Deep Media

More on the future of books: Neil Gaiman at the London Book Fair

Not long after the If Book Then conference in Milan and Stockholm, Neil Gaiman gave a much-talked-about keynote at the London Book Fair in which he too talked about the future of books. Speaking to the international publishing establishment, he made a point that was both familiar and critically important: Change is here, and denial is pointless. "I worry that too many of us . . . are certain that if only we can get 1993 to come back again, we'll clean up. That if we hold our breath and close our eyes and guard the gates with bigger and more dangerous weapons, time will turn backwards and it will be yesterday again. And we all knew what the rules were yesterday. The rules of publishing were simple. Authors, agents, books, incredibly long lunches—that was publishing. Not any more." 

Along the way, however, he gave some tantalizing glimpses of what the future could hold. Some were quite basic: the idea that buying a physical book might automatically give you the ebook and audiobook as well. Others were counterintuitive in the same way that the study I designed with JWT was counterintuitive: "I suspect that one of the things we should definitely be doing . . . is making books that are prettier and finer and better. We should be fetishizing objects. We should be giving people a reason to buy objects, not just content, if we want to sell them objects." 

 

If Book Then . . . what now? Books face the future

What's a book, anyway? The answer used to be simple: two covers, a lot of words in between, printed on paper and meant to be stored on shelves. Not any more. With ebooks the paper is gone, the covers are vestigial, the shelves are virtual, and the words might be joined by playable videos, expandable photos, interactive graphics, and HTML5 pyrotechnics. The question is not what a book is but what it can be. 

So it was gratify­ing to spend a couple of days re­cently with people who have smart ideas about this. With The Art of Immersion just published in Italian, I was invited to Europe to speak at IfBookThen, a future-of-books confer­ence staged in Milan by the Italian e-publisher Book­Republic and reprised two days later in Stock­­holm by Publit, its Swedish counter­part. Here's what I came away with.