Our colleague Laura Dawson has written on her personal blog about an "unconference" called #altbookstore, which she attended in Manhattan last week. This meeting, she notes, was convened because...of Amazon:
This arose, of course, from a commonly-held desire amongst the attendees (and some attended virtually as well) to really probe The Amazon Problem. Amazon is many things. To customers, it’s an ideal store that basically sells everything you could possibly want, and delivers it almost before you know you want it (yesterday on Twitter I was calling this #acciostuff). To developers, it’s a technology company that basically invented what we know as “the cloud”. To publishers, it’s a disintermediator, a disruptor, a strong-armed bully upending business models and shrinking margins. To authors, it’s a benefactor and a cruel mistress.
For more on the session, you can go to her blog here. Chris Kubica, the organizer, wrote about it for Publishers Weekly. And Porter Anderson has a write-up for The Bookseller.
