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Led by the American Library Association, the U.S. library system is in furious transition. At the association’s Midwinter Meeting in Boston, BiblioBoard’s pivot reflected libraries’ new roles as enabling hubs of community culture.

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Normally focused on distribution and recommendation algorithms for publishers from Europe to Asia, Boston’s Trajectory has analyzed all the presidents’ State of the Union addresses ahead of Tuesday night’s Obama speech.

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In a rich signal of a maturing self-publishing sector, the author Hugh Howey opens a new dialog on the unthinkable: the importance of quality control — if the readership writers need is to be expanded.

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The publishing specialist Jane Friedman asks authors to reconsider a widely popular trend toward self-publishing as a means of attracting a traditional contract. “A serious epidemic of impatience,” she calls it.

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As the new SELF-e program gives indie authors a curated pathway into libraries for their ebooks, Library Journal opens a contest in four genres of submissions.

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From two strong voices in today’s publishing commentary, questions of how books can be accommodated in a digitally-fast age, and whether we’re doing all we can to make them worth the effort.

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In an unusual opening to a publishing industry conference, German author and journalist Kathrin Passig speaks of the collaborative imperative — and shortcomings she has observed — in the author-publisher relationship today.

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Following the Author HQ program at London Book Fair, the Alliance of Independent Authors held its IndieReCon in London to do reconnaissance on ALLi’s first three years of international operation and writerly progress.

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In the run-up to the London Book Fair, Monday’s Publishing for Digital Minds conference at Olympia London is the first of the year’s trade-show-opening publishing conferences.

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At Charleston’s PubSense conference for writers, attendees learn about the free SELF-e service from Library Journal. The program, free for authors, has begun curating independently published ebooks for harried librarians both at the state and national level.