‘Originality? That’s a problem...’
Haven’t heard from Josh in over a week – which, based on experience, could mean anything – but the highlight of my week was a Books at Breakfast session at the Hospital Club in Covent Garden. Books at Breakfast is a fantastic idea, run by the entrepreneur Richard Kilgarriff, in which attendees get breakfast, plus a fireside chat with an author and copy of his/her book (and all for twenty quid). I’ll be going to many more as an attendee, I hope.
Mine coincided with Internet Week Europe and I was pleased to find that a lot of those present were from the London tech industries, which made the discussion intensely interesting to me. Inevitably, the question of whether there could be another tech bubble arose and responses varied from ‘No, we know too much about it now,’ to ‘We’re already in one.’ Those who’d lived through the first one tended to echo the stories told in ‘Totally Wired’ and I was interested to note how readily vets could laugh at some of the excesses they’d witnessed or experienced.
One said, ‘It’s easy to underestimate the role of cocaine in those years’ – a sentiment with which I readily agree. Robin Williams noted that ‘A cocaine habit is God’s way of telling you that you have too much money,’ but it never did much for a person’s sense of caution, either. So no wonder it was to the 90s what LSD had been to the Sixties. A kind of bubble X-Lax.
A propos of some of our midweek discussion, a report in today’s New York Times addresses the current App Goldrush myth, pointing out that while these things are being written in their hundreds of thousands and used everywhere, almost none of their authors make a living at it. A strange turn of events: almost no one who makes anything also makes a living at it, because the rewards are in packaging and repackaging, whether it be books or financial instruments. Will we reach a point where there’s nothing left to repackage, I wonder?
Which reminds me of how I roared with laughter the night an editor at a publishing party frowned, ‘Originality? Yes. That’s a problem.’
Though of course I spent the journey home either crying or looking for something small and furry to kick…
And never went to another publishing party.
Mine coincided with Internet Week Europe and I was pleased to find that a lot of those present were from the London tech industries, which made the discussion intensely interesting to me. Inevitably, the question of whether there could be another tech bubble arose and responses varied from ‘No, we know too much about it now,’ to ‘We’re already in one.’ Those who’d lived through the first one tended to echo the stories told in ‘Totally Wired’ and I was interested to note how readily vets could laugh at some of the excesses they’d witnessed or experienced.
One said, ‘It’s easy to underestimate the role of cocaine in those years’ – a sentiment with which I readily agree. Robin Williams noted that ‘A cocaine habit is God’s way of telling you that you have too much money,’ but it never did much for a person’s sense of caution, either. So no wonder it was to the 90s what LSD had been to the Sixties. A kind of bubble X-Lax.
A propos of some of our midweek discussion, a report in today’s New York Times addresses the current App Goldrush myth, pointing out that while these things are being written in their hundreds of thousands and used everywhere, almost none of their authors make a living at it. A strange turn of events: almost no one who makes anything also makes a living at it, because the rewards are in packaging and repackaging, whether it be books or financial instruments. Will we reach a point where there’s nothing left to repackage, I wonder?
Which reminds me of how I roared with laughter the night an editor at a publishing party frowned, ‘Originality? Yes. That’s a problem.’
Though of course I spent the journey home either crying or looking for something small and furry to kick…
And never went to another publishing party.
date
newest »
newest »
message 1:
by
Paddy
(new)
Nov 29, 2012 06:13AM
LSD had nothing to do with the Beatles' song. Check out what it was really about. It's V interesting
reply
|
flag
