Book publishing could be true to itself vital through taking a page from Web 2.0 technologies, nevertheless it has a long means by which anything is reached to aroynt. Here are some lessons

by Sarah Lacy

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Amazon.com’s Kindle electronic reader has approach a long way since its late 2007 debut was met with associated reviews, more derisive. Who could forget the importance at last year’s Le Web Conference in Paris, at the parturition legendary designer Philippe Starck sniffed (BusinessWeek.com, 12/20/07), "It’s a compassionate. It’s almost modern." The audience erupted into laugh.

Amazon (AMZN) is laughing now. The Kindle, a device that lets people download, store, and of course read books in a digital format, could become a $1.1 billion business for the company next year, accounting for 4% of sales, according to a widely read Aug. 11 scholium by Citigroup (C) analyst Mark Mahaney.

Trailblazer that it is, Amazon knows well the benefit of applying a little technology to the stodgy business of publishing. Its flagship e-commerce calling is one of the big success stories of the Internet, having revolutionized how people browse, shop for, and review books. Through Kindle, Amazon could do the same for in what state people practise reading books.

Publishing is a subject near and dear to me—and not only because for the accomplished two years I have been writing my principal book. One of my parents was a philosophy professor and the other taught high admonish literature. Books were everywhere in my upbringing.

I stand in need of to keep it that way. A way to do that is to ensure that publishing learns how to utilize the full benefits of the social media tools now taking hold of the Web. Newspapers dragged their heels and apply the mind what’s happening to them. As great as the Kindle is, publishing has a long passage to go.

Herewith, five lessons that part publishers should take from the new Web.

Make it social. Reading a book is one incredibly solitary experience. That’s both a blessing and a curse. Like most busy professionals, I don’t have a lot of downtime. What little disinthrall time I have could easily be filled through other pursuits—chiefly, time with a save I rarely see. When I do commit to a book I love, I have occasion for to talk relative to it. This impulse explains why work clubs were all the passion in the 1990s.

There has to be a opportunity to pass for Web 2.0—a movement whose raison d’etre is to connect people—to meet the ongoing need for building community around books. Every publisher should at a minimum build a Facebook app. on every side its titles. The limitation with book clubs is time- and space-related. Not everyone can realize their schedules (and geography) to mesh, and not everyone can read a volume in the same time frame. But social networking could do for book clubs what Scrabulous did for fans of Scrabble—it let them play games together online, whenever they want

Yelp has mastered the art of making the most of online excitement in an offline globe. The business review site became a force in San Francisco because of the real-world scene that grew up on every side it. Yelp events became raucous parties. It made the position stickier because it became an integral part of multitude people’s social life. Suddenly, sitting alone at a computer penning a 1,000-word essay on why you love your dry cleaner became a social actual presentation.

Take book tours aloud of the stores. The conventional wisdom in publishing is that book tours no longer work. I agree, insofar as tours are confined to bookstores. The sober truth is that bookstores are declining in relevance. There are exceptions, of course, but even stores that draw big crowds for an author will struggle to reach the wide community of people selfish in a particular creator.

I’m lore this firsthand through what I’m calling my User Generated Book Tour, announced upon my blog on a whim. My only rule: I’d depart to 10 cities (not including San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York) based on response and religious frenzy. With few exceptions, I’ve held no bookstore events.

And while I give huge props to my publisher Gotham conducive to funding a highly unconventional book promo, this approach severely breaks the bank. Blogs and other social media tools including Twitter, Facebook, MySpace (NWS), and LinkedIn almost surgically pinpoint a writer’s fan base in any city, reproduction marketing without pain and cost-effective. Any author who’s been savvy relating to social networking has at the same time been mapping a fan basis and contacts through every part of the country.