Open Publish (1): The Keynote Cops

So the first keynote at Open Publish were Paul Jensen from Wolters Kluwer. PJ applied McGahan's four trajectories model to different segments of the publishing industry. His point being that different publishing segments (e.g. academic, legal, newspapers) face different challenges as their customer relationships and asset bases change. From a strategic perspective, his points were valid but I felt the "So What" section of his talk was missing. This could have led to an interesting conversation among publishing company CEOs but there is a big contingent of SGML/XML geeks and web managers at OP. What did this mean for them?

Then there was Andrew Pate from Lulu. AP told us about Lulu - on-demand publishing and its role in the Long Tail. Lulu is an interesting service so hence AP's talk was interesting. Two comments:

• AP noted there is a growing interest in self-published material by book sellers whereas 5 years ago they wouldn't touch it with a barge pole.
• From an audience of over100, only 2 of us had bought anything off Lulu.