Computer publishers and authors came to the 11th Annual Waterside Conference in San Diego April 5 dazed and downhearted, and left three days later with a renewed sense of purpose.
The winter hadn't been kind to the industry: PC sales were down, meaning demand for titles was down, sales were at best flat and the number of imprints was down. Even the supposed growth area of electronic publishing was stymied by the bad news from tech stocks and the subsequent drying up of venture capital. So it was no surprise that publishers were reserved coming to the annual gathering of the Waterside Productions literary agency's friends to look at the market for the coming year.
With a kind of prescience that makes Waterside worth attending, agency founder and president Bill Gladstone slotted Rodnay Zaks, the founder, president and CEO of leading independent tech publisher Sybex Inc., as the keynote speaker. Zaks traced the ups and downs of the industry of the past four decades, and pointed to significant trends for the future. Noting that people had been wondering aloud if the current slowdown marked "the end of computer publishing," he commented that this period was nothing like the first part of 1983. "Christmas '82 was a disaster," he said. "No PCs were sold, so through January, February and March, no books sold, either. People thought it was the end of the PC. But the truth was that the fad was gone—the PC was fine. The early adopters had bought their computers, and the rest of the world hadn't caught up. As soon as the Macintosh appeared, the market began to grow again. We're in a time like that now—victims of our own success. There hasn't been any really new hardware or software for a while, just added features to products we already know."
But that's about to change, he predicted. "Moore's Law says that power doubles every two years, but communications technology is far ahead of that. Bandwidth is doubling every four months. And as always-on and wireless Internet connections become the norm, computer publishing will have lots to write about. The important thing is to know the real market, not the fads."
Lifelong Learning, Custom Books
The theme of serving the rest of the population (after the early adopters have moved on) reappeared throughout the conference. Bernie Luskin, vice-chairman of Global Learning systems, followed Zaks. Luskin quoted a "Peanuts" cartoon to illustrate the feelings of most of the populace regarding technology. In it, Lucy notes that on the cruise ship of life, some people face their deckchairs forward to see where they're going, and some face backward to see where they've been. When she asks Charlie Brown which way his chair will face, he replies, "Actually, I can't seem to get my deckchair unfolded." There is a huge market developing, Luskin said, in helping people get their deckchairs unfolded.
"Acc0rding to a recent Bell Atlantic study," Luskin said, "62% of the general population are PC-literate. That means resistance to computer use is down. Corporations have begun establishing training programs to get their workers up to speed."
Luskin pointed out that there is tremendous growth in learning institutions outside of schools—namely the corporate university. "The need for training is so acute that there are already 2,000 corporate universities, established by such diverse companies as Disney, Macdonald's and Wal-Mart, dedicated to fulfilling their employees' desire to learn."
These corporate universities are fueling demand for course materials incorporating every kind of audio/visual technology for delivering information, Luskin said. "Web, Digital TV, DVD, WAP and PDAs—anything to get people information they need just in time, right where they need it." For this reason, Luskin said, PDAs and handheld computers will become a huge market for computer publications this year.
Leading publishers in this movement to fulfill consumer desires, Hungry Minds and Microsoft Press each gave sneak peeks at their custom-publishing programs.
Richard Swadley, senior v-p of technology for Hungry Minds, explained his company's decision to abandon one of the most recognizable brands in the industry. Echoing Luskin, Swadley said the company had studied the way consumers used their IDG Books, and found that customers treated both the books and the Web sites, such as Dummies Daily, as learning tools—not reading them as linear texts, but referring to them continually. "Dummies Daily has more than 200,000 subscribers, and delivers more than 700,000 text messages per month; Frommers.com serves up 4.5 million page views each month. IDG Books was product-centered; Hungry Minds is experience-centered; it will become the preferred brand for 'continuous knowledge,' for lifelong learning."
According to Swadley, the new A La Carte program works like a college coursepack. Consumers create their own books, selecting chapters from any HM text, then receive the print-on-demand book in three to seven days, or as an e-book file in one hour. HM is also starting a program called Unlimited Editions, in which readers buy what amounts to a subscription to a basic text, then receive one new revised chapter or two new articles each month until the next edition of the print text is released.
Grant Duers, publisher and GM of Microsoft Press, announced his company's Custom Books program, which is going live now on the Web site mspress.microsoft.com. As a beginning, MS Press is making 36 titles in five categories (Windows, SQL Server, Exchange and Office, plus XML) available for consumers to browse, and then combine into their own custom texts. Titles will be available in print in four business days, and in either MS Reader or Adobe Reader e-book format within hours.
Throughout the conference, speakers referred to the complexity of today's software, with both operating systems and applications so automated that they don't need much explanatory text. If Zaks, Luskin and Swadley are right, individual attention to customers' needs will provide work for publishers and authors for years to come.
