Random Musings

Archive for the ‘Book Camp Toronto 2009’ Category

Personally I think Book Camp Toronto was a huge success! I love the notion of an “unconference” and the grass-roots level of discussion, both within the sessions and without. I will definitely be back next year!

I got a lot out of the sBook session. Their thinking is the same as mine in regards to printed books eventually being relegated to a status of a souvenir item in time. I can see content becoming more format-agnostic and see it becoming more organic as well. When I talked about Google Wave, I got invited to the sLab to see what they’re doing. Very exciting times we are in!!

Special thanks to the organizers:

• Hugh McGuire
• Mitch Joel
• Mark Bertils
• Erin Balser
• Alexa Clark

I wish I had time to put some more context around some of the jot notes I took (see previous posts) but when you’re participating in an unconference it’s a little hard. Here are some blog posts of folks that did a much better job than I did:

ON SELLING (AND MARKETING) BOOKS

Flickr Photos

Don’t Tell Me Your Email Address

Publishing. Copyright. Web.

Conceptualizing the True Nature of Conversation #bcto09

#bcto09 Elaborating on my textbooks

Reaching Readers: Thoughts from BookCamp TO

BookCamp TO – Moving to The How

BookCampTO explored the publishing ecosystem

Evolving with the book

The lowdown on BookCamp

Gone BookCampin’

#bcto09 on bookish communities…

#bcto09: Kindle, Shmindle notes…

Full Interview: Hugh McGuire on the Future of Books

BookCamp Toronto report

BookCampTO: How the Plight of Publishers and Authors Affects You

BookCamp 09: Reflections on Books and the Web

Book Camp Toronto: What Is a Publisher For?

Book Camp Toronto: Branding

BookCamp Toronto 2009: Asking the Right Questions

BookCamp Toronto: The way we’ll read

Thanks to everyone who participated in Book Camp Toronto 2009!

The Carrot Seed: A new model for book, author and publisher promotion Mark Blevis (Just One More Book!!) uses the groundbreaking children’s book by Ruth Krauss and Crockett Johnson as a metaphor to demonstrate how the book publishing industry (authors, illustrators/photographers/artists, publishers, publicists, etc…) can use text, audio and video content as onramps to promote books, engage book readers and buyers and demonstrate thought leadership. The session will highlight some of the many creative campaigns that can be found on the Internet including those by Neil Gaiman, Terry Fallis and the KidLit Community.

Here are quick notes as I took them, mostly around marketing strategies:
- talk of Neil Gaiman and how he uses Twitter as well as a video tour of The Graveyard Book
- podcasting
- reading tours
- giveaways
- games on web sites related to the book (see Rings of Orbis by PJ Haarsma
- Greg Pincus (from Kidlit community) and 30 poets-30 days
- book trailers
- blog tours (but make sure each blog asks different questions). J.A. Konrath did this successfully.
- there was a bit of a digression on how to get kids to read
- connecting with bloggers and podcasters to review your books, but ensure that your book suits their target audience
- don’t pester the reviewers

I’m sure I missed lots, but if you check out @conniecrosby on Twitter, she did a fabulous job of covering some of these sessions.
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Toward the sBook: simple, searchable, smart, social, sustainable, scalable

Greg Van Alstyne, Bob Logan (Strategic Innovation Lab, OCAD) Peter Jones (Redesign Research) Ramon Sanguesa (Citilab, Barcelona). We live our lives split between page and screen. How can we reintegrate and enhance the experience and interconnections between networked forms and printed forms of publication? This interactive session engages ideas, solutions and critical questions regarding the coming convergence of social media, recommender systems, Internet of things, and print on demand, toward a future of publishing that may be simple, searchable, smart, social, sustainable and scalable.

notes as I take them:

- left brain – reading
- right brain -patterns
- allows you to scan it and pull up a web page with e-version of book, author updates, reader annotations, comments, archive
- mixes ebook and print
- kindle’s network allows you to buy more, but not use it for the social aspect
- need books that support links
- printed books will become rarer – something like a souvenir
- moving from industrial economics to attention economics
- can we combine the best of the print world and web world
- we should stop thinking of print book to ebook
- the book is a machine to think with
- max headroom ex. book as a nonvolatile storage media
- you always put old content in new medium
- the content will change with the new medium
- where is the value? platform not product
- annotation; interpretation; project management
- design for serendipity?
- freedom to publish across spheres
- david’s thought: could google wave have a place in all of this?
- for fiction: write/adopt a different type of novel
- tools that engage communities (eg. infinite jest)
- tools that evolve
- tagging structured data
- tagging unstructured data
- impact of Google Wave
- archive in different contexts
- semantic segmenting

you can email logan (at) physics dot utoronto dot ca

web: http://slab.ocad.ca – apparently this will get better.

Here are some notes from this session (don’t mind typos):

Visual representation of the ecology of the book:

http://stephanietroeth.com/bcto09/

- book is portrait oriented rather than landscape b/c the binding is stronger in that orientation
- Stanza allows landscape orientation similar to scroll reading
- is there a reason we need to stick with the portrait format? does the author/reader care?
- does the eye have an optimum width for viewing portrait vs land
- now that we don’t have constraints on design of ebooks, what will change? where can we go from here?
- should we create new content to accompany the new device rather than rely on old content
- is the page sacred?
- do we need to preserve page numbers since we can search on an ebook?
- what happens with page headers and footers, especially when you read on a 3″ screen?
- we consume content in different ways, ex. wanting to keep a book you love that is well printed vs a quick consumption of an ebook
- we move from physical layout that is set for you vs suggested options for readers and let them decide on format
- hardest thing to design is to design to variable widths
- TV has moved from large conglomerates to microcasting; some could still love the old model of book, but we can branch off to new models as well
- poetry is wedded to the printed page. epub/html breaks that.
- perhaps going audio for poetry instead of digital?
- if we move to having content ready in any format, is that right? will there be a place where the creator is right and only a specific format should be used?
- we need to do both, a mix of mediums
- what’s the future?
- multi-author creating
- new creative forms are beginning to emerge
- do authors need to be technical enough to provide multiple formats for various mediums?
- what if ebook readers had a projector to project high res images/art books
- mixed medium; this will allow more collaborative work between publisher and author
- there’s fear of losing the existing book (david’s note: this seems to be in a couple of these sessions. I’m surprised at how some folks here are clinging to this and not seeing the future.)
- demo of epub zen garden (epubzengarden.com); “beautiful ebook” (this session was merged with the ecology of the book)

I’m going to be blogging about Book Camp Toronto tomorrow as well as twittering all day so keep an eye out for what’s happening. Can’t wait!!