Marcelino Elosua, founder of LID Publishing, speaks about the future of books
At Trends & Talks first day of conferences, titled How will we live in 15 years? and celebrated on March 13th, founder of LID Publishing Marcelino Elosua explained how books are going to evolve. His intervention was about explaining how books are becoming different concepts to all interested parts: reader, distributor, editor and author.
To the reader, the book becomes an author-guided internet navigation that links knowledge, has audiovisual contents and lets him interact with others. About distribution, virtual libraries benefit from their unlimited capacity to store contents and a market without geographic barriers.
In order to publish a work, the author has to look for somebody who understands his or her objectives, deals with the right formats and has the capacity to create the necessary sinergies to achieve them. These formats include the physical and electronic book, conferences, online courses and magazines, among others.
To the president of LID Publishing, the future of the book hangs on the interactivity among people with the same interests through specialised digital libraries as bluebottlebiz.com, focused on business books, where readers can share ideas, express their opinions and work together at workbenches. This model benefits both the reader and the editor: readers have access to big amounts of content in different formats with a flat rate, leading to a great savings, and editors learn the interests their contents are awakening, apart from gaining a more estable income and avoiding piracy.
Marcelino Elosua states a comprehensive and personalized communication approach will be required in the future from the editors to cover the authors’ needs and to achieve sinergies in the production processes of all formats. At the end, author and editor choose each other; their relationship is not based in one book or another independently, but on an long-term overall interaction that generates value for both parts. For all this to be possible, the relationship has to take into account the goals pursued by both author and editor, as well as all the formats.
Elosua has authored the chapter «Evolution of knowledge management», included in the collaborative work Dentro de 15 años: ¿escenarios improbables? that belongs to collection Fundación Empresa y Sociedad.
