What does 21st-century technology hold for the printed word? Last week academics, librarians, publishers and writers descended on the Villa Reale, near Milan, to find out.
We hear from a Senegalese publisher struggling with the differences between west and south, from an Argentinian innovator who keeps his office on a laptop and a digital designer who has put Wikipedia between hard covers.
Harvard professor Robert Darnton explains why, far from killing off the book, the new digital technologies are giving it a new life, while the Chilean novelist Antonio Skarmeta – author of Il Postino – asks how the writer is going to make a living in the new world. The American teacher Esther Wojcici suggests that the answer may lie in a radical new form of copyright.
