What are the most significant things that have happened in the world publishing in the last year?

        Harry Potter, Harry Potter, and Harry Potter!

        There should be more significant things in the world publishing, but when I heard this question, because of recent years’ Harry Potter craze, Harry Potter popped up in my mind naturally.

        So, if we define ‘the last year’ as ‘the last 12 months’, the release of the book 7 and the last one of this series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, 2 months ago, is the most significant thing that have happened in the world publishing without doubt. No matter it is a good book or bad one, no matter you like it or not, you can’t ignore this millions-of-copies-and-billions-of-dollars feast of publishing.

        As for 2006, the most impressing thing was Dan Brown and Random House won the copyright lawsuit filed against them by two authors Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh over The Da Vinci Code. It was interesting that Baigent and Leigh's earlier book, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, was also published by Random House, publishers of The Da Vinci Code.

        At the same time in China, a famous 80s writer named Guo Jingming （郭敬明）was accused of plagiarize by an unknown author Zhuang Yu（庄羽）. Not lucky as Dan brown, Guo lost the case, and he refused to apologize to Zhuang in accordance with the court sentence. That led to a big dispute on 80s writers’ moral qualities in net forums.

        Maybe for publishers, the most significant things should be those have relation with publishing’s world leaders, Reed Elsevier, Pearson, Thomson, Bertelsmann, Scholastic, etc, about who sat on the top of revenue rank, who dropped from the top, who and who made what combination, who sold what to whom……

        While for me, I care more about publishing on line. According to Chris Anderson’s long-tail theory, nowadays there is infinite space in bookshops online for books those aren’t the blockbusters as the Harry Potter and the Da Vinci Code. It is the opportunity for small and grassroots publishers. But at the aspect of magazine, according to the 36^th FIPP world magazine congress, the advertisement revenue of paper media went up 8% in the last year, at the same time online media’s ad revenue went up 40%. We know unlike the books, the most magazines live on advertisement. So a lot of weak magazines that have no power to seize opportunity in this digital age will disappear in very soon future.

        As Sir Winston Churchill said, ‘A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.’  I want to be an optimist. But, how?