More than any other year, 2010 at Frankfurt was one for problem solving, partner finding, and planning practical approaches to the new terrain our industry is moving into.

We finally settled on a platform for publishing e-content that seems almost too good to be true:

• Negligible up-front set-up cost
• Strong yet flexible DRM
• Publisher-controlled backend allowing us to control, monitor, modify business models, pricing strategies, customer communication, and admin
• Support of multiple languages
• Reasonable revenue share

No bookstore complete without a cash register; we identified a partner who can handle all sorts of online financial transactions – from POs to EFTs to credit cards and PayPal — in 60 currencies worldwide, with all necessary security clearances.

We capped off years of Digital Object Identifier (DOI) discussions with nifty plans to employ DOIs on a very granular level on scientific content, addressing pressing version control, citation and archiving needs along the way, while pushing the DOI business model to new levels.

We were invited to join the rights committee of a powerful standards-setting industry organization; we had stimulating discussions about GPS-enabled books. And finally, and most fun, we met a game developer who appears to have his finger on the pulse of both man and mouse—we look forward to following this path off of the printed page!

Watch this space for more details (real names and ideas, real products!), as Marina and I follow up on a very productive show, separating business realities from “show talk,” and helping to build publishing systems whose size, global scope, and immediacy were the stuff of imagination a few short years ago.