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February 14 – February 21, 2008 Edition Publishers Prepare
For Transformation
At OReilly Event
NEW YORK, NY/2/12/2008–Todays publishers face a gaping landscape of technological change, from everywhere they turn– in writing and development, production, distribution and consumption, in bean counting and legal departments. These transformations are no longer theoretical. Theyre well past a tipping point, and are shaping every aspect of the publishing industry of tomorrow.
In New York this week, at the second annual OReilly Tools for Change Conference, publishers have been gathering the tools they need to understand, embrace, and prosper from the tectonic shifts affecting their industry.
On the conference floor, weve been talking with innovators in the exciting and passionate future for books. Listen in to some of the people we have spotted as key innovators in the unstoppable movement toward the books of tomorrow, and consider how these transformations may affect you as an industry profession.
Links will become live as we post new information. Keep watching this story.
Digital Strategy and Action
Brent Lewis, director, Internet & Digital for Harlequin Enterprises, Ltd., a leading publisher of womens fiction and the worlds largest publisher of series romance. Brent leads the strategic development and operational execution of Harlequins digital publishing and marketing programs. He talks with Authorlink about Harlequins own site featuring a robust community of readers, a leading and widely recognized e-book program, digital audio, mobile distribution, digital only content and leveraging Harlequins famous brand in the web 2.0 world.
How Open Does Open Need to Be, in the Universe of Free?
Michael Jensen, Director of Web Communications, The National Academies, has been at the interface between digital technologies and scholarly/academic publishing since the late 1980s. From 1998 to 2007, he was Director of Publishing Technologies for the National Academies Press, which makes more than 3700 books (more than 650,000 pages) from the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Research Council fully browsable and searchable online for free (http://www.nap.edu). This site receives more than 1.5 million visitors per month, and boasts of some of the most advanced search and discovery tools available on any publishers site, most of which were initially developed by Mr. Jensen. He talks with us about free access and its relationship to increased book sales.
Digital Publishing Beyond eBooks: Cross-device, Media-enhanced, and Socially Aware
Bill McCoy, General Manager, Digital Publishing Business at Adobe Systems, Incorporated, is responsible for Adobes solutions for digital distribution and protection of commercially published works. Bill has been involved in the development of publishing and content delivery solutions for 20 years, including key roles in the development of Adobes PostScript and PDF technologies. With Authorlink, he briefly discusses Adobes open, cross-platform digital publishing solution, including Rich Internet Applications for online and downloadable distribution.
Collaborative Content
Joel Bush, Director, Publishing and Media, Near-Time
Near-Time is a Web 2.0-based service that leverages the power of the New Web by integrating weblogs, wikis, group calendars and shared files in a hosted and secure collaborative environment. The service brings enterprise class collaboration within easy reach of organizations and businesses of all sizes. Collaborative content can be private, semi-private or totally public. Using Near-Time, communications can be one-to-one, to the Web at large, and everything in between. Near-Time also supports roles and permissions, so that the interactive process can be managed, from open to tightly controlled to support large teams.
Near-Time recently announced a major update of its namesake hosted wiki and weblogging platform that enables the rapid integration of thousands of widgets and Web services to offer endless possibilities for user-generated solutions.
SEO for Book Publishers: Beyond Book Search
Jamie Low (SearchEngineMarketing.com)
Jamie Low has helped hundreds of organizations get search for over a decade. The founder of consulting firm SearchEngineMarketing.com, he regularly guides virtual teams of marketing and technology professionals through the turbulent waters of creating and maintaining their own in-house search marketing initiatives. Search engines are one of the primary ways readers can find your web site and your books. But rising through the result ranksknown as search engine optimization or SEOis, fraught with easy-to-overlook details, technical jargon, and alluring options that can get you banned from the major search engines. Jamie discussed the hidden opportunities available to publishers and author web sites.
Next week well be posting a few more conversations from the conference.
Keep watching Authorlink for details on these
Ingram and the Digital Market
Clifford Guren (Microsoft Corporation), and Andrew Weinstein (Ingram Digital Group)
Talk about new sales, marketing, and distribution methods and models emerging in todays digital publishing world. Ingram is making the investments to deliver a suite of solutions to assist publishers.
Next Generation Web Publishing
Jason Hunter is a Principal Technologist with Mark Logic, specializing in large-scale XML content manipulation using XQuery. Hes the author of Java Servlet Programming (OReilly Media) and the creator of the JDOM open source project for Java-optimized XML manipulation.
Making Mobile Work
Bob Kasher is Sales Director for MPS Mobile a new Mobile device based content delivery platform that makes print, music and video available to any Internet enabled mobile device anywhere in the world. Authorlink and MPS Mobile have an alliance to deliver content on cell phones. Bob has been a pioneer in the world of digital content as one of the founders of /Database Directories/ an early digital publisher still operating profitably and successfully. He talks with Authorlink about how publishers and other content providers can take advantage of the growing opportunity mobile poses in reaching new markets both domestically and internationally. Authorlink Audio Interview
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