Saturday with the Bay Area Independent Publishers Assocation

I was the guest speaker today at the Bay Area Independent Publishers Association monthly meeting in San Rafael, CA. The topic was ebooks.

It was a smart crowd of publishers, many of whom have decades of experience in all matters of publishing. They asked great questions and it was fun to see such enthusiasm for the publishing opportunities presented by ebooks.

We had an interesting conversation about how books are ultimately vessels of cultural expression, and how digitally distributed books can cause cultures to collide unexpectedly when one culture's norm is another culture's freak show. I won't mention the exact Smashwords book that sparked this discussion that left some of us squirming uncomfortably, though I'm sure enterprising minds might figure it out on their own.

I brought a PowerPoint presentation, but alas, we couldn't get my ThinkPad to communicate with the projector. So there I was, holding my ThinkPad in the air so the audience could view the market data graphs.

For those who'd like to view the PowerPoint presentation in its original unadulterated form, click here to access it at Slideshare.