6 Ways to Save Publishing

Michael Tamblyn, the CEO of BookNet Canada, presents 6 ways technology can improve the world of paper book publishing. For me, the most interesting tidbit in that video is that 99.5% of Canadian book sales are paper books (I suppose this is as opposed to digital or audio books). And if you’re interested in how books publishers survive as that percentage decreases, there are some good thoughts in this presentation.

Here’s the 6 ideas:

1. The ability to pull metadata from the cloud
2. More and better markup. “An XML workflow that doesn’t suck”
3. Sexy mobile reading devices
4. Smarter, individualized comprehensive sales information in catalogs
5. Online browsing that makes you want to buy
6. Embrace startup culture

And the video:

Via Boing²