Technology Innovation: Make it happen, watch it happen, or wonder what happened…

Change is happening. There is no going back.

Now, more than ever, publishers are facing the reality that an industry defined for decades by the printed page has an increasingly digital future.

Consumers are embracing emerging technologies, turning to e-readers and e-books as naturally as they turned to MP3 players and digital downloads for music.

But do publishers understand the opportunity before them? More specifically, do they understand what consumers want and what they are doing right now? Data out of the Harrison Group suggest a fundamental disconnect between what consumers want and what publishers intend to offer. Reconciling these digital divides will be one of the industry’s main challenges in the months and years ahead.

We will answer the following questions over the upcoming weeks as we dive into trends in a new survey taken by the Harrison Group:

• Who is the early adopter in this revolution?
• How will information be created and consumed in the future?
• Are there barriers to overcome for consumers in adopting this new digital media (and do publishers understand or value them appropriately)?

Many of these topics will assuredly be explored next month at the Tools of Change (TOC) Conference in New York City. The conference, now in its fifth year, brings together folks from the publishing industry to talk about how technology innovation is changing their business.

Jim Cathey, vice president of business development for Qualcomm MEMS Technologies, will be a featured speaker at TOC.

• The Consumer-Driven Reading Revolution: Are You Along for The Ride?
• What Do eReading Customers Really, Really Want? An In-depth, Research, and Data-driven Exploration of Reading Behavior, Content Consumption, and Consumer Attitudes Toward eReaders and Multifunction Devices

I’ll also be attending TOC this year, so watch for updates from the event and via our Twitter feed when I return from the show.