International Conference April 24-26, 2009 MIT

How has the rise of new publishing and promotion technologies affected how titles are acquired, produced and publicized?  How have your experiments with new technologies and practices made conducting business easier, and how have they made conducting business more challenging?

Is all the transparency afforded by having agents, authors and publishers openly blogging and Twittering really a good thing?  How has maintaining an open public face helped or hindered your work?

One of the great challenges facing is e-books is that e-book adopters are largely required to choose between print and electronic versions, or to pay for both.  What is the state of the e-book?  Is it really the Next Great Thing for publishing, what are the challenges standing in its way, and what is being done to address those concerns?  How are e-books changing the way that you do business?  What will it take for e-books to succeed?

We've seen an explosion of new forms of storytelling in recent years, from video games to mobisodes to webisodes to alternate reality games to augmented reality systems to cell phone novels and what is apparently being called "hint fiction", Twittered tales in under 25 words.  How are authors, agents and publishers evolving to incorporate all of these different forms of storytelling, including transmedia storytelling, and how are your businesses evolving to incorporate those changes?  What's next?