Print vs. Pixel

In less than a decade’s time, the advent of ebooks and increasingly affordable ereaders has disrupted publishing and traditional bookstores—ebook sales skyrocketed 1,260% between 2008 and 2010. Some believe this signals an uncertain future for print books. Others contend the print book is here to stay for the long haul—they accounted for 80% of all book sales last year, while ebook sales fell by 10% over the first half of 2015.
 
Join us for another raucous evening of our new series of MWPA Oxford Debates: An Oxford Debate on Books vs. Ebooks. Arguing in favor of the book will be Don Lindgren, antiquarian bookseller and owner of Rabelais: Fine Books on Food & Drink. Taking a stance for the ebook will be Caleb Mason, the founder and publisher of Publerati, a literary fiction imprint based in Portland.
 
THE MOTION FOR DEBATE 
“Ebooks will eventually supplant printed books entirely.”
 
Don Lindgren is an antiquarian bookseller specializing in books on food and drink. His bookselling career started in 1979 and other the years he’s worked for Barnes & Noble, Powell’s, the Seminary Cooperative Bookstore, the Strand Rare Book Room, and Lame Duck Books. Since 2006, his own business, Rabelais: Fine Books on Food & Drink, has sold rare books, manuscripts, ephemera, and other materials related to culinary history and culture, and was named “the best cookbook shop in America” by Bon Appétit Magazine. Don performs appraisal and institutional placement services for collections and archives related to food and drink, and his clients include Harvard’s Schlesinger Library, the New York Public Library, and many of the nation’s major research institutions. Don is a Governor of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America, and a member of the International League Antiquarian Booksellers, the Ephemera Society of America, and the Bibliographical Society of America.
 
Caleb Mason is the Founder and Publisher of Publerati, a literary fiction imprint based in Portland, offering titles through global ebook channels and as print-on-demand trade paperbacks via the Espresso Book Network.  Publerati utilizes a unique goodwill business model, donating a portion of all sales to the Worldreader Organization to help spread literacy using ebooks. He began his career as a bookseller in Boston, then worked at Little, Brown in Boston, before co-founding Salem House Publishers, eventually sold to News Corp and merged into HarperCollins. With family in tow, Caleb left publishing in 1990 and moved to Maine where he worked for Konica during the transition years from analog to digital photography and at DeLorme during the early years of digital mapping and GPS.  He is the author of The Isles of Shoals Remembered (1992) and the novel Normal Family (2011), written under the pen name Don Trowden.
 
This free event is co-presented by SPACE and the MWPA and made possible thanks to the generous support of the Kirby Family Foundation.