The inaugural edition of Lisbon’s Book 2.0 was seated at the Museu Nacional dos Coches, the National Riding School. This year’s iteration is at Museu do Oriente, the Museum of the East, September 5 and 6. Image: Book 2.0
By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
A Conference in Three ‘Chapters’
Having staged its inaugural iteration in 2023, Lisbon’s Book 2.0 conference is set for September 5 and 6 this year, and is themed “TheFutureOfReading.
As is the case in most international book publishing conferences, this one—organized by APEL, the 97-year-old Portuguese Publishers and Booksellers Association—”aims to place at the center of the debate the main challenges that books and reading are facing, pointing out ways to overcome them.”
The program has opened its registration and promotes itself as “the single largest event in Portugal and Europe to discuss the future of books.” While some may want to mention other major events in Europe—rare is the marketing person who can resist calling an event “the largest”—what’s interesting about this event is that it’s public-facing. Something like Britain’s Hay Festival, it stages specialists, most of them authors, in this case focused on publishing issues, and invites the consumer base to hear the conversation: The first registration button is for the “general public.”
A summary of recommendations put forward in the first outing of the program last year is interesting for their familiarity: Here are such notions as allowing children and young adults to choose their own reading; more support from publishers for campaigns targeting young readers; reading physical books “for better information retention and higher levels of compensation” while “encouraging reading through digital formats and platforms”; and calling for “publishers’ innovation to generate the passion for reading, starting from six months old and especially during adolescence” while little is said about working to bring adults back to reading from the prettier pastures of more visual media such as film and television series on the streamers.
By definition, the Lisbon conference has a healthy investment in education and that, quite logically places some emphasis on younger people. At registration, attendees signal which of three “chapters” they’d like to attend. They are:
- Chapter One: Publishing in the Digital Age
- Chapter Two: Diversity and Sustainability
- Chapter Three: New Models of Education
‘Commitments for the Future’
At the 2023 inaugural edition of Portugal’s Book 2.0 conference. Image: Book 2.0
With a bookselling component included in its format, Book 2.0 stands as a kind of literary festival built around its conference core.
In the first section on The Future of Publishing in the Digital Age, speakers include Thijs Launspach, a psychologist and author, on “Humans vs. Machines”; Narine Abgaryan, an Armenian author who writes in Russia, speaking with Madalena Sá Fernandes on “Endless Inspiration: Based on True Stories.” More authors in that section include the United States’ Jeneva Rose; Brazil’s Breno Perrucho; Portugal’s Hugo van der Ding; Spain’s Pablo Rodríguez Coca; as well as Bruno Duarte Eiras; Rui Couceiro; and Edite Guimarães.
In the second session, which has the title From Ecological Footprint to Rethinking Diversity, Elsevier’s director of global sustainability, Rachel Martin from Amsterdam, very well known to our readers, will present recommendations from the Carbon Footprint Whitepaper, which comes from a study of the Portuguese publishing industry’s carbon footprint. Also in this segment of the programming are António Redondo, CEO of Navigator; the American writer Jeff Goodell; Portugal’s minister of youth and modernization Margarida Balseiro Lopes; States-based author Rachel Lynn Solomon; and more.
And in the final section on The Intersection of Culture and Education, the United States author and psychoanalyst Galit Atlas speaks on “emotional inheritance” with Cristina Nogueira Fonseca and Manuel Celemnte. Also appearing in this part of the program are Catherine Nixey; John Tørres Thuv; and Robert Miller.
A summary of “commitments for the future” is to feature Su Blackwell of the United Kingdom; Italy’s Ricardo Franco Levi, who is president of the Federation of European Publishers; and Paulo Rangel, Portugal’s minister of state and foreign affairs.
Partners in Place
In a gallery at the 2023 staging of Lisbon’s Book 2.0. Image: Book 2.0
Lisbon’s Book 2.0 is to be congratulated for its assembly of a strong brace of support this year including:
It goes without saying that educational interests are central to many challenges in reading trends in virtually every market of world publishing. But it’s also to be noted that Lisbon’s program, like so many in international publishing, doesn’t include a focused comparable “chapter” on the need to regain members of the adult populations of the world for books and reading. Programmers of so many events don’t seem to value as much those people who are doing the voting, the managing, the funding, and the running of things, the adults—the parents of the children—who are losing their capabilities and interests in long-form reading.
Perhaps in the future, the Lisbon program—still so fresh to the world of bookish discussions—may want to see how much concentration can be placed on the question of post-childhood reading and its various elements of decline in the contemporary era. The entire entertainment combine today is reading’s competition. And to work so hard on those future readers, the children, shouldn’t mean that we don’t care if the adults wander away from reading.
More on the 2024 edition of Lisbon’s Book 2.0 is here.
The public-facing Book 2.0 conference in Portugal includes a book fair for sales. Image: Book 2.0
More from Publishing Perspectives on publishing conferences in the international book business is here, more on the Portuguese market is here, and more on publishing in Europe is here.
Publishing Perspectives is the International Publishers Association’s world media partner.
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