Word up: Frank Romano on book trends

Since his beginnings at the Mergenthaler type foundry, Frank Romano has been the standard bearer for each new wave of innovation in the graphic arts. Industry people have come to regard his utterances with a reverence usually reserved for the Pope, or Seth Godin. There are many who attend lecture after lecture of his. Jimmy Buffett has his Parrotheads, and Frank has his--what should we call ourselves? Pocket Pals?
Boston's Pocket Pals were well represented in an audience of about 65 who came to hear Frank speak about Book Production Trends on November 19 at the Colonnade Hotel (a spot so swanky the validated parking cost as much as the lecture tickets). As he often does, Frank kicked off the evening with a video. Video allows him to indulge two of his passions: Printing-history montages and song parodies. This one was We Didn't Trash Your File, sung to the tune of Billy Joel's We Didn't Start the Fire. It's easy to laugh at the flickering parade of discarded information technology, but in between the floppy discs and the Syquest cartridges, there's a serious message: Don't put too much stock in your tools. The people who make tools make their living by selling us new ones, so the cycle of obsolescence is inescapable.
Frank is one of the few speakers who can make statistics interesting, but he can't make them optimistic. He cited a study indicating that book manufacturing in the US peaked in 2007, and is projected to decline steadily. Some of that decline is work that has moved offshore, but some of it is work that has simply disappeared. Frank pointed to other data that showed a steady decline in the size of print runs, and the steady migration of books from offset to digital presses. He gave examples of how press manufacturers are responding to the trend by rolling out digital presses with ever-increasing speed, resolution, and color fidelity. The rise of digital book manufacturing is a silver lining of sorts, because it supports growth in the areas of neglected backlist and niche titles, and custom-published items like personal photo albums.
When Frank got around to the subject of e-books, he brought up Random House v RosettaBooks, a 2001 case in which Judge Sidney Stein denied Random House's claim to e-book rights on certain of its titles. According to Frank, Judge Stein's decision was based on his opinion that an e-book did not fit the definition of a book. Frank put his audience on the spot by asking them to define a book.
I was stoked at this point, because the lecture was sponsored by Bookbuilders of Boston (on whose board of directors I serve), and most of the audience were Bookbuilders members. Here's where my people get to show off their publishing mojo, I was thinking.
"What makes a book?" Frank asked again. Voices from the audience called out:
"Pages."
"Pages in sequence."
"With a binding. Pages bound together in sequence."
A woman sitting in front of me spoke up with the thin, cautious voice of a fifth grader who isn't completely sure she knows the right answer. "Words?" she said. Nobody seemed to hear her.
I hope next time she speaks up louder, and I hope Bookbuilders listens. Because the future of Bookbuilders--and all its member companies--depends on being able to see books as something much more than pages bound together.