In his keynote at the fifth Digital Minds Conference, bestselling author and Twitter superstar Neil Gaiman kicked off the London Book Fair by likening the digital transition to being on an unruly, but exciting new frontier. "People ask me what my predictions are for publishing and how digital is changing things and I tell them my only real prediction is that is it's all changing," Gaiman said. "Amazon, Google and all of those things probably aren't the enemy. The enemy right now is simply refusing to understand that the world is changing."
Over his 30 minute talk Gaiman entertained and challenged his audience to think creatively about the future, conceding that he himself was “perfectly willing to acknowledge the possibility that the novelist may have been a blip” in our cultural history. “The model for tomorrow, and this is the model I've been using with enormous enthusiasm since I started blogging back in 2001,” Gaiman said, “is to try everything. Make mistakes. Surprise ourselves. Try anything else. Fail. Fail better. And succeed in ways we never would have imagined a year or a week ago.”
Gaiman’s speech kicked off what conference chair Sara Lloyd, digital and communications director for U.K. publisher Pan Macmillan, said was the highest attended Digital Minds event yet, and the most diverse, with more than 32 countries represented. Since its debut in 2009, the event has served to “set the temperature” for the London Book Fair, she noted, and this year’s conference, themed “the future of publishing content,” was no different, with a daylong program of panels and speeches focusing on the state of publishing’s digital transition.
To that end, Gaiman, whose The Ocean at the End of the Lane (Macmillan) will be released in the U.S. this spring, put a fresh, and personal spin on the persistent challenges facing the industry. He began by recounting his youth in a punk rock band (“punk rock Neil”), when he was given a yellow sticker for his instrument case that declared “home taping is killing music.” He acknowledged the uneasy shift from an age of scarcity, when books were difficult to get, to one of abundance, where e-books can now can be delivered at the push of a button. And he spoke of the benefits, particularly of discovery, arguing that most readers find their favorite authors by “encountering” their books through libraries or friends, rather than buying them in a bookstore.
 
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