We all entered the book publishing space early in life without realizing it – it was the day we were first aware that the words on a printed page meant something and that the words and meanings stayed there.

As a practical matter, our next significant entry probably came in school, college or out in the working world when we realized we could attach our life’s work or major interests to some aspect of the industry – perhaps, originally, not even realizing the connection.

So it was for me -- passing through childhood in a small Bronx apartment filled with my mother’s books, few of which I read (but of those few marked by them forever by the wonders of imagination), World War II military service, a civil engineering degree and thirteen years in the printing business -- before I crossed the line to work as a production manager for what was then Monarch Press, a competitor to Cliff’s Notes in their early days.

Fast forwarding through work at Random House, Psychology Today Magazine/CRM Books and Prentice Hall/Goodyear and 24 years in Southern California in book production, trade organizations, small town civic engagement, writing columns in the local papers and independently consulting, I came back east to the mid-Hudson Valley in 1992 and by virtue of good fortune was engaged by Victoria Sutherland and Mardi Link to help them plan ForeWord Magazine in time for Book Expo in 1997. I stayed with them ever since as Editor at Large.

So now, ten years later, the internet and digital technologies have created a new platform for expression and infinite opportunities for publishing in many forms and formats.

Limitless subjects to blog about

In this blogging column I will seize the opportunity thus presented to talk about the past, present and future horizons of all of the elements that make up the functions of publishing – “making things generally known,” as is its generic definition.

We are at the center of a transforming industry and culture. So many of the legal foundations, business models, technologies and marketing tools that we use don’t seem to apply to the realities around us or when, as many of them do, they apply in new ways.

There is no end to the topics we can pursue , the ideas and the practices we can challenge:

• How should we manage intellectual property in the digital era of cyberspace?
• Will upcoming generations care about reading? In what interest areas? In what forms? For what purposes?
• What literary genres are ebbing and flowing – such as graphic novels, mind/body spirit, religion, science fiction – and what does it say about society in general?
• Does the author really make a difference? If so, how and when? Or is free access to content a right we enjoy without obligation.
• What are the new roles emerging for brick and mortar libraries and bookstores in the cyberspace world?
• How much does human nature need the codex (written book) as a medium of story-telling, information collection and cultural transmission?
• How will content and all of the existing publishing channels find synergies with portable hand-held, wireless portable multimedia devices?
• Do we need new business models to create revenue streams to compensate authors and publishers?
• How will new supply chain and work flow efficiencies affect job descriptions, job opportunities and career planning?
• To what extent will toner printing replace offset printing, and more importantly, how will real-time updating and multiple versioning of books affect reading patterns as well distribution channels?
• And super-ordinate to all of this are the issues affecting local politics as well as world order, civil society, faith, the creative and practical arts and human liberties – all of which are the stuff that publishing is all about.

And that is just a partial list.

There is no wanting for questions to ask; ideas to offer and challenge, new practices to learn about and old practices to wonder about. And, reaching back into our histories, commenting on the present and speculating about the future.

They are all game for this blog. What’s on your mind?

Posted by: Eugene G. Schwartz