Past Programs
Computers and Technology - 2007
The Cult of the Amateur by Andrew Keen (review) Read Transcript
09/10/2007
Is the internet making our culture and society more banal? Are we becoming less intelligent in the age of information? A new book by Andrew Keen says this is indeed the case. He argues that because ordinary people can post opinions and film clips online, as well as contribute their ideas to pseudo-encyclopedias such as Wikipedia, that our culture is being swamped by mediocrity. Our culture -- represented by novels, music, newspapers and the like -- is threatened by this new army of amateurs.
Simon Cooper is here to review The Cult of the Amateur and he is only partly convinced.
The future of digital publishing
20/07/2007
What does the future of the book look like? Imagine a Dungeons and Dragons role playing type game but that instead of pretending to be a knight or a wizard, you're doing it with characters from a funky new novel - say from The Raw Shark Texts. Or, if you're an author, imagine you no longer make money from your book, but from the tie-ins your book produces - maybe a computer game like the one just described.
These scenarios have been hot topics of discussion this week at a seminar about the future of digital publishing organised by the Australia Council. Publishers, literary agents and authors have been imagining a world of print on demand and ebook utopia. They have been nutting out issues from the more glamorous side of marketing to the fiddly problems of digital rights management.
Andrew Wilkins - Borders, Booksellers and Digitisation
09/07/2007
With the latest and most important news from the book universe Ramona Koval is joined by Andrew Wilkins, who's the publisher of the online Weekly Book Newsletter and the monthly Bookseller + Publisher magazine -- Australia's two major publishing-industry journals.
Last time Andrew was on the program, he spoke about the surprise decision by the US book giant Borders to withdraw from all its Australian and NZ operations. At that time Andrew discussed what this might mean for the local booksellers that remain.
Now the reason we would want to talk about this is, quite simply, that the arrival of Borders in the first place was so consequential for the way we thought about bookselling in Australia. And so their decision to go is both odd and, whether or not you liked Borders as a retail model, it'll leave a massive hole in the landscape.
Also, at the recent Australian Booksellers Association conference, the president of European Booksellers Federation (EBF) John McNamee gave a keynote address, in which he delivered a sobering assessment of the landscape for local booksellers. He basically said that the 'digitisation' of books was a reality, that it was not going to go away, and that, if booksellers wanted to survive, they'd better start trying to figure out how to live with, and take advantage of, the digital book.
