In about two weeks, I, along with a couple thousand or so of my closest friends, will be attending the 2013 Tools of Change for Publishing conference in New York. As you may have guessed, recently I’ve felt I haven’t had much to add to the digital publishing conversation. In many ways — while I know there has been exciting innovation — I’ve felt like we’ve been at a standstill. (Or, to misquote my friend Eoin Purcell, publishers feel like they have this whole digital thing sorted. Done and done.) Of course, if you’ve been paying attention (and I know […]

So what with this, that, and the other, Booksquare has been a bit quiet lately. The world of digital publishing has been amazingly active, and — oh! — filled with more rumors, speculation, and nonsense than even I can stomach*. Which means the important news gets buried as the digerati chase the next bright and shiny thing. I have been very much focused on Moving Forward. Which means thinking about how publishing can position itself for the next year, the next five years, the next ten years, heck, the next century. One thing I know for sure is that nobody

Months of anticipation. Weeks of preparing. Days of thinking. Hours of wondering. And that’s before the annual Tools of Change for Publishing Conference begins. Once the action starts, the mental rush is indescribable. It takes me days just to organize my thoughts, an entire year to wonder at how what I heard is playing out in the real world.* The container limits our imagination. TOC 2011, like the previous iterations of the conference (oh, can we return to San Jose, where the weather is delightfully mild?), was jam-packed with people, enthusiasm, and ideas**. You gotta love an event where the

As much as the idea of enhanced ebooks brings the sexy to publishing, it doesn’t really do much for most of the books published. Enhanced, enriched, transmedia, multimedia…these are ideas best applied to those properties that lend themselves to multimedia experience (or, ahem, the associated price tag). While many focus on the bright and shiny (and mostly unfulfilled) promised of apps and enhanced ebooks, the smart kids are looking at the power of social reading. And with the reading comes the book discussion. Social reading is normal reading. It’s how we already read in an offline world, and, yes, how