“All of us are living today in such a period of crisis, but the revolution is not a scientific one. It is a technological revolution, first, as well as a social revolution, and a media revolution, too. The World Wide Web is the flashpoint, and devices likes smartphones and laptops and platforms like Amazon and Facebook provide the artillery and the battlefields.”

In times of political division and heightened concerns for the future, particularly around free speech and intellectual freedom, what are the roles independent publishers and authors should play? In such times, what are the responsibilities of independent publishers and authors? What should be our collective response?

Those were the questions for discussion at last weekend’s keynote panel for Publishing University, the annual conference of IBPA, the Independent Book Publishers Association.

Panel members included Patrick Maloney, Editor & Production Manager, Wise Ink Publishing, a Minneapolis-baseed creative publishing agency for authors; activist and storyteller Jessica Salans, who is Outreach Director of Coralstone Press, publishers of long-form, narrative storytelling for children’s picture books; and Brooke Warner, publisher of She Writes Press and SparkPress, and president of Warner Coaching Inc.

New paradigms emerge after a period of crisis in science, when theories fail to describe what scientists observe about the natural world, noted moderator Chris Kenneally.

“All of us are living today in such a period of crisis, but the revolution is not a scientific one. It is a technological revolution, first, as well as a social revolution, and a media revolution, too,” he said. “The World Wide Web is the flashpoint, and devices likes smartphones and laptops and platforms like Amazon and Facebook provide the artillery and the battlefields.”