Webcast Video: Why Publishers Should Care About SEO

Mac Slocum
November 6, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Below you'll find the full recording from last month's TOC Webcast, "Why Publishers Should Care About SEO," with SEO expert Jamie Low.

U.S. News Shifts Focus to Digital

Mac Slocum
November 5, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1) | Listen

U.S. News & World Report is pulling the plug on its regular print edition. From the Washington Post:

The financially struggling magazine, which cut back to biweekly publication earlier this year, now plans to reinvent itself on the Web. While it will publish one print edition each month, according to staffers briefed on the decision, these will be entirely devoted to consumer guides -- such as its annual rankings of colleges and hospitals -- and contain no other news.

Last week, the Christian Science Monitor announced that its daily print edition will be replaced by Web coverage in April 2009.

Related:

• News.com: "NYT's Sulzberger: 'We can't care' if newspapers die"
• POD Opens Door to Magazine Experiments and Customization
• Could a Young Newspaper Company Still Succeed?
• Lessons for Publishers in IDG's Digital Success

[TOC Webcast] What Publishers Need to Know about Digitization

Mac Slocum
November 5, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Tools of Change for Publishing will host a free webcast with digitization expert Liza Daly on Wednesday, Nov. 12 at 1 p.m. eastern (10 a.m. pacific).

No prior experience with digitization is assumed in this overview of the conversion process. Topics will include:

• What's XML and do you need it?
• What's the cost-benefit analysis versus PDF or other formats?
• What should you consider when selecting a vendor?
• Should you use a centralized platform or go on your own?
• How can you monetize your digital offerings?

Slots are limited, so register for free today.

Related:

• StartWithXML: Why & How - Event and Research

Open Source, Community and Audiobooks: Q&A; with LibriVox Founder Hugh McGuire

Mac Slocum
November 5, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (2) | Listen

LibriVox is a volunteer effort with a big goal: record audiobook editions for every title in the public domain. In the following Q&A;, LibriVox founder Hugh McGuire discusses the project's beginnings, the organic development of the LibriVox community, and the distinctions (or lack thereof) between "professional" and "amateur" efforts.

How did LibriVox start?

LibriVox came about in August 2005, when I was looking for free, full-length audiobooks online for a long car trip. I went to gutenberg.org, but found mostly machine-read stuff there, which I don't like. Eventually I found someone who had recorded half of Lady Chatterley's Lover, which was enough for my trip, but it occurred to me when I got through the first half, that i would have to wait months to hear the rest.

At the time, I'd been thinking and writing about a fair bit about the free software/open source movement, and how it might apply to non-software projects. Wikipedia was a big inspiration there, as was Brewster Kahle's Internet Archive, and his call for, "universal access to all human knowledge." I'd been enjoying podcasting, and in particular had been excited by AKMA's project to get a group of volunteers to record and distribute Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture, also an inspiration. Project Gutenberg has been a long-time inspiration, too.

So all those things percolated together, and I thought, well why not try to start a big open source project to get volunteers around the world to record public domain texts for free? I put up a blog, sent out some emails, and had 13 people agree to read our first book in the first day. Three months later, we'd completed eight books; within a year later we had 257 books.

How many audiobooks do you offer?

Currently our collection includes 1,896 completed works, all free, all public domain. We produce anywhere from 60 to 115 works in a given month, which puts us among the most prolific publishers of audiobooks in the world. We've got books in 26 different languages, including Finnish, Japanese, Spanish, Chinese, Russian and German. Our books include classics from Twain, Austen, Nietzsche, Zola, Plato, Shakespeare, Sun Tzu, as well as many more obscure books, such as The Romance of Rubber.

What file formats are LibriVox audiobooks available in?

128kbps MPe, 64 kbps MP3 and Ogg Vorbis. All our files are hosted on the Internet Archive.

How many volunteers have participated? How do these folks find LibriVox?

We have 12,362 users registered on our forum, 2,476 of whom have volunteered to read. Many of our volunteers started as listeners. The rest just find us one way or another on the Web.

Do volunteer readers typically read entire books? Or, do books feature multiple volunteers reading different chapters?

Roughly half of our projects are collaborative projects, and half solo projects. That ratio has remained stable over the past few years (and, frankly, was something of a surprise to me: I did not expect so many people to record entire works, since it is a challenging thing to do).

What do you think motivates people to participate?

A whole range of things, but probably the main thing is our volunteers enjoy recording texts. Many were read to as kids, and enjoy being read to, or reading to others; some of us have idealistic motivations, about free access to knowledge; others have ambitions to become professional voice actors (a number of our volunteers have gotten gigs as pro readers). There is probably a certain satisfaction of being the voice of a writer you love for thousands of people. For a long time, Pride and Prejudice was our most popular book, downloaded hundreds of thousands of times, read by a library student from Missouri. I expect that's a pretty wonderful feeling, having so many people get so much pleasure from something you've done for your own enjoyment.

We also have a wonderful, helpful online community, so I think many people just enjoy hanging out on our forum. The main thing that motivates people, and keeps us going, is that it's fun.

Do you find that the same core group of volunteers continues to participate year after year, or do volunteers come and go?

There is a core of a few of us who have been around since the beginning, but we've had lots of turnover. It's the kind of thing that becomes an obsession for many people, and so there is a natural burnout process. But there always seems to be a new crop of people to jump in. We have about 25 moderators/admins, and probably adding and subtracting about three people every three months or so.

As with Wikipedia, a huge portion of our recordings are done by a small number of readers. The 20 most prolific readers have read 30 percent of the sections in our catalog (!).

Was there a moment when the LibriVox community seemed to take on a life of its own? If so, when did this happen and how did you know it?

That's easy: on Sept 12, 2005, when Boing Boing wrote about us. Traffic went from a couple of hundred a day, to 10,000 in one day. Nothing's been the same since!

What are the biggest challenges you've faced in building and maintaining the LibriVox community?

In the early days the main challenge was dealing with the growth in the community and production. With a few books I gathered all the files myself, and uploaded all the files to the Internet Archive as they came in. But by the time we got to 10 projects that was too much for me (and I'm no good at organizing that sort of thing); at 100 projects we needed to streamline our system. We currently have about 400 active projects (that's typical) and we are releasing an average of eight hours of audio a day. So the whole management of that process evolved organically, but took a fair bit of thinking about.

The other challenge more recently is a change in the sorts of people who are deeply involved in the project. In the early days, it was kind of like the wild west, and we attracted a motley crew of open sourcey types, with a broad range of skillsets (Web design, coding, etc). These days it seems like there are fewer of those kinds of people around (or, because the community is much bigger, it's harder to find them), so some things we'd like to get done (for instance making our Web site more accessible) have been on the back burner for a long time. So that's a challenge we have yet to figure out.

Have you marketed LibriVox, either through traditional advertising channels or via grassroots campaigns?

We've never done any marketing, except sending the odd email to Boing Boing and places like that. We get something like 40,000 visits a day on our site, all of it driven by general interest on the Web -- small blogs writing about us, podcasters talking about us, and once in a while a big media piece (New York Times, Reason, LA Times, BBC, NPR etc). But mainly it's just old-fashioned netroots marketing that seems to take care of itself.

Which titles and genres are most popular? Why did these titles/genres catch on?

The big ones are Bronte, Twain, Austen, L.M. Montgomery, Thomas Hardy, Dickens, and Conan Doyle. I think these are the classic stories of English literature, and so they are the writers most people seek out. But Einstein's "Relativity: The Special and General Theory" has been downloaded 38,000 times, so it's a pretty broad range of interest displayed by listeners. There are a number of sites that select out the best-of LibriVox, and that probably drives a fair bit of traffic, but it's all a bit of a mystery to me how certain things in our collection become popular.

In previous coverage, it's been noted that LibriVox's goal is to "record every book in the public domain." Do you have a sense of how many books that would involve and how long it would take to accomplish that goal?

I have no idea how many books that would be. In theory, the corpus of texts in the public domain should increase every year, as copyright terms expire. But the US Congress keeps extending copyright term, so we seem to be stuck with a fixed number of texts, mainly those published before 1923. Maybe someday that will change. I hope so.

But to the question: Project Gutenberg has 25,000 public domain books available to us, and the Open Content Alliance/Internet Archive just passed the 1 million mark of scanned public domain books. The there is Google's project. So, I'm not sure what the total number would be, but ideally we'd like to do all public domain books in all languages. We have our work cut out for us.

Our plan is to continue our efforts until we're finished. If we up our production a little bit, to say 1,000 books/year, it will take us 1,000 years to get through the Open Content Alliance's collection (which contains the entire Gutenberg collection). But if we can really get cracking and push to increase production by a factor of 10, we could cut that to 100 years.

Let's split the difference and say 550 years.

Is there any distinction between "amateur" and "professional" on LibriVox? How do you define quality in a volunteer effort? Does quality even matter in this case?

No, there is no distinction really. Everyone is encouraged to join us. We have a wide range of quality, from truly exceptional (in a traditional sense), to good, to not so great. Our goal, however, is to record the books, and to make a platform that allows anyone to contribute to the effort. We ask no questions, require no auditions, make no judgments about style or technique, and are happy for every single audio file someone chooses to contribute to the project. So in many important ways we are not like a traditional publisher: our focus is more on our volunteers, helping them to record in order to contribute to our mission:

"To make all books in the public domain available, for free, in audio format on the Internet. "

And in some ways it's a wonderful side-benefit that the world gets free audiobooks as a result of our efforts.

I personally like the more idiosyncratic recordings in our collection -- the birds chirping in the background, and the rustling papers, the odd cough or stumble. These bring a different sense of humanity to the books than do professional readings. But that's my personal feeling, and I do love the more traditionally "good" recordings as well.

But my general feeling is that the Internet is very good at sifting through piles of complex information, so other sites should come along and rank and sort our content, by whatever criteria they find important. It's out there and available for all to use for free, however they would like to do so.

We have a policy against rating, and against un-asked-for criticism on our forum. It tends to discourage participation, and we need as many people to help out as we can convince.

However, you can search our catalog by reader; you can search for just solo works; and you are also encouraged to submit another version of recordings. A good number of our books have multiple versions.

So in short: we don't do the sorting ourselves (though we have started to compile a list of favourite recordings from among our community), but we encourage others to do it.

Related Stories:

• Web Community Management Tips
• Maintaining a Web Community is as Hard as Building One
• Q&A; with Developer Who Turns Ebooks into iPhone Applications
• Wikinews: "Interview with LibriVox founder Hugh McGuire"

A Call for Tiered Access to Google Book Search Terminals

Mac Slocum
November 4, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1) | Listen

Peter Brantley says proposed public access (pdf) to Google Book Search library terminals is too restrictive, particularly in areas serving underprivileged populations:

This is not an economic matter; it is a social foundation. A library is a refuge; you can provide solace in that refuge, and a promise for a different and better kind of future. It is morally incumbent upon you to do so.

I propose that public terminals be accessible on a tiered basis. If a certain percentage of a public library's served population falls beneath the poverty level or a similar metric, the number of public access terminals is commensurately increased.

Related Stories:

• Reaction to Google Book Search Settlement
• EFF's Concerns About the Google Book Search Settlement
• Siva Vaidhyanathan "My initial take on the Google-publishers settlement"
• David Rothman: "TeleRead vision vs. Google book settlement: Bring the e-books HOME"
• Google Book Search Agreement

What Cookbook Publishers Can Learn from the Music Industry

Mac Slocum
November 4, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

The similarities between the music and book industries tend to diverge when you examine the smallest possible component of each format: unlike songs, book chapters aren't usually self contained.

But recipes are a different matter. A recent story in the New York Times looks at the upcoming Web site, Cookstr, which aims to catalog recipes from top chefs:

Cookstr, which will be supported by advertising revenues, will aggregate recipes from published cookbooks. All of the authors will have their own pages, with biographies, links to recipes and books, and in the case of restaurant chefs, links to their locations on Google maps.

Cookstr isn't blazing new trails here: All Recipes, Epicurious, Big Oven, FoodNetwork.com and other Web outlets have built their sites around aggregation of individual recipes. But there's still a silo-based mentality in play because recipes are only free to roam within the boundaries of each site. This is equivalent to a record company only making songs available through its own proprietary service. As we've seen with the success of iTunes, YouTube and most recently through Hulu, users flock to platforms that replace traditional boundaries with massive catalogues of material. Shoehorning content and users into a specific channel rarely works on the Web (iTunes is the exception), so the record labels eventually moved toward wide distribution across multiple platforms.

There are key differences between songs and recipes -- paid downloads vs. free text content most notable among them -- but a variation on the song model might work for recipes: sell advertising against publisher-owned recipe pages; allow standalone recipes to disperse with attached branding and pull-back opportunities; and use increased attention from wider distribution to deliver related products with built-in scarcity, such as traditional cookbooks, custom books, curated collections, cooking classes and events.

Related Stories:

• Levels of Quality and Revenue Streams
• Digital Experiments and Useful Analytics Must Go Hand-in-Hand
• Watch the YouTube Video, Buy the Product
• To Chunk or Not To Chunk?
• When it Comes to Search, How Low Can You Go?

Vanishing Paper in Higher Education

Peter Brantley
November 3, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Christopher Conway has a thoughtful essay at Inside Higher Ed on the seemingly inevitable trend towards digital text consumption:

It is becoming increasingly easier to put together affordable 'readers' or anthologies culled from existing print material without bypassing rights and fees and without overloading students with unnecessary expense. If this wave of the future takes hold and becomes the new standard in textbook publishing, I think it will be good for all parties involved. But what about the paper-and-binding book? Say you are teaching David Copperfield by Charles Dickens and you had a choice between an excellent paper-and-binding edition by a major academic press, with useful footnotes and front matter, and an electronic edition that students could download to their handy e-book readers, along with selected secondary articles you have selected for them to read? What if their e-book readers had a stylus and/or a network that enabled the class to annotate those assigned texts, and share them over the class network? I don't think anyone's nostalgia for paper-and-binding can replace the pedagogical value of my not-so-fanciful or far-fetched e-book scenario."

Related Stories:

• The Confusion Between Content and Containers
• College Bookstores to Offer Ebooks through Kiosks
• Colleges Weigh Blanket Copyright Licenses vs Fair Use Rights

EFF's Concerns About the Google Book Search Settlement

Peter Brantley
November 3, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (4) | Listen

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) notes that the Google Book Search settlement accomplishes a degree of access that litigation might have taken years to develop, but it also observes areas of concern: fair use, innovation, competition, access, public domain and privacy.

Innovation: It seems likely that the "nondisplay uses" of Google's scanned corpus of text will end up being far more important than anything else in the agreement. Imagine the kinds of things that data mining all the world's books might let Google's engineers build: automated translation, optical character recognition, voice recognition algorithms. And those are just the things we can think of today. Under the agreement, Google has unrestricted, royalty-free access to this corpus. The agreement gives libraries their own copy of the corpus, and allows them to make it available to "certified" researchers for "nonconsumptive" research, but will that be enough?

Full analysis available at EFF.org

Related Stories:

• Harvard Won't Permit Google Scans of In-Copyright Material
• Reaction to Google Book Search Settlement
• Google Book Search: It's All About the Index

Another Sci-Fi Publisher Opts Out of DRM

Peter Brantley
November 3, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Night Shade Books has joined Baen's WebScription service. It's interesting how sci-fi is one of the genres leading the way into DRM-free ebooks. From a Galley Cat:

"Baen has successfully led the industry into the future with its DRM-free electronic publishing program," said Night Shade editor-in-chief Jeremy Lassen in a press release announcing the move. "This canny insight into the e-book market is just one of the many reasons Night Shade has chosen to partner with Baen for the launch of its e-book line."

Related Stories:

• Cory Doctorow: "Science Fiction is the Only Literature People Care Enough About to Steal on the Internet."
• The Analog Hole: Another Argument Against DRM
• "Spore" Backlash: Is DRM Officially Bad for Business?
• First Frontlist O'Reilly Ebook Bundle (Including EPUB) Now Available
• Charting the Pitfalls of DRM

Harvard Won't Permit Google Scans of In-Copyright Material

Mac Slocum
October 31, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1) | Listen

Harvard University Library (HUL) has been a partner in Google's library scanning project since 2004, but the boundaries of that partnership will not expand to the in-copyright works covered under Google's new Book Search settlement. From the Harvard Crimson:

In a letter released to library staff, University Library Director Robert C. Darnton '60 said that uncertainties in the settlement made it impossible for HUL to participate.

"As we understand it, the settlement contains too many potential limitations on access to and use of the books by members of the higher education community and by patrons of public libraries," Darnton wrote.

"The settlement provides no assurance that the prices charged for access will be reasonable," Darnton added, "especially since the subscription services will have no real competitors [and] the scope of access to the digitized books is in various ways both limited and uncertain."

The Crimson notes that Harvard will continue to allow scanning of books with expired copyrights.

(Via Jose Alonso Furtado's Twitter stream)

Related Stories:

• Library Journal: "Harvard Slams Google Settlement; Others React with Caution"
• Siva Vaidhyanathan: "My initial take on the Google-publishers settlement"
• Reaction to Google Book Search Settlement
• Google Book Search: It's All About the Index

Connecting the Dots Between Google Book Search and Android

Peter Brantley
October 31, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Ed Nawotka of Beyond Hall 8 discusses the possibility that the Google Book Search settlement permits them to envision product delivery through Android-capable devices:

Perhaps most important of all is how this cements Google as the industry leader in the distribution of digital books. Sure, there's Amazon with its Kindle...and the Sony E-reader...each with hundreds of thousands of titles available. But what happens when Google links its open source Android operating system -- now powering cellphones -- to the Google Book Search? You will, quite literally, have a library in the palm of your hand.

Related Stories:

• Reaction to Google Book Search Settlement
• Google Book Search: It's All About the Index
• Calling Google a Publisher Underestimates its Platform
• Amazon and Google Challenging iTunes through Mobile
• Q&A; with Developer Who Turns Ebooks into iPhone Applications

New Project Examines Close Reading and Web Collaboration

Mac Slocum
October 31, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1) | Listen

On Nov. 10, Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook will be read and discussed by seven readers in a new experiment that explores "close reading" and the mechanisms of online conversation.

The project is the brainchild of Bob Stein, founder of Institute for the Future of the Book. Stein outlined the project's goals in an email announcement:

Fundamentally this is an experiment in how the web might be used as a space for collaborative close-reading. We don't yet understand how to model a complex conversation in the web's two-dimensional environment and we're hoping this experiment will help us learn what's necessary to make this sort of collaboration work as well as possible.

The seven readers will discuss the book through margin notes and a group blog, and a public forum will be available for others to join the conversation. Further details are available through the project site.

Related Stories:

• Joe Wikert: "Penguin's 'We Tell Stories' experiment: What does technology add to reading?"
• Experimenting for the Sake of Experimenting
• Calling Out Risk-Averse Publishers
• Digital Experiments and Useful Analytics Must Go Hand-in-Hand
• Audible CEO: Publishing Has History of Tech Ambivalence

New York Times Movie Reviews Released as API

Peter Brantley
October 30, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (2) | Listen

The New York Times has released an application programming interface (API) to its movie reviews, which is a rather significant feature. From the Times' Open blog:

Finally -- and this is the key -- we're giving you access to our Movies search feature, containing all 22,000 reviews indexed by title, reviewer's name, director's name, names of the top five actors, and plot keywords. So, if you'd like to build a list of what The New York Times thinks of Pedro Almodóvar or Lindsay Lohan, we've got you covered. And this is only the beginning: in the next few weeks we'll be rolling out better lookup and search features that will let you call up reviews based on publication date or the movie's release date, just to name two.

The Times also released campaign finance and metadata APIs earlier this month.

Related Stories:

• TOC Resource: Application Programming Interface (API)
• CEOs Must Have API Literacy
• Sulzberger: "Be of the Internet, Not on the Internet"
• ReadWriteWeb: "First New York Times API is Live - Here's Why it Matters"
• How Hackers Show it's Not All Bad News at the New York Times

Analytics: Are Streams the New Hits?

Mac Slocum
October 30, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Web analytics folks have been trying for years to remove the term "hits" from the analytics lexicon because it's an inherently flaky measurement (one Web page could theoretically yield hundreds of hits). That same flakiness has unfortunately infiltrated another measurement tool: "streams," a key metric for online video.

An off-hand mention in a New York Times article reveals cracks in the "stream" definition:

Despite all the experimentation, it is still difficult to know exactly how many viewers are watching individual TV shows and movies online. Hulu ranks its most popular content, but unlike YouTube it doesn't show the view count for each video. Still, it is clear that millions of viewers are watching some shows online. The Season 3 premiere of "Heroes" in September was streamed 8.1 million times on Hulu and NBC.com, according to the network. (All online streams are not counted as equal, because on NBC.com each segment of an episode is counted as a stream, so a full episode could count as six streams. On Hulu, one episode equals one stream.) [Emphasis added.]

This is a problem. Most digital content models rely on advertising as a revenue stream, and ad rates are generally associated with key analytics (impressions, page views, unique users, streams, clicks, etc.). Redefining a common metric puts the entire industry in flux because advertisers rarely buy inventory on one site. Now they'll need to monitor both their active campaigns as well as variations in campaign metrics (ie -- is this a Hulu stream or an NBC stream?). The last thing digital content needs is more complexity.

Related Stories:

• Web Analytics Primer for Publishers
• Digital Experiments and Useful Analytics Must Go Hand-in-Hand
• Overestimating the Home Page
• Finding Balance Between User Experience and Web Ads
• Piracy and Advertising: An Unlikely Union that Just Might Work
• Free Ebooks with Embedded Ads Via Scribd-Lulu Partnership

Registration Open for Tools of Change for Publishing Conference '09

Mac Slocum
October 29, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Registration is now open for the next Tools of Change for Publishing conference, being held Feb. 9-11, 2009 at the Marriot Marquis Times Square in New York City. From the press release:

The third annual TOC Conference will decipher the tools of change for the industry and help cut through the hype in order to reach a more profitable future in publishing. From authoring, editing, and layout to distribution and consumption, new technologies will continue to change all aspects of publishing. TOC 2009 will focus on industry-wide strategic issues, like the changing retail and supply-chain landscape. In addition to examining "long-view" trends, the conference will also supply practical tales from pioneers already experimenting and innovating on the digital frontier of paid content.

Confirmed speakers include:

• Laurel Touby, founder and CEO of MediaBistro
• Jeff Jarvis, blogger and author of What Would Google Do?
• Nick Bilton, New York Times R&D; Lab
• Chris Baty, creator of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo)
• Jason Epstein, chairman, OnDemand Books

Here's a sampling of planned sessions:

• "What Does the Future Look Like for Book Publishers?" by Sara Lloyd of Pan Macmillan
• "The Rise of eBooks" by Mark Coker of Smashwords, Inc., David Rothman of TeleRead.org, Joe Wikert of O'Reilly Media, Russell Wilcox of E Ink, and author April L. Hamilton
• "Smart Women Read eBooks" by Kassia Krozser of Booksquare.com
• "Youth and Creativity: Emerging Trends in Self-Expression and Publishing" by Julie Baher of Adobe and Bill Westerman of Create with Context
• "eBooks: How Soon Is Now?" by Peter Balis of John Wiley and Sons
• "If at First You Don't Succeed: Using Agile to Relaunch XML at Cengage Learning" by Greg Shepherd of Cengage Learning
• "Lessons from a Book's Simultaneous Publication in Print and on the Web" by Stephen Smith of Crossway Books
• "The Long Tail Needs Community" by Gavin Bell of Nature
• "What Happens When Anyone Can Edit Your Book, Online?" by John Broughton, author of O'Reilly's Wikipedia: The Missing Manual
• "Speaking the Same Language: Universal Technology Standards in Publishing and Bookselling" by Lila Bailey of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, Otis Chandler of Goodreads.com, Aaron Miller of BookGlutton.com, Kevin Smokler of Booktour.com, and Tim Spalding of LibraryThing
• "Making an Impact with Travel Content--in Print, Online, and Mobile" by Ensley Eikenberg of Frommer's
• "Where Do You Go with 40,000 Readers?: A Study in Online Community Building" by Ron Hogan of Beatrice.com, Patrick Nielsen Hayden of Tor Books, and author John Scalzi
• "Crafting a Digital Road Map: One Publisher's Path to Success" by Adrienne Kinney and Andrew Malkin of Rodale
• "If Shakespeare Had a Hard Drive: The Challenge of the Born-Digital Belletrist" by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum of the University of Maryland
• "Building Old World Publishing Values into New World Automated Workflows" by Phil Zuckerman of Applewood Books

Early registration, which offers a savings of $200, will end Dec. 18, 2009. Registration information and additional details are available through the Tools of Change for Publishing Conference site.

Share Your Success Stories and Failures (and Get In Free)

One of the ongoing goals for the TOC Conference is to encourage the sharing of success stories and of the lessons learned from failed experiments and initiatives. For 2009, we're going to try something a bit different to add to the discussion, and we want your help.

Tell us about your experience with a new technology, technique, or strategy based on the shifting publishing landscape. We're particularly interested in efforts based on what you learned at a previous TOC Conference. We'll pick four submissions to present as part of a panel at the 2009 TOC Conference. If you're selected, you'll receive a complimentary admission to the full conference.

We're looking for personal accounts. We want to hear the key actions that led to success or failure, as well as what you've learned from the experience. Submissions can be in whatever format best suits your story: text, video, etc.

Send your story to toc AT oreilly.com before Nov. 10.

Related TOC '09 Information:

• Conference Registration
• Conference Speakers
• Conference Schedule
• Conference Sessions
• Conference Tutorials