In case you haven’t seen it, the next Rolling Stone magazine has the girls from MTV’s The Hills on the cover.

Really? The girls from The Hills? That’s the best Rolling Stone could do this week? Wow. Really?

Look, I realize that criticizing Rolling Stone for abandoning their original music-oriented mission by putting actors, models and other non-musicians on the cover started in earnest over twenty years ago, when Jann Wenner started putting his Hollywood buddies on the cover, so this isn’t about that.

I don’t really have an issue with their long-ago morphing into a general pop-culture magazine. After all, had they stuck to just covering music, we wouldn’t have had Hunter Thompson or Tom Wolfe or PJ O’Rourke or Matt Taibbi, just to name a few non-music writers that they’ve featured over the years.

Nor do I have an issue with them trying to stay relevant for what is now the third generation of kids they’re trying to deal with. New generations have new popular culture icons, I get that. Maybe these girls are the Kurt Cobain or Johnny Depp of the Millennial Generation.

Maybe. So why does this week’s cover feel like a new low?

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I’ve been told that you can’t get book publishers to an industry event at the Javits Center if it rains (an observation that I suspect might be a lot more amusing if you’re in the publishing industry and from New York). Regardless, the weather in New York City last week was atrocious (seven degrees and snow), yet O’Reilly Media’s TOC conference was sold out — packed to the rafters with publishing industry insiders. That’s an obvious sign that TOC is not your typical publishing industry event.

Book publishing may not be the world’s oldest profession, but it is the world’s oldest form of mass media. As a result, publishers tend to be a little set in their ways. That’s a nice way of saying that publishers have a lot of catching up to do. And that’s exactly the problem that TOC was designed to solve. This year’s conference dealt with a range of issues challenging traditional publishers, from backlist digitization to XML.

But TOC is about more than just technology. It’s also about the new mindset that publishers need to survive in a world where the traditional media landscape is being transformed by digital convergence and rapidly evolving consumer expectations. These days new technology isn’t enough. Publishers need a whole new way of thinking.

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I’m a minimalist by nature, which is why it’s so unfortunate that I share office space with the Booksquare lady. I live in fear that a long overdue earthquake will hit Southern California, triggering a catastrophic bookshelf collapse. When that happens, I will almost certainly be crushed to death by Kassia’s “to be read” shelves.

Nothing would make me happier than replacing every book in my life with a single digital device capable of accessing every book ever published through a high speed wireless connection. If anyone wants to see ebooks succeed, it’s me. And yet, I am deeply skeptical about Amazon’s new ebook reader.

On a superficial level, the Kindle looks almost perfect. Amazon has obviously spent a fair amount of time engineering an electronic device that affords readers something approximating an analogue reading experience, while seamlessly connecting with Amazon for book purchases on-demand (a dangerous feature that really should be accompanied by the sound of a ringing cash register).

Unfortunately, there are more than a few problems with Amazon’s initial product offering. Those problems will almost certainly limit the appeal of Kindle, making it a niche product for early adopters and gadget freaks.

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This summer I wrote about a new industry conference called TOC — Tools of Change for Publishing. TOC is an O’Reilly Media sponsored event, designed to help the slow moving world of book publishing ease gently into the 21st century. It’s the place to be if you have any interest at all in the future of publishing. It’s also one of those rare events that will likely have a substantial impact on an entire industry for years to come.

TOC 2008 is shaping up to be every bit as thought provoking and inspiring as the inaugural event was. The sessions and tutorials are designed to get publishers up to speed on the latest developments in technology and new media that will shape the publishing business for years to come.

I’m happy to report that a couple of members of the Medialoper team will be appearing at the upcoming TOC conference. Kassia Krozser has been invited to participate in a panel discussion on LitBlogs, and I’ll be presenting a session titled DRM, Digital Content, and the Consumer Experience: Lessons Learned from the Music Industry (at this point I have no clue how I’m going to fit all of those lessons into one 45 minute session).

TOC 2008 runs from February 11 - 13 in New York City. Registration is now open, and Medialoper readers can use this special discount code to save 10%: toc08mlp

We’ll be writing more about TOC as the event draws closer. Hopefully we’ll have a chance to meet some of you at the conference.

Technorati Tags: TOC08, Conferences, Publishing, DRM

Last June we told you about O’Reilly Media’s inaugural Tools of Change for Publishing conference (TOC), an event designed to expose publishers to a range of new technologies that are transforming their industry.

Planning for the second annual TOC conference is already underway, and O’Reilly has issued a call for participation.

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So it follows the course of human events that popular (and not-so-popular) novels are made into movies (prompting the ever-after statement, “The book was better.”). Once upon a time, books and movies, rightly, occupied different spheres. How would they meet? It’s not like they sold books in movie theaters or screened films in bookstores.

Ah, to return to those innocent times. The joy…

Seriously gang, it’s 2007. Nearly 2008. A new age has dawned and all that. So it makes perfect sense that one key way to promote books-made-into-movies is to, well, you know, work both sides of the media spectrum. Cross-promote, build on the audience of one for the other. Use modern technology the way the Internet gods intended it.
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It’s no secret that Medialoper loves disruptive media technologies. One of our favorites happens to be one that most consumers aren’t aware of — Print-On-Demand.

As the name implies, Print-On-Demand is a technology that allows publishers to print books as they’re needed. Imagine a world where books never go out of print, no matter how obscure they might be. That’s the promise of Print-On-Demand.

Print-On-Demand also provides authors with a relatively low-risk means of self-publishing. While self-publishing may or may not be a good idea for an unknown author, it could prove be a very profitable move for established authors or individuals who are well known in some other medium.

Today we use the occasion of our first ever Medialoper podcast to take deeper look at Print-On-Demand and the implications that it has for the publishing industry, as well as authors.

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It has been a sad week around here at ‘Loper HQ. One of our totemic icons — or is that iconic totems? — The Weekly World News, is soon going to become an ex-tabloid.

While it is still going to live on as a website, no more will its headlines about regegade apes and aliens for Bush (clearly his final stronghold of support) scream at me from the Supermarket check-out line. This sucks.

Reading the coverage about the closing, I think that I’m not the only one who feels that way. Mainstream outlets from The Washington Post to Wired have been giving it a fond obituary.

While some might sneer that this just shows How Low Things Have Sunk, I think that the worldwide outpouring of grief for the Weekly World News is a good thing. These people are simply recognizing a pioneer in the field of fake news, a clear progenitor to our current most popular practitioners of the made-up news story: The Onion, Jon Stewart and FOX News.

And besides, like Elvis or Andy Kaufman, the Weekly World News doesn’t have to die. It can be saved.

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Saturday, July 21, 2007 3:00 AM PDT

It’s still not here yet.

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Amazon has promised — promised! — me that they will delivery my copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows this Saturday, July 21, 2007. But when? And can they come through?

Will it be early enough on Saturday that I’ll be able to finish it before the actual spoilers from people who have read the actual, physical book come spooling out of the ether? Or will it be right up against the 7:00pm deadline that Amazon has promised?

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