I first met the writer Molly Flatt in Bogota, Colombia a number of years ago, but to continue our discussion on the future of books and publishing, we arranged to meet in an equally interesting, although somewhat less exotic, bar in Fitzrovia, London. A prolific journalist and researcher into digital trends, Molly is the Associate Editor for FutureBook, Digital Editor for PHOENIX magazine and Associate Editor for the Memo, and writes regularly for publications such as the BBC and the Guardian. Her debut novel is entitled The Charmed Life of Alex Moore.

I was recently invited to chat about books with the futurist Mike Walsh.

Mike is one of those people who makes you feel like you could probably Try Harder. He’s a futurist, global speaker and author who travels the world teaching companies like Sony, BBC Worldwide, Deloitte, Cisco and Red Bull about things like “leadership in the age of machine intelligence”.

If that description makes you want to kill him, you should know that he’s also the kind of guy who orders you a flat white (with biscuit) so that it’s there waiting for you, all steaming and velvety, when you show up to record his podcast after a hard day’s graft on a rainy January Wednesday. So: not just an impressive human being, but a good one.

I first met Mike back in my agency days, when we were both doing keynotes at a giant marketing conference in Bogotá, Colombia. People were drinking cocktails and wearing strapless dresses while listening to speakers talk about ‘digital megatrends’ at 10am. It was beyond satire.

This time round, a good five years later and in the much colder but equally beyond-satire environs of a Mayfair hotel, Mike wanted to get my take on the future of publishing. So we talked the importance of libraries, the need to be an entrepreneurial author, the joys of print, the rise of independent presses, and my own debut novel, The Charmed Life of Alex Moore (see what I did there?).

Anyway - let me know what you think.