In the end there was a little less hacking, printing, soldering or coding than I might have hoped for, but the conversations, discussions and presentations that took place at Saturday’s Bookcamp confirmed that people think that the time is right for some seriously bookish experimentation.
As Russell Davies blogged last week, the book isn’t going away any time soon, but the business models associated with publishing are being vigorously challenged and excitingly (and challengingly for traditional publishers) the means to produce, promote and distribute books are become available to anyone with an idea or story and access to the internet.
At Bookcamp a mixture of technologists and publishing types (and the odd publishing technologist) considered a good number of these challenges and opportunities. We thought about what publishers and authors might be able to sell if the book ceases to be an artefact. Whether good design can save the book from the online onslaught and whether good design can be built into digital products. We wondered how books can be turned into social objects, retaining the memory of who read them and how these readers had responded to the text.
In a week when it was revealed, to much astonishment, that the amount of time Americans spend reading literature has actually increased in recent years, Bookcampers asked how we might pass on an enthusiasm for reading to children, digital natives growing up with an (over)abundance of entertainment options. And there was a terrific brainstorming session on how an after-school literacy initiative based on the 826 Valencia model might be established on these shores.
All in all, it was a stimulating day which to me demonstrated that the geeks are not out to destroy the book or replace The Great Gatsby with Grand Theft Auto as an paragon of narrative. But equally clear are the challenges that face publishers who traditionally know only how to publish and market traditional printed books in the traditional way. The worlds of reading and books are changing – publishers like Penguin need to keep on learning new tricks while we continue to tweak our old ones.
Thanks to everyone who came and contributed – let’s try and continue our conversations and experiments in the comments below or on the wiki.
Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher
PS We’re going to try and compile blog posts, photos, reports and other notes from the day into a print-on-demand edition with the working title The Big Bookish Book of Bookcamp – more on this soon.
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The Penguin Blog 