Good read from this weekend’s Globe and Mail covering this year’s London Book Fair and the ongoing debate about the future of publishing. Undoubtedly the future is flux. We have mediums and messages exploding all over the place, and we’re all racing to understand what’s next.

New to the discussion is start-up Wattpad. Wattpad purports to be the “YouTube for e-books” and bases its success on user-uploaded material. CEO Allan Lau claims traditional publishing is as useless as the human appendix. Oh, and also: The new reality is that everyone is a writer.

This has been said, and hasn’t this always been true? Just the same as everyone is a filmmaker, or everyone is a photographer? What isn’t true, is that everyone is good at doing so, or that audiences care to read every piece of garbled material that can be managed to be saved as a pdf.

There is need and desire for Lau’s sentiment. The focus is not on authorship, however, it’s on sharing. We all feed into that, and benefit from it. The purposeful beauty of the internet, and content connectors like YouTube, is the magical opportunity for sharing and making us all better and bigger people.

I get the gist of Wattpad. The possibilities for sharing self-published e-books are evident. But beyond that, where’s the revolution? Everyone wants to tear down the traditional, but maybe they miss the point.  It’s hard to imagine that Wattpad will be the take-down of traditionally curated and edited material. And it’s hard to imagine that readers necessarily want it to.

Fionnuala Duggan, of publisher Coursesmart, is quoted: “One cannot underestimate the importance of editing, selecting and preparing the books for publication. There will always be a market for editorial value.”

And in the same article Evan Schnittman, Bloomsbury publishing executive, is quoted in the same article: “User-generated content is crap.”

As writer Leah McLaren points out, “While you may not like much of what’s published on sites like Wattpad and Lulu, you will undoubtedly find something to read, since their output is so vast.”

Full Globe and Mail article by Leah McLaren is available here:

Canada’s e-book moguls versus literary London – The Globe and Mail.

via Salvos from the slush pile – The Globe and Mail.

Another look, by Andrew Albanese, at the same London Book Fair debate from Publisher’s Weekly:

London Book Fair 2012: The Great Debate: Will Publishers Perish?

And Wattpad’s Alan Lau boasts his personal arguments:

In the fight for survival, outsiders and start-ups are taking on today’s heavyweight publishers and will ultimately deliver a knock-out punch