Googly goodness
Folks, the valiant supergoddess Tess has - well, I've tapped her out, poor kid - she's handed the reins of this blog back to me. So strap on your seatbelts - let the snark begin.
Today Google held an all-day seminar at the New York Public Library called ?Unbound?. Attendees were, largely, from the publishing and e-commerce industries ? the usual suspects, in other words.
Today Google held an all-day seminar at the New York Public Library called ?Unbound?. Attendees were, largely, from the publishing and e-commerce industries ? the usual suspects, in other words.
Moderated by Mike Shatzkin (of Idea Logical at the moment), the seminar began with a baseline of statistics about the amount of content that?s becoming available digitally ? with the general consensus that the bulk of it is in the STM market, with the traditional textbook market seeing the big increases. Angela D?Agostino (from Bowker) gave a great set of figures.
Then came what Tom Turvey referred to as ?the fun stuff?. Chris Anderson spoke about the process of writing ?The Long Tail? collaboratively (virally?), through blogging and receiving instant feedback about his ideas. Seth Godin attempted to explain that audiobooks cost nothing to make (thus earning many eye-rolls from the audience). Cory Doctorow spoke about how social networking has increased his sales ? and later we heard from a panel of authors saying much the same thing. MySpace has become the artist?s best friend.
I remember when I was at Doubleday, right out of college, encountering a very stubborn copy editor there. The editor I reported to was quite a maverick, and at least once a week this copy editor would moan his mantra to me: ?But we just don?t do it that way.? He would look at me, unblinkingly, and moan this. As if that were going to change the way my editor and I were doing things. There?s a lot of that mentality out there.
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