Speakers: Karine Pansa, IPA President; Kristenn Einarrson, CEO, World Expression Forum; Christoph Blaesi, University of Mainz and Aldus up; Luis González, Fundación Germán Sánchez Ruipérez, Aldus Up

Moderator: Miha Kovač

Digitalization is one of the fastest accelerators of change in human history. The World Wide Web, social media and the explosive growth of English as a global language connect us across geographical and linguistic boundaries; thanks to the unprecedented development of natural sciences, we are looking into the deepest darkness of the universe and exploring the secrets of the human genome; even more so, we have developed virtually intelligent machines that could immeasurably accelerate scientific development in the coming decades and change the current rules in the process of creating textual content. But we also live in a time when stupidity and vulgarity are not only on public display but are becoming a political virtue, and social media enclose us in bubbles where we lose sense of the differences between facts and beliefs, arguments and biases, ideologies and scientific methods. How to understand such a complex, fluid and entangled world? And how does book publishing fit into all of this? How to communicate all these complexities in book formats without getting lost in simplifications? And what role does higher-level reading play in understanding the complexity of today's world? Is it an obscure intellectual technique that is becoming obsolete, or is it something that cannot be replaced by a range of new media activities, and do we need to rethink its position both in publishing and in the cultural landscape as a whole?