While few publishers feel they are yet masters of this wired world, there is little doubt the book business is now part of it, and two definitive books from Financial Time Management on this subject should help publishers navigate within it -- and the help will come quicker if they are wired already.
Just a book? Why not a CD-ROM, a Web site or at least a textfile with a DOI number assigned? Clearly, FT Management, a Pearson company, was considering the books' editor and their audience. For the editor on both books is Anne Leer, senior strategist at Oxford University Press, the world's oldest publishing house, now entering its sixth century. (A woman who is paid to keep her eye on the future, Leer is also on the British Library's Advisory Committee on Research and Innovation.)
Masters of the Wired World, which will be released this month in the U.K. and the U.S. next March (distributed by National Book Network), is a compendium of thoughts on the future of the information society by 40 of those who are way out in front, including Alvin Toffler, Nicholas Negroponte and Arthur C. Clarke.
Vice-President Al Gore gives the most glowing promise of the electronic future when he says in his chapter: "As each breathtaking new development brings us closer together in communication and in common cause -- building a true global electronic village -- we have the chance to spread a new prosperity, a new literacy, a new love of freedom and democracy, and even a new sense of community." Clarke is slightly more realistic: "We should never underestimate the capacity of our own ingenuity to take us by surprise." And business guru Charles Handy says we will have to get a lot more down to earth: "The world I see emerging, with its looser organizations, has many threats and many dangers, but it should allow more people to stop pretending much earlier in their lives. If that is so, then the Wired World and Age of Unreason may become a better world."
How will publishers make a business out of all this? That is among the questions Leer addresses in the companion title, Welcome to the Wired World. According to Leer, this is a "corporate textbook," which synthesizes the commentary in Masters and adds compliance and regulatory issues she thinks will shape the electronic publishing business.
A European Commission-sponsored seminar at Frankfurt this year featured Leer and some of the contributors to Masters. "We have done books on paper to perfection," Leer told PW. "Now we must learn to promote and distribute better. Our biggest competition in publishing is people's attention elsewhere. We must find new ways to get that attention in the wired world."Leer believes the publisher's role is essential, including the business of branding. However, she warns, "Branding, which big publishers take for granted, must be fed and nourished, like people. The culture of a publishing house g s with its brand, and that brand attracts new people. If you have a cultural clash between the existing people and new media, you are threatening the growth and nourishment of the bedrock of your organization."
Though neither book is currently available here (Welcome has no U.S. date yet), thanks to our wired world they can both be ordered now from the U.K. at www.Amazon.co.uk.
