As you may have heard, the LA Times Festival of Books is this weekend at UCLA. Vroman’s will have a booth (Booth 367, in Dixon Plaza, near Royce Hall), and we have a great lineup of authors scheduled to sign at our booth.
Additionally, I will be appearing on a panel called Publishing: The Next Generation, which will be kind of like Star Trek: The Next Generation, only instead of LeVar Burton, you get me. My fellow panelists include Goodreads.com founder Otis Chandler (You may remember my podcast with Otis from a ways back), former Publishers Weekly Editor-in-Chief and current contributor to the Wall Street Journal Online Sara Nelson, and former Soft Skull/Counterpoint publisher Richard Nash. The panel is moderated by David Ulin, books editor of the LA Times. We’ll be discussing the future of the printed word in a digital age. What does it mean to be a journalist, editor, publisher or bookseller in a world where, increasingly, books exist as digital objects as much as they do bound paper. It should be a fascinating conversation between a bunch of smart people and, well, me. We will try to avoid a Twitter lynch mob. I would love it if you could make it. The panel is at 1:30 p.m. on Saturday in Humanities A51. You will need a ticket, which I hear is sold out, but rumor has it that people willing to get there early and wait are often admitted.
And if you’re at the Festival, stop by the Vroman’s booth and say hi. I’ll be there in the morning and evening on Saturday and all afternoon on Sunday. If you’re on Twitter, remember to tag your posts with the #latfob hashtag. Have fun and see you there!
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It’s too bad this interferes with the Grilled Cheese Invitational on the other side of the planet (that is, Chinatown).
I’ve been trying to get them to combine the two events. Supposedly they were close this year, but talks fell apart at the the eleventh hour. Some in the Gruyere contingent balked at having Amazon as a sponsor. Can’t say I blame them.
great panel today! It was good to meet you afterward in the Vromans booth. I will be adding your blog to the list of (almost exclusively) design blogs I follow!
Loved the panel discussion yesterday–it was very informative and entertaining! I would like to ask for a little more info though. How do you see the future of publishing being in the “discussion about content” and not in the content itself? Does that mean that we’ll pay to join social networking sites to discuss books or that publishers will host these sites and they’ll have advertising–or do you envision something else? How do you see this next step evolving? Thanks!