Publishing Talks: David Wilk interviews Bob Stein

In this series of interviews, called Publishing Talks, I have been talking to book industry professionals about the future of publishing, books, and culture.  This is a period of disruption and change for all media businesses. How will publishing evolve as our culture is affected by technology, climate change, population density, and the ebb and flow of civilization and its economics?

I hope these Publishing Talks conversations will help us understand the outlines of what is happening, and how we might ourselves interact with and influence the future of publishing as it unfolds.

These interviews give people in the book business a chance to talk openly about ideas and concerns that are often only talked about “around the water cooler,” at industry conventions and events, and in emails between friends and they give people inside and outside the book industry a chance to hear first hand some of the most interesting and challenging thoughts, ideas and concepts being discussed by people in the book business.

Bob Stein is for me one of the great visionary innovators and someone I greatly admire.   He most recently co-founded The Institute for the Future of the Book, which quite modestly describes itself as “a small think-and-do tank investigating the evolution of intellectual discourse as it shifts from printed pages to networked screens. We are funded generously by the MacArthur Foundation, and affiliated with the University of Southern California. We are located in Brooklyn, NY and London, UK.”  Bob’s bio includes founding the excellent Criterion Collection of classic films, which he ran for 13 years, as well as The Voyager Company, which produced more than 75 innovative multi-media projects in CD-ROM formats.  Subsequently, Stein started Night Kitchen to develop authoring tools for the next generation of electronic publishing. That work is now being continued at the Institute for the Future of the Book.

In our conversation Bob talked a bit about his background and his history of working in publishing as lead in to a wide ranging discussion of digital publishing issues.  Bob’s vision of how reading and books work in the digital, networked social environment – “books as conversation” as well as or perhaps instead of “books as objects” – and how authors and readers interact in the emerging environment is compelling.  Bob has a deep experience that combines conceptual and hands-on work on so many of the issues that concern anyone interested in books and reading which for me makes his point of view so important to experience.

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Publishing Talks: David Wilk interviews Eoin Purcell

In this series of interviews, called Publishing Talks, I have been talking to book industry professionals about the future of publishing, books, and culture.  This is a period of disruption and change for all media businesses. How will publishing evolve as our culture is affected by technology, climate change, population density, and the ebb and flow of civilization and its economics? Publishing Talks interviews help us understand the outlines of what is happening, and how we might ourselves interact with and influence the future of publishing as it unfolds.

These interviews give people in the book business a chance to talk openly about ideas and concerns that are often only talked about “around the water cooler,” at industry conventions and events, and in emails between friends.
I believe these interviews give people inside and outside the book industry a chance to hear first hand some of the most interesting and challenging thoughts, ideas and concepts being discussed within the industry.

Eoin Purcell works and lives in Dublin, Ireland. He is a publishing industry analyst and commentator. He runs Green Lamp Media, a publishing and publishing services company and also edits Irish Publishing News.

He has worked as Commissioning Editor with one of Ireland’s oldest independent publishers Mercier Press and at Nonsuch Ireland (now The History Press Ireland). He writes occasional blog posts and columns on the Irish book trade for The Bookseller magazine.

I was prompted to talk to Eoin by his persuasive and cogent article that appeared in (Ed Nawotka’s highly recommended online newsletter) Publishing Perspectives called “E-Books are a Cul-de-sac: Why Publishing Needs to Rethink its Digital Strategy.”  In my view, Eoin consistently thinks and writes clearly about the unfolding future of a digital publishing future.  In this conversation we talked mainly about how publishers (and authors) can and must adapt to the emerging environment created by new technology (and new distribution models), including practical ideas and actions they can take to embrace new tools and methods of reaching readers in a profitable way.  He expressed his view that publishers need to focus on longer term trends, the values they can provide to readers (and writers) and then build their businesses around identifiable communities of readers.  We also talked about the differences in marketing paradigms that digital publishing establishes for publishers, the idea of “publishing as community” and much more.

Eoin provides a fresh, incisive perspective along with realistic ideas and strategies for publishers who want to embrace a new paradigm of publishing based on a web-centric environment.  I think this conversation will be valuable to anyone (publisher or author) who is interested in creating a successful digital strategy for the long term future.

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Publishing Talks: David Wilk interviews Jason Epstein

In this series of interviews, called Publishing Talks, I have been talking to book industry professionals about the future of publishing, books, and culture.  This is a period of disruption and change for all media businesses.

How will publishing evolve as our culture is affected by technology, climate change, population density, and the ebb and flow of civilization and its economics? Publishing Talks interviews help us understand the outlines of what is happening, and how we might ourselves interact with and influence the future of publishing as it unfolds.

These interviews give people in the book business a chance to talk openly about ideas and concerns that are often only talked about “around the water cooler,” at industry conventions and events, and in emails between friends.
I believe these interviews give people inside and outside the book industry a chance to hear first hand some of the most interesting and challenging thoughts, ideas and concepts being discussed within the industry.

Jason Epstein has led one of the most creative careers in book publishing of the past half century. In 1952, while a young editor at Doubleday, he created Anchor Books, which launched the so-called ‘paperback revolution’ and established the trade paperback format. In the following decade he became cofounder of The New York Review of Books. In the 1980s he created the Library of America, the prestigious publisher of American classics, and The Reader’s Catalog, the precursor of online bookselling. For many years, Jason Epstein was editorial director of Random House.   He is the recipient of many awards, including the Curtis Benjamin Award of the American Association of Publishers for inventing new kinds of publishing, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the National Book Critics Circle for creative publishing, and the National Book Award for distinguished contribution to American Letters.  As an editor, he worked with many well-known novelists, including Norman Mailer, Vladimir Nabokov, E. L. Doctorow, Philip Roth, and Gore Vidal, and important non-fiction writers as well.

Most recently he has spearheaded the creation of the Espresso Book Machine as co-founder of On Demand Books, and is the author of Book Business: Publishing Past, Present, and Future and numerous articles and essays.

For me it was a great honor and pleasure to talk to Mr. Epstein at his kitchen table, first about his incredible career in publishing, then about his current work with on-demand publishing, and of course, his many ideas about the future of books and publishing, all of which deserve the close attention of all of us who are trying to figure out where books, publishing and literary culture is headed.  His vision of the evolving future of the nature of publishing and the value of traditional editorial skillsets will be of particular interest to many listeners.

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