I Have No Affiliation — Wrap-up of TOC09
T-O-C. Table of contents. Theory of constraints. Sounds like “talk”. Tools of Change 2009.
It is over. I am back in Toronto.
What are the tools that will change the book industry?
A TOC09 presenter, Scott Berkun, pointed out tools tend to be pretty ineffective for change. Martin Luther King didn’t have tools. Gandhi didn’t use tools. Talk of tools for change is a blind alley. Talk of change-as-revolution is too. If you are one step ahead you are a hero. If you are two steps ahead you are a martyr. The revolutionary Robespierre, after all, was killed by guillotine — his very own TOC.
What about the gizmos like the Plastic Logic reader and the opaque alphabet soup of tools like DRM, XML, OPS, ONIX, and NCX? These are the materials of change – the details. There was enough talk of standards and formats at this conference to drown the devil. None of it is really important though. People drive change, tools do not.
O’Reilly Tools of Change: PlasticLogic Demo from Open Publishing Lab on Vimeo.
And man there was a ton of people there. Over a thousand.
Tuesday — Day One
But it was people that weren’t there — the readers — that dominated on Tuesday.
- Bob Stein from the Institute for the Future of the Book said the implicit hierarchy between reader and writer is about to collapse. Reader = writer. Or now everybody is a writer.
- Peter Brantley from the Digital Library Federation took that one further and explored the book as a social construction — or “machine to think with” — an increasingly electronic, connected, ubiquitous, commodified machine. “What’s published will be less about the book and more about the people who read them.”
- At the core of Cory Doctorow‘s talk on DRM was the implicit assumption that readers are of ultimate importance to publishers. The sad joke is they are not. (In an excellent presentation the following day Wiley’s Peter Balis was honest on that point.) But Doctorow knows an anti-consumer straw man – Amazon’s Kindle — when he sees one. The Kindle is a closed platform. A closed platform is hostile to readers. Doctorow warned that Amazon was screwing with the reader and since readers’ business is publishers’ business, Amazon was screwing with publishers. Only the naive publishing types in the room couldn’t help feel incriminated. At worst vendors, publishers, and retailers are colluding against the customer. At best they are practising mutually-re-enforcing denial. The j’accuse moment was encapsulated in Doctorow’s law – “Any time somebody puts a lock on something you own and doesn’t give you the key, they are not doing it for your benefit.”
- Dan Gillmor, author of We the Media — a book on citizen journalism, gave a presentation that I missed.
- The founders of BookGlutton talked about Building a Better Web Based Book by, you guessed it, putting the reader at the core of the process.
- The following day the reader-centric theme receded but presentations like The Long Tail Needs Community, Understand Your Consumer BEFORE You Define Your Strategy, and
Where Do You Go with 40,000 Readers? were tangential to the reader discussion. - Then at the end of day two, nicely mirroring Stein’s keynote from the beginning of day one, Evangeline Haughney and Bill Westerman talked about the next gen of readers. Old people create media by using File–>New. Young people create media by using File–>Open. Readers = writers. Reading = writing.
So the story on Tuesday was the readers are coming, the readers are coming.
For the sake of the business I hope they arrive. For the sake of the publishers, if they arrive I hope readers are welcomed and embraced.
Wednesday — Day Two
I posted from the conference about the afternoon keynotes on Tuesday. The show quickly rebounded. Wednesday was awesome. I would say that TOC showed up with their A-game, but BookNet Canada’s Tim Middleton beat me to it. No predominant theme. Good people ignite great conversation. It was just more my thing.
-
The News Box That Prints Only The News You Want
A highlight for many was New York Time’s Nick Bilton. Bilton surely won’t be able to save the Gray Lady by himself but he just might save newspapers. His job is to essentially tear down the process of news delivery and rebuild it for the internet age. If Tuesday’s challenge for publishers was hire a VP of reader relations, then Bilton’s challenge to the industry on Wednesday was hire a bunch of geeks and challenge them to reinvent the book. To follow Bilton’s lead, we should stop trying to reproduce the experience of the printed book electronically and start trying to invent new forms. Hopefully a book publisher (other than O’Reilly) will do this soon. Nothing like waiting until your worth turns to junk to spur organizational change. That means a manager somewhere needs to stick their neck out for an R&D lab with no revenue line. I am sending karma to the person that is willing to do this… PenguinUK?
- Also on Wednesday was the panel on piracy. I was hoping TorrentFreak would release some book piracy data soon. It looks like O’Reilly will beat them to the punch.
- Authorship? That is way more complicated in the age of Wikipedia, although presenter John Broughton seemingly discovered that at the same time the audience did. The legal and academic understanding of authorship is falling behind what is actually happening. I look for a striding grad student somewhere to update Foucault’s “What is an Author?”
- A highlight for me was the Speaking the Same Language panel on Universal Technology Standards in Publishing and Bookselling. If you have ever wondered if the book universe would explode if the heads of Goodreads, Shelfari, and LibraryThing were all in the same room together, I have an answer for you. Sparks fly but it appears to be an old school/new school conflict. Otis Chandler of Goodreads and Tim Spalding of LibraryThing are friendly towards one another. In fact they are allies for unencumbered data streams. Publishers pay attention. The data that flows through your organization is actually valuable to more people than you think. Set it free. I also was stoked to see Colette Vogele (cNet celeb) and Kevin Smokler. This was the one panel that I wanted to chat after wards individually with every panelist about different things. Medialoper‘s Kirk Biglione for the win!
Wednesday simply rocked. There were more panels that I wanted to attend than I could. What follows are some additional notes…
Pleasant surprises
- Meeting tweeple. Not really a surprise that twitter people were great, but still.
- The ubiquity of Cory Doctorow — at the first presentation through to the last. His formerly boring twitter stream exploded with great stuff.
- Neelan Choksi has it. This guy is lucky enough to be riding the biggest wave in the business and he has the fitness of mind not to fall off. Humble. Nice guy. Knows a thing about business but not arrogant enough to act like he knows everything about publishing. You can catch up with Neelan at the Booknet Canada Tech Forum. Cool Neelan trivia: he was a member of the MIT blackjack team.
- Chris Baty from NaNoWriMo. I made up my mind beforehand that his keynote wasn’t worth staying late for. I was wrong.
Other Unexpected Things
- From what I saw the plastic logic reader is not ready for prime time. The refresh rate needs to become instantaneous and the price needs to be sub $300 for this to unseat any incumbent device. They are likely to come in higher than $300 — they are targetting business users — and the refresh rate looks like you will have to anticipate page turns.
People I Was Bummed I Didn’t Meet
- Kate Eltham
- Richard Nash
- Ivory Madison from Red Room
Am Absolutely Pissed I Missed…
- Booklamp.org lightning demo http://beta.booklamp.org/
- Piracy panel
TOC Notes Elsewhere
- Tim Middleton’ Posterous
- Jackie Fry
- Tracy Marchini (multiple posts)
- Harper Studio 10 Take-Aways From the O’Reilly TOC Conference
- Pan MacMillan The Digitalist’s 10-Point Round-Up of TOC
Last Word
If you are in the business of change, according to Berkun, don’t sellf identify as a revolutionary — be a problem solver. The book business has plenty. Pick one and go make something. As Tim O’Reilly, conference sponsor, said in his keynote the best way to predict the future is to invent it. Get to it.
2 Comments