Today I was a volunteer for Digital Book World 2011, an annual conference that discusses the changing technologies of the publishing world. It was cool–I got to meet people in the industry, and for about five hours I handled their coats. Yeah, that’s right: coats. It was actually a great way to meet new people, since nobody wanted to carry around their drippy, snowy, heavy coats all day.
I was able to see one of the talks, and it was about optimizing the sales of eBooks. Basically print-on-demand (POD) is on the rise, because it offsets printing costs quite a bit, and it is vital to digitize backlist titles. There were also a lot of statistics showing the effectiveness of digitization for certain books, and I was surprised to find that I’ve learned about most of this stuff in my NYU classes. I also learned that libraries are becoming more digital, and they are actually very helpful to publishers and still a big part of publishing.
The conference was held at the Sheraton Hotel, nearish to Rockefeller Center, and it lasted three days. To read more about the specific panels, check out the NYU blog posts Digital Book World: Optimism and Excitement and Digital Book World Day Two: Catering to Kids.
