Some of you, over the last week, may have noticed me proclaiming the coming of the future… The Futurist Panel, that is. Yesterday we convened the first of what will be a monthly gathering of forward-thinking publishing experts. In a wide-ranging 30-minute conversation, this insightful group began some interesting inquiries into how publishing has changed and will continue to morph, and how its future identity might shape up.
Brett Sandusky
Join us today for the first episode of our new monthly video chat: The Futurist Panel. At 3PM EST, we invite you to join our Google Hangout as we talk about: "what is publishing, exactly?" "Can we decouple publishing from technology or are they one and the same?" and other pressing futuristic questions!
At our Publishing Business Conference & Expo in September, one very popular session was called "The Futurist Panel." Convened and organized by the visionary Brett Sandusky, it included a number of forward-thinking and innovative publishing folks, encouraged publishers to think more like software designers and less like, well, publishers, and debated the future of publishing as a craft and the core strengths publishers need to develop to compete in the publishing landscape of tomorrow.
We asked some of our favorite thinkers in the publishing world: "What trends will shape the industry in 2014?" Here's what they had to say.
Book Business spent last Sunday hunkered down at Workman Publishing in New York attending… camp. Specifically, Book^2 Camp ("book squared"), an annual pre-TOC "unconference" dedicated to discussing, well, just about anything related to book publishing, but with an eye toward sussing out the future of the industry.
A big task, for sure, but the campers were up to the task, compiling an agenda on the fly, gathering into intimate, round-table discussions—in conference rooms, offices, break rooms and really any otherwise unoccupied space at Workman—about profitbility, discoverability, readers, editors, the Internet, etc. and asking a lot of "what if" questions:
- What if publishing started today?
- If there was no money in publishing books, what would book publishing look like?
- What if digital predated print?
In general, the conversations were focused on possibilities and opportunities, with a pinch of pragmatism thrown in to hold it all togther.
In the interest of trying new things, we're going to present our report using Storify, a platform for turning social media into narratives. It's not new to many of you, but we've never used it before. So here goes nothing. Tell us what you think/Conferences are most useful when they shift your thinking in some way. Those moments are rare, but I got to enjoy two of them this week at two separate conferences — Book^2 Camp, a book publishing “un-conference,” in New York on Sunday and the much larger O’Reilly Tools of Change Conference on Wednesday and Thursday. I came away with some new thoughts on discoverability and walled gardens…
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