I rolled into BookExpo's Thursday panels at 9:30 A.M. sharp, to check out a presentation by Barbara Kline Pope and Michael Jensen (right) of the National Academies Press on how "Capitalism Meets the Gift Economy of the Web," which boils down to this: the National Academies are fulfilling their mandate to distribute the reports created by their scientists "as widely as possible while being completely self-sustaining" by giving away as much content as they can in HTML and PDF format. With this strategy, they've attracted 1.5 million visitors to the National Academies site each month, or, as the graph at right trumpets, "The Result of Free Is Traffic." Pope handled the marketing end of the presentation, revealing how 4,000 titles selling 10 or fewer copies genertated $400,000 in income in just one year, while 1,400 titles selling one copy each generated an additional $40,000; Jensen presented the various search tools they'd designed to make the site more effective, including features that enabled visitors to skim books and land on the first pages of various chapters. For these types of scientific reports, the National Academies are the only game in town, and these online efforts seem to go a long way towards maximizing the revenue stream. I was impressed, at any rate.

Later that afternoon, I went to check out Kevin Smokler's (left) presentation on RSS for publishers, where he was upfront enough to admit, "The fact that we're having this conversation in 2006 means we're already three years behind." And, yeah, sure, as someone with a long legacy of adopting 'net tech early, I found it a bit basic, but really Smokler just echoed stuff I've been trying to pitch to online marketing people all along—RSS is the way to reach out to the sort of people who'll actually make the effort to buy the books that interest them. As a publisher, you can't rely on people making the conscious effort to visit your website every day/week for news about your authors, and you can't rely on email newsletters to carry all the burden. RSS is "a way to distribute information without friction," as Smokler puts it, to exactly the sort of people who want to know it. Very few publishers have picked up on that yet, though it's my fervent hope (and Smokler's, too, I imagine) that they're on the verge of figuring out what they could accomplish with what turns out to be a very simple tool.