Intersection: Publishing: an introduction

Welcome to our brand new blog, and thanks for reading.

Intersection: Publishing is two things rolled into one. The first, most pressing thing is a BarCamp-style event that will take place in London on April 17th – the Saturday directly before London Book Fair.

The second thing is this blog and its associated conversations, which will carry on well after the event.

What’s a BarCamp, and why do we need one?

Publishing is at a crossroads. Some hard decisions need to be made, and we think it’s important to both inject new life into the existing conversations, and start some new ones. Simply put, we want to put innovative publishers, geeks, authors and people who know about intellectual property law into a room, and allow them to bring their expertise to the discussion table in a hierarchy-free environment.

A BarCamp is a different, more informal kind of conference. When you show up in the morning, what you’ll find is an empty schedule and a room full of people who care passionately about the same things you do. Everyone shows up with an idea of what they’d like to talk about, and we collaboratively design the day together. Are you interested in how traditional publishing can adapt to devices like the iPad? Great; propose a discussion on that. If you’re more interested in the global licensing issues involved with digital publishing, say, or in the mechanics of the ePub data format, those are important too: add those topics to the schedule. You set the agenda.

Attending Intersection: Publishing 2010

Want to join us? It’s completely free. All you need to do is add your name to the list and show up on the day. There are also some sponsorship vacancies remaining; if you’d like to add your support to Intersection: Publishing, here’s some further information.

You can read more about BarCamps on the official BarCamp site, including what to expect at one and the BarCamp rules. (Hint: speak up and blog, tweet and post about what you learn.)

Photo from BarCamp SoCal 2009, released by Morgantis under a Creative Commons license.