Miha Kovac

Information on Speaker

Miha Kovac started his career in 1985-86 as editor in chief of Mladina, the only opposition paper in what was at that time Yugoslavia. In the nineties, he moved to book publishing and in 1996 became editor in chief of Mladinska knjiga, the biggest Slovene publishing house. He holds a PhD on Library and Information Science. In 2000, he started to teach publishing at University of Ljubljana. He is the author of a book on Slovene book publishing and numerous articles on book studies that have been published in different international journals. For the last fourteen years, he has written weekly columns for one of the biggest Slovene dailies. He is also editor in chief of the Slovene edition of National Geographic magazine. His book Never Mind the Web: Here Comes the Book will be published in 2008.

Abstract

In recent history, discussions about the end of the book were especially popular in the mid-nineties, when companies such as Arthur Andersen predicted that in ten years time, a major shift towards e-books and e-reading would appear and e-book reading devices will start to take over from printed books. However, at least in the first decade of the new millennium, this shift did not happen. Furthermore, the number of book publishing companies and number of book titles printed on paper significantly increased, and print-on-demand technology together with internet bookselling gave a new perspective to the book publishing industry. As a result, at least to a certain extent, the e-book became part of history of printed book and rather than the opposite. The paper will look at the deeper historic and social reasons (beyond screen and battery problems, typical of the first e-book reading devices) for why the printed book did not disappear as quickly as predicted. Additionally, the paper will address the importance of understanding historic and social context of book industry as a part of publishing education curriculum.

Part of this Conference or Workshop: SHARP 2008