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A promising discussion
Two weeks ago, BISG sponsored a one-day conference, “BISG NEXT: Publishing Crossroads”. Going in, the theme was billed as “Developing the 2020 publishing program”.
The BISG web site has a nice write-up of the event, one that initially appeared in Shelf Awareness. The BISG site also features a short list of take-aways that its director, Scott Lubeck, developed to close the meeting (made available as a pdf).
After the conference, Barry Graubart of Content Matters posted an interesting summary of his experience in one of the several break-out groups that met for the central part of the program. Of particular note are the assumptions that his team made about the publishing world in 2020:
- opening up content to others
- embracing the concept of writable APIs
- partnering with market leaders
- curating and organizing the content of others
It is fair to question these assumptions, and some may not come to pass between now and 2020. But for a day, at least, it was instructive and promising to join a discussion that made assumptions explicit and challenged some orthodoxies as part of an effort to solve our problems of the present.