5 Things I Learned in The First Day of IPC 2018

Today was the first day of the 32nd edition of the International Publishers Congress, and this year it is hosted in New Delhi, India.

The agenda of the congress is a promising agenda with a long list of panels on all important matters to publishers of this day, with sessions on the future of publishing, copyrights, CSR, and so much more. There is a lot of learning to be gained in such a conference, but here are my 5 highlight lessons from today's sessions.

1. The publishing industry seems to shift interest every decade. In the 90s the focus was on marketing and sales, in the 00s the focus shifted to logistics and business development. However, one can only hope for the new shift in this decade to be towards authorship and better management of intellectual property.
2. Whereas IQ was developed as a concept to measure human's intelligence, and then EQ was formed as a way to measure emotional intelligence. Nowadays as publishers, we need to cultivate CQ, Cultural Intelligence, to learn about the differences and similarities between cultures and religions in a globalized and diversified economy like ours today.
3. The future of publishing will not rely only on a great content curation but will also require strong analytical skills to understand our readers and what works.
4. In the digital age we're in, the 5 biggest content publishers are no longer book publishers, but rather the tech platforms: Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft. And with them operating a completely different business model that doesn't rely on intellectual property(IP), the only way we can protect our IP is by talking with them directly about it rather than debating among ourselves how will we protect it from them.
5. The new digital platforms are a product the new world economy with a whole new business model that doesn't come with a legacy that weighs them down as would be the case for traditional analog businesses that are trying to adapt to the new economy.