In Toronto Friday (June 9) I attended the above-titled conference day, which was more interestingly subtitled "Linking the Content Creators to the End Users"—particularly provocative wording for an audience of book industry people. The day was evidently run and set up by Don Sedgwick and Shawn Bradley; if anyone can talk to book people, it's them.

The sessions were rather interesting, too. Apart from an all-too-tame panel featuring representatives from all three of Amazon, Google, and MSN's respective book-slurping projects, the key personalities of the day were Michael Cader of PublishersMarketplace (which he says boasts 35000 subscribers) and tazmanian-devil/inspirational web/lit/speaker Kevin Smokler.

The interesting thing, for me at least, was that neither Cader nor Smokler said anything particularly new or interesting, at least for a tech audience—I've heard essentially these same presentations given dozens of times over the past, er, decade or so, even given a few of them myself. What was notable was that there were several hundred book people who had signed up and paid to spend the whole day listening to it. Rather than, in previous years, mostly ignoring such talk when it did appear at the margins of an otherwise traditional conference program.

Is this the year, then, the book industry takes the web seriously? Of course I'm not talking about the big players; Amazon is a decade old itself, and among the crew of online marketers from Random House Canada in attendance there was certainly a lot of tongue-clicking going on; nothing new for them here either. But the bulk of the crowd was the mainstream of the Canadian book trade; lots and lots of smaller publishers and booksellers for whom the Internet and new media have seemingly been something to ignore if possible. These people at least were prepared to sit up and listen this day.

There was, of course, nonsense uttered in various directions, too; some predictable resistance in the audience reared its head toward the end of the day in panel sessions. The otherwise erudite Judy Rebick at once point made a comment about Google and Amazon somehow threatening the existence of libraries. And, the otherwise on-target Kevin Smokler at one point claimed that the book will "soon be a text file."

Apart from these small bits, though, the larger problem with the day was the still considerable cultural gulf between a community established on the premise of the exploitation of tightly controlled intellectual 'property' and, on the other side, an emergent technocultural environment which seemingly cannot contain (nor be contained by) such predictable structures. The program promised a discussion of "who owns content and who gets to distribute it," but this was glossed over in so many non-threatening platitudes and never really discussed. All the while, though, evangelists like Smokler were—quite appropriately—talking up the enormous potential of the net as an open, free, and multi-directional conversation. It seems to me that if books—and more crucially the book trade—are to survive in this environment, it will be by holding onto their firmly established identity as isolated objects, and not, as suggested by Albert Lai, merged into a larger, conversational, multimedia platform. The IP divide between these two worldviews is just too great, the bridges across it far too rickety and provisional.

I have some further bloggish thoughts arising from this BEC session over at Branding: authors, books, publishers...

-- JMax?