What's Big and Green and Reads a lot?

I know posting has been a little patchy of late, though I ask you all to bear with me. I'm still out and about, trying to keep up with the book world, so I shall post as I can. The delays are mostly due to "The Europe Trip" which approaches apace (more on that soon).

Back in London though, last Friday I went up to Wood Green to check out the Big Green Bookshop. Full marks must go to Simon and Tim the venerable owners, who have been through almost every trial and tribulation to get the shop open. They should be very proud of their efforts. It's a fab wee shop, a great selection of books, and the service is lovely to boot. I don't think I've ever had a book retailer in London who was more delighted to serve me. Word of their shop has certainly spread through the reading world (thanks no doubt to their ever-hopeful blog), and I was chatting away on LibraryThing the other day when another punter mentioned the shop. I hope it all turns into sales for them.

Book Futures, Pt 2

After a short speech by each of the panel, the floor was thrown open to questions. Impossible as it was to get through them all, they raised a lot of good points (even if they weren't always well-constructed questions).

Martyn pointed out that technology doesn't always evolve in the way you expect, for example the use of the QWERTY keyboard isn't the most efficient in terms of typing, but historically was the set-out that avoided the hammers from jamming.

John labelled this the "age of the amateur". For example, anyone can now become a film-maker, but it hasn't been the downfall of film. In the same way, anyone can now write.

Following a question regarding academic publishing and the peer-review process, there was some interesting discussion about standards. Martyn noted that in academic publishing, the author isn't looking for payment, but CV building and tenure (my words, not his). Scott observed that until the Internet, academic material went through a very small number of peer-reviewers. He also noted that the world is full of books that are crap, but have a lot of appeal, and I personally think these two points go together - yes there is a lot of crap on the Internet, but that doesn't mean people aren't interested in it. The Internet creates its own peer-review process.

Martyn made the great point that the book world is really a number of different industries united by a format - literature is different from religion is different from trade is different from cookbooks. Each is used and read differently, and evolution will therefore happen at a different pace in each area. As an aside, I think you already see this in academic publishing and journals, and there are some industries that will always be difficult to move to another media, such as the graphics in architecture journals.

The discussion then turned a little more towards e-books and Digital Rights Management (DRM). Scott gave the statistic that in his last 2 years at Waterstone's when they were selling books through Amazon, they sold 1 e-book. Most of the panelists seem to agree that providing some free digital content actually stimulated sales of the physical product in both books and music. Martyn noted that most of what is holding back digitisation is rights and debates about the rights of the author.

At this point the night was pretty much concluded, and I think it's apt to finish with an observation by Scott Pack, who said that we wouldn't believe the future of the book if someone showed it to us today.

Book Futures, Pt 1

It's been a few days since I last posted, the combined effect of a morning job, and preparing to leave the country. I did take some time out last night though to attend Book Futures, the last event of the 1st London Word Festival.

Featuring Scott Pack, Chris Meade, Martyn Daniels, John Lenahan and Shirley Dent, they generated lively discussion for an hour and a half (though all could have gone on for easily that long again, I'm sure). My apologies for any mis-quotations, but I'll try to distill the gist of the conversation from my 3 pages of closely scrawled notes.

After a reading from John Lenahan, Scott Pack started the evening by summing-up the evening - that is, we don't know the future, and if you ask 100 different people, you'll get 100 different answers. He predicted a lot of change for writers and publishers before readers really notice much difference, and made the observation that book retailers are "shitting themselves" about digital technology. He drew the same parallels between the digitisation of books and music that I did in LibraryThing not that long ago. Essentially, major changes came about in the music industry when it became more portable and more enjoyable (I put it as more "cool"), whereas things aren't quite the same for books. They're already portable. You don't read a chapter of this book, then a chapter of something else, in the same way that you might change albums to listen to different songs. Readers will be the ones that decide what happens if digital media, and will only take it up if it improves things. Where the reading experience can be improved (travel guides, cook books) is where the changes will happen.

Martyn Daniels was up next, with an analogy that predictions about the future of the book where like those about global warming. You've got your doom-mongers, your profiteers, experts and ignorers. Ultimately however, we're discussing consumer demand in a vacuum since there is little digital content available. Figures he gave later in the evening pointed to 3,000,000 books in print currently, and only 100,000 e-books of which 80,000 is academic material. He also called the Kindle a "waste of space" which, in its current incarnation at least, I'd agree with. Daniels also pointed out that form has largely dictated content up until now, and digitisation offers the opportunity to "explode the spine". With writers throughout history making use of serialisation, from Dickens to Stephen King to the new mobile novels in Japan, we should look at new technology and writing as a glass half-full.

Chris Meade followed up the idea of form over content by asking, What matters to us about Literature? He predicts that a new kind of writer will rise for a new kind of reader. We now have more possibilities for collaboration between a creative writer and a creative reader, making use of the technology.