Digitise or Die Conference

I’ve been invited to join a panel at “Digitise or Die: The conference for the book industry in the digital age” on 3rd July, held at the London Stock Exchange. The conference is organised by The Bookseller, the trade journal for the book industry in the UK. The blurb says:

The Bookseller is going to get to grips with the digital questions for the book industry once and for all.

Is the digitisation furore just a nervous reaction to experiences within the music industry - or is the heightening concern very real? Is eveyone prepared for the digitisation of the written word? What are the new technologies that publishers should be thinking about that could improve their online presence?

How can digitisation sell more books? What about digital rights and digital copyright? How do you find and develop communities of readers online? What are the differences in digital strategy of trade and non-trade publishing?

With e-books about to take off in the UK, isn’t it time the industry faced up to the changing consumer climate and technology?

These are just some of the questions that will be addressed at The Bookseller’s Digitise or Die full-day conference on 3rd July in London. It is fair to say, that you will definitely miss out if you are not there.

I’ll be on the panel discussing Digital Spaces, alongside Andrew Keen (author of The Cult of the Amateur, I think, though it’s not clear from the draft programme yet) and Kieron Smith, managing director of BookRabbit, which is a cross between the book social network LibraryThing and online bookstore Amazon. The panel will be chaired by Jeremy Davis of Chameleon Net.

The panel topic will be:

Different kinds of digital spaces: @ home on PC, out on the mobile, paid for content, UGC what works on different platforms? To what extent do digital platforms fit into each other to enable content to live across hardware boundaries? How do young people in different cultures interact with digital platforms? (itunes, phones, PC, online etc…) and how does this culture affect the use of such devices?

This invitation came via a non-blog related route shortly after my series on audio downloads and ebooks so it feels to me as if there is some synchronicity going on right now. Given my background as a novelist and my current explorations of the social media sphere, what I’d like to contribute to the discussion, I think, is the use of digital spaces by writers and storytellers from a creative perspective. How can we use the new media to enhance the way we tell stories? How might the stories we tell evolve with new media channels? Is creating a story for online reading different from creating one for a physical book? Is it different for e-book reading? Is reading passe in the face of YouTube and Flickr?

I’ll be making notes and researching all this in preparation for the conference over the next few weeks.

If you have any thoughts, ideas or experiences of storytelling in digital spaces, please do get in touch so I can share your views at the conference as well. I’d also love to hear from you if you have views about ebooks and the current state of ebook publishing - and any thoughts about what you would like to see evolve in ebooks and digital publishing in the future.

You can get in touch by leaving a comment to this post, or emailing me via the Contact link above, or by leaving me a voicemail at http://www.jaxtr.com/yangmayooi. If I use your contribution at the conference I will of course give acknowledgement to you for the contribution so do leave a name as well.

If you’d like to come along to the conference, you can do so using the Bookseller’s booking form.

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