Then on the Wednesday of the Fair I’m going to be participating in a panel on some of the hot issues surrounding ebooks. It’s chaired by Laurence Kaye, and my fellow panellists are Richard Charkin of Bloomsbury and Peter Collingridge of Enhanced Editions.

The first keynote speaker, Simon Waldman of Guardian Media Group, gave an overview of the changing media landscape, looking at four disruptive forces: the nature of the Internet, new entrants and entrepreneurs (whose actions look destructive to sectoral incumbents but who actually create value), the proliferation of technology, and consumers’ desires — which Waldman commented could be ‘exponentially satisfied’ online. On this last point, I was particularly taken with his truism that information does not want to be free, it’s consumers who want it to be free (or cheap).

Waldman also addressed the question of organisational change, and the idea that businesses need to move from innovating at the edges to transforming the core of their operations, a process which requires committed leaders, supportive owners, a healthy balance sheet, a smart attitude to cannibalisation and a range of staff (‘firestarters, rock stars and fixers’).

Bertrand Moullier from Narval Media struck a slightly more downbeat note in his keynote, which looked at the experience of the film industry. Moullier acknowledged that the industry has a glowing record of technophobia, from the end of silent cinema through the postwar boom in television, to Jack Valenti’s infamous comment that ‘the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone’.

Moullier looked in detail at a number of the new commercial models for film, characterised by a compressed and widened distribution chain, more control to the consumer, and product differentiated by price not time. His conclusion was that the newer business models have not proved themselves sustainable, and that income was not enough to support new film-making.

The first panel, moderated by David Roth-Ey of HarperCollins, looked at what the consumer experience could be in a future ebook environment. Marek Vaygelt presented findings from YouGov’s research in this area. Richard Orme from the RNIB talked about the benefits ebooks offer in terms of accessibility to the visually impaired. Jonathan Ferman presented Adobe’s vision of itself as an ‘ecosystem enabler’ — the company is increasingly looking to more flexible, social DRM, and Ferman suggested that consumers shouldn’t have to think about it, it should just work. Finally, author Tom Reynolds talked about his experience publishing via a DRM-free, Creative Commons-licensed route, and suggested that publishers will sell service not content.

Mark Majurey from Taylor & Francis ran the second panel, on the future supply chain, which was introduced by Mark Carden. Richard Palk from Sony and Ruth Jones from Ingram both highlighted the success of epub, though Jones expressed the view that for academic publishing, epub was not fit for purpose. Ben Drury from Seven Digital talked about the experience of the music industry, especially around DRM and copyright infringement. Google’s Santiago de la Mora outlined the additional reach which could be achieved through publishing in the cloud, something which concerned Mark Carden who pointed out that there’s no such thing as ‘the cloud’, only services and brands (see also Mark’s comment below for context on this beyond my very brief summary). Carden highlighted the opportunity in reducing the friction between want/buy/read, and suggested that whilst sales might decrease by value on an individual transaction basis, the overall volume could increase enough to offset this.

Finally, Sara Lloyd led a panel of digital publishers which included Fionnuala Duggan, Stephanie Duncan, David Roth-Ey, Mark Majurey and myself, which answered questions from the floor and identified some of the key themes from the day for the PA to pursue, including communications, business transformation, consumer insight and standards.

All in all it was a varied and thought-provoking morning, and thanks and congratulations to Alicia Wise and the PA for putting it together.

Writing for The Times, David Hutchinson argued that “multinational media companies simply can’t get their heads around the idea that the monumental profits of the previous 20 years just aren’t possible any more. Pushing vastly overpriced content is only going to encourage more people to abandon ship and take up a life of virtual swarthy swashbuckling instead.”

What I find interesting is not so much the article itself, but the frankly rather benign final sentence, which highlights an interesting point about nomenclature. As a smart colleague of mine observed recently: “Piracy immediately conjures up images of Johnny Depp in dreadlocks and jolly-faced rum-swiggers singing sea shanties and going “aaaaarrrrrrr!!” a lot. Pirates are cool and funny, so ‘piracy’ is never going to be taken seriously.”

Author David Hewson gave his view here. He doesn’t use the P word to describe the problem: for him it is straightforward theft. “There is a real danger that we’re sliding towards a cultural shift which divides creative writers from their work, where copyright itself is somehow seen as theft, a conspiracy against a public that has a ‘right’ to take what it wants from the web for nothing. If that happens we’re headed for fewer professionally published books, a poorer range of literature, and the dumbing down of mainstream publishing to a handful of established genres and big-time authors.” Hewson went on to discuss some of the specific issues in a follow-up post, debunked the idea that pricing is a factor in copyright infringement, looked at why he believes DRM does not work, and concluded his series of articles with a look at how copyright infringement could be reduced. Both the articles and their robust comment threads are well worth a look.

Finally, via Tim O’Reilly on Twitter, I came across this example from another industry on copyright infringement and Apple’s app store, which looks at the percentage of users of a given game using paid-for and infringing versions, examines the excuse given that infringement is in effect just a form of sampling, and concludes: “Having seen our data . . . these arguments all sound a bit delusional to me. It seems like an attempt at trying to be legitimate while hiding the real reason. They should just. . . say: ‘We pirate because we can’. That seems to be a much more honest statement based on the data we’ve seen.” (The data in this piece is well worth a look).

This event is aimed at thought leaders in key stakeholder groups, including representatives of the author and agent communities; publishing directors with responsibility for strategy, legal, rights, IT and digital; and senior leaders in companies developing and selling digital services to the publishing industry.

Registration details are here.

It’s interesting at this stage to see consensus on relatively few of these points. I’ve paraphrased many of the predictions where different phrasing was thematically similar, hopefully without losing any of the intended meaning. As and when I see other predictions for 2010, I’ll add them to the table — and please let me know if you’re the author of such a piece so I can include it (or shout at me if I’ve played fast and loose with your existing predictions).

Updated 4 January 9.30pm: Thanks very much indeed to Ted Treanor for getting in touch with his own set of predictions, now added to the table.

Updated 4 January 10.00pm: And no sooner had I posted the last update than Michael Cairns’s predictions appeared on Google Reader . . .

Updated 5 January 12.00pm: Thanks to Kassia Krozser for sending me a link to her predictions. Unfortunately, the table has now grown too unwieldy for my Wordpress template, so I’ve had to spin it off into a separate page, linked to below. I’ll prettify this when I have the chance — the last time I styled an HTML table was back when they were commonly used for layout, so I’ll have to do some CSS work.

I’ve also received links to longer term predictions — and I’ll work out how best to present these alongside the 2010 predictions.

Aggregated Predictions for Publishing in 2010

There’s a nice piece on the BBH Labs blog on updating Twitter via QR codes — though there’d be plenty of other uses.

I also came across the MIR:ROR over Christmas, shown in this video, which looks like quite a neat way of experimenting with RFID. As a publisher and a parent, I quite liked the tagged book that reads aloud to the child. I’m torn between the impulse to buy one to play with and the reaction on Twitter from one of the more innovative of my acquaintances, who wrote that he was “struggling to find anything remotely interesting or useful to do with it.”

“The concept aims to capture the essence of magazine reading, which people have been enjoying for decades: an engaging and unique reading experience in which high-quality writing and stunning imagery build up immersive stories.”

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.