I’ll be at Readercon (July 8-11) on Friday and Saturday next week. Here’s what I’ll be doing as a program participant:

Friday 6:00 PM, Salon F: Panel

The Bonus DVD in Literature.  John Joseph Adams, Jim Freund (M), Marty Halpern, Robert V. S. Redick, Sarah Smith.

Brandon Sanderson has posted “author commentary” on a chapter-by-chapter basis for all of his major fantasy novels. Steven Hall wrote “un-chapters” for every chapter of his published book _The Raw Shark Texts_ and has scattered them in the world and online. And Catherynne Valente recorded audio “author’s commentary” for several chapters of her online YA novel _The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland In A Ship Of Her Own Making_. How does the presence of authoritative commentary change the reading dynamic? Does it affect the sense of closure and satisfaction that is conventionally experienced when we reach the end of a story? Will a proliferation of such bonus material create more
informed readers, or simply ones less willing to work to understand a story? And how does the idea of a “published work” change when different readers may have experienced less or more of it, depending on how much bonus content they have experienced?

Saturday 11:00 AM, ME/ CT: Panel

The New and Improved Future of Magazines (Part 2).  John Joseph Adams, John Benson, Leah Bobet, Robert Killheffer (L), Sean Wallace.

After last year’s “The Future of Magazines” panels, participant K. Tempest Bradford wrote: “The magazines and anthologies that I love tend to have editors who have taken the time to examine themselves or their culture, to expend their knowledge of other people and ways of being, to open their minds. These magazines and anthologies contain far more stories I want to read by authors of many varied backgrounds. As I said, it’s not fully about print vs. online, it’s about better magazines and books.” This time, creators and proponents of both print and online magazines collaborate on determining ways that any genre magazine can create a brighter and better-read future for itself, using Bradford’s comment as a launching point.

Saturday 12:00 Noon, Vinyard: Kaffeeklatsch