Eoin Purcell

Sara Lloyd over at the Digitalist (PanMacmillan’s digital team’s blog) has started a really exciting series on the future of publishers. There are some amazing thoughts even in the first one which quite expertly puts the case for all forward looking publishers:

We will need to think much less about products and much more about content; we will need to think of ‘the book’ as a core or base structure but perhaps one with more porous edges than it has had before. We will need to work out how to position the book at the centre of a network rather than how to distribute it to the end of a chain.

Hard to disagree with that I think. But what of this:

There are two areas of activity in the linear progression of a text between author and reader which have previously remained hidden to the reader: the development of the text itself; the writing and editing process, and the sales, marketing and distribution of the text. Readers have traditionally had no role in the former and only a limited role in the latter, through word of mouth recommendations or viral marketing. It is likely that today’s digital natives, who have become ‘prosumers’ (producer / consumers) with alarming speed and perhaps even more alarmingly different levels of proficiency, will expect a great deal more involvement in both of these areas of activity if they are to be engaged by texts. Witness two main stream examples, the Star Wars films and the Harry Potter books and films, both of which have developed massive prosumer (or ‘superfan’) followings, and both of which have seen conflict between the film companies and the fans that are creating content.

I can almost feel the blood rising amongst the more traditional amongst my peers!

Go read Part One and Part Two

Enjoying good writing and lucid too,
Eoin

PS This news via Personanodata is both exciting and unsettling!