Topic 6: Predictions

Michael: More of the same, more of the same, more of the same. The big publishers continue to show little imagination - the Quills is the best thing they can come up with to get readers excited about the product? - but the threats to their hegemony (from print on demand and more nimble small publishers to the Google and Amazon efforts) aren't quite there yet.

Alex: I think big publishers are going to start publishing lines of "special" or "collector's editions" of books in expensive limited runs as a marketing ploy. And it will work. But I won't get paid anything for coming up with the idea.

Maud: As I said last year, I'm interested to see how publishers will deal with the emerging international conversation about books.

Robert: Prognostication has never been a strength of mine, though occasionally I have called a batter hitting a home run. But what the hell, I will go on record to say that Boston baseball fans will live to regret their ignominious treatment of Pedro Martinez.     

Predictions are dreams and wishes unfulfilled. Given that view, I would venture that there will be a backlash from whomever represents the American intelligentsia against the current raging excesses of ideological zealotry and dogma and a brief return to our only homegrown philosophical school, once called Pragmatism.

A few other predictions:

Jonathan Safran Foer’s next novel will be greeted with courtesy and an absence of slashing and burning notices.

Dan Wickett will finally get around to doing a United Parcel drivers of the literati panel.

Rosie will get a book contract in 2006.

Ed Champion will only take 5 or 6 imaginary breaks from Return of the Reluctant.

Birnbaum is going to talk with Phillip Roth or die trying.

Michael Orthofer will only review books published in Sanskrit, Urdu and Sumerian.

Alex Good will change his mind about Christopher Hitchens (Hitchens may change his mind about a few things) and maybe Chip Kidd.

This panel will all still be reading literary fiction and still be complaining that no one acknowledges our favorite authors, damn them!