A Love Letter to Books

The year has been one of great change in the publishing industry, and I am thrilled to be so intimately involved with books at such a pivotal time. Sure, change is frightening and, at times, unpredictable; but its transformative nature makes it exciting and rich with new opportunities as well.

Boston's North Station continues to generate the clicking noise of tiles longer after the train schedule board has gone digital. Likewise, e-reader innovators strive to unite the romanticism of the print book to the expediency of the ebook. The bookophile has been at the heart of every invention—after all, the tactile love of a book is why we swipe an ereader's screen to the left to turn a page. But the digital versions are cultivating new forms of romance—our current forms of digital texts will be something we look back on nostalgically as the industry moves to yet another technology. It's ever-advancing, ever-changing. While many mourn the digital age as a loss, I prefer to recognize that we're gaining a sense rather than losing one: the new digital, multimodal world provides even more ways to experience text. But then again, I am an optimist.

The Book Show is proud to revere both tradition and innovation and to recognize that the two aren't mutually exclusive. New digital tools bring new possibility to our print texts. It keeps us on our tows and makes our texts interactive.

From the 56th Annual New England Book Show.