Here's an interesting Book Summit theme -- Giving It Away: Books, Business and the Culture of Free.
Cost of admission: Culture of $145 ($75 for seniors and students).
The event is "presented by Humber College and the Book and Periodical Council in association with Authors at Harbourfront Centre," and it features lots of talk about what getting "it" for free (music, news, and books) means for the future of publishing.
The event's thesis statement: "Now deeply into the digital age, we find ourselves thrust into a new universe of textual media, provoking some unexpected questions. Giving It Away will confront these issues of access, diversity and democracy. Increasingly, the pressure is on the publishing industry to "give it away." It has happened in the music business and it is starting to happen in the newspaper industry. Is book publishing next? Will it go beyond sampling and current marketing methods to the very core of what we do?"
Book publishers, copyright experts, creative commons experts and at least a couple of actual creative types will be there.
The issue they will examine seems to come down to the definition of "free": We all should be "free" to access whatever we want whenever we want, and the Internet makes that possible. But does that "free"-dom mean "free of charge"?
And what does paying for goods possibly have to do with diversity and democracy anyway?
It's amazing to me that those things ever became conflated in the first place, and it astounds me that anyone could possibly fail to see that Limewire is theft. But I would be nuts to deny I'm in a minority with that view, or that anyone watching the business they're spent their life in collapse around them tends to be touchy.
Still, fair warning to book publishers -- you can attend seminars like these and debate these ideas in a spirit of openmindedness. But just imagine yourselves in five years when e-books are the norm and digital copies of your latest releases are being fenced on Limewire and your profits tumble to zero and everyone gets laid off in the name of "free."
You might find yourselves to be a little less sanguine about the subject.