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).

(Read more of Team Coverage of the O’Reilly TOC Conference)

We spend quite a bit of time thinking about new media and the future of the publishing industry. It’s clear that some major changes are taking place that will fundamentally alter the world of publishing. It’s really just a matter of how soon, and who will benefit by taking advantage of the new opportunities that are presenting themselves.

Unfortunately, it sometimes appears that the publishing world at large is oblivious to these new opportunities. If publishers are taking advantage of new media and the social web, we aren’t hearing much about their efforts. And yet, something tells me that there must be innovators out there who are blazing the trail that the rest of the industry will soon follow.

Over on our Booksquare blog we’ve just put out a call for examples of innovative uses of new media in the publishing industry. If you’re a publisher, author, agent, or publicist, and you’re doing something interesting and unique online we’d like to hear more about it.

We hope to use our findings in a series of posts that will highlight new opportunities for those in the publishing industry. Depending on what we uncover we may also include examples in our upcoming report “New Media Best Practices for Publishing Industry Professionals”.

Technorati Tags: Publishing, New Media

In the course of some work I’ve been doing on another project, I’ve noticed three things about authors and their websites: first, a lot of authors still don’t have websites; second, some authors think that having a page on their current publisher’s site is sufficient; and, many authors who have websites don’t take them seriously.

Let’s take these in order.

(Read more of Three Mistakes Authors Make on the Web)

The Oxford Media Works team spent last week at BookExpo America 2006 — an eye-opening experience for more than one reason. We’ve heard rumors that approximately 25,000 people attended BEA, and if you spent any time at all trying to fight your way through crowds in the exhibition hall, you’d probably say that number is low.

There were two aspects of the conference that created a big impression on us. First, he sheer number of books being pitched to book buyers (as opposed to consumers), reviewers, and anyone who slows their pace or catches someone’s eye. Second, the rather last-century relationship the publishing industry has with new media, including, oddly, the Internet.

(Read more of Don’t Fear New Media)