Don Linn has a terrific post reflecting on what was and wasn't said at the recent O'Reilly TOC (Tools of Change) conference. Here are a few selections (everything in a bullet point is a direct quote, with snips in between):

• There's not much new under the sun: In the 2 1/2 days I was there, I didn't see or hear anything startling or revolutionary that hasn't been discussed in other conferences or even at previous TOC's. Don't get me wrong, there were some terrific speakers and some interesting information conveyed, but the overall themes continue to be:(a) get to know your customers better and interact with them in a meaningful way; (b) make your titles discoverable with great metadata and SEO technology, (c) use the analytic tools available to you to analyze your publishing program and adjust as necessary, and (d) develop an XML workflow yourself or hire one of the many vendors to get your titles into shape to flow to multiple devices. Without diminishing the importance of any of those, they're hardly bold new ideas.
• We are not yet thinking broadly enough about enhanced ebooks. Although there was lots of enhanced ebook talk, most of the conversation I heard was around adding a few audio or video enhancements to text-based titles. This, to me, is the digital equivalent of packaging in a CD in the back of a print book, a practice that for most publishers (yes there are exceptions) has been a dismal failure. We need to bring in some gamers and film-makers to open our minds to the possibilities here. Jeff Gomez (of Starlight Runner) gave a keynote on Transmedia storytelling that hinted at the kinds of things that could be done within (and external to) the book. If the early enhanced digital books are poorly done, it could sink the entire opportunity.
• We are provincial in our thinking. Ramy Habeeb of Kotobarabia blew everyone's doors off in his keynote on Wednesday describing the Arabic market and bringing home the fact that in the digital world, content is borderless. Most of us in publishing have not thought that way and it's an urgent matter we need to embrace. If there was an "aha!" moment for most of the audience at TOC 2010, that was it.

(Here's a video interview with Habeeb that has a bit of the "aha.")

What's common to all three of these complaints is a sense that all of the various "future of publishing" conferences usually consist of the same people saying the same things to the same audience. Linn, Richard Curtis ("Are You Futured Out?"), and Edward Nawotka all write about a similar experience of "conference fatigue" -- here's an excerpt from Nawotka's "Are Conferences Creating a De Facto E-book Elite?":

The question is if digital publishing is promising democratization of the book business by lowering barriers to production and distribution, do conferences inadvertently create an elite by creating what amounts to a pay-wall around best-practices? Are those who cannot afford the best education being put in a disadvantageous position, one that will allow those who can afford to pay-to-play to co-opt the distribution channel for themselves?

While Nawotka worries about the little guys who are cut off from the great ideas shared by the big boys, Linn's post suggests the opposite problem: "a core group of players is acting as an echo chamber for each other's ideas on the future of publishing while the world spins merrily along." In other words, the homogeneity of the conference attendees, and the sheer number of conferences, virtually guarantees that only a handful of presentations are going to feel like breakthroughs.

I have to admit, sometimes I have bookfuturist blog fatigue. I know who's on my Twitter feed and RSS. And for the most part, we all follow each other. Why repost something that 9/10 of your readers have probably already seen? It's a dangerous way to start thinking, because it precludes the breakthrough event -- the encounter, the comment, the synthesis, the reaction to something new.

At the same time, if you just become a clearing-house for passing along information, maybe with a thumbs-up or thumbs-down, or even an elaborated but predictable critique, that's pretty futile too. You've got to add something. You have to make someone see.

Now, getting back to provincialism at TOC. The demand for bold, new ideas by new people runs exactly counter to the demand for hard, actionable data from people whose situation translates naturally to your own. It just does. The wild-eyed kids who've cooked up transmedia book-meets-game formats can't offer you sales and marketing numbers. The guy who's trying to crack e-texts on mobile phones in rural India can't help you save your small bookstore chain.

Homogeneity isn't just about finances -- it's about audience members demanding that presentations have something that speaks directly to their situation. We get provincial solutions because we only pose provincial problems. The irony is that this is all the more the case as e-books become a bigger, more viable, more well-defined business.

Or, it's theater. All presentations, all lectures, have a dramatic aspect to them, and the world of digital reading is no exception. Publishers will let the wild-eyed kid or the spokesman for the foreign market talk to them because as with any vacation, you want some tourism. You want someone to put on a show, whether it's with software or far-away places.

I don't know how to crack this. But it seems to me that this problem of provincial borders, and the paucity of new ideas exactly when we need them, is one of the greatest problems facing the future of reading today.