So, to the Reader/Writer Mash-up, held conveniently on the 10th floor of Penguin towers and attended by a motley collection of educators, librarians, metaverse evangelists, poets, game designers and the odd publisher.
The point of the evening, Miranda McKearney from meeting organisers The Reading Agency, told us was to look at the changing nature of reading and writing in a digital age; "The advent of new media is changing the way we all read, and this is especially true of young people."
Then Rose, hilariously described in the programme as 'Young Person' confirmed this by saying that her and her friends all love reading, but all chose different ways to get content. For her it is olde-worlde print and paper books, but many of her friends access manga online, and presumably soon will be doing the same on their mobile phones.
I guess that what I took away from the evening (apart from Rose's brilliantly and spontaneously invented word that I've used as the title of this post) was that as publishers we often preach to the converted, those who already love books and love reading, people like you! We try very hard to sell more books to the same group of readers, rather than trying to deal with the fact that a generation is growing up who want to create content as well as consume it.
My other thought, it is time to retire the word mash-up to refer to the practice of cutting, pasting and remixing words, film, music and any other type of content imaginable. In this digital world of cut and paste, drag and drop, ctrl-c and ctrl-v, mashing up is simply stuff we make and stuff we do.
To sort of illustrate the themes of the evening here's a video which brilliantly encapsulates everything that was discussed and raises several other issues. Expressivity indeed.
Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher
update - thanks to those who pointed out by horrible misquotation of Rose's new word - my shorthand isn't what it used to be.
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