Although most of the sessions at last week’s PSP Conference were fairly industry-specific, there were a couple of items that might be of general interest to normals.  Here’s one…

The Devil Is In The Devices

Dr. Bill Detmer, founder, President and CEO of a company called Unbound Medicine, gave this presentation on publishing content for handheld devices.  He summarized the current state of affairs, the rapidly expanding market for handheld devices, the even more rapidly expanding market for iPhone apps, and all of the ridiculously varied ebook formats.  His advice to publishers was to find a way to prosper without DRM, his view being that it causes as many problems as it had the potential to solve.  Of course, he didn’t offer a solution to the question of how publishers–especially those whose content commonly costs thousands of dollars a year–could put that content out into the world without DRM and not fall financial victim to mass piracy.  Again without offering up an example of how it has or could work, he also spoke favorably of publishers using “the power of free.”  This is the same kind of thing that has been discussed here and elsewhere: give users some free bait in anticipation that they’ll appreciate it so much that they’ll eventually come back and pay for more.  More and more, this is becoming a fairly acceptable option even in the stodgiest corners of the corporate publishing world.

The question that occurred to me during the session was this: is there a company like Unbound Medicine for fiction publishers and self-published fiction authors?

Essentially what they do is stay on top of handheld technology (including ebook technology) for publishers and then handle the technological development of such content.  In most cases, even the largest publishers don’t feel confident enough to handle complex medical ebook production themselves (lots of graphics make it problematic). They’d rather leave it to a specialist.  So is there a company that self-published fiction authors could go to that, for a reasonable fee, would produce expertly formatted ebooks in a variety of ebook formats?  Or even just the few most significant formats (EPUB, PDF and Mobipocket, say)?  I can imagine that such a company might have a different pricing model for individual authors, another for small publishing companies and yet another for the larger publishing companies.

Would this be useful?  Does somebody do this?  If not, is anybody interested?

About to head off to the Association of American Publishers Professional/Scholarly Publishing (PSP) Division Annual Conference in Washington, D.C.  Yup.  Think of it as the O’Reilly TOC Conference for the totally uncool.  Or post-cool.  Or ambivalently non-cool.  More brains than beauties.

Anyway, there are some sessions on changing copyright laws, handheld devices, mediating authority in the digital age and some other things that may be of interest to “normal” people.  If I hear anything good, I’ll report back.