At the UnBound conference, publishing insiders discussed the future of the industry with regards the digital world, and argued about whether "the creator...has the right to decide" what happens to written property.

"Free sells books," said Sparknotes publisher Daniel Weiss.

"Book search should be like Web search," concluded O'Reilly Media CEO Tim O'Reilly.

"Publishers are pervy for paper," cracked Cory Doctorow of the wildly popular BoingBoing blog.

On went the catchphrases at the one-day event, carefully designed to tell attending publishing industry types that if you're not moving with the digital times, you're just not a 21st Century publisher. And as the day wore on, it seemed as if the audience had been completely lulled into submission by the overly positive mood and the plentiful supply of food.

Then one soul dared to defy the collective during a Q&A session with O'Reilly: How could Google think it had the right to search through publishers' catalogs and make the content freely available, when the publisher itself objected? For a brief moment, it looked as if the room's elephant had finally reared back upon its hind legs and bellowed. The nervous audience awaited O'Reilly's response.

And then, the moderator cut off questioning and the conference returned to its shiny, happy, artificial equilibrium. But for that single moment, the tension between Google and the publishing world was on display -– as well as the larger sense that there's no holding back the tide of change to an industry still struggling to understand what the digital age is all about. "The publishing industry has become increasingly irrelevant," said author and UnBound speaker Seth Godin in a recent telephone interview. "They need to stop thinking about selling paper, when the last big changes to that model took place over sixty years ago with popularization of the paperback."

Her organization, as well as the Author's Guild, sued Google in November 2005 on those grounds. The suit is still pending, and Schroeder indicated that the case, still in discovery phase "is moving along –- we're in very good shape." Google counters that Book Search is the "equivalent of a card catalog with every word in the publication indexed."

Digital Ownership at the Crux

At the crux of the fight against Google Book Search is ownership of digital content. Free may sell books, but who should decide? Schroeder's answer: "The creator, be it the publisher or author, has the right to decide." And for many publishers, digital technology they control has helped. Even before the controversy began, some publishers had begun taking tentative dips into the digital water. Michael Holdsworth, former managing director of Cambridge University Press, spoke about the company's success in bringing back "zombie titles" from the no-man's-land of zero sales to greater prominence -- and sales -- as digital titles. Springer, a publishing firm devoted exclusively to science, technology & medicine titles, also touted its success with its backlist thanks to the implementation of e-book rental. For a small fee, customers can download textbooks for a day, a week or longer. And more presses may sign on with WOWIO, a website that offers users free e-books in many categories, inserts full-page ads in between the pages of the PDF file and shares the revenue with publishers.

No publisher has made more public waves on the digital front than HarperCollins. In the nearly two years since they began building an in-house digital warehouse, the company has scanned over 12,000 frontlist and backlist titles, according to Carolyn Pittis, senior vice president of Global Marketing Strategy & Operations, with plans for more in the coming years. Pittis had an easy answer for why HarperCollins was devoting so much energy to setting up a system that she calls "perfectly analogous" to the distribution model of physical books: "We're focused and committed to protecting our authors' content, as well as using this content for marketing opportunities. Authors can have great websites, newsletters and even speaking businesses individually, but we're able to provide something they can't do on their own."

Along with early online programs such as First Look (which enables readers to sign up to receive copies of new books several months before publication) and Author Tracker (for readers dying to keep up with where their favorite authors will appear next), Pittis pointed to two collaborative writing contests, Avon Fan Lit and Harper Teen Lit, that HarperCollins sponsored in 2006. Both projects proved to be "extremely popular," but Pittis was especially pleased with the marketing breakdowns for Avon Fan Lit, as 58 percent of those logging onto the site heard about it through HarperCollins' efforts. "Authors are accustomed to feeling as if they have to do the bulk of marketing efforts, but they aren't experts or in a position to know everything as a global publisher can."

There's a good reason why authors feel they must perform the lion's share of marketing work: too often publishing houses simply dump the books in hope that an audience arrives instead of the opposite. That may explain why the Web has become increasingly attractive as a means of spreading the word about books for authors and publishers alike. Blogs, MySpace pages, videos, and podcasts are becoming increasingly de rigeur for established and new writers alike. Then again, as for music, the real interest in digital content may come from the reader. Audiobook sales are up considerably, thanks to the popularity of iTunes and other formats making downloading easier. Print-on-demand costs are dropping each year to the point, Schroeder says, of "finally becoming economically viable." And while the late 1990s rush to anoint e-books as the next big thing is a distant memory, new-generation applications such as the Sony Reader have revived interest. Launched in 2006, the Reader has built up a library of more than 12,000 titles with the cooperation of all the major trade publishers, according to Ronald Hawkins, vice president of Portable Systems. "Understandably, there were tough questions as [publishers] recognized the history of the run-up and blowup of e-books in the dotcom area, but they could see we had done our research and saw the value of Sony entering the market." Other e-readers from other companies are hitting store shelves or are on the way.

There's no clear sense of the future for publishing, and many questions remain. Uppermost in the industry's mind is whether Google will prevail in its quest to make the world's backlist fully searchable, but the larger issue is whether the publishing industry's embracing of the digital world arrives too little, too late. Because when it comes to change, those in the midst of it are often the last to know, and the slowest to react.

Sarah Weinman is an editor for GalleyCat, mediabistro.com's publishing industry news blog.