Six continents, one million people engage at Publishing for Digital Minds Virtual Conference

Around The World in eight Hours, the virtual stream of The London Book Fair’s Publishing for Digital Minds conference generated 17.8 million impressions and reached 8,82,000 users on Twitter alone on March 18. The virtual conference – which was the first of its type mounted by a major publishing conference – took place between 8 am and 4.30 pm GMT on March 18. It took a whistle-stop tour around the global publishing industry, beginning in China before moving on to Australia, Malaysia, India, Germany, Mexico and the United States.

Taking place over a single day across eight time zones, the conference attracted visitors from over 170 locations worldwide to events on Google Plus, Twitter and LinkedIn. Speakers and delegates dialed in to observe and participate in discussions about the book business from six continents. Engagement in India, Malaysia and the United States was particularly strong, but virtual visitors to the conference came from as far afield as Argentina, Saudi Arabia and Tanzania.

Selected highlights from the programme included: A prediction from Thomas Abraham, managing director of Hachette India that ‘95 percent’ of e-books sold in India were read not on e-readers or tablets but mobile phones; an exclusive infographic from e-book subscription service Scribd revealing the favourite books in participating countries; best-selling author Amish Tripathi said that he self-published and sold 5,000 print copies of his first book as a marketing tactic to achieve his objective of landing a publishing contract; Klaus Renkl of the German e-reading platform Tolino, revealed that GfK’s consumer panel put Tolino’s share of the e-book market ahead of Amazon in Germany for the second successive quarter; and Source Book’s Dominique Raccah predicted that the growing popularity of ‘click and collect’ ecommerce had the power to change bookselling.