Putting the final touches to a talk I am giving tomorrow for the STM organisation. It occurred to me that the list of speakers at this conference might give a flavour of how book publishing is changing in the 21st century. Many of the companies did not exist a decade ago and yet I suspect that the debates at this meeting may prove more relevant to our future than the retail 'controversies' we are suffering in the UK right now. I have also pasted in the aims of the conference which set out very clearly some of the challenges facing book publishers today.

• Keynote Speaker: Richard Charkin, Chief Executive of Macmillan and President of the Publishers Association    'The Internet Changes Everything - Not!'
  

• Chris Armstrong, Managing Director, Information Automation, Ltd

• Louise Breinholt, Marketing & Communications Manager, Wiley Interscience

• Paul Carr, Editor-in-Chief of The Friday Project and Editor of 'The Friday Thing' and 'London by London'

• Warren Cowan, CEO, Greenlight

• Adrian Driscoll, Publishing Consultant, Caxtonia

• Richard Fisher, Executive Director, Humanities and Social Sciences, Cambridge University Press

• Suzanne S. Kemperman, Director, Publishing, NetLibrary (a division of OCLC)

• Sara Lloyd, Business Development Director for BookStore, MPS Technologies

• Ray Lonsdale, Reader in Information Studies, Department of Information Studies, University of Wales, Aberystwyth

• Jayne Marks, CEO, Global Operations, MPS Technologies

• Dan Penny, Account Manager, Electronic Publishing Services, Ltd

• Marika Stauch, Marketing Manager, Mathematics & Computer Science, Springer

• Wim van der Stelt, Vice President Global Marketing, Springer

While STM journal publishers have been driven to "go digital" by market need, the market and business models for digital book content delivery have been far from clear.

It has been difficult to assess if and when students, graduate students, academics, and the general reader, will begin demanding digital delivery of the content they want. Publishers have questioned which formats and business models will dominate, and, crucially, how we can unlock the revenue potential of digital delivery.

During the past year book publishers have recognized the need to resolve the answers to some of these questions. This has been driven partly by non-traditional, Internet-based competitors such as Google and Amazon stealing the march on publishers, launching their own initiatives enabling readers to get to the content they need. Also new "non-publisher publishers", such as Wikipedia, are introducing innovative content development and delivery mechanisms playing to markets where 'good enough' content is increasingly acceptable.

There is also a sense that, particularly in academic and professional markets, at least a proportion of readers are actively beginning to seek digital engagement over print content, delivered in the simplest, fastest and most cost-efficient way. The key question for publishers is: how to remain at the heart of the relationship between author and reader in this new digital environment? In other words, how do we continue to add value for authors and readers in the digital delivery chain?