From Publishing Perspectives:
Those of us on the annual international tournée de livres can tell you that, as advertised, FutureBook Live really is the largest of today’s conferences in terms of turnout. Not trade shows, mind you, this is a conference, a one-day outing which includes not only plenary sessions but four strands of focus.
. . . .
- Hook the Readers sessions (purple)
- Take Smarter Risks sessions (navy)
- Seize the Agenda sessions (pink)
- Hack the Process sessions (a kind of worried blue that’s not navy)
. . . .
As Flatt announced earlier this autumn, you’ll find appropriate change afoot this year in the show. “As we approach our 10th anniversary,” she wrote, “you may have noticed that we’ve dropped both ‘digital’ and ‘innovation’ from our tagline and marketing. Why?
“Because in this extraordinarily unstable time, those terms no longer feel very useful. Everyone who works in publishing, whatever their seniority or specialism, must now understand digital; everyone, whether a conglomerate CTO or a self-published author, must innovate or die. And nor are digital solutions or splashy innovations always the best way to answer the challenges exploding around us.
“We have to use everything at our disposal, from woodblocks to Weibo, to restore books to a central place in our culture and to keep book businesses afloat.”
. . . .
Bookseller editor Philip Jones writes, “The conference began as a digital event, morphed into one concentrated on innovation, and is now squarely focused on the business in its entirety, particularly, ahem, the future bit.”
He goes on, as Jones is still perhaps the best in the business at doing, at capturing exactly the challenge that world publishing–don’t tell the Brits it’s not just them–faces today: “How we maintain the cultural caché of books.” Exactly.
Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives
PG found it interesting that British (and perhaps other European) publishers are worried about the “cultural caché of books.”
PG speculates the unspoken extension of this concern is the “cultural caché of traditional publishers.”
If an intelligent and well-meaning young person who loves books were to ask PG about going to work for a publisher, PG would paint a dire picture of the future of traditional publishing. The echo chamber of New York (and, likely London) publishing is growing smaller and smaller by the day.
If the traditional book business is losing cultural caché, how will it justify its high prices and low royalties?
One’s cache of cachet is rapidly diminished by not knowing the difference between “cache” and “cachet” (let alone their illegitimate child “caché”).
Thank you. I was just about to comment on this. It is a bad look in a piece about books.