Here are more notes from O'Reilly's Tools of Change for Publishing conference in San Jose. Day 2, Wed June 20.

Here's the conference program: http://conferences.oreillynet.com/toc2007/schedule/

The first day's notes are at TOC07 Day 1 Notes

The first keynote is O'Reilly's Dale Dougherty, publisher of Make and Craft magazines. Make was developed for readers, not advertisers ($34.95 subs). It draws inspiration from the Japanese hybrid concept "mook"—in between book and magazine (the mags are both fat quarterlies). Dougherty tells the story of why magazines are cool, why physical tech is cool ("it is more fun to launch a water rocket than to launch a website"), and then reads a panegyric letter to the editor. Everyone applauds. Dougherty picks up 300 new subscriptions, I guess.

Manolis Kelaidis from the Royal College of Art in London on the essence of the book. He presents a scenario of a traditional book, but with digital-era features added, like hypertext. He then demos his blueBook which is a bluetooth-enabled notebook with "printed hypertext" links (ingenious little conductive-ink icons) that talks to his computer and cause appropriate things to happen there. He talks also about bookjackets with changeable ink, so that hypertext can extend itself to the bookshelf. You can imagine the applause as he touches pages in the book and things appear on the screen in front of us. Scenario then extends to using the icons as triggers for small in-book or magazine advertisements—ads which go to your web browser. He talks about possible applications for connecting Make mag with its website. Much fascinating information about how he did it: all about figuring out how to do conductive ink on the pages, how to design circuits, how to electrically connect paper pages in the binding, and how to design icons that would make switches when touched by skin. All the people that subscribed to Make mag in the previous keynote gve this guy a standing ovation.

John Ingram of, um, Ingram. Positions beginning of technology revolution in publishing with microfiche in 1972, which they employed to communicate inventory information with booksellers. He talks about the need for DADs, and positions Ingram as a DAD, singing the "everybody needs a DAD" refrain.

Stephen Smith of Crossway Books relates that instead of discounting online direct sales (which irritates retailers), they add value by allowing the immediate download of a watermarked PDF e-book with online purchase. He says this is taken up by 75% of buyers, and that it has doubled web orders (though it's hard to see how you measure that, exactly).

Todd Sotkiewicz of Lonely Planet talks about the multiple ways in which they drive traffic and interest across the web to the books, and back again (as well as promoting indie stores)

Stephen Buxton from Mark Logic, who make a "big, fast native XML content server." Very big, very fast, real content, and powerful search capabilities, the kind of tool a publisher would put all their content resources into. Example is Oxford African American Studies Center, which allows searching through piles of OUP content as if it were one source. XQuery? is key component, which is a "content-centric" query language (unlike SQL, which is table-centric).

This makes putting together something like a custom textbook pretty close to an instant process. This is the SafariU? model. Or selling books by chapter (which makes sense for mobile apps).

Congressional Quarterly, which tracks US laws and bills, uses Mark Logic to trace how a bill might affect existing laws. This would be incredibly cumbersome otherwise.

Trends: do more with content: aggregate, centralize, enrich, treat as core asset; make more of XML: metadata, enrichment; do more with XQuery? (transformations, etc.)

Buxton says the "big bang" approach of trying to mark everything up all at once never works; instead, focus on particular applications, leave everything else as a mess until you have a need to fix it up.

Mark Logic is a big, expensive system.

Session on "beta books"

Tonya Engst, from TidBITS? & Take Control Books, who produce primarily to PDF, with versions. The idea of a beta—that is, say, v0.5—came naturally. Their book on Apple's iWeb was such a project.

Dan Gillmor, who wrote We the Media; early draft of book appeared on his blog, solicited feedback, then chapter drafts went online, ultimately published with CC license. These things are properly part of the larger ecosystem of the book.

Laurie Petrycki, from O'Reilly, on the "Rough Cuts" series: wantng to be responsive to market fast, often following tools being first announced. Paid model, with updates, leading to final version.

I asked about versioning vs editions (with new ISBNs?), and the panel responded that they're still feeling things out. Tonya Engst replied that while they're providing free updates, it's not new editions. At the point where a new version warrants a new purchase (because the old version is different but still valid, for instance), then it would be a new edition, with a new ISBN.

Lawyer Roberta Cairney points out that copyright registration is based on static editions, minor versions are complicated, and registration is a major tool for publishers to fight piracy. "Don't bet the company without knowing where you stand."

Adam C. Engst on collaborative tools. Needs: central storage, version control, file format and editor, change tracking, commenting. This ends up being Engst's wishlist for a software tool. Otherwise, nothing new.

john, you are funny --gmm, Wed, 20 Jun 2007 12:14:08 -0700 reply

love the quasi-satirical lilt to your phrases. you must be tired.

more pics of the blueBook --mauve, Wed, 20 Jun 2007 12:47:22 -0700 reply

That blueBook seems quite interesting. You can see more pics on the designer, Nick Evans' website: http://www.nick-evans.com/index.php/work/no/2/1/0