Ind Pub Conf Academic Day 2012
‘Diversity and Independence in Australian Publishing’
November 8, 2012
The Wheeler Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas
Melbourne Australia
Diversity and Independence in Australian Publishing is the inaugural conference of SPUNC—The Small Press Network, Australia’s only advocacy body for small and independent publishers.
REGISTRATIONS FOR THIS CONFERENCE ARE NOW OPEN. Click here to register, and see the bottom of this page for the full program.
This conference, featuring a Keynote Speech: ‘Publishing in End Times,’ by Mark Davis, (Associate Professor, University of Melbourne), will explore how the changing landscape of the publishing industry, including the rise of digital culture and technologies, has affected the issues of diversity and independence in Australian publishing, with a particular emphasis on the small press sector and the question of how to enable a plurality of voices, reflective of national and international diversity, to flourish in the Australian publishing industry.
In the 21st Century, new pressures on localised writing, publishing and reading ecologies have emerged, as well as new opportunities and innovative responses. The great leviathans of publishing such as Bertelsmann, Random House, Penguin, HarperCollins and Hachette-Livre, have been threatened by the entrance of much larger corporations—such as Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft—into the publishing industry. New players in publishing have also grown in significance: Elsevier and Springer in science and education publishing, Ingram and Lightning Source with the print-on-demand revolution, indexers, abstractors and content resellers, such as Ebsco, and software providers such as Adobe. Some early trends of digital convergence have begun to settle into established patterns and it appears that, for the time-being, at least, talk of the imminent demise of printed books and the bookstores that sell them, has lost at least some of its urgency.
Conveners: Emmett Stinson (University of Melbourne) and Nathan Hollier (Monash University).
Registration details:
Download the full program here.
About The Small Press Network:
SPUNC—The Small Press Network was founded in 2006 to represent and advance the interests of the small and independent publishing sector, and an immediate and lasting priority was to recognise and promote diversity in the publishing sector. In the six short years of its existence SPUNC has has grown to represent over 100 small and independent Australian publishers and now offers a Digital Distribution Service, which enables its members to publish their ebooks directly to major, international ebooks vendors.
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