Online literary review gets physical
Peter Gordon is making his digital publication available in physical form. He explains the move to Kate Whitehead
Going against the trend in the publishing world, the Asian Review of Books, the only dedicated pan-Asian review publication, has shifted from online to print.
Does the development - which took place in the same week that the Hong Kong Book Fair finally sailed beyond its target of one million visitors - signal a rosy future for Hong Kong's literary scene?
Review founder and editor Peter Gordon thinks so. "The Asian publishing scene is much more interesting and impressive and explosive than most people realise," he says.
On paper, the American may seem an unlikely character to be embedded in Hong Kong's literary scene. He arrived in the city in 1983 with a degree in mathematics and linguistics, and worked for a US computer firm before switching to investment consulting. Along the way he met and married his wife, Elaine Leung, who has been involved in many of his businesses and projects.
Although Gordon says he has always enjoyed reading, it wasn't until 2000 that he took a serious interest in the literary world. And he moved fast - within a year he and his wife had a bookseller, a publisher and a literary review.
Unusually for someone in the publishing industry, he wasn't coming at these projects from a scholarly perspective but a technical one. "I was a computer guy, so I knew how to do computer stuff, I knew how to program," he says.