LBF virtual conference confirmed for end of January

Around The World in 8 Hours, London Book Fair’s virtual conference which tracks key trends in the global publishing industry, will return later this month.

Building on the inaugural edition launched last year which engaged more than 900,000 people on Twitter, the conference will bring leading publishers from five continents together for a day of discussion and debate on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and webcasts.

The conference will feature market insights and data from Nielsen revealing how, where and why the industry is changing in key territories - reflecting the new, data-driven vision of LBF's publishing conference, Quantum.

Presented in association with the UK Publishers Association and sponsored by Copyright Clearance Center, Quantum: Publishing & So Much More, which takes place at Olympia, London, on the 11th of April, is the conference that will "consider how the content industries are changing as developments at the cutting edge of science and technology take us beyond the digital and into the quantum age," the organisers have said.

Around The World in 8 Hours 2016 will start off in New Zealand, with an overview of the country’s publishing industry, before proceeding to China, with a special event focused on the country’s thriving children’s publishing sector. The focus will then shift to the Philippines, to look at a country where Wattpad has proved to be a major catalyst for discovering and publishing new authors. From there publishers and booksellers will discuss why the e-book revolution has yet to happen in India, and then the conference will give a tour of the book industry in Poland.

The afternoon sessions will see the conference focus on South Africa and the Americas. ‘What sells in South Africa’ will look beyond the country’s tradition of producing Nobel and Booker laureates such as Doris Lessing and Nadine Gordimer to assess how important home-grown commercial fiction is to the domestic publishing industry. Then, it will "take the temperature of publishing" in Brazil before finishing in the United States with a Twitter chat on the effect that North American science fiction and fantasy literature has on the world’s cultural imagination.

Orna O’Brien, conference manager at The London Book Fair, said: “As an event that brings a diverse range of voices and perspectives together to discuss the hottest topics in publishing, Around The World in 8 Hours promises to be a perfect taster of what’s to come at Quantum itself. We have some very special names and guests lined up for the next edition of the Virtual Conference and can’t wait to share these with the delegates who sign up between now and 27th January.”

Around the World in 8 Hours will be a free to attend event, taking place across multiple social networks on 27th January. More information is available here.