Books, Poison Ivy And The 21st Century

Today marked the opening of the BookExpo, the book publisher’s annual trade show. The last time I attended BookExpo was in 2005, when I made a strategic move to expand my publishing domain to include the “old media” replete with dead trees. Armed with nothing more than an idea and a business card I set out to figure out the travel guide industry. Four years later not much has changed. The bulk of sales are still in printed books, instantly out dated, only now accompanied by the latest buzz term, this year its iPhone. And iPhone or blackberry have since emerged as the digital distribution point that most people feel comfortable with, but how best to deliver information? That is the niggling question. The greater question is authenticity.

For the past few weeks I’ve been suffering through a case of poison ivy. No simple cause and effect case either, while I thought I avoided touching the stuff during the Wall Street Clean Up event, I apparently transferred the urushiol to something which then transfered to me about 10 days later. In need of a rash stopping cure, I turned to the Internet, where countless web sites extoll various remedies including oatmeal, jewelweed, lotions and potions. One of the great things about information on the Internet is that it is a marketplace of opinion. And if you read enough about a certain subject, you develop your own truth-o-meter trying to gauge the veracity of information. Microwave Oatmeal wrapped by Saran Wrap? George’s cousin’s next door neighbour swears by it. The Mayo Clinic web site suggests Calamine Lotion. A thousand people say don’t bother. And that’s how I found about Zanfel.

Zanfel worked for me. Out of all the remedies out there, the web site included testimonials from enough victims of poison ivy, doctor’s who’ve used it and recommended it and user comments that I was compelled to hit Walgreen’s and try it out. Zanfel promised relief in 30 seconds. It wasn’t that fast. In fact it took a few applications to get the itch to stop, but what it did do right away was prevent new outbreaks till I figured out what was causing new urushiol contact. Tecnu also became my friend. When the soap and water cleansing of all surfaces including my computer didn’t seem to work, I added that to my aresenal. Unlike Zanfel, I learned about Tecnu by talking to a friend who also recommended that I go for a prednisone shot to clear it up once and for all.

As I walked through BookExpo though, I was struck by the thought that books used to be the repository of “official” information. Experts became so, especially certified ones, based on knowledge acquired by the tried and true method of “book learning.” Somewhere in the book publication food chain there was a fact checker and an editor placing their stamp of approval of the book’s content. Things that were printed were considered realiable, vetted. Until the curtain was ripped away, and it turned out that facts that were long held were never reconsidered — the subject of a famous essay by Stephen J. Gould, The Case of the Creeping Fox-Terrier Clone.

Gould wrote eloquently about evolution and baseball and many things science, and in this essay he wrote about the evolutionary “facts” that books repeated over and over, year and year, in new editions. In discussing the evolutionary tree of the horse, Gould seized upon the typical description of the fossilized description of the Eohippus, a horse ancestor — about the size of a fox-terrier. Gould had no idea what a fox-terrier looked like so he traced the hrase back in time and discovered the earliest printing of the comparison in a 1904 Century Magazine article by American Museum’s Henry Fairfield Osborne. He wrote:

‘We may imagine the earliest herds of horses in the lower Eocene as resembling a lot of Fox-Terriers in size …’

And everyone else copied him. The Fox-Terrier, according to the wikki, is a term used to describe several breeds of dogs, notably the smooth-haired fox terrier and the wire-haired fox terrier. But fox is often dropped from the breed names, which gets us to a famous wire-haired terrier that I know, Asta. If you know Nick and Nora, then you know Asta. The more popular breed of terrier would be the Jack Russell Terrier. And if you lined all the “fox-terrier” breeds you’d end up with different sized dogs. Which brings us back to — just what is the size of the Eohippus, now called Hyracotherium?

Continuing my circular path, why did the authoritative source, a book, not serve as my first choice for poison ivy research? I vaguely remember that we once had a book titled something along the lines of Family Reference Medical Guide, which served some family purpose in the pre-Internet dark ages. But that book, and many things reference in nature, stopped hanging out on my book shelves about the time I learned I could Google info. No longer did I need to have PERL, a programming reference guide on hand, when I could google a cryptic partial memory of something like regular expression pattern matching that I needed syntax listed. Dictionaries? Google happily corrects my spelling attempt and links me to the freedictionary.com definition. Google will even do basic math equations for me. Google or more accurately the Internet has slowly replaced my brain. Or has it?

The Internet offers up a body of knowledge, but without context. I’m still determining if the information I find is accurate and valuable. So somehow I’m retaining some context that I’ve already learned from somewhere else. Books likely. But today’s walk through BookExpo also showed me something else. This year’s BookExpo was about half the size of that 2005 show I attended. The hundreds of small publishers were gone, and many book brands were now housed together under one publishing house. Unlike the Internet where more and more authority brands are available, it seems that the book world is shrinking. And shrinking is not a good sign. Especially when more and more people are reading more and more content. And that was the missing link at BookExpo.

It should have been Content Expo, and the Kindle and iPhone and every imaginable form of content delivery should have been there. The music industry, although horrendously unadaptive to MP3s, at least never followed down the path of Vinyl Record Expo, or Cassette Tape Expo. They at one point understood it was the music not the delivery media business they were in. But publishers haven’t quite figured it all out yet, the business model of printed media publishing remains almost unchanged despite advances on the production side with technology.

Yet there is a serious movement to educate children with technology. IT in the classroom initiatives are accelerating the dilemma for printed media publishers like the textbook industry. There’s a call for a technology educated workforce, so educational systems dutifully deploy smart boards and computers in classrooms while banning texting and mobile phones. In a few short years consumer Internet will be hailing its 20th anniversary and we seem no closer to figuring out how we should be using all this technology with information.

There’s a great conversation going on about IT and education at least at Educational Orgami. One exhibitor missing from BookExpo was nyconvergence.com, a site devoted to all things media and digital in the tri-state area. Instead, according to NJ.com:

In an essay in the current issue of The Nation, Elisabeth Sifton, a longtime publishing industry executive and senior vice president of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, puts it this way: “It is a confused, confusing and very fluid situation, and no one can predict how books and readers will survive. Changed reading habits have already transformed and diminished them both. I, for one, don’t trust the book trade to see us through this. Wariness is in order.” The essay is titled, “The Long Goodbye? The Book Business and its Woes.”

Yet for BookExpo America, the attitude is entirely different. It is more like the “The Short and Very Friendly Hello , the Book Industry Loves to Twitter and Podcast and Embrace the Future (Even if We’re Really, Really Terrified)!”

You can learn all of this even before BookExpo America begins, just by witnessing how the event is being promoted and what will be transpiring at the exhibit hall and in its conference sessions.

Just consider the Countdown to BookExpo America 2009 newsletter being e-mailed to registrants. “BEA Will Be Tweeting from the Show Floor,” the newsletter informs industry insiders, and sure enough, BEA is twittering (at twitter.com/BookExpoAmerica), with 1,699 followers the last time I checked. If Twitter isn’t your style, then you can also tune into BEA discussions at Facebook, where the BEA page has 1,596 fans.

But a review of the conference’s sessions reveals how seriously the publishing industry — or, at least, the people behind BookExpo America — view the changes taking place in the world of books and reading, from the frenzy over 140-character Twitter messages to the growing popularity of e-books and e-reading devices like the Kindle.

They were tweeting? About what? I had whipped out my iPhone a dozen times, checking email under lousy connection times, and unless they had info stations telling me what to google, twitter or facebook, I was digitally stranded. Reluctantly I grabbed the printed show guide so I could work out the map of what aisle I wanted to hit. In the end it didn’t matter, the show was small enough to cover in a couple of hours. If the show organizers didn’t know how to communicate to me, the publishers and exhibitors sure didn’t. I still had to hand my business card to a person, no one had badge scanners where they could get all my contact details instantly and route to the appropriate devision. Hardly anyone thought to have me type in my email address to send catalogs to. And even fewer had running displays promoting the next book. But maybe the best example of why the book industry is having trouble is this observation. The dozens of food vendors who lined the entrance were all selling $5 hot dogs. There were lines. A few feet outside was the guy with the hot dog cart, selling them for $2. There was no line for his stuff. And there were no lines for taxi cabs either. Another sign about attendance perhaps.