October 8th, 2009 . Posted in events | 6 Comments »
Part of O’Reilly’s Tools for Change mini-con, Oct 2009.
Speaker: Matthew Bernius (Rochester Institute of Technology’s Open Publishing Lab)
2009 has been a watershed year for ebooks. According to the Association of American Publishers, not only did are year to date ebooks sales up 149.3%, June 2009 saw the highest amount of ebook trade sales so far, $14,000,000 in total. Internationally more than a dozen new ebook readers have been either released or announced, and more are on the way. As Tech consultant and author Geoffrey Moore would put it, the ebook industry is now in the midst of “crossing the chasm,” moving from an audience of early adopters towards mainstream markets.
This presentation will cover the current state of the art in ebooks and ereaders – discussing the technologies currently at play and those coming in the near future. Drawing up lessons from the adoption of other products, the presentation will also discuss trends that may influence the long term development of these technologies.
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October 8th, 2009 . Posted in events | 7 Comments »
Part of O’Reilly’s Tools for Change mini-con, Oct 2009.
All too often our understanding of what readers want is based on what we want ourselves, or outdated assumptions, or even worse—guesses. In this session, panelists will examine the state of the publishing industry through a reader-centric lens.
Moderator: Kassia Krozser (Booksquare.com)
Speakers: Angela James (currently consultant/freelancer), Jane Litte (Dear Author), Malle Vallik (Harlequin), Sarah Wendell (Smart Bitches Trashy Books)
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October 8th, 2009 . Posted in events | 4 Comments »
Part of O’Reilly’s Tools for Change mini-con, Oct 2009.
Is $9.99 the new “normal” for ebook pricing? Or is the sweet spot closer to $3.99, or $1.99, through the iTunes store? As the age of ebooks dawns, publishers are struggling to find pricing that works for their customers and their business models. It’s a time of transition fraught with challenges and opportunities.
Moderator: Joe Wikert (O’Reilly)
Speakers: Hugh McGuire (BookOven/LibriVox), Neelan Choksi (Lexcycle–Stanza), Trip Adler (Scribd), Tammy Nam (Scribd), Michael Tamblyn (Shortcovers)
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October 3rd, 2009 . Posted in work | No Comments »
On 28 February 1906, Samuel L. Clemens (Mark Twain) spoke at the Hartford, Conn. funeral of his former coachman, Patrick McAleer. Both the local paper (Hartford Courant) and the New York Times carried stories about the event. The Times account of 5 March 1906 included this text:
Patrick was a gentleman, and to him I would apply the lines:
So may I be courteous to men, faithful to friends,
True to my God, a fragrance in the path I trod.
SLC’s lines are slightly mangled, it turns out.
We had the option of not footnoting this segment if we couldn’t identify its source, but the phrasing seemed unusual enough to justify investigation. (Very common phrases are hard to source: their transmission, often garbled by memory or hearsay, cannot be untangled readily.) The more time a colleague and I spent on these lines, the more we wanted to find something we could share with readers.
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August 28th, 2009 . Posted in events | No Comments »
13:30–15:00
Paul Duguid (m), Adjunct Prof., UCB iSchool
Mark Liberman, Trustee Professor [Linguistics], U of Pennsylvania
Geoffrey Nunberg, Adjunct Prof., UCB iSchool
Clifford Lynch, Director of Coalition for Networked Information
Dan Clancy, Engineering Director, Google Book Search
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