Ethics and Publishing

Here's Michael Tamblyn, the CEO of BookNet Canada, presenting six technology initiatives that could radically alter the course of publishing for the better. It's a refreshing presentation, focused on selling more paper books using better technology that improves workflow and marketing, while acknowledging that there's lots of room for improvement in ebook readers as well.

“The best way to get out of this is to invent a new product. That’s the way Google thinks. Incumbents very seldom invent the future.”

Milner is certainly right in some ways. The old digital divide is now a chasm. The 25% of people in the UK who have no access to the Internet are, indeed, profoundly unequal with the rest of us – the 75% who have the good fortune or wisdom to know our way around the Internet. As Web 2.0 morphs into the raging real-time stream of services like Twitter, those poor souls who don’t even know how to send emails are, like their mid 19th century handworker ancestors, doomed to analogue oblivion. Luddism is for losers. Aside from the super rich who can afford their own Internet butlers, technological ignorance is the symbol of failure, the red cross of shame, in our Darwinian digital “democracy”.