Regardless of what type of writer you are—or where you’re at in your career—I implore you to read and educate yourself about how technology is impacting the future of reading, writing, publishing, and authorship. Here are some good places to start.

Books on the Future of Publishing

• Sprint Beyond the Book, a collaborative experiment that explores the future of publishing. I am a contributor.
• Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto, a collection of essays by Hugh McGuire and Brian O’Leary (O’Reilly, 2012)
• The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future by Robert Darnton (read an interview with Darnton, “Do Books Have a Future?”)
• The Late Age of Print by Ted Striphas
• The Merchants of Culture by John B. Thompson
• Clay Shirky has two books that look at larger cultural/tech shifts, both of which speak to writing/media/publishing quite a bit: Here Comes Everybody & Cognitive Surplus. (See below for more Shirky.)

Specific Posts on the Future of Publishing & Journalism

• Here’s my take on The Future of the Author-Publisher Relationship
• Twelve Steps by Brian O’Leary
• Beyond the Text: Writing Undercover on the Web by Anna von Veh
• What Is the Business of Literature? by Richard Nash
• How We Will Read, a Q&A with Clay Shirky. And here’s Shirky’s blog.
• Post-Artifact Booking & What Books Will Become by Kevin Kelly
• Wikipedia & The Death of the Expert by Maria Bustillos
• The End of Paper Changes Everything by Seth Godin
• The New York Times Is Not Going to Turn Into Buzzfeed (interviews with former editors of NY Times and Washington Post)
• The Future of the News Business by Marc Andreessen

Websites, Blogs, Events, Talks

• BookTwo (James Bridle). Check out his blog entries AND his talks, where available.
• Books in Browsers event. Scan for links to presentations and videos.
• Lean Back 2.0. I’ve been mentioning this one a lot lately. See the presentation that kicked it all off.
• The Institute for the Future of the Book. Check out their blog, if:book.