The Early Views from Digital Book World

I am here at DBW despite the elements (3 inches of snow in Connecticut this morning) and glad I got to enjoy the opening session and remarks.  A quick welcome by David Nussbaum was followed by remarks from the always insightful Mike Shatzkin.  Mike highlighted the five keys he sees for the near term of publishing, that included:

1. The Random House/Penguin Merger:  this is going to be transformative both for the industry as a whole and for publishers.
2. Growth of Vertical publishing.  This is going to be audience specific - publishing for communities.
3. Changing the way publishers market, the line between editorial and marketing will continue to blur, being less title centric and now be audience centric with a intense focus on audience engagement 
4. Illustrated children's books, their future is unwritten at this point in time, but they will face competition from new sectors.
5.  Globalization- for big publishers, there are new markets with low barriers of entry, because of low selling and distribution costs.  For small pubs, there is increased opportunity and appetite for their content.

James McQuivey delivered DBW's continued research that they have done since the DBW began four years ago and shared some really interesting data.  I will post a link if they make it available but I thought it was enlightenting.  The most amazing stat was that since this survey began, it is the first time results had changed when publishers estimated when digital would be 50% or mor of their revenue.  For the last 3 years, the research showed December 2014.  This year the research indicates pubs will reach that by June of 2014.

Lots of people to see and sessions to listen to, hope there are not too many typos here.