On April 20, HarperStudio will combine book clubs, book tours, and business conferences in a single event. The imprint will bring HarperStudio authors together for a short conference entitled re-Set: The Business Models of Tomorrow.

The whole event will be hosted by author Seth Godin (pictured). Speakers include NY Times contributor Anna Bernasek, former Disney CEO Michael Eisner, business author Tom Peters, wine and social media expert Gary Vaynerchuk. The short conference includes breakfast, idea sharing, and a forum. Each participant receives a signed copy of each panelist’s current book.

Here’s more from the site: “re-Set Business is an innovative speaker series designed for senior-level executives to share thoughts with the world’s leading visionaries about how the world does business in a variety of fields, today and in the future.”

A lot has happened in the last 10 years that has changed the book publishing industry dramatically.

It was not that long ago when people said, “Google, who?” Now, Google has become a verb as in “just Google it”. Google, once only a search engine, is poised to partner with book publishers or perhaps one day go head-to-head.

That’s not all. Since the Year 2000, we’ve seen the creation, rise and sometimes fall of Napster, the iPod, the Kindle, and Smashwords. We’ve seen massive lay-offs at major publishing houses and experimental publishing entities created such as Vanguard Press, Open Road Media and HarperStudio that have challenged the way the book business has existed for the last century.

What changes will we see in the next 10 years? What will life be like for the book publishing industry in 2020? In the next series of articles, we will uncover predictions by some of the industry’s most respected and vocal advocates for change.

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Digital guru Seth Godin made bloggy headlines over the weekend with a rant about textbook publishing, finally concluding: “This industry deserves to die.”

Godin’s grim post broke down the problems he saw in the traditional industry, but nevertheless, this market is on the verge of massive changes. Last week, California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger announced that he hopes to switch students to digital math and science textbooks, and many companies are vying for control of this digital market.

Here’s more from the post: “They are expensive. $50 is the low end, $200 is more typical. A textbook author in Toronto made enough money from his calculus textbook to afford a $20 million house. This is absurd on its face. There’s no serious insight or leap in pedagogy involved in writing a standard textbook. That’s what makes it standard. It’s hard, but it shouldn’t make you a millionaire.”

There are far more fools in the publishing industry than GalleyCat ever imagined. Here’s a round-up of the literary news breaking around the Internets on April 1st, 2009…

Jeff VanderMeer sold his newest book, Bookdeath, including chapters like: “How to Use Personal Information About Your Enemies in Your Fiction.” Meanwhile, Publishers Weekly raved about a new reality TV show for writers.

The Kenyon Review has purchased conglomerate publisher Random House for a low six-figure deal. The FBI has deputized the entire team at Writer Beware for a special publishing scam task force: “Rich, Victoria and I will be reporting to Quantico for special training next Monday. At the end of our training, we’ll be issued our badges and guns, and begin our tour of the country.”

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Last Friday, marketing expert and bestselling author Seth Godin suggested on his blog that “ads are the new online tip jar.” If you read a blog without ever clicking on its ads, he warned, “you’re starving great content… If you like what you’re reading, click an ad to say thanks.”

“If every time you read a blog post or bit of online content you enjoyed you clicked on an ad to say thanks,” he said, “the economics of the web would change immediately.” Yes, several critics answered, it would—for the worse. J.D. Roth offered a particularly thoughtful response on his Get Rich Slowly blog: While there’s nothing wrong with following up on ads for products that genuinely interest you, “there are long-term ramifications to empty clicks,” he explained. “If an advertiser spends money on a campaign that doesn’t work, it’s not going to renew it.” Instead, Roth proposes, if you like a blog and you really want to help it flourish, you should take active steps to strengthen its audience—get your friends to read it, for example, or mention it on your own web site if you have one. “Trust me,” he says, “if new readers come, revenue will follow.” Instead of creating a extra chore for readers (“I haven’t clicked on an ad here in a while, I suppose”), websites should strive to inspire readers to “spread the word” without thinking twice about it.

This is where authors, publishers, booksellers and others who have built websites, with or without the “support” of advertising, should ponder one question carefully: Why are you cultivating that audience in the first place? Are you creating a pool of potential customers for yourself, or one that you can rent out to the highest bidder? (OK, that was two questions, and, yes, I suppose you could answer the last question with “both.”)

But Godin wasn’t done explaining his theory yet.

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A crowd more than 300-strong gathered at the New York Public Library‘s Celeste Bartos Room for Google‘s all-day Unbound conference to be told, in no uncertain terms by an array of speakers, that if you’re not moving with the digital times, you’re just not a 21st century publisher. I paraphrase, of course, but that was certainly the vibe in the air what with Seth Godin comparing publishers to outlying planets, Cory Doctorow (on the fiction side) and Daniel Weiss (on the educational side) explaining why giving content away is a good thing, and Tim O’Reilly advocating for Google Book Search as a way of capturing the almost 75% of books that aren’t accounted for by not being in print or in the public domain.

Aside from Godin and Doctorow, Chris Anderson was on hand to give an abbreviated spiel of his bestselling THE LONG TAIL, Stephen Dubner (of Freakonomics fame) talked about how the related website – now a blog with additional content features – brings in over 2 million page views a month, and J.A. Konrath stressed the importance of having “things to offer” instead of “things to sell” on an author website. But the big hit of the afternoon – at least, judging by applause – was Josh Kilmer-Purcell, who used Powerpoint in hilarious fashion to describe how MySpace hooked him up with fellow members of the Memoirist Collective. And for those who need help interpreting the slide, Kilmer-Purcell illustrated how his book, I AM NOT MYSELF THESE DAYS, was published by HarperPerennial, which is part of HarperCollins, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch, who owns “half the world” – and when the Judith Regan graphic cued up, the room erupted in laughter…

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