skip to main | skip to sidebar

Translate!

Labels

Amsterdam Arizona Art Batman Big Issue Boulder City CSBM CSI Daniel K David Bowie Dirty Three Edinburgh Festival Elwood Flagstaff Florence Fry GSOI Grand Canyon Green Coat Magic Hackpacker Hunter S Thompson Iggy Pop Incheon airport Italy Jesse L Martin John Berendt Jordan Las Vegas Lawrence of Arabia Lonely Planet Los Angeles Lou Reed Max Bygraves McSweeneys Melbourne Michael Clarke Obama Paula Hunt Prague RMIT Shelley Winters Sleepers TV The Goodies USA Valetta Venice Wells Tower Williams X adam ford afghans airports architecture australia bells birds and beasts blogs boats books buses bushrangers butterflies capitalism churches czech-republic dancing desert dogs drugs duelling blogs earworms eavesdropping edinburgh elections fashion fiction fire fireman food football france gadgets ghosts gigs god gordon homecoming housekeeping iceland istanbul japan laos malta massage meerkats middle east money music names ned kelly paris peace people that impress me perfume petra and the south photos poetry politics puli rain rants reviews reykjavik saints scotland searching seoul shopping south africa south korea southwest sun moon lake sunsets sydney taiwan trains travel turkey viagra vientiane violence virgin wadi rum waiting war weather web western taiwan workshop writing

Archivo del blog

  • ► 2012 (2)
    • ► August (1)
    • ► July (1)
  • ► 2011 (1)
    • ► March (1)
  • ► 2010 (21)
    • ► November (1)
    • ► October (1)
    • ► September (1)
    • ► August (2)
    • ► June (3)
    • ► May (3)
    • ► April (2)
    • ► March (1)
    • ► February (5)
    • ► January (2)
  • ▼ 2009 (47)
    • ► December (1)
    • ► November (3)
    • ► October (3)
    • ► September (5)
    • ▼ August (5)
      • Melbourne Writer's Festival: Future of the Book
      • Books and Brits
      • Held Breath
      • Homecoming Queen
      • A Novice’s Guide to Edinburgh in August
    • ► July (4)
    • ► June (4)
    • ► May (7)
    • ► March (3)
    • ► February (6)
    • ► January (6)
  • ► 2008 (4)
    • ► December (4)

My Blog List

  • Hackpacker
    Mandalay Bus Canberra
    3 months ago
  • theotheradamford
    And Lo! There Shall Come a Newsletter
    9 years ago
  • The Moral High Ground
    The Next Big Thing – Splendor
    12 years ago
  • My Right Foot
    Monkey punch dinosaur
    12 years ago

Sign up...please?

Posts
Atom
Posts
Comments
Atom
Comments

Followers

Follow this blog
Powered by Blogger.

The Saturation Point of Bells

"There are those who stay at home and those who go away, and it has always been so. Everyone can choose for himself, but he must choose while there is still time and never change his mind." (from Moomminvalley in November, Tove Jansson,1971)

Melbourne Writer's Festival: Future of the Book

Saturday, August 29, 2009

Today we are most honoured to be joined by Hackpacker, who sends us this missive fresh from the Melbourne Book Festival, as part of our duelling blogs series.

Thursday the MWF got all digital. There were sessions dedicated to marketing in the info age and showing off the latest e-readers. I got along to three sessions but the whole day proved too much of a test of stamina and battery life.

The opening was called the State of Digital Publishing. Victoria Nash and Elizabeth Weiss grappled with the huge subject from the publisher point of view. They were concerned about the rise of the $9.99 e-book and how it had pushed them into what Elizabeth refererred to as "Get all out books out there and have them competing" mentality. Victoria mentioned piracy and how they saw it as "protecting our authors' copyright and obviously our revenues". It all looked very industry-focussed and I felt like the author was out of the picture.

Thirty minutes in Bob Stein got a word in about the future. He pointed out that more than a million books are available on public domain and that the book industry was facing the same challenges that video and music had online. He characterised it as seeing the book as something unique that allowed it "a free pass - I actually think it's going to be worse". It wasn't all grim as cloud computing would change the way we read and Bob pointed to newer shorter forms of writing that would thrive in this environment. Get your flash fiction ready now.

The marketing session was interesting - apparently it's all about community and SEO. But no-one really had a good way to monetise community. Lonely Planet pointed to blogsherpa (sharing traffic with bloggers rather than pays them) and their new groups. While Brett Osmond pointed to sucesses they'd had like a Where the Wild Things Are Facebook page which offered fans (more than 40,000 of them last look) of the book new content. I couldn't help but thinking that a major movie might have pushed up the fan numbers a tad. The AirBourne project Random House conducted looked amazing with 28 chapters contributed by users and the whole manuscript bookended by thriller writer James Patterson. But again it was called "a marketing exercise" rather than a big moneyspinner.

Thank god for Liner Notes' Thriller edition which ended the day on a high. Nick Earls mashed up Beat It with Masterchef while managing to sidestep Weird Al Yankovic's Eat It. But Melbourne's own shone out with Emily Zoey Baker doing a Jeff Goldblum impersonation, Sean M Whelan working his poetic alchemy on "Ma ma se mama sa ma ma coo sa" until the phrase had a new meaning and Ben Pobje told us how long lost twins getting it on was all part of Human Nature. A fitting tribute to the King of Pop that brought tears to the eye.

Posted by Unknown at 10:47 AM    

Labels: blogs, books, duelling blogs, Hackpacker, people that impress me

0 comments:

Post a Comment

Newer Post Older Post Home
Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

Blog Design by Gisele Jaquenod

Work under CC License.

Creative Commons License