As I mentioned in a previous post, we’ve been thinking a lot lately about the future or the publishing industry. We all know that technology is transforming the music, television, and motion picture businesses, but few people realize how significantly technology and new media will alter the book business. It’s a time of great change, and tremendous opportunity for publishers who embrace the future.

The Oxford Media Works team was fortunate enough to attend the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing conference in San Jose last week. The event was designed to immerse publishers in the future. This was the inaugural TOC conference, and we have every reason to believe that it has already established itself as the premier conference for publishing industry technology (never mind the fact that it may very well be the only conference in that category, it was still a fine event nonetheless).

Our coverage the TOC conference can be found on both Medialoper and Booksquare:

• Book Publishers Meet The Future — An overview of the conference and some of the challenges currently facing publishers.
• DRM for Books: Will Publishers Learn Anything from the Music Industry’s Mistakes? — A look at Digital Rights Management as it applies to the publishing industry.
• Connecting Books With Readers: A Failure — Despite the promise of Print On Demand and streamlined inventory management systems, publishers still have challenges getting books into the hands of avid readers.
• Hansel and Gretel Were Right: Number 99 in Our Series on Search — If publishers need to learn one thing it should probably be that Google is not the enemy. Better to work with all search engines than to try to build your own.