I’ve got a “Publishing Year in Review” post up over at the BookNet Canada Blog, with a few predictions thrown in at the end:
I started off 2009 with a trip to London, to attend BookCampUK – an unconference about books. While there were big rumblings of fear and hand-wringing about the arrival of the digital age in the publishing world, BookCamp was a great start to the year: a group of publishers, technotypes, writrers and book-lovers collecting in one place for some open discussions about the future of books. I left more enthused about books than ever, and promptly started organizing BookCampToronto, leading into another group of West-coasters putting together BookCampVancouver.
By March, the rate of change in the business had become positively dizzying. At BookNet Canada’s Tech Forum, Neelan Choksi, of the beautiful iphone ereader Stanza, presented a slide listing all the major announcements in the ebook space in the first three months of 2009 (Amazon’s new Kindle, Google Book Search, Indigo’s Shortcovers which has since become Kobo, and on and on). By there end of 2009, there would be no font small enough to allow all the significant announcements in publishing and digital to fit on one slide.
So, where are we, and more importantly, where are we going? …[more...]
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