Yesterday started the IV Congress of the Electronic Book of Barbastro, an event that takes place in Barbastro and where professionals from the publishing world and not so professional meet to talk about the electronic book or ebook in Spain.
In this IV Congress of the Electronic Book the format has changed somewhat although the essence remains the same. Now the event will last two days that will be divided into two parts: a professional conference and a practical workshop. The idea of this change is that both speakers and attendees are an active part of the event, trying to turn it into an active and open forum on electronic books in Spain.
The IV Congress of the Electronic Book of Barbastro has a whole day of practical workshop
In this edition, despite the fact that the ebook is the king of the event, they have highlighted two topics that have given much to talk about and that will undoubtedly give much to talk about, are the audiobook and Big Data. On the latter, they talk about what they are doing and what they can do. Big Data or data collection for other functions is causing ebooks to write themselves or applications to tell the author what topics or ebooks are going to be a bestseller. Needless to say, currently applications derived from Big Data play an important role as ebook recommenders.
On the first topic, the audiobook, is something that is becoming more and more famous and more virgin in Spain. In the IV Congress of the Electronic Book of Barbastro it is reaffirmed that Spain is still a "green" market for audiobooks and that the industry can take advantage of it to capture the good and correct the bad of other markets such as the United States, where more than 5 million audiobooks are already sold, while in Spain it only reaches 3.000 units sold.
This event is one of the most important in Spain, but it is also very interesting, perhaps one of the most interesting in the Spanish-speaking world where the main agents of the sector have gathered. So if not you can attend, you can always watch the videos about their sessions, something that is on YouTube and on all social networks. Hopefully next year this event will go ahead but with a broader program.
Image - Event Flickr