By Erin L. Cox Yesterday, the second annual “7x20x21” panel was hosted by Farrar, Straus & Giroux Online Marketing Manager Ryan Chapman and Ami (with an i) Greko, of Get Glue and The New Sleekness. The panel was a presentation in the Japanese Pecha Kucha style, giving each presenter a seven minute window to speak, while showing a backdrop of …
Clay Shirky on Authorship, Wiki novels, and the Future of Publishing
BookExpo America starts today and we invite you to come back frequently throughout the day for news, views and opinion. Tomorrow, we’ll provide you with a PDF of our print edition, but to kick things off today, we off a Q&A interview with media guru Clay Shirky. Shirky teaches New Media at New York University; he is the author of …
Selling Books from Town to Town: On the Road with the Itinerant Book Show
By Deborah Emin If you had told me two years ago that people outside of New York City would be interested in hearing stories about how the publishing industry is changing and developing, I would have laughed at you. As I drive across the country from my office at Sullivan Street Press in New York and stop at places like …
Against the Odds: Bringing Arabic Kids Books to Life in Beirut
By Olivia Snaije BEIRUT: Dar Onboz is a small, Beirut-based publishing company with big dreams. Founded in the spring of 2006, just before the Israeli summer bombing of Lebanon, Dar Onboz has faced down financial worries, problems with distribution and the general difficulties of running a company in country where the political situation is volatile and corruption is commonplace. The …
SXSW Digerati: Publishing Assassins or Saviors?
By Edward Nawotka Q: What do Israeli Mossad agents on a not-so-secret mission to Dubai and the digerati at SXSW have in common? A: Both groups are assassins disguised as geeks wearing thick black plastic glasses. SXSW: I think saw the future in Austin: It was wearing black plastic glasses. This year’s SXSWi — short for South-by-Southwest Interactive — gave …
Review: Brooklyn by Colm Toibin
By Gwendolyn Dawson In Colm Toibin’s latest novel, Brooklyn, young Eilis Lacey leaves the struggling economy of her small hometown in southeast Ireland to forge a new life in Brooklyn, New York. In unadorned prose, Toibin describes the daily struggles and triumphs of Eilis’s life in the unfamiliar, and often inhospitable, urban environment of her new home. In many ways, …
Consider the Customer and Other Lessons from the DLD Conference
By Hannah Johnson Consumer-oriented innovation, online content strategy and digital brand management were at the center of many discussions and panels during the Digital Life Design Conference (DLD), which ended on Tuesday in Munich, Germany. DLD was started six years ago by Hubert Burda Media, one of Germany’s largest magazine publishers, as an invitation-only “platform for progression” and a meeting …
Lessons from the Rick Moody Twitter Project
By Andy Hunter, Editor-in-Chief, Electric Literature Earlier this month, twenty co-publishers joined Electric Literature in using Twitter to publish Rick Moody’s “Some Contemporary Characters,” a short story written for the medium in 153 bursts of 140 characters or less. Our goal was to create a conversation, agitate for literature, and expand the readership for Moody’s story. It was an inclusive …
Chika Unigwe on the Streets of Antwerp
By Belinda Otas TURNHOUT, BELGIUM: “I think what I hoped they would get from it is the same thing that I got from the girls; which was, basically, some of us can’t afford to have shame,” says Afro-Belgian author Chika Unigwe, whose second novel On Black Sisters’ Street, a chronicle of the lives of four African women (three Nigerian and a …
Why Sony is Losing the E-Reading Race
By Erin L. Cox Last week, Steve Haber, President of Sony’s Digital Reading Business, has proven why Sony is lagging behind in the digital publishing and e-reading race. Both at Mediabistro’s eBook Summit and again on the Huffington Post, he called for publishers to “Make your content more interactive” and stated “It’s time for the publishing industry to join them …