Publishing Next: A Conference on the future of publishing

Publishing Next: The Next Chapter in Publishing’ was organized on 16 February on the sidelines of the NDWBF ‘14 at New Delhi. The event started on a lighter note with a poetry session by the Kannada poet Mamta Sagar. The first session on ‘Indian Language Publishing’ was chaired by Vinutha Mallya, a consulting editor to Mapin Publishing. With Alind Maheshwari, Desraj Kali, Gouri Nath, Mangal Majhi and Sridhar Gowda as the panelists, the session focused on Indian languages and publishing ecosystem. The session on ‘An Analysis of the E-Publishing Ecosystem’ was chaired by Venkatesh Mariharan, director, Knowledge Commons, an NGO working on open education resources. The panelists included Badri Seshadri, Debasri Rakshit, Shiva Kumar, Swaran Lata and Vishal Salgota and the discussion elaborated on issues that have impacted the growth of e-publishing in India. Another session on ‘Going Slow: Examining Self-Publishing’ examined the role of self-publishing, its popularity and challenges, in today’s publishing environment. It was chaired by Leonard Fernandes, co-founder of Cinnamon Teal Publishing. Kanishka Gupta, Manish Purohit, Shailesh Bharatwasi, S Sitaraman and Vivek Mehra were the panelists in the session. Lastly a workshop on ‘E-Publishing 101’ was also held where Amit Verma and Vidula Tokekar spoke about the development of digital book format and examined the issues involved in e-books specially those raised by publishers with limited resources. The Conference was organized by Cinnamonteal Publishing in association with NBT, India.