The great journalist Robert Fisk wrote a piece in the INDEPENDENT newspaper in 2005 which has stayed with me ever since because it articulated a feeling that had been growing since I’d left university a year earlier, a suspicion of the closed-off world of our educational institutions: ‘Let us rebel against poisonous academics and their preposterous claptrap of exclusion'.

In a rancorous piece, Fisk – clearly speaking from the heart − exposed his inferior-superior mindset towards academia, railing against the men and women who lord knowledge over others principally because they code it in language only they and their familiars are permitted to understand: ‘To enter this unique circle of brain-heavy men and women, all must learn its secret language lest interlopers manage to sneak through the door.’ 

Today the Digital Book World conference begins in New York. It’s a who’s who of digital publishing brought together under the aegis of Mike Shatzkin, a thinker about the digital future of publishing who has attained Yoda-like status within the community. 

‘Community’ is one of the buzz words of the digerati: how the principle challenge and opportunity of the rapid growth of digital reading enables a direct engagement with its ‘audience’, its readers. We no longer publish into the void to an anonymous body of consumers. We can  − and many argue must – have a direct communication with them through ‘products’ and ‘services’ that we ‘license’ to an ‘end user’.

Do we try and create a brand and thus attract an audience? Or go where the ‘eyeballs’ are and target them? Who will be this ‘service provider’ to consumers? Surely the entity best able to ‘capture’ that audience: whether publisher, retailer or author.

What’s obvious is we must ‘exploit’ our ‘content’. Even better, ‘fillet’ and ‘leverage’ it at a ‘granular’ level.

A participant in this bubbling conversation (or we can call it a debate) on Twitter (a tool I mostly love and sometimes loathe), Don Linn (@donlinn), last week said: ‘Anecdotes are not data. They are interesting; they may be useful. But they're not data.’

I think that last comment triggered this piece. I think he’s right, but his statement made me think that maybe now we prize the data (the sales statistics) too greatly over the anecdotes (the human experience). Or to put it another way, we reach for the functional terminology of facts and figures and dismiss the demotic too readily.

For a while now I’ve been uncomfortable that there is a conversation going on that is increasingly disassociated from the everyday language and mindset that has made the book industry thrive: that of readers. Maybe this new ‘discourse’ that seeks insight over instinct and intuition is what the book industry needs to tool up and cut its way through the tangled forest of its daunting future. It’s certainly indicative of the way that marketing and marketing speak has become central to selling books. That’s been a good thing, but when in the mouths and postings of the technology crowd I feel it often deadens and straitens the conversation it should facilitate.

As we look to the minds of Digital Book World this week for wisdom and guidance I hope we don’t open up more of a chasm between the theory and the practice. In the UK we’ve just seen the first significant steps towards e-reading as a common practice: Kindles and iPads have really only just established themselves post-Christmas.

Now when I tell ‘normal’ people what I do they don’t draw a blank or get defensive.  But it’s telling when even some insiders are worrying that we are getting ahead of ourselves, mainly because ‘right now is progress enough for the savvy consumer’. 

Don’t get me wrong, I am as guilty as anyone. I’ve spent three weeks in scores of meetings at a new job and many times slipped into this jargon. I understand that we need some visionary (even OTT) forward-thinking  to try and delineate the future of the ‘book’ industry. But as a lot of people are experimenting, some succeeding, many failing, I hope we don’t forget that this isn’t about solidifying a digital fortress within publishing. As Ernst Kallus of Oxford University Press said at the Futurebook conference in November, in a couple of years it won’t be called digital publishing anymore, just publishing.

Everyone with a ‘digital’ in their job title has a responsibility to be a learner, and an optimist or realist if they so choose.  But most importantly that person is an outrider; responsible for coming back to camp to tell everyone else what they’ve learnt.  We need to do that in the clearest terms possible in a language that makes sense, so that digital practitioners and thinkers don’t become guilty, as Fisk accused academics, of being ‘great at networking each other but hopeless at communicating with most of the rest of the world’.

If we risk failing to communicate, as the Gjallarhorn is being sounded presaging the demise of book publishing, the digital ‘experts’ will not be understood, or at worst ignored, and we’d only have ourselves to blame. In the digital world where so many tout their publishing ‘solutions’ we must not let communication itself be the problem.