After you read these two recent articles about the top book industry stories and happenings of 2012 (and some predictions/hopes for 2013 from some industry gurus):
A Year in Digital Publishing and What To Expect in 2013, from The Literary Platform
and
Notables of 2012, from Publishers Weekly
you might agree with me that it’s been a mind-bogglingly crazy year of transmogrification, change and upheaval (and excitement!) in the publishing world over the past twelve months. The continued meteoric growth of ebook sales, the [real and imagined] Big Six mergers, the price-fixing collusion debacle, the arrival of gads of new devices like the iPad Mini and Kindle Paperwhite are just a few things that went down/broke loose this year.
So it got me wondering about what will happen in 2013. What will be destroyed? What will be born? What will change? What will rise? What will diminish? What will happen that NONE of us can predict?
Personally, it is my hope that this is the year of Big Data for books…that books actually become data (literally relational databases), that book metadata gets better and more standardized, that book content and reading habit data becomes more pervasive and open and that links between ebooks and ebookcases and ebook readers becomes better and better such that soon we’ll have one, awesome, global neural net of booky goodness.
But what do you look forward to (or fear) for the world of books in 2013? Please sound off in the comments!
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