Guest speaker Erik Hanberg

This last week we had a guest speaker in class. The guest speaker was Erik Hanberg. He has written multiple books and worked with podcasts which we will touch on a bit. He is also the metro parks Tacoma commissioner currently. When he was in class many things were discussed but there was two big points. The first was why does self publishing work and the second was why does podcasting work. He described several reasons why self publishing does work. The first reason was how the invention of ereaders lead to ebooks becoming popular. He described how ebooks popularity meant many people could publish a book online that people could download to their device or ereader. He then described how the popularity of the ebooks has made a massive ebook store. This makes publishing ebooks a very much more simple task than publishing a traditional book, allowing people to be able to self publish and succeed in selling their book. He also explained how ereaders only took off and became popular because cell towers and wireless internet allowed for people to download their books from virtually anywhere. This is also a reason that podcasts could take off. Besides that the large amount of people with iPods and iPhones allowed podcasts in all formats to take off. The massive library of podcasts to choose from and open format on how to do podcasts made them very popular. While he was here he also mentioned some other interesting things such as how people originally saw the internet as a way to reach billions or a cheap way to reach a few and how many employers in the modern day will google you before they hire or interview you.