Richard Fisher comes to talk about Adding Value to content

Last week we were privileged to welcome Richard Fisher, Managing Director of Academic and Professional at Cambridge University Press, who came to talk to us about adding value to books.  Richard is a great speaker, who engages directly with the audience, and he made us all think about the value we place upon content in different formats.  How much would we pay for a book as a physical thing?  How much if that was an ebook?  Would we care if the physical book had the ebook thrown in for free?  What makes people spend money?  Why should we pay for anything?
He talked about the Big Three - Amazon, Google and Apple - and made us aware of the dangers of the digital age in terms of the risk of losing content through the loss of the technologial platforms that support it.  The growth of ebooks is startling at the moment, but the real challenge is how to keep sales trajectories going beyond the current bumpy take-off of the e-markets.  Richard stressed the need to keep up to date, recommending blogs like The Scholarly Kitchen and Mike Shatzin's The Shatzin Files.   A great session, leaving us all with much to mull over.....

Bibliotherapy: Benjamin Button

One of my students, Julie Young, recently lent me her beautiful copy of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, by F Scott Fitzgerald, to read.  It was a classic case of being seduced by book production and title - because I have to admit, Fitzgerald is quite near the top of authors I've tried but am not keen to try again....but this little volume, by Scribner, shows how bibliotherapy is not just the text itself.  This is a softback book, but with inside flaps and wonderfully tactile cover (silky in feel), and the pages are a deep cream, rough cut, with wide margins.  The act of reading was a pleasure, and the text itself, which (sorry, Julie!) would have left me cold and untouched without its perfect packaging, went down with little murmur of protest.  The story would be whimsical if it wasn't so bare:  like a fairystory without the room to create imaginative contexts, it felt quite ruthless.  There was an unease here:  the author felt present, watchful, but withdrawn, and I couldn't shake the sense that this was a carelessly written piece.  I enjoyed the film much more, as this did give visual resonances to the very sparse prose. 
However, I have loved the book itself, as an object, and have also enjoyed looking at Scribner's website, which is correspondingly beautfully laid out.  Scribner is an imprint of Simon and Schuster, and has an amazing literary pedigree.  Well worth more research, in the future...!