O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference
The O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference explores emerging trends around digital publishing, focusing on industry-wide stra...Video Episodes:
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12:20:52 04/16/09
TOC '09 -- "What Happens When Anyone Can Edit Your Book, Online?" -- John Broughton (Author of an O'Reilly book)
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This is a case study of an unusual publishing initiative, something that has never been done before. Some books have been published on-line first, readable and printable for free, and then later sold in hardcopy, but this was different. Concept O?Reilly Media, the publisher of Wikipedia: The Missing Manual, and the Wikimedia Foundation, the owner of Wikipedia, agreed to post the book on-line, on the Wikipedia website, as fully-editable content. And the book?s author agreed to O?Reilly?s proposal to do this. The Foundation stood to benefit from this because the publicity might get more people interested in editing Wikipedia articles (free, detailed instructions!), and the book?s contents might help current editors get better, as well as interested in doing more O?Reilly (and the author) stood to benefit from on-line, editable version because it might spur sales of the hardcopy book (readers have different preferences for form factors) and because edits of the book might correct errors or improve wording or even add new sections that could be useful in a future version of the book. (Such edits, however, could not be used directly because of copyright issues.) O?Reilly also stood to benefit in general (reputation, possibly increased sales for other books in the Missing Manual Series, etc.). From XML to wiki markup: technical issues The book was in XML format when it was published in January 2008. The markup for the MediaWiki software is considerably different. O?Reilly had some experience with converting from one to another, but the existing script for doing so left a lot of things still to be done manually. So some time was spent revising it, and figuring out other ways to do mass changes to avoid manual editing. Page numbering in particular (a hardcopy book has page numbers, while a wiki does not) was particularly problematical. Publicizing the wiki version of the book O?Reilly and the Wikimedia Foundation worked out a joint press release. After that, much of the publicity would be within the Wikipedia community. And adding links to existing Wikipedia instructional pages would help editors find the wiki version of the book. A book open to all for editing: what happened? To be discussed: The extent of vandalism and other inappropriate changes; the extent to which useful copyediting was done; the extent to which extra content was added; monitoring (or not) of the changes. Impact on hardcopy book sales To be discussed: did book sales increase?
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11:36:46 04/16/09
TOC '09 -- "New Reading Habits, New Distribution Models" -- Peter Brantley (Digital Library Federation), Susan Danziger (DailyLit), Sol Rosenberg (Value Chain International, Ltd.), David Wilk (Booktrix), Caroline Vanderlip (SharedBook Inc.), Jamie Carter
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We are in a transitional period: basic reading and distribution patterns are carrying over from traditional models, but these methods are also being shaped by new habits and systems that are only beginning to emerge. This panel will discuss the implications of this reading/distribution transition, the new economics at play, and the impact technology will have on future reading.
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11:28:46 04/16/09
TOC '09 -- "eBooks: How Soon Is Now" -- Peter Balis (Wiley)
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he digital landscape has changed dramatically over the past few years and Wiley, like many other publishers has worked tirelessly to stay ahead of the curve by anticipating trends in technology and consumer behavior while managing costs and workflows. It is at once an extremely exciting time and a difficult time as seemingly every day brings a new eReader or proprietary format to the fray. This presentation will use Wiley as a case-study for eBook publishing today. Wiley, a hybrid publisher of both commercial trade and professional content, is a good example of a financially successful eBook program that has overcome many of the difficulties in converting complex content to reflowable eBooks. In addition to a basic overview of the eBook format landscape, you will see some of the lessons we have learned along the way in hopes of making your own transition to eBooks both profitable and scalable. Lastly, a brief look at the horizon will help all of us see that the future is already here?and it is looking very bright.
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11:25:49 04/16/09
TOC '09 -- "Challenging Notions of 'Free'" -- Brian O?Leary (Magellan Media), Mac Slocum (Tools of Change for Publishing), Chelsea Vaughn (Random House)
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As digital content has become more available and more commonly distributed in book publishing, fears of piracy and lost sales have grown. The rise of peer-to-peer file sharing sites has likely amplified these fears. While the debate over the impact of ?free? content has been at times heated, the discussions are more often than not characterized by a lack of hard data. To address this data gap, O?Reilly Media began a project in 2008 to characterize the ?free? universe, catalog and assess recent experiments, establish ways to measure the benefit or cost of free distribution and conduct some follow-on experiments of our own. O?Reilly is joined in this effort by Random House, which contributed data for several of its own tests. Come to this session to hear an interim report on the initial phase of this ongoing study, including a preliminary model of where and when free distribution works as well as what?s worth continuing to track over time.
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11:06:06 04/16/09
TOC '09 -- "XML Recommendations and Lessons Learned: The StartWithXML Project" -- Mike Shatzkin (The Idea Logical Company, Inc.), Laura Dawson (LJNDawson), Brian O?Leary (Magellan Media), Ted Hill (THA Consulting)
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Based on the results of six months of research, surveys, interviews, and analysis, the StartwithXML project offered a clear argument for developing intellectual property as XML documents from the outset. Participants who attend this session will learn why an XML workflow makes sense for publishers and how content agility provides publishers with opportunities to grow revenues and better manage expenses. The panel will conclude with recommendations on what publishers should consider when planning to adopt XML workflows.
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10:52:04 04/16/09
TOC '09 -- "Smart Women Read eBooks" -- Kassia Krozser (Booksquare.com), Angela James (Samhain Publishing), Sarah Wendell (Smart Bitches Trashy Books LLC)
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For well over a decade, independent publishers have been publishing and marketing ebooks to a largely female audience. While the perception of ebooks is that they are more likely to be adopted by a younger, more tech-savvy audience, these independent publishers have found success by selling to a wide demographic of readers. Your grandmother reads ebooks. While mainstream publishers initially viewed this market as fringe, in recent years, some have turned to these e-only houses to find new talent and to form marketing/distribution relationships. Traditional publishers have also introduced imprints and lines to challenge the market space occupied by these epublishers. Of course, these epublishers have countered by moving into the print market, finding shelf space in a time of shrinking retail spots. Mainstream publishers such as Harlequin have responded to this growing market by embracing innovation and diversity, including making their entire front-list available in electronic editions when the print versions are released. How has this female-centric ebook market thrived while efforts by mainstream publishers have found rough going? These small, independent entities have succeeded by offering readers what they want at reasonable prices; they?ve created easy-to-use marketplaces and made sure their books are available wherever ebooks are sold; they?ve released titles in DRM-free, device-agnostic formats, enabling their customers to choose how and where books are read; and they?ve developed strong author relationships through higher-than-average royalties and more timely reporting. As traditional publishing houses move into the online market, they are not only competing with other media for readers, they?re also competing with independent entities who have developed loyal followings by not doing business as usual.
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10:41:36 04/16/09
TOC '09 -- "Rights and Licensing Amidst Digital Change" -- Edward Colleran (Copyright Clearance Center), Nancy Ziser (John Wiley & Sons), Greg Merkle (Dow Jones Enterprise Media Group), Hadrien Gardeur (Feedbooks)
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Digital publishing creates opportunities for ancillary products, customization, sharing within online communities and mashups to name a few, but it also opens the door to new rights, licensing and copyright questions. This session will take a pragmatic look at rights and licensing best practices, revenue and branding opportunities, and the unique issues publishers face as they take on the digital transition.
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10:32:04 04/16/09
TOC '09 -- "Taking Open Source Publishing Further: Tools from the Open Publishing Lab at the Rochester Institute of Technology" -- Patricia Albanese (Rochester Institute of Technology), Matthew Bernius (Open Publishing Lab at the Rochester Institute of Te
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Today, more content is being created than ever before thanks to free, open-source publishing tools like wikis and blogs. However, much of that content is constrained to the medium it?s created in. For example, there?s no easy way to move a blog from the web to print. Further, the capabilities of these open-source tools are often limited by the software development abilities of the people using them. Drupal, for example, while extremely powerful, also has a steep learning curve. This is all especially the case for individuals and groups involved in lo-fi, community driven web publishing projects. The mission of the cross-disciplinary Open Publishing Lab at the Rochester Institute of Technology is to make publishing easy, allowing content-creators to focus on the end-product rather than the enabling technology. Through its research and open software development efforts, the OPL works to: Extend existing publishing platforms, Enable new forms of publishing and business models, and Empower communities and individuals to easily tell their stories.
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10:29:27 04/16/09
TOC '09 -- "Google Book Search: Past, Present, and Future" -- Jon Orwant, Google
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Google is trying to make every book in the world findable on the web, and so far has digitized seven million of them. In this talk, I?ll describe some of the features we provide for publishers, and give a sneak peek at some upcoming developments.
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10:23:58 04/16/09
TOC '09 -- "Extending the Publishing Ecosystem, Sharing Greater Wealth" -- Dan Gillmor (Arizona State University's Cronkite School of Journalism & Mass Communication)
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We know now that many books, especially timely non-fiction, can become major elements of intellectual ecosystems?including blogs, websites, magazine excerpts, speaking gigs, consulting and more. In the future those various activities could become part of a business ecosystem as well, where all work to the benefit of each other in more direct financial ways. This suggests collaboration on the part of everyone in the chain ? author/speaker, publisher, book agent, speaking agency, et al ? and sharing the wealth from the hopefully greater total value that?s likely to be created.
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10:18:20 04/16/09
TOC '09 -- "Authoring Challenges in a Multiplatform World" -- Scott Meyers (Independent Author and Consultant)
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How should authors approach their task, given that what they produce may or may not appear in printed form, may or may not have color available, may or may not be able to display dynamic content, may or may not have Internet access available, and may be viewed on devices ranging from widescreen monitors to cell phones?unless it?s consumed as audio? The challenge is particularly acute for technical authors, because, in addition to words, they typically employ charts, diagrams, and tables to convey their messages. How do you (usefully) display such things on an iPhone, not to mention via an audio stream? Publishers need to concern themselves with these questions, because multiplatform publication is much more likely to succeed if the content was designed for it in the first place. Authors experienced only in the creation of traditional books rarely think about the constraints and opportunities associated with other forms of publication. Electronic books can use animations to depict dynamic phenomena, for example, and frames from these can be used in print books, but how many authors (or their publishers) are adapt at creating animations? Cross-references within a book are great for avoiding the need to repeat information, but how do you treat them when you want to break the book into chunks for independent consumption? There are ways authors can addresses these issues, but they must occur during content creation, not after the fact. In this talk, Scott Meyers introduces some issues authors need to keep in mind as they write, discusses how tools and techniques can help them, and explains the role that publishers can play in the creation of content that?s a natural part of a multiplatform world.
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10:12:27 04/16/09
TOC '09 -- "Literature as a (Web) Service" -- Peter Brantley, Internet Archive
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The explosion of publications on the web, in combination with increasingly ubiquitous broadband networks, accessible from ever-more mobile computing platforms, leads us to consider how literature might serve as a collection of data to enable new services on the web. Publishing is becoming not merely a producer of short story collections, essays, and treatises, but an entry point into new opportunities for machine-enabled applications. Hypothetical examples discussed include the integration of online book repositories into wikipedia, and enabling the availability of all published non-fiction as a set of queryable-facts in any major world language.
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10:11:07 04/16/09
TOC '09 -- Jason Fried, 37signals
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Jason Fried is the co-founder and President of 37signals, a privately-held Chicago-based company committed to building the best web-based tools possible with the least number of features necessary. 37signals? products do less than the competition ? intentionally. Jason believes there?s real value and beauty in the basics. Elegance, respect for people?s desire to simply get stuff done, and honest ease of use are the hallmarks of 37signals products. 37signals products, used by over 2,000,000 world wide, include Basecamp, Backpack, Highrise, Campfire, Ta-da List, and Writeboard. Their latest book, Getting Real, has been called the Bible of Web 2.0. Ruby on Rails, another 37signals creation, is the underlying technology driving thousands web apps.
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09:32:23 04/16/09
TOC '09: "If Shakespeare Had a Hard Drive: The Challenge of the Born-Digital Belletrist" --Matthew Kirschenbaum, University of Maryland
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The majority of writing today is now born-digital in the sense that it is composed with a word processor, saved on a hard drive (or other storage media), and accessed as part of a computer operating system. Yes, some writers still begin a composition long-hand, but sooner or later the text will be keyed into a computer, there to be further worked and revised. Editors edit electronically, inserting suggestions and emendations, and emailing the file back to the author to approve. Publishers use electronic typesetting and layout tools, and only at the very end of this process is the electronic text of the manuscript (by now the object of countless transmissions and transformations) produced as the static material artifact that is a printed book. This new technological fact about writing is already having an impact, from office work to government and the academy to literature and the creative arts. In the particular realm of literature and literary scholarship, this means that a writer working today will not and cannot be studied in the future in the same way as writers of the past, since the basic material evidence of their authorial activity-manuscripts and drafts, working notes, correspondence, journals?is, like all textual production, increasingly migrating to the electronic realm. Often literary and creative writers are not technologically inclined; sometimes technology is regarded as dehumanizing or otherwise antithetical to the creative process. Ignorance or adversity to technology leads to bad decisions. The popular and important novelist Zadie Smith, lamenting the loss of personal correspondence carried out over email, adds almost off-handedly: ?I don?t have a single early draft of any novel or story. I just ?saved? over the originals until I reached the final version. All there is is the books themselves.? This is a common perception and an all-too-common practice. Computers therefore raise major challenges for all those concerned with writing and publishing, particularly in the area of belles-lettres, the source of some of our most precious artifacts of cultural heritage. What are the boundaries of literary authorship in an era of blogs, wikis, instant messaging, and email? Is an author?s web browser history part of her ?papers?? What about a chat transcript or an instant message stored on a cell phone? What about a character or avatar the author has created for an online game? What are the ethical issues involved in plumbing the depths of a storage medium that routinely commits all manner of data, both momentous and mundane and often without the user?s knowledge, to its magnetic memory? Should a scholar be allowed to see an author?s high score on Tetris or their choice of desktop wallpaper? What about the music available on an MP3 playlist? What about the author?s choices for fonts and layout as expressed by the Preferences in their software? Such details may seem recherch?, but in fact critics often want to know what an author was listening to or what images were important to them during the writing process. What about pornography or financial data or other sensitive content? The growing effectiveness of forensic information recovery raises the stakes still further: is erased or overwritten data appropriate for a scholar to access if it can be recovered in a usable form? Such questions have already passed from the realm of the speculative to ground-level decision-making about accession, curation, and preservation as writers have begun including diskettes, CD-ROMs, even entire computers and laptops in their literary papers. My talk in this session will introduce and explore the issues above in a manner suited to a broad industry audience; it will be focused by the presentation of results from a recently concluded study funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities entitled ?Approaches to Managing and Collecting Born-Digital Literary Materials for Scholarly Use.? This project supported personnel working with the born-digital components of three significant collections of literary material: the Salman Rushdie papers at Emory University?s Woodruff Library, the Michael Joyce Papers at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, and the Deena Larsen Collection at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland.
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09:25:41 04/16/09
TOC '09: "Manifesto 2.0: What Does the Future Look Like for Publishers?" -- Sara Lloyd, Pan MacMillan
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In this challenging call to arms, Sara Lloyd, Head of Digital Publishing at UK trade publishing house Pan Macmillan, explores whether there will be a role for publishers in a digital future and discusses the radical changes in culture and approach publishers will need to make if they are to evolve quickly enough to embrace the change from a linear content creation and delivery chain in which a publisher?s role is definitive and fixed, to a circular, networked, web-based one. In this broad ranging speech, drawing on her ?Manifesto?, she will cover the creative directions in which content creation and delivery might develop, new ways in which publishers will need to engage with authors, readers and other distributors in the content creation chain and the interface between publishers and non-traditional competitors emerging in the digital marketplace.
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08:41:18 04/15/09
TOC 09 "Digital Distribution and the Whip Hand: Don't Get iTunesed with your eBooks" -- Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction novelist, blogger and technology activist. He is the co-editor of the popular weblog Boing Boing (boingboing.net), and a contributor to Wired, Popular Science, Make, the New York Times, and many other newspapers, magazines and websites. He was formerly Director of European Affairs for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (eff.org), a non-profit civil liberties group that defends freedom in technology law, policy, standards and treaties. In 2007, he served as the Fulbright Chair at the Annenberg Center for Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California. His novels are published by Tor Books and simultaneously released on the Internet under Creative Commons licenses that encourage their re-use and sharing, a move that increases his sales by enlisting his readers to help promote his work. He has won the Locus and Sunburst Awards, and been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula and British Science Fiction Awards. His latest novel, New York Times Bestseller LITTLE BROTHER, was published in May 2008, and his latest short story collection is OVERCLOCKED: STORIES OF THE FUTURE PRESENT. In 2008, Tachyon Books published a collection of his essays, called CONTENT: SELECTED ESSAYS ON TECHNOLOGY, CREATIVITY, COPYRIGHT AND THE FUTURE OF THE FUTURE (with an introduction by John Perry Barlow) and IDW published a collection of comic books inspired by his short fiction called CORY DOCTOROW?S FUTURISTIC TALES OF THE HERE AND NOW. His next novel is MAKERS, due from Tor Books in October, 2009. He co-founded the open source peer-to-peer software company OpenCola, sold to OpenText, Inc in 2003, and presently serves on the boards and advisory boards of the Participatory Culture Foundation, the MetaBrainz Foundation, Technorati, Inc, the Organization for Transformative Works, Areae, the Annenberg Center for the Study of Online Communities, and Onion Networks, Inc. In 2007, Entertainment Weekly called him, ?The William Gibson of his generation.? He was also named one of Forbes Magazine?s 2007 Web Celebrities, and one of the World Economic Forum?s Young Global Leaders for 2007. He is presently working on a new young adult novel, FOR THE WIN (about union organizing in video games). On February 3, 2008, he became a father. The little girl is called Poesy Emmeline Fibonacci Nautilus Taylor Doctorow, and is a marvel that puts all the works of technology and artifice to shame.