O’Reilly Media’s Tools of Change conference returned to New York City with its unique combination of headsplitting technical details and visionary futurism. Book publishing at the TOC serves as both hero and goat—the unlimited potential of unleashed digital content sadly suppressed by the industry’s tentative response to the evolving digital marketplace. Perhaps that’s why the show is so interesting—besides trying to identify the next big business thing, the show portrays the new world of networked digital publishing as a qualified form of Nirvana, holding out the promise of an almost magical connection to people, events, products and services from any place in the world at any time.

Easily the best example of the TOC’s hardheaded technical details was the panel on the legal settlement executed in the fall of 2008 between the book industry and Google over its ambitious plan to digitize all books, whether in print or not, and make them available to the public through Google Book Search. The book industry, represented by the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, filed a copy-infringement suit against Google (Google claimed fair use) in 2005, and Bill Rosenblatt, president of GiantSteps Media, a technology consultantcy, and John Kreisa of the digital services company Mark Logic walked the audience through a thicket of details defining the book industry’s new relationship to Google Book Search.

Among other things, the settlement requires Google to provide about $30 million to set up the Book Rights Registry, an independent agency that will function sort of like the Copyright Clearance Center, to monitor and dispense rights and payments. The BRR will act as a rights database and divvy up royalties to the appropriate parties based on a well-defined set of “initial business models” related to the current Google Book Search model—limited display of content, publisher-controlled free previews, shared ad revenue and publisher-directed links to online retail.

On the other hand—and this is where it gets interesting—the settlement also provides for future business models—POD, custom publishing and per-page pricing, PDF downloads, subscriptions, summaries and abstracts. According to Rosenblatt, the problem is that these future models, as detailed in the 141-page (plus supplements) settlement agreement, are based on digital formats other than the page-images on which Google traditionally bases its search business. Defining and securing the rights to these formats from publishers will take more than a notion. And while these future models are “aspirational” proposals that do not require Google to implement them, they are also likely to be important potential revenue streams in the new and increasingly near digital future. And remember, the BRR is an independent agency and any service provider, not just Google, can offer a plan to the agency to exploit these future models.

How these rights will be secured and exploited by Google or someone else should keep the lawyers and the visionaries busy for some time. In fact, Rosenblatt says that it will probably take as long as two years just to get the BRR up and running to service the initial business models, let alone the aspirational ones. Rosenblatt and Kreisa say the future business model will require publishers to restructure their content in ways most of them don’t do at present. How do you secure and define the rights to set up a custom-publishing service that combines content from different publishers? What about textbooks with a multiplicityof content—photos, text, art and charts? Dealing with multiple publishers can be difficult enough, but what about out-of-print titles whose rights have reverted to the author—will aggregators need to negotiate with every single author? “It will be very complex,” says Rosenblatt.

The rest of the TOC lurched delightfully from the ever-present worries over e-book piracy—a joint study by Random House and O’Reilly to track such piracy led them to conclude the threat is “overstated”—to gnostic exhortations to the book industry (“Life is public, so is business”; “your customers are your ad agency”) by keynote speaker Jeff Jarvis, author of What Would Google Do, to go and get some “Google Juice.” Dedicated e-readers—including the new and forthcoming thin plastic device from Plastic Logic—were all the rage, yet Sara Lloyd, digital director of the U.K. house Pan Macmillan, offered a keynote that was a longish history-driven manifesto on the future of book publishing that essentially led her to the mobile phone as the likely locus of the digital publishing future.

The TOC conference alternates between the confusing and the inspiring, the revelatory and the perfectly obvious, which I suppose is the best way to describe the current moment in book publishing.