Armchair BEA Wrapup & The Future of Blogging

First of all I'd like to thank all the organizers of Armchair BEA for a great week and a great community event. I had fun at the Twitter parties, read a lot of terrific new-to-me blogs and learned about a ton of books. Mostly I think I learned how much so many of you enjoyed The Fault in Our Stars! If there's one takeaway for me it's that I need to read that book!

Seriously, the takeaway for me is how many of you there are out there, how enthusiastic you are about blogging and how bright the future of blogging is. I don't know if blogging will become more or less involved with the publishing industry- certainly blogging is and will continue to be a conduit for many of us to become more involved in a paid kind of way, whether it be via freelancing, bookselling or working with publishing companies and literary agencies, but already many of us have made the leap from hobbyist to professional and I expect that that will continue. And I think that those of us who don't, will continue to connect with our fellow readers and booklovers whatever else we're doing.

I also think that lots of the conversations we've seen this week will continue and that as a community we'll continue to come up with thoughtful and thought-provoking contributions. And I think we'll continue to take those conversations outside of our blogs as well. Already we're seeing bloggers included in literary festivals and other events, and I think that will continue as well.

I hope that the blogging community will continue to act as ambassadors for books and reading with our friends, our families and our schools and libraries. I hope that we'll continue to support independent bookstores and vote with our dollars for the service, selection and community value that they provide. I hope that bloggers will advocate for library funding in their communities. And I hope that we'll continue to support the reading formats we use and enjoy, whether they be print, electronic or audio.

Blogging itself will change as social media formats change. Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, etc., are influential right now because they're popular generally but if MySpace has taught us anything it's that social media formats come and go. I don't think longer-form reviews and posts will disappear but I think that trendy and popular utilities will be used and discarded over time, replaced by something else as something else comes along.

As I said I think the future of book blogging is really bright and I can't wait to see it unfold!

More on this topic at ArmchairBEA Central.