We hosted BookCamp Vancouver! Friday, October 16th was the big day, and more than 160 people came to SFU Harbour Centre to talk about books, publishing, and the future. The CCSP sponsored the event venue-wise, and BookNet Canada provided coffee and lunch for everyone...

The schedule ran four tracks in parallel in 5 sessions over the course of the day, so nobody saw the whole show, but the 500+ tweets from the day made it seem like “all one big conversation” (via @loricat). As this was a *camp, the emphasis really was on moderated converations, rather than presentations. I’ll comment on some of the sessions I participated in.

Tris Hussey spoke first thing in the morning on Tech Tools for Editing Workflow, which was a nice wheels-on-the-ground discussion of software that real writers and editors can get working with. Tris evangelized things like DropBox as a way of maintaining synchrony between an author and an editor. Shane Kennedy from Lone Pine brought up Adobe InCopy as a tool for integrating editoral and production; last spring we worked out a way of using the web as a replacement for InCopy in this same role, so that was intriguing.

In the second session, I helped Monique Trottier lead the session on Optimal Use of Social Media for Publishers, in which we had a pretty broad discussion around the room about the role of Twitter, Facebook, and the like—and how to ensure that tending these beasts doesn’t eat up all of your available time. Monique is great at focusing attention on the conversation that people want to have around books, and the need to encourage and nurture that.

After lunch, I sat in on Sean Cranbury’s second session of the day, the provocatively titled Who Gets Paid When Books Are Free? Sean defined free in the libre sense: “paid for, and thereafter unrestricted.” This discussion ranged far from the original question. Leanne Prain noted that at this point, it’s hard to make a meaningful distinction between a bought “ebook” and a file downloaded (legitimately or otherwise); it remains a poor cousin to the ‘real’ printed book. Jesse Finkelstein asked if this is what “free” has come to mean—the disposable digital version—or, more ominously, does it point to an overall devaluing of digital content?

D&M’s Emiko Morita lamented the move among major newspaper chains to stop buying excerpt rights, arguing instead that they provides promotional coverage and should therefore be available free. “What precendent does that set online?” she asked, “And when we shift formats to all-digital, then what?” Will readers be prepared to pay for content at all? The conversation shifted to the added value in the fine-art and handcraft facets of book production—Tara’s Sirish Rao calling for a re-appreciation of the “bookishness of books” and the experience of a book: What kind of books do we covet and collect? What books would we be prepared to buy in leather binding?

“Go back to an old-fashioned idea: that a book, printed in ink on durable paper, acid-free for longevity, is a thing of beauty. Make it as well as you can. People want to cherish it.” - James Gleik

What disturbs me about this impluse—ever since Gleik’s Op-Ed in the NYT suggested publishers go back to publishing beautiful things for posterity—is that it potentially abdicates publishing’s relationship to both authors and contemporay culture. If a greater proportion of publishers’ revenue comes from the “value-add” components (fancy bindings, collectables, and so on), is this at the expense of the intellectual qualities we have so long associated with books? Will publishers let the authors and other cultural commentators simply go, online, because there isn’t enough revenue to make the model work that way? Will publishers create beautiful and collectible artifacts for a diminishing audience, while the intellectual churn of a society goes on elsewhere? Perhaps this has already happened...

Deanna McFadden from HarperCollins Canada doesn’t think so. She wants to see people reading, and if technology is the way to get there, then she’s for it. Deanna’s session, Content Would Be King, emphasized the importance of getting book content online, in as much richness and depth as you can manage. The old model of promoting books revolved around the blurb, a venerable B2B tool that has little utility as a promotional device “Why do all book ads look the same?” Online audiences, she argues, demand much more. “Every bit of content you can put online,” Deanna said, “has the capacity to convert a browser to a buyer.” Why skimp on that?

Deanna’s energy and enthusiasm was undeniably infectious; she kept her audience rapt, and drew on our energy (and knowledge) really naturally as she went along. It was one of the most best presentations I’ve seen in a long time, even though she confided afterward that she felt she was going to run out of air all the way through :-) Check out Deanna’s notes from her blog.

At the end of the day, we auctioned off the last 3 slots in the schedule. I didn’t make it to any of these sessions, so I can’t report in detail, but I will note that the session topics that seemed to all be around strategies for starting things up, changing companies, changing ways of doing things. BookCamp Vancouver—as with the Toronto show in June—showed, if nothing else, that the publishing community is hungry for change. These are not, I think, people who are having change thrust upon them, but rather who truly want to reorient their professions and organizations to a new way of working.