PubWest Attendees Urged to Prepare for Either/And World
by Jordan Foster -- Publishers Weekly, 11/17/2008 8:02:00 AM
Even in the current economic slump, the independent publishers and trade professionals who flocked to the Publishers Association of the West’s annual conference and trade show in Portland, Ore. were eager to brainstorm ways to keep the book a valued commodity. Building on the success of 2007’s show, “Digital World,” this year’s conference, held November 13-15, focused not only on the impact of devices such as Amazon’s Kindle and the Sony E-Reader, but on new digital printing technologies and the increased need for environmentally-aware business practices in the publishing world.
Friday kicked off with an opening talk by Ingram Book Group chairman John Ingram entitled “Not My Father’s Ingram.” Touting the company’s print-on-demand and digital services, John Ingram emphasized that we live in an “Either/And” world, not an “Either/Or” world. Instead of choosing between printed books or e-books, publishers can and should focus on both, especially since, as Ingram pointed out, consumers’ expectations are rising. In this new “Either/And” world, Ingram urged the audience to make the most out of all the resources available, from traditional printed books to digitized files and print demand to downloadable e-books. He earned a round of applause when he promised the audience that in the new “Either/And” world they could be selling more.
The conference offered a variety of peer-to-peer seminars geared towards three main tracks in the publishing world: sales/marketing, editorial/production/design and financial/administrative. A popular panel, “Authors Breaking Out,” focused on how three writers use the Internet and book tours to raise their profiles. Moderated by independent publisher Ken Arnold of KenArnoldBooks, the panel featured novelists Marc Acito and April Henry and nonfiction writer David Wolman. Acito—whose comic novel How I Paid for College: A Novel of Sex, Theft, Friendship and Musical Theater won the Ken Kesey Award and generated a huge online buzz—uses his blog to interface with readers, as well as utilizing social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace. Henry—a mystery novelist primarily known for her Claire Montrose series and whose young adult novel Torched comes out next year—emphasized that writers must be willing to pursue signings and events on their own, especially as publishers struggle in these tough economic times. A contributing editor to Wired, Wolman—whose latest book Righting the Mother Tongue: From Olde English to Email, the Tangled Story of English Spelling came out in October—told the audience that even though book tours may not always be profitable for publishers, they’re a great way for the author to meet readers and get his or her book featured in a bookstore. All three panelists agreed that no one can move books like an author and sometimes all it takes to get a bookstore to order your book is to introduce yourself, even if it’s on your own time.
Digital printing and the advantages of print-on-demand were addressed in another seminar, “Digital Printing: Models from a Publisher Perspective.” Sylvia Mendoza, the design and production director at The University of Chicago Press has been using digital printing there since 1994. For Mendoza, one of the best things about digital printing is that it makes it possible to keep any book in print indefinitely. Through a grant from the Carnegie Mellon Foundation, the press has been digitizing their backlist as well as new titles for a digital archive. Arnold, who started the Portland-based independent publishing company KenArnoldBooks in January of 2008, employs print-on-demand for all his titles. Despite encountering resistance in the media world, Arnold told the audience that his goal was to produce books that are marketed virally on the Internet, rather than bowing to the demands of major bookstores.
Saturday opened with a “Visionaries” panel, moderated by The Oregonian book editor Jeff Baker, featuring novelist Ursula K. Le Guin, Dark Horse Comics founder and president Mike Richardson and Dennis Stovall, publisher of Portland State University’s Ooligan Press. Richardson, a lifelong comics fan, started Dark Horse after discovering that most comic book artists and writers didn’t own their own work, a policy that Richardson would change at his own company. He also admitted that he’s pleased that there will finally be a comics collector in the White House. (Barack Obama is reportedly a fan of Superman and Conan, the latter of which Dark Horse publishes.) Stovall, who founded the independent press Blue Heron Publishing, currently runs the graduate program in publishing at PSU, which includes Ooligan, the student-run press that produces four books per year. As for the future of the publishing industry, Le Guin spoke up for print-on-demand, telling the audience that she hopes it could help to elevate mid-list books and authors who don’t get enough attention. Richardson predicted that new methods of delivery—beyond digital and printed books—will evolve.
Since Portland is such an environmentally conscious city, it seemed fitting for PubWest to offer a panel on eco-friendly publishing. Moderated by Deb Bruner of Pinnacle Press, the talk featured panelists Cindy Peer of P. Chan & Edward and Ted Ricks of Bookbuilders West. While Bruner outlined numerous steps publishers and printers can take to reduce their carbon footprint and help preserve the earth’s dwindling forests, the most important one was to use only paper and mills certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). The panel emphasized the need for eco-friendly printing practices in the global marketplace, not just in North America, including using post-consumer waste paper, vegetable- and soy-based inks, and outlawing harmful logging practices.
During Saturday’s awards luncheon, the Jack D. Rittenhouse Award was presented to Richard Abel for his contributions to the community of the book in the West. Born in 1925 and a graduate of Reed College, Abel is known as the “father of the modern-day library approval plan,” based on the marketing and distribution firm he founded called International Scholarly Book Services (ISBS). He also founded numerous independent presses, including Champoeg Press, which specialized in reprint editions of rare books on western Americana, and Timber Press, specializing in botany. In sharp contrast to the overall enthusiasm for digital media, Abel told the audience that they should not “waste ten minutes worrying about e-books” and should “simply forget it.” Nothing, according to Abel, has come close to the visual stability of black ink on white paper and “in 500 years, no electronic medium has yet to surpass Guttenberg’s printing press.” Despite all the hype about viral marketing and the endless possibilities of the Internet, Abel stressed that publishers today have not found a way to use the internet in a creative and intelligent way; instead, the web has become a poor imitation of a printed catalogue.
Abel urged general publishers to identify their niches and focus on those, since there is no way to compete with the international conglomerates’ deep pockets. As niche publishers, Abel told the audience that it’s possible to use the internet not for e-books but as a place to create a community of readers bound by interest in a common subject matter.
Even if Abel’s stance on digital technology wasn’t shared by everyone at the conference, his declaration that those who work in the book industry are the people who build and drive the engine of culture was heartily embraced.
