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.

It’s not many a writer who would admit that comic book companies are the geniuses of our industry.

No seriously. They have the whole demand scale figured out. Not only do they mass produce paperback copies of their stories, but they have television shows, movies, yearly conventions in every major city in the world. They have lunch boxes. They have toy figurines of the hero, the sidekick, the villain, the villain’s hairless cat, and let’s not forget the sidekick’s landlady. And depending on when they’re made, how rare they are, and whether or not the buyer has resisted temptation and left the figure in its original packaging, the villain’s hairless cat may go for several hundred dollars when first sold and several thousand dollars years later. This, my friends, is marketing genius: realising that the money is not in the paper bound book, but in the other entertainment opportunities we can provide the audience based on the story.

Indie publisher Richard Nash talks most eloquently on writers needing to expand their scope from the novel to further interactive opportunities like workshops, Q&A sessions, memorabilia, exclusive dinner parties, your own board game or selection of swim wear (well you never know) and endless other possible endeavours depending on your genre.

Larry Correia, author of the Monster Hunter International Series, encourages the design of military style patches for various teams in his series. He also offers for sale not only signed books from him but patches of his own design as well.

A German art student, Benjamin Harff, made a beautiful hand-illuminated and bound copy of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Silmarillion, an enhanced version of the book that many Tolkien fans would give their pet orc for.

Simon has written a piece for SPUNC on how literary journals can use a digital strategy to complement their print editions.

She adjusted her glasses and took a deep breath as silence descended on the room. Her eyes were red, but dry, her chest swelled and her jaw set: bring it on. When she spoke, her voice was cracking but not cracked. She talked about her love of the printed page, of the bound volume. She pointed to many examples of print culture declining in the news world—closure of news rooms, consolidation of mastheads, low revenues. She talked of print being under attack, and of its advocates being proudly out of step with the zeitgeist. She talked of being in the minority and of being right.

‘If you’re here to convince us to go digital, you can get the hell out.’

She didn’t say that directly to me, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t squirm.

The occasion was a gathering of small publishers and the speaker in question published and produced a small literary journal. As a writer with many contributions to small literary journals over the years, I felt strange and uncomfortable to be considered, even briefly, an antagonist to the little magazine. Really, I am heartened to hear that small publishers have no intention of walking away from their print editions, but I hope the speaker in question was kidding with all that digital stuff.

Follow this link to continue reading.

Simon has written a piece for UK bookish blog, The Book Shed in which he manages not to swear while detailing some recent developments in book futures from an Australian perspective.

In this line of work, it is sometimes difficult to avoid grand sweeping pronouncements. I understand that. When someone asks you a question on book futures and the truth takes twenty minutes just to get a sense of the industry’s complexity, it’s tempting to dismiss them with the equivalent of “Kill them all, the Lord will recognise His own”, just so you can get to lunch on time.

“Look, the book’s dead, alright? Where are those sandwiches?”

Follow this link to read on.

Image courtesy of the George Eastman House Collection on Flickr Commons.