The nine-year-old Caribbean Publishers Network (CAPNET) has in recent years been struggling to retain the enthusiasm of its member publishers, and the Jamaica meeting was convened amidst much gloom about the future of the publishing sector in the wake of falling sales as a result of the global recession, renewed competition and market penetration by UK-based multi-national media conglomerates, and the recent loss of lucrative government publishing contracts by some of its members.
A major challenge facing the overwhelmingly small and undercapitalized regional publishing firms is finding the technical skills and funding to make the transition from their traditional print-based operations to electronic publishing technologies, with their consumer-driven applications on the Internet and a slew of new hand-held and mobile devices. Incorporating electronic publishing technologies into their business operations is vital if they are to remain competitive or even relevant, given the current consumer market trends. The most recent statistics on e-book sales released by the Association of American Publishers, in conjunction with the International Digital Publishing Forum, in September, show triple-digit growth, with sales for the calendar year already up by 176 per cent.
potential
A sign of the growth potential for e-books is that, last year, there were only a handful of e-book readers available like Amazon's Kindle, Sony and IREX. Now there are predictions of some 30-odd new e-readers announced to hit the market between Christmas and the new year, and new online sites are being launched weekly.
Caribbean publishers were relieved to hear that it is not necessary for them to reinvent the wheel, that there are numerous service providers available in the US and places like India ready to bring them up to speed, and that by coming together in a consortium through CAPNET, access to the most up-to-date technology can be affordable for even the smallest individual publisher.
Energized by the presentations, networking and the therapeutic effect of sharing common problems, participants at the meeting spent hours crafting new governance and organizational structures, and elected a new council of nine headed by President Ken Jaikaransingh of Trinidad and including sector representatives for the different genres of publishing. One significant addition is a sector representative of service providers to the industry - editors, designers, printers, authors etc.
Next year will mark the 10th anniversary of the formation of CAPNET, and already a committee headed by the dynamic Neysha Soodeen (who was herself celebrating in Jamaica the 10th anniversary year of her outstanding MACO magazine) is already at work planning a series of activities that will culminate in an international conference on the theme of Caribbean publishing in the digital age, tentatively scheduled for November 2010.