Book Business' “Future Think” Program Expands

Early this year, we started writing stories in Book Business magazine featuring innovative start-ups. As the stories began to cohere into a regular section in the magazine, we knew it needed a name. What popped into my head was Future Think, and the name stuck. Many issues later, the Future Think section has appeared regularly and enabled us to tell you, our readers, about some really interesting work and new technology that is already or will in the near future affect how we publish.

Future Think fascinates and delights us, and it is beginning to grow into much more than a section in the magazine. What I’d like to do here is introduce you to our new Future Think brand, and give you a peek into what you can expect to see under the Future Think umbrella.

This past September, at our annual Publishing Business Conference, we had a session entitled The Futurist Panel, which was comprised of five forward thinkers talking about (you guessed it!) the future of book publishing. They were sharp and thoughtful and provocative, and the audience loved them. And then, after the show, they didn’t stop talking! In fact, they had so much to say that we decided to give them an ongoing platform.

The Futurist Panel is now a regular monthly Google Hangout, and we invite you to attend. Join us for what we call “Futurist Friday.” The next one is coming up next week, on Friday December 13th (it seemed like a perfect date for this sort of thing!) at 2pm ET. Here’s where you can sign up, meet our panelists and listen in. Or if you’re not on Google plus, you can watch/listen here.

And of course, nothing can exist these days without having a Twitter presence – oh how we love to tweet! We have begun to shoot out futurist ideas of our own and gather our readers’ ideas under the hashtag #futurethink14. Join us there, too!

Our February issue of Book Business will feature more Future Think company profiles, looking at a new cloud-based publishing system, a wide scale plan for open annotation, and more.

Keep watching this space (in the future!) for news and an upcoming announcement scheduled for our January 17th Futurist Friday. And in the meantime, tune in now to the Google Hangout and Twitter #futurethink14.