Ben Vershbow
Editorial Director, New York Public Library

Ben Vershbow is currently editorial director of the Institute for the Future of the Book, a small New York/London-based think tank dedicated to exploring the future of reading, writing and publishing in the digital age. He has overseen a wide range of publishing experiments at the Institute investigating new methods for developing, disseminating and building community around books on the Web with authors such as Mitchell Stephens, McKenzie Wark, Lewis Lapham and Siva Vaidhyanathan. Ben also writes frequently for the Institute’s popular “if:book” blog, as well as for a variety of mainstream publications. He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Sessions

11:35am Monday, 02/11/2008

Books as Conversations

General Broadway South

Ben Vershbow (New York Public Library)

Historically, scribbling in page margins has been a solitary practice—one reader, one book—with annotated copies sometimes shared. If the book is digital, however, and resides on a network, new possibilities begin to open up. Read more.

2:00pm Tuesday, 02/12/2008

Are New Devices Breathing New Life into e-Books?

Broadway South

Tonya Engst (TidBITS Publishing Inc.), Ben Vershbow (New York Public Library), Mike Shatzkin (The Idea Logical Company), David Rothman (TeleRead.org), Steven Levy (Newsweek), Garth Conboy (eBook Technologies, Inc.)

Although Arthur Andersen famously predicted a billion-dollar e-Book market would be here by now, 2007 was a big year for the e-Book faithful, with the launch of Amazon's Kindle, the first experiments with delivery of digital books on revolutionary new mobile devices like the iPhone and the $100-laptop Read more.