Three reasons why we're in a golden age of publishing entrepreneurship

We are enter­ing a gold­en age for entre­pre­neur­ship in the pub­lish­ing indus­try. The Books in Browsers con­fer­ence last Octo­ber and the London-basedFuture­book con­fer­ence in Decem­ber showed a rich array of star­tups from all around the world. Pro­file Books' Michael Bhaskar has com­piled a list of publishing-related star­tups that he intends to add to as it grows.

There are three rea­sons why this growth is hap­pen­ing.

Books are dig­i­tal

Or, I should say, books can be dig­i­tal­ly man­aged. Stan­dards such as EPUBor ONIX enable both the con­tent and the meta­da­ta of the books to be dig­i­tal­ly avail­able. And this means that new capa­bil­i­ties and ser­vices can be built around the con­tent. You can think of e-book­stores, of course, but star­tups try to look beyond the obvi­ous: What about rec­om­men­da­tions based on the book's DNA á la Pan­do­ra, like Book­Lamp? Or relat­ing places, songs, or oth­ers books, as does Small­Demons? And what about some remix­ing, like BookRiff?

Process­es are dig­i­tal

Inter­net tech­nolo­gies have sim­pli­fied some of pub­lish­ing's process­es. For a few years now, dig­i­tal pub­lish­ers and self-publishing plat­forms have exper­i­ment­ed with new ways of approach­ing the mar­ket, the authors, and, most impor­tant­ly, the read­ers. Self-publishing ini­tia­tives like Smash­words orLulu are pret­ty well known, but new ven­tures are also pop­ping up, like the com­modi­ti­za­tion of EPUB pro­cess­ing pro­posed by Press­books or Bib­lioCrunch. Star­tups that focus on offer­ing new back-end tools and ser­vices to boost effi­cien­cy in the pub­lish­ing life­cy­cle will be, as Don Linn hailed them, 'heroes, even if large­ly unrec­og­nized, this year."

Read­ers are dig­i­tal

Most impor­tant­ly, read­ers are becom­ing more dig­i­tal. I have been read­ing almost exclu­sive­ly in dig­i­tal for­mat for more than a year. When, a week ago, I start­ed "Zen and the Art of Motor­cy­cle Main­te­nance" in print for­mat, I fully under­stood how sig­nif­i­cant the dig­i­tal leap is. I found myself think­ing: "I don't under­stand this word — where is the dic­tio­nary?" "I loved this pas­sage, how do I share it?" I truly felt that I was going back­wards. And this is where all the star­tups focused on social read­ing like GoodReads,Anobii, or Flatleaf will be com­pet­ing........

http://radar.oreilly.com/2012/01/publishing-startups.html?cmp=em-orm-toc-newsletter-0111212-direct&imm_mid=07c121

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