New roads for publishing aims to find a dialogue space to discuss a question that is driving everyone crazy in the industry:

What the hell is going on?

The publishing market is in a considerable mess, and has been for quite a while. As an example we can see what happened when Amazon recently published certain data (in a press release). From one data item (the already famous 143 sold e-books for every 100 hardcovers), it reached the point where it was claimed that there were more e-books sold than paper books (such as in the article on B&N in el País ).

We are undoubtedly in a time of change, and book publishing, and even more critically magazines and newspapers publishing, must adapt.

That is what we will talk about: what can we do with the coming storm. We'll talk about the options offered by new tech, and if at all possible we'd love to avoid talking about the sad loss of the smell of a new book or of the happy and full live of the tree that will be saved from death to publish the latest best-seller.

That's not the idea. What we want is to see the new opportunities awaiting us there, for readers, publishers, authors and all those interested in the universe of writing, to create and read better works, far more rich and interactive than what we were used to.

Without pretending to set limit to the conversation (from 6 to 8pm, although if we are in the mood it can be extended… forever), we'd like to pose some items that are possibly interesting (if they aren't, there you have the comments, and this post can be edited):

• Literary creation and new technologies (just an example: Electronic literature collection v1)

• Epub, Mobi, Kindle, iPad… whatever is going on with the formats? (also, why it seems to be so difficult to use several formats for the same work, as the Pigs, Gourds and Wikis post can demonstrate)

• Community literature, with an without a main author (such as http://www.elbazardeloslocos.org/, a fairly recent initiative to publish a book written through Twitter w/ #bazarlocos)

• The paper is not dying or what's with all the fuss: POD and new value paths without print runs and permanent availability.

• Oh, I just inserted a video in the book. Is it still a book? Who cares?

@pdavenne awaits you at El Masnou on September 15th, at 6PM, to talk until 8PM, and further if it feels like it… ¡Cheers!