Went to an interesting Byte The Book event yesterday evening, featuring a high-profile panel including musician Feargal Sharkey, Richard Mollet the CEO at the Publishers Association, Chris Maples the European boss at Spotify, and Paul Brindley the ex-bassist with The Sundays and co-founder of specialist strategy business Musically. It was sponsored by PrintWeek's good friend John Charnock at Print Research International. In the swanky surrounds of London's Ivy Club (although somewhat disappointing that their great glass elevator wasn't working) the panel debated what, if any, lessons book publishing could learn from the music industry. On the way in I bumped into Rohan Quine (great byline, eh?) who's just about to publish a novel in e-book form. But he has ambitions to produce a p-book of it too. The description 'p-book' was new to me, but apparently it's commonplace, so am obviously behind the curve with this stuff. E-book = electronic book V-book = video book A-book = audio book P-book = printed book. Or, as I see it, Proper Book. Talking to Rohan I was reminded of the EL James phenomenon moving from e-book to massively successful p-book. Anyhow, it was all terribly interesting. Paul Brindley noted that it was ridiculously simplistic to say that all the stuff music has been through, so will books. Piracy has had a major impact on the music biz, whereas the growing use of devices such as Amazon's Kindle means users are, in the main, consuming e-books legally. And unlike the shift to buying single tracks instead of albums, people are hardly likely to buy a single chapter of a book. Sampling is an opportunity, rather than a threat. Feargal Sharkey was, as one might well imagine, a forthright speaker who noted that technology is marvellous and all that, but it "opens up access to the mediocre – you can't replace the talent bit" when it comes to being successful. He also got a gold star from me for this: "My home would be a dull, less inspiring place without books." There was no talk of the death of the p-book, thank goodness. From my point-of-view I remain convinced that people are by nature more attached to books in their various shapes and sizes than they are to CD jewel cases. Spotify's Maples emphasised the need to provide customers with as many options as possible: "Put it in front of consumers in as many ways you can." Hopefully that will continue to include the odd p-book.