This coming Saturday, 6 June 2009, I will be coordinating a session called “Putting Print in its Place: The Importance of the Local in a World of Globalized Words” at Bookcamp Toronto.
Here’s the session description:
Is there still a place for the local in a globalized literary landscape? Whither small presses, independent booksellers, local reading series, community book fairs and books engaging imaginatively with local places? In a world dominated increasingly by Amazon, big box bookstores, multinational publishers and digital print, how do we maintain a place for local literature? This session will explore how Toronto functions as a hub of literary innovation whose continued success will depend on how well it makes room for the local.
Bookcamp Toronto is billed as “a conversation about the future of books, writing, publishing, and the book business in the digital age” — critical questions at a time when text shambles toward its next rebirth in what begins to look like a truly post Gutenberg era.
At the same time, digital media do not make text less relevant — they make it more important than ever. The challenge is to maintain some continuity in the meaning of words in environments where they may be endlessly replicated, commodified and removed from their origins. I’m concerned about what digital print does to local stories, situated cultures, indigenous languages, narrative traditions and oral histories. At its worst, digital print reduces text to a pastiche of blurred photocopies, a simulacrum of meanings whose connection to local places and local cultures has long since been forgotten and blown away.
In the session I’m hoping we can address some of the implications of these shifts, as well as explore ways of keeping print in its place.
The session will run from 3:15 to 3:55 pm on the third floor of the Faculty of Information (iSchool) at the University of Toronto, 140 St. George Street (beside Robarts Library).
The day will be packed with discussions about books, publishing and digital culture; click here for the full schedule.
[Please note: this post has been recreated from back-up files. Regrettably, any comments posted to the original version have been lost.]
