Salon is where Dreaming in Code started, and so it’s fitting — and wonderful — that my colleagues are featuring the book there now. There’s a Q&A with me by Andrew Leonard (with beautiful art by Mignon Khargie, another one of Salon’s founding gang) and a brief excerpt from the book as well.
Tonight I returned from Portland from the final trip of my two-and-a-half-week quasi-pseudo book tour. I moderated a panel on “new media” at the American Booksellers’ Association Winter Institute, which gathers the people who run independent bookstores and tries to equip them better to deal with increasingly volatile times in their biz.
As I told the crowd, I found it funny that we’re still calling this stuff “new media” — a term that first came into vogue 15 years ago, when it typically referred to CD-ROMs. It was great to try to peer into the crystal ball with the other panelists — Amanda Edmonds of Google, Madeline McIntosh of Random House and C.J. Rayhill of O’Reilly.
I was to be introduced by a gentleman who is the CIO of Ingram Book Co., the mega book distributor based in Tennessee who supplies many of those book stores with their stock. He quite nicely asked me if I had a copy of Dreaming in Code that he could hold up to the crowd; foolishly, I was not carrying one. Unwilling to sacrifice this tiny opportunity for promoting the book, I dashed across the street to a humongous mall that contained a branch of a certain giant chain bookstore — and there, somewhere behind giant stacks of Bob Woodward bestsellers and the “Cosmo Kama Sutra,” I found one precious copy of my book, which I purchased and carried triumphantly back to the hotel.
When I handed the volume to the Ingram exec, he noticed the reference to The Soul of a New Machine among the blurbs on the back. “That’s one of my favorite books!,” he declared, and asked me if he could keep Dreaming in Code. The coals-to-Newcastlishness of the proposition struck me as amusing — Ingram is, as its site says, “the world’s largest wholesale distributor of book product” — yet what could I say but “Of course”?
More soon. Tonight, I sleep.
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