International Digital Publishing Forum

In about two weeks, the International Digital Publishing Forum will meet for two days as part of the BEA conference. It's the premiere meeting-place for everyone with an interest in the future of digital publishing on a very, very microscopic level. As they say:

eBooks may have outsold hardcovers, but successfully selling digital editions is only the first phase of a profound transformation of the traditional book publishing business. The immediate challenges are many: navigating among the retail titans, placing your assets in the right hands and into the right channels, using Big Data effectively to optimize reach and revenue, and engaging directly with readers and building community.

We can expect even more dramatic change as entirely new kinds of digital book reading experiences are enabled by the shift to tablets and smartphones, via HTML5 and EPUB 3. As the worlds of apps, browsers, and eBooks collide, and a new generation of digital natives are born, a total transformation of education and reading is imminent.

That's serious stuff. And seriously awesome. You don't go to this one to hang out. You go to this one to be part of the future before the future happens, and to stretch your brain. The speaker page is a virtual who's who list of thinkers and founders in the emerging ditital space. On one hand it's not surprising that the speakers at an event like IDPF would be great, but on the other hand, often there are speakers who are great but not the best in the field. There is actually a panel with Craig Mod, Corey Pressman and Hugh McGuire at the same time. Let me sit down for a moment...

OK, we're back. Why do I bring up IDPF at all?

Two reasons:

1. Standards: This is where they literally hash out the standards for digital books. You wish you could get your .mobi files and your .epub files to work on the same device? These are the people talking that out. You wish formatting an eBook as an author was easier? That's what they're up to. It's the council. It's the rule-makers. They are literally building the scaffolding for the future.

2. Growth: They are making those standards for an industry that is absolutely exploding. Check out this graph of the growth of eBook trade sales:

And that's just up to 2010. That really huge bar on the far right is eBooks making $450,000,000. It's now two years later and last year's number was $995,000,000. They would have to double the size of this graph to show last year's bar.

I'll report back in a few weeks when we know what comes out of that conference. Is anyone else as interested in this as me? Do you get excited about the future of digital books?

Image courtesy of uniondocs via flickr, graph from IDPF via Mark Coker's Huffington Post article