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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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