The year 2007 represents a turning point for publishers and digital content. Not—as you will see from this inspiring suite of articles—that major issues have been resolved. Rather, the fog of buzz and coyness that has long hung over publishing is lifting. Like the spirit at BookExpo this year, as James Gray, CEO and President of the Ingram Digital Group puts it in his contribution:

“While the winning business models for digital products and services are still evolving...it is essential to participate and experiment in order to uncover opportunities, create solutions and gain a foothold in the emerging markets.”

To which trade publishers like HarperCollins and Random House, STM publishers like Elsevier and Wiley, technology vendors like Klopotek and Publishing Technology Inc., and of course the power players, Google, Amazon.com, and Microsoft, would all say a hearty “amen.” Filing out of the church of enlightened thinking, however, publishers now face a real, steep, and slippery slope. Even from base camp it is possible to see at the summit a digital nirvana. Getting there (or not) will be the great story of publishing over the next decade, and as the Caravan Project (see below) shows, nirvana may be closer than we realize.

The shot across the bow that led to publishers’ enlightenment was Google’s December 2004 announcement of an agreement to digitize all the holdings of six major libraries. Flying the flag of “organizing the world’s knowledge,” as Google’s Director of Content Partnerships Jim Gerber expresses it, and merrily whistling past the graveyard of copyright, Google, and Amazon.com right after them, have shown publishers that their world has changed for ever. (The copyright tussle, as has been observed, is really a business issue, and business issues have a way of resolving in a practical fashion.)

As Mr. Gerber frames it—and essentially Microsoft shares this view, while, at the same time, honoring the niceties of copyright— “organizing the world’s knowledge” is a good thing for publishers. Sweet as this vision is, there are business issues publishers would do well to examine carefully. Random House, Holtzbrinck, and HarperCollins are each exploring the best way to maintain control of their digital files, while making the necessary “snippets” available to search engines. Changing paths, and entering the more rarified atmosphere of academic publishing, (see contributions from Peter J. Dougherty and Peter Osnos), one is dazzled both by Dougherty’s commentary on the “philosophy of the book,” as well as by the mighty coalition that Osnos has gathered, including foundations and academic presses (with Ingram handling infrastructure) whose goal is to create a path to the summit.

“What is a book in the first place?” Dougherty asks, and replies, memorably: “You should write a book if you want to start, or end, an argument,” citing notables like Kant, Marx, and Edward Said. (Exactly what argument Joyce’s Ulysses, or Kafka’s Metamorphosis were meant to start or end, of course, is a different question.) Dougherty asserts that, in the future, “vital” books will be about “ideas,” adding, “being a great editor is as much about understanding readers as it is about understanding authors.”

By saying this, the Princeton publisher has described a digital truth that trade and STM publishers are also ingesting: the ultimate customer is at the center, and is the beginning not the end, of the entire digital publishing process. Which takes us back to the path to nirvana.

It would be unfair, dear reader, to reveal here the complex, brave, and amazing Caravan project now cautiously making its way along a virtual silk road. The charismatic leader, the “Qaidi” (thanks, Google) of the Caravan, Peter Osnos, is committed to the proposition that digital publishing should be about supplying: “Good books. Anyway you want them. Now. In all the ways technology permits.” (See: www.caravanbooks.org.) If twenty-three titles in the first season seems like a small number compared with the 8 million or so books available across the “long tail,” remember: “the journey of eight million miles starts...”

In this spirit, in my mind’s eye, I see the digital publishing mountain top as a seamless integration of physical and digital content, whether manufactured on traditional presses or print on demand, served electronically as eBooks, audiobooks, Web sites, as whole works or in chunks, fully-customizable, available physically by mail, in bookstores, or from PoD kiosks, or delivered wired or wirelessly to computers, readers, game-boys and eReaders, mobile devices, totally at the command of the ultimate customer, in any combination of formats, including personal content or not, interoperable across all systems, openly shareable physically and electronically, and using subscription, ad-based, pay per volume/view, or business models yet to be imagined.

In sum, content nirvana for the consumer. Now, really, is that too much to ask?