I went to the TOC (Tools of Change) conference in San Jose a week or so ago. It was all about publishing and how it’s changing. And about the tools others are using to move this industry into the 21st century.
It was a great conference. It was a mix of novice sessions and advanced. Since I’ve been online since, yikes!, 1985, and I built my own early sites in Notepad, some of the basic electronic / web stuff I already knew. But, there was plenty I didn’t. In addition, I met a lot of people, which was really the highlight of the conference. Who came, and who didn’t was really interesting.
Sessions I’m still remembering: An art student from London gave a keynote speech on a printed interactive book he developed (no grants, not a school project). By using conductive inks he could complete a circuit with his finger and the book would play music or direct a nearby computer to a particular page on the Internet. He built the electronics into the spine of the book. Without disparaging interactive books created by others, such as Xerox Parc, this was exciting.
On the last day I sat in on a session on how to make the reading experience better online. I wasn’t really interested in this topic, but wow — there are reading psychologists involved with typographers and the New York Times figuring out how to make online reading come closer to the experience of offline. Some statistics given out were that readers would spend about 48 minutes a day with the printed version of the New York Times, about 60 minutes a month with the web site, and about 25 minutes a day with a new reader they are developing with Microsoft. So, I got into an enjoyable lengthy discussion with the psychologist from Microsoft about fonts, design, typography and all kinds of other interesting topics.
Another session, this time with two authors, was very interesting — how authors also need to participate, more or more effectively, in the promotion of their books, or content.
I met a woman from the Girl Scouts who was investigating ways to build community with a limited budget; several people from university presses; a Japanese journalist; some authors; and many publishers.
I didn’t meet anyone from bookstores — which was a shame because bookstores need to look hard at themselves and how successful they are at fulfilling their end of the distribution system. Ingram, a large book distributor, is really in the process of enormous change — they are leading publishers and others, and that was a surprise. I had always thought of the distribution end of things as hidebound… well, not today.
And of course O’Reilly is way ahead on distribution of content (and books) in new ways and old. All in all, a great conference. Next year it will be held in New York City and it will be interesting to see whether the East Coast setting will affect the friendliness or the content of the program.
