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Posts Tagged: Future of Photobooks

What do you think photobooks will look like in 10 years? Will they be digital or physical? Open-source or proprietary? Will they be read on a Kindle or an iPhone? And what aesthetic innovations will have transformed them?

Picture 1I know I’m not alone in pondering these questions. Joerg Colberg echoed these thoughts just last week in a post on Conscientious. Then I talked to Andy Adams at Flak Photo about his weekly features highlighting the winners of Blurb‘s 2009 Photography.Book.Now contest (left), and something clicked.

For a while now, it’s been our goal (at RESOLVE and liveBooks) to find and share new business models that will move photography and the creative industries forward in a positive way. But we’re also eager to conduct our own experiments. And what better place to start than the incredibly flexible blogging format?

Andy and I initially wondered how we could use our blogs in a new way to further illuminate the question, “What will photobooks be like in the year 2019?” We’re not psychic, but we do have a lot of faith in collective intelligence. And with all the talk these days about “crowd-sourcing,” we thought, why can’t we crowd-source a blog post?

Discussions in the blogosphere generally lead readers along trajectories of information, but all those useful ideas rarely get tied back up into a single useful post. We plan to centralize the discussion around this specific topic — photobooks — so that anyone searching for related posts can find them easily and understand the context around them.

So how does this Future of Photobooks thing work? Andy and I have contacted fellow bloggers and asked them to post about the most prescient innovations they’ve seen in the photobook and publishing industries. We’ll add links to those blogs within this post as they go live, so over the next few days you’ll be able to see the “research” for our final post developing in real time.

COLLABORATING BLOGS
Adam Westbrook: The future of the Photobook?
Keep Your Shutters Open (Rachel M. Wolfe): Foto Future
eyecurious (Marc Feustel): Some more fuel on the photo book fire
The PhotoBook (Doug Stockdale): Future of Photobooks?
Quintessence (Ellen Rennard): Photo Books in Ten Years?
We Can Shoot Too (J. Wesley Brown): The Photo Book
Ed Kashi Weblog (Paul O’Sullivan): The Future of Photobooks
The PhotoOracle (Tomas Ovalle): Photobooks: Evolution or Revolution?
sevensevennine.com (Nick Turpin): The Future of Photobooks?
TechTock Blog (Jack Howard): Thoughts on the Future of Photo Books (And books in general)
Elysium (Colleen Mullins): Dummy
LOZ (Laurence Vecten): I heart photo books
Green Tea Gallery Magazine (Francesco Gallarotti): The Future of Photobooks
Craig Ferguson Images: For the Love of (Photo)Books
Brereton Blog (Mark Brereton): Photo Books Photo Books
Heather Morton Art Buyer Blog: An Invitation to Participate in a Discussion about the Future of Photobooks
La Pura Vida (Bryan Formhals): The Netflix of Photobooks
Elizabeth Avedon: The Future of Photobooks: Past, Present, and Future
Thought Factory (Gary Sauer-Thompson): Photobooks: Possibilities + Future
Link-Log: The Future of Photography Books?
Darius Himes: The Premise: A Crowd Sourced Blog about Photography Books Publishing
Street Level Japan (Dan Abbe): The Photobooks I Bought This Year
Amy Stein: The Future of Photobooks
New Photographics (Jonathan Worth): ‘The Future of Photo-books’ A response.
Larissa Leclair: Joining the conversation about photobooks
Ben Huff . words & photographs: A few thoughts on books
Little Brown Mushroom (Alec Soth): The Future of Photobooks
Fraction. The blog for the magazine (David Bram): The Future of Photography Books
Food For Your Eyes (Nathalie Belayche): Future of photography books: food for thought
Ocular Octopus (Todd Walker): The Photobook Circa 2019
Luceo Images Blog (David Walter Banks): Resolve Blog: Future of Photobooks
The Space In Between (Stacy Oborn): What May Come: On the Future of Photobooks
altfotonet (Gary Sauer-Thompson): A conversation about the future of photobooks
Shooting Wide Open (Jin Zhu): Photobooks, periodicals, and boxes
Hamburger Eyes (Ray Potes): The Future of Photobooks
Shane Godfrey: What Will Photo Books Look Like in 10 Years?
Sadkids (Geoffrey Ellis): The Future of Photobooks
Daylight Magazine (Michael Itkoff & Taj Forer): Future of the Photo Book
Blurberati Blog: The Future of Photo Books
Jerry Avenaim Photography Blog: The Future of Photography Books?
Harlan Erskine Photography/Blog: Thinking about the future of the Photobook
The Online Photographer (Mike Johnston): The Future of the Photo Book
Critical Terrain (Alan Rapp): Inversely Proportional: thoughts on the future of the photobook
Lens Culture (Jim Casper): The Future of Magazines and Photobooks?
Exposures Blog (Lesley Martin): The Future of the Photobook
Emily Goligoski: The Future of Photobooks (& Media Monetization?)
Image Your Emotions (Jean-Baptiste Blanc): Future of photobooks
Lens Culture (Jim Casper): Simon Roberts Video Excerpt: The beauty of photobooks
DLK Collection: A Contrarian View: A Collector’s Thoughts on Photobooks
Larissa Leclair: Interview: Elizabeth Flemming
Lulu Blog (Tim Wright): The Future of Photobooks
Rolando Gomez: The Future of Photography Books — Free Books!
Metro Nature (Christina Seely): The future of photobooks
Contact Photography Blog (Emily Graham): On the Photobook

But please don’t wait for us to contact you to start contributing. If you have something you want to say about photobooks, write a post on your own blog, linking to this post, by Sunday, Dec. 13 (we’ve had so much great interest, we’ll continue to accept posts on an ongoing basis). Then ping Andy or I with the link on Facebook or Twitter, and we’ll add you into the list. (Andy: FB & Twitter. Miki: FB & Twitter.) Don’t have a blog or don’t have time to post? Simply leave your thoughts in the comments. If you want to be notified when other people share their great ideas, be sure to use the “subscribe” drop-down to received email updates.

And this is just the beginning. At the end of this week, Andy and I will choose the standout ideas and highlight them (with links to whoever suggested them) in another post. That post will be all about real-time discussion. We’ll organize the big ideas — it will be up to you to tell us what you think about them. Delve into the details, throw out some pros and cons, tell us we’re off base if you must. We’re just excited to host a healthy discussion.

Finally we’ll sift through all the great ideas and heated debate and pull it together in one final post, which we hope will live a long online life as a resource for anyone trying to understand where the photobook industry is headed. And your name, links, and/or blog will be an indispensable part of it. You’re helping us explain where photobook publishing is headed, and we’re helping people find you and your brilliant ideas. Everyone wins. Just the way we like it :)

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