’ll explore some specific examples of this in future posts, but until then, please consider the new opportunities made possible by viewing consumers as another resource in the publishing network – a resource not just capable but willing to co-create value.

Scott Walker likes to play in the collaborative sandbox of entertainment, building bridges between creatives and audiences. His most recent project is Shared Story Worlds, a site focused on participatory commercial entertainment. Scott is also a member of the StoryWorld Conference Council.

Interested in learning more about using transmedia storytelling and cross-media strategies? Join us at StoryWorld, the only major gathering of industry leaders, decision makers, and transmedia specialists, to explore new business models, innovative partnerships, and fresh revenue streams.

Ebook Piracy: How Do You Persuade People to Pay?

We’re picking up the issue of ebook piracy again this week because of Cory Doctorow’s piece in The Guardian, “In the Digital Era Free Is Easy, So How Do You Persuade People to Pay?”:

In this article, I take a first cut at a taxonomy of “value propositions for the purchase of digital goods” – that is, reasons you should spend money on digital files that you can get for free – and of the market strategies that enhance or undermine each strategy.

Positing 7 value propositions, ranging from “Buy this or you’ll get in trouble” to “Buy this and you’ll get more features than you would with the unauthorized version,” Doctorow’s taxonomy holds the promise of parsing out the discussion into more manageable statements about value. In an industry where the question is usually framed as “How do you stop piracy?” recasting the question as “How do you encourage legal purchases?” might be the solution, one that holds promise for many of the issues of this week’s roundup.

Will Publishers Find Sustainable Ebook Pricing?

Because really, the disconnect in pricing has a lot to do with perceived value, and it’s a disconnect being played in many arenas, but perhaps most noticeably at Amazon. At The Wall Street Journal tech blog, Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg brings in the example of John Locke, a self-published author that sells his books for 99 cents. According to Locke, the burden of proof regarding value falls not on him, but on the traditional publisher.

From the article:

“When I saw that highly successful authors were charging $9.99 for an e-book, I thought that if I can make a profit at 99 cents, I no longer have to prove I’m as good as them,” says Mr. Locke. “Rather, they have to prove they are ten times better than me.”

But, Mike Shatzkin at The Idea Logical Company brings up a great point about “what we know and how.” Even though discussion about ebook pricing has infiltrated mainstream media in force, there’s still a problem of scale. Talking about the pricing of individual authors like Locke is “anecdotal”; what publishers need to do is really experiment with pricing:

[P]ublishers don’t know nearly as much as they could and should about how price affects unit sales and total revenues.

Sooner or later, a big publisher or two will start seriously experimenting with this. They will gain knowledge that will enable them to tell an author or agent, “we know things about pricing that are worth real revenue to you if you publish with us.” When that happens, it will likely be more significant to an author than an increase in the ebook royalty rate would be. Maybe a publisher can even add enough value with pricing savvy to pay for their cut!

But, What About the Value of Books in General?

As if questions about value and ebooks were not enough, two stories about the value of print books caught my eye this week. The first involves Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies, a story shared by Michael Eisen, evolutionary biologist at UC Berkeley, who just wanted to acquire an extra copy of the out-of-print reference on fruit flies for his lab:

As I amusedly watched the price rise every day, I learned that Amazon retailers are increasingly using algorithmic pricing (something Amazon itself does on a large scale), with a number of companies offering pricing algorithms/services to retailers. Both profnath and bordeebook were clearly using automatic pricing – employing algorithms that didn’t have a built-in sanity check on the prices they produced. But the two retailers were clearly employing different strategies.

Showing in detail how he could determine the underlying strategies of the two retailers based on their automatic pricing behaviors, Eisen’s post is a fascinating look at how the resale market, or at least, the Amazon Marketplace, operates.

The apex of the price war over The Making of a Fly, however, far exceeded the estimated value of this 500-year-old copy of the Nuremberg Chronicle found in Utah. Missing pages and in poor condition, this copy might be valued as low as $50,000, but even one in good condition would “only” be worth up to $1 million. It turns out that “The rarity of the book has almost nothing to do with its value,” according to an antiquities and rare book dealer.

How does this relate to ebook pricing? Considering the ongoing discussion that an ebook purchase is not a sale of an object, but the granting of a license, the value of this 500-year old book highlights ambiguities about how we value books in general. Now that authors can autograph e-books on the Nook Color, what will the value of a personally autographed ebook be, especially since it can’t be resold?

How Can We Connect With Our Readers?

The topic of our last roundtable, “Direct to Reader: Best Practices for Publishers,” is very much part of an ongoing discussion in the book world about the apparent disconnect between the publisher and the reader. It seems an endemic problem for the industry, one that touches on so many other issues, including ebook pricing and piracy, author recruitment, and more.

But, it’s not just a problem in the US market. Writing about her experiences at the Leipzig Book Fair, Amanda DeMarco at Publishing Perspectives writes:

In Germany, the Leipzig Book Fair is known for being especially reader-friendly; it’s a wonderful environment for authors to connect with the public. But walking around the 2011 fair last month, I couldn’t help thinking that for publishers it was a massive missed opportunity to educate their audience, both at the seminars and in the stands. And that that missed opportunity represents a failure endemic in the industry, in Germany as well as in the United States.

Right now, we do a lot to inform ourselves about changes in the field, and we try really hard to market books to the public. What we do not do is make non-marketing efforts to inform the public about how publishing works and how it is changing.

However, it does seem that some publishing professionals see the writing on the wall, and this week several major players in the industry launched major initiatives designed to establish better connections with the audience.

The first, Penguin’s decision to launch Book County, an online community to support genre fiction writers, seems to acknowledge 2 basic principles about the current book market: first, that more and more readers are becoming authors themselves through self-publishing (and many are commercially viable) and second, that genre fiction, and the communities gathered around them, are especially vibrant areas of the industry.

That these communities should be cultivated was also on Macmillan’s mind this week, as it launched CriminalElement.com, to serve the crime book genre in a “publisher neutral” way, much like its sister communities, Tor.com and HeroesandHeartbreakers.com. Earlier this month, Hachette USA’s science fiction and fantasy imprint launched Orbit Short Fiction to get closer to its readers, and this week, too, F+W Media joined in the genre fiction market with the launch of F+W Crime.

In addition to community building done at the level of genres and imprints, niche markets too offer the chance of a more intimate relationship with the consumer. Take, for example, UK-based Gallic Books, which offers contemporary English-language books translated from French. In a companion piece at Publishing Perspectives, Edward Nawotka poses:

Certainly by developing an expertise in a particular market segment, publisher can exploit this to attract the best authors. In addition, by being so focused, they can hone their marketing programs to precision — something that is often lacking an publishing — and thereby develop a deeper relationship with an audience, a brand even, which can help them sustain sales in the long-term. In addition, several niches are simply too small for the large trade conglomerates to pay much attention to, thus leaving room for smaller publishers to take up the slack and thereby granting them an organic competitive advantage.

Is There Really Such a Thing as “Just Marketing” Anymore?

Finally, three links to affairs outside of the book industry, but with a great deal of resonance for book publishers. One of the complaints often heard about publishers’ inability to connect with readers is that whatever outreach they do is “just marketing.” But perhaps that’s an archaic view of marketing, downplaying the very real connections that marketers are forging between consumers and the brands they represent.

For example, video game producer Valve just launched a highly anticipated sequel to the first-person physics shooter (and personal favorite), Portal. For the release of Portal 2, in addition to colorful YouTube video extras, not-so-secret updates to the original title, and an alternate reality game that started back in March 2010. there was also “cross-promotional bundling” through Valve’s Steam distribution platform, that Chris Meadows at TeleRead links to the book publishing industry’s e-piracy woes.

Of course, the popularity of the Portal games is also heightened by its darkly humorous story world and how it is developed both within and outside of the game itself. The importance of story in branding extends into product marketing, too, as Sarah Doody at UX Magazine explains “Why We Need Storytellers at the Heart of Product Development”:

The first goal of a product storyteller is to facilitate collaboration and co-creation. Today, many companies have their product and marketing groups disconnected from each other. Marketing decisions are often made at the executive level—much higher than where product decisions are made. The result is that marketing tells one story, and the product tells a different story. In the end, consumers are left to put together the conflicting messages and try to determine why they should engage with the product. A product storyteller should be positioned in the company to help break down the walls between all groups, facilitate the development of a single story, foster collaboration between groups, and ensure that every interaction a consumer has with a product or brand maps back to that story.

A third look at the marketing world comes to us from Coca-Cola’s Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing and Commercial Officer Joe Tripodi, writing at the Harvard Business Review blog. Describing concrete ways to look at “consumer expressions” (consumer responses to marketing initiatives) in addition to “consumer impressions” (the number of consumers that encounter an initiative, Tripodi lays out the numbers:

We estimate on YouTube there are about 146 million views of content related to Coca-Cola. However, only 26 million views were of content that we created. The other 120 million views were of content created by others. We can’t match the volume of our consumers’ creative output, but we can spark it with the right type of content.

Tripodi offers great insights into how Coca-Cola has encouraged user content and engagement in social media campaigns (one of which is an anachronistic Twitter account for Doc Pemberton, the inventor of Coke’s secret formula). If a connection with readers is what publishers need to survive and to thrive, both Coca-Cola and Valve should provide inspiration for going beyond “just marketing.”

But, in both cases, the primary holders of the brand or IP, respectively, gave up a certain amount of control to allow consumers or other video game companies to create or collaborate, making those connections a productive way to market. Can the book industry do the same?

Tweet of the Week

That’s just a taste of what you may have missed this week. To stay on top of the most interesting news, commentary and tweets related to publishing, keep in touch via our RSS feed, follow us on Twitter, join your publishing colleagues in our LinkedIn group, and connect with the broader DBW Network.

Find the Future is an interesting example of library community building, and the in-person event serves as marketing for a crowdsourced book that will be created through game mechanics.

At the event, 500 special guests will play an on-location game involving a hundred historical objects on display (including for example, the library’s copy of the Declaration of Independence in Thomas Jefferson’s hand), QR codes read by smartphones and used on laptops, and quests that serve as writing prompts. Through the gameplay, participants will submit content—text or images in response to the quests—that could be included in a publication compiled from player submissions, using the Biblion: The Boundless Library app, which will be launched at the event. After the on-location event, an online version of the game will also be available to play for free as well, so the experience is not limited to those able to attend the live event.

From an interview with the NYPL, game designer and writer Jane McGonigal claims that “The game is designed to empower young people to find their own futures by bringing them face-to-face with the writings and objects of people who made an extraordinary difference. Like every game I make, it has one goal: to turn players into superempowered, hopeful individuals with real skills and ideas to help them change the world.”

That player contributions will result in a book is just one of the compelling dimensions of Find the Future. Using game mechanics to encourage collaboration and to creativity, while focusing that playful energy into positive projects is the hallmark of game designer Jane McGonigal’s work, brought together in her recent New York Times bestseller, Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. With an emphasis on social awareness, one of McGonigal’s previous games, Evoke, channeled gameplay into over 50 social enterprises, and McGonigal has appeared in numerous venues to discuss the transformative power of games, from a talk at TED2010 to the Colbert Report to, most recently, being named Speaker of the Event at South by Southwest Interactive.

Encouraging user-created content and even channeling gameplay into creativity seem to be among the more commonly adopted strategies to encourage interactivity by blurring the lines between creator and consumer. Another example of focusing the user experience toward an active and productive end include the recently completed alternate reality game Black Helix, a project supported by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland that will result in a crowdsourced fiction project. In a less fictionalized experience, Digitalkoot, a Finnish library project that uses game mechanics to correct OCR conversions manually in order to improve the quality of the library’s digitized heritage collection.

It will be interesting to see what will result from real-world engagement with historical artifacts and game mechanics at the Find the Future event, but excitement about the experience is already high: at the time of this writing, there are over 1600 entries for the 500 spots. Submissions will be accepted until April 21: just head over to the Find the Future website and respond to a writing prompt about your vision of the future.

Topic: Know Thy Reader (Now, More Than Ever)

This episode of The Roundtable was webcast live on Thursday, February 23rd @ 1pm ET / 10am PT.

• Register to participate LIVE
• Subscribe to the audio podcast
• DBW Members can access the on-demand archive of The Roundtable

THE PANELISTS

• Laura Dawson, Content Chief, Firebrand Technologies
• Pablo Defendini, Interactive Producer, Open Road Integrated Media
• Matt Mullin, Community Relations/Marketing Manager, Digital Book World
• Brett Sandusky, Director of Product Innovation, Kaplan

THE MODERATOR

• Guy LeCharles Gonzalez, Chief Executive Optimist, Digital Book World

LINKS

E-books Boost Sales: From the AAP
Publishers Weekly

The good news for reporting companies is that the significant growth in e-book sales was able to make up for the drops in print revenue, resulting in a 0.2% increase in combined print and e-book sales in 2010. E-book sales represented 8.3% of combined trade sales in 2010, up from 3.2% in 2009. E-book sales have jumped 623% since 2008, when sales from reporting companies were $61.3 million, a figure that represented about 1% of trade sales.

“Context first”, revisited
Brian O’Leary, Magellan Media

The challenge is not just being digital; it’s being demonstrably relevant to the audiences who now turn first to digital to find content. New entrants – our real competition – start with the customer.  They develop contextual frameworks that help them differentiate both readers and themselves.  The new guys like the new tools because they are cheap, scalable and open-source.  In fact, they are already exploiting tools that many traditional publishers lament are “just too hard to learn”.

What Blogs Can Do
Three Guys One Book

Book marketers need to understand that their role is to facilitate conversation about books. I am willing to define books themselves as distilled conversations. Blogging, reviewing, interviewing are just extensions…amplifications of the original literary process. They are essential to a literary culture. And you need such a culture if you want books to thrive. And yes, if you want them to sell. The sooner the talk starts the better, and the more often the talk takes place the better, especially if it is really good talk. What is marketing? Make people talk. That’s it!

Why Most Facebook Marketing Doesn’t Work
Peter Yared, Read Write Web

Make sure your fans get something in return for liking your page with promotions likes offers for fans that they can easily redeem. The more lucrative the deals offer, the more sharing with friends will happen. Fans want things like exclusive products/services, drastically discounted prices akin to Groupon type deals, and early notification and registration for upcoming events, ideally exclusive to fans. Promotions should make the fan feel like they are a brand insider, not just a standard consumer.

You Want a Publishing Success Story? Here It Is
Noelle Skodzinski, Publishing Executive

We set out to be a media company, so as not to be dependent on print only. We focused on a community of people and endeavored to know more about them than anyone else. These two things gave us the resilience and the foundation to not only weather the recession but thrive in the recession, because innovation was less expensive and our competitors were busy cleaning up bigger print messes.

The Pitfalls of E-Book Buying: What to Look Out for Before You Purchase
Melissa J. Perenson, PCWorld

The digital rights management issue remains a point of distinction between Amazon and its competitors. Sony and Kobo, which sell e-book readers as well as e-books, are quick to point out that they, unlike Amazon, use the industry standard ePub format; Apple does, too.

But ePub support alone isn’t synonymous with cross-platform support. Applying DRM to an ePub file can make the ePub book incompatible with other e-readers (be they software or hardware). For example, Adobe Digital Editions ePubs that carry DRM can be read by other software or devices (like Sony’s Digital Reader series of e-readers) that support Adobe Digital Editions. But if you use Adobe’s PC-based library manager, you’ll have to jump through the hoop of entering an Adobe ID.

Barnes & Noble’s e-book shopping experience can be even more confusing: The company has voiced support for ePub, and it offers ePub-formatted books; but when you buy a book, you have no way of knowing whether it has DRM protected. If it is, it’s locked to Barnes & Noble’s system. Furthermore, if you want to redownload an e-book you bought from Barnes & Noble, you’ll have to provide the credit card number that you used to buy it originally.

Is the future of physical book publishing the same as the future of reading and writing?
Daniel Nester, We Who Are About to Die

When I was at AWP last weekend, I saw not one, not two, not three, but four people reading from Kindles while manning publisher tables. I myself read a couple chapters on Kindle for PC of Patton Oswalt’s new memoir. So here we are at a bookfair that celebrates writing, the typefaced word, and reading, and people who are pimping the printed objects are reading for pleasure from screens. Kindles!

You Want a Publishing Success Story? Here It Is
Noelle Skodzinski, Publishing Executive

We set out to be a media company, so as not to be dependent on print only. We focused on a community of people and endeavored to know more about them than anyone else. These two things gave us the resilience and the foundation to not only weather the recession but thrive in the recession, because innovation was less expensive and our competitors were busy cleaning up bigger print messes.

Interweave Certifies Half Its Company in SEO, SEM
Folio:

Eighty-five Interweave employees from a variety of publishing disciplines received access to Mequoda Group’s archive of 32 Webinars and 45+ hours of training library whitepapers and attended seminars and received one-on-one coaching. “This is something that probably no other content company in the world can say,” says Interweave CEO Clay Hall. “Interweave is committed to building and deepening our expertise in search-engine optimization, blogging, e-mail newsletter and Web site strategies, and social media marketing in this new media environment.”

Relationship Doesn’t End With The Sale
Jack Loechner, Center for Media Research

Timely, relevant emails tied directly to consumer behavior deliver much higher metrics than broadcast emails, notes the report. 80% of survey respondents reported an open rate of 21% or higher for cart abandonment reminders while only 31% experienced similarly impressive results from their general broadcast emails.

Tweet of the Week

That’s just a taste of what you may have missed this week. To stay on top of the most interesting news, commentary and tweets related to publishing, keep in touch via our RSS feed, follow us on Twitter, join your publishing colleagues in our LinkedIn group, and connect with the broader DBW Network.

By J. J. Madden, Independent Writer / Multi-media Producer

It was reassuring to be at the second-ever Digital Book World Conference, if only to see so many others hurtling forward in the same general direction. We were all a little breathless in the brief time-out from our unexpected digital journeys.

Mine began four years ago, when I had an idea for a book. Ironically, it’s a strategy parents can use to introduce their kids thoughtfully to the online world. I started down the publishing road like everyone else back then: researching the topic, writing a manuscript, sending out proposals. I found out pretty quickly that no one wanted to print tech-related non-fiction – especially by an unknown author.

Then the ground began to shift.

I was at an American Independent Writers conference, cheerless from some face-to-face rejections, when I wandered into a session called “The Online Platform.” We were told that if a writer is going to be successful, she had better have a blog, website and Twitter account. Agents won’t even talk to you, the speaker insisted, unless you come with a posse. Sensing I had no choice (and no posse), I set out to create my digital lasso. While I was still sorting out the hashtags from the plug-ins, my husband gave me a Kindle and I saw how Amazon was squeezing book-selling like a python.

Shortly after that, I stumbled upon the Digital Book World Roundtable.

Each week I would lurk, listening in on Guy LeCharles Gonzalez and his merry band of digital pioneers. After a few months, they convinced me the writing on the wall was electronic, so I studded my manuscript with links. Then, last summer – driving between West Palm Beach and Jacksonville – I wrote a script in my head for a companion video. A few months later, as luck would have it, I was able to attend DBW 2011 to do some interviews and shooting cover footage.

DBW 2011 Conference Wrapup

Hillel Cooperman on A Story Before Bed

Wired’s Frank Rose on the Past and Future of Reading at Digital Book World 2011

The formal sessions were captivating, as was the time in between. From executives to entrepreneurs – all were happy to share their thoughts.

Inaugural Publishing Innovation Award-winner, Hillel Cooperman, showed me how his kids and his parents can read books together on the iPad, even when they’re on opposite coasts. And, author and Wired scribe Frank Rose divulged that he is “groping” toward understanding this strange, new medium (though his book is published). Vook‘s Matt Cavnar enthusiastically noted that “it’s early days. This is the Paris of the 1920s of the digital book experience.”

I returned home grateful for sipping the nectar of a blossoming industry – and encouraged as I grope my way towards the future.

J. J. Madden is an independent writer, multi-media producer, and broadcast news veteran based in Washington, D.C., who specializes in topics of health and personal sustainability. She has traversed the digital divide along with her three children, the youngest of whom would prefer she not pay any attention. J. J.’s blog about sensible living in the digital world can be found at durablehuman.com.

The DBW Roundtable is a live, interactive webcast featuring some of the most outspoken industry professionals gathering to discuss and debate the hottest publishing issues of the moment.

2/10 @ 1pm ET: Publishing Without Borders
2/24 @ 1pm ET: Know Thy Reader (Now, More Than Ever)

THE PANELISTS

• Laura Dawson, Content Chief, Firebrand Technologies
• Pablo Defendini, Interactive Producer, Open Road Integrated Media
• Matt Mullin, Community Relations/Marketing Manager, Digital Book World
• Kate Rados, Group Marketing Director, F+W Media
• Bridget Warren, Former Co-Owner, Vertigo Books

THE MODERATOR

• Guy LeCharles Gonzalez, Chief Executive Optimist, Digital Book World

These final two episodes will lead into a changing of the guard as Matt Mullin will be taking over stewardship of the DBW Community starting in March. Join the Roundtable crew for two provocative discussions that will set the tone for what promises to be another exciting year in the publishing industry!

• Register to participate LIVE
• Subscribe to the audio podcast
• DBW Members can access the on-demand archive of The Roundtable

NOTE: Previous Roundtable registrants will have to re-register for these two free events.

“The right information, at the right time.” --Christopher Ferebee, Partner, Yates & Yates, LLP

The Digital Book World 2011 staff is still digging out from the literal and metaphorical snowstorm of the past week — (Thunder Snow?!? Really?) — but one of our top priorities was getting the attendee survey out for immediate feedback on the second edition of the Conference, a day longer and twice as large as 2010′s debut, to find out what they loved, liked, and thought needed to be improved.

Not surprisingly, the latter included the free WiFi access which frequently buckled under the weight of 1,200+ fully engaged attendees, as tweets were posted at such a fever pitch #dbw11 ended up as a top trending topic on Tuesday morning, before the breakout sessions split attendees into four separate hashtags. “The WiFi Curse,” as the NY Times referred to it last month, is a challenge all conferences face, but rest assured that we’re already looking into ways to improve it.

Technology challenges aside, though, the feedback we’ve received so far on the three-day program itself was overwhelmingly positive, and we’ve collected a sampling of the congratulatory comments that have come in so far.

[NOTE: All registered attendees received an email on Wednesday afternoon with a link to the survey and we encourage you to respond at your earliest convenience with any and all feedback, positive or negative. If you didn't get the email, or would like to offer more detailed feedback, please contact Matt Mullin.]

ATTENDEE TESTIMONIALS

“DBW11 was a terrific investment in my start-up publisher. It exposed me to best practices and big thinkers in a market that is changing faster than anyone outside that market understands.”

–David B. Schlosser, Publisher, Equinoctes Media

“I found the show well constructed, well planned, and full of useful information. My thanks to the organizers.”

–Gary Gentel, President, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Trade

“DBW is a valuable resource for anyone working in or around the publishing industry. The right information, at the right time.”

–Christopher Ferebee, Partner, Yates & Yates, LLP

“The sessions were very informative, the structure was well organized and it was an excellent networking event.”

–Lisa Faith Phillips, Director of Digital Strategy and Development, Hachette Book Group

“The conference provided a good overview of where trade publishers are in the digital transformation and offered some excellent insights on the opportunities and issues that this transformation has wrought. It was two days well spent for me.”

–Richard Rhorer, Director of Digital Business Development, Macmillan Publishing

“It is a wonderful conference – packed with high quality sessions and excellent opportunities for networking.”

–Susan Kesner, Director, Rightsholder Experience, Copyright Clearance Center

“Digital Book World is the essential event for all of us finding our way through to the future of publishing and beyond.”

–Mary Ann Naples, VP Development, OpenSky

“Both useful and exciting – I came away charged with new ideas for our digital publishing”

–Andrew Franklin, Managing Director, Profile Books, London

“I went to DBW to learn more about the US Market and ebook publishing in USA. I’m working with publishers and bookstores in Canada and I discovered things are actually the same in both countries. Everything goes fast and we are all learning about this new world together. DBW was also the moment to meet partner Baker & Taylor. It was a great experience for me.”

–Martine Rioux, Digital Publishing Services Coordinator, Marque

“Digital Book World stands out as one of the most valuable professional conferences I’ve attended in recent years. Covering the gamut of issues that publishers are grappling with in the digital age, the conference left attendees with much to think about as they devise new, more flexible business models for the future.”

–Erika Heilman, Vice President, Editorial Director, Nicholas Brealey Publishing

“Digital Book World 2011 conference brought together a community of thought leaders and publishing industry stakeholders who are together creating opportunities, addressing technology and culture challenges and socializing best-practices that will ultimately definine the texture and shape of the ebook market and help evolve our long and passioned tradition of delighting and engaging readers.”

–Susan Adelmann, Director, Emerging Product Strategy, Follett Software Company

“The conference was everything I had hoped it would be. Extremely well run and informative.”

–Barney Saltzberg, Picture book author/illustrator, Inkless Publishing

“A bellwether”

–Lindy Humphreys, Director, Digital Assets & Publishing Technology, Abrams

“The conference was chock-full of information, stories, experiences and the buzz of digital book publishing which has taken on a new life with the advent of tablets. The doubling of attendees this year testifies to the need for this conference. Well-organized and executed.”

–Daniel Heffernan, VP Sales & Marketing, Advantage Computing Systems

“Great conference! The seminars I attended provided me great data which will certainly be helpful in developing our digital strategy.”

–Curtis Key, Director of Digital Publishing, Casemate Publishers

“Good information for all publishers, not just trade publishing.”

–Rosalie Donlon, Acquisition Editor/New Product Development, Wolters Kluwer Law & Business

If you weren’t in attendance but following along on Twitter, feel free to let us know what you thought about the conference here in the comments.