If you are interested in writing, books and publishing 2.0, then you need to be aware of O’Reilly media and Tools of Change for Publishing (TOC). They hold an annual conference for the cutting edge of publishing.
The TOC Conference 2009 was by all accounts a brilliant event. I am in Australia so wasn’t able to attend but here are some highlights from other blogs and people I follow who were there!
· Top 10 TOC soundbites from The Digitalist at Pan Macmillan – includes Cory Doctorow on dropping DRM (digital rights management)
· 10 takeaways from the TOC conference by Harper Studio – including “the best way to predict the future is to invent it”
· The definition of book needs to change to become “a place where readers (and sometimes authors) congregate.” – from keynote speaker Bob Stein, from Future of the Book Institute
· Indie author April Hamilton from Publetariat, reports on the changing nature of the form of the book and building an online community around your book. Both of these favour the indie author who can be flexible and internet-based.
· The rise of ebooks session: debated some of the interesting trends in ebook publishing including the following from Smashwords blog:
o What’s driving the rapid sales growth of ebooks? (Answers: better screen display technology; availability of more titles; Oprah; lower prices; e-reading becoming as, or more, pleasurable than print; DRM starting to slip away)
o How long until ebooks go mainstream? (Prediction that 2-3 percent of American households will own a dedicated e-reading device in the next 18 months [this is huge, and even if he's off by half, it's still huge], and most of the panelists agreed the ebook market will be dramatically larger in the next couple years.
o Screen technologies, present and future (screens will get faster, cheaper, better color, different sizes)
o Rich media ebooks, integrating video, audio, sensory feedback such as vibrations (lots of interesting stuff happening; a worthwhile opportunity to leverage traditional “book” content to offer readers a more engaging experience)
· Mark Coker from Smashwords says that Twitter has changed the way conferences are experienced. Twitter is up and coming and authors need to be aware how useful it is.
There are videos from the conference here.
You can download the best of TOC PDF for free here, and you can follow the TOC blog here.
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