I’ve been jolted into action by James from Camerjam posting the presentations from last week’s m-publishing event.

For those of you who weren’t there, many of the presentations hosted here on Slideshare speak for themselves.

For me there were two clear trends going on. There’s a significant amount of “Top Down” work going on to work out what the strategy should be. This is coming from the likes of Associated Northcliffe Digital (AND) CEO Richard Titus, sitting astride an empire with 40M uniques a month, who made an impassioned plea for the quality of data to get better in the overall publishing space before the market could mature. AND has a clear strategy for attacking and monetising this space, evidenced later in the day by Teletext Digital MD Neil Johnson’s Metro and Prime location Ipad apps.

At the same time there was some “bottom-up” innovation going on with book publishers getting into the market and experimenting. David Roth-Ey of Harper-Collins provided some great insight (with rare candour in this over-polished business) into how the publisher had contrasting experience with two forays into mobile publishing, one with 100K downloads (SAS survival guide) and Hilary Mantel’s Novel Wolf Hall (less than 1K). Presentation is here

David was clear about his strategy: add value to the book format with richer content, take advantages of the richer elements of the e-pub format as they arrive and= expand to other platforms. It was a clear and realistic strategy, and one of the clearest articulated in the day.

Throughout Camerjam there were a lot of interesting showcases from different news, magazine and book publishers. However it was clear that the iPhone platform had dominated the mindset of most players in the space, with Android trailing behind and Nokia’s OVI environment now getting a few spontaneous mentions. Microsoft’s Peter Bale spoke up for Windows 7 and showed how the slick UI and deep integration into native features will confound those who believe this platform will be an also-ran by this time next year.

It’s clear that ease of development and high usage per user by iPhone users are the most influential factors here, but other key trends falling out of the day were:

-An app is not a strategy. The business needs to move beyond a single platform. As Handmark CEO Paul Reddick commented “it’s like making a TV programme which can only be watched by people with LG TV sets.
-Publishers need to go beyond simply digitising content and making it available. “Raw” Content needs the accompanying social and contextual factors to make a compelling consumer proposition. For more detail view our take on Books 2.0 and the “3Cs Model” of Content, Context and Community

Startups are active in this space and are threatening to destroy the existing models. Maureen Scott of Ether Books laid out her position when opening the day’s debate, arguing that the future of publishing lay in digital and that the days of “analogue consumers” are numbered.

like most content / tech plays this is a five-way football match between those involved in hardware, middleware, OS-driven plays (MSFT and Google), traditional “content 1.0″ companies and the sparky VC-funded (or would be funded) startups in this space.

The next few years will be chaotic and be too much for those brought up in the linear traditional world of dead tree publising. However for those who can transform and cope with the challenge and pace of continual innovation, the future for this industry will be bright.

The challenge now is for the publishing execs outside of the enlightened and converted who were present at Camerjam. They must ready their businesses for the rapid and perpetual nature of change which will become the norm in the connected digital ecosystem