Eradicating Legacy Thinking

There’s a lot of talk in our industry about legacy publishers adapting to new technology and new ways of doing business. Part of the resistance is something I’ll call “legacy thinking.” It’s about doing things the same way and expecting a different result. We all know that doesn’t work. Ending legacy thinking is about breaking out of the comfort zone. It's about learning. And it's about training and re-training.

As it happens, we’ve done a roundup of some of the excellent publishing education programs around the country in this issue, in case you're interested in seeking out some classroom training. And if it's conferences you want, we'll hope to see you at the Publishing Business Conference & Expo, and Porter Anderson provides a guide to the Frankfurt Book Fair in these pages. A number of our other stories also touch on training-related issues. A feature by senior editor Denis Wilson looks at technology changes in the arena of education publishing, and columnist Andrew Brenneman suggests some new ways to successfully develop the application of educational technology.

A feature on “social reading” by John Parsons interviews marketing experts and presents ways to successfully utilize social media. That requires training too—for me, posting on Facebook or tweeting isn't something that comes naturally quite yet. I still need to train myself to remember to do it! I have been getting some comprehensive training recently, along with our new editors, Denis Wilson and Ellen Harvey, on effective and efficient use of Adobe InCopy, the system we use to traffic our manuscripts. Since I tend to be a bit old school when it comes to giving final approval on proofs, and still prefer to do it on paper with a red pen in my hand, this requires some retraining too. These are all ways of eradicating legacy thinking.