Today’s Reading: Sara Lloyd’s, “A book publisher’s manifesto for the 21st century”

Sara Lloyd has published a wonderful and informative manifesto about the place of publishers in a rapidly changing reading landscape. It’s an absolute “must-read” for anyone involved in the production of written content (bloggers, authors, publishers, and marketers alike). There’s enough information here to feed a lot of different blog posts so don’t be surprised if you see me turning back to this one with some frequency.

Publishers – and, importantly, authors - will need increasingly to accept huge cultural and social and economic and educational changes and to respond to these in a positive and creative way. We will need to think much less about products and much more about content; we will need to think of ‘the book’ as a core or base structure but perhaps one with more porous edges than it has had before. We will need to work out how to position the book at the centre of a network rather than how to distribute it to the end of a chain. We will need to recognise that readers are also writers and opinion formers and that those operate online within and across networks.

If you have a few minutes today, give it a read and then post a comment telling me what interested you or what you’d like for me to follow up on in more detail. I’ll be happy to dig down into anything here.

Easy Links to all 6 parts of the manifesto:

1. Part 1
2. Part 2
3. Part 3
4. Part 4
5. Part 5
6. Part 6