O'Reilly Media is trying out a new smaller, traveling version of its hugely popular Tools of Change conferences, called miniTOC. The first one takes place in Portland, Oregon this Wednesday the 27th, and will explore current trends in digital publishing from a local perspective: miniTOC Portland provides an opportunity for Portland's publishing and tech luminaries to share how they are forging ahead in the publishing/tech/content space. The best and brightest of PDX's art, business, craft and technology leaders will be gathered for a day of collaboration and connecting around their shared love of the bookish. If you're in the area and want...

Here's another one from Tools of Change. It's an important subject and I hear over and over at seminars, and read over and over in articles, that publishers are not paying enough attention to the interrelationship between metadata and digital publishing. This is from an article by Nick Ruffilo: Why won't ebooks save publishing? E-books represent a format, just like hardcovers and paperbacks. Because they are a different format, they require different pricing. Things that are consumed and priced differently do open themselves up to a new market but unless that new consumption method is revolutionary, the growth (new readers) to...

Last month, I mentioned Ubimark’s publication of a print edition of Around the World in 80 Days with “e-footnotes”—QR codes that can be scanned by a free iPhone app to turn into links to webpages with additional content. Now Tools of Change reports that Ricoh Innovations is set to allow publishers to do the same thing with no QR codes required. According to Jamey Graham, Distinguished Research Engineer at Ricoh, RI's technology is similar to that of QR codes, but uses the natural patterns of an object or a page as opposed to a barcode....

On O’Reilly’s Tools of Change blog, Hugh McGuire—the co-developer of the Book Oven on-line content management system for publishing, among other things—explains why a better publishing platform might actually be made from Wordpress, of all things. McGuire started Book Oven with the goal of building books “in the cloud”, so that online collaboration would be easier, and the book would be more portable to different devices. But while pitching his system he encountered suggestions that “It would be great to have a tool that’s as easy to use as Wordpress.” That started him thinking. Wordpress is familiar to most writers...

Kassia Kroszer at Booksquare has a great wrap-up of the Tools of Change conference, in which she talks about her own and others’ presentations, links to interesting blog articles, and shares some general thoughts on the state of the e-publishing industry at this point. There are far too many interesting observations to summarize, so I’ll just pick out a few to mention here. Early on, Kroszer points out that “all publishing is already digital”—insofar as manuscripts are by and large now submitted electronically, rather than as typewritten or handwritten pages. But publishers are still using an old-fashioned...

A couple of weeks ago, I saw a post on O’Reilly’s Tools of Change website that I wanted to cover, but it was so long that I never actually got around to looking at it in the detail I needed, until now. Fortunately, the article is still no less timely. This piece is an interview with Richard Nash, a theater-director-turned-publisher who has now launched a “social publishing” start-up called Cursor. Nash talks about Cursor and its goals, then goes on to discuss some of the broader implications of publishing meeting the kind of “Web 2.0” interactivity that is...

I'm back from an exhausting time of trying to cover TOC for you guys and here are a few thoughts about my overall impression of the conference. TOC is a rather odd duck in that I don't think it quite knows who is eating its eggs. It is a mixture of low level, in the trenches, stuff and very high level thought pieces. This makes many of the sessions suitable for the worker bees and mid-level managers (for example those on copyright, the workshops on the first day). The dichotomy comes in when TOC goes with its keynotes....

Tim O"Reilly, founder and CEO of O'Reilly media. Challenge is not to build the coolest and most enhanced ebooks. The publisher will never be a winner in a technology race. Innovations do come from publishers, but that's not the heart of what publishers do. Publishers' job is to do for authors those things that authors can't do for themselves. Be creative, but remember what you really do. Which is often the boring stuff. If not good at those things then someone will take your place. It's not easy to be found in this new world. Big haystack. All of...

Ramy Habeeb, established first Arabic language ebook house. Arab publishing market behind western publishing, and its lessons also applicable to other emerging economies. 60,000 titles published every year. Arabic market is the size of the US. Problems: distribution is still very primitive, In Egypt, 80% of books only available within 5 kilometers of publishing house. Censorship is still a problem. Three kinds: on purpose, self censorship and unconscious censorship. No viable OCR solution available in Arabic. International standards are a problem. Nobody uses ISBN numbers. They have them but don't use them or any other international standard. Industry...

Frances Pinter, Bloomsbury Academic. Startup academic publisher. Publishing monographs in academia, an endangered species. 1980 sold 3,000 copies of typical monograph, now sell about 350. Challenge: how do we get to a point where we can sustainably publish long form monographs. (Discussion covers only social sciences and humanities) Academics still want independent verification of quality, editing, typesetting, curation, branding. Pressures on academic community: expanding academic ecosystem and need more publishing services, governments and foundation wants to see impact for research they are funding. Pressures on academic publishers: technology driven changes require investment in time of global...

Angela Bole, BSIG; Kelly Gallagher, Bowker Consumer attitudes to ebook reading. Ongoing project. Very fresh data, completed survey last week and this is the first release to the public. Looked a print book readers who are moving to ebooks. Respondents had to have read an ebook. 95% confidence level, about 44K respondents. Purchasing behavior: #1 reason to buy an ebook is affordability 34% acquired their first ebook within the last sixth months Purchasers of ebooks are buying fewer hardbacks and paperbacks 47% read ebooks on a desktop, 32% on the Kindle, 11% on iPhone, 10% on iPod Touch, 9% on...

Peter Meyers, A New Kind of Book. Even Apple is focusing on the "dark ages" Epub standard which just recreates old fashioned paper books. How to reconfigure books the way that modern brains have been reconfigured by the web and technology. All this can be done with current software. These are ideas that can be used to "enhance" a book in new and different ways. The Colonel Fitzwilliam problem: keeping track of many characters in a book can be tough. Put into each book a "tap" that will take you to a quick summary of the character whose nome you...