As the Interactive portion of SXSW winds down and the music crowd takes over just as the rain appears, it’s time to consider what SXSW accomplished this year for publishing types—and whether it’s worth attending going forward. As Richard Nash, a newbie this year, marveled, “If there’s a tech show that is friendly to culture,…Continue Reading
A panel discussion on “Reading in a Digital Age” at CUNY’s Macaulay Honors College engaged students and their elders through the dinner hour on November 11—with enough questions following the formal session, to keep the speakers tied up well past the program’s formal end time. Moderated by Bill Goldstein, founder of the New York Times…Continue Reading
In 1995, Disney’s then-CEO Michael Eisner created the Disney Institute, his commercial homage to the Chautauqua Institution, a 135-year-old center of learning and recreation in western New York that comes alive for nine weeks every year. Disney Institute, which is located on the periphery of Disney World, never became as successful as Eisner had hoped,…Continue Reading
A much-anticipated panel on children’s books at NYU‘s Summer Publishing Institute brought out an amazing array of publishing talent, with newly minted literary agent Brenda Bowen moderating. Included in the lineup were Ellie Berger, President of Scholastic Trade Publishing; Megan Tingley, Publisher of Little, Brown Books for Young Readers; Don Weisberg, President of Penguin’s Young…Continue Reading
On Shakespeare’s birthday, it seems only fitting to talk about the London Book Fair and what it suggests re: book publishing’s future. It was, as others have said a smaller fair than in recent years, and there were noticeably fewer Americans, with some publishers (viz Random, Scholastic) represented only by their sub rights people. A…Continue Reading
Last week a group of publishing folk, moonlighting as humanitarian aid workers, invaded Cuba. We spent the week in Havana and its environs and – because it was the 10th Havana Art Biennial – found ourselves immersed in a vibrant city-wide exhibition that focused on third world and Latino artists. Havana is a mass of…Continue Reading
Much has been written about this year’s SXSW Interactive Festival in Austin, where game developers rubbed shoulders with web marketers, and the publishers that attended were confronted at one panel by exasperated authors and bloggers. But now that the bytes have settled (or healed, as the case may be), what are the useful takeaways? Most…Continue Reading
Book publishers–and agents–are scarce at SXSW’s Interactive Festival, and when they do show up, they’re not always treated with love and respect (see Booksquare’s “New Think? Not So Much”), but at worst it’s a love-hate relationship between the digital crowd and the page turners. At best–and there is a bright side–it’s because this crowd (about…Continue Reading
For those of us who are in the business of keeping abreast of industry trends, this week will rank as one of the busiest, filled with all manner of diverting events. It started tamely enough with the American Book Producers Association‘s annual conference, which had actually been moved from the end of last year to…Continue Reading
On the final day of TOC, Tim O’Reilly gave his keynote, following on the heels of the inventive Nick Bilton from the NYT’s R&D labs. (Bilton created the interactive website for David Carr’s book.) Much of what he discussed was focused on the topic that was subsequently addressed at the next session, where a group…Continue Reading
