Data Portability, openID, and the Walled Garden in Book Publishing
The deadline for submissions for BookNetCanada’s Technology Forum 2009 is tomorrow.
It got me thinking about the kind of presentation I would like to see this year.
I would like to see someone from TAXI speak about the Open Book Toronto initiative. It would be amazing If that person was on a panel with someone from Indieboung.org talking about site planning and administration. Both those projects are huge.
I would love to see a panel on book trailers and video with someone from Bookshorts/MovingStories, someone from Simon’s Bookvideos.tv, plus an independent web producer — MGImedia’s Amber Mac? — and maybe Harper’s Steve Osgoode.
Most of all I would love to see a panel or presentation about book publishing and data-portability (.org). Right now it is a big issue for MySpace, Facebook, Google and other huge web companies. It is just a matter of time before book publishers/retailers need to pay attention to it too.
DataPortability – Connect, Control, Share, Remix from Smashcut on Vimeo..
- Content Syndication: sending duplicate blog updates to Amazon is already a reality for authors in the US. Is that good or bad for the page rank on the author’s site?
- Platform Choice: does an author’s site even matter when there is Amazon, Indigo’s reader community, BookArmy.com, myBN, Bookbrowse, Librarything, and AuthorsandBooks.com. How do you choose? More importantly how do you advise your authors to manage their time? Answer: it should be simple — see Ping.fm.
- On the customer side: are publishers allowing customers to delete their site accounts? Are publishers offering an API or even RSS?
- Ownership: what is the legal climate around reviews (see the kerfuffle re: Thomas Nelson’s blogger program). Who owns the reviews, the lists, and the picks on or off your site?
- Portability: most importantly, are publishers and book sellers allowing customers to take their reviews, lists, and picks with them if they leave? If they aren’t are they prepared to do so if that becomes the law?
- openID – what is it and why should publishers care?
- The Future: there are implications for ebooks too. Will we ever see a microformat for annotations? (See Sara Lloyd’s Digital Manifesto at the digitalist.net for why this may be important.) And what happens when the semantic web finally turns up? Are we going to keep books bolted to the publishers’ platform? Or will publishers allow content to live out there on the web in structured meaningful ways — coherence as well as context?
Who should give such a talk at the BNC forum? I have no idea, but I would love to hear it.
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