Next Wednesday Liza Daly at Threepress will be giving a free Oreilly webinar about What Publishers Need to Know about Digitization. Liza is a technical expert on e-books and publishing (read her recent piece for TeleRead). Liza and Threepress have been doing a lot of work on tools for ePub, including an ePub validator and bookworm (an online app that lets people manage their epub libraries online). The threepress blog has some great pieces on open standards. See How good are your ePubs? (a list of gotchas when creating ePub files) and their recent ePub logos (which are released into the public domain).
Also, in midday today I’ll be having a live teleconference with Advisor Press podcast. The subject for the talk will be What’s Up with E-books? We’ll talk about e-book standards and market trends from an author’s perspective. (You can actually call in to listen and even to ask questions). It’s scheduled for 12 PM CST Thursday November 6 (i.e., today!). To listen in live, follow the instructions on this page. AdvisorPress is a podcast run by Peter Johnson for authors about publishing, promotion and book trends. Peter Johnson comes from a background in financial publishing and marketing and does telereconferences monthly. Subjects range from creating buzz for your book, book covers and other practical subjects. I particularly recommend John Kremer’s 2007 talk about 1001 ways to market your book (mp3) and Annie Jennings 2008 talk about how authors can get TV appearances as experts (mp3). By the way, if you’re unable to listen in, don’t worry; I’ll provide a link to the downloadable mp3 in a week or so.
12:30 PM CST Update: Due to technical difficulties, the live teleconference had to be delayed. I’ll post the mp3 when it becomes available.
Also, in the literary podcast terrain, two other notable talks. From the Writing Show, Catherine Ann Jones talks about a spiritual approach to writing. I didn’t think I’d like it as much as I did. Jeffrey DeRego, I’m no fan o’ Nanowrimo (mp3). For the truly nostalgic, here are two historic podcasts from the Wired for Books mp3 archives. : Ray Bradbury (part 1 and part 2) and Isaac Asimov (mp3). Bradbury is a riot (as usual), and the part from the Asimov interview that made me laugh was his admission about how some of his earlier writing was so awful it wasn’t worth trying to revise. That’s the difference between back then and the current writing scene. Asimov wrote, published and moved on. But with online writing, they can publish and years later republish the writing without any problem. But is that really progress?
