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...

Peter Costanzo and Rick Joyce Perseus Books Group: independent publishing company and distribute other independent publishers. Surveyed their independent publishing clients. What is most significant focus in 2010: ebooks, social media and direct consumer were highest top 3. What percentage of your titles will be ebooks in 2010: 30% less than 10%, 50% half or more made into ebooks. What are barriers to your ebook entry: highest barrie is poor fit of titles with device capabilities 43%, piracy 37%, retailer pricing 37%, cost of conversion 35%, confusion about technology standards or processes 34%, poor handling of color 34%, cost...

Final keynote of the day is a conversation between Kurzweil and O'Reilly. Kurzweil presentation on Blio: enabling factors in place for ebooks. Blio is free ereader with free and for pay books. With audiobooks combine audiobook with the text book. Can synchronize highlighting on the text with the audiobook. Can use text to speech to do the same thing if don't have an audiobook. For textbooks include auxiliary website material directly into the book. Connect directly from a book to Wikipedia, dictionary definitions, highlight material, take notes. Conversation: For Blio what is the authoring environment: have an authoring tool that...

Bookserver is in technology demo basis. 1,800,000 books in the Internet Archive and it scans 1,000 books a day. Costs about 10 cents a page to digitize a book and takes half an hour or so to do it. Public domain is about 20% books, 70% out of print and 10% in print. Bookserver aimed at out of print and in print books. A distributed system for lending and vending on the internet. Laptop to search engine to find book, and goes to holder of the book. OLPC now has access to Internet Archive books. Kindle...

Sourcebooks founder and publisher Dominique Raccah thinks of herself as running two companies: a book publishing house and a mixed media company. And so should every other publisher, Raccah told the audience during a workshop at TOC Tuesday. The point, she said, is to think in terms of the content you have—or, “what are you expert at”—and how that expertise can be packaged and sold in different forms and at different price points. At Sourcebooks, that includes taking its popular baby naming title and repurposing the information as a high-end $19.95 gift book and a $4.99 iPhone app. That...

ThreePress consulting announced the release of its new Epub reading program. You can find details about the new reader here. The different thing about it is that the books are kept in the cloud, as is the reader. No need to download anything and so you can read from your web browser, iPhone, Android and other mobile phones. When used with an iPhone and an Android 2 phone you can read even when you're not connected to the web....

2001 ebook devices, 3 to 7 million in sales, Industry Standard. Kindle estimated sold about 2 million total. What went wrong: Not enough books available. Expensive and tepid publisher involvement. Prices were too high High prices, too few titles, no one wants to invest in a device. Usage patterns : Since they won’t buy a device, let’s put it on stuff they do use. PCs, PDA’s. Not enough periodicals—didn’t want to make compromises on quality, advertising doesn’t work the same, competition from free websites. Marketing. The challenge: For consumers books aren’t broken.The most successful free publisher online: is Yahoo. Yahoo publisher the equivalent of...

Caren Milloy, JISC (United Kingdom): huge survey of users with over 23,000 responses on ebook use from students and academics and librarians. Data presented was all about students, despite the title. Highest users of ebooks: business students used them a lot more than other areas and medical titles were hardly used at all. How did they get ahold of the ebook: most student got them through the university library, as opposed to free, off the web, pirated, etc. Very few students actually purchased etextbooks. How did they read them, part or all of the book: read "in and out" by...

John Warren; Eric Frank - Flatworld; Frank Lyman - Coresmart; Nicholas Smith - Agile Mind; Neeru Khosla - CK12 Founcation Flatworld: open access textbooks but still able to generate sustainable revenue CK12: doing same thing but completely in K to 12 market. Providing online services and developed online reader Coresmart: Many textbooks now available in digital format. 10,000 etextbook titles on their site. Agile Mind: now can marry instructional concepts and multimedia. How do digital textbooks solve problem of educating student; online books give more access and lowers price point. Hard for teacher/student to get "real time" knowledge of what's relevant to...

Speaker is Peter Collingridge of Enhanced Editions. Published The Death of Buddy Monroe. Came from a background of publishing, web page designing and film production. Value of books driven down by retailers and impact of digital has been very small. Want to make digital innovations to increase value of books. Sit between developer, consultancy and marketing house. UK publishing houses slow to uptake on the iPhone. They said they were not publishing houses. E-ink devices too limited. iPhone has the ability. Had to be a premium publisher to get value back into the book....

Skip Prichard, President and CEO of Ingram Content Group. Today's ebooks are warmed over print books and will be changed into something very different in the next five years. There is no fundamental right for a business to survive and that included publishers. Publishers must stay focused in marketing creative and innovative content. Print and digital are going to merge and this is how the next generation of consumers will think. Kids spend 7.5 hours a day in front of a digital device and industry must recognize this. Industry must simplify - find mission and strategy and focus on it. ...

William Patry, Google copyright counsel, but not speaking for Google. Copyright expert, author and law professor, all in the copyright area. Legal system should not be used to solve business problems, even when there are legal issues. Legal system is bad place to seek closure to a business problem. Copyright industry feels that more laws and better laws will solve their business problems. Piracy is not a legal problem it is a market problem. It is a failure to give the consumer what they want. There is a belief that sending someone to jail will increase the bottom line...