Sign of the Times: Open Road partners with BlogHer for ebook anthology

At the heart of the digital disruption the publishing industry has been pushing through for the last few years has been the very nature of content and how it is delivered to those who would consume it.

Even in our own publishing group here in Philadelphia, where we put out Book Business and Publishing Executive magazines—along with your favorite daily publishing e-newsletter—we confront this idea all the time. Where do we cover ebooks put out by magazine publishers—in the magazine for book publishers or the one for magazine publishers? Where does something like McSweeney's Lucky Peach, a periodical with an ISBN get written up? And don't get us started about scientific publishers who tore down those walls decades ago, producing books, journals, directories and data sets?

This is the reality we've all been living with, and there's no better embodiment than the news that digital publisher and multimedia content company Open Road is partnering with the BlogHer publishing network to produce "The BlogHer Voices of the Year: 2012," an ebook anthology of essays culled from blogs, as well as six thematic collections over the next year.

BlogHer joins ProPublica, Esquire, Cosmopolitan and Seventeen, among Open Road's publishing partners, all of whom are continuing to blur those lines between book, ebook, magazine, website, blog, social media and even visual art (the BlogHer anthology will include a chapter for photobloggers).

How are you seeing the lines blurred and the walls between the kinds of products you produce in your own organization come down? We'd love to hear about it. Email me at bhoward@napco.com and tell me your personal stories of the digital disruption.