Has Syndication Changed?

This last week I came home from one of the largest syndication conferences in the country if not the world.  That is the largest print media conference known as Book Expo America (BEA) which caters to publishers, authors and book and magazine distributors.  The conference held in New York, NY this year made me reflect on how much the syndication of published information has changed.   At BEA  there were sessions for independent authors on how to publish their books, classes concerning the copywriting of books and legal issues surrounding foreign markets.  There were opportunities for authors, publishers, book distributors, and retailers to meet together in order to facilitate the movement of the printed content from its creator to the ultimate consumer of the information.

So just why was a guy like me who is promoting the values of RSS and mRSS doing at a traditional  print media event.  Well besides getting a workout from carrying away the many pounds of books that I carried away from the event, I was there to expound the benefits of modern technology in distributing information.  While it is evident that many people still like to curl up with a regular old book, Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com are proof of that, there are many more efficient ways to distribute content than to carry 75 pounds of books around with you.

We now have the benefits of eBooks and of course the technology that this site is dedicated to and that is RSS.  With so many benefits such as the ease of distribution to news readers, blogs, websites, cell phones, PDAs and who knows what next, content can be distributed about as fast as the speed of thought.  Another benefit is that when something is published in an RSS feed it is easy to make edits and have the content immediately updated to reflect the change.

Of course RSS and other technological advances in syndication still share some of the problems that plague traditional print media.  Mainly when it comes to copywrite issues and attribution to the original sources of information.  I believe this will be less of a problem in the future as the online world becomes more organized and adopts generally accepted practices that we all adhere to.  The important thing is for us to create and abide by these standards ourselves.  If we don't we may find that the online freedom that we enjoy could be infringed upon by government regulation that is pushed upon us to combat these issues.

While many of us still enjoy a traditional book, maybe the next generation will thank us as they curl up with the future version of a PDA to scan the news or read a classic.