Today is the last day of the SXSW Interactive Festival in Austin, TX, but it wrapped up for me last night, and while I'm still digesting everything I took in, a few highlights have already become clear. Overall, the festival has been a chaotic mix of truly inspired presentations, thinly veiled sales pitches, over-the-top demagoguery and/or self-promotion, filtered through an incredibly diverse range of creative disciplines and strategic philosophies. The program was an eclectic buffet that wasn't always easy to navigate with the Austin Convention Center's awkward layout that makes it difficult to go between the 3rd to 4th floors,…
This will be my first year attending, and while a few presentations immediately jumped out at me as must-sees (eg: You Are Not a Gadget author Jaron Lanier), I decided to ask other people in publishing why they are going and what/who they are most looking forward to seeing.
Three weeks ago, when I last posted something here, I was on the verge of completely disappearing into Digital Book World, both the conference and the community that spun out of it, the latter now representing my day [and night, and some weekends] job.
So I’ve been pretty busy.
Thankfully, it’s been a good busy, and the next couple of months are going to be very exciting.
Digital Book World
The conference was a huge success by pretty much any measure — I had the extreme honor of giving the closing remarks, “The Future of Publishing is Bright” — and the community platform is quickly coming together, starting with a series of free WEBcasts; in-person seminars (Digitize Your Career); and more to be announced.
Whether you agree with Macmillan's push for new terms of sale for their ebooks or not, one thing that's been particularly impressive is the extremely vocal support they've received from their authors, particularly those published by their sci-fi/fantasy imprint Tor/Forge. As the news broke last weekend, several Tor/Forge authors immediately reacted to Amazon's ceasing direct sales of their books by replacing Amazon's links on their sites and redirecting their fans to Barnes & Noble and IndieBound. Among them was Cherie Priest, whose popular steampunk novel, Boneshaker, was recently honored with a PNBA 2010 Book Award, and as of 12:45pm EST…
When you’re ranting about the evils of “Big Publishing”, it helps to remember that for every My Life Outside the Ring, there’s also Boneshaker, and The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, and the entire First Second catalog! All of those happen to fall under the Macmillan umbrella. I’m not saying publishing isn’t all screwed up right now, because it damn sure is, but it’s also full of people who really do give a shit about good books and I know and work with a lot of them. We may not be running the companies from the top, but we’re sure as…
"The combination of hive mind and advertising has resulted in a new kind of social contract. The basic idea of this contract is that authors, journalists, musicians, and artists are encouraged to treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind. Reciprocity takes the form of self-promotion. Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising." Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget I'm knee-deep in final preparations for Digital Book World next week (look for the new website to relaunch by Tuesday, built by me!), but I wanted to give…
There are millions of books on amazon.com, and on average each will sell around 500 copies a year. The average American is reading just one book a year, and that number is falling. The problem (to quote Tim O’Reilly) isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity. Authors are lucky to be in a business where electronic copies aren’t considered substitutes for physical copies by most people who like reading books (for now at least).
The op-ed I wrote for Publishing Perspectives earlier this week, “E” is for Experiment (Not E-books), got an unexpected amount of attention and I’m pretty sure it’s the most I’ve ever seen a post of mine fly around the Twitterverse. Writing for someone else’s site is much harder than blogging on your own, so full credit to Edward Nawotka for a great job of editing it, helping me bring forward my main points and carving away the extraneous content, most of which went into my previous post!
One of the comments I got on the article allowed me to elaborate a bit on one of the points I made, that “e-readers will never have their ‘iPod moment’ for one very simple reason: books are not music.”
Dan from BookLamp mildly disagreed with me, making a point about the potential benefits of cost-savings and discoverability afforded by eBooks and eReaders, making a subtle pitch for his own platform that purportedly “matches readers to books through an analysis of writing styles, similar to the way that Pandora.com matches music lovers to new music.”
