For Position Only: Giving Publishers a Shot in the Arm

If all the recent bad tech news has got you down — and if your company has a few bucks squirreled away for training and travel — you might want to skedaddle to Bean Town next week for the annual spring Seybold Seminars. The week-long event at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston promises to draw all of the leading technology vendors to the expo, showing the latest and greatest print and Web design and publishing tools, and to offer scintillating seminars, conferences, and tutorials on a host of topics, from e-books to streaming content. (Creativepro.com will be mailing a special Seybold Seminars newsletter with all the hot news direct from the show. To receive it, sign up here.)

I kid you not. The great thing about Seybold shows is that they draw attendees who are committed, professional print and Web publishers, along with both established and upstart vendors. And that’s why, according to Seybold Seminars Program Director Thad McIlroy, the show won’t really be slowed this year despite the stumbling dot-conomy. “We’ve seen the bursting of a speculative Web bubble,” McIlroy says, “but if you look at the underlying metrics of the Web they’re particularly strong, even in this time of economic slowdown: weekly page views, ad views — all the key metrics continue to climb in double-digit numbers. So from our audience’s point of view, nothing has changed.”

According to McIlroy, Seybold isn’t smarting from the bursting of the Web bubble. “We never ballooned or burst because of the Internet bubble,” he says, adding that companies are entering a much healthier phase of Web publishing as they reevaluate their Web business models and become more realistic about what they want to achieve with their sites.

At the show next week, attendees will be able to learn not just how to prepare content for those sites, but especially how to leverage and intersect their print and non-print publishing workflows efficiently and wisely. “It’s the biggest conference we’ve ever produced,” says Seybold President and General Manager Gene Gable. “While some of the enthusiasm of the Web as a standalone product has certainly waned, everyone is discovering that the value of the traditional publishing market — in terms of understanding commerce and being paid for material — is the one that’s going to have to take place. Seybold’s take on the Web has been to put it in context of what our traditional audience already knew, and apply the traditional values of commerce to the equation.”

Keeping Up with the Times
Two new topic areas at the show address some of the biggest challenges facing print and online publishers today: digital rights management (DRM) and streaming video.

“DRM means different things to different sectors of the industry, both in terms of what needs to be protected and how,” McIlroy said. “The Web has turned DRM into a minefield for corporations; for traditional publishers it’s a more familiar concept that has become increasingly complex because of technology.”

Each of the show’s four conference tracks will feature seminars on DRM, including Digital Rights Management for Electronic Publishing (Tuesday, Publishing Strategies Conference), and Rights Management Systems (Thursday, Digital Media Conference). Plus Monday is a “Special Interest Day” with sessions all day long on the topic. On the show floor there will be almost a dozen DRM technology vendors, including Authentica, ContentGuard, and Reciprocal. The Seybold editors gave this last company a “Hot Pick” for its Storefront product: a templated retail Web site for clients of Reciprocal’s Digital Clearing Service

As for streaming content, the new Digital Media Conference will have several seminars to address the design and production of streaming media: Developers can check out How to Choose a Bandwidth Partner on Wednesday; executives might want to check out New Content Delivery Methods (Thursday). In addition there will be a tutorial on streaming media basics on Sunday, and Digital Imaging Special Interest Day (Thursday) has been expanded to include both digital images and video.

“We feel that, thanks to good and simple DV authoring software and burners, this is going to be a more mainstream way of disseminating information,” Gable says. “The first place professionals are likely to use these tools are training and product support.”

Old Stand-Bys
Other themes that habitual Seybold attendees will recognize include XML, PDF, e-books, asset management, and color publishing. On Tuesday you can hear a keynote speech from Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen on that company’s vision of network publishing; on Thursday you can hear Quark CEO Fred Ebrahimi talk about that company’s media-independent publishing strategy and introduce a new product (?!). In a follow up on a keynote in San Francisco last summer, on Tuesday you can hear four visionaries debate what publishing will look like 20 years from now; and two days later you can hear three noted designers discuss the future of design in the age of digital media.

If you’re a glutton for punishment, on Tuesday you can go to Recipes for Defeat: Why Dot-Coms Fail When the Gravy Train Stops, and on Wednesday you can check out Dot Bombs, a panel discussion that asks the question, “What went wrong?”

McIlroy says that he’s been tracking the PR materials that exhibitors are sending out, adding, “I’ve yet to fall off my chair.” But that’s not a bad thing: “I see a deepening of the technology rather than a wow factor,” he says.

Gable notes that although Seybold Seminars has been accused of straying from its roots as an event for print publishing, that’s a misperception. “People think we somehow abandoned print, but Seybold was always about page composition, and we’re saying the same thing today: We’re designing in a new format but we’re still composing pages. Not much has changed except the definition of page composition.”

If your business focus is limited to print design, Gable says Seybold isn’t the venue for you, but if you do printing and publishing to other media, then Seybold is a premier event. “We’re talking about the integration of print production and other kinds of distribution. For the print world we’re focusing on people whose content will have to make its way into these other media. If you want the newest type of plate, go to Graph Expo. But if your clients need access to info and you want to help them integrate their print material with new formats, then you have to come to Seybold.”

And even though it may seem a bit late to be making travel plans, he adds, “There’s always room for more.”