After two intense days of speeches, panels, presentations, celebrations and debates, breakout sessions, networking and exhibits, there was so much to take away from the Digital Book World conference that my head swam. But after contemplating it all in tranquility I was able to reduce the takeaways to one simple but powerful impression: the paradigm shift in publishing from a tangible culture to a virtual one has finally begun to take hold, and its grip will endure.

The moment I beheld a CD-ROM I knew that a day would come when I would behold an electronic book reader. For years I have chronicled the evolution of digital technology, noting its incremental but inexorable trajectory toward a tipping point. I cannot say that we have reached it – indeed, Impelsys’s Sameer Shariff told an audience at DBW that the industry is where the primitive video game Pong was in the early 70′s. Nevertheless, the conference attendees clearly grasped that the gravitational pull on their home planet has weakened and the tug of a new world has become palpable.

How to characterize that new world? It’s no longer about the product. It’s about community, the impossibly tangled, virally sprawling, thrillingly energetic, intoxicatingly imaginative web of writers, editors, readers, entrepreneurs, aggregators, curators and technologists in the service of authors and books, utilizing tools of staggering complexity and power. It’s bigger than any of us but publishing people, even old timers (over 40), have lost their fear and accept the new medium and its tools not just as inevitable but as benign.

Indeed, it took an over-40 veteran, publisher-turned-agent Larry Kirshbaum, to remind the assembly that however dazzling the delivery systems may be, the real magic of books is produced by authors and publishers, and it always will be. Good for you, Larry! And a big shout-out to Mike Shatzkin, F+W Media and the other sponsors for creating an event that would enable us to grasp how vast and wonderful our community is.

We are told that “May you live in interesting times” is a curse. I cannot remember a more interesting time for publishing than today, and I feel blessed to witness and be part of it.

Richard Curtis