Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

For any publishing types who are attend BEA this week, I’m giving a presentation entitled “The Role of Book Publishers in the Real Digital Age: An Insider’s Perspective.” The presentation takes place Wednesday, at 11:30AM, in room 1E04.

Here’s a description of the presentation from the BEA website: “In a time when the discussion over the future of the book is less a debate and more of a cautionary tale (with newspapers and magazines going out of business left and right, or else laying people off, as they scramble to adapt their financial models and products to a digital world), this presentation will discuss the current changes occurring with books, writers and readers by highlighting the imminent rise of digital reading and what that will mean for traditional publishers who for years thought of themselves as being in the book business. A quick history will be included in terms of the decline of traditional reading and the rise of digital reading, touching on how and why eBooks failed to take off six years ago (and why digital reading today is not the same thing as eBooks were back then), putting this into perspective in terms of Web 2.0 tenets such as the Attention Economy, user-generated content, and on-demand everything. And now that we’re all sure that printed books have to change, what’s a publisher to do? What does the future look like, and is it a scary thing or a good thing? What does this mean to the backlist, let alone the frontlist? What are the opportunities that shouldn’t be missed, and the pitfalls that had better be avoided? This session will touch on all of these subjects.”

I guarantee that it’ll be the only BEA presentation that quotes Victor Hugo, Nietzsche and Elvis Costello.

Drop by if you’re interested, and if you’re a reader of the blog be sure to let me know.

BEA Website