Eugene G. Schwartz, Editor at Large | May 19, 2010

The liquidity of content in electronic form is a concept that explains a lot about how and why the foundations of the publishing industry are shifting under our feet — even as we daily go about doing our business as we have been for most of our professional lives.

According to Fred Wilson, founding partner at Union Square Ventures, venture investors, this shifting marketplace is more hopeful for those developing content than those distributing it.

Speaking to “The Merging of Content with Technology,” this was his theme at the monthly meet-up of Susan Danziger’s Publishing Point event at the Random House tower in Manhattan on May 18. This monthly event is open to all publishing professionals who have joined the Publishing Point network and who are quick enough to reserve a spot before the seating space of one or two hundred runs out, depending on where the noon events are held.

Returning to our theme, in the olden days – a decade and more ago – we imprisoned content in printed containers that defined both the industry and the user experience. The industry through its distribution channels could easily enforce the bounds of intellectual property rights, while readers, once possessed of the physical object that is a book could share it with others, one at a time, or even resell it.

Despite having to lug around multi-pounder best sellers or build arm muscle holding bulky paperbacks for reading in bed at night – we enjoyed a happy balance between producer and user.

Meantime the author who was successful could enjoy something approaching a revenue stream (notice I didn’t say “income”) and the vast number of aspiring authors, or professional ones with narrow or “mid-list” markets, were pretty much out in the cold.

Along came the internet, portable devices and print on demand and the balance has changed – and appears now to be transforming exponentially, “lubricating” the way for liquefied content. Millions of reading devices – Kindles, iPads, Nook, Sonys, iPhones and other portables capture the attention of immersive readers and information seekers. Print on demand and over night shipping has empowered self and independent publishing as hundreds of thousand of new titles reach the market place, straining the capacities of the identifier business as well as the cataloging and reviewing curators to keep up with it all.

Wilson, as do I and others, sees opportunity here even as it upends our business models. The threat to distribution channels – especially booksellers and libraries – is manifest. For online e-tailers and content aggregators it is a wild west of opportunity as social networking, mashups, repurposing and outright piracy unsettle business models.

Technology behemoths – Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo, Adobe, Time Warner, Verizon and newbies such as Facebook and Twitter vie for distribution supremacy. Hundreds of smaller aggregators target special content interests, formats and media to deliver real time and archival experiences for an increasingly engaged public. According to Wilson they “lubricate” content enabling it to flow to its most convenient level for the consumer; resisting this flow it would appear is as effective as fingers in the crumbling dike.

This is hard to take for people like me who have been in this business for over fifty years and are accustomed to the “old ways” – yet at the same time it is an energizing development because of the entrepreneurial and creative opportunities it offers. Less so for those of us book publishing professionals who have built careers around print-based product development and re-seller distribution models. More unsettling also, as employment will have to take different forms – but also offer opportunities for the adventurous.

One of Danziger’s messages – and reasons for creating Publishing Point – is to open the window to the possibilities and compelling reasons for young professionals today to look to the ways they can fashion their skill sets and connections into the future,

Wilson also made a few other interesting points that impressed me as validating some of my own notions of the transcending qualities of human nature that both shaped the printed book as a storehouse of culture and an object of value, and are now shaping its replacement by portable devices. Qualities that endure in new forms,

In describing his own household today, Wilson and his wife and children do their reading and engagement entirely in electronic forms (e.g. Blackberry, Kindle and now also iPad) and with social networks, including real time content sharing of music and video –(see www.Boxee.tv ). He noted also that with a Kindle app on the iPad, two people in the same family can now read one book at the same time for the price of one.

As he observed when he showed one of their sons a Kindle, his first impulse was to pass his finger over the screen – there being no touch response he remained unimpressed. There is a lesson here about why the new portables will capture a game-changing place in our culture – they respond to natural human behavior in ease of use and as an extension of physical expression. I saw that this past weekend when I spent an hour with my 13-year old granddaughter painting pictures on her iPad by pointing and moving our fingers,

I was interested also in Wilson’s observation that print remains the “trophy” medium that we place on bookshelves to easily reach for and show what we have read that we value.

Following the logic of ease of use that is lubricating the distribution of content, Wilson held out little hope for the bookstore – although more so for the library – but hoped a way would be found to preserve their curative value and the function of the library as a repository for free access to books.

I am less pessimistic. I think social networking and electronic communities, virtual realities and avatars will never replace the value humans hold for, and the rewards they enjoy from personal social contact in a physical place. Bookstores and libraries remain nodes for such social and community expression and they can reshape their presence in the future scene for readers and seekers.

Finally, Wilson provided some insights into the venture investment community’s phobias about investing in intellectual property enterprises. VC’s have traditionally come out of technology and are most comfortable dealing with risk/rewards in that space. Nurturing and growing talent and content is outside their realm of experience and intuition. There are, he observed, some VC partners who have entered the space who have come out of media experience and are more disposed to look at putting money into ventures that have an editorial component. (Mention was made of Huffington Post, half of whose staff is in editorial, the other half engaged in technology).

The convergence of content and technology — Wilson’s theme – is best expressed by his own desire for engagement and for sharing his reading, listening and viewing experiences. These can take place in real time as well as retrospectively..

There was much more meat on the bone in this presentation and discussion and my hat is off to Susan Danziger (Organizer) and her partner Maggie Hillard (Assistant Organizer) for launching and growing this networking experience for people in the metropolitan New York area – or for those visiting if you plan your trips accordingly.