

Automation and/or Emotion: The Book Industry in the Post-Digital Age
Publishing and Communications - University of Melbourne
As the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century nears, books and the publishing industry are firmly located within a digital environment. Every aspect of publishing is digitally mediated: marketing and communications are integrated with social media, while distribution and sales rely on digital infrastructure and data-driven market knowledge. Self-publishing and the creation of e-books and apps expand the industry. Technology giants including Amazon, Apple and Google have proved disruptive entrants in this digital environment, challenging and changing traditional publishing practices.
Reports of the ‘death of the book’ in a digital age, however, appear to have been greatly exaggerated. The publishing industry is entering its post-digital phase, in which print books, book festivals and other analogue aspects of the business hold their own alongside digital developments. In this mixed environment, the lecture will ask to what extent the industry is organised via digital automation processes (the algorithmic and the data-driven), and to what extent via human emotion. In the context of Amazon’s establishment of retail centres in Australia and the technology-led disruptions this may provoke across multiple industries, this lecture will address key public interests about what is happening to felt, human connections with books. Is there still a role for emotion, taste and personal experience amidst online selling, algorithmic marketing and datadriven production?
Claire Squires is Professor of Publishing Studies at the University of Stirling and Honorary Professor of 20th and 21st Century Book Cultures at University College London. Professor Squires’ work addresses how books are produced, disseminated, and consumed in a postdigital age; how and where value is generated within the publishing field, how individuals’ tastes intersect with broader organisational behaviour, market environments and communities of taste-making; and how narratives around the construction of literature are generated. Professor Squires is the author of Marketing Literature: The Making of Contemporary Writing in Britain (Palgrave 2007) and co-editor of the forthcoming volume Cambridge History of the Book in Britain Volume 7: The Twentieth Century and Beyond.
Date:
Thursday, 26 July
Time:
6.00pm-7.30pm
Venue:
Yasuko Hiraoka Myer Room
Sidney Myer Asia Centre
University of Melbourne
Swanston Street
PARKVILLE VIC 3010
Admission is free.
Bookings are required.
Seating is limited.
To register visit: http://alumni.online.unimelb.edu.au/squires
SUPPORTED BY THE MACGEORGE BEQUEST
For further information please contact: Dr Beth Driscoll [email protected]
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