At Publishers' Conference, the Digital Future Is (Almost) Now

By Jennifer Howard

Washington

The people who gathered here last week for the Association of American Publishers’ Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division's annual conference did not waste a lot of time worrying whether print is going the way of the dodo. As Matthew Nauman, director of publisher relations at Blackwell’s, put it, “A book sale is a book sale, and we don’t care what the format is.”

For many of the publishers, though, digital is where it’s at—or where they want to go—and