One of the more interesting blog posts that I had the good sense of reading (and not immediately marking as read in my now 3000+ items strong Google Reader account without so much as a skim-through) last week was a roundup of the first ever Philippine Digital Publishing Conference held last September 13 and 14 at the UP-Ayala Technohub in Quezon City. I would have been thrilled to be there and sit through all the sessions, but, alas, a quick look at the registration fees for the conference was enough to have me sit it out. Luckily, Honey, a writer and editor for one of the country’s leading publishers, was present and was more than happy to share what she learned from the conference, ominously titled, The Future of the Book, in a long but very enlightening post on her blog, simply titled, Some Reflections on the Future of the Book. In it she offers exactly what the post title says and asserts that “there’s a big gap between what publishers know or where they are and what the consumers know or where we are.” That considerably weighty observation, not without foundation to be sure, became the main discussion topic during the first ever Filipino Book Bloggers meet-up held a few hours ago around a set of four round coffee tables in Shangri-la Plaza. The event, small in scale but grand in its attendant ambition of securing the future of the book, be it printed or electronically rendered, required no fees of any sort, so my attendance would have been made impossible only by a sudden health crisis or, less serious but far more probable, a bout of laziness. When it became apparent that neither would come about, I set out for our rendezvous and met Jansen, who is more a film geek than a bookworm, but was gracious enough to tag along (Don wasn’t). Soon enough we were shaking hands and exchanging blog URLs with not only book bloggers (Honey, Chachic, Tina, Rezel, Michelle, Ariel, Aaron, Ace, Jason, Gege, and Tarie) but also independent booksellers (Jasper and Celina), independent publishers (Mr and Mrs Paolo Chikiamco and Kenneth Yu), and published writers (Carljoe Javier and, again, Paolo).  The little meet-up saw us spending the afternoon with lively book talk. It was a great pleasure to finally meet offline these like-minded people whose love for books is evident in their respective online presences. But a greater pleasure it was to argue with one or two of them about the merits of The Catcher in the Rye and the real-world plausibility of Erasmus’s famous confession, “When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.”   —Above: Justin Cronin’s The Passage, on loan from Honey; a signed copy of Carljoe Javier’s The Kobayashi Maru of Love, purchased from Avalon.ph; and A.J. Jacobs’s The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World, also from Avalon.ph.

One of the more interesting blog posts that I had the good sense of reading (and not immediately marking as read in my now 3000+ items strong Google Reader account without so much as a skim-through) last week was a roundup of the first ever Philippine Digital Publishing Conference held last September 13 and 14 at the UP-Ayala Technohub in Quezon City. I would have been thrilled to be there and sit through all the sessions, but, alas, a quick look at the registration fees for the conference was enough to have me sit it out. Luckily, Honey, a writer and editor for one of the country’s leading publishers, was present and was more than happy to share what she learned from the conference, ominously titled, The Future of the Book, in a long but very enlightening post on her blog, simply titled, Some Reflections on the Future of the Book. In it she offers exactly what the post title says and asserts that “there’s a big gap between what publishers know or where they are and what the consumers know or where we are.”

That considerably weighty observation, not without foundation to be sure, became the main discussion topic during the first ever Filipino Book Bloggers meet-up held a few hours ago around a set of four round coffee tables in Shangri-la Plaza. The event, small in scale but grand in its attendant ambition of securing the future of the book, be it printed or electronically rendered, required no fees of any sort, so my attendance would have been made impossible only by a sudden health crisis or, less serious but far more probable, a bout of laziness. When it became apparent that neither would come about, I set out for our rendezvous and met Jansen, who is more a film geek than a bookworm, but was gracious enough to tag along (Don wasn’t). Soon enough we were shaking hands and exchanging blog URLs with not only book bloggers (Honey, Chachic, Tina, Rezel, Michelle, Ariel, Aaron, Ace, Jason, Gege, and Tarie) but also independent booksellers (Jasper and Celina), independent publishers (Mr and Mrs Paolo Chikiamco and Kenneth Yu), and published writers (Carljoe Javier and, again, Paolo). 

The little meet-up saw us spending the afternoon with lively book talk. It was a great pleasure to finally meet offline these like-minded people whose love for books is evident in their respective online presences. But a greater pleasure it was to argue with one or two of them about the merits of The Catcher in the Rye and the real-world plausibility of Erasmus’s famous confession, “When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.”  

—
Above: Justin Cronin’s The Passage, on loan from Honey; a signed copy of Carljoe Javier’s The Kobayashi Maru of Love, purchased from Avalon.ph; and A.J. Jacobs’s The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World, also from Avalon.ph.

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