Among the participants in the two-day 140 Character Conference earlier this week were Macmillan digital marketing managers Ryan Chapman
and Ami Greko, who offered their quick assessment on what they'd been learning from the steady stream of experts and celebrities filing on and off the stage. On his blog, Chapman elaborated, and brought up a subject that's fascinated him of late: "The fin de siècle/industrial revolution gave us stream of consciousness, the nuclear age gave us post-modernism, and now the information age has produced…what? Writers need to experiment with narratives across media in the same way that alternate reality games have experimented with the video game." His example of a step in the right direction? Scholastic's The 39 Clues series, which combines books, websites, and trading cards as pieces of a $10,000 scavenger hunt puzzle.

We took part in another discussion about the publishing industry, where the consensus seemed to be that it wasn't the industry that's "broken," but the dominant business models at the companies most likely by virtue of size to get noticed by the national financial media. What's the solution? Well, if we knew that, we wouldn't have to keep having panel discussions about "the future of publishing," would we?