My Favourite Colour

TOC Conference Day 1
Today and tomorrow, I'm at the Tools of Change for Publishing conference, for work. I'm here to understand how the publishing industry is using technology, and how I can help them get their digital content on site faster and more effectively.

The conference started with the message that the biggest challenge facing publishers isn't piracy, it's obscurity. Following that were many keynotes and sessions that focused around the idea of creating and engaging with community.

Douglas Rushkoff spoke about the importance of connecting people to people, not people to products. When you connect people, you gain social currency; otherwise you're just doing marketing. For example, the value of a good joke teller at a party isn't that you particularly like the guy, or that you even particularly like his jokes, but his value is that he breaks the ice and gives everyone else something to talk about. Something that starts conversations is extremely valuable social currency. Tim O'Reilly talks about this more in his coverage of TOC. Inverting Marshall McLuhan: "The message is the medium".

There was a recorded conversation with Kathy Sierra, who said that in her Head First series they put as much effort into the first chapter as into the rest of the book. This made me think that for very well written books, maybe the Surprise Me feature of Search Inside is missing the point, and that people really do want to start with the excerpt. This is counterintuitive for me as a huge fan of the 'don't start at the beginning' principle, which is embraced by Head First.

Bill Burger urged us to look at copyright in a new light, and envisioned a community of content producers and consumers who value the tools we can build as much as the content they can produce. He views books as living documents. This was echoed in a session by Dan Gilmore who sees the book as participatory media. Involving community around the book by releasing draft chapters and valuing their feedback ultimately leads to a much better book. He cites 5 reasons for this: the readers may know more than the author; readers know what they want to know; the community has already started to create buzz and spreads word of mouth; releasing drafts enables authors to publish on time critical topics by getting feedback quickly; readers are an army of proofreaders. What tools do readers need?

This leads into another theme that I heard a few times in the talks today: the role of the author is changing. The author is being asked to not just write, but to talk to customers, to continually update, to use social tools, to create graphics and video, and so on. But it's not just the author -- all our roles are changing as technology makes it easier to do so many more things. The key is to find the thing you do, consider it decoupled from any means by which you do it, and to find ways to be more effective. Reduced to a slogan in a tourist shop window I saw today: Don't try to find your purpose in life, create it.

The talk about community was emphasized by Barry Libert in a closing keynote on 'communitizing' your customers. Find the means by which they can engage with you, figure out exactly who they are, provide them with tools and support, accept their wisdom, and finally measure contributions to the community, especially from people internal to the company. His talk made me happy to already work at the world's most customer centric company. The people who were sitting behind me (sadly I was too shy to turn around to read their name badges) were scoffing through the talk calling these ideas stupid and ridiculous. I felt a lot of this sentiment sitting in the audience -- no excited random comments after talks, purposely sarcastic slow clapping, exclamations of disbelief -- not from everyone, but it was certainly there.

I went to two other talks today, one on digital textbooks and one on making ebooks accessible to the blind. eBooks are slowly, but finally becoming accepted by publishers. Some are starting to understand that what's important is the content, not the container that it's sold in. This is especially true in textbooks, where publishers speak to the value of selling chapters and in cutting up the content so that as a student you can get your hands dirty with it and use it in different contexts. Ingram's interpretation of this is that they'll generously let you use your DRM'ed ebook on all of 2 different computers. Well. The folks who are advocating accessibility for the blind have the utterly reasonable stance that DRM currently means that people who have difficulties with print media (they can't see it, can't interpret it, can't turn pages, etc) can't use ebooks, because their existing text to speech translators can't get inside the DRM box. The fact that there are 6 different ebook standards also presents a challenge.. The Daisy consortium is advocating an XML format called DTBook which preserves some re-flow information so that a screenreader can intelligently interpret sidebars, math, etc. They're also trying to work towards some sort of interoperable or central DRM. I hope they won't have to though, and that soon we'll see the first DRM free ebooks store with a wide selection of content. I think it'll only take about a decade as it did for music. Echoing some earlier points, the value really isn't in the content, it's in connections between people. Publishers enable people to interact in the context of a book, they enable knowledge to be exchanged between people, they enable connections. O'Reilly gets this, and they understand that to survive, they have to perform that function better: so they hold conferences!

Some other interesting thoughts: people here are really happy with their Kindles. I've seen a few, and heard them talked a lot. They're being used by editors and reviewers to read manuscripts before they're published. I chatted with someone whose name I didn't get who worked at a company that bought audio rights and published audiobooks through Audible. He said they have links between the audio and text at paragraph granularity, but currently do nothing with that data.

There are more talks tomorrow, then I head back to Seattle in the evening.