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By Chris Meadows

“rise of the ebook session … hopefully this turns out better for us than rise of the terminators” —@trovebooks on Twitter

A full report on the Tools of Change conference will likely have to wait until Paul Biba and David Rothman get back to their computers. But here are a few tidbits I picked up from following #TOC on Twitter:

Andrew Savikas (pictured at left, photo by James Duncan Davidson) revealed that the Bookworm on-line ePub reader is now part of O’Reilly Labs.

According to Tim O’Reilly, an informal audience poll in the Jeff Jarvis panel indicated that about 10% of the audience read on Kindles, but 70% on iPhones.

The Rise of the E-Book

At the “Rise of the E-Book” panel, it was revealed that Buzzword, Adobe’s free on-line word processor, will gain the ability to export in ePub form.

It was also mentioned that, while e-book sales now make up 10% of Amazon’s sales volume for books that are available in both print and Kindle formats, e-book sales are only 1/2 of 1% of the overall book market.

Occasional TeleRead commenter Pablo Defendini tweeted, “E-Ink 2009: next with E Ink:new sizes: smaller and larger; new countries; touch and pen interfaces; flexible displays like PlasticLogic.” Panelist Russell Wilcox from E-Ink also promised that the speed of e-ink was increasing at the rate of Moore’s Law, and that there would be usable color screens in 2010.

Some of the “Rise of E-Books” panel audience looked askance at panelist David Rothman’s use of the term “p-books” to differentiate print books from e-books. The consensus seemed to be that it might look all right on paper, but it sounded silly spoken aloud. (I prefer to say “tree-books,” myself.)

Twitter #TOC

Following the #toc hashtag has been an interesting experience; interspersed among tweets reporting from two or three simultaneous panels have been interesting conversations. jtallent asked how anyone could read on an iPhone, and got back several answers ranging from “very well, thanks” to more serious explanations of their benefits.

From time to time, someone would retweet an earlier comment—reposting it in their own Twitter stream so their followers would see it. One of the most repeated tweets had to do with the representatives from Audible.com supposedly getting up and walking out on Cory Doctorow’s anti-DRM presentation this morning.

[Update: The next day, totai (the originator of the repeated tweet) tweeted, "4 the record, my tweet re: Audible folks walking on day 1 was a joke. Now it's been written about!" and linked back to this article. It certainly proves the power of Twitter to spread the most sensational news fastest. It also reminds us not necessarily to believe the most sensational news we hear (which is why I made sure to include the "supposedly").]

Perhaps most amusing were the tweets I would see from time to time from people who were jumping ship from a boring panel in favor of another whose tweets sounded more interesting. If any demonstration was necessary about how Twitter has changed the nature of technology conferences, this would probably be it. (Ironically, I’m pretty sure that at least one of those came from someone who deserted a panel on “Social Networking”.)

I look forward to seeing David and Paul back behind their keyboards, with more information on what went down at the Tools of Change conference.

 
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