Giving it away at the Harbourfront

Friday I attended Giving It Away: Books, Business and the Culture of Free held at the Harbourfront Centre in Toronto. The goal of the conference was to examine the impact of free culture on writing and publishing.

Now deeply into the digital age, we find ourselves thrust into a new universe of textual media, provoking some unexpected questions. Giving It Away will confront these issues of access, diversity and democracy. Increasingly, the pressure is on the publishing industry to “give it away.” It has happened in the music business and it is starting to happen in the newspaper industry. Is book publishing next? Will it go beyond sampling and current marketing methods to the very core of what we do?

The first session was How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Give It Away for Free with keynote speaker Rives, “the first 2.0 poet”. Along with performing his poems, Rives discussed his pop-up books, his grandmother’s fascination with his first patent, how he ended up writing commercials and almost marrying a supermodel and the wonderful story of his hero and earphones girl. I feel that the audience were expecting some structured advice but the presentation did an excellent job demonstrating the complexities of producing online content, what happens when you give it away and how it can impact your offline existence, without attempting to lay out an approach that would be redundant three months from now. I only wish we had more sessions like this at library conferences.

After the lighthearted opening, the panel session, Does It Pay to Be Free?, produced an emotional turn in the audience. The feeling of dread was palatable and it seemed that the black draped stage could serve as a suitable setting for a publisher’s danse macabre. With the current recession, discussing how technological change could disrupt the publishing industry’s traditional models was not something that was going to produce a smile and a song. However. Johnny Temple‘s comment that, when asked if giving it away would pay, he felt charging didn’t seem to be paying either, seemed to lighten the mood and opened up the discussion. Darren Wershler offered some excellent points about the role of publishing, its relationship to culture and presented issues with the cellphone as a mode of content delivery. Carolyn Pittis receives my award for best one-liner: “Free is so pre-recession”. Unfortunately the next session, The View from Creative Commons, was cancelled as the presenter was unable to attend.

I went to two workshops, Creative Collaboration with Darren Wershler and Copyright and Contract Implications with Dean Cooke and Erin Finlay. The goal of Wershler’s workshop was to

consider the full range of issues for authors and publishers in a digital culture. With reference to the kinds of objects that writers are now circulating on the Internet, Wershler will explore the idea that common-sense notions of publishing, authorship and creativity may all need to be reimagined for the 21st century.

For me, Wershler made the conference worth attending. His presentation had far too much content to summarize but I strongly advise you to check out his work. Anyone who describes librarians as “unsung heros” deserves our attention!

Erin Finlay and Dean Cooke’s workshop on copyright provided an overview of the subject and helped to clarify some of the issues discussed in earlier sessions.

I found the conference enjoyable and it gave me plenty to think about. I would certainly attend again, especially if they serve ice cream during the breaks like they did this year. And my most interesting discussion during the day? Someone from a small press told me that in the 60′s they used to insert acid blotters in their books to encourage sales. Perhaps libraries could experiment with this as a means of increasing circulation? Just a thought…