Libraries: From Info Vaults To Creative Hubs The American Library Association’s (ALA) Midwinter Meeting in Boston, has just closed with some impressive numbers to report. Gary Price at Library Journal reports that a total 11,716 people attended the five-day event—librarians, library workers and supporters including 3,622 exhibitors. This makes the 2016 event some 1,000 people larger… Read More
At PubSense In Charleston: Checking Out Indies’ Ebooks With SELF-e
More Than 17,000 Library Buildings You’d think — who wouldn’t? — that libraries were the place to find everything bookish. The assumption gains new interest with the news that the Cleveland-based OverDrive, leading distributor of ebooks to libraries, has been bought by Tokyo’s Rakuten, which also owns the Canadian ebook retailer Kobo and its self-publishing platform, Kobo… Read More
Contributors and conferences: The sun never sets on The FutureBook
We see conferences — conferencing — in many ways now. In many places. Or in no places. Such is digital publishing. Such is digital everything. Everywhere and nowhere. At all times and at no times. World without schedule but hardly without agenda. And here we are, at The FutureBook, holding what is, in fact, a kind of… Read More
In The Hothouse Of Publishing, Our Terminology May Need Pruning
Let’s Give ‘Hybrid’ Back To The Botanists It’s not as if the industry! the industry! doesn’t have enough transition to contend with. Oh, what a lovely disruption we’re having, and at a time of upheaval like this, we’re going to see changing phrases, new jargon, and updated iterations of various terms come and go. Not… Read More
Our Star Authors: Special Victims Unit
Their numbers speak more loudly than their words. So loudly, in fact, that many authors who admire them…don’t read them. The “indie bestsellers”‘ among us become Million Kindle Club members when they hit 1 million sales. Most go on to become double Million Kindle Club members. Then triple. At least one of them headed for BookExpo America’s Author Hub (BEA) in May, Barbara Freethy, has passed the 4 million mark. H.M. Ward is on the other side of 5 million. Read More
Provocations in Publishing: “Engineering Serendipity” at PubSmart
As for serendipity and its engineers, I’ve been looking over my shoulder all week. Surely some wry creature, probably in a Citadel cadet’s dress whites, is there to get off a big wink at me. It’s an odd, if pleasant, thing to find yourself returned to your Deeply Southern hometown by a career that’s moved you as far away as Rome, Copenhagen, Bath, London, Moscow, Sofia, Berlin, Athens. Read More
Charleston’s PubSmart Joins Conference Row
PubSmart may be creating something we’ve needed to see much more of: a conference in which not only business-conscious authors but also smaller publishing companies can start doing the logical networking they’ve needed: with each other. Read More