Signal or Noise: What Can We Learn from All These Digital Publishing Conferences?

Signal-to-noise ratio… used… to quantify how much a (electrical) signal has been corrupted by (meaningless or random) noise… Informally… the ratio of useful information to false or irrelevant data in a conversation or exchange.

Wikipedia

Abstract

Fifteen years ago, a senior publishing executive had three cardinal points on her calendar: Frankfurt Book Fair (October), the AAP annual meeting (February) and BookExpo (May). That was then. Between December 2009, and March 2010, there have been over half a dozen major meetings. With slightly different emphases: e.g. trade publishing, technology, and printing and manufacture, each of the events sought to project the future of publishing at a time of digital transformation of content, the arrival of new devices such as the iPad, and significant distress within the industry. Using the engineering metric of “signal to noise ratio,” the article takes a look at some of the high points of these well-attended meetings, and the ratio of promising experimentation and reasoned hypotheses to digital hype.