Last week I was on the road, giving a number of speeches in New York and Las Vegas. Perhaps the most interesting event I was speaking at was a one-day conference held by the Book Industry Study Group on the Long Tail of books. The presentations were all fascinating (check out the Abebooks one for a sample) and they're now online (my own opening keynote is here):
- KIRBY BEST, President & CEO, Lightning Source: "New Markets for the Deep Backlist and Small Sellers"
- IAN BRADIE, Press Distribution Director, Cambridge University Press: "How to Keep Your Titles Alive with Print-On-Demand"
- MARK SUCHOMEL, President, Independent Publishers Group: "Best Practices for Publishing & Distributing Mid-list Books
- CAROL FITZGERALD, President, The Book Report Network: "Best Practices for Target Marketing on the Web
- BORIS WERTZ, COO, Abebooks.com: "How to Cost Effectively Sell Books to Micro-Markets
One of the other stops was a keynote at the National Association of Broadcasters convention (the big annual meeting of the TV and radio industry) in Vegas. Lost Remote blogged the speech here.
I had lunch with the NAB's new president, David Rehr, who I was pleased to discover is a PhD economist. I had to ask the obvious question: does the "B" ("broadcast") in the organization's name risk making it irrelevant in a multicast, many-to-many world? After all, the NAB charter says it represents only "free, over-the-air radio and television broadcasters." Over the air? Jeepers.
His answer: the NAB needs to redefine "broadcast" to include new forms of distributing video, from cellphones to the Web. Rehr's a smart guy, so he no doubt has a plan. But my suggestion to make it easy and drop the "B" entirely didn't get far.
