I’ve been poking around Playing For Keeps, a scifi novel that began as a series of podcasts. Frustratingly, it’s hard to dip into its world and explore now: you either have to buy the book, or dig around to find extant podcasts. But what is exciting about Playing For Keeps is that it’s a scifi book that began as free digital content, built up its community and then - and only then - became a print book.

Digital does not supersede print, whatever the techno-utopians say. We’re going to see a lot more of this.

The nature of the Web is conversation; conversations tend to start out free-form and then develop consensus opinions over time. Witness, for example, the way messageboards will tend to archive ‘definitive’ conversations about core topics and refer new users to these rather than leaving n00bs to be flamed by long-time members reluctant to rehash familiar territory. The more time-sensitive, debated, fluid or just off-topic stuff is happier online. Consensus emerging from conversation, the sort of agreed and co-created knowledge that’s likely to stay consistent for some time, is ideal material for printing, circulating and thus ‘fixing’ in the grand tradition of the book.

James Bridle of BookTwo has already demonstrated that it’s (relatively) straightforward to set up a new publishing imprint, from your bedroom, using existing design, POD/fulfilment and distribution platforms. Post-social-media, we’re going to see more and more of this kind of activity in the book world, whether or not publishing companies are equipped to handle it.

At Bookcamp, I found myself debating with a publisher and a literary agent about the pros and cons of persuading published writers to engage online with their readers. My reaction at the time was: ‘Isn’t that putting the cart before the horse?’ Why, I wanted to know, shouldn’t books begin as online communities and only later consolidate into printed objects?

The evidence says publishers aren’t set up to do things like that. The complex ecosystem of publishers, literary agents, aspiring writers, distribution and so on relies ultimately on the writer having created (or mostly created) a piece ahead of schedule that can then be judged to be marketable and ‘worth’ publishing. The idea of market-testing a story ahead of the book being written - bypassing the industry’s entire machine - is unthinkable in this context. So if we begin to see more works being created through this process of conversation, consolidation and materialisation, the prospects for print books continuing to be created is good. But the prognosis for the established cycle of the publishing industry is not.