A mesh13 media panel
At last year’s mesh conference, David Weinberger joined us on the mesh main stage to talk about how we need networked forms of knowledge and collaboration even more now to understand the world around us.. Though we spoke for close to an hour, it felt like we just scratched the surface of our conversation. David generously shared his insight with us and, honestly, left us wanting to just continue talking.
So earlier this year when we started talking about putting together a session about what’s happening in books beyond publishing, we knew that we wanted to have David join the conversation. As the co-director of the Harvard Library Lab, David has been actively working on projects that transforms the way that we use libraries. These projects include ShelfLife—a community-based wayfinding tool for navigating the vast Harvard Library System, LibraryCloud —a cloud based infrastructure to share what libraries know, and the Library Test Kitchen—an academic collaboration exploring the future of libraries. With more e-books now being sold than paper-based books, the multi-billion dollar business has entered a new stage. But there are many areas where the impact and business models for digital books are still unfolding. Libraries are one of these areas. But it is not the only space where business models are changing. We are also seeing changes in how talent and his or her works are being discovered.
Joining David on this panel are two talented innovators, Beth Jefferson (BiblioCommons) and Allen Lau (WattPad).
Beth Jefferson is the co-founder of BiblioCommons, a shared catalog and social discovery experience to millions of patrons worldwide. BiblioCommons emerged from Beth’s work as the founder of The perF!NK Project, a non-profit youth literacy initiative that sought to enable the same social context for reading that is at the heart of forms of popular culture. BiblioCommons has a lofty goal,
“To help public libraries deliver the same kind of rich discovery and community connection experiences online that the library has always delivered in its branches — all built around the heart of the library: its collections.”
With BiblioCore and a full suite of SaaS solutions, BiblioCommons has created a platform that allows the users to search, explore, borrow, track, share and connect, replacing a library’s existing public access catalogue to create a better patron experience.
Allen is the CEO and co-founder of Toronto-based WattPad, the world’s largest community for readers and writers to discover and share stories. WattPad builds on a somewhat lost tradition of sharing—when the writer was the author, publisher and the distributor of the work. As Margaret Atwood—who has embraced WattPad, said in an interview:
“It’s not a new thing, it’s an old thing that has come back via the Internet….The Brontes wrote for one another in their famous little booklets….Robert Louis Stevenson wrote Treasure Island and read it to the family circle and they found it interesting enough that he kept on with it.”
It may not be new, but that does take anything away from the fact that WattPad fundamentally changes the way that we now interact with books and with authors. This vehicle for discussion and sharing that allows for readers to become fans while they talk with the author about the poems or prose. Allen and the WattPad team have created a space for author and reader that collapses the line drawn between the creator and the consumer
For all of these reasons, we ask is the book as we know it about to fade? How will we share and discover our next great works? We look forward to learning what’s next for the book.
To learn more about our speakers, please click on their links below:
Allen Lau (WattPad)
Beth Jefferson (BiblioCommons)
David Weinberger (The Open Library Project)
