Today, the first Tools of Change conference in Europe opens on the eve of the Frankfurt Book Fair. Sara Lloyd, digital director at Pan Macmillan, opened the TOC conference with a warning to publishers: the book industry is dangerously close to winding up in the same place as the newspaper and music industries. She stressed that the digital world is no longer in the future and ended on this note:
“The new thing is never as good as the old thing, at least right now. Soon, the new thing will be better than the old will be. But if you wait until then it’s going to be too late.”
Read the entire article on Bookseller.com or follow TOC chatter on Twitter (#TOCFrankfurt).
In related news, Time magazine has an interesting article about the evolution of the e-reader and current state of the e-reader industry (at least 17 are either in development or on the market worldwide, though Amazon’s Kindle has been ahead of the game thus far), as well as a photo gallery of Kindle imitators currently on the market.