While the name certainly implies a technological slant, the Digital Kids Conference at the 2013 Toy Fair on Tuesday and Wednesday was not all app-talk and virtual worlds. In fact, a theme emerged as quite the opposite: many new products in the toy market are combining digital with some physical product. Just as Skylanders was…Continue Reading
The topic at a recent American Book Producer Association (ABPA)’s brown bag lunch panel – open to nonmembers for $20 – was art books, and three publishers spoke to the assembled group of packagers about what is working, where it’s selling, and what projects they‘re looking for. Thames & Hudson’s President/Publisher Will Balliett, National Geographic’s…Continue Reading
The 44th Cairo International Book Fair (CIBF), scheduled to run January 23-February 5, 2013, is the second held since the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, but the first since the election of President Mohamed Morsi and his cabinet. More specifically, the Fair’s coincidence with the January 25th anniversary of the Revolution inevitably ties it to questions about…Continue Reading
The Digital Book World 2013 panels, “Sales Across Borders: Export” and “Sales Across Borders: Import” (back to back on Wednesday afternoon) were both concerned with the question of what new digital systems best allow books to travel across international boundaries—though their approaches were hardly two sides of one coin. On the Export panel, there was…Continue Reading
While authors have always been – and will continue to be — the driving force behind popular children’s characters, more publishers than ever are now also looking in-house for the ideas that will eventually become the next Fancy Nancy or Hunger Games. Original, publisher-generated intellectual property (IP) is nothing new—Alloy has long perfected this model with…Continue Reading
With a keynote by Robert Levine, journalist and author of Free Ride, about how the proponents of consumer access to free content are often those who use that content to sell advertising, this year’s Copyright and Technology New York conference began. A few in the audience were from book publishing – MIT’s Bill Trippe moderated…Continue Reading
July 4-8, 2012 marked the tenth annual Flip (“Festa Literária Internacional de Paraty”), the literary festival held every July (except for World Cup years when it is held in August) in the Brazilian resort town of Paraty. Although attendance has grown from 6,000 to well over 25,000 every year, Flip itself remains roughly the same…Continue Reading
Hard on the heels of the AAUP (covered below) came the biannual National Museum Publishing Seminar (June 21-23), which also took place in Chicago, bringing with it questions of how effective museum publishers’ efforts have been in the digital space. Every two years, museums and other arts and university presses gather for programs addressing publishing concerns…Continue Reading
The AAUP’s annual meeting (held back-to-back with the biannual museum publishing seminar in Chicago) on June 18-20 was not only lively, but oversubscribed following two dismal, gloomy years, and all attendees were in good spirits. As Jennifer Howard described in her coverage for The Chronicle of Higher Education, “The numbers created some logistical hassles but…Continue Reading
