Innovation in publishing

Hello folks,

I have somehow managed to talk myself into giving a 30-minute presentation at something described as a 'summit', on the subject of 'innovation', and have been invited to think about interesting new developments in publishing. So I have been trying to come up with stuff to talk about.

I have a good few ideas, but I would be very interested to know what you guys feel is 'innovative' in publishing at the moment, and what you think might be around the corner. I stick 'innovation' in scare quotes because I'm sometimes not entirely sure what it means. To me, I think innovation is opening up a new market or a new niche, but there may be more to it than that.

Any ideas, suggestions, arguments...? Things I'm definitely going to
discuss include fanfic, new genres, the return of the pulps, crowdfunding, and interactive storytelling. I'd be very grateful for your thoughts on this.

Amarie said:

I'm not sure it fits within the scope of your talk, but there are definitely innovations in the way authors interact with readers. Skype, in particular, is an incredible tool for children's and young adult authors to connect with classrooms and library groups.

I've spoken to groups from small towns who have never and will probably never have an author visit in person.

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I definitely need to talk about that. Authors interacting with their readers is something that the internet has scaled up a lot.

Medievalist said:

The last true innovation was the move to the codex from the scroll.



I'd suggest in addition to the items you've mentioned, interactive story telling is morphing to shared reading, as the comments and glosses once restricted to the margins of manuscripts are via the net moving to real time interaction with the text, the author and other readers. Right now, we still have a base text as the "spine" of interaction, but increasingly readers can choose to make a marginal text--say fan fic--their spine and interact with it, each other, and the authors.

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That's interesting. The community thing is something they very much want me to talk about. I think I should say something about 'social reading' platforms, but I'm not really sure that anyone uses them. (At least not in the way that the examples in that link suggest... Am I wrong?)

One of the threads I want to pull on a bit is that private reading - i.e. being able to buy and read books without having to interact with a bookseller or display a lurid cover in public - is a thing as well.

Amarie said:

In terms of what might be around the corner, I assume someone is working on a format that will let the reader switch back and forth between a text version and an audio version of a book, so that if you listened to a book in your car while driving, you could switch to the text version where you left off when you had time to read.

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Someone's got to be, huh? The stumbling block will be some kind of tedious rights issue.

waylander said:

You could also mention how the new technology is making old forms/lengths viable again e.g. novellas and novelletes

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Yep, that's the bit of the talk I have tentatively called 'everything old is new again'. Serials, too.

Amarie said:

In terms of "social reading," some reviewers do this, where they post what they think of each chapter as they read it, and their friends comment. As far as I can tell, it's mostly with young adult and romance readers. Many times, it's a way to find funny things to say about a book the reviewer really disliked, but I think it's been done for other books as well.

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Goodreads does this, right? You can post updates on how far you are through a book, what you think so far etc...? People do use that.

YA and romance is an interesting observation. I wonder why those genres are more social than others?