if:book:group 25/10 - introduction

Chris Meade: I'm Chris Meade, co-director of if:book in London. At if:book we look at how the locus of culture has shifted from printed book to the screen. As a group, we have a variety of approaches. I've spent the last 12 years promoting books: poetry, children's literature and fiction. Recently, I've also become involved [...]

james bridle:

I was an editor at small publishing house - so small I did everything - we were trying to work out how to get books out there with no budget. So I used the internet a lot. Gradually I became more absorbed in that, and as well as blogging I now work for a [...]

simon fox:

I've been fascinated with words, stories (plot is the most accurate) since I was very young. I've also always been interested in computers and games. I'm involved with lots of projects: probably the most relevant to this gathering is 'The Written World', a collaborative writing project that we're launching in the new year. We want [...]

lucy allen:

I'm a producer of arts organisation Foolish People. We create art, ritual theatre and meta-events using immersive, interactive, open-source myths.

john harrigan:

I'm a director of the theatre group Foolish People. Foolish People is about the missing link, the piece that's always left out. Hermetica, esotericism, gnosticism. When people connect with the word, we're interested in how and what that connection is. The numinous. If people come away from our events without fundamentally changing, we've failed. We [...]

Welcome

The if:book:group is a series of offline meetings bringing together people from across print, digital, literary, library, academic and other disciplines to discuss themes around the future of the book. We'll use this space to collect notes from each if:book:group meeting so that the conversation can continue beyond the meetings.

Navigating

The first introductions are posted individually to make them easier to navigate. To read all the way through the introductions and debate, click on the first post and then use the arrows that appear at the end of the post to navigate forward or back. Or to skip straight to the debate use the 'Categories' links on the main page to click straight to it.