It's quite hard to know what to expect from Bookcamp which is now only a few days away. Publishing conferences (this is not one of them) are often quite dry events - 'Supercharging Content Acquisition and Productivity for Publishers', anyone? - and a lot of the real action takes place outside the conference room in nearby corridors, bars and hotel lobbies. The only time I've seen someone demo something that they had actually made at a publishing conference, they got a standing ovation.
At Bookcamp we're hoping to see lots of things people have made or hear them discuss what they might like to make in the future. I'm looking forward to following discussions about how we get children hooked on reading, hearing about authors' fear of the internet and learning why everything on the internet is the opposite of how it is in print! And I'm excited to meet some new people who share an interest in and passion for books and stories and, yes, technology.
But most of all I'm looking forward to being surprised on the day. It's a day of bookish experimentation and we're going to find out what happens when a bunch of smart, creative, enthusiastic people get together to think about how we might save, repair, rethink and rebuild the book for the 21st century. I can't wait.
Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher
PS Please note that because of space restrictions we can't accept any more attendees but we'll report back here soon after the event and perhaps even try our hand at custom, print-on-demand publishing to produce a record of the day.
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It's been an exciting and stressful couple of weeks in the world of books and frankly, I'm suffering from information overload. Last week three big US publishing companies announced redundancies or restructurings causing
one commentator to ask whether book publishers should be compared with car companies or banks. Makes a change from us being compared to record companies, I suppose.
Despite, or perhaps because of The Fear, the last week has also seen a spate of interesting digital announcements from the big publishers. Our sister company in the US have announced the launch of
Penguin2.0, a suite of forward-looking applications. Over here
HarperCollins have announced that they are putting ebooks on the Nintendo DS and
Macmillan are doing the same on the iPhone via the
Stanza reader. All nice interesting work with the general concept of giving the customers as much choice as possible in how and when they access books, and on what devices.
So rather than announce any bookish experimentation of our own (for now!), we're going to sponsor
a day of bookish experimentation instead and host what we are calling Bookcamp in the middle of January.
Our plan is for this to be a day of talking and doing - examining the
role of the book as an object and as a delivery mechanism for content.
We're inviting authors, typographers, cover designers, printers,
technologists, retailers, literary agents, publishers and geeks to come
along and consider if and how technology can transform and perhaps
improve on The Book. Will print on demand mean the end of the bookshop?
Will ebook technology allow everyone to be their own publisher? Will
printed books go the way of vinyl and become collectors objects? Are
games the new novels? And, most importantly, what is the use of a book
without pictures and conversations?
To help us make this a day of making and building as well as talking, we've roped in
Russell Davies and
James Bridle to help plan and execute and we've invited a bunch of excellent people who we hope will have fun taking apart and rebuilding the book - and perhaps the book business - for the 21st century. There are still a few spaces spare, so if you think that you might have something to contribute, share or show
send us an email and let us know what you've got in mind.
We'll cover the event on this blog and on twitter in the new year - now at least we've got something to look forward to after the winter break!
Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher
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Terms of Use. If you consider any content on this site to be inappropriate, please report it to Penguin Books by emailing
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