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Tag: Tech Forum

Published March 20, 2009

Something for the Weekend, March 20th, 2009

Book City Jackets— Printed at a small press in downtown New York, these lovely “updated versions of the classic paperbag bookcover” are made from recycled paper and sized to fit almost any book (pictured above). And they have a blog!  (via swissmiss & Design*Sponge).

Near Heretical — The inimitable Mike Shatkin on the story of DRM.

Don’t kill me, Robert Bringhurst — Nic Boshart, BookNet Canada intern and coordinating editor at Invisible Publishing, offers another nice round-up of lessons for small presses from the BookNet Tech Forum.

Wish you were here — Seen Reading‘s collaborative Google map of independent bookstores.

That elusive viral component — Wired on Random House, Simon & Schuster, Workman Publishing Co., Berrett-Koehler, Thomas Nelson, and Manning Publications making e-books and excerpts available on Scribd:

For book publishers, Scribd is not the only platform they are utilizing with the rising e-book hype, but the viral components are limited elsewhere… Along with navigation features like search and zoom, the books can be download (as a .pdf) and viewed on compatible e-book readers or shared across numerous social networks including Digg, Facebook and Twitter.

“The YouTube for print” — PW has more on Scribd.

Sony e-book reader gets 500,000 books from Google, but Sara Nelson doesn’t think it will be enough in the LA Times:

Sony seems, instead, to be hitting hard on the theme that it’s giving options to publishers, who have not been shy about their complicated feelings toward Amazon and the power it wields.

Making public domain books more available is all to the good. But at the moment, Sony’s move appears to be too little, too late.

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Published March 19, 2009

6 Projects Video

6 Projects That Could Change Publishing For the Better — Video of Michael Tamblyn’s talk at BNC Technology Forum 2009:

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Published March 16, 2009

Monday Miscellany, March 16th, 2009

Beyond Miffy —  Caustic Cover Critic on Dutch illustrator and graphic designer Dick Bruna, best known for Miffy, but who also designed some very cool book covers for crime novels (picture above).

Cautiously Hopeful — Literary agent Nathan Bransford, who has been talking about remaining positive in the face of negativity on his own blog recently,  interviewed by Alan Rinzler on The Book Deal blog:

The role of publishers especially is going to change dramatically as there will be tremendous downward pressure on prices and publishers increasingly retrench behind “known” commodities and bestsellers.

Publishers will live and die by their big bets if they aren’t cultivating any small bets that have the potential of panning out in a big way.

6 Projects That Could Change Publishing for the Better — Michael Tamblyn’s  presentation from the BNC Tech Forum is available online.

Open Baskerville — An open source project to create a digital version of Fry’s Baskerville,  originally created by  Isaac Moore a punchcutter at the typefoundry of Joseph Fry in the 18th Century (via Eightface):

With the written word an absolute fundamental component of daily communication, typography and fonts have are vital to providing aesthetic harmony and legibility to our textual works. There are thousands of fonts available, of which only a small number are useful or any good for setting vast quantities of text, and of which an even smaller number are available to be freely distributed and shared. This project aims to help close that hole, beginning with a Baskerville revival.

Optic Nerve — the fabulous Adrian Tomine interviewed at the Creative Review (illustration above).

Why Kindle On The iPhone Matters — Michael Gaudet on the iPhone Kindle app at E-Reads:

What Amazon is finally acknowledging is that E-Books are a multi-device service and that Kindle is not just a device but an E-Book platform. E-Books may be commodities, but reading is a user habit that has always required a distribution service that anticipates the creative ways readers are looking to acquire new content.

Books and Stuff — Illustrator and designer Amy Cartwright, who blogs about vintage kids books and modern design at Stickers and Stuff, shares some wonderful pictures of her favorite books and “the stories behind some of her finds” at the always awesome Grain Edit (including the Cosy Tomato Post Card Book pictured above).

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Published March 15, 2009

Experiments

One of the recurring themes of the Book Net Tech Forum was that publishers need to learn through frequent experimentation, or as BNC CEO Michael Tamblyn put it: “place lots of little bets quickly.”

Mark Bertils has just posted this great interview with  O’Reilly Media’s Andrew Savikas recorded at the BNC Tech Forum last week on exactly this topic (and Andrew — sorry about making fun of your PowerPoint slides on Twitter):

And, all this ties in quite nicely with Clay Shirky’s recent — must read — essay on Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable :

“You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model. So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?

I don’t know. Nobody knows… it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it… We just got here. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen…

“If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” The answer is: Nothing will work, but everything might. Now is the time for experiments, lots and lots of experiments…

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Published March 13, 2009

BookNet Tech Forum

Yesterday I was at Book Net Canada’s Technology Forum at the Radisson Hotel on Queens Quay West in Toronto.

The theme of the event was Evolution or Revolution: “How does the publishing community best prepare for the next generation of reading (and readers)?”

With a wide-range of speakers from publishing and beyond, there were lots of ideas zipping around.

For basic details, the day’s schedule,  brief summaries, and slide-show presentations are available from the BNC website, and  immediate, off-the-cuff comments (including my own not terribly clever insights) can be found on Twitter with the tag #bnc09.

The Quillblog has just posted a scholarly summary of the day, but here are some of my slightly random notes on the good, the indifferent, and the ugly of Tech Forum 24 hours later…

The Good

BookNet. Along side SalesData and the forthcoming BiblioShare (which will facilitate access to bibliographic data),  Tech Forum demonstrated that BookNet is fast becoming the honest broker for publisher collaboration in Canada.  Whilst dropping heavy hints about future BNC projects (notably electronic cataloging) CEO Michael Tamblyn delivered a genuinely brilliant presentation, and slipped in the line of the day:

“Plastic Logic is like Jesus: It’ll save the world, but only 12 people have seen it, and no one knows when it is coming.”

(With quips like that I can almost forgive him for: “What do you want your revolution to be?” Er… Something that doesn’t involve vacuous bullshit hyperbole?*)

Harlequin Enterprises. Discussing the evolution of their ebook program, it was hard not to be impressed with Harlequin’s willingness to experiment in  a potentially conservative market.  I’m yet to be convinced that everything they do could be done as effectively by a general trade publisher, but Harlequin’s initiatives  demonstrate  that publishers should innovate and innovate often. And involving authors and readers will only improve that process.

Neelan Choksi, COO of Lexcycle who managed to talk about technology without condescending to his audience or hard selling Stanza. He also dealt with  speed-presenting  the app’s new features as the video demo malfunctioned behind him with self-deprecating good humour.

Hugh McGuire (LibriVox, BookOven) shaking off scurilous internet rumours that he is the angry man of publishing, and talking about love. A lot. Hugh’s advice: Focus on readers and enable book lovers to talk about your books. Do not underestimate the power of passionate people!

And, it should also be said, Tech Forum was  a great opportunity to meet new people in the industry and catch up with familiar faces.

The Indifferent:

Too little discussion of quality and how to make better books; too much blather about marketing and window-dressing.

Asking a room full of Canadians “how many of you have Kindles?” is an easy mistake for an American to make, but it was indicative. The US and Canada are very similar — in lots and lots of ways — but there was very little recognition that there are also very real differences between the markets. The absence of any Canadian sales figures and stats (or even cultural references) made several presentations markedly less compelling.

Assuming that your specific experience can be generalized; the current model is valueless and irreparably broken (even though it provides the vast majority of our business and fuels yours);  that publishers are fiddling while Rome burns; you know something (anything) about the music industry and can make a convincing argument with sloppy comparisons;  all content is of equal value; social media will save the world; the screen is inherently better than print; DRM is the biggest thing we have to worry about…etc. etc.  =  big *meh*. Platitudinous  digital orthodoxy is . not. interesting.

The surprisingly low number of people online at the forum. Mark Birtels’ unofficial count had a dozen laptops in use in the room of around 200 people (all Apples except mine!), which is pretty close to the number of  people who live-tweeted the event… It’s hard to convince people we know our arse from our technological elbow with those kind of numbers…

The Ugly

The really good news is that there was surprising little to complain about. BNC Marketing Manager Morgan Cowie and the rest of the BNC staff did a great job of corralling everyone and ran a great event. BUT, just for the record,  if there’s one thing worse than PowerPoint presentations, it’s BAD PowerPoint presentations: Never. Use. Comic. Sans. In. Anything. Ever.


And if you were at Tech Forum yesterday, I would love to know what you thought about it. Send me an email send at danielwagstaff [at] gmail.com, DM me on Twitter, or leave a comment below…

*As its overall glibness atests, this post was written in haste  to be timely, ‘hyperbole’ better fits my intended meaning better than ‘bullshit’.

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