Tools of Change for Publishing: TOC Conference

TOC Conference

Outperforming Books at Getting a Job Done

Andrew Savikas
November 16, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (1) | Listen

Clay Christensen talks about how people hire products to do jobs for them, and for a very long time books have been the best performers at doing certain types of jobs. That's changing of course, and the crop of new Augmented Reality applications should be on the radar of many types of publisher, from travel to fiction to repair manuals:

In the not-too-distant future, it might be possible to slip on a pair of augmented-reality (AR) goggles instead of fumbling with a manual while trying to repair a car engine. Instructions overlaid on the real world would show how to complete a task by identifying, for example, exactly where the ignition coil was, and how to wire it up correctly.
A new AR system developed at Columbia University starts to do just this, and testing performed by Marine mechanics suggests that it can help users find and begin a maintenance task in almost half the usual time.

We'll have a session on Augmented Reality at February's TOC Conference.

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/23800/?a=f

Posted via email from TOC Posterous

Michael Tamblyn's TOC Frankfurt presentation (actually a dramatic recreation thereof)

Andrew Savikas
November 7, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (4) | Listen

via blip.tv

Shortcovers' Michael Tamblyn was kind enough to record his talk and slides from last month's TOC Frankfurt Conference. I got a lot of great hallway feedback about the session, and you'll see it's for good reason. Michael will also be speaking at TOC New York.

Posted via web from TOC Posterous

William Patry delivering Frey Lecture in Intellectual Property Law at Duke

Andrew Savikas
November 7, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Google Senior Copyright Counsel Bill Patry, who will be one of our keynote speakers at TOC 2010, delivered a great lecture at Duke last month dissecting the "moral panic" approach to copyright debate, as exemplified by the late Jack Valenti, former CEO of the MPAA. His talk is just under 30 minutes, and then he goes into Q&A with the audience. I particularly appreciated his point that copyright is a social structure, not a moral one, and not one that's based on property rights.

Posted via web from TOC Posterous

Early Registration Now Open for TOC 2010 New York

Andrew Savikas
November 3, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (1) | Listen

Early registration is now open for the 2010 Tools of Change for Publishing Conference returning to the Marriott Marquis Feb. 22-24 2010.

The program for TOC 2010 reflects how quickly the landscape is changing for publishers -- digital can no longer be thought of as a separate topic; digital creation, delivery, distribution, consumption, and communication are permeating every layer of the publishing ecology.

This year we've tried to include a lot of conversations about and with readers, to encourage discussion about how new formats and modes are shaping preferences and behavior. We've also split the popular Lightning Demo sessions into two different components, both now part of the main program. The familiar 5-minute demo format will remain for a dedicated Breakout Session, and as a special Plenary Session, we'll be using the popular and entertaining Pecha Kucha format, where each speaker gets 20 slides that advance automatically every 20 seconds. We've also split several of the tutorials into two 90-minute workshops, rather than the longer 3-hour format.

It's important to remember that we are still very early in a transition as big or bigger than the shift from manuscript to print as the primary form for books. And it's useful to look back on that transition for insight into how the apparent shortcomings of the new and uncertain matter little in the long run. From James J. O'Donnell's essay, The pragmatics of the new: Trithemius, McLuhan, Cassiodorus in The Future of the Book:

Every negative claim made about print [in the 15th century] is correct, and every negative prophecy came true. Take the argument about the likeness of copies making collation and correction impossible: a perfectly valid point. Why did it not derail print in its glorious career? ... [T]he system of communication introduced by print was so large, so fast, so powerful, and ultimately such a source of wealth that the defects of the system could be remedied as far as need be. ... In short, in the end, the defects of print and the criticisms they drew didn't matter. This is a lesson worth mulling at length.

Posted via email from TOC Posterous

Video: Seth Godin on New Media and New Marketing

Andrew Savikas
October 18, 2009 | Permalink | Listen

I got a note from our Conferences Web team saying that video from Seth Godin's 2008 talk at the TOC Conference is "generating more than normal buzz" over on our Blip.TV channel I was in the audience for this one, and it's worth a watch:

The App Store and the Long Tail Part 2: The Real "DRM" At Stake

Andrew Savikas
August 10, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (5) | Listen

Note there's a lot of images in this post, so if you're reading it via RSS, you may want to click through to the original post if you can't see the images.

A few weeks ago I wrote about how the small number of sales from many different countries were adding up to more than the large number of sales from the US in the App Store for our books. That trend has continued (and accelerated), and right now about 60% of our App sales are coming from outside the US:

geography copy

When I've talked with other publishers about our success with iPhone Apps, they typically discounted what I said because I was talking about iPhone: The Missing Manual, a title particularly suited to the device. And to a degree, that's a fair argument, and I don't expect very many other books-as-apps to sell as well as that one. But the results for the next batch of 17 titles is instructive. For the two-week period of July 20 to August 2 (the first two calendar weeks the apps were on sale), five of the 17 titles sold more units as iPhone apps than via print (as measured in Bookscan). Here's a comparison across all 17 titles:

That got me wondering why there's not stronger interest from other publishers, especially trade publishers, in iPhone apps (besides concerns about pricing and the approval process). Then as I was looking at rankings for some of the top paid book apps, I spotted a possible answer.

In the App Store, each country has its own top 100 lists (overall and for each category, and for free as well as paid). Something that's #1 here in the US may not even register on the top 100 in another country. Here's the current (as of this writing) worldwide rankings for the "Classics" App, the #1 paid book app right now:

Classics is one of the most popular paid book apps in nearly every country with iPhone service (the list actually goes further down than shown above).

Now here's the current (as of this writing) worldwide rankings for "Twilight" which has been holding steady in the top 25 paid apps here in the US:

Yup, that's it. Just the US. Presumably this is a rights issue -- Hachette either doesn't have the rights to sell this book as an App anywhere else, or they're choosing not to. But taken in light of our own sales of nearly 2/3 outside the US and the data from Classics, that means a publisher who can't (or won't) sell their app outside the States is missing a lot of the market. Here's the current rankings for the "A Twilight Trivia" app, which is ranked above Twilight in the US (and is not affiliated with Hachette or Stephenie Brown):

So there's clear interest in the Twilight content on the iPhone outside the US -- enough interest to keep this app well into the top 100 paid book apps in dozens of countries.

Perhaps the most important "digital rights management" at stake right now is that of the rights to sell digital content globally.

If you're planning to attend the Frankfurt Book Fair, producing and selling digital and mobile content from a global perspective will be a big part of the program at TOC Frankfurt on Oct. 13.

Wanted: Proposals for TOC 2010

Andrew Savikas
July 23, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

If you follow us on Twitter, you already know that the Call for Proposals is now open for the 2010 Tools of Change for Publishing Conference (Feb. 22-24, 2010 in New York).

One of our main themes last year was that all publishing is now digital publishing, and that's becoming clearer with each new announcement about a new device, reseller, smartphone, or other new way to reach an audience -- an audience that is now often walking around with a bookstore in their pocket or briefcase. Here's some of the topics we're looking for:

Reaching mobile readers: when your customers carry bookstores in their pockets
Pricing and packaging digital books
Case studies of successful (or unsuccessful!) new publishing and digital initiatives
Case studies from implementing lessons learned at a previous TOC Conference
Strategies and tactics for incorporating print-on-demand into a supply chain
Moving beyond books: selling merchandise, community, experience, and other scarce goods in a world of "free"
Tools and challenges for an efficient all-digital workflow
Revising your P&L's for the economics of digital publishing
Understanding and responding to the changing retail landscape
Using the web to find and promote the original people behind "user-generated content"--authors
Best practices for working with Amazon, Google, and other big internet players
How to capture and analyze web metrics of interest to publishers
Best new practices and tools for working with and supporting authors during editorial, production and/or marketing phases
Systems and devices for displaying digital copy (demos welcome)
Business models for delivering and/or receiving material via new devices
New copyright clearing, assertion, and determination mechanisms
XML, EPUB, RDF, and other TLA's (three-letter acronyms) decoded and explained
Using open-source tools to assemble a digital publishing workflow

If you have an idea for a session, tutorial, or "lightning demo" we want to hear from you.

And if you're making plans for the Frankfurt Book Fair, don't forget to sign up for TOC Frankfurt, a one-day conference looking at these issues from a European perspective.

TOC Coming to Frankfurt

Andrew Savikas
July 1, 2009 | Permalink | Listen

I've had the opportunity to speak with quite a few of my industry colleagues in Europe during the past year, and it became increasingly obvious there was an opportunity to bring the Tools of Change for Publishing message to a European audience. So we've teamed up with the Frankfurt Book Fair to put on a special one-day TOC Frankfurt on Tuesday October 13, the day before the Book Fair begins.

Many of the topics (and some of the speakers -- including Tim O'Reilly, Cory Doctorow, and Sara Lloyd) will be familiar to TOC New York attendees, but tuned for a European audience. And while the program is still in development, we're also trying to include some fresh voices who can bring a more global perspective -- such as Kotobarabia's Ramy Habeeb and Guardian Media Group's Simon Waldman.

If you have your own ideas for a session, speaker, or topic, you can submit it right here (just a simple Google Form).

TOC blog readers get a discount on registration by using the code TOC09BL when registering.

TOC Twitter Visualization Contest Winner

Andrew Savikas
February 26, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

The winner of our impromptu contest for best visualization of the TOC Conference Twitter activity is Stephen Smith for his tag clouds and stats over at toctweet.com:

Congrats to Steve, who gets a free full pass to TOC 2010! (With an honorable mention to @thewritermama for banging out 720(!) tweets during the show.)

Hallway Video from TOC Conference: Tim O'Reilly on Open Publishing

Andrew Savikas
February 26, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

The folks from the RIT Open Publishing Lab have posted a short video talking with Tim O'Reilly in the hallway of the TOC Conference about Open Publishing:

OMG. Best. TOC. Wrapup. Ever.

Andrew Savikas
February 17, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (1) | Listen

Every single thing on Kat Meyer's Tiger-Beat-style cover from her TOC wrapup cracked me up:

I think we may have a new cover design for our printed program for TOC 2010. Well done, Kat.

Full Text of Jason Epstein's TOC 2009 Keynote

Andrew Savikas
February 17, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (8) | Listen

Few can claim the depth of experience with publishing that Jason Epstein brought to the stage at the TOC Conference. Among my favorite moments of the conference this year was the chance during a break to hear Jason talk with Tim O'Reilly about their respective views on the past and future of publishing.

Several attendees asked for the full text of Jason's keynote, and he was kind enough to oblige:

Speech given by Jason Epstein at the 2009 O'Reilly Tools Of Change for Publishing Conference

I don't have to tell anyone here that we are at the end of the Gutenberg era; at the threshold not only of a new way of publishing books but of a cultural revolution orders of magnitude greater than Gutenberg's, assuming we survive our financial calamity, our 20,000 nuclear weapons, and our melting ice cap, all of them by the way unintended consequences of the western civilization that Gutenberg's technology made possible.

Five centuries ago Gutenberg's dream was to print a uniform prayer book on his new press to be distributed to all the churches of Europe and in this way unify the catholic faith which was fractured by schisms, especially in Germany where Gutenberg made his living selling trinkets at religious fairs. Instead, to what would have been Gutenberg's dismay had he lived to see it, the printing press spawned our modern world with all its wonders and woes -- the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment and for better and worse, our skeptical, secular, experimental civilization. Whoever believes that books are simply another form of entertainment has missed the point.

Links to All Articles/Posts from Best of TOC eBook

Andrew Savikas
February 15, 2009 | Permalink | Listen

Some of you interested in the "Best of TOC" ebook have objected to having to go through the O'Reilly shopping cart process to get the free ebook. Point taken, and thank you for the feedback. Other readers are looking for a place to comment on the pieces; because these were all published blog posts, many already have rich comment threads of conversation. To address both concerns, here's a full linked list of all the pieces we included in the Best of TOC ebook:

According to our ecommerce data, several hundred of you have "purchased" the free ebook. I'm thrilled there's so much interest -- this is definitely something we'll be looking to do again with this and other conferences.

Text and XML of All #TOC 2009 Tweets

Andrew Savikas
February 13, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (4) | Listen

I was planning to do some crunching last night and early today, but between an unexpected flight delay coming back from New York, and the pleasant surprise of getting Slashdotted about Bookworm, the day is quickly slipping away. I'll give it a go over the weekend, but if anyone else is eager to play, here's a super-raw text dump (the best I could do for getting around the API limit). Update: to be explicit, this covers roughly mid-afternoon Sunday 2/8 through late morning Thursday 2/12, so includes the entire event, but not every #toc tweet.

Update #2: Using the raw text as a starting point, I've generated an XML file listing all of the people who tweeted with hashtag #toc during the conference, and listed each of their tweets. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader :) to sort by time, or otherwise slice/dice (best visualization among those submitted in the comments by 2/24 at midnight EST gets a free pass to TOC 2010 -- winner chosen by the TOC program committee, and announced 2/26).

Update #3: Unfortunately, the Twitter Search API appears to only have returned the first ~15 or so of each user's #toc tweets (nowhere near enough to include all of the 200+ tweets from the top tweeter, @thewritermama, so that XML doesn't contain all of the tweets in the plain text. I've posted the intermediate XML I used, which contains less data about each tweet and tweeter, but does contain all of the tweets.

Update #4: Anyone interested in the gory details of where the XML came from, I've posted some background over at O'Reilly Labs.

Photos from New York Times R&D Lab

Andrew Savikas
February 12, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Nick Bilton was a hit yesterday at the TOC Conference, and during his keynote he talked about what they're working on with content at the NYT R&D Lab. Nick was kind enough to give a few of us a private tour earlier this week, and here's some photos from the trip:

Best of TOC Collection Now Available as Free Ebook Bundle

Andrew Savikas
February 11, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (20) | Listen

Hit a glitch with the cover image, but the full ebook bundle (PDF, EPUB, and Kindle-compatible Mobipocket) is now posted for the Best of TOC collection (details on the content here). They're also shutting the Espresso machine down within the hour, so you can still try to grab a print one while/if they're available (no promises, sorry).

At TOC: Best of TOC Writing

Andrew Savikas
February 10, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (9) | Listen

One of my favorite books of 2007 was The Best of Technology Writing, edited by Steven Levy. We decided to try something similar for this year's TOC Conference, and over at the O'Reilly booth we have (hot off the Espresso Book Machine) the Best of TOC, a collection of writing from on publishing from around the Web:

It includes writing from TOC speakers:

... and more from around the Web, like John Siracusa.

Because all of the writing in here was born on the Web, it's full of hyperlinks, which we've presented in the print version as footnotes (done automatically, BTW). The shear number of links (there are more than 600 in 126 pages) illustrates how differently we write when it's for the web. Now that all writing is really writing for the web, it's important to both incorporate more links within the content you create, and be sure your print designs and workflow can easily accommodate those links in print (footnotes is one way, but not the only way).

For the digital/production geeks among you, we used DocBook XML and a customization layer of the open-source DocBook XSL Stylesheets. That means we can use the same source to get print, web-friendly PDF, and EPUB, here's a snippet of the source XML:

As soon as we can, we'll also make this available for free download, so don't worry if you don't get a copy from the booth. Thanks to all the writers who agreed to let us share their work.

Open XML API for O'Reilly Metadata

Andrew Savikas
February 10, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

In addition to Bookworm, O'Reilly Labs now includes an RDF-based API into all of O'Reilly's books:

Most publishers are familiar with the ONIX standard for exchanging metadata about books among trading partners. Anyone who's actually spent time working with ONIX knows that its syntax is abstruse at best. While ONIX does use XML, there are more modern, more general, and more immediately comprehensible standards out there, particularly for the basic details like "author," "title," and "edition." One of those standards is RDF, or "Resource Description Framework." This experimental O'Reilly Product Metadata Interface (OPMI) exposes RDF for all of O'Reilly's titles, organized by ISBN.

If anyone onsite (or otherwise) puts anything interesting together with the data, we'll be happy to feature it here on the TOC Blog, just let us know in the comments.

At TOC: Video from Yesterday's Kindle Announcement

Andrew Savikas
February 10, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Courtesy of Phil Torrone at makezine.com, here's video from yesterday's Kindle announcement:

At TOC: Cory Doctorow to Publishers: Demand Option To Not Use DRM

Andrew Savikas
February 10, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (6) | Listen

I knew Cory Doctorow would be a great wrap up to the first day morning keynotes at TOC, and he more than delivered.

He ended the keynote with a challenge to publishers: withhold digital content from any device or service that doesn't give you the option to exclude DRM. (For example, right now publishers cannot sell books on the Kindle or audio books on Audible without DRM.) He's proposing "Doctorow's Law" which I'm paraphrasing here from memory:

If someone takes something that belongs to you, and puts a lock on it that you don't have a key for, that lock isn't in your best interests.

We couldn't agree more, and it's a big reason we sell all of our ebooks (now more than 400) without DRM (and with a Kindle-compatible format that can be added manually to a Kindle), and why we don't enable DRM in our iPhone Apps either. I agree with Cory, and strongly encourage publishers to not use DRM at all for their digital content, but at a minimum, it should at least be a choice for a publisher to make.

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