Details of Australia’s first digital literature centre, the Institute of the Future of the Book, or ‘if:book Australia’, were announced at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival on Thursday August 27.

The Brisbane-based centre, only the third in the world after New York and London, will promote new forms of digital publishing and explore means of enhancing connections between writers and audiences in the digital age.

“We’re thinking of it as a think and do tank,” says Kate Eltham, CEO of the Queensland Writers’ Centre, which will host the Institute.

“Its purpose will be to investigate publishing futures, particularly digital futures for books, reading and writing; and also to share what we learn with the sector, with writers, publishers and the public at large through blogs, through publishing our research, and through experiments we’d like to run with our partners.”

Eltham is at pains to stress that the Institute of the Future of the Book will support writers as well as publishers and retailers.

“Obviously because we’re the Queensland Writers’ Centre we have a particular interest in opportunities and resources for writers. There’s quite a lot of work that’s been done to help publishers to understand and navigate these changes, but unfortunately so far we haven’t seen the same sort of thing happening to assist writers as well; and we’re really keen to make sure that writers – individual authors – can understand how their business is changing and how they can take advantage of new opportunities they hadn’t imagined before.

“The future is upon us now when it comes to publishing, and that’s right across the board, whether we’re talking about traditional journalism and newspapers, or book publishing. For over a decade, industry observers have been predicting that the structure and the business models for our industry will fundamentally change as a result of the rise of digital media, and we can no longer sit and wait for that to happen, because it’s happening now,” she says.

“So we would like to assist Australian writers in particular, but also other players in the publishing industry, to understand how these changes affect them; and also to take advantage of the new opportunities and the new markets that this actually creates for them as well.”

The Australian Booksellers Association (ABA) has welcomed news of an Australian branch of the Institute of the Future of the Book, especially in light of the lack of coordination around the issue of e-books and digital publishing in the publishing and booksellers’ sectors.

“Some of the publishers are doing something with digital, and good on them, but they don’t really know what they’re going to do with it once they’ve done it. There’s no real partnership with any retail chain. They’re all talking furiously now, but to make any new thing work you need all the market to grow it,” observes ABA CEO Malcolm Neil.

“My concern is that if we go down this fractured approach that we appear to be doing, with just individual large retailers or individual websites having access to content rather than it being a more open approach, we won’t adequately develop and exploit an Australian market, and we’ll just end up with someone coming in from overseas with something that is more customer friendly.”

Just as the world’s music industry is currently being forced to adapt to changes in the way people purchase music due to the ease with which people can download songs via file-sharing programs, in recent years the publishing industry has also being faced with a shift in the way people access and consume books and other publications.

Software programs such as Stanza, an application for the i-Phone, have dramatically increased the rate at which people adapt to reading e-books on portable digital media devices. In the 12 months from its launch in July 2008, over two million people have downloaded Stanza, downloading 12 million e-books in 20 different languages in the same period according to the program’s manufacturer, Lexcycle.

Amazon.com’s Kindle software and hardware platform, which can hold up to 2G of information, is another popular means of accessing and reading e-books and other digital media.

But despite the rising popularity of e-books, Kate Eltham doubts they spell impending doom for the publishing industry as we know it.

“Print isn’t going anywhere, certainly not for a very, very long time. If you look back at new media technologies that have come along in the past, they don’t replace old media, although they certainly disrupt them. They sometimes challenge the existing business model and turn things on their head … but they don’t replace the old media.

“So, video didn’t really kill the radio star,” she laughs, “and digital isn’t going to kill print either. But we are going to embrace other forms of reading, through other kinds of media, and that’s because we’re using these sorts of media channels now.”

if:book Australia at the Queensland Writers’ Centre at www.qwc.asn.au