As part of the Livebooks crowd-sourced blog post about the future of photobooks I recently gave a video interview to Jim Casper at Lens Culture about the beauty of the photobook, which you can view here.

Why not get involved with the debate? Over 50 photo blogs have so far, including Darius Himes: The Premise: A Crowd Sourced Blog about Photography Books Publishing, Ben Huff: A few thoughts on books, Little Brown Mushroom (Alec Soth): The Future of Photobooks and Exposures Blog (Lesley Martin): The Future of the Photobook.

Here are more details from Miki Johnson over at Livebooks–

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?

I 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 it 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.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 4th, 2010 at 3:50 pm and is filed under MISCELLANEOUS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.