The 'Centrality of Books in Our Culture'

Andrew Keen: The 'Centrality of Books in Our Culture'

"Your industry needs to take advantage of this particular situation, because this cultural crisis is not just the flavor of the month, this is the beginning of a serious rethinking of the nature of information in a digitial age which promised so much and delivered so little. So my advice to you would be to be unbookish and to show off, stress the fact that your industry is still creating works of value in a post-truth age, in an age where the most popular networks are those which destroy photographs after a few seconds, in an age of the 140 character tweet, of the Facebook update, in the fake news of the post-truth age....
"I think that if you do that, responsibly and coherently, and maintain your traditional business model, your focus on this remarkably historic analogue product that generation after generation of consumers have loved, a product that creates real long-form value for a culture in crisis, because of its ephemeral nature then I think you can do very well....
"Because of the centrality of books in our culture, because of the growing appetite for understanding a world responsibly, because of the way in which technology will allow us to know more and more what everyone else is doing legally, I think you're on the verge of, if not a renaissance, certainly something very profitable, both in economic, cultural and intellectual terms."

--Andrew Keen, author of The Internet Is Not the Answer, speaking at the Bookseller's FutureBook Conference