TOC: Closing Thoughts

1. We're in the early innings of this game. We'll look back in just a few years and think how quaint it was. Things will continue to change.

2. The start up space is critical. There is some innovation within the houses, but most of it is happening with start ups. Traditional publishers would do well to collaborate with these start ups.

3. We're starting to see companies use technology but not for technology's sake.

4. What is it that you do in your house that is unique? That is what you want to invest in, outsource the rest.

5. Community is first. You can't just put out a site to sell eBooks and have it work, you need to create community (it's what worked for O'Reilly).

TOC: Brain Pickings - Maria Popova

Brain Pickings is a website that is supported directly via readers.

How do we support alternatives to ad supported journalism? The problem goes back to the original newspapers. Today writers can focus on a site and readers will follow them. Although it is simple to be online, it is not cheap. Brain Pickings costs $3,600 a month. Add a minimum wage employee and it is nearly $7,000 (instead Maria works 18 hours a day on her own).

RadioLab is on public radio and does the normal fund raising, but they now do live shows too to bring in money. 99% Invisible rose the most money on Kickstarter ever recently.

Spot.us is community funded reporting. Flattr allows for a sort of subscription way to spread money amongst content creators, though it's trapped in circular logic that no one signs up for flatr because there are no donations and no one donates because no one is signed up.

When any one way becomes they way, that becomes a dangerous thing.

TOC: Library Journal - Meredith Schwartz

Patron Profiles is a survey that went straight to the consumers rather than having data colored by the librarians.

eBooks are becoming a bigger part

The majority of library user households are middle income. They are also book people. Patrons of libraries are active book buyers. eBook library borrowers are even more likely to buy books.

There are 16,700 libraries and 2,400 bookstore outlets. As bookstores close, more and more they are the place readers go for books. 37% of those surveyed lost their local bookstore in the past year and 47% of them increased their library use.

The showroom effect of the library: 26% of print borrowers buy the same title and 72% of ebook borrowers do.

Far more libary patrons than the average person have tried an eBook.

57% of people who tried to check out an eBook couldn't find their book and 22% of them were so frustrated they gave up on eBooks.

"Books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs are by elevators" - Stephen Fry

TOC: Reinvinting Comics & Graphic Novels for Digital

Thrillbent - Mark Wade

[This is the most exiciting publishing technology I've seen at TOC this year.]

Comics have been crafted to work in the printed page in a portrait format. It does not work in landscape mode. The art was designed for a certain canvas and doesn't work on the screen; it does not take advantage of the digital space.

Motion Comics tried solving this problem a few years back by adding a little motion and sound, but these aren't comics. What makes comics comics is that the reader is in control of the pace that you are reading [this theme came up earlier].

Thrillbent is trying to retain what makes comics special and take advantage of the medium. It puts you in control of the pace. It makes use of panels in a way that depends on the page turn rather than the reader reading from left to right. You can replace an existing panel or modify an image rather than move to an entirely new layout. Dialogue can be handled by changing the voice bubbles or adding background explanatory images. It takes advantage of what digital does.

On the site the panels all load dynamically rather than reloading the whole page. The layout is responsive, so it adapts to the browser size. The fonts are optimize and it works with landscape format.

Print costs have risen so how that they looked at going digital first with an eye towards maybe doing print later. So now they publish on a regular business and sell via comixology which recoups all of the production costs. Nobody gets rich but everybody gets paid. One revenue stream covers all their costs which free them to experiment in other streams. The online content is free.

TOC: Content is Still King

Byliner

Think of themselves as an entertainment company, not a publisher. They create "Byliner Original" which are eShorts. They make them available in many formats (print, digital, audio) including a subscription model. Every month 90 million readers seek out work by a specific writer. For instance Atwood has 461k looking for her writings. But it isn't easy for these readers to find.

What is needed is like a GitHub for authors, a writer specific stream of stories easily discovered and followed. Byliner creates live digital feeds of a writers entire body of work. It turns the author's byline into a powerful reader acquisition tool.

Byliner has an HTML5 based subscription reading service that combines these digital feeds (sort of an IMDb for authors) and a Netflix of books into one system.

TOC: Startup Showcase Winners

Paperight

Bringing books to the rural countryside by turning photocopy shops into print on demand bookstores. They tell coffee shops you will be the bookstores of the future. They offer a legal means to print books from reputable publishers. [This to me is the feel good story of the conference. It is like an example straight out of the book Switch]

CartoDB

“A new type of tool for digital, dynamic, data driven story telling”. CatroDB works entirely in the cloud and works with a variety of devices. It makes mashing up data quick and easy. In a handful of minutes you can take tweets and drop them on a map to visualize locations.

Old weather – a project that took old ships longs with weather and location data to make it visualized.

Borne Digital

Books that adapt to the reading level of the child. As children read they can pay attention to how quickly they read and how they answer questions in order to offer the child the correct reading level. This data also powers dashboards for parents, teachers, and publishers. These are digital books that can offer higher prices because they are a better product. They are adaptive eBooks.

TOC: Debate: eBooks vs. Web Apps for Interactive Content

eBooks - Bill McCoy

Publisher’s need scale. It’s the business of multiple titles. Authors need scale and tools (InDesign, PDF, etc). Tools should be made that then the publishers use to do their work. We need to think about design and rich content, but this should be done by designers, not programmers. The inmates should not run the asylum (see the book). Programmers should be used to create tools with which designers create. You can only hire so many programmers, it doesn’t scale. You can though have a few programmers create tools with which to have a lot of designers create a lot of things. There is an importance to have rich experience and consistency. The consumer wants a certain amount of consistency and not to have to figure out every different thing they read. If you need interactivity, use building blocks (widgets), don’t have it built from scratch. Just look at the web where most pages are built with templates not from scratch.

Aerbook.com allows creating digital books with motion and animation with CSS.

Apps - Sanders Kleinfeld

O’Reilly is now realizing all of their books in ePub3 format. So O’Reilly believes in ePub, however, web apps are the way of the future. He looked at his book HTML5 for Publishers in multiple browsers but most of the readers didn’t support the ePub3 features built in. So they took the book and created Chimera, a web app reading system for browsers that could display ePub3 in various browsers.

Being online and being social is offered by web apps. It facilitates feedback about the text. URLs can easily be used to post links to the content directly into a specific section of the book. The book can link out to many other resources and in turn they can link into it.

If you want to do all of this interactivity now, you need a web app because otherwise you’re waiting for Amazon, B&N, etc. to catch up with you (notably Apple’s iBooks does fully support ePub3, but they’re the exception).

O’Reilly puts out over 100 books a year. They can’t build an app for every book, but they can build something like Chimera and have a bunch of books published in it. Or for instance they have Atlas, which is an XML editor for ePub. Atlas is able to export formats for Chimera. So they’ve built a platform instead of building only a single book.

McCoy: It is important to use HTML5 where it makes sense for your business before the eReaders catch up. But instead of developing tools you should find other tools out there. Web apps are an option, but you need to pay attention to standards, which get you things like accessibility (for the blind for instance).

Kleinfeld: The impression that creating the web app is too hard for publishers is wrong. The elephant in the room is that eBooks are software. You are in the software business, do you want to give away that core part of your business to someone else? O’Reilly did build Chimera, but it’s built on tops of things like Rails so there are standards, dozens.

M: Dozens? Shouldn’t you instead as a publisher be using one product?

K: There’s a sliding scale depending on what you need to do. WordPress might be all you need and is a viable option. O’Reilly takes it a little further. Bottom line either way you are online.

M: But if you’re creating a site how do you sell it? You don’t have a product. Are you going to use a pay wall?

K: There are different models. We are not putting all our eggs in one basket. We need to figure out how to monetize web apps, but even with that unknown they are the way of the future. Wrapping up your content in someone else’s DRM (Amazon) and giving them 30% is not the way to go.

M: Yes, walled gardens are not the way to go. We’re both about open standards.

Audience: Pay walls vs. discoverability

M: Inkling has done a good job of figuring this out. Safari and NYT has a somewhat good way of handling this.

K: Being on the web is critical and part of the business, but you don’t need to hire a bunch of developers. The standards are out there, like ePub3.

M: When is O’Reilly going to move away from PDF?

K: PDF is actually our most popular download from our site. Maybe due to the audience.

M: PDF is the portable format, but ePub is as well. A web app doesn’t give people the portability.

K: HTML5 application cache allows you to go offline with your site.

Audience: What about eInk?

M: eInk is on the way out. Tablets are so much more compiling.

K: Agreed. Tablets vs. phones is a big question.

M: PDF is bad for the phone as it does not adapt well, which is where ePub does better.

Audience: is this build vs. buy?

K: Realize your strengths. O’Reilly has the developer base to scale up whereas other publishers might not be able to do this.

M: Tools for HTML5 should be part of your core competency. You should try to buy, but if its not there go ahead an buy.

TOC: Creators & Technology Converging: When Tech Becomes Part of the Story

How does new technology affect the creative process?

Motion Poems - Todd Boss

Started in corporate marketing. Pushed the first magnetic poem kits by teaming up with American Poetry Society and set up magnetic walls around the US and then decorated the new VW Beetle with them.

Writes poetry for people who hate poetry and writes to be accessible. Poetry has a point of sale issue in that there’s no way to have a sample of the poem to know if you want it. You need to read the whole thing and there’s an imaginative investment that is needed for poetry before you can understand it (unlike most everything else).

Todd teamed up with an animator who turned some of his poems into animations and then it turned into the company Motion Poems, which uses the work of many poets. They want to work with poets and the institutions that support poetry like publishers. The Motion Poem becomes not only a work of art in its own right, but also becomes a marketing tool for the poet.

Minneapolis Minnesota has the biggest art board in the country and it helps support Motion Poems (also KickStarter).

Digital Fiction - Kate Pullinger

Project: Landing Gear. A mix of video and text across the screen. At the moment it is a proof of concept.

Prologue: Flight Paths: A Networked Novel.; Landing Gear; Epilogue: Duel

The Alpine Review - Louis-Jacques Darveau

www.thealpinereview.com about things that matter, a compendium of ideas built by an international team. Neo-mania = technology for its own sake, which can cause fatigue. You can connect to anyone, but to what end? Technology is not the answer, it is the amplifier of intent. Some of the new forms of publishing are almost rational to the point of being boring. There’s a lot of sterile data around us that impairs our ability to think. We fall into a pattern of information overconsumption (not “information overload” because its our choice); The Alpine Review is about perspective (a mountain lets you see the unexplored valleys or nooks in the mountain). Perspective is the answer to the flood of information.

Why print and not digital for The Alpine Review? Permanence is important; we have multiple senses, which is important. People are buying handmade physical crafts these days as a reaction to the digital world. Analog watches give us a sense of time. Computers that are sealed shut (like MacBookAir) are very removed from our senses and us.

Technology does help The Alpine Review. They collaborate with contributors from around the world and also costs are lowered. It also allows for better marketing.

The Silent History – Eli Horowitz and Russell Quinn

Eli worked at McSweeney’s where they spent a lot of time thinking about the book as object, but around 2009 they admitted they had to move into the digital world. It felt like the content was squeezed onto the Kindle in a grey slurry.

In trying to figure out what could be done online with the same sensibility that was applied to the device that was applied to the book. Thoughts like “updates are relatively easy” “we carry these devices around” went into the design.

The Silent History is a novel told by 120 voices. Each day a post is sent to your phone and the post is a part of an oral history. Each day, each week, and each month had an ark to it. So this was not a work shoved into a digital format, this was composed for the digital world. The screen was split between testimonials (circles) and pins on a map. You have to go to the location to read that part of the content. The idea is not that you’re simply unlocking it, but that the setting is part of the text and you need to be there to understand it. This is a novel that can be explored. Readers have responded eagerly to the book.

There is a lack of patience with traditional publishing within McSweeny's so they just started creating The Silent History (with no thought even of VC).

TOC: From Eye to Brain: Content Design & the “Last Mile” Problem - Peter Meyers

A book is for document organization.

Immersion is one of the big benefits of the page after page format of a traditional book. However the page after page format hides the really great moments in the book, you need to read it to find those moments. Yes, sometimes they are excerpted on the back of the book, but overall they are hidden within the book.

Other mediums have found solutions for this. Magazines advertise on the cover what’s hidden within the media (often headlines are on the cover). Browsing the outside gives you insight on the inside.

Steven Johnson – Where Good Ideas Come From – The annotation sketch note map is both a video advertisement for the book, but it also gives the game plan for the book and shows the reader the insides of the book. The video gives insight into the author, but also the map alone on the book makes the book more marketable on its own.

Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely. The table of contents is laid out in a grid. The piece in the middle of the grid are highlighted because the author indicated they were key ideas. There are little visual indicators (higher and lower stacks of paper) to show how much content is devoted to certain topics. It also pushes people towards experiencing the book in a non-linear way.

The Secret War Between Uploading and Downloading is not quite the right thing, but it is a great step forward in exploring how a book can present itself at first small (executive summary) then medium, then large (traditional book). It allows pinch and zoom into sections where it’s first a toc, then summary paragraphs, then chapters.

eBooks should not be “we have this mass of multi-media files lets dump them in” they want thoughtful curating and inventive use of the media.

“I believe our attention is well-directed these days thanks to good algorithms and great curators, but it’s like a flashlight beam whipping around the room. Never resting. Never returning. What’s the alternative?” - Robin Sloan

A big block of text pushes us off readers who are used to quick snippets on the web. It can almost be a wall. Sloan made an eBook app, a tap essay, which prints a line with each tap. It aerates the text, giving space to the words and space for yourself to ponder the words. He also uses different background colors, all caps, and font color for effect. He has a page that has this:

Maybe that’s a reasonable

DEFINITION OF LOVE

on the interne tor anywhere else:

TO LOVE IS TO RETURN

And only on that page does he offer a share button, which communicates the idea that he thinks this is the part of the text worth sharing. It highlights it as a major point. There’s a rhythm to the writing that is reveled with each tap, a rhythm to language that the digital world can communicate.

When he gets to the sentence “it’s like a flashlight whipping around the room” is in white text on black as opposed to the text before. He then greys out a sentence as if to lower his voice. Then there’s a blank page which says to the reader to take a rest.

Writing like this is paying attention to the materials we use to write with.

There is a web-based book called Welcome to Pine Point. It has drawings and an instrumental sound track. Words on a screen interact differently with other kinds of media. It is always difficult to get people to pay attention to text and not the media, so often people put a large amount of text and not much media. In this book however the opposite is done and the text is short, almost poetic. It is a remarkable example of integrating different kinds of medium.

The problem with video is it deprives the reader of the pacing control they have with text. With text you can go back and reread or read at a different speed at your choice. Video forces you to go at its frame rate. In the print world you can handle a recipe by laying it out in storyboard fashion with the text within each image. There’s less cognitive burden because you don’t need to attach text and picture. Hello Cupcake is a great example of giving the control to the reader. Wiping your finger across the page scrubs the images forward at your own pace. The stop motion video with scrubbing is the best of both worlds.

www.wearemudlark.com/orchestrated/winter_1.html Has a pairing of text to the music that really helps you understand the music. It was originally spoken word on a CD, but now it offers a much better combination of description and music. It illuminates the pieces in an effective manner.

On Writing

Several Short Sentence about writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg

“The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering.” – Tom Waits

Thinking about line length (look at marketing descriptions) when writing.

TOC: You Bought it, But Do You Own It – Bill Rosenblatt

Amazon’s patent on digital resale was filed in 2009.

Publishers would not be allowed to forbid or restrict libraries to lend eBooks freely. Copies would last forever and there would be no more confusion or complexity. Currently the big six publishers all have different library rules. Every publisher would have to use the Random House model of license, but unlike RH the libraries would get consumer pricing, not the current higher price.

In Europe its been stated that a license that looks just like a sale is legally a sale. In America it is not clear (though the opposite is clearly true, if it doesn’t look the same a license is not a sale).

Amazon is clear that they are licensing not selling you books. Apple has a similar though not so clear policy with iTunes.

Copyright Office in 2001 was asked to offer an opinion. To have consumers resell they would need to delete after they hand over a copy and that’s not reasonable to assume we can trust consumers. What we would need is a formalized “forward and delete mechanism”. Since we don’t have this the Office said to wait to see how things go.

A forward-and-delete mechanism would have to be sure to delete all copies from the consumer. One idea is to have only one key and encrypt the eBook, so passing on the key would cause the eBooks to be useless.

Providers in this space: Lexink, ReDigi, Rekiosk.

There were failures in the music space: Weed, Peer Impact, File-Cash, Bitmuk, Bopaboo (various use of watermark and CRM)

ReDigi is of note right now. They take a cut of the resale and give labels or artists for music. Looks at watermarks or metadata in the files to delete copies on your computer. They admit this doesn’t work if you have one device running ReDigi and one device not.

ReDigi is being sued by Capitol Records (EMI) because they saw this as a first test case for Digital First Sales. The judge did not offer a preliminary injunction, which means the judge does not assume the trial will succeed.

The whole idea of First Sale is that the publisher has nothing to do with the second and preceding sales, but ReDigi is involving them. Also another question is if users violate the terms of use, does that trump copyright law?

OverDrive (who has an obvious vested interest) did a study that say libraries lead to sales for publishers via discovery. Publishers are skeptical of this. Given the current law, libraries don’t stand a chance in the eBook world. Furthermore Amazon directly markets AmazonPrime against libraries.

Libraries became involved with the Owners Rights Initiative, which is lobbying in Washington. They state: “if you bought it, you own it”. Other businesses are involved as well such as eBay, RedBox, GoodWill, Chegg, Powell’s, AscdiNatd, overstock.com, QualityKing, CCIA (they’re thinking of used copies of software), and of course ALA (there are others).

The big winners of digital first sales: Users, retailers that sell used, libraries

Neutral: authors

Losers: publishers, retailers that don’t sell used

Why do websites have a “buy” button when you are actually licensing? Shouldn’t it say “rent”? Well no because “buy” is what consumers understand.

Larger publishers could create their own libraries

Before digital, courts ruled in favor of “fair use” which allowed copying, but it was very specific about audio, video, and software. It may not apply to digital world since the laws were so byzantine and specific.

What about international? Europe has a concept of exhaustion. Things are more clear in the US because it has so many more lawsuits so more has been tested.

TOC: The Third Tier: Between the Big Six, and Self-Publishing, a Digital-First Business Model

Atavist - Evan

Multimedia non-fiction short books. Kindle singles, etc. Publish through website/app. Narrative non-fiction and software company. Create their own software and use it to publish their content.

Paying authors from magazine world model, no royalties. Their product was a hybrid of magazines/books, so authors get 4 figure fee and 50% royalty on post-platform. They get the fee from the first sale. This incentives them to help market.

Used a contract that was based on real contracts, but for a year or so no lawyer even saw it. World/not world rights don’t make sense these days – it’s all the world and revenue will be split with author/publisher. They share rights with author after 120 days if author wants to jump ship – this way they prove value and if not author is free to go elsewhere (though atavist can still publish).

Get the author involved with marketing in a partnership type relationship rather than let author think they’re on their own.

Want customer to be equally happy wherever they buy a product, but they prefer to have customers come straight to their website which is better for them in the long run. Want people in their world, their base.

Self funded for first two years. Making money by licensing software so they don’t need to actually sell content to be ok (though now they are doing well with the content).

Use public domain materials and freelancers, but with small efficient team feels they have same standards as big publishers.

No inventory to create overhead. Office can be the only overhead.

4 – 10 people start to finish.

Publishing is not the sexiest place for programmers to go. Started out with self taught programmers. Have found literary engineers who have their own projects to. Can’t really afford most engineers

Trying to build a platform for storytelling in the long run. A unique kind of storytelling that’s different from books and magazines.

Part of BrightLine venture.

OpenAir Publishing - Jon

Instructional books

Video content is royalty only, which gets providers to market.

Customer is the user. Thinks that way every step of the way. It translates into the higher ratings and word of mouth.

Experiment with free and different prices. For instance Starbucks and Crate&Barrel free books.

Using inkling habitat to make great books. Discover platform has seen great results already.

They share revenue with authors rather than base it on a more common royalty structure.

3 – 10 people start to finish. Salaries for team and fees for production.

Concentrated on front end development at first (high end) then switched to inkling habitat.

Be the leading digital first non-fiction digital publisher is the long term goal. To take advantage of the new medium in new ways (like TV in the beginning which started as plays on film but then turned into things that only work on TV)

Plympton – Jennifer 8. Lee

Serialized fiction for digital reading. Partnering with dailylit.

Great media company needs great content and great distro.

Modest advance for authors, but revenue share at back end. Left it open since market is eveolveing

Higher risk higher reward author compensation model.

You keep most of the rights unless otherwise specified.

Contracts are writer friendly, but tied fortunes together. Blanket contract with world rights, digital, print, drama, merchandizing, etc. Anything to do with text (translation, print, audio) then Plympton got higher share of royalties because they put in more effort. With other things they knew someone else had put in the effort. Prefer working with things from the start because of how much they want to be a part of.

[didn’t realize the amount (little) of effort involved in publishing on iPad but not UK]

They need to know who purchases their copies. Via Amazon you don’t know who bought the part of the book. Much better to manage the relationship, hence dailylit partnership.

Facebook has helped them build the right list (women over 40 spend more on their product and are cheaper for Facebook ads).

They do physical book giveaways via goodreads which builds a list that they can then market to (pBooks made via Amazon)

Just turned profitable.

Creating great content at scale is not helped by technology, but marketing at scale is helped with technology.

Got programming from friend by trading python scripts for okcupid profile. Bartering helped with costs. Got students to help by offering sundance tickets.

Trying to have a route from MIT course6 into Plympton.

Want writers to be able to write for a living.  Serial publishing is difficult right now, but they want to find the way.

Jennie started because she wanted to make a difference in the world.

Imprints are for publishing ego and not for this model.

TOC: Density

Density - Tobias Nielsen

International book marketing for the small publisher. How to compete.

20,000 titles in hardcover is a huge success in Sweden

Sometimes the digital edition in English of the Swedish title is offered by a competitor at half the price.

International Competition

What you buy: translated vs original

When you buy:

-                the fans

-                titles in English: time, price, search (status) (search shows the English translation right next to your Swedish text)

-                the buzz

English language can sell 13 times better than Swedish version in Sweden.

Tying back to the keynote, ABBA wrote the narrative for how Swedes can go international

Key Lessons

Focus – being available is not equal to being discovered

Dedicated distributors vs. self-publishing platforms – dedicated distributor helps get your titles featured which is why they are better

Monitor, evaluate, and adapt

Local PR support is very helpful (local agencies w/n market you want to enter) work with aggregators who are in contact with online booksellers

Don’t be Swedish – thought that labeling as Swedish would be useful, but in truth most people want a general take away and don’t care about that branding

Stockholm text launched last summer 2012 with 15 titles. 4 of 15 titles did well. Mystery and crime fiction did well. Used creative campaigns, active price stargy, and focus on retailer promotions. Thought as a traditional print publisher instead of out of the box.

40k – Italian publisher who thought digital would be easy, but some of the big hurdles are the same as print

Crossroads ahead

Digital-first vs. physical books

Niches vs. the big market share

Densified format (short reads) vs. traditional format – kindle sales show that densified does better, though you are locked into certain number of words and low price (especially if you assume long tail is true)

Density

Knowledge is important

Specialized knowledge critical

But clear and fast

Hence, “densify” knowledge

A gap exists today

www.theDensity.com

TOC: Designing and Creating a Social Book App using Open-source Technologies - Haig Armen

Strategy – PhoneGap

Design – jQueryMobil

Glue - JSON API bridge

Recomended reading: A Social Book and 50 Years of Life Online by Alexandra Samuel

Can reading a book be a participatory and a social experience?

The social component should be integrated in such a way that it does not get in the way of the original content of the book.

How can the book be dynamic?

Problems with social books:

1. Social usually means sharing quotes outside the book – Facebook Twitter
2. Reader's comments are private and hidden from other readers
3. Comments are separated from the text into another space

Stack: Native application <= phonegap => HTML CSS JS <= JSON API => Wordpress CMS

PhoneGap was bought by Adobe so it’ll be part of DreamWeaver. Cordova became the open source version of PhoneGap.

Gestures are the way to navigate a book, because the closer the user gets to the content the more they engage with it.

In 50 years book the table of contents is a decade view with each decade color coded. It allows you to go into a year list of each decade and each year is an article.

Pinch drills into content, reverse pinch goes back.

There are little indicators with numbers to tell you how many comments are available. They open to reveal all comments. Comments can be rated to be promoted to be part of the text.

PhoneGap Build is a webservice that creates an app for you with the HTML that you send to it.

To use PhoneGap in XCode turn off “automatic reference counting”

JQueryMobile.com

HTML meta tag “viewport” needs to be added to keep the browser from scalling

Embed the jQuery CSS and scripts

The

will use a “data-role” argument to tell jQuery about the div container.

A little bounce animation on interactive elements makes a huge difference in intuitive design.

Clear  (a to do list app) has a good interface for teaching you how to use it

All of the code for this social book project will be on github when its complete. Watch @haigharmen on Twitter for updates

Each paragraph in the book was a Wordpress post. This facilitated comments because they’re regular Wordpress comments.

Revenue stream should be based on the content and not the app

Chose native app over open web because it makes it so much easier to offer offline support.

They need a name for this open source social book project – tweet the name to hashtag #socialbook

^.^

(__)…

TOC: Book as API - Alistair Croll & Hugh McGuire

Things you can make with a book if it has an API: tag cloud, timeline, map

Imagine a grid with these four quadrants: objective, subjective, fiction, & nonfiction
Consuming content varies by quadrant (for instance subjective nonfiction would be a marketing book, objective fiction would be Clan of the Cave Bear)

Long shadow = anything wrong in your product that you have to live with (like battery issues in hardware)

Version management has been the key to the success of SaaS

API is how SaaS allows customization without supporting a huge array of features

An Internet connection was the killer for the camera - it is why camera phones are now the most popular cameras

There's more stuff outside the book than within
 
A book is a bundle of content [this idea was present in various sessions at TOC]
 
The publication date is a false epiphany -- the content continues to grow and have a life of its own once released

Authoring a book is about content and structure and an API connects them and it is as important to the book as the Internet connection is to the camera

API gives content it's own life stream

Start thinking of books as stuff

A book is a collection of ideas

The index is the starting point for an API (they are not the same of course)

Use class names for semantic data [I've mainly resisted editorializing, but I must say I'm not sure about this]


SmallDemons overcame the fact that books aren't APIs by asking publishers for all the content (the ePubs)



Readmill overcame the fact that books aren't APIs by asking readers to upload their ePubs

More new sites that help the whole industry could easily be created if books were APIs -- they wouldn't have to overcome it

Dracula has been turned into an API -- it is broken out into journals, maps, location lists, character journey

Doing this is not hard if you use PressBooks as your CMS [says the man behind PressBooks]

Recommends Mashery for publishers API since it manages users, traffic, uptime for you

TOC: Evening keynotes part two

W3C - Jeff Jaffe

Web = publishing  and  publishing = web

Those in the web world completely agree with that, but those in publishing will tend to respond that book publishing is something different.

Early impacts on publishing from the web: low barrier to entry, linked documents

However there were issues: low resolution, small bandwidth

But it enabled innovation

Now we have core technology changes that have changed the web: mobile, no geographic borders, broadband, social, cloud, generational divide in consuming info

Other changes: Google ad revenue exceeds US print ad revenue combined; eBooks have seen triple digit growth

The pressures that are affecting book publishing are also affecting entertainment, games, and healthcare, but book publishing will probably be the most impacted.

TV/Entertainment is increasingly moving from the TV set to the internet.

The open web platform is the future platform for book publishing. It is based on HTML5 which is now stable. HTML5 is now in the “early majority” for adoption, no longer only embraced by early adopters.

What will bring us to this future is for the publishing industry to work with the web industry closer. The W3C needs to participate in publishing events and vice versa.

This happened with the W3C and the TV industry years ago. This lead to changes in HTML5 based on the TV industry’s needs.

W3C is committed to: match current publishing practices, leverage value-add of the web, support diverse business and distribution models, satisfy consumer behaviors

Keep the conversation going to build a web for publishing.

TOC: Evening keynotes part one

Douglas Rushkoff

Applying the concept of “present shock” from his book (http://www.rushkoff.com/present) to publishing.

Present shock is the human reaction to our current reality which is always connected, in real time, and highly aware of the present moment. What is it like when you are catching up with your twitter feed and it is catching up with you. Present shock is about presentism; the moment we stopped leaning towards the future to being in the future now. Instead of looking at your portfolio and thinking “what will it be worth” we started thinking “what is it worth right now”.

The Mayan culture got it right, we are at the end of time, but that’s not the “end time” it’s the end of the concept of time. Before we had the written word we didn’t have history, because oral tradition could be changed. The first written things were contracts because the written word was durable.

The printing press moved us from scrolls to pages. The breaks changed. The codex begins in the industrial age. The book is the industrial age package.

The digital book is as different from the physical book as it was to the scrolls before it.

The wrong medium for the amount of compression we put in. We shouldn’t spend six months on composing a tweet. A few years of time on a print book was how we worked before.

Reading today is about the moment, not about the ark or the whole thing – it’s about the gist of it.

(Advances went away because book scan allowed publishers to find out the truth.)

In the industrial age the purpose of money is to store value over a long period over time. In the digital age it is about the tranactions.

Corpoarations (just piles of money) bought publishers thinking they were a growth business, but it is really a sustainable business. The corporations said make more money, but what could the publishers do? There isn’t ability to grow at the rate of the debt structure of their parent company. Publishers are left to buy other publishers to give the illusion of growth to their parent companies.

The buying and selling of books has become more like spotify. People don’t want to spend 40000 on education, they want to spend a few dollars and grab what courses they need off coursera.

People are going to want to subscribe to books. They want all choice all the time. The problem with this is that people want to read in order to feel entitled to dismiss. They want to be able to assume they understand the material enough to ignore all of it. That’s not a great thing.

Instead of reading to dismiss, reading should be an extended experience of non-agency. We surrender our authority to that of the author’s. We need to show people that it is entertaining and valuable.

Medium - The Obvious Corporation – Evan Williams

Evan wants to lower the barrier to get more voices into the discussion. Medium wants to enable lots of voices but have an emphasis on quality and collaboration.

Posts on their site are bundled into collections. Within a collection posts are not ordered with the newest at the top, but instead on people’s reactions to the content (less emphasis on the new, more on investing in the topics). Posts can spawn new ideas.

The content editor for Medium is not completely plain text, but offers the minimum of formatting. Mainly WYSIWYG and no text boxes, but some greyed instructions in the boxes.

If you want to try Medium email your twitter username to yourfriends@medium.com

Discussion – Douglas Rushkoff & Evan Williams

Rushkof: Corporate capitalism at this time is a nightmare

Williams: The jobs act enabled crowd sourced funding and people use that, but not all ventures need funding. Bloggers didn’t threaten good journalists; it threatened poor journalists

R: 18 – 22 year olds are really bad at distinguish credible information.

W: The things I work on are trying to make the internet capable of more, of more reliable information. We’re trying to create an efficient and general system that has an economic system built in since that’s more important for some content more than others.

R:  You would love someday for people to be able to enable a paywall on their own?

W: There’s a company called Matter which is looking into it.

R: When I saw the name called Medium I was thinking of length of time.

W: That is the original idea. We looked at micro blogging and tweets and I thought of medium.

R: I was told I was using my blog wrong, not what it was intended for.

W: That’s what this is all about. You can’t tweet wrong – that’s what the unfollow button is for.

R:

W: It’s great to think that a feature you never got around to was a good design choice (even if that wasn’t the choice). Searching the archive is tremendously valuable.

R: Posts on Medium look good.

W: That’s part of the idea. It feels preserved. It’s a place with context for your content and the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. It’s not about creating a platform right now.

R: The concern at TOC is for the industry and not building a platform. Do you see where the revenue model for publishing is going.

W: Digital doesn’t just lower distribution costs. It makes the content richer and gets it into people’s hands faster. We can increase the surface area of the idea (allow more routes for people to discover the content). This doesn’t mean necessarily free, but the tools can increase efficiency and surface area. It’s not just change print to digital.

R: I’m almost old enough to stick with traditional publishing to the end.

TOC - Morning keynotes

TOC is O'Reilly's Tools of Change for Publishing conference. The theme this year was "connect/create/create". I'll be posting my notes here as different posts for the different sessions all with the label TOC.

O'Reilly - Tim O’Reilly

Copyright common sense seems to be becoming more common.

Is piracy the new advertising – Forbes

Innovators are in the driver’s seat

At VidCon this year YouTube stars were received like the Beatles. Self published fan phenomenon.

John Green (who co-runs VidCon with his brother Hugh) has 15% of all people who bought the book rating it on GoodReads. GoodReads has 10x the reviews that Amazon has. John and Hank (YouTube star) sold out Carnegie Hall. Cross media stars.

O’Reilly is not just a publisher selling books, but involved in media, like conferences. They are a platform.

The new world is about creating and engaging as a community.

“Discovery is Publishers’ Problem not readers” – loudpoet.com

YouTube became our storehouse of folk knowledge – Atlantic

Work on stuff that matters

Intel - Brian David Johnson

Brian is a futurist (he looks 10-15 years in the future) using social science and ethnographic data to see what it will feel like to be human he is also a SciFi author.

His previous topic for today was How To Change the Future, but then he talked with President Clinton and changed the presentation

Pretty soon we will be able to turn anything into a computer because of the size of components. This changes from "how can we do it" to "what should we do".

SciFi shows us how technology affects people. Steampunk is playing with the past, but all about technology – it is one answer to how technology today affects the past. Just as SciFi tells about a future we want and one we don’t, history (the genre) can do the same thing. 

To change the future, you change the story that people tell themselves about the future.

Narrative, opinions, words matter -- the what it is, the device its on doesn’t matter anymore.

Inkling - Matt Macinnis

10 minute recap of the hour long presentation from Monday.

Amazon forces us into the model of a $10 text file. A step backwards given the benefits that eReader technology could offer (color, interactivity, gestures).

You can relight your pilot light on your furnace from a YouTube video, but if you’re going to build a patio out back you want beautiful, curated content -- in other words you want something from a publisher.

Discoverability is offered via their site and Google searches. It was turned on the middle of December. This drives users to their site and the conversion rate to purchasing the books is respectable (double that of normal adverts). Here are two examples:  “sommelier wine pairing decisions” “backless bench posteour”

(O’Reilly's TOC chair is “bullish” on Inkling)

SPi Global - John Wheeler

Standards and structure are important in eBook production.

Internet traffic to mobile devices will soon surpass that to desktops.

Need to be sure content purchased on one device works on another since a fare percentage of people view two screens at once at that will grow.

Most HTML5 features are EPUB3 features.

ePub3 means eBooks should not substantially lag behind the browser in future

[the section below will be edited later]

Panel: Cory Doctorow, Brian David Johnson, Henry Jenkins

When is something a blog post, when is it print, when is it a film, when is it multimedia?

Spreadable Media is a book by Jenkins about how content spreads trhough media. When asked to cut the book down in size before printing. They took the extra and put it on the web and asked for it to be spread then finished the book discussing that.

You used to have to buy the right book to know how to do something. Now what you need is to know the right keywords.

You can assume as a writer that the reader has a search box at arms length as they read.

The worry of pocket calculators was that kids wouldn’t be able to do long division in their heads – forgetting that adults couldn’t at that time anyways. Now good education assumes a calculator and good literature should assume the search engine in much the same way.

You need to go everywhere to spread the message, both physically (around the world) and with mediums (blogs, devices, print, conferences, etc). Intel Tomorrow Project works this way. Says “yes” to every medium (should we make a blog).

Cory’s Dandelion model

Should call it unauthorized circulation instead of privacy – you loose control but gain cultural currency. It allows for massive circulation beyond what would normally happen (look at jangham style).

With the best rated tv show and movie added together you don’t get close to the number of views of a non-profits web video (40 m vs. 200 m).

Corey “we’re very invested in our reproductive strategy” – realized it with his daughter, but sees it with his creative ideas. Mammals want everything they make to do something great, but a dandelion just wants to spread seed with no worry about the particular seed but to know that every crack in a sidewalk has a dandelion growing out of it. We need to switch our reproductive strategy from mammalian to dandelion. This works now because reproduction is so cheap compared to results. Fluid cheap distribution systems are key to this. This is where YouTube or Facebook monetizing (penny cost in YouTube for checking content, $10 Facebook promotions of posts) is a big problem because it forces you to be more careful and think mammalian instead of being dandelion.

Sub cultures used to require you to go somewhere (hippies to Haight/Ashbury) but now if you want to be a steampunk just go online.

The occult = my firm will tell you how to make your video go viral. The avoidance = shrug on why it went viral.  These are both the wrong attitude. Instead its about setting up the conditions to promote an ecosystem that allows things to go viral.

SciFi is like taking a sample and putting it into a petri dish and seeing what happens. It isolates a factor to examine it.

SciFi with an intent (author has strongly held opinion) and that’s what changes things.

Unbound

Last night in NYC Matt Macinnis unveiled Inkling Habitat at an event called Unbound. What they were smart to market during the presentation was discoverability. They have opened their site to Google which means people are searching for phrases like "fall exile and return to babylon" and the second result is inkling.com. Of course their phrases require a large number of specific words to put Inkling towards the top of the search results, but this is good for discoverability and as they point out much better than Amazon which doesn't allow results straight into the book. Also they've only been live since December 2012. To keep people from reading the whole book after they read too much content the app limits them for 24 hours (the specific "too much" amount wasn't mentioned).

What I was most impressed by is that Inkling now has an enterprise model of which Pearson is the first participant. All they said though was the enterprise model allows you to brand everything with your name and possibly host the system yourself, but they had no details. I think this may address a for some regarding loss of branding on inkling.com. I wish there had been more detail on what enterprise meant, because there's a larger range of what it might mean. Anyway, I can see Pearson's interest as it makes sense for their content. Text books are a perfect fit and that's most of Perason.

They are supporting Creative Commons licensing for all of their content, which is great for collaboration within the platform. This brought in some interesting partners like the 20 Million Minds (www.20mm.org). I'm not sure if it is something authors, agents and editors would love though as it reuse can also feel like loss of control.

Matt was very anti-Amazon in their presentation. He compared Amazon to Darth Vader and accused them of controlling everything. What's interesting is Inkling is positioning themselves to be in the same sort of place someday.

The HTML produced by Habitat has long and somewhat meaningless CSS class names. This might make a mess of a style guide, though a closer look would be needed to tell. If everything flowed well it would all work, but if not it might be a headache to edit. Also a concern is the preview render time for ePub. When an eBook creators have an issue with formatting they sometimes iteratively tweak and preview, but if your render time is long it makes this process excruciating. Also not as impressive is the ePub output, though the Inkling output looks great. I could see this changing as Inkling matures.