24 hours.

9 writers.

1 book.

On 11 June 2012, if:book Australia will challenge a team of writers and editors to collaborate, write, and publish a book in a single 24-hour period.

At midday, nine writers (including Nick Earls, Steven Amsterdam, Krissy Kneen, and P.M. Newton) will gather at the State Library of Queensland and begin writing furiously. Their stories will be written live on the day, with work in progress posted online to allow readers to watch the story unfold and to submit ideas, suggestions and contributions across media. As the stories are completed, a team of bleary-eyed editors will take the text from manuscript to a book.

2011 was a year of tremendous and exciting change. Conversation has moved on from questioning the fundamental value of digital publishing to broader questions of how the relationships and roles within the publishing industry adapt and change to form new distribution networks and fit new content formats. The relationship between reader and writer has become closer and the roles less well defined.

After capping off 2011 with the publication of our first ebook title, here are a few highlights of what have planned for 2012.

Creating Your Own Ebook (Workshops)

In partnership with the Australian Society of Authors, if:book will be running a two day workshop in the mainland capitals throughout the year taking you through the nuts and bolts of creating your own ebook. Presented by if:book’s Kate Eltham or Simon Groth, the workshops will provide hands on knowledge and skills to help authors navigate the digital waters.

The Amplified Author

The Amplified Author will be expanded this year in a suite of online resources including articles, videos, and templates designed to respond to the most common request from if:book’s audience , namely resources for specific skills and knowledge development in digital content creation.

The 24-Hour Book

Based on a project from if:book UK, the 24-Hour Book challenges writers, editors and audience to write and publish a book in a single 24-hour period.

The project will commission a series of short fiction pieces from leading Australian authors around a central location in an Australian city. The pieces will be written live on the day, with work in progress posted online to allow participants to observe the story as it unfolds and to submit ideas, suggestions and contributions across media.

The book will be completed at the 24-Hour mark and available in electronic and print.

The 24-Hour Book will launch in June.

Bookcamp 2012: the Emerging Future

if:book held 2011’s Bookcamp as a one-day unconference within the Melbourne Writers Festival. The event gathered more than 80 authors, typographers, gamers, booksellers, publishers and geeks to consider how storytelling can be supported or transformed by new media. The resulting discussion, captured via Twitter, included other participants not in attendance has been made available via the if:book digital platform. To follow on from the success of the event, if:book’s 2012 unconference will focus on young writers

In 2012, the theme for Bookcamp will be “the emerging future” and will invite emerging artists, publishers, and geeks to discuss the impact and possibilities of emerging technologies and media on stories and storytelling. How will the coming generation of writers and artists find and engage with audiences? How are they using the tools and platforms already at their disposal?

Bookcamp will happen in September.

The if:book essays from 2011 are now collected in a single digital volume.

Throughout 2011, if:book Australia (the Institute for the Future of the Book in Australia) commissioned essays from ten Australian writers on the future of writing and reading in a future tilted towards the digital. Each writer drew on his or her experience in fields diverse as publishing, transmedia, gaming, and comics to observe the changes taking place in ‘books’ and discussing where this might lead for authors, readers, and reading culture. High Tech Hand Made is the result.

The collection is available in epub, Kindle, and PDF formats. Licensed under Creative Commons, it is free to download and share.

Find it here.

if:book Manager Simon Groth was recently in San Francisco for the Books In Browsers conference. This is the second of his observations from the conference, reposted from Simon’s blog at simongroth.com.

In Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame, Claude Frollo looks from a book to the cathedral and says, ‘Ceci tuera cela.’ (‘This will kill that’). Apparently we’ve never been all that good with pluralism (witness the seemingly endless moaning that digital is killing print, regardless of how little hard evidence emerges to support such a position).

While visiting the Sharjah International Book Fair in the United Arab Emirates, I was pleased to find a panel in the program titled Between Classic and Electronic Creative Writing. What shape would a discussion on digital writing in the Middle East take?

The panellists were from diverse backgrounds – Ahmed Maaty (Egypt), Ibrahim Jrady (Syria) and Fadhel Thamer (Iraq) – and the discussion broad-ranging. The panel was both enlightening and frustrating. It was fascinating to gain a new cultural perspective on a topic that is so prevalent in the West. But, ultimately, the panel seemed to fetishise the ‘paper book’ overall and pass the buck to the ‘new generation’ to solve the challenges of  new technology.

Simon recently returned from San Francisco and the fabulous Books in Browsers 2011 conference therein. This post originally appeared at his blog.

I tried hard to keep live tweeting from the event (via the @ifbookaus account), but alas I’m no @ebookish (forever now known as The Thumbs of Fury). I was reduced to desperately taking notes and occasionally copy-and-pasting in the Twitter app.

The event itself is organised by the awesome Peter Brantley and hosted at the Internet Archive. Books in Browsers is a small event attended by some of the finest people at the techie end of publishing (and me). Because of its size and the quality of its attendees, there was no need to waste time on discussions of paper versus screen or on the relative merits of digital workflows. It was like a welcome homecoming.